Everything and More (53 page)
Read Everything and More Online
Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
“Today I got two letters,” he said finally. “One from Roy.”
Althea looked up from her blinis. “I thought she wrote often.”
“Yeah, she does, but this one’s different.”
“Different? How?”
He raised his body, fishing two envelopes from his pants pocket, handing her the pale blue one, which held the warmth and curve of his body.
She scanned the once-familiar writing:
Darling,
You have to forgive me for writing like this, but you have been gone for an eternity. I do understand how important it is for you to be around during the showing—but you said it would only be two weeks. And now it is over six weeks. Darling, I am not complaining. You and your career have always come first with me, you know that. But the house is so terribly empty without you, and at night all kinds of tormenting thoughts run through my mind.
Have you found a girl?
You know I’ve always understood that a man like you, a magnificent artist, can’t be expected to be strictly monogamous. If you’re having a fling, I can handle it. Darling, whatever it is keeping you in New York, I will understand.
But I have to know.
I am positive there is another woman—a wife can always tell, so you don’t have to keep it a secret.
The one thing I cannot bear is feeling cut off from you.
I went to Dr. Dash again, and he suggested a specialist who has a new kind of treatment. I’m going tomorrow. Darling, how I long to give you a child! Always remember, you are my everything, I am nothing without you, I worship you with my whole heart, and I ache to have you home.
If only you were inside me,
I adore you.
Roy
Althea felt a wave of queasiness. If this were anybody but Gerry Horak, she would be retreating from the misery in his face, from the sad, horrible love letter, from the dark underside of so disastrous a relationship. But this
was
Gerry, Gerry, whose clenched knuckles rapped on the white tablecloth.
She returned the letter. “It’s sick, Gerry.”
He raised his shoulders. “She only throws emotional bazookas about one thing. Me.”
“She used to be cheerful, unsubservient. Maybe she was sozzled when she wrote it. You said she drank.”
“Only that one time when I suggested we split. I’m a bastard to let you see it, but when she acts like this, it gets to me.”
“God, no wonder. From my experience with Aubrey, I’d say it’s a typical masochist’s game.”
“No, it’s the real thing.” Sighing, he pulled the paper from the other envelope, handing it to her.
Dear Gerry,
I reckon I am butting in, but poor Roy’s been looking ill and dreadful for weeks now and I am sick with worry. She drags around and never says one word of complaint, but she’s been seeing all kinds of doctors.
She would have a fit if she knew I was writing to you, but I reckon you have a right to know when your wife needs you. No art showing is as important as that. Remember how Marylin got herself released from
The Lost Sabrina
when Joshua had his heart attack?
Call me an interfering old mother-in-law, Gerry, dear, but you belong right here, making sure that Roy takes care of herself.
Love,
Mother Wace
Althea looked across the booth at Gerry. “Then you’re going back to California?”
“I’m staying put.”
“Because of me?” It amazed Althea how secure she felt as she asked the question.
He shook his head.
And even more amazing was that this negation did not destroy her. She dipped a bite of blini in sour cream. “Why, then?”
“When she puts the emotional screws on me, I can’t give in. I want
to, but I can’t. It’d be one hell of a lot easier to mouth a few nice, sympathetic words, give her the reassuring pat that she wants. But something always stops me. A black, mean mulishness.”
“I’d call it a sense of decency,” Althea said. “They whine, and your guilts gush. It’s Pavlov’s dog pure and simple. Well, who likes to be reduced to a bundle of animal reflexes?”
That night they returned to her apartment.
They were drinking in the library when the telephone rang. It was Charles.
“Mother, I was hoping to get you,” he said, his adolescent voice briefly cantilevering into a bass. “Have you made any plans for Christmas vacation?”
“Not yet,” she said.
“Naismith”—his roommate—“has invited me. His people have a place in Maine with skiing.”
“I hear the powder’s been perfect there.”
“Before I accepted, I wanted to talk it over with you.”
“Charles, we can see each other the weekend before.”
“I don’t want you to have a lonely time. It’s the first Christmas since Father died.”
Neither had to remind the other that she had been divorced from Firelli for many years. But except for those three hectically busy Christmases when she had been tied to Aubrey Wimborne, she had made it a point to spend the holidays in Eastbourne with her son and the stout, jolly old maestro.
“I have a million things I can do,” Althea said.
“You’re sure you won’t be alone?”
“Charles, I’m delighted that you’re getting along so well. I want you to go.”
As she replaced the phone, Gerry’s eyebrow went up, and she found herself flushing.
Charles’s father,
she thought. “My son,” she explained.
“It’s great, the way you talk to him. Straight out. No browbeating or phoniness.”
“That’s how we are.”
“I gather the kid’s busy over Christmas. What about coming to Oaxaca with me?”
“Oaxaca?”
“I was planning to do a Mexican series.”
“Will you stop off in Los Angeles on the way?”
Gerry shrugged ruefully. “I guess. That’s how it goes. In the end, I always play it her way, but as rottenly as possible.”
She walked across the room to kiss his creased forehead. “I haven’t been to Mexico in ages,” she said.
49
Their suite in Hotel de los Reyes had a narrow balcony overlooking Oaxaca’s main square—the Zócalo. With its bird flocks rising and dipping amid shade trees, its splashes of hibiscus and salmon-colored bougainvillea, the Zócalo entertained an unending parade. All day black figures came and went from Oaxaca Cathedral. In the early-morning coolness, the beshawled old Indian tortilla vendors shuffled under the colonial arcades with the covered baskets that held their steaming wares. When the wooden cathedral clock (a gift from the Spanish king in 1735) was chiming 9
A.M.
the tourists were already sitting at sidewalk cafés while itinerant peddlers displayed their gaudy heaps of serapes, rugs, and shawls. Around noon rambunctious marimbas serenaded, and musical groups began alternating in the spoolwork bandstand. When early evening fell, young men with patent-leather hair stalked arrogantly around the square in one direction while clusters of girls sauntered giggling in the other. At all hours there circled ancient cars and grandiosely finned new cars, ramshackle trucks, ox carts, bicycles, and burros—a cacophonous blaring of horns and ringing of bells.
Althea arrived in Oaxaca on December 23, the Fiesta of the Radishes, when enormous radishes were carved into saints’ likenesses. She arranged for demi-pensione at Hotel de los Reyes. Gerry flew in five days later, on the day of the Breaking of Plates, when
buñuelos
were eaten from earthenware plates that were then enthusiastically hurled into churchyards. He said nothing about his Christmas with Roy, but Althea surmised without recrimination that he
had slept with his wife, showed up with her at holiday gatherings, and growled a justification for this trip—a new series of paintings, dammit.
Althea and Gerry’s days slipped into an unassuming pattern of contentment.
They slept until 8:30, when a little maid with a pure Mayan face brought them thick-crusted
bolillas,
strawberry jam, and a spouted pot of steaming chocolate whose foamy richness she gravely poured into huge, green pottery cups.
Gerry would drive off in their rented Studebaker to stare at Monte Alban, the hilltop city that millennia before the Spanish conquest had housed a population of forty thousand. He hadn’t yet decided which of the mighty ruined pyramid temples, bizarre palaces, ball courts, and ceremonial squares to tackle.
Some mornings Althea might browse through Oaxaca’s vast
mercado,
protected from the sun’s glare by strips of wood or canvas overhead. She bought Gerry pleated shirts and herself a collection of the local brilliantly embroidered cotton shifts. Saturdays, the Mixtec and Zapotec Indians from crazily named nearby villages brought their wares, and she picked out inappropriate gifts for her friends: naively brilliant wool serapes from Tlacolula, embroidered Mitla belts, a huge leather toy burro from Otzompa to make Charles laugh. She even selected a handsomely glazed black pottery urn from Ocotlán for Gerry to send Roy.
Most mornings, though, she would take her pastels or watercolors onto the narrow balcony, attempting to capture one moment of the perennially changing Zócalo. Compared to the vivid reality, her renderings seemed pallid and awkward. Yet they gave her a sense of owning the square.
Around one Gerry would return to the hotel. They would lunch at a sidewalk café on the Zócalo, generally ordering tamales Oaxaqueno—banana leaves wrapped the rich
masa
which enfolded a delectable concoction of meat and the peppery
mole
sauce that left an aftertaste of chocolate on the palate.
During the siesta, they made love and slept heavily in each other’s arms.
In late afternoon they drove, exploring the surrounding honey-toned hills and flatlands. Oaxaca’s pre-Columbian inhabitants had raised innumerable tombs, and despite the ecclesiastical efforts to extirpate these marks of the ancient Mixtec and Zapotec religion, many remained. Althea and Gerry returned again and again to “their” tomb. Over its entry lintel stood paired busts of a heavyjowled man and a delicate-featured woman, obviously man and wife,
a couple dead for long centuries yet joined in their cozy five-room eternal resting place. “When the time comes, I’d a hell of a lot rather be here with you than planted in Forest Lawn,” Gerry said.
In the swift maroon twilight, they slowly sipped margaritas, tapping their salt-rimmed glasses in time to the Zócalo’s strolling marimbas. At ten they would go inside to the candlelit, tapestried hotel dining room to eat a four-course dinner. Long before midnight they were asleep in their big soft bed.
* * *
One exceptionally hot morning in mid-January, Althea took her pastels to the ravishing green gardens of Oaxaca Courts, a hotel maybe two miles north of the center of town. By noon even the shady trees and her big straw hat no longer protected her, and she started back. Within five minutes she regretted not having taken one of the cabs lined outside the hotel. Sweat dripped between her breasts and down her sides and she filled her mind with visions of the rewards at journey’s end—a cool bath, a big glass of icy Dos Équises beer.
Dots were moving in front of her eyes by the time she reached the Zócalo.
“Althea,” a woman called, “Althea!”
Althea jumped. Though some tourists had attempted conversation in the hotel or at the cafés, she and Gerry had remained aloof. Baffled, she stared in the direction of the call.
A young woman wearing a sundress that bared freckled shoulders was waving vigorously from an umbrella at the Café Manuela.
It was Roy.
Seeing Gerry’s wife—her onetime friend—Althea first felt a hard clutch of fear.
She shifted the basket with her art supplies, wishing she could rush to the hotel, shuck off this moist, stupid native dress, bathe, and coolly armor herself in one of her cruise silks.
Roy waved again.
Althea drew a deep breath and avoided traffic to cross to the Café Manuela.
Roy hugged her with that remembered warmth. “This is absolutely wild! Here less than an hour, and I run into an old friend. I can’t believe it’s really you.”
“It’s me, but I won’t be around to tell the tale if I don’t get something cold to drink.” She raised her hand and the stout waiter with the wispy Charlie Chan mustache sped toward them. Althea ordered rapidly in Spanish.