Listening to Billie (15 page)

The weather had affected everyone. Tourists babbled crazily, snapping pictures of each other, on and off the cable cars, screeching over hills. People in wild gaudy clothes crashed cymbals, shook tambourines and danced—at nearly noon, in the middle of Union Square.

Eliza wandered in and out of familiar stores, aimless, looking. It was as though she were in a foreign city. It was even surprising when she approached clusters of people and realized that they were speaking English. A sudden smell reminded her of Rome; she smiled as she saw that it came from a bus’s exhaust fumes.

In I. Magnin, at a distance, she saw Gilbert Branner, who was leafing through expensive ties (of course), who did not see her. In Macy’s, at a lesser distance, there was The Lawyer, looking at socks, also not seeing her. Perhaps she really was invisible? She wished strongly that she would see Miriam; Miriam would see her. Instead, on Grant Avenue, arm in arm, there were Peggy and Ted Kennerlie, who saw her, and greeted her with an enthusiasm that she recognized as entirely false.

“Eliza, how are you? You look marvelous, so cool in that dress. What do you hear from Harry?”

“Who?” With a shock she realized that she had for the moment almost forgotten who Harry was: Harry her favorite friend-lover. “Not much, for a while,” she said.

She was not dressed up enough to be talking to the Kennedies. She got this clear message from Ted—and especially not on lower Grant Avenue, in fact right in front of Saks. And so with a perfunctory smile she slipped into the store, as they headed toward Doro’s, to celebrate something, whatever. In Saks, Eliza did not buy a new dress, or anything.

Coming out of Saks, after her short restless tour of the store, she glanced into the traffic, then at its noontime heaviest, and for an instant her heart stopped: scowling but beautiful, looking dead ahead, there was Reed Ashford, in his unmistakable Plymouth. It would be so easy to slip out between the stopped cars, even to wave and shout to him. Why, then, did she not? Why did she, in fact, sink backward, out of his possible sight?

She was dizzy, suddenly, with the heat, with fatigue and incomprehension; too much was getting through to her, and none of it was making sense.

She took a bus home.

Two black women were seated across the aisle from her, talking in a loud and comfortable way to each other, old friends. The one who was talking more was saying, “All things I’ve ate all my life, now I can’t eat any more. Now they make my stomach cramp up. Onions. Turnips.” She was a big woman,
with some dark down on her upper lip; she and Eliza did not look at all alike, but Eliza had a compelling sense that she
was
that woman; she was watching and listening to herself. When the woman got off the bus, she smiled protectively in Eliza’s direction. But why? Why this friendly sense of slipping back and forth, of being other people? Why was she sometimes invisible?

Reed came somewhat later than he said he would, and Eliza, who had been almost faint with longing, with anxiety (faint from whatever cause) fell upon him with kisses, as he did her, with love. They endlessly kissed, murmuring love to each other.

Later they smoked more joints, and drank some wine.

At some hour of the night or early morning, they went down to the kitchen and made eggs, mounds of eggs. Coffee, toast. They were too dazed and tired to talk, to do anything but laugh a little, lightly, and then to sigh with love.

Most of their nights were like that, over the summer.

“A love affair that is empty at the center, a world with no central flame. Dirt flying apart,” Eliza wrote in her notebook. She doubted that a poem would come of that, and she believed that she was in fact flying apart, was out of control.

Often after Reed had made love to her, she dreamed of flowers: once a branch of almond blossoms, flowering, sweetly scented; and on another night an alpine New England meadow, a Maine meadow of wildflowers, of all colors. The triteness of this made her smile; nevertheless, those were her dreams.

Reed lived in what was a shack, on Stinson Beach—a shack that very few people had ever seen. Eliza had not. “Darling, it’s
terribly cold and foggy there most of the summer. We’ll go for a weekend in the fall, when it’s nice. Besides, I love your house. It seems made for us. Perfect,” he had said to her.

The young married woman with whom he had been involved—Rosalyn, who looked so much like Daria—was one of the few people who had ever been there, and that had happened at a time when Reed was short of money, really short; and two or more afternoons a week in motels were too much for him. Perversely, Rosalyn, who was extremely rich, loved it there: the small drafty rooms, the sagging furniture and irremediable smell of must were to her exotic, and aphrodisiac in a way that no posh motel could ever be.

That summer Rosalyn was at Tahoe with her husband and children—happily for Reed, who was wildly in love with Eliza. But Rosalyn phoned a lot, and she had begun to understand that Reed was infrequently at home, no matter when she called. Clever, up to a point, in her own way, instead of accusing him she spoke sadly and tenderly. “Darling, I miss you so badly; nothing is beautiful without you. Sometimes I cry.” This worked; she had some insight into Reed. It worked to the extent that he was prevented from saying, It’s over between us, I love someone else; someone marvelous, someone I
really
love. He sometimes thought that he would say that, but not now, not when she was crying over his lack.

He felt rather kindly toward Rosalyn, who was very beautiful, more beautiful, really, than Daria was—with whom he had enjoyed many long afternoons of love.

Then Rosalyn began to urge Reed to come up to Tahoe. Her husband traveled back and forth, went everywhere on business. “Darling, it would be so easy. Darling, I can’t wait. It’s been so long.”

Reed made excuses, almost hoping that they were transparent.

He was getting low on money. He was “between trips,” as he put it to himself. He liked to arrange his business life so that profits from one trip would pay for the purchases on the next,
which entailed going back to Europe almost as soon as his cargoes had arrived, been sold and paid for. He had waited too long; his last antiques—the silver and brass and pewter, from Verona—arrived and were sold in May. Now, in early August, midstream in his summer of great love, he was running low; he would have to scurry around for advance money for his next trip, which was what he most hated to do. Having grown up in Hollywood, he was used to financial extremes—the son of a sometimes-rich-and-famous movie star, and an equally erratic director. Still, he hated the bottom areas, the lowering, the necessary scrounging.

Of course he told Eliza none of this, any more than he would mention Rosalyn to her.

Eliza was concerned with Catherine’s impending return; the entrance of reality into their life, as she thought of it. What, strangely, did not concern her was the fact that she had done no writing at all over the summer. A few scribbled notes, lines here and there that could be called sketches for a portrait, a portrait not necessarily of a person. Perhaps simply of a state of mind—a summer.

But no poems. She thought of this without worrying about it. She believed that once the summer was over everything would settle down. Poems would surface almost automatically.

Out with Reed in a restaurant, Eliza, although “madly in love,” was not entirely at ease. She was a pretty woman, she knew that, who probably looked five or six years younger than she was, and Reed was only five years younger than she. And why should that matter, which person was older? Perhaps it didn’t. What did matter, and she was sure of this, was his most conspicuous, compelling beauty. Women and men, too, stared at him as though dazzled by the sun. And so Eliza, after all those years, was given a late and terribly pained insight into poor
Evan; she could see (she could even feel herself to
be
) poor doomed Evan, dazzled, following Reed about, not knowing at all what to do with what he felt. (Sometimes she felt the same.)

They did not talk about Evan. Reed hardly knew him, after all, and Eliza had nothing to say. Certainly she couldn’t talk about her sense of
being
Evan, and in an idle way she wondered if this love affair would end by killing her. Was that why she had met Reed?

Catherine was to come back on a certain day late in August, and so Eliza and Reed decided that he would stay away, in Stinson, for a few days after that. It would be a chance for Eliza and Catherine to see each other and (Reed did not say this) a chance for him to pull his affairs together.

Nothing went according to their plan.

Just as Reed, at Stinson Beach, was sadly distributing some of his effects from the overnight bag that since early summer had been at Eliza’s house, he heard from outside the high whine of a familiar engine (like most Californians, he was sensitive to cars); he heard the slam of a known door, and there was Rosalyn’s brown Jag, and Rosalyn, herself quite brown, and thin and lithe, in crisp sheer white.

He went to the door. They embraced. She was lovely, and there were tears in her gray-green-yellow eyes. How could Reed not be glad to see her?

He was glad, but what she wanted (this was instantly clear) was to make love right away—to reseal, as it were, their being in love. And Reed was not ready for that.

He disengaged himself from her sharp and demanding embrace, and said, “Let me get you a drink.”

Rosalyn smiled mistily. “Okay, but don’t be long.”

When he came back, with tall, postponing gin-and-tonics (her favorite), Rosalyn was stretched out on his lumpy studio couch, her shirt unbuttoned to white net, brown breasts.

He sat beside her, reflecting on the oppositeness of Rosalyn and Eliza: Eliza’s body was generous and warm, voluptuously soft, whereas Rosalyn’s was smooth and cool, spare, firm. He suddenly thought how fantastic it would be to be in bed with both of them. (He had never done this, or seriously thought of it before.) To be made love to simultaneously by two such separately beautiful girls.

In the meantime, Rosalyn unbuttoned his shirt, then reached for the buckle of his belt, and Reed thought, Well, why not? Why not let Rosalyn make love to me?

He did. He was excited by her mouth, her tongue, her fingers probing him. Lying almost still, Reed savored long delicious moments of her caressing.

But he had forgotten Rosalyn, really forgotten her, and she was in her way as spoiled, as in love with herself, as he was. She suddenly, shrilly cried out, “Christ, Reed, you’re so passive! I might as well be screwing a dildo!” In an awful, unfamiliar voice.

So Reed consummated their act, in a conventional and not very satisfactory way.

Five minutes later, the phone rang. Since he had told a prospective backer—and this must be she—that he would be at home all afternoon awaiting her call, he couldn’t not answer.

But it was Eliza. Catherine had come and gone—gone up to Mendocino for a couple of days with some friends she had met over the summer. Catherine was fine, fat but beautiful. Eliza and Reed wouldn’t have to spend the night apart. Then she said, “You sound very strange.”

“I do? I didn’t mean to. That is terrific. I’ll see you about seven.”

Rosalyn said, “You sounded awfully strange.”

“I did? That was a possible business partner. I guess I really don’t like the idea.”

“A woman? Reed, come on, how much am I supposed to swallow?” Rosalyn was again speaking in her alien, harsh voice.

The possible backer was a woman, an antiques dealer, but Reed felt himself in no position to insist on this. Also, he knew himself to be a poor liar; he did better at confessionals.

“You must be having a really successful summer, business-wise. Spending all your time at it, right?” Unskilled in irony (does any impassioned person do it well?), Rosalyn heard her voice crack; it broke unattractively, which was too much for her pride, for her totally attractive self-image, and she felt that it was Reed’s fault—Reed was making her be like this (and of course she was quite right).

Pulling her clothes together, seizing her bag, she got up and went into the bathroom, from which five minutes later she emerged with cool and perfect eyes, smooth mouth and smoothed-out voice.

She extended a thin brown hand to Reed, but then it all came apart, all her plans: tears rushed into her eyes, and she screamed, “You rotten fucking bastard!” She ran out to her car, running knock-kneed, like a furious and awkward child.

Reed hated scenes—his mother had thrived on them. Now, sickly shaken, he went in to take a shower. He felt that he had been infected with germs, but that those germs could possibly be washed away.

Eliza, at a little after seven, greeted him, “Oh, darling, what a
relief!
When Catherine said she was going on to Mendocino, I realized how much I’d dreaded the end of summer, our time together. So tonight seems a marvelous reprieve, a gift. And I made a lovely crab casserole. It won’t matter when we eat it.” All this was said interspersed with kisses, with strong embraces, increasing in intensity, until the words about the casserole that could be eaten at any time informed Reed that she wanted to make love
then
, right away (as they had often done, near her front door).

Reed did not want to make love. Very gently, he made a slight gesture of withdrawal.

Which Eliza, who was genuinely aroused—for whatever curious reasons—chose to ignore. She kissed him more insistently, touched explicitly.

Reed, more explicitly, withdrew.

And then knowledge, or a vision, exploded like a flash fire in Eliza’s mind, and she thought, or
knew
, that he had been with someone else that afternoon. With someone when she called. She could even see him pumping into someone else. (Someone dark and thin, in white: she knew or had intuited his true sexual type, and knew it to be not herself.)

In a voice that was not her own, she said, “You sounded so strange when I phoned.”

In fact, she had used Rosalyn’s taut, angry voice. Horrified, and dumfounded, Reed explained, lying exactly as he had to Rosalyn. “Yes, a business thing. I haven’t told you this, but I’ve been looking for a sort of backer. She was there.”