The View from Here Page 7

  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.

  “H.H. instead then,” Phillip had said to me.

  H.H. meant nothing. It happened that these were the initials on a serving spoon that I had bought at a flea market and that Phillip was holding at the time, but Chloe did not know this and incredibly has never figured it out. Throughout her childhood, she would beg in that wheedling way offspring adopt with parents to be let in on the secret, because for Phillip and me it became a constant code. It was our way of expressing love in public, secret to us, immensely private. Until Josee.

  H.H., she had written. H.H., Josee.

  How could anything that had breached the privacy of our marriage so profoundly simply evaporate?

  • • •

  There were to be more guests in those gilded halls, I had discovered in the course of casual dinner conversation the night before. The idea, through the passing of a glorious morning, began to make me faintly edgy, as if my own fragile standing were threatened somehow. By the afternoon, with the arrival imminent and then announced by the hiccup and sudden cut of a throttley car engine, a soft murmur of nerves had set up in my stomach.

  The girl in the convertible did not open the door to get out; she just stood on the buff leather of the bucket seat and slipped one golden leg and then another over the side of the shiny red chassis. When she landed in her bare feet on the gravel, she gave an easy little hop, slipped the seal-sleek curtain of her hair back behind her ears, and stared at the house for a moment the way I had once tried not to. Then she looked back down the sweep of the driveway, toward the tennis court, across the fresh emerald of the perfectly clipped lawns, before turning back to face us with a small, sincere sigh.

  “Great place,” she said.

  I felt my nerves dim and fade, and a different, female part of me spark. Here was another extraordinarily pretty woman, wearing a string bikini top.

  Mason smiled.

  The car’s driver exited the vehicle more conventionally than his companion. “This is Skipper,” he said in her direction. He stretched slightly, and stood easing his back. The movement drew attention to the difference in their ages.

  “Good to see you, Carl.”

  Ned and Mason advanced at once to shake Carl’s hand.

  Patsy and Bee Bee had not joined the welcome committee on the gravel driveway, though it had been Bee Bee who had told me the night before that Carl and Skipper were coming. She had known Carl a long time, but was no fan of Skipper’s. Evidently Carl had a wife somewhere who was Bee Bee’s friend.

  “He ditched her for the babysitter,” she had explained. “They’ll do that, you know.”

  Now, by the pool, a small clutter of necessities dividing them, the two women were spread, shins and arms and cleavages gleaming with suntan oil, impervious to the recent arrival, though it was heralded again by Howie, fantasydriving Carl’s car around an imaginary bend. He skirted the pool and skidded to a noisy halt near his mother.

  “That man’s got a sports car, Mom.”

  Patsy opened her eyes then and stood to be introduced. She and Richard had never met Skipper and Carl either. I was pleased.

  Bee Bee sat up, limply, to receive Carl’s kiss and waved halfhearted fingers past him at Skipper.

  “Hi,” Skipper said, beaming.

  Carl had revealed a stump of ponytail when he bent forward over Bee Bee.

  “You’ve been in California way too long, fella,” Ned said.

  When they left to say hello to Sally, who was in the house, Bee Bee inclined her head toward Skipper’s skimpily denimed derriere and pushed her glasses back up her nose with an exaggerated gesture. “Poor old Carl,” she crooned. “He hasn’t got the first clue how much that pin-skinny piece of ass is gonna cost him.”

  Thirty-two hours had passed since Mason had kissed me, and there had been no further sign that he had. He remained his assured, charming self. Particularly, it pained me to note, with women. All women.

  It was the evening of Carl and Skipper’s first day. She had come to dinner wearing the same clothes she’d arrived in with the addition of a thin top, its narrow shoulder straps crisscrossing the halter tie of the bikini. We had eaten outside. It had gotten cooler during dinner and a breeze had come up. Mason lifted a shirt, one of his, from the back of a chair and handed it to Skipper. He left it there this morning, I thought, when he came out to swim.

  “Thanks,” she said, pulling it on and rolling up the cuffs. She raised an arm to her face. “It smells of the sun.”

  Leaving the shirt unbuttoned, jutting her hip and the soft curve of her belly forward, Skipper reached with one hand into the front pocket of her shorts. When she sat up again, leaning forward, elbows on her knees, she held up a joint, horizontal in her fingertips. “Do you mind?” she asked Mason.

  He shrugged and lifted his hands.

  “Carl?” she called. “Match?” She caught the box he tossed her easily with her left hand, lit up, and inhaled, holding her chest expanded for a second before breathing out again.

  Carl moved to stand behind her and gave the nape of her neck a gentle stroke. She smiled, passing the joint over her shoulder to him. When he handed it back she half stood and sent it not sideways in Mason’s direction, but across to Richard.

  Richard hesitated, his grip slightly pinched. Then he looked at Patsy. When he had caught her eye he held it, put the joint to his lips and inhaled as deeply as Skipper had. He grinned as he exhaled the smoke. The broad stretch of his lips made him look, for just a moment, almost rakish.

  “Nothing like a little Mary Jane,” Carl said.

  Later Patsy dragged the hi-fi speakers out by the pool, hurrying back inside with a little jiggy movement of her hips and emerging again on a wave of music with her wrists held together in the air above her head and her breasts swaying. She swung herself, describing smooth circles with her pelvis, past the clutch of Carl and Mason and Richard, who quit their talk and laughed as she plucked an orange from the bowl on the long table and tucked it under her chin. Limboing lightly she beckoned, her arms waving like an Arabian dancer, for someone to take it from her. It was a game; people played it at parties.

  Ned, mirroring Patsy’s move
ments, attempted to relieve her of the orange without the use of his hands. It rolled down the tender swell of her upper body with his head in steady pursuit. Eventually he caught it and, birdlike, twitched it from the open plain of bare skin near her belly button. I watched as Bee Bee took it from him and Richard from her as Ned, prone on the patio tiles, made a play of looking up Bee Bee’s skirt.

  Skipper stood when Richard turned from Bee Bee, triumphant with the orange locked under his jaw, and slipped Mason’s shirt from her shoulders. She held her arms fractionally behind her, shimmied, and smiled as she approached him. His eyes smiled back, flirting. Everybody was.

  “She’s got even bigger bazooms than Paige,” Jenny said, staring sleepily at Skipper.

  The twins were nestled on an embroidered cushion that they had taken from a small sofa in one of the downstairs rooms, vaguely hypnotized by the noise and the antics of the adults, a shared bath towel encircling their shoulders. I had detached myself momentarily from the rest of the party to sit near them. Children’s company has always been a sort of refuge for me and I was feeling separated somehow from the revelry. The dynamics had changed.

  Paige cuffed her sister lightly. “Better not let Christina catch you with that cushion.” But she didn’t take her eyes off Skipper, who was squatting, knees splayed, feet together, heels raised, with her hands on her hips. The orange was rolling first left, then right along Richard’s waistband, half held between Skipper’s chin and the long stretch of her throat.

  “It’s too loud,” Jessica complained.

  “Let’s go for a swim,” Howie suggested. He had been amusing himself for the past fifteen minutes tickling alternate girls’ ears with a straw, until Lesley had grabbed the thing eventually and destroyed it. “With Tallulah.” He leapt to his feet and grabbed Tallulah, squeezing her enthusiastically. She yelped.

  It was the yelp that got Sally’s attention. She turned toward us with a little swish of paisley voile and said, “You children should be in bed.”

  Howie whined.

  “Now,” she insisted.

  I offered to take them.

  On the way back from the childrens’ rooms I met Mason standing in the long hallway, the warm light from a wall sconce bleaching his hair. He stopped me in front of him and lifted his hands to my face. I was just a little tipsy. I gazed serenely for a moment at the skin revealed in the uneven, open V above his shirt buttons.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, raising my eyes.

  He kissed me. More seriously this time.

  “Good.” He turned me, holding my shoulders, back toward the party noise.

  I rejoined the others with a new jitteriness in the pit of my stomach and, brightly light-headed, grabbed the orange from Carl. Mason, reappearing, ducked his head and took it from me. He spun then, arms spread, grinning.

  “Well?” His voice was impeded by the obstacle at his throat. He leaned backward, gaily imploring someone to take it.

  Sally was the only one who hadn’t played. “You’d think we were in high school,” she said.

  Mason dropped the orange into his palm, then onto an occasional table in the big room where we often had drinks. It rolled a little, looking lonely, and came to a rest against the ceramic base of a Chinese lamp. Then, claiming concern for the children, he turned the music down. In the sudden quiet, the party slowed, but nobody went in. We all sat instead, in the moonlit dark, scattered amongst the ashtrays and half-empty glasses. Sally had sent the maids to bed.

  “My father used to say that California girls had good teeth and no last names,” Richard announced, too loudly, lagging behind the general mood.

  Carl ran a drowsy hand under the strap of Skipper’s top. She was sitting on the ground at his feet. “Who needs a last name?” he said.

  “I think,” Skipper offered slowly, turning her face up toward Richard, “that convention can become a sort of a prison.”

  “A prison,” Richard repeated, nodding his head deliberately, creating a bond between them with the matching seriousness of his tone.

  “Oh spare us,” Patsy said, flouncing back in her chair. Her mood, at some unseen point, had dimmed from its initial spiritedness. I had heard her arguing earlier with Richard, their voices harsh whispers. He had shrugged after a minute or so and walked away, leaving her flipping edgily at the catch of her cigarette lighter.

  “But Patsy,” Sally, an elegant curve in the patio doorframe, said now, “I thought you were all for throwing off the shackles of society.”

  Patsy, twisting toward Sally, hesitated.

  Bee Bee didn’t. “To hell with all this throwing-off-the-shackles crap,” she declared, puffing herself up as if she had said something regal. “It’s all just a lousy excuse for men to think with their balls.”

  Skipper’s was the warmest laugh, a chime over the gentle rhythm of the night noises.

  • • •

  Guilt is such a feeble emotion. It surrenders so easily. Some might say, fans of pop psychology like Maggie, that this illness, this ogre that inhabits me, that cannot be removed, and is proving, too, resistant to the onslaught of chemical and mechanical weapons, was caused by guilt, or some such negative emotion looking for exit. And although it is hard now to escape those sorts of thoughts—thoughts of self-infliction—if pressed I would argue that such a theory was wrong, because life is full of random unfairness. Didn’t I say so often enough to Chloe? Some things just happen, good or bad. But that is not the only reason that I would say that guilt cannot be the root of my disease; I would say it because I think I really forgave myself. And that is something that I cannot forgive now.

  It was probably in great part due to Chloe, the self-bestowed pardon—because I did so much for her. Everybody said so; even Maggie, hesitant and chain-smoking, but heartfelt, said to me once, “You’re doing a great job with her.” And it’s terribly easy to bask in, and absorb, what everybody says, isn’t it?

  My initial meeting with Chloe coincided with the first time that I spoke to Phillip, though I had often seen him pass my desk, parked near a drafty doorway in the advertising agency where I was working as a temporary something, I forget the title. Secretary would be too grand; office help is more accurate. Mostly I filed things and answered telephones and bought sandwiches for more important people, and sticky paper cups of coffee. Phillip was a copywriter. Phillip Grace. I had put his mail in the slot with his name on it once or twice.

  Chloe was a dark, elfin thing, exquisite to look at even then, at four, almost five years old, and she was busy methodically emptying the drawers of one of the desks near mine. She did not look up when Phillip called her name in a clear signal for her to stop. I disliked the woman whose desk she was divesting of its contents, so I watched her unchecked progress with some amusement until Phillip, crossing to her and lifting her away from her task, said, “Leave it, Chloe,” in a voice so edged with strain that his words were more entreaty than command.

  Chloe reacted in a way one might associate with a much younger child, a child of two perhaps, a child at that age when frustration marks every communication. She stiffened, rigid against her father, so that it was difficult for him to keep holding her, and she wailed. Phillip, struggling with her small body and obviously distressed at the sound, looked thoroughly beaten. I put my arms out instinctively to that little girl whose tears, copious already on her plum cheeks, spoke to so many parts of me.

  It’s a cliché, I know, a man falling for a woman because of the relationship she has with his daughter, but that is what happened between Phillip and me. We were united over that small, unhappy head, perhaps instantly. Phillip had a meeting to go to, so I took Chloe, who came to me unthinkingly, quitting her tears, maybe from surprise at a stranger’s face, maybe from some animal understanding of what would develop between us, and I offered to watch her for half an hour. I managed to distract her quite quickly with a box of paper clips.

  The next day Phillip bought me a ham salad in the c
offee shop downstairs, and the story of Chloe’s difficult infancy, her mother’s disappearance, the valiant efforts of his parents and various friends to help, came tumbling out.

  “She really took to you, though,” he said eventually.

  “I took to her,” I replied.

  Ten months later we were married.

  Recently Helen, sitting with me one afternoon while Phillip worked upstairs, interrupted some rambling narrative about a book she had just finished and said to me, “Did you never want children of your own, Frances?”

  The directness was not typical of her. I was surprised and must have looked it, but she did not pull back, just gazed at me with those gray green eyes, the same ones Phillip has, and an expression of sincere interest.

  “Once, maybe. But Chloe was like a child of my own. At least I don’t think I would have loved a child of my own any more than I loved her.”

  Helen nodded and smiled a smile full of gratitude and acceptance and kindness, a smile that she had smiled at me many times before.

  The real question, though, is whether a good deed cancels a bad one, whether evil is undone by penance. Some people believe that, don’t they? My friend Catherine is deeply forgiving; I think she would believe it. Do I? Do I think these kinds of processes, addition and subtraction, will figure in the final reckoning?

  I devoted myself to Chloe, devoured her. Spent all my energy on activities that calmed her and food that pleased her and making for her a whole safe little bubble of life that allowed her to be a bright, adorable child. Helen and Andrew had a granddaughter to spoil, and Phillip had a little girl to delight in. And I had my own private Jericho. Because mothering can provide a vast wall of protection from the outside world if that is what you are looking for.