The View from Here Read online

  • • •

  “Why is Patsy laughing so loud?” Jenny asked, toying with her spaghetti next to me at dinner.

  Patsy’s voice had grown, in the two hours since Arturo and Maria had left, steadily brassier. Jenny, giving her plate a bit of a shove away, dropped her fork. Everyone else had finished and Christina had begun to clear the table. Patsy, dipping her delivery to a sugary coo, said, “I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian and wearing flowers in my hair.” She leaned toward Paige and went on in a strident, conspiratorial whisper, “That’s the kind of thing men like.”

  Paige colored and dipped her head.

  Patsy turned a defiant shoulder to her husband and snared his eye.

  “Isn’t it, Richard?” she asked brightly.

  Richard stared.

  Mason, in the chair next to Patsy, lay a light, restraining hand on her arm.

  “Can we have some ice cream?” Jessica asked.

  “Can we?” Jenny echoed.

  Patsy, ignoring these interruptions, rotated her body pointedly toward Mason and arched her eyebrows. “You’re quite partial to a hippyish young thing too, aren’t you, Mason?”

  Bee Bee, who was tight, said, “Here we go.” She was watching Patsy steadily over the rim of her wineglass.

  “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream,” Ned sang, winking at Howie.

  Howie, though, was intent on his father, whose jaw and lip line had taken on an unfamiliar, hard set.

  “Will you please just shut up,” Richard said in a low, commanding voice.

  Patsy sprang, sharp and alive, overturning her chair. “Will I shut up? That’s rich, coming from the giggle king.” She laid her hands flat on the table and put her weight on them. “Oooh, baby, let’s smoke a little weed,” she sang, saccharine.

  “That’s enough!” Richard, standing, upset his glass.

  Jessica began to cry.

  “Why is everyone yelling?” Jenny said, distressed.

  “Come on.” I pushed my chair back. “Howie, you too.”

  Howie did not respond. His little eyes darted, first to one parent, then to the other. I decided that he must have witnessed scenes like this before.

  “Go with Frankie, Howie,” Mason said.

  The child glanced at his father a last time, for direction. None came. Richard, his head down, looked exhausted. I gestured again to Howie and he slipped obediently from his chair. I put one hand on his shoulder and led him, with the twins, out of the room.

  The children’s rooms were on different corridors. I sent the twins on alone and told them to clean their teeth. Then I took Howie’s meek hand. “My room is right above you,” I said when we got there. “Do you hear me…stomping around?”

  He looked at me, mute.

  “Where are your pajamas, pet?” I asked, waving off the jokiness and recalling, for a moment, my father, in rare, sweeter circumstances, saying the same thing to me.

  Howie tugged a pair of pajamas from under the pillow of one of the room’s single beds. They were festooned with cartoon cowboys, Stetsons and lassos flying. I knelt to help him with the buttons of his stiff party shirt. Stripped of it he looked frail. I hugged him quickly, the floor tiles hurting my knees. He stretched his arms obediently, one after the other, for the pajama top, and when I had fastened it, he stood with them flat at his sides. I got up and handed him the bottoms. He clutched them to his chest, shy.

  “I’ll go and check on those naughty girls and come back in a minute,” I suggested, and he nodded, bowing his head then to slip a narrow black belt from his trouser loops.

  The girls were easily settled with hugs and reassurance. Tallulah had been slipped, against Christina’s rules, into Jenny’s bed; I pretended not to notice. They wanted a story, but I said it was late already and it had been an exciting day, reminding them of the fun we’d had earlier at the beach. “What was the best bit?” I asked them from the door, my hand on the light switch.

  “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” they shouted, shimmying their shoulders.

  Under the bedclothes Tallulah wiggled and yipped.

  By the time I had checked again on Howie, there was quiet in the dining room. Coffee had been served by the pool. I helped myself to a cup form the tray. For a moment nobody spoke. Then Patsy said quietly, “Oh look, the other little hippie.”

  I felt myself stiffen, the way an animal does sensing danger.

  Richard stood, took his wife firmly by the elbow and tugged her from her chair. She tottered as he forced her inside. Her expression as she passed me was almost gleeful.

  I had seen Patsy and Richard argue before, often. But I had never had the sense of either of them being genuinely engaged. It was like a habit with them and almost a performance from her. One night, one of the late nights when the drinking had gone on and on and people had swum naked and lain afterward in the dark singing along to some popular song, a row had erupted from nowhere about the war in Asia. Patsy, jumping up, had shrieked vehemently at Richard that he was a pompous jerk, but even then I’d felt that she was just bouncing off him somehow. No one else seemed to pay much attention to her outbursts either; they faded too fast.

  “Big day,” Ned said now, as if we were all children, tired from an outing. But his voice was covered by Richard’s, plainly audible through an open bedroom window.

  “What is it with you?” he yelled.

  “With me? You’re the one who’s been all over that brainless little tramp for three days. Humiliating me.”

  “Humiliating you?”

  “What else would you call it? Your tongue’s out of your mouth every time that little nympho waggles her tits.”

  There was a beat of dangerous silence. Then Carl, a protective arm around Skipper’s shoulders, said, “I think we’ll turn in.”

  “Good night,” people said.

  “Good night.”

  Richard’s voice, worn, drifted again above us.

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Patsy. It’s disgusting.” And then with an audible sigh, “Anyway, Skipper’s a perfectly nice girl.”

  It was a mistake.

  “Skipper.” Patsy’s voice was thick with mockery. “Let’s see, what would you call her in the sack? Skip? Skippy?”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  At the pool Ned tried again to start a conversation. No one else had the heart.

  “Come on, Bee,” he said, giving up. “What about hitting the hay?”

  Bee Bee was reluctant.

  “Come on,” Ned repeated. He took the empty brandy glass from her hand and put it on the table. She looked at him for a second, then got up meekly, and they went into the house.

  “I think that’s enough for me too.” Sally stood, still holding her coffee cup. When she put it down, she shifted the tray slightly to a more solid position on the table. “Good night,” she said, half turning, smiling at me and then at her husband before walking steadily away.

  Alone in the night, Mason and I heard Richard say, “Maybe I just like getting a little attention from a woman for a change. A little warmth.”

  “Oh, don’t be pathetic,” Patsy spat.

  There was a rumble. A chair toppling? Something knocked from the dressing table? Richard’s voice came deep and even over it.

  “Don’t you think I see the way you look at other men? Mason, for instance?”

  There was silence. Then a slamming sound—the windows and shutters closing.

  Mason did not speak. Neither did I. We were sitting a little distanced from each other, too far to touch. I was aware of the sound of my own breathing and the jangle Richard’s words had set off inside me. We remained like that, motionless, for some time. One by one the lights in the house dimmed, and the going-to-bed noises died. After a while Mason stood and took my hand. Wordlessly, he led me around the pool and through the gate at the far end of it. There was a soft click as the latch closed. In the dark he kissed me, the weight of his upper body pressing me to the wall behind. He raised my ski
rt with quick, insistent hands.

  SIX

  ISLEPT LATE AND ate breakfast alone except for the younger children playing nearby. I had almost finished when Howie, sitting on the side of the pool with his feet dangling, suddenly looked up warily. Patsy was at the glass doors, holding a coffee cup. She came out and, without encouragement, took the seat opposite me.

  “I think I may owe you an apology, Frankie,” she said, cradling the coffee in both hands and looking at me directly. She was paler than usual, and the skin under her eyes was thinned by mauve shadows.

  I looked at her, not knowing what to say.

  Seeming to take my silence for a rebuke, she dropped her head.

  “Things have just been rather…difficult,” she said, “for some time now. For Richard and me.”

  “I’m sorry.” I put my coffee down. There was real sadness in her voice.

  “Well, you know…marriage.” She raised her shoulders and flashed a wan smile. “Actually, I guess you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “I guess not,” I replied, smiling too, though a bit of me resented the remark.

  She rested her elbows on the table. Inhaling, she rolled her head sadly from side to side.

  “Hudson,” she said, “was a mistake.”

  It was a level of confidence that I wasn’t prepared for. Mild shock must have registered on my face, but, if so, she went on anyway, apparently not noticing.

  “If there was only Howie, I might have just, well”—she flipped her hand and sighed—“made a decision. I don’t know. It’s all complicated enough already, without a baby.” There was a pause. Then she said, “There are other people involved.” She looked up at me, holding my gaze for a long moment, as if I might say something, or know something, of great importance. Then she shook her head, dispelling the idea. “Anyway,” she said, with a deliberate lift of tone, “the point is, with all this going on, I say things sometimes, especially on top of a few martinis, that I don’t mean. So I’m sorry if—”

  “Let’s just forget it,” I interrupted.

  She smiled, and nodded, and got up, and went over to the pool. Howie, tentative, watched as she walked absently toward him.

  “Do you want to see me swim, Mom?” he asked in a small voice as she neared.

  “Sure,” she replied, sitting and letting her feet drop over the mosaic tiles into the tealy blue of the water.

  Patsy had a full absolution. Sally, arriving at the pool later that morning in a strapless sunbathing outfit, simply laid her book on the table and said, “Good morning.”

  “They got off all right, then?” Bee Bee asked, midway through her first cigarette. The hollows under her eyes were more pronounced than Patsy’s.

  “Oh, yes. I assume so. Mason’s briefcase was gone when I woke up.” She laughed and looked toward Patsy, who spoke matter-of-factly.

  “Uh-huh. I heard them leave.”

  I was listening with mounting apprehension. Who had left? Sally had referred to Mason’s briefcase, but Mason could not have left. Could not possibly have left. Not without talking to me. The sun had begun to turn white, and in the fresh heat a prickly sensation crept across my skin. I could not bear it. I sat up. “Leave?” I asked suddenly, not caring if my voice betrayed me.

  “Richard and Mason have gone to L.A. for the day,” Sally explained simply. “You know men. If they’re away from the cut and thrust of the workplace for too long they lose their ability to function. Mason is like some sort of small animal detached from its natural habitat if he goes more than two weeks without contact with a lawyer or a secretary.”

  “Worry if he starts dictating when you sit in his lap,” Bee Bee said.

  They all roared. I shut myself behind the protective screen of my eyelids as Sally settled herself elegantly in the sun and heard them, across the sudden brutal gulf that had arisen between their world—worse, Mason’s world—and mine, drifting into pleasant, detached conversation.

  It was something I had marveled at in the past, and would again, the ability of that set to refix the veneer, tug the covers over anything troubling, with their talk. They had a kind of language that united them, a glib clever kind of language that I was impressed by and tried not to copy too obviously. Their talk revealed things about them too, about their lives that I enjoyed my glimpses of. They spoke in familiar terms of politicians and millionaires and artists who I had not yet heard of, but would later. They knew a couple who had had a child kidnapped for ransom, they employed au pairs from Sweden and cooks from Tennessee, and they had close friends who lived in Paris.

  That day they talked about the house. There were several things, it seemed, in addition to the yellow sun umbrellas, of which Sally did not approve. She thought the marble in the bathrooms too creamy, she was unhappy with the linen and she regretted not having had her own bedding and towels sent ahead, and she disliked red geraniums.

  “Although,” she said, “in this kind of setting, in these sorts of hot countries, red is perhaps right.”

  I was astonished. I had no idea that such a thing could be wrong. I heard laughter as they blamed what they apparently considered lapses, not just in taste, but something deeper, more fundamental, on the owner’s wife. I had seen a photograph of her once. It had been pointed out to me, in fuzzy black and white, in one of Richard’s newspapers. The husband was a businessman, a tycoon, whose name I knew. I had thought the wife looked rather prim, in pearls and a suit with a short jacket, but nice enough, kind enough. Perhaps I didn’t understand anything.

  “Daddy used to tell us that money didn’t buy breeding,” Patsy said.

  “Unfortunately, the reverse is also true,” Sally replied. And then there was a change in her tone as she said, “Oh. Hello.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Carl and Skipper were standing at the glass doors. Carl was holding two carryalls.

  “Hello,” Carl replied to Sally quietly.

  Skipper just nodded.

  Patsy looked at them, then away.

  “We thought we might move on today,” Carl said. “We’d planned to tour around a bit, you know. Thought we might head off…on the next leg.”

  Skipper was holding a fat guidebook. She waved it pathetically. “It was very good of you to have us,” she said to Sally.

  “Not at all.” Sally stood. “We’ll miss you. And I know Mason will be sorry not to have been able to say goodbye.”

  “We only ever meant to impose on you for a few days,” Carl said. “Anyway, I hope we might see you all in California some time.” He shifted his gaze to Bee Bee.

  “Oh,” she said. “Sure.”

  We all followed them out to their car, Patsy lingering at the back of the group, till she could no longer avoid saying goodbye. She took Carl’s hand and looked at him, ducking Skipper’s eyes.

  “Look…” she said “I—”

  Carl, cutting her off, hugged her noncommittally and patted her back. She didn’t go on.

  “Bye,” Skipper said, opening the door of the little red car and turning to get in. “Thanks for everything.”

  We all waved until the crunch of wheels on the gravel had faded and Sally said pleasantly, “Let’s have tuna fish salad for lunch.”

  Things were not as bad as I had thought. When I went to my room before the tuna fish salad, which I didn’t think I could face anyway, there was a note. It had been slipped, apparently, through the gap between the door and the floor and had caught there, lodged in the knotted fringe of an Oriental rug. I hadn’t noticed it.

  Darling, the note said. One lonely day. Sorry. A penned heart, the lines not quite meeting in the sweet upper V, signed it. I refolded the stiff buff paper and, elated, slid it into the bottom drawer of the tall bureau near my bed. It nestled there, happily, between a white shirt and a blue swimsuit, ready for later rereadings.

  Mason and Richard were to be back in the early evening. They had chartered a small plane for the day, and it would return them to the dusty airstrip north of the town. They’d taken
the jeep there at dawn for the trip out and left it parked. I knew the airstrip and imagined the jeep waiting, forlorn as I was without them. Without him.

  The afternoon threatened to drag. Patsy had gone to her room to sleep, and Paige and Lesley had taken advantage of a momentary lack of pestering from the twins to escape to the beach on their own. I was glad when Ned suggested a run into town. He and Bee Bee and I decided to take the younger children but Sally cried off with one of those polite little half smiles that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She had a headache.

  On the way Jessica sat on my lap.

  “That cactus looks like a man,” she said, pointing.

  Ned pulled the car over and got out to dedicate his hat to the illusion.

  “Looks better on him,” Bee Bee said when he got back in the car.

  As we pulled out again Howie said, “If he is a man, then he has to have a name. A man’s name,” he emphasized. He had never quite gotten over Tallulah’s being a girl.

  “His name is Roy,” Ned said, as if this were a matter of common knowledge, “Cactus Roy.”

  In the town that day there were mariachis pah-pah-pahing at the sky in honor, it seemed, of the local beauty contest.

  “Miss Mexico,” Jenny hollered, thrilled.

  Both twins were lifted to look. There were crowds in the square. At the far end of it, half a dozen young women tottered on a red-bannered podium wearing high-heeled shoes and old-fashioned bathing suits.

  “Who ya for?” Ned nudged me.

  “Number three,” I said. I knew her slightly.

  “Now me, I like number six.” He grinned. “Not that I’m looking,” he added for Bee Bee’s benefit.

  “Look all you want, fella. I don’t see any of them looking at you,” she said.

  There was a hush, and then a linen-suited judge, some local dignitary I remembered meeting at the Rodriguez’s house, took the podium ponderously and tapped the microphone. It squealed. The musicians stopped playing. A blue Ford that had been circling the square pulled sharply to the curb, and behind us a gang of boys who had climbed onto the bench outside the barber’s shop jostled each other, causing one of them to fall. Number six was announced.