The View from Here (7 page)

I was surprised, after we had eaten, when Paige followed me to my room and sat, uninvited, on the corner of my bed. It had been tidied already by an unseen maid.

“Can I borrow your blue shirt?” she asked.

I looked at her. “Sure.”

It was a small thing, but it seemed to be enough. She smiled. Suddenly warm. A softly pretty version of her mother's thoroughbred beauty.

“ Thanks.”

I guessed that meant we were friends now.

Paige wore the blue shirt to lunch. We went to a beach restaurant on the other side of town. Patsy, Bee Bee, and Sally, their female offspring, and me. Outside we could see pelicans diving, framed by the sloping line of the roof. I watched them, aware briefly of a mild shiver of not belonging. But then Bee Bee grinned at me, pulling me into the crowd, and said, “Hot, ain't it?”

Patsy finished her drink and put her hand up for the waiter. Earlier she and Bee Bee had slid behind the painted breeze-block bar and shown him how to make daiquiris the way they liked them.

“Keep up, Frankie,” she said, noticing mine, half full.

“Frankie's not much of a drinker,” Sally said.

Bee Bee hoisted her glass. “Drinking is key, Frankie. Drinking helps you to forget.”

Sally laughed lightly. She and Bee Bee had known each other since childhood, Mason had told me. I could see it. The long association. “Maybe Frankie hasn't got anything she wants to forget,” she said, looking at me.

I smiled at her. She had been very flattering to me the night before in that offhand way she had that I never knew how to take, commenting to Mason that my looks were an ideal mix of Celt and hothouse.

“Everybody wants to forget something,” Patsy declared. She had a gold chain belt around her hips. It jangled as she shifted in her chair.

Sally, with an icy kind of evenness, leaned forward over the table.

“Well, sure, honey, a little forgetfulness can come in real handy sometimes.”

Patsy's voice had a hint of the South in it. Sally had mimicked it exactly.

I did not know what had happened, but I knew that something had by the way my breath held tight in my chest while I waited for what would happen next. Patsy stared at Sally, and Sally held her gaze, and then Patsy laughed, a little falsely I thought, but Sally smiled, and, at that, Bee Bee smiled too. And I realized that whatever was happening was happening way over my head, so I volunteered to go and check on the children, who had wandered, bored, out onto the beach.

I rode home with Patsy in the jeep. About a quarter of a mile out of town she said, “That high-and-mighty act Sally puts on is going to cost her eventually.”

She had sobered a little, but I put her fractiousness, nevertheless, down to too long a lunch. That and the inevitable sparking of temperaments. Sally, it seemed to me, was queen to Patsy's princess.

“I'll tell you one thing for sure,” she continued. “That marriage of hers isn't the fortress she likes to think it is.”

Suddenly she turned and winked like a little girl with a secret.

I smiled back, caught, uncomprehending, in whatever amusement had diverted her.

The men got back not long after us. I was pleased to see them, sunburned and bedraggled in their open-necked shirts. The room filled up again with deep, men's laughter and squealing, teased children. The edgy flicker that had flared over lunch faded and seemed completely forgotten.

THREE

I
T HAD BEEN
twenty-one months and almost as many days since Adam had smiled at me across the tanned thighs of another girl at an overheated party in Los Angeles. He had been heading east and I west. We were both voyagers, drifters really, like so many people were then, seeing the world. I followed Adam's smile almost directly to bed and from there to San Francisco and from there to New Orleans. All together, with him and before, I had been traveling for more than three years and thought myself, in the wake of this slim history, rather sophisticated. But then the Severances had come along, with their gay friends and their grandly casual outlook on life, and I had begun to realize there was a great deal of the world that I did not know at all.

“Dear girl,” Patsy said, “they're
honeymooners.”

I felt horribly naive. We were picnicking, all of us, on the beach and I had commented, watching Bee Bee and Ned at the water's edge, on their apparent affection for each other. Now, in the distance, we saw Ned trip a playful hand over the curve at the base of Bee Bee's spine.

“That marriage is barely broken in, honey,” Patsy went on. “It's still chock-full of high-school freshness.”

The laughter was general.

Mason, rescuing me, explained, “Ned is Bee Bee's third husband.”

“She got Lesley from the first one and a darling little fortune from the second one,” Patsy finished.

Richard, his fair eyes straining against the sun, looked at Mason. “How'd that second guy make his money?”

Mason shrugged. “Steel…stocks…dime stores. Fingers in a lot of pies, I gather.”

“And a lot of cocktail waitresses,” Sally added blandly.

I stared. Her appearance was so immaculate that any hint of crudeness from her was mildly shocking.

She picked up a magazine. “The man was a philandering lowlife. Bee Bee earned every cent she wrung out of the bastard.” She plucked at a glossy page, pinching the corner grimly. “Where men are concerned, Frankie, always go straight for getting even. Getting mad isn't worth the frown lines.”

I was freed, luckily, from having to produce the kind of response for which I lacked the wit by Richard's low, admiring whistle. “She sure got herself a sweet deal.”

Sally ignored him. Her eyes, lifting from the magazine, took on the flinty look I had seen there before. “Divorce is
bloody
for women,” she said. Then, just as suddenly softening again, brushing off the thin fizz of attention the strenuousness of her remark had generated, she went on lightly, “Well…everybody blames the woman, don't they? The man just dusts himself off and moves in with the new version, generally shinier, while the old has-been wifey is left to stew over her failings and save up her alimony for plastic surgery. And the social life, forget it. The husband and the floozy get all the invites, and the divorcée gets to opt for a quick, tradedown remarriage or a series of endless, inebriate lunches with other divorcées.” Patsy tittered at this, and Sally smiled at her, finesse fully recovered. “I swear half the restaurants in Manhattan make a living out of those dames, bitching over their noon martinis. They call all the waiters by name.”

The others recognized this and laughed.

“Still…” Sally said wickedly, amusing herself now, “I guess it's nice that they have each other to turn to when the pool boy throws them over at the end of the summer.”

Later, as we lay there in the roaring afternoon heat, Howie begged people to swim with him.

“Not now, hon,” Patsy said, lazily shrugging off his tug. Her turquoise bikini, held together by gold rings at the corners, exposed the sharp line of her pelvis.

Richard stood. “Come on, son. I'll swim with you.” He leaned over Patsy, casting a shadow. She half opened her eyes.

“You're in my sun,” she said flatly, closing them again.

Richard bent swiftly and scooped his wife up as if she were straw. As he carried her to the sea, we could see her legs flailing and her fists pounding ineffectually at his neck. The children exploded, squealing and splashing, when he dropped her into the water. Patsy emerged instantly, adjusted the strap of her bikini top, and waded shoreward. Richard, behind her, submerged his head for a moment before rising and settling his dense gaze on the retreating lower center of her back.

“He's such an
adolescent
,” she said, reaching us back on the sand. She flattened her towel with irritated, fluttery hands.

“Oh lighten up, Patsy,” Mason said. There was a tiny scowl in the sleepy, afternoon drawl of his voice.

Patsy, stretching, paused at it and twisted her face to him. He did not meet her look.

Jenny and Jessica, breathing hard, rushed up to the edge of the cluster of adults on the sand. “Come and swim,” Jenny said.

Jessica was clutching Tallulah, who was shivering miserably. “Tallulah loves it. You put her in the water, and she swims, but then, when you lift her up, she keeps swimming.”

Jenny, giggling, imitated a dog's frantic paddle. “Come and see,” she urged.

“All right,” Mason agreed. “Frankie?”

I looked at him.

“Coming?” He lifted his arm slightly, beckoning, and the silver of his heavy watch flashed.

I looked around. Patsy was on her stomach, the strap of her bikini top undone. Lesley and Paige, their heads and towels together, were huddled at a safe distance from the adults down the beach. Everyone else was swimming or sleeping. Sally smiled over her dark glasses and signaled with a tiny, queenly movement of her hand that we ought to just go.

“I'm happy here,” she said.

“What's around the bend?” Mason asked over the children's heads. We were standing thigh-deep in the water. He looked back toward the rocks at the end of the crescent of the bay.

“More rocks. One big one that looks like a wineglass. Narrow at the bottom and wide at the top.”

“Show me.”

“All right.”

We left the girls swimming and walked up onto the sand toward the rocky curve.

“See. Like a wineglass.” I made my hands into a V.

“Yes,” he said, “it is.” And then: “How was yesterday?”

“Fine.”

He looked at me. “Women never mean fine when they say fine. How was it?”

“A lot of drinking.”

“Yes, and?”

“I don't know…”

He smiled. “Don't you?”

We had wandered beyond the wineglass rock and stopped on the far side of it, in its shadow.

“Sally and Patsy got a bit edgy with each other.”

“Patsy shouldn't drink,” he said mildly.

“No.” I toed the sand, wishing for something cleverer to say.

He put one hand at the back of my head and kissed me.

“Don't mind about them,” he said, “Patsy and Sally and Bee Bee.”

My brain couldn't catch up. “I don't.”

“Yes you do.” He laughed and took my hand.

He held it, walking ahead of me across the rocks, until I disengaged my fingers when I could make out the shapes of others, vague through the veils of haze.

That night we ate formally, as we did sometimes, in the vaulted dining room. Sally presided over those occasions with a majestic mix of grace and authority, but that wasn't the sort of thing I realized at the time; I was too caught up in the constant, joyful undercurrent of anarchy. So much charm and beauty, so much heady entertainment, all in one room. I was giddy with it, that night in particular, though Mason's seat, assigned by place card, was at the opposite end of the table from mine.

Between us the children were in revolt.

“Not fish again.” Jenny's plate had just been laid in front of her. Soft fingers of lemon sauce spread across the white of the porcelain.

“Good fish,” Christina said sternly, “from your Daddy.”

“Probably I caught it,” Howie announced.

“No,” Ned insisted. “I recognize that one. He's mine.”

“It's disgusting,” Lesley groaned, pushing a fork in a listless half circle around her plate.

“What's wrong with it?” Richard asked.

“We don't like it,” said Lesley.

“I do,” Paige said. “I think it's delicious.” It was painful, her crush on Richard, and all the harder to watch now that I was beginning to like her.

Howie forked a chunk of fish and dipped it in his sauce, then licked at it before spitting theatrically.

Richard's disgust registered clearly on his face. “What
do
you like?”

“Spaghetti.”

“That's all they ever eat. Spaghetti and hot dogs and candy.”

“They're barbarians,” Sally commented blithely. “It's best not to attempt to civilize them.” She lifted her wineglass and sipped. “That way they grow up better prepared for the perils of adult life. Like guerrilla warfare and marriage.”

The twins, their hair, almost white now, tumbling uncombed over their shoulders, gazed at their mother.

“We like hamburgers,” Jessica offered.

She seemed confused when everybody laughed.

I stayed up late that night, drinking brandy and flirting, feeling distanced from my earlier gaffe over Bee Bee and Ned by an effervescent new mood and a sense that something had changed, that I was a small step closer to becoming one of them, a member of their ill-defined, faintly hedonistic club. When, eventually, I said goodnight and went to bed, my skin still damp from moonlit swimming, it was to dream, on the frothy foundation of one tiny, unrepeated kiss, girlishly of Mason.

• • •

There are stories, aren't there, plays and things, in which the central plotline involves one person driving another mad through all sorts of contrivances that leave the victim doubting the evidence of his or her own eyes, ears, memories? In life, of course, it's simpler. One person only needs to lie to another patchily but regularly for a reasonable length of time for the lunatic edge to set in.

In the three months since Phillip had come home to me, and stayed, he had been a model husband. Concerned and caring, he took on all kinds of new tasks and accomplished them with bachelor aplomb. He complained, comically, about the price of fruit juice, the difference between the good kind and the processed kind, the kind we did not like. Pressing home to me, through this exchange, the marvelousness of his realization that we needed fruit juice, and that he could not just leave Joan to reach for the first and cheapest one that caught her eye. I had to praise him.

Then, when praise wasn't quite enough, he caught a cold, or a sore throat at least, and though lousy with it, ventured out on a chilly day to spread some gravel on a pothole in the driveway. I had commented on the pothole the day before, on our way to Dr. Griffith's office. Phillip blamed the visit to Dr. Griffith's office, the crowded waiting room in particular, for the sore throat.

As a result of the damp gravel spreading, the sore throat naturally flared and I was aware—and not as cross about it as you might suppose—that Phillip wanted nursing. That he wanted me to fuss over him; that he wanted soup. And, when I obliged, he lapped my attention up like a greedy puppy.

At other times, away from my gratitude, or concerned inquiries, he was quieter than he might have been, more distant. But one could put that down, if not in possession of the facts, to writing pressures, to the difficulties of running a company from a distance, to the days when I really did need him and some expression, some new paleness perhaps, alerted him to that fact and frightened him as much as it did me.

Actually all of these things did strain him and eventually began to take their toll. He was tired. I heard his mother, Helen, a frequent and welcome visitor, say to him in the kitchen one evening: “You must take care of yourself, dear. You're no use to Frances if you're ill too.”

She is a decent woman, Helen, and would not have wanted me to hear this remark. In my presence all her concerns are directed at me. I feel for her. It has not been so long, three years, since she lost her husband. And now she is worried again, for us, for me, and Chloe, and Phillip. She sees in Phillip, of course, only the dutiful son, the devoted husband. I wish that that was all I saw, that no vision of him as someone else's lover ever wandered unbidden across my eyelids when I close them to sleep.

One warm evening a short while after that visit of Helen's, I joined Phillip in a whiskey and soda. I rarely drink whiskey, but that night I wanted one, a premonition, perhaps, of what was to come. Whiskey is such bracing liquor. Phillip, sipping his and gazing sternly at the skyline, said that he needed to go to London. He had tried to avoid it, but there was nothing for it; some campaign, some new client demanded his presence. He would probably need to spend about a week away, so he had asked Helen, and she had said she would stay with me. Chloe had even offered to take a week off work and come down too if I liked. Or maybe I'd prefer it if Catherine came.

I would prefer Catherine, I thought, and then I told him so, rather slowly, feeling as though I was watching us having this conversation from a distance, wondering when he had discussed his plans with all these people. When he had stopped discussing his plans with me. I realized with a small shock that this lack of communication predated my illness, predated even his affair with Josee. We had been sliding for a year or two, maybe even three, toward this vaguely detached state.

“Right then,” Phillip said, and he brushed my hand, which was resting on the tabletop, before getting up to fix us another drink. I didn't want one.

Why was I so sure that after three months of apparent and admirable devotion, after three months of, if not forgetting, at least distancing himself from his lover, my husband would take this opportunity to see her again, had perhaps already arranged to do so? I stared at his empty chair. H.H., I thought. That's why.

H.H. was a device that Phillip had concocted when Chloe was not yet in her teens. She went through a phase, as most children do, of exhibiting acute and noisily disapproving embarrassment at any sign of affection between us. Once, when Emma was visiting, she gave a display of particular horror when Phillip attempted to kiss me over a bowl of coleslaw.