The View from Here Read online

  Ned cheered. “I could always pick ’em,” he said with a wink for his wife.

  There was a carnival atmosphere. We ate ice cream and cotton candy from the carts in the streets. Ned danced with Jenny and then Jessica balanced on his feet. Howie, his face tight with concentration, almost waltzed with me. He’d had lessons.

  On the way home the children, still excited, yelled “Roooy” with enormous gusto from a hundred yards distant.

  “How’s the head?” Ned asked.

  Sally was rubbing hand cream into her palms. It smelled of almonds. “Worse,” she said. She frowned and carefully twisted the cap back onto the hand cream jar. “It’s been a long afternoon.”

  “Da-da-da-da-da dah,” Jenny sang. Ned had shown her how to conga.

  “Dah dah,” Howie shouted, wiggling and grabbing at her.

  Sally, one hand to her forehead, called, “Christina.”

  Christina appeared instantly, as if she had been waiting, hidden somewhere, for just such a summons. “Yes, madam.”

  “This might be a good time.”

  “Yes, madam,” Christina said, and then commanded, “Children.”

  Christina proceeded to herd the children, like so many stunned geese, out of the room amid a general subduing of the atmosphere. Something in Sally’s tone had suggested more than the words. She sighed when the children had gone and said, “I had to send one of the garden boys into town with that dog. It was sick again, and yowling.” She gave her ring finger a last gentle stroke. “I couldn’t believe something so small could make so much noise.”

  Patsy came in, doe-eyed from her afternoon’s sleep.

  “What noise?”

  “That dog yelping. Christina put it in the basement, but it was no good.” Sally touched her forehead lightly and stretched her long legs, emphasizing the headache.

  “Tallulah’s sick?” Bee Bee asked. She looked at me. “Is there a vet or something in the town, Frankie?”

  I didn’t answer because Sally said, “I told him to have it put down.”

  There was a silence, which was pierced by the wail of a child. Christina’s timing must have matched her mistress’s.

  “It was a stray,” Sally went on calmly. “There wasn’t much point in doing anything else.”

  During the twenty minutes of shouting that followed, Bee Bee called Sally a coldhearted bitch. This got very little in the way of a rise from her. She was apparently unconcerned both with the pathetic demise of the little dog, and with Bee Bee’s fury. But at the insult I noticed that Patsy, watching the row from the corner, smiled. Inside I felt oddly satisfied too. I was sad about Tallulah, and I knew that the children must be upset, but Sally’s chill distraction had given me reason to genuinely dislike her. I was certain that Mason would feel exactly the same way.

  Sally put a fleeting hand on her husband’s chest, at lapel level, when she leaned forward to kiss him hello. Their cheeks brushed.

  “Well,” she asked, “got your fix?”

  Mason set his things down by the glass doors. He was foreign to me, and more attractive than ever, in a white shirt, silk tie, and dark trousers. A maid, at a nod from Christina, lifted his briefcase and draped his jacket carefully over her arm.

  “I always used to go to meet him,” Sally said, sitting, draping an elbow over one of the outdoor chairs. “But then I realized it was easier to wait at home for the call saying that he wasn’t coming.”

  “Aah,” Mason said, passing her on his way to fix himself a drink. “No such call today though.” He winked at me then. I read oceans of meaning into that.

  Switching his glass from hand to hand to undo his cuffs, he leaned, proprietorial, against one of the arbor corner posts and asked, “So what’s been going on?” His smile implied that nothing serious could have occurred in his absence.

  “The vegetarians skipped off, hand-in-hand, to pastures new, and your wife slaughtered a puppy,” Bee Bee said.

  Mason’s eyes swept the faces of the adults scattered around the pool and lingered on Sally’s.

  “That little dog got sick,” she said calmly. “I had to have it put down. Bee Bee thinks I slit its throat and drank the blood.”

  The twins, who were hovering near their father, squealed at this and buried their heads in his waist. Paige and Lesley glared. Bee Bee took a hard slug of her drink and tightened her lips. Mason put his glass down and gathered his youngest daughters in by the shoulders.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” Sally said. “Let’s eat.”

  Ned sent Bee Bee a beseeching, pacifying look, which she ignored. She spoke steadily into the pall that had fallen over the evening. “You know, Sally,” she said, “sometimes I think there’s marble where your heart ought to be.”

  Sally didn’t reply.

  “Ned?”

  Ned raised his eyebrows.

  “We’re going out,” his wife said.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Sally announced smoothly.

  “Screw dinner.” Bee Bee tucked a hand into Ned’s elbow. Lesley got up and took the other one. Ned glanced back, once, over his shoulder as the three of them, united, left.

  A moment later Sally stood.

  “I’ll just let Christina know we’re only eight,” she said to nobody in particular.

  It was a subdued sort of an evening, but it stretched on a while after we ate. The Newsons had not come back. Sally and Patsy and Richard and Mason and I sat outside drinking brandies in the quiet. Everybody was tired. Talk ran out. Eventually Sally said, “Mason?” and got up.

  Mason got up too.

  “Good night,” he said to Patsy and me.

  I said good night and smiled. To hide my disappointment. Watching, I saw Mason open the door to the hallway and put his hand on the small of his wife’s back as she passed through it.

  In bed I switched on a lamp. I felt worn out, but not yet able to sleep. I opened a paperback I’d borrowed from the shelves in the television room. There were lots of them there, scattered amidst the driftwood and gathered shells of other vacations. But I knew, even as I nestled my thumb between the arc of its sepia-edged pages, that I would not settle to the story, a lonely tale of a Chinese girl unsuitably in love. I sighed and gazed up at the dark of the windows, projecting an image there of a different sort of homecoming for Mason.

  I fell asleep with the light on, and the book open, and woke bleary, wondering where I was. I turned the corner of my page down and switched off the lamp. When I rolled over, I heard voices, low and murmuring. I couldn’t distinguish whose they were. I assumed Bee Bee and Ned’s, come back from town. Then I heard a softly throaty laugh. Not Bee Bee’s. Patsy’s. I got up and crossed the floor to the window. Outside even the underwater pool lights had been switched off. It must have been very late.

  I could see the tiny blaze of Patsy’s cigarette and made out, against the faint orange glow of a single lamp lit inside the glass doors, another silhouette. Mason’s. I blinked, confused. Mason had gone to bed before me, when Sally had.

  I strained but I couldn’t make out anything, though I could hear that they were talking. They were very close to one another, side by side. Patsy turned and extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray that would be cleared before anyone came down in the morning. Then she faced Mason. She may have said something, her face at his shirt front. He made a sound and drew her to him, resting his chin on the top of her head.

  I felt cold and I trembled. But I didn’t move. I stood and watched as they walked into the house and Mason slid the glass door shut behind them and stopped to flick off the lamp.

  • • •

  Many women before me have decided to ignore the signs, reduce the obvious to explainable trivialities and plough on with their marriages. In some cases this behavior can be considered almost elegant, in others delusional. I cannot claim either of these forks. I was not deluded. I had no doubts that Phillip had been, and was still, in love with Josee. However, nor was I so noble in my lack of confrontation as to remain steadfastly
above it. I mentioned her name to him occasionally, unnecessarily, to watch his face.

  However, I do know that, whereas I had done this in the past with a dominant mood of mischievousness, of doing something that I ought not to do, like a child scratching, I was by then more motivated by wanting to know. I was opening a door for him, offering him an unhindered route to…not confession, discussion. I was worn out with pretense. Secrets, while unseen, are nevertheless burdens, and I did not have the energy to carry mine, or Phillip’s, anymore. I wished, sincerely wished that he would just tell me.

  One day, not long after our trip to the beach, my eternity ring still new enough to feel odd on waking, I did not come downstairs all day. It was the first of a few days like that. I was exhausted with a new kind of exhaustion, one that is quite familiar to me now. Dr. Griffith was called, and came, but no immediate emergency was declared. I just needed sleep, real sleep, beyond the rest kind I had been relying on up to that point.

  So I slept while, outside, Mr. Hardwick took advantage of the last of the good weather to tidy the hedges and mend the wall where it was clipped on the lane side by a tractor. Mr. Hardwick built that wall himself fourteen years ago and now he attended to the damage with skilled, old hands. His labors provided the background sounds for my drifts in and out of consciousness, the sleepy drone of the electric shears, then, later, the singsong tap of metal against stone. These are the sorts of things that mark the passage of time on the poor days, the bedridden ones, when I cannot get up and afford myself the more distinct rituals of daily punctuation.

  One afternoon, dreams turning real and reality becoming distant as I dozed, I opened my eyes at some point to see Phillip at my bedside, sitting on the little nursing chair that Helen gave me years ago and that I have been meaning to have re-covered and now never will. He had a book in his lap, but he was not looking at it. Nor, despite his proximity, did he seem aware of me. He was staring instead out the window at the garden, messy with the ragged start of autumn, the asters still in bloom and falling, roses not yet turned to hips. He had that blank look that people have when they are hugely troubled by untold things. And I longed to say to him, “I know.” But I did not. Not then.

  • • •

  I would have liked to walk crisply into breakfast and demand an explanation. But I was nobody’s wife; I could not. So I overslept instead. I felt leaden when I finally got out of bed, and I was slow to shower and dress. Downstairs, Bee Bee and Ned were up with Mason and all the children. Patsy appeared half an hour later with Sally right behind her.

  “Good morning,” Sally said.

  Bee Bee looked at her. Ned looked at Bee Bee. Bee Bee, holding Sally’s gaze, sighed and shrugged.

  “We’ve been friends a long time, Bee Bee,” Sally said and Bee Bee, with her husband’s silent encouragement, smiled, crossing back over the thin crevice of ill will that had split Sally from the rest of us.

  I wasn’t alone with Mason until much later, on the beach. I wandered off by myself and he contrived to join me, back at our old spot, in the seclusion afforded by the wineglass rock. He had been swimming. Plump drops of seawater clung to his shoulders, and his hands, on my waist, were cold. He turned me to him and kissed me. My mind, though, was still full of brisk questions. I kept a little stiff. He didn’t seem to notice. He smiled.

  “Did you miss me?” he said, and then maybe he did notice because he said, much more seriously, “I missed you.”

  But I had been stewing.

  “How’s Patsy?” I was appalled by the petulant sound of my own voice. It was too late, though, so I tensed, backing myself up and making it uncomfortable for him to keep his arm around me.

  “Patsy?” He was taken aback.

  “I saw you. Out by the pool,” I said, aware as I did that this wasn’t the way I had meant things to go. “Last night. After I’d gone to bed. After you’d gone to bed.”

  “Aah,” he said, putting a tentative hand to my hip. “Look, darling, that’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  I stared at him. I wanted to worry about it. I did not want to be detached from any aspect of his life.

  He sighed and kissed my forehead.

  “Look. Patsy and I are friends.”

  “Kissing friends?” I asked ludicrously.

  He chortled at this, the way he might have at something one of the twins said.

  “I kissed her at our last Christmas party,” he told me, mock earnestly. “It was that kind of party.” He was smiling, but then he stopped. “And now I’m kissing you.” He did.

  I pulled back, although I was beginning to want to be pacified, to start over.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said, steadily. “I got up, and I found Patsy out by the pool. She was pretty miserable, so I stayed with her for a while. Then I went back to bed. That’s it, sweetheart.” He raised his palms. “That’s it.”

  This explanation, especially in light of Patsy’s recent revelations, was horribly logical. I felt ridiculous. I didn’t reply.

  “Look”—his expression, watching me, was vaguely amused, pleased by my concern—“I was thinking of doing a little supply run, before dinner. Let’s go together.”

  I felt then, all at once, the time that he had been away and the time without him since. I had missed him. I nodded.

  “Good.” He ran a smooth hand over my lower back, and lower. Burying his head in the hollow of my neck, he said, “I have a little present for you.”

  It was a bracelet. Small gold links and a fancy clasp, a tiny blue stone in it. I was astonished. I had never been given a present like it before from anyone other than my parents. A watch once for good examination results, a family string of pearls on my twenty-first birthday. I stroked the bracelet after he had fastened it to my wrist.

  “I thought it was nice.” He reached out and slid the links up my arm, looking at it as if for the first time. “Pretty,” he said.

  “It’s lovely. Thank you.” I put my hand on his. We were in a café in town.

  He kissed me swiftly, leaning over a bag of limes, and laughed. So did I, his girl again.

  That night there was pink champagne, Patsy and Richard behaved as if the air between them had never been bruised, and all the children came to dinner wearing cardboard crowns crayoned purple. Even Hudson had one. He shoved it back from his damp forehead with pudgy hands.

  “Someone oughtta make a proper toast,” Ned said. “There are some nights when you can’t just pick up a drink and down it. Not even an average-to-inferior glass of fizzy foreign firewater.”

  This remark was greeted with a wave of good humor.

  “Here’s to nights like this, then,” I toasted.

  Sally, resplendent in the silver white empire-line dress of a goddess, raised her champagne with an elegant, unhurried gesture and smiled. “Well said, Frankie.”

  “ To nights like this,” Bee Bee repeated, “and plenty of ’em.”

  A stranger would not have picked up a single crosscurrent in the room.

  Much later, some time in the thin hours after midnight when Sally and Bee Bee were recementing their friendship in low voices through the soft nimbus of Bee Bee’s cigarette smoke, the two of them fell silent and settled four cold eyes, it seemed, for an uncomfortable moment, on me. Just then, though, Richard called my name. Patsy had invented some sort of drinking game that involved forfeits and spelling, and I was challenged to “anaemia,” so the moment, the look, if it had happened at all, was immediately swamped by merriment.

  I had been asleep for about an hour when I was awoken by a tap at my door. I held still for a moment and listened for it again. When it came, I got up and pulled a cotton robe around me. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

  Mason didn’t speak. He opened my robe and put his arms around me and touched his lips to the base of my throat. We stood like that for a long time in the moonlight. He looked up and said quietly, “Your shutters are open.”

  “I like the light, in the mornings.”


  He kissed me again. “I like you.”

  There was a great tenderness in him that night, and the frantic edge that had marked some of our lovemaking honeyed, mellowed into something, if not softer, then deeper. It left me utterly passive and, if it were possible, even more open to him than I had been before.

  “You are a fabulous girl-woman,” he said, his hand on my belly.

  “Girl-woman,” I repeated, rolling onto my side, propping myself up on an elbow and looking down at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “This part girl.” He touched a finger lightly to my left breast. “The heart of a girl. And this part woman.”

  I lay back again at the feel of his hand, but he took it away and smiled.

  “Sleep now, darling,” he said, his breath at my forehead.

  We had, to my delight, breakfast alone, except for the younger children, who were occupied with some insect that Howie had found. The girls were squealing, running away from it, then running back to be teased some more. Howie at some point took off after Jenny in earnest, holding the creature with his arm outstretched. She, longer-legged, and faster, kept just ahead of him, shrieking and twisting her head back constantly over her shoulder.

  “Make him stop, Daddy,” she shouted, passing us.

  “You make him stop,” Mason called. “You got him started.”

  Jessica, coming up behind Howie, made a grab for him, surprising him. He dropped the insect. It landed stiff and brown on the poolside tiles. “It’s dead now,” he moaned. “You killed it.”

  “It was already dead,” Jessica said.

  Howie bent down and gave the insect a poke. It skimmed, lifeless, a few inches over the tiles. Jenny came back to have a look. But she wasn’t in a standing-around mood.

  “Race you to the front gate,” she challenged, and started for it. Jessica and Howie took off after her, Howie soon lagging by a yard. Mason turned to watch them round the corner of the house.

  “That kid has no idea what he’s up against,” he said, turning back to me. “Even miniature women will tie you in knots.”