Die a Little (7 page)

"Lora, I'm desperate. I've got to get pregnant. We've been waiting for so long now." She runs her tiny hand up and down her arm, which is flecked with goose bumps from the chilling night air. "We had this fantasy of getting pregnant on our wedding night. That's what I expected. But now ... I just want it so bad, Lora." Edie is the young wife of Charlie Beauvais, one of Bill's coworkers at the investigators' office. Although he was always willing to take a coworker who'd had a hard day out for a beer, and he'd always stop in at the local tavern when an after-work gathering was under way, Bill never had many friends. Besides, most of the men in his department are either heavy drinkers or gamblers or both, or are wrapped up in the politics of the office.

But Charlie has been a kind of mentor to Bill, showing him the ropes when the other men resented Bill's quick rise, which they attributed to luck or imagined connections.

"But you're so young, Edie," I say, watching the action absentmindedly, watching Charlie waving his hat, waving a player in, laughing mightily, big white teeth against his stubble-creased face.

"You've got plenty of time."

"I know," she says. "I've got nothing but time." She stifles a long sigh by dipping her chin and tucking her mouth into her collarbone.

Edie is twenty-three, Charlie's second wife. Born in Bakersfield, she was straight out of modeling school when they met four years Die a Little -- 39 --

before. She had talked her way out of a speeding ticket, claiming a "feminine emergency."

"Are you going to help out at the fund-raiser again?" I ask.

"Sure, sure," she says, eyelashes fluttering, trying gamely to focus on the action. "Where's Alice?"

"She wasn't feeling well," I say.

Edie nods vaguely, watching Charlie bounding in from the infield, removing his hat and rubbing his crew cut vigorously.

"Looking good, honeybunch," she coos, waving and twisting in her seat. Charlie's face bursts out into a grin. It seems to explode over his whole rubbery face as he turns to join his teammates on the bench.

"When are you going to get yourself one of those? A husband, I mean," Edie asks as we watch Bill take a few practice swings.

"So you think I'm in danger of old maid status too?"

She turns to me with a smile. "Don't you want to have a house and kids and nice things?"

I look at her with her blond lashes, eyebrows penciled with delicacy, face so fresh and flat and empty, as only California faces can be. "It's hard to find a man like Charlie, though, isn't it?"

"Hmmm," Edie says, eyes roaming dreamily back to the game, to the shoving match that seems about to unfold between Bix Carr and Tom Moran, who always fought, over sports, old debts, patrol assignments, cars.

I am supposed to say these things, the things I should want. It is what you say. I look at Edie, looking at the other tired, careless faces on the bleachers, hair tucked in curlers under scarves, bodies straining or flaccid, pregnant or waiting to be.

We watch as Bill and Charlie separate the men, and Bill talks them down, his hand on Bix's shoulder, Bix nodding, cooling. Tom abashed, kicking the dirt.

"I'm going home, sugar." Edie sighs, stumbling forlornly down the bleachers.

I wave good-bye.

An hour later, the game finally over, Bill wanders over. "Where's Edie? Charlie's looking for her."

"She left," I say.

"Oh. Really? That's funny. Charlie-"

Tom Moran comes running up behind Bill, slapping him mightily on the back. "Billy, where's that gorgeous wife tonight?"

Bill extends a hand to help me descend the bleachers. "Under the weather."

"Too bad. Don't mind gazing up at her."

Die a Little -- 40 --

Bill looks over at him for a second, as if caught between annoyance and good humor.

"You know." Tom shrugs, grinning at me anxiously. "She's different than the others. Than the other wives. Ain't she?"

I smile faintly, and Bill tilts his head, unsure how to respond.

I know this isn't the first time he's heard these comments. I've seen the way they look at her. They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.

Their wives come from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St. Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisters with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliances and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling to them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ...

Charlie Beauvais, he once said it. Said it to Bill in my earshot. He said, Don't worry, pal, don't worry. It's not that they want her. It's just they have this feeling--and they're off, Billy, they're way off--but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she's more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precinct house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs...

Die a Little -- 41 --

[?]*[?]

Struggling to sleep in the guest bedroom after helping clean up the damage from a late party, I can hear Bill and Alice talking on the back porch, talking soft and close.

"How is it that Lora hasn't been snatched up, anyhow?"

"What?"

"You know. I'm just surprised she isn't married. I mean, you could say the same about me, until I met you. It's just that she seems the type to be married."

"She is the type to be married. She'll get married."

"I'm sure. I just wondered why she hasn't yet, darling. Just curious.

She's so sweet and such a warm girl, and--"

"She was almost married once. About three years ago." I am listening as if it isn't me somehow they are speaking about, as if it were someone else entirely. I hold my breath and pretend to sink into the very walls.

"Oh? Did you scare him off, big brother?"

"It wasn't like that. He was a good friend of mine. A guy who used to be on the force when I first started."

"Did you play matchmaker?"

'Sort of. It just kind of happened naturally. We'd all spend time together, go to movies. He was a good guy, and it made sense."

His tone is shifting, from cautious to grave, and she begins to respond accordingly.

"So what happened?"

"They began getting serious just as he had to leave the force. TB. It was rough, but she stood by him. You know, that's how she is."

"Oh, dear. Did he--"

"No, no. He eventually had to go to a sanatorium, way up by Sacramento or something. He didn't want her to wait for him. He was a shell of the guy he'd once been. Down to a hundred and twenty pounds. He couldn't bring himself to continue with her. He did the right thing. He said, 'Bill, I can't let her tie herself to me like a sash weight,' he said. So he broke it off."

"He isn't still up there--"

"No. They wrote to each other for a while, but it wasn't the same.

Last I heard, he married one of the nurses there and they settled. He works for an insurance company or something."

It really wasn't like this, was it? Was that how simple it was, so explicable in a few sentences, a few turns of phrase? Wasn't it Die a Little -- 42 --

months of high drama, so wrenching, so unbearably romantic that I'd conveniently forgotten that I never really cared that deeply for the amiable, square-jawed Hugh Fowler to begin with?

It had absorbed all the emotional energies of Bill and myself for a fall and winter and an early spring, and then, suddenly, it was as though he'd never been a part of our lives at all. His second month at River Run Rest Lodge and we couldn't remember when we'd next be able to make the long drive up the coast.

And then other things emerged, other things that left no room, no time, no space for that sweet-faced young man who, so ill, would shudder against me despite his height, his gun holster, his still-broad (but not for long) shoulders. Was that it?

"How very tragic," says Alice. "Like out of a movie. It could be a movie. Poor Lora."

"She'll find someone and it'll be right," Bill says firmly.

I feel my eye twitch against the pillow. I press my hand to it, hard.

"Well, I'm going to help."

"Oh, Alice, I wouldn't--"

"I know lots of wonderful men. Men from the studios."

"I don't think Lora would want to date anyone in the movie business. That's not Lora."

"Oh, brothers don't know," Alice says. "And I can't bear to see her with these sad sacks from school. These men with the saggy collars and shoes like potatoes. I'm going to get her with a real sharpshooter. If you had your way ..."

"Alice, you don't know Lora. She won't--"

"Just watch me."

I can hear her smile even if I don't see it. It doesn't seem real, that this is me they are talking about. I look out the window, at the heavy jacaranda branches trembling gently against the pane. I think, for a moment, about the men Alice seems to know and it's hard to believe they really exist. That they could enter my life, my small world. What would it mean if they came crashing in the same way Alice has?

As my cheek leans against the glass, I realize suddenly how hot my face is. I press my hand to it, surprised.

It is a long time before I fall asleep.

With this forewarning, I am prepared when, after one of what Alice refers to as my "sad sack" dates, she phones me and announces she is ready to play matchmaker.

"His name is Mike Standish. Can you believe it? I call him Stand Mannish."

"What does he do? He's not an actor."

Die a Little -- 43 --

"No, no, of course not. He's with the publicity department. He's delicious, Lora. He's a huge, strapping man. He's like a tree, a redwood. He's a lumberjack."

I am always surprised by what Alice thinks might make a man sound attractive to me.

"I don't know."

"Lora, he's very smart and accomplished. For God's sake, he went to Col-um-bia University."

"He doesn't want to date a schoolteacher in Pasadena."

"He wants to date you. I set it all up. He's taking you to Perino's and then to the Cocoanut Grove. The only question is what you should wear."

"When is all this supposed to happen?"

Why not, for God's sake. Why not.

"One thing, Lora, one thing," she says, and it's almost a whisper, a voice burrowing straight into my head. "This is what he does: first thing, he warns you that he's going to charm you, and that warning becomes part of his charm."

Die a Little -- 44 --

[?]*[?]

"Hey, Shanghai Lil, come over here," my brother says, waving his arm toward Alice.

"I think that you no love me still." She pouts, imitation geisha, as she pads over in her brand-new Anna May Wong-style silk pajamas.

"See how nice it can be staying home on a Saturday night." He smiles peacefully, tucking her into his arms.

"Until you get the call." She sighs.

"Not tonight. Promise."

"Your sister will have fun enough for us all." She turns from inside the serge curl of my brother's arm and looks to me.

"Oh? Where are you going?" He straightens up suddenly and peeks out over Alice's blue silk to see me.

I pause.

"Just to dinner, I think. And then dancing maybe." I stare at my lipstick, then dab a bit more on for good measure.

"Mike Standish shows a lady a good time." Alice slides out from Bill's arms and slinks over to me.

"We can go out, too, Alice. I just thought--"

"That's not what I meant," Alice says, curling up in front of me as I sit in the wing chair.

"Maybe we can join them. I--"

"No, no, no, darling." She reaches out for my lipstick to add still more. Her face looms over me, and her eyes hang big as saucers.

"Besides, they don't want old marrieds along, believe me."

"I'm sure we'd be glad for the company," I say, blotting with the handkerchief she holds out to me. "The more the merrier."

"I'd like to meet this Standish guy," my brother says suddenly.

"Have him in for a drink."

Alice shakes her head and slides back into his lap. "Easy, Judge Hardy. You're not her father, after all. You'll meet him soon enough.

Besides, doesn't Lora want some privacy? Some life separate from family."

She looks at me as she says it, and there is a wistfulness there, a kind wistfulness that, despite everything, I find myself warming to, and secretly thanking her for.

Two hours later, this:

Die a Little -- 45 --

"I could tell you stories, honey." Mike Standish smiles. "Stories to make Fatty Arbuckle blush. The four-o'clock-in-the-morning calls I've gotten, the places I've had to peel them off of the floor, the circus freaks I've had to pay off to keep these little discretions, these quaint peccadilloes out of the papers."

"You sound proud of yourself."

"As they say, life is too short to bother with Puritan hypocrisies.

Besides, it's not me racking up time in the booth with Father McConnell. I just clean up," he says, still smiling, rubbing his hands together as if to wash them.

"My grandmother would have called those devil's dues," I say noncommittally, removing the maraschino from the bottom of my drink.