Valley Fever

 

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For Russel

 

1.

I don't return to places I've lived. I avoid my high school dorm by not going back to all of Massachusetts. In London, I'll avoid Holland Park so as not to be reminded of the basement flat on Addison Road. The furnished two-bedroom on Via Annia in Rome, the bright studio in the white brick building on West Eighty-fourth Street with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the two-bedroom in Prenzlauer Berg I shared with a publishing-heiress insomniac who would speak only Russian: some of those places were good for a while. Still, whole neighborhoods, whole cities, can be ruined by the reasons you left.

“This entire thing has gone off the rails.”

“Come home,” Anne said.

“Home where?”

“At least you don't have a dog.”

“Annie, I could kill you with a fucking pencil.”

“Stop swearing,” she said. Then she said, “I have soft-shell crabs.”

I have made so many calls from airports, and so many times I have been crying. Here's what I like about airports: no one's surprised to see you cry. In airports and closets and hospitals, cry as much as you like.

“Well, I have lots of wine. Let's drink our way through Charlie's wine cellar, okay?”

“I don't have anywhere to go.”

“Charlie wants you to come over here and drink your way through his wine cellar.”

“Did you ask him that?”

“Charlie, do you want Ingrid to come over and drink her way through your cellar?”

“I'm taking a different flight.”

“He does.”

“It's going to be late.”

Something else I like about airports is that you have no choice but to eat french fries and peanut M&M's. At the airport in Denver toward the end of the small C concourse, there's a mom-and-pop greasy spoon where you can get grilled cheeses cooked in shortening.

I said to the employee behind the airline counter in the lounge, “He says he doesn't love me as much as he thought he did.”

Her name was Gloria and she had enormously coiffed blond hair and coral-pink lipstick that bled into the tiny lines around her mouth. “You're very brave,” she said as she changed my ticket. Crying will get your ticket changed without a fee. “I was married for twelve years to a man who didn't love me.”

On the flight from Denver to Los Angeles, I drank four glasses of wine. Gloria had upgraded my ticket to business.

It was not the first time Anne had rescued me heartbroken from an airport, or restaurant, or apartment, or football game, but it was the first time I really had no place at all to go. Ten months earlier, I had quit my job as a personal assistant to an aging news anchor and moved from New York to live with Howard in Los Angeles. Then, now, on the forty-five-minute flight from Aspen to Denver, Howard had told me, “This isn't what I thought I wanted.”

“What did you think you wanted?”

“I thought I wanted you,” he said.

We had spent an awful week with his awful father, a blank and stupid congressman from Nebraska who never, in two years, had spoken to me directly. On the way to the Aspen airport, we had stopped for bacon sandwiches at Jerry's. Howard was always introducing me to things I never would have considered, like Vietnamese fish-head soup or the Jerry's bacon sandwich, with sprouts and avocados and cream cheese and sunflower seeds. He knew things like where to get the best sushi in Little Tokyo and the best barbecue in Inglewood. One of the several terrible things about that flight from DEN to LAX was the delicious bacon sandwich that wouldn't get eaten.

“What changed?” I said.

“Nothing. Nothing changed.”

“Something changed your mind.”

“Maybe I changed.”

“Is this because I don't have a job?”

“No, Ingrid. It's not like that.”

“Because I wear my sunglasses indoors.”

“No, no.”

“They're prescription!”

“I know, Ingrid.”

“Your father hates me.”

“Why do you always say that?”

I said, “How is it, then? What happened?”

Howard said, because someone had to say it, “I think I only love you when I'm drunk.”

*   *   *

By the time I landed at LAX, my hands throbbed with anxiety, as if something in my veins was trying to push its way out.

“You look adorable,” Anne said. “You always look adorable.” She took the small suitcase our parents had given me when I was thirteen, when I left for school. It said IPP on it. It was a floral tapestry, now covered in grime. “For someone who's just been demolished, you look fantastic.”

Her car smelled new. Her posture was straight, her hair mussed but clipped back with a tortoiseshell barrette. Anne made everything in the world seem clean and fresh and obvious.

“Aspen will be ruined for you now,” Anne said.

“Ruined for you, too,” I said.

“Well, we already paid for the rooms at New Year's. Has he ruined all of Colorado? Can you still fly into Denver?”

“Thank you for coming to get me,” I said, flattened.

“I will always come and get you.” She tugged on a clump of my hair. “I'm saving up for when you have to come and get me.”

*   *   *

Los Angeles was dark and wet and cold as it is every June, but this June the rain relieved a thirteen-month drought.

“They'll say one hard rain makes no difference,” Anne said. This was not true, we knew. Every bit of water mattered. Even the smallest rain could make or ruin you.

“It's beautiful, though, isn't it?”

The windshield wipers went back and forth like a conversation. It was late. By morning, the gutterless streets would fill and overflow and potholes the size of platters would sink into Hollywood Boulevard. Anne and Charlie had held dinner. Back at their white clapboard house with the green shutters, Anne gave me wool socks and her shearling slippers and we kept the windows open so we could hear and see and smell the rain.

“The paint is going to bubble,” Charlie said.

“It will be my fault,” Anne said.

“Of course it's your fault.”

She said, “He'll blame me for the peeling windowsills and for everything.” The windowsills were already peeling. The windowsills in Anne's house peeled perfectly, the paint coming off in full strips.

Charlie fried wiggly, still-snapping soft-shell crabs in mustard and butter and we drank a bottle of malbec so rich and viscous, you couldn't see your fingers on the other side of the glass.

“Aren't you supposed to kill those first?” Anne suggested.

“I have done this before,” he said, shaking the pan with the crab curling up in it. Just outside, under the eaves, Charlie had spears of sweet potatoes frying in a lobster pot over the barbecue, and he turned to check on them.

“All right, lovey. I am just trying to help.” Anne's wavy hair and neat clothes and straight posture could make you hostile to her advice. “You'd think you would just want to kill it quick,” she said, half to me and half to Charlie.

“You want me to cook some fritters?” I said.

She said, “We don't have any squash. Don't try to do anything tonight, Ingrid. You got off the plane drunk.”

Outside the window, rain poured out of the storm drain like a faucet. We finished the first bottle of wine and opened a second.

Charlie said, “If you can't tell the difference between this and the malbec, then next time I'm going to serve you this.”

I said, “I can tell the difference, Charlie.”

When Anne and I were teenagers, Miguel caught us drinking Blue Nun in the vineyard. Dad was so angry, he sold Anne's car and forced us both to work in the packing shed for the rest of the summer. “This punishment is not for drinking,” Dad said. “This punishment is for drinking Blue Nun.” Charlie has latched on to this story and to the idea of me and Anne as drinkers of German plonk.

Anne said, “Do you want to talk about it, Inky, or do you want to talk about other things?”

“Have you spoken to Mom?” I said.

“I spoke to her, but I didn't give her any details.”

“You didn't have any details to give her,” Charlie said from underneath the eaves. He used long metal tongs to lift the sweet potato fries out of the pot.

“I don't want to talk about it, anyway,” I said. I never give Anne any real details. Keeping secrets is not one of Anne's specialties. In fact, Anne's specialty is using your secrets against you.

“I guess we'll cancel December,” Charlie said.

Anne said, “You don't have to cancel the whole month. December exists.”

“We can go to Wyoming instead,” I said.

Charlie said, “I put the deposit down on Aspen.” He emphasized the word
deposit
.

He filled my plate with wilted greens and slipped a perfect crunchy crab on top, straight from the pan.

“I can't go back to Aspen,” I said.

Charlie said, “You're crossing a lot of places off your list, Ingrid.”

“Are you going to let him keep Aspen?” Anne said.

“We'll see how I feel in December.” The soft-shell crabs were crunchy and golden and tangy with mustard, but I couldn't eat more than their crispy little claws.

“You and I could go, Anne,” said Charlie.

Anne picked at her wilted greens, eating them one by one. “I don't really want to go with just you.”

The rain slowed down. You could hear each separate drop hit the flat leaves of the palms. The rain, like everything, was temporary.

*   *   *

Anne gave me soft cotton pinstripe pajamas and a carafe with water. I opened the wide windows to let the rain splash in but the rain had stopped. There were leftover irregular drops from the rooftop. Beside the guest room I could hear Anne in the kitchen, drying the Saint-Louis and setting them back in the cupboard. Anne doesn't let anyone else wash her expensive glasses. I smelled the smoke from Charlie's weed, outside. Charlie liked to smoke and Anne didn't. I didn't either. Weed could make me suicidally depressed. Charlie used to say, “That's because you only smoke when you've been drinking.” Charlie's marijuana came in a pharmaceutical bottle. It was an anti-anxiety prescription. One morning after dinner at Anne's and a late-night smoke with Charlie, I woke certain that if I did not immediately flush all my Lunesta and Vicodin and all my Tylenol PM down the toilet, I'd swallow pill by pill with bourbon. This is why I don't own a gun. Everyone else in my family owns a gun, including Anne. What would I do with a gun besides shoot myself?