“Yeah, yeah. Remember Biddy, the old lady, sitting in the chair with taloned feet, reminding herself of the Chinese empress who looked like a wise old monkey?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and they shared a great laugh.
“Schuyler?” asked Rae.
“Yeah, the poet. You know, James, he spends about half the year in an asylum.” He nodded.
“James was headed for one. I rescued him.”
“You call backpacking being rescued?”
“I’d come into his room where he’s trying to write, only he’s like a dog going around in circles before it sits down; he’s going, ‘Thigh, thigh, is there such a word, Lank?’ He thinks it sounds too lispy to exist, so I tell him to look it up, so he goes to the dictionary. ‘T,’ he says, ‘okay, t, huh’; he can’t seem to place its order in the alphabet; he’s going, ‘Ellemenopee, cue, are, ess, and tee...’—he’s singing the alphabet song—‘now I’ve learned my A B C’s, tell me what you think of me.’”
James was laughing.
“So I say, ‘Good boy, James,’ and he’s going, ‘T-h,’ big problem here, with ‘h.’ ‘flitch? flitch aitch aitch.’”
Everyone was laughing, and the joint, relit, was passed.
“We should string up our food pretty soon,” said Lank.
Elizabeth groaned.
“It’s not that bad,” said Lank.
“Yes, it is,” said James.
“But we have to do it. Last night we got pretty loaded and starting hoisting up the pack with food in it, up onto the bear wires—see, Elizabeth, strung between the trees? But then we left the other pack, with a few snack-type items in it, which we thought we might need later that night, outside our tent, ten feet away maybe, and this morning, we hear, Chuff chuff, chuff chuff chuff, and this bear is gobbling down our Cheetos. Lucky the pack wasn’t closed, or he’d have torn it apart.”
“Lucky it wasn’t in the tent,” said Rae.
“Really. Anyway. We have the equipment, and I have the experience, and if we were to pass out and get ripped off again, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“Let’s have a nightcap,” said James. “Then we’ll do it.” He got up to collect the cups and Elizabeth sized him up: five-foot-four tops—no, maybe five-five. She imagined being in bed with him, wondered if their children would have that crazy hair, if their children would be teased in school, imagined them spending their weekends not backpacking. He had a good voice, beautiful hands, pleasant face, green eyes. But she towered over him. Why did the packaging matter so much? The best men she had known, besides Andrew, the ones with whom new languages were invented, had chipped teeth or pockmarks, were fat or sixty or...
“You read Pigeon Feathers lately?”
“Yeah,” she lied.
“Updike’s the master. Sometimes, when I read him, I’m so in awe that I think I’ll never write again, that there’s no point in my trying to compete. But sometimes I read him because I want to cringe with admiration, and somehow it gets me back to the typewriter.”
Rae and James lit up another cigarette; Elizabeth watched the silvery wafting smoke.
“So you’ve got a daughter?” Lank asked.
“Does she have a daughter. You’ll be reading about her someday—she may be a writer, or a great comic actress. Ro-sie Ferguson.”
“How old?”
“Eight,” said Elizabeth.
“Does she look like you?”
“Sort of. She’s got black hair, but it’s curly. We’ve got the same features, basically, but her face is heart-shaped, triangular, and she’s got these very blue eyes.”
“Not to be believed,” said her aunt. “And her schtick is amazing.”
“Are you divorced?”
“No, widowed.”
“Oh.”
They sat, the four of them, finishing up their drinks, watching the golden red flames of the campfire.
“Would anybody like to hear me sing?” asked Lank.
“No,” said James.
“I would,” said Rae.
So under the silver moon, Lank got up, somewhat unsteadily, and cleared his throat. Oh, God, thought Elizabeth, this is going to be awful.
They heard the river, the rustle of leaves, the fire and crickets and owl, the great animated stillness of a meadow at midnight, and then Lank began singing “Stranger in Paradise,” in an at-first quavering tenor, not loud but with great feeling: It was beautiful, and chills went up her spine. She wanted him to sing all night.
Rae wept.
“Wasn’t that beautiful?” she asked, an hour later, when she and Elizabeth lay side by side in the tent. “The song?”
“Yeah.”
“They were terrific. Why don’t we ever meet guys like that?”
“We just did.”
“Yeah, but they live in the city, and we didn’t even give them our numbers.”
“Did you want to see Lank again?”
“I’m leaving, remember? For two months. But you and James.”
“I liked him, but I wasn’t attracted to him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a dwarf. And a smoker.”
“None of your deodorant-commercial men have panned out....”
“I can’t stand kissing smokers.”
“But—”
“Look. It was a good night, a nice twist of fate. And it was for tonight, and that’s all.”
“But Andrew was a nice twist of fate. It was a total quirk that you ever met, and the rest is history, the rest is Rosie.”
True, she thought. If one day, more than ten years ago, she had not chosen to kill time in Brentano’s while waiting for a date to show up in North Beach, and if the Neruda collection Andrew had bought there two days before had not been missing middle pages, they would not have been in the bookstore at the same time. Andrew was at the cash register when Elizabeth went to pay for The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
“Can I take a quick look at that?” he asked.
“Sure.”
He looked at the cover, flipped through the text, and handed it back. “Can I read it when you’re done?” he asked.
Rae fell asleep almost immediately. Elizabeth lay in the tent, alone in the dark, in the woods, and listened to Rae’s stomach growl.
“Rae?”
The only response was a death rattle, a grunt, and coughing. Elizabeth thought of Rosie and started to play the tape in her mind called “Rosie and the Dreadful Things”: Rosie in a burning house, Rosie being murdered. Something was in Rae’s nose, causing an airy wheezing distinct from the snores.
To take her mind off the commotion, Elizabeth replayed parts of the James tape. “Jesus!” he’d said. “I couldn’t stand the idea that the Russians saw that photo—Reagan looking like an old snapping turtle, lying helpless on his back, flailing; some clown in a cheap rubber Nixon mask; the Madame Tussaud statue of Carter; and Jerry Ford behind them all, mouthing ‘Woof woof woof’ to amuse a child.” She smiled in the dark, heard an owl.
She and James had recognized each other. Too bad he smoked. Too bad he didn’t look the right part. Too bad he didn’t know her last name. Rae stopped snoring and ground her teeth, grunted, wheezed; Jesus, Elizabeth thought unkindly. No wonder she’d never been married.
Maybe he would come to Bayview, looking for her. Maybe in the morning there’d be a note from him in her backpack. But you’d eat him alive, Elizabeth, you’d tear him apart.
Hi, James, she would say when he called, sexy, aloof, and wanting to see him. What a surprise, she would say.
“Hello? Hello!”
“Rae! It’s okay, you’ve been dreaming.”
CHAPTER 10
Birds, singing in the pepper tree, wake her. Who, where, when? A thin ray of consciousness struggles through the smog that envelops her, finds a headache tucked behind her eyes, and it all comes back. I, Elizabeth, am in bed with Gordon in mid June on Willow. I have a headache. Ergo sum.
Oh, God, you did it again—you drove, you drove home from the b
ar with one eye closed. It made her sick to her stomach. Please, for God’s sake, don’t drive; one of these days your luck will run out. Or get rid of the car.
Gordon, still asleep, stirred beside her, turned to hold her. She wished he would wake up and leave but knew he wouldn’t. Soon he would press his long thin body against hers and want to make love, then he would want to make her breakfast, then he would want to talk, then he would want to do something useful around the house, tack mosquito netting to the windows or something, to justify not leaving, and all these acts of kindness would wear on her nerves, would take too long; he would say “marvelous” too often, would tell stories that dragged on like a child’s retelling of a movie, would say “Bah” when he finally left. She felt trapped, oppressed by his dull, handsome face. “Trapped like a trap in a trap,” as Dorothy Parker put it. Sometimes when he overstayed his welcome, she could get him to leave by directing beams at him from, as Rae put it, her bad-vibe ray gun. Other times, despite her best efforts, he stayed and stayed and stayed. Last time, Elizabeth patiently explained that in the mornings he always stayed a little too long. He became embarrassed, defensive, morose—and he had stayed, and stayed, and stayed.
Why did he tolerate her bitchiness? Because he was a kind and patient man, and she turned him on. And why did she tolerate such a relationship? Because the pickings in town were slim.
Bitch. Siren. User.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Boy, do I have a headache.”
“Yeah?”
He stroked her prominent hipbone, and she felt her body tighten.
“You want some breakfast?”
“No—I want you.”
She feigned a yawn, couldn’t bring herself to look into his dumb, trusting face. She shook her head groggily. “I need some food,” she said.
He made them an omelette with bacon and cheese, while she sat in her white kimono at the kitchen table reading the Chronicle; rococco on the radio, sunlight, bacon cooking, Elizabeth so unhappy about her unhappiness that she couldn’t speak to him as they ate.
He finally left an hour later, wounded, mad, and disconcerted.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just want to be alone.”
“Why don’t you just say so, then?”
She shrugged, shook her head, pulled at her bangs. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“What can I say, Gordon?”
It was no good, and they both knew it was all but over.
***
“Mama?”
Elizabeth had been in the bathroom rereading the front page ever since Gordon had left half an hour before. Her body was rejecting the omelette he had made her. And she was, in a big way, sick and tired of her life.
“Hi, sweetheart. Come on in.”
“No way.” Elizabeth laughed. “Don’t get that babysitter again.”
“How come?”
“‘Cause she eats too much.”
“Okay.”
“I need my allowance.”
The phone in the hallway rang. “Will you get that?”
“Okay, but can I have two quarters today? One for Sharon?”
“Sure—get the phone.”
Elizabeth followed the sound of her daughter’s footsteps on the carpet.
“Hello? ... Yeah. May I help you? ... Yes, she’s here, but she’s in the bathroom reading the paper.” Oh, no, who was she telling this to? “She’s been in there an hour. I’m afraid to go in.”
Oh, Christ, thought Elizabeth, smiling.
“Okay, I’ll tell her you’ll call back in a while.... You’re welcome. Do you know what time it is? ... Okay. Well, ‘bye.”
“Who was that?”
“Some guy named James—says he’ll call back.”
Side by side, Rosie and Sharon rode toward town on their bicycles, rehashing Psycho, until they turned downhill on the road which ran like a garden walkway past ice plant, ivy, echium, eucalyptus, wildflowers, and nasturtiums: red, yellow, orange, full of nectar. Their eyes shone and their cheeks turned pink as they sped along to the butterfly grove where for the last few days millions of Monarchs had been flying and nesting in the trees. But today they skidded to a stop when they found the road littered with butterfly corpses, in piles like leaves.
“Oh, my God.” They went to investigate. Thousands still l few, but the death toll was awesome. Sharon stood, with eyes lowered, a skinny eight-year-old Renaissance Madonna, beatifically sad. Rosie surveyed the bodies with her arms crossed, sneering, toeing a pile of dead butterflies, Joe Friday.
“You know who did this, don’t you?” She glared. “Carbavella.”
“Yes,” Sharon agreed. It was clear, carbavella, bees as big as guinea pigs.
“Deadly mutants.”
Sharon whirled around as a butterfly flew past, looked into the sky as if it might start raining snakes, and covered her head. Rosie did the same. They ran to their bikes, frantic and full of adrenaline, out of breath when they reached the piers that marked the beginning of downtown Bayview.
As with most fears, the fact that carbavella existed only in their imaginations did not diminish the sense of danger, and the relief at having escaped: they were filled with a lively joy.
They returned to the harbor after buying all the candy they could for a dollar, and spent the better part of the morning deciphering the Morse code messages of the pelicans and gulls that flew over the water. Gulls were dots, pelicans dashes. The birds had been trained by two escaped convicts from San Quentin, one hiding on Alcatraz, the other on the loose, quite possibly in Bay-view. Dot dot dot dot dash dash: “Kill the blonde.” Dash dash dash dash dash dot dot: “Send bullets.”
“What’s dot dot dash dot dot?”
“Heroin.”
Elizabeth cleared her throat when the phone rang. She let it ring. She languidly combed the bangs away from her forehead, picked up the phone finally, and said hello, in a faintly British accent.
“Hello, Elizabeth? This is James Atterbury. Remember me?”
“Yes, of course. How are you?”
“Fine, thanks. You?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“How’s Rae?”
“Oh, fine. She’s leaving for New Mexico in a couple of days.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Hunh.”
Elizabeth drummed her fingers on the kitchen table. “How’s Lank?”
“Madly in love, with an airhead. And she’s madly in love with him. It’s almost more than I can take.” Elizabeth made her smile audible by exhaling sharply. “How’s Rosie?”
“Fine.”
“I remembered Rae saying, To-sie Ferguson,’ so I looked up Ferguson in the phone book, and there you were: E. Ferguson.”
“Ah.”
“Do you have plans for tonight?”
“Well, yeah, I do, tentatively.” She was lying.
“If they don’t pan out, would you like to get together for a drink?”
“Listen. Let me call you back in a few minutes. I’ll see if I can get out of what I’m supposed to do.” She wrote down his number and called Rae.
“Marmee! I’m so glad you called. I’m getting cold feet about leaving. I’m having terrible separation anxieties.”
“James called.”
“What? James called? I’m so happy!”
“Why?”
“Because he’s perfect for you.”
“Yeah, except that he smokes, and he’s a dwarf.”
“God, you’re a turd, Elizabeth. Come on, Mama, think of what duds most of your handsome boys have been. I mean, your tall handsome boys. James has a great face, great sense of humor.”
Elizabeth stroked her long straight nose.
“See, it’s another classic example of the Green Eggs and Ham syndrome—you never give anything a chance.”
“I know what’ll happen if I give him a chance. I’ll end up eating him alive. Of co
urse, I like him a lot, but he’ll start getting on my nerves. Now, see, the syndrome I’m thinking of is Short Man syndrome, gross egotism born of insecurity....”
“Yeah, unlike ourselves.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you have a drink with him, see if you have fun together and want to be friends. Don’t forget. You’re not going to have me to kick around for two months.”
“Good point. Maybe I will have him over, let him audition.”
“That’s a loving attitude. What are you going to wear?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wear that green silk blouse. It makes your eyes look wicked.”
“Okay”
“And those Levi’s you had on the other night.”
“I’ve worn them every day this week. I’ve got them on now. They’re giving me bedsores.”
“Well, everything you own looks good on you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re scared, Elizabeth. You should try to trust yourself like I trust you.”
“I can just be so awful to men.”
“Well, just don’t be. That’s easy. Be brave and kind. Give it your best shot.”
“Are you leading up to the part where Breaker Morant say—”
“‘Live every day as though it’s your last, because one of these days you’re bound to be right!’”
“Goodbye, Rae.”
“Call me with a full report in the morning.”
“Okay.”
“Can I call if I have a monstrous anxiety attack?”
“Yes, of course.”
She hesitated while dialing James’s number, hung up midway. If she invited him over to her house, it would be hard to get rid of him if it didn’t go well; but she was much, much more secure on her own turf. She dialed the number all the way through.
“James? Elizabeth. I’ve rearranged things. Would you like to come over for a drink later?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Good. Say about six?”
“Yeah, perfect. How do I get there?”
“After you take the Bayview exit, stay on the road that goes through the downtown area. Bear left when the old railroad yard ends, which will put you on Cypress; go about a third of a mile; then left on Willow. We’re at Thirty-six Willow, halfway down the road; it’s a white Victorian, sort of dilapidated, with a white lattice gate and a lot of rosebushes.”