Beautiful Girl (16 page)

“Can I—” He was not sure what he had meant to offer.

“No, I’ll be all right. Care for a drink?”

She already had one, something dark on ice.

Jacob poured himself a shot of brandy.

She said, “You know, it’s too bad that children are brought up so much with globes for toys. They see the world as a small ball full of oceans, with those insecure patches of land.”

She spoke with great intensity, her visible dark eye huge. She was not drunk but Jacob sensed that earlier she had been. He wanted to ask her if she had, in fact, knocked on his door.

She said, “Tonight I was thinking about those old globes, and how these islands look on them, and I thought we might fall off into space. Do you think I’m going crazy?”

“No, I don’t.”

“God, I may never get back on a plane.”

Jacob wanted to say, Don’t. Don’t go anywhere, stay with me. Read all my books, and then I’ll send for more. Talk to me when you want to. Stay.

Valerie stood up, stretching. She still kept the side of her face that must by now be swollen and discolored turned away. She said, “Well, I think I can sleep now. See you in the morning.”

In the morning he could say to her what he had meant to say.

Jacob went off to bed and while he was still reading (impossible then to sleep) he heard the Datsun return. Stop. Slam.

In the morning Valerie and Larry came to Jacob’s office together, both dressed for travel—she in dark-blue linen, huge glasses covering whatever had happened to her eye, Larry in pale gray.

They had simply and suddenly decided to leave. They felt that they had to get back. Larry’s new TV show. Quentin.

Jacob and Valerie shook hands—their only touch. Her hand was small and hard and strong, and she wore a lot of rings. “I’m absolutely terrified,” she said, with a beautiful quick smile. “All those flights.”

Jacob said, “You’ll be all right,” and he smiled too. Goodbye.

But he was not at all sure of what he said. All that day he was terrified of her flights.

Ardis Bascombe, the tobacco heiress, who twenty years ago was a North Carolina beauty queen, is now sitting in the kitchen of her San Francisco house, getting drunk. Four-thirty, an October afternoon, and Ardis, with a glass full of vodka and melted ice, a long cigarette going and another smoldering in an almost full ashtray, is actually doing several things at once: drinking and smoking, of course, killing herself, her older daughter, Linda, has said (Ardis is no longer speaking to Linda, who owns and runs a health-food store), and watching the news on her small color Sony TV. She is waiting for her younger daughter, Carrie, who goes to Stanford but lives at home and usually shows up about now. And she is waiting also for a guest, a man she knew way back when, who called this morning, whose name she is having trouble with. Black? White? Green? It is a color name; she is sure of that.

Twenty years ago Ardis was a small and slender black-haired girl, with amazing wide, thickly lashed dark-azure eyes and smooth, pale, almost translucent skin—a classic Southern
beauty, except for the sexily curled, contemptuous mouth. And brilliant, too: straight A’s at Chapel Hill. An infinitely promising, rarely lovely girl: everyone thought so. A large portrait of her then hangs framed on the kitchen wall: bare-shouldered, in something gauzy, light—she is dressed for a formal dance, the Winter Germans or the May Frolics. The portrait is flyspecked and streaked with grime from the kitchen fumes. Ardis despises cleaning up, and hates having maids around; periodically she calls a janitorial service, and sometimes she has various rooms repainted, covering the grime. Nevertheless, the picture shows the face of a beautiful young girl. Also hanging there, gilt-framed and similarly grimed, are several family portraits; elegant and upright ancestors, attesting to family substance—although in Ardis’s messy kitchen they have a slightly comic look of inappropriateness.

Ardis’s daughter Carrie, who in a couple of years will inherit several of those tobacco millions, is now driving up from the peninsula, toward home, in her jaunty brown felt hat and patched faded jeans, in her dirty battered Ford pickup truck. She is trying to concentrate on Thomas Jefferson (History I) or the view: blond subdivided hills and groves of rattling dusty eucalyptus trees that smell like cat pee. She is listening to the conversations on her CB radio, but a vision of her mother, at the table, with her emptying glass and heavy blue aura of smoke, fills Carrie’s mind; she is pervaded by the prospect of her mother and filled with guilt, apprehension, sympathy. Her mother, who used to be so much fun, now looks as swollen and dead-eyed, as thick-skinned, as a frog.

Hoping for change, Carrie has continued to live at home, seldom admitting why. Her older sister, Linda, of the health-food store, is more severe, or simply fatalistic. “If she wants to drink herself to death she will,” says Linda. “Your
being there won’t help, or change a thing.” Of course she’s right, but Carrie sticks around.

Neither Linda nor Carrie is as lovely as their mother was. They are pretty girls—especially Linda, who is snubnosed and curly-haired. Carrie has straight dark hair and a nose like that of her father: Clayton Bascombe, former Carolina Deke, former tennis star, former husband of Ardis. His was a nice straight nose—Clayton was an exceptionally handsome boy—but it is too long now for Carrie’s small tender face.

Clayton, too, had a look of innocence; perhaps it was his innocent look that originally attracted Ardis’s strong instinct for destruction. In any case, after four years of marriage, two daughters, Ardis decided that Clayton was “impossible,” and threw him out—out of the house that her parents had given them, in Winston-Salem. Now Clayton is in real estate in Wilmington, N.C., having ended up where he began, before college and the adventure of marriage to Ardis.

Ardis has never remarried. For many years, in Winston-Salem, as a young divorcée, she was giddily popular, off to as many parties and weekends out of town as when she was a Carolina coed. Then, after the end of an especially violent love affair, she announced that she was tired of all that and bored with all her friends. With the two girls, Ardis moved to San Francisco, bought the big house on Vallejo Street, had it fashionably decorated and began another round of parties with new people—a hectic pace that gradually slowed to fewer parties, invitations, friends. People became “boring” or “impossible,” as the neglected house decayed. Ardis spent more and more time alone. More time drunk.

The girls, who from childhood had been used to their mother’s lovers (suitors, beaux) and who by now had some of their own, were at first quite puzzled by their absence: Ardis,
without men around? Then Linda said to Carrie, “Well,
Lord
, who’d want her now? Look at that face. Besides, I think she’d rather drink.”

In some ways Ardis has been a wonderful mother, though: Carrie sometimes says that to herself. Always there were terrific birthday parties, presents, clothes. And there was the time in Winston-Salem when the real-estate woman came to the door with a petition about Negroes—keeping them out, land values, something like that. Of course Ardis refused to sign, and then she went on: “And in answer to your next question, I sincerely hope that both my daughters marry them. I understand those guys are really great.
Not
, unfortunately, from personal experience.”
Well.
What other mother, especially in Winston-Salem, would ever talk like that?

Ardis dislikes paying bills—especially small ones; for instance, from the garbage collectors, although she loves their name. Sunset Scavenger Company. Thus the parking area is lined with full garbage cans, spilling over among all the expensively imported and dying rhododendrons and magnolia trees, the already dead azaleas in their rusted cans. Seeing none of this, Carrie parks her truck. She gets out and slams the door.

Five o’clock. Ardis will have had enough drinks to make her want to talk a lot, although she will be just beginning to not make sense.

Carrie opens the front door and goes in, and she hears her mother’s familiar raucous laugh coming from the kitchen. Good, she is not alone. Carrie walks in that direction, as Ardis’s deep, hoarse voice explains to someone, “That must be my daughter Carrie. You won’t believe—”

Carrie goes into the kitchen and is introduced to a tall,
thin, almost bald, large-nosed man. He is about her mother’s age but in much better shape: rich, successful. (Having inherited some of her mother’s social antennae, Carrie has taken all this in without really thinking.) In Ardis’s dignified slur, his name sounds like Wopple Grin.

“Actually,” Ardis tells Carrie later on, “Walpole Greene is very important in Washington, on the Hill.” This has been said in the heavily nasal accent with which Ardis imitates extreme snobs; like many good mimics, she is aping an unacknowledged part of herself. Ardis is more truly snobbish than anyone, caring deeply about money, family and position. “Although he certainly wasn’t much at Carolina,” she goes on, in the same tone.

Tonight, Ardis looks a little better than usual, her daughter observes. She did a very good job with her makeup; somehow her eyes look O.K.—not as popped out as they sometimes do. And a gauzy scarf around her throat has made it look less swollen.

Walpole Greene, who is indeed important in Washington, although, as the head of a news bureau, not exactly in Ardis’s sense “on the Hill,” thinks how odd it is that Ardis should have such a funny-looking kid.

Carrie, reading some of that in his face, thinks, What a creep. She excuses herself to go upstairs. She smiles privately as she leaves, repeating, silently, “Wopple Grin.”

In Chapel Hill, all those years ago, in the days when Walpole Greene was certainly not much—he was too young, too skinny and tall; with his big nose he looked like a bird—he
was always acutely and enragedly aware of Ardis. So small and bright, so admired, so universally lusted after, so often photographed in the
Daily Tarheel
and
Carolina Magazine
, with her half-inviting, half-disdainful smile; she was everywhere. One summer, during a session of summer school, Walpole felt that he saw Ardis every time he left his dorm: Ardis saying “Hey, Walpole” (Wopple? was she teasing him?) in the same voice in which she said “Hey” to everyone.

He saw her dancing in front of the Y, between classes, in the morning—smiling, mocking the dance. He glimpsed her through the windows of Harry’s, drinking beer, in the late afternoon. She was dressed always in immaculate pale clothes: flowered cottons, cashmere cardigans. And at night he would see her anywhere at all: coming out of the show, at record concerts in Kenan Stadium (“Music Under the Stars”), emerging from the Arboretum, with some guy. Usually she was laughing, which made even then a surprisingly loud noise from such a small thin girl. Her laugh and her walk were out of scale; she
strode
, like someone very tall and important.

Keeping track of her, Walpole, who had an orderly mind, began to observe a curious pattern in the escorts of Ardis: midmornings at the Y, evenings at the show, or at Harry’s, she was apt to be with Gifford Gwathmey, a well-known S.A.E., a handsome blond Southern boy. But if he saw her in some more dubious place, like the Arboretum, late at night, she would be with Henry Mallory, a Delta Psi from Philadelphia.

Ardis always looked as if she were at a party, having a very good time but at the same time observing carefully and feeling just slightly superior to it all. And since his sense of himself and of his presence at Carolina was precisely opposite to that, Walpole sometimes dreamed of doing violence to Ardis. He hated her almost as much as he hated the dean
of men, who in a conference had suggested that Walpole should “get out more,” should “try to mix in.”

It was a melancholy time for Walpole, all around.

One August night, in a stronger than usual mood of self-pity, Walpole determined to do what he had all summer considered doing: he would stay up all night and then go out to Gimghoul Castle (the Gimghouls were an undergraduate secret society) and watch the dawn from the lookout bench there. He did just that, drinking coffee and reading from
The Federalist Papers
, and then riding on his bike, past the Arboretum and Battle Park, to the Castle. The lookout bench was some distance from the main building, and as he approached it Walpole noted that a group of people, probably Gimghouls and their dates, were out there drinking
still
, on one of the terraces.

He settled on the hard stone circular bench, in the dewy pre-dawn air, and focused his attention on the eastern horizon. And then suddenly, soundlessly—and drunkenly: she was plastered—Ardis appeared. Weaving toward him, she sat down on the bench beside him, though not too near.

“You came out here to look at the sunrise?” she slurred, conversationally. “God, Wopple, that’s wonderful.” Wunnerful.

Tears of hatred sprang to Walpole’s eyes—fortunately invisible. He choked; in a minute he would hit her, very hard.

Unaware that she was in danger, Ardis got stiffly to her feet; she bent awkwardly toward him and placed a cool bourbon-tasting kiss on Walpole’s mouth. “I love you, Wopple,” Ardis said. “I truly and purely do.” The sun came up.

He didn’t hate her anymore—of course he would not hit her. How could he hit a girl who had kissed him and spoken of love? And although after that night nothing between
them changed overtly, he now watched her as a lover would. With love.

“Lord, you’re lucky I didn’t rape you there and then,” says Ardis now, having heard this romantic story. She is exaggerating the slur of her speech, imitating someone even drunker than she is.

Walpole, who believes that in a way he has loved her all his life, laughs sadly, and he wonders if at any point in her life Ardis could have been—he backs off from “saved” and settles on “retrieved.” Such a waste: such beauty gone, and brains and wit. Walpole himself has just married again, for the fourth time: a young woman who, he has already begun to recognize, is not very nice, or bright. He has little luck with love. It is not necessarily true that Ardis would have been better off with him.