Beautiful Girl (26 page)

Nell hesitates, at a loss. “No, we don’t talk about that much,” she honestly says, at last.

“Oh, I suppose not. Your mother would have lost interest, lucky for her. Out here it’s quite a favorite topic, among his friends. That’s partly what I mean about California. It’s as vacuous as it is windy, in fact it’s a chilly windbag of a place.” And she laughs, in a pleased way—she will clearly say this again. “The truth is,” she then continues, “Jason is scared. His last book was so good that it scared him to death, almost.”

Nell smiles politely. She is the sort of child to whom adults often talk, perhaps in some (erroneous) belief that innocence prevents her understanding. She is by now used to nearly incomprehensible remarks that later make considerable sense, and so now she tucks away this notion of California, and of her father’s work. And she wonders: Is Pauline talking about herself?

The salad that Pauline is making, in a huge wooden bowl on the large butcher-block table, also looks (at first)
familiar to Nell: several kinds of lettuce, thinly sliced onion, parsley. But then other things from dishes in the giant refrigerator are added: fish-smelling things, pink, and indistinguishable in shape. “Mussels and clams,” Pauline says.
“Fruits de mer.
They’ll absolutely hate it. Everyone except your father. He loves all this stuff too.”

Did Pauline once love her father? Did they have an affair, back in the Forties? This thought, or question, has been slowly forming in Nell’s mind. Nell’s mother and her friends talk a lot about people having affairs, which Nell takes to mean making out with someone you’re not married to. She is very interested, although she herself has so far only observed other kids at parties smoking grass, making out.

And she of course enjoys being talked to by adults, but only up to a point. She does not like it—is in fact frightened—when voices begin to slur, when eyes grow vague and at the same time wild. She now with alarm observes the onset of these symptoms in Pauline, as Pauline says, staring at Nell too intently, “If I could only get thin again, then I could work. It’s all this fat that holds me.”

Nell can no more imagine being fat than she can being dead, and she has only the vaguest ideas about work. But she has, still, a strong sense that Pauline even semi-drunk is someone to whom she should pay attention.

Pauline says, “The really important thing is never to marry.”

Well, Nell had decided that for herself already, years ago.

Just then a dark man whom Nell has not much noticed before comes into the room, and Pauline embraces him in a way that Nell has seen before: grown-ups in a kitchen (usually) lurching at each other.

Pauline croons, “Ah, my long-lost love, why couldn’t everything last?”

There are tears in her manic eyes that to Nell look real, but the man seems not to take them seriously. He pats her shoulder in a dismissing way; he even says,
“There
,” and he goes back out, looking embarrassed.

Pauline gives Nell a sober, calculating look of complicity; was she then pretending with that man to be drunk, or much drunker than she is, in order to make fun of him? What will she do next? Nell fully believes in Pauline’s desperation.

Now Pauline goes over to the oven, and efficiently (undrunkenly) with asbestos gloves she removes a huge steaming garlic-smelling casserole. This and the salad and the napkin-wrapped silver are placed on a wire-wheeled cart, and propelled into the living room. Nell follows at a little distance in her wake.

People line up and help themselves. Not sure what to do, or where to be, Nell is surprised to see her father coming toward her, carrying two full plates, saying, “Come on, let’s go over there.”

And then, when they are seated, in a tone unusual for him, with her, he says, “I hope this isn’t too bad a party for you? I didn’t know there’d be so many people. And somehow I wanted you to meet Pauline. Anyway, sometimes it’s easier to talk in the middle of a crowd, have you noticed that yet? And we haven’t had much of a chance to talk, have we? Have I seemed preoccupied? The thing is—please, you won’t mention this to anyone? I’m sure you won’t. I wanted to tell you—”

Nell is to find that life often provides too much at once: just as her heart jumps with pleasure at her father’s telling her something important, in confidence—just at that crucial moment they both hear Pauline shouting from across the room; they see Pauline wildly waving her arms—Pauline making a scene. “Well, goodbye, one and all. I’m off for a
walk. Don’t eat and run—I’ll be gone for hours. Unless—would anyone like to come along?” There is a terrible pause, especially terrible for Nell, who believes that the invitation, or summons, was for her—who is frozen in her corner. “Well, then, O.K. Sorry I asked.” A door is slammed, and Pauline is gone.

Nell looks at her father, and she sees her own feelings apparent on his face, written across his features so similar to her own: Jason looks stricken, deeply shocked, as she is. And Nell is aware of real panic: a friend of her mother’s, a woman writer who often drank too much, committed suicide at last. What will happen to Pauline? Will she plunge drunkenly into that cold bleak ocean, that terrible Pacific?

She looks questioningly at her father, who only says,
“Well
,” in an exhausted way.

Unable not to, Nell asks him, “You wanted to tell me—”

He looks at her forgetfully. “Oh, just a novel. I’ve begun one.”

Naturally enough, people do eat and run. In a flustered way Stephen serves coffee, which everyone seems to gulp, and then there is a general movement toward cars.

The drive home, to Nell, does not seem dangerous; she trusts her father’s skill at the wheel. And the scenery is extraordinary: once they have left the beach, and the now golden glimpses of the sea, they climb steeply into what could be a rain forest, dense variegated vegetation, trees, giant ferns—into what must have been the view from Pauline’s kitchen, and Nell remembers what Pauline said about its being a country for mountain lions. It smells of bay leaves.

Her stepmother is talking about Pauline. “Well, I
never saw drink hit her quite like that. She has put on weight, hasn’t she? Anyway, she always manages to put out a great lunch. Although I could have done without all those bits of seafood in the salad. I wonder why she ever married Stephen. She seems to fall in love with giants and marry pygmies. What do you suppose struck her, finally? Three ex-lovers all suddenly at the same party?”

Nell finds all this vaguely disturbing, less vaguely unpleasant. She is still worried about Pauline; why is no one else worried?

Her father makes a sound that for him is completely in character, that is brief and impossible to read. And Nell is suddenly aware of a rush of the most intense and private love for him.

A month or so later Nell and her mother are sitting on the beach—Crane’s Beach, at Ipswich. A perfect beach, of fine white silk sand that squeaks underfoot. Dunes, grass. And a perfect hot still day. From time to time Nell has been thinking of Pauline. (She has gathered that nothing horrible happened to her; someone would have said.) Now she wonders if this was the way Pauline thought a beach should be, and that summers should produce this sort of day? Yes, probably, she decides, and then she experiences again a tiny pang of guilt-regret at not having gone for that walk with Pauline, Pauline leaving her own party, so furiously. Although, of course, it was impossible at the time; she was talking to her father.

These days Nell’s mother is extremely happy, almost giddily so: a man she knows, in fact an old family friend, is getting a divorce, and he and Nell’s mother are going to get married. He works for a firm that is moving to Houston, and
that is where they will all live. Houston, Texas. “We can take wonderful trips to Mexico, and New Orleans,” her mother has said, with her new young laugh. Nell wonders about parties in Houston, and what will happen to her there.

The sea is very calm today; the barest waves, translucent, lap the sand, where at the edge, on their crazy useless-looking legs, the sandpipers skitter past. And overhead white gulls wheel and dip, as though drunk with sunlight. Pauline would love it here, is what at that moment Nell thinks. She is also thinking that there are only about four more months until Christmas, which is when she can go to visit her father again. It has been agreed that she can now go more often.

Her mother, reading letters beside Nell on the sand, suddenly laughs. Nell has seen that this one is from her father, whose letters to his former wife do not usually make her laugh. “Well,” her mother says, “everyone seems to be breaking up these days.” (Does she mean Nell’s father? Will she have a new stepmother? This quick notion is enough to make Nell queasy for an instant as her mother reads on.) “You met Pauline Field, didn’t you, darling? Well, she’s up and left poor old Stephen, and she’s gone off to San Miguel de Allende, to study painting there.”

Nell makes an ambiguous noise, not unlike her father’s noncommittal sound. Then she asks, “That’s probably good for her to do, isn’t it?”

“I suppose. She was quite terrific, in her way.” Nell’s mother adds, “I never understood that marriage to Stephen. Or any of her marriages, for that matter.”

Nell says what she has not said before: “She was sort of upset at her party that we went to.
She
said”—they both know that this “she” refers to Nell’s stepmother—“something about three ex-lovers at the same party. Can a husband be counted as an ex-lover?”

Her mother laughs a lot. “Darling, what a marvelous
question. Well, actually one of them would of course have been Jason. They had a tremendous love affair, just before me. Sometimes I thought he’d never get over it, and I used to wish he’d married her. Instead of me. Maybe he would have gone on writing, or at least got her out of his system.”

Digesting this news, which is not news at all, but something deeply known or felt before, Nell experiences a kind of gladness. Things seem to fit, or to have sorted themselves out, after all.

And, later still, although she has been told that San Miguel is in the middle of Mexico, nowhere near the coast, and although she has not been told that her father and stepmother are separating, what she imagines is—Jason and Pauline (a Pauline brown and thin, renewed) on a bright hot windless tropical beach. For good.