Listening to Billie (14 page)

However, Eliza was too busy observing Daria to be conscious of those confused reactions to a too attractive young man. Daria, cured, was a young Woodside matron, the wife of a success. And that was how she looked: beautifully dressed, of course, in pleated white silk. Serious rather than sad, and showing at least a perfunctory interest in every conversation, although not initiating any talk herself. She seemed older than she was; her eyes were a little tired, a little glazed.

And Eliza found herself—curiously, half consciously—imitating her sister; she, too, was unaccustomedly proper, and more than a little perfunctory. At some point she asked that over-attractive young man, whose name she had already lost, what he did in Europe; he had referred to a great many trips.

“Oh,” he answered, smiling beautifully and vaguely, “I sort of buy things for people.”

Not terribly interested—she was only making conversation—Eliza took this to mean that he traveled for fun and liked buying presents for friends, making a sort of occupation out of shopping, as terribly rich women seem to do. Much later she understood that he was a buyer, professionally, for antique and import-export stores, for decorators—anyone. And he was not, in fact, rich; he only had that air.

Daria’s husband was plumper and softer with success. Predictably, he had become an expert on wines; more surprising, he was interested in politics. Trips to Washington, for a long time now. A vague air of knowingness.

And Eliza remembered that at some point he and Daria were invited to the White House; they were going, and then did not.

Although she knew that the trip might be dangerous ground—it was still assumed that she and Smith disagreed on everything, that he probably considered her crazy—because she had thought of it, she asked, “You didn’t go to Washington, after all?”

Daria giggled in a loud and sudden way, quite out of keeping with her proper clothes, her hostessy demeanor (as Smith alarmedly recognized). “We thought it might be dangerous,” Daria said, and she laughed again.

Eliza, however, had liked her sister’s laugh; to her it was a glimpse of the old pre-depressed Daria, the lovely, hypersensitive, quick-to-laugh-or-cry girl that Eliza had known all her life. And so, in a superior way, Eliza said to Smith, “Dangerous to national security, I hope?”

Smith reddened, and at the same time looked very sad.

“Well, it certainly could have been interesting,” said the beautiful blond man; although he had spoken rather neutrally, Eliza took this as a defense of Smith, and she regarded him with distaste.

Smith spoke into an unfriendly silence: “This is a rather nice Pinot Chardonnay, don’t you think? Just dry enough.”

The house that Smith found and bought for himself and Daria and for the children that he still envisioned was huge, of course, an enormous fortress of a house, on a thickly wooded hillside. It was literally hidden among the trees, the massive cedars and elms, poplars and eucalyptus. Giant precisely trimmed boxwoods guarded the entrances and lined the paths, and strategically placed spotlights illuminated the shrubbery at night. No one could possibly enter that house, or leave it, unseen.

The dining room was long, low-ceilinged, the table manorial; to Eliza, the setting was as oppressive as the present conversation. White uniformed maids served a succession of predictable dishes: crab salad, overdone lamb with potatoes, something chocolate and too rich.

Looking across at Daria, whose head now drooped, her eyes wavering with fatigue, Eliza quickly imagined that her sister was imprisoned: drugged, restrained. But then she looked at Smith, his brown-eyed, clear-browed American niceness, and she knew that her imaginings were melodrama. She thought of this ability Smith had—always to make her feel crazy. Wrong, and silly: surely writing poetry is a silly thing to do?

Coffee in the living room.

And then the young man, an unlikely source, offered escape. Turning to Eliza, “I don’t know about you, but I have an awfully early day tomorrow. Would you care for a ride back to the city?”

And Eliza, who had been planning to stay over, rather
gratefully accepted. No matter that she didn’t like him much.

Goodbyes were said, they walked out into the night, the dark.

Seeing his battered car, she even began to like him a little, and she liked him better when he said, “Well, it’s always nice to leave a party, don’t you think? I’ve got some pretty good dope. Would you like some? Frankly, I could use it.”

By the time they got to her house, they were fairly stoned. Once inside, they fell upon each other. They seized each other, kissing; kissing, they fell onto the sofa, holding, kissing. But because they were so high it was all very gentle, deliberately slow, and into Eliza’s foggy mind flashed scenes from her adolescence; she saw, or felt herself, necking with lovely boys, all tender and young, as she was then, on sofas or back seats of cars, in darkness, late at night. Even Evan; even she and Evan had had such moments for a while.

And as gently as they kissed they disengaged; they looked at each other and laughed, and he said, “I’ve got two more joints—”

“Lovely, and would you care for some wine?”

They laughed again, really breaking up, and Eliza went into the kitchen.

He is younger than me, she thought—and much more blond. A blue-eyed marvel, his face a miraculous balance of planes and lines, he is
very
beautiful. She who had never liked beautiful men, who at first did not like this one, at that moment could not care less.

Coming back with cold wine and glasses on a tray, she asked, “Is that just plain grass, really?”

“Well, I think it’s been doctored a little.”

Eliza poured wine, and spilled a little—this, too, seemed hilarious. And dizzily she was thinking, Terrific, we’ll have a marvelous night in bed; lucky that Catherine’s away. I don’t like
him much, really, but it doesn’t matter—we won’t talk much, or should I stop these one-night stands? Her mind, as she thought all this, was quite remote—was someone else’s mind.

Nothing about this man made sense, least of all her being with him; and nothing mattered except this sexual urgency between them, and a seemingly shared instinct to delay, to postpone its consummation.

He said, “I like your house. Very much. This is lovely wood,” and he ran his hand along the tabletop. “Lovely,” he said again as his hand caressed the wood, just as her hand had, in the long refinishing process.

Watching him, Eliza was aware of a hot tightening in the bottom of her stomach. “I have a thing about wood,” she said tensely.

“Do you? So do I.” He smiled.

They had lit the two new joints, and now they began to laugh again, choking a little. And then, there on the sofa, they kissed again.

At last he said, “Look, we really have to go to bed. It’s time.”

“Yes.”

What happened between them in Eliza’s wide low bed was an acting out of all sexual fantasies, all at once, all fantasies of making love with everyone, with all differences of gender blotted out, all apertures and extremities in use, all violently, at once.

And even while it was going on Eliza was aware of what was happening, and a part of her mind was thinking that it must be the drug, whatever it was that had been added to the grass. And she observed, too, that nothing that was happening had anything to do with “love”—with “being in love.”

In the morning, presumably sober, they made love again, wonderfully.

•  •  •

Even the day to which they had awakened was amazing: warm and golden, with gentle sunshine lying across the Bay, a light breeze rustling the eucalyptus just outside Eliza’s bedroom window, scents of lemon and spice wafting in to where they lay. A romantic smell—a lovely and possibly romantic day. Why, then, did Eliza feel so queasy?

She said, having resolved some time ago to be more straightforward with men, “I feel funny.”

“Funny?” He considered. “You’re either madly in love or possibly you’re hungry. Or it could be both?”

She laughed. He was, then, a nice person. But it came to her that what she felt was a little crazy, in her own familiar room, in her own bed that she had refinished laboriously and lovingly herself. She was somehow disoriented.

Quite seriously, he announced, “There’s something I have to tell you.”

He was propped up on one elbow, and now he laughed a little at the stagy momentousness of what he had said, and she laughed, too, but her heart sickened suddenly. Was he going to say that he was married, or in love with someone else? Was
she
in love?

He asked, “Tell me, last night when Smith introduced us, did my name mean anything—ring any bell for you?”

Was he a criminal, famous for something terrible? She murmured no while her mind continued its dark imaginings.

“It may not be really important, I don’t think it should be,” he was saying, “but I was a student at Raleigh—in fact, just before—”

The most beautiful boy in the world.
“No, I really don’t want to know his name. Why should I?” Eliza had said somewhat angrily to Evan just after his confession. And so “Reed Ashford” had meant nothing at all to her, the night before.

Her queasiness had mounted to her throat; it was lodged there, stuck.

Now Reed was saying that of course he knew Mr. Quarles was not gay (“gay”—Christ! what a word for poor Evan), but there was something funny; he used to see him everywhere. Eliza then had a wrenching vision of Evan following a boy around, not knowing what to do. (“It’s enough to make me wonder if I could be queer.”)

Eliza wondered if she had felt strange, queasy before because of the imminence of this revelation—of its aura, so to speak? In any case, she felt much stranger now; she was both incredulous and aware of a kind of horrible logic in all this. Just as she was thinking, Why me, she also thought, Of course it would be me. Of course
inexorably
, this word clangs in her mind, of course he and Daria and Smith would meet in Amsterdam, and they would bring him home to me.

Reed said, “I started to mention it to Daria and Smith in Amsterdam when they said your name, Eliza Quarles, but I wasn’t sure, and Daria seemed so delicate—I might have upset—”

Inexorably, this had to happen, Eliza thought. And she thought of the other violent coincidences in her life: a suicided father and husband, too.

“Lovely Eliza,” Reed said, and he stroked her bare arm. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But, you see, I thought I should say it. Eventually something about Raleigh would have come up.”

Then they are to see each other again? This was not another one-night stand? Of course it was not; and, recognizing this, Eliza felt, all at once, ill and elated, warmly glad and helplessly trapped.

“Suppose I make breakfast? I’m good at that.” He was smiling in the clear, cleansed way of one who has confessed.

Looking at him, Eliza thought, Of course, he knew perfectly well that Evan had fallen in love with him. He might even have encouraged Evan, in his way.

He walked out of the room, and Eliza was left with an
agony for Evan such as she had not felt for years—had not felt since his death. An agony and a new sickness of her own; she had not before been so much and so sickly “in love.” (Surely that was what was the matter, really?) Her very surroundings were strange and unfamiliar, her own bedroom, familiar books and pictures were alien.

And now “the most beautiful boy in the world,” Reed Ashford, came into her bedroom with a tray: her white wicker tray, full of breakfast. He had found everything, including the tray; he had made bacon and toast and eggs, poured juice, while she was still lying there, trying to digest the fact of who he was, to digest her own tangled and tattered feelings.

Perhaps because she was still preoccupied with that, with what still seemed both fated and a wild coincidence, Eliza recognized but did not consciously think of another important quality in Reed: he was a man used to taking care of women; he chose that role, even with Eliza, who was certainly not used to being taken care of by men. By way of thanking him, but laughing a little, she said, “You’re really incredible.”

“But you’re still bothered, aren’t you,” he said to her as they ate. “About Mr. Quarles. Its turning out to be me.” Intuitiveness was perhaps Reed’s most striking quality—or, possibly, he was no more intuitive than other people were, but he listened, was wholly attuned to his intuitions.

Eliza said, “Yes. I am.”

“Well, why not treat it as the kind of ordinary coincidence that really happens all the time? People turning out to know other people. You know, especially people who go to a certain group of schools during certain years. Try thinking on that level.”

Speaking so sensibly (if very slightly unconvincingly), Reed had left out the reason for his pursuit of the connection with Daria and Smith, despite his boredom and annoyance with Smith—which was his strong attraction to Daria. He had
recognized her as his
type
; she was so familiar to him. She was as familiar as the woman whom he was, in fact, to see that afternoon, his married love of several years.

But Eliza smiled at what sounded sensible, and smiled her agreement and her thanks.

Outside, the day was clearer and brighter and warmer, moving toward noon. The beginning of summer as it might be in a place with less aberrant weather than San Francisco has.

Reed said, “I have to go now, but tonight—what time can I see you? How early? We’ll go out, okay?”

He left, and Eliza got out of bed, but she was halted by the small problem of what to wear. It was not simply the rare warm weather that had created a problem; after all, she had some cotton clothes. It was rather that she was not sure, that day, how to dress—who to be. She would go downtown, she thought; would perhaps buy something to wear tonight, but as what person would she go downtown, in what persona? As an upper-middle-class white woman in her thirties (Miriam’s friend), or as a young poet “in love”? And what could she possibly buy, what could she wear with Reed Ashford? For the moment, she settled on an old cotton dress in which she would be comfortable, if not invisible, which was what (and
why?
) she had at last understood that she would like to be today.