Listening to Billie (16 page)

“That isn’t true.” By now they were standing and facing each other like enemies, in the hall where they had so often languishingly embraced. And outside was the heavy, invading fog that had so often over the summer enclosed their house, their love.

“You know that isn’t true,” Eliza repeated in Rosalyn’s voice—so that Reed had a sense of being a carrier of some kind of plague; he had infected these two women so that they had become not themselves; they had become interchangeable, and horrible, two harpies.

Helplessly he admitted, “You’re right, I was with someone else.”

They both understood the sense in which he had meant “was with,” but still, if dimly, Reed hoped that the truth would work, would free Eliza from being Rosalyn, that they could talk and be in love again.

This was not what happened. Eliza screamed, “You bastard!” and pushed him toward the door, toward the cold and threatening end-of-summer night.

Harry’s motel room was so wildly flamboyant as to caricature interior design; someone must have been kidding.

The carpet, so thick that it squished beneath bare feet, was a swirl of greens and purples, a pattern and combination of colors that was repeated in the draperies, with the addition of gold threads, and in the bedspread (heedlessly crumpled on the floor). The lamp bases inexplicably were white, but swirly, too, massively so; more predictably, the shades were parrot-green. In huge gilt frames, on canvas, gigantic flowers echoed the color scheme.

The room’s proportions were outrageous, too; it must have been at least a Presidential suite. In fact, the Beatles had once stayed there, or some of them had. And the bed was impossibly vast, was orgiastic in its suggestion.

All in all, it was enough to make anyone laugh, anyone except Eliza, who was lying across the bed with Harry (they were both naked), and she was crying: violently, ragingly, the rage at least in part against the fact of crying. Harry, who was gentle (and at that moment more than a little frustrated), was stroking her shoulder, very slowly.

When she could speak, what Eliza choked out was “That cock-sucking mother-fucking bastard—
goddam
him, what he’s done to me!”

What had just happened was that midway in the act of love, when Eliza began strongly to respond, something (perhaps the response itself) reminded her of Reed, of his loss and what she still thought of as his betrayal, and uncontrollably she began to cry. And then to curse.

Sententiously, perhaps, but quite forgivably, Harry said, “Sometimes it’s easier to be with someone else when you’re happily involved. Not when you’re missing someone. Once I had an affair with a married woman who would never see me when her husband was out of town. That struck her as unfair, a betrayal—”

But although well meant, this was exactly the wrong thing to say: he could be describing the behavior of Reed, who while happily involved with Eliza went to bed with someone else. And so she began to cry again.

Harry (newly divorced: the Corsican didn’t last long) had just brought out a new movie, a sad grim “realistic” story about adolescents in the desert towns of southern California; they were to see it previewed that night, in San Jose. He listened patiently to Eliza for a while; he patted her shoulder and pulled up sheets and a light blanket, comfortingly. And then he said, softly and sensibly, “Why don’t you talk, instead of crying? I think in the long run it’ll do you a lot more good.”

So, after a few minutes, Eliza did begin to talk. “It doesn’t make
sense
, my feeling so terrible about Reed. But I have this terrible pain where I think my heart is. Curious: once I missed someone else very badly, The Consul—and my stomach hurt. It’s as though he’d cut something out of me; there’s this dreadful lack. Harry, I didn’t like him all that much! I like you much more, you know that.”

“Sure, baby.” He kissed her forehead lightly, lay back down. “We like each other for good, but I have a curious instinct.” (Eliza looked over at him, in the bright unreal midafternoon sunlight that escaped through a gap in the draperies; as Harry looked off into some inner space, with those violently pale blue eyes.) “I think more was going on between you and Reed
than you understood. I don’t think it was just a summer romance, as we used to say. There was a reason for Reed in your life.”

“And I can’t write any more.”

“Well, maybe now you can? Even better? ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.’ ”

“What?” She half sat up to look at him.

“Mr. Auden on Mr. Yeats.”

“Harry, you always surprise me. But I think you’re making another romantic movie. Well, I’m sure Reed would be available.”

Harry laughed at her. “You’re wrong, but it’s not a bad idea. In fact, why don’t you try to think of it as a movie, or a story? For example, would it help to cast Reed as the dumb blond?”

Finally Eliza laughed, too. She said, “Harry, what in the world would I do without you?”

And some sort of circle seemed to have been completed: having gone from failed sex to anguished tears, to rage, to laughing—they returned to sex. In a slow and most friendly way they made love.

Later, with time to spare between dinner and the movie, they went down to the swimming pool—or, rather, to an area containing several swimming pools. And bright striped deck chairs and plastic lounges and palm trees. And people: old fat people in his-and-hers brilliant Hawaiian outfits. His shirt, her muumuu—too sad and terrible to be anywhere near funny, or so Eliza saw it.

Uncomfortably they chose the least populated pool; swimming up to each other, they almost simultaneously said, “Why do we never go back to Mexico?” (Ixtapanejo: they had never been back.)

“San Jose,” lamented Eliza. “Whatever are we doing here?”

“It’s a great movie-tryout town. It has the most movie houses per capita, or something.”

Harry’s movie was superb—Eliza realized later as it replayed in her mind. For the moment, unhappily and uncontrollably, she had reverted to missing Reed, to his vivid lack. In the darkened, smoky theatre, as Harry craned his long neck about, seeking audience reactions, Eliza listened to the Thirties’ music (Harry’s favorites) from the jukebox, on the sound track. “Body and Soul,” “It Had to Be You”—and although Lena Home, not Billie Holiday (thank God), was singing them, Eliza was thinking, Reed, good Christ, come back, if only for an hour or so.

“Well, how did you like it? Go all right, do you think?” asked Harry.

“Marvelous.” She wept.

Rationally, on principle, Eliza did not believe infidelity to be all that bad. She was thinking of this some days later, as alone in her house she waited for Catherine, after another of Catherine’s increasing absences. One could do worse things to people than be unfaithful to them, Eliza thought. Reed, on a certain afternoon, with another, unknown woman, performed a certain—“a certain act”? At that phrase her mind stammered, and shuddered to a dead halt. It was
unthinkable
, literally so. She was shivering, as though she had been thrown into a chilly pool, a lake. But nevertheless she made an effort at reason. Well, then, should he have lied? Is that what she was now asking him to have done? Yes. No.

Her blood ran giddily along her veins, and something was pressing down on and enclosing her brain. Her heart hurt, and later, when she could think, she thought that jealousy was as mysterious and as impossible as sex.

Catherine, returned and seated on one of the kitchen’s two comfortable chairs, was fat and fair, her hair bleached, skin
browned, blue eyes seemingly bluer from a summer of whatever she had been doing: hiking and camping on Mount Tamalpais and up in Mendocino, swimming—watching dawns and sunsets from high distant places. These were the things she had been talking about, and, in a fond, bright liberal-mother way, Eliza had added: Making love, of course she’s making love. She’s eighteen, probably been doing it for several years by now.

Idly, Catherine asked, “What about that guy you were sort of seeing? The gorgeous little blond one.”

Trying to match her diffidence, “I sort of stopped seeing him,” Eliza said. And for an instant she wildly wanted to ask Catherine: How do you feel about sexual jealousy? Is it really okay, among you kids, for people to screw anyone at all? Do you tell each other about it?

But she couldn’t ask Catherine this and, recognizing her own inhibition, Eliza thought, God, I’m as rigid in my way as Josephine is.

“The pill?” Catherine was asking.

“Darling, I’m sorry. My mind went somewhere else. You were saying about the pill?” Catherine had started taking the pill a couple of years ago, mainly (or ostensibly) for irregularities in her periods.

“Well,” Catherine said earnestly, “it never did seem right to me, when I thought about it. The idea of interfering, I didn’t like it.”

“Mm.” Eliza absently agreed.

“I don’t really like any pills. I must be sort of like you. I’ve heard you say, ‘I have to be practically dying before I’ll take an aspirin.’ ”

Catherine with her unaccented California voice had perfectly imitated Eliza’s still most-New England accents, of which she herself was usually not aware. This was a thing that Catherine had not done before (at least in Eliza’s hearing: the possibilities were frightening). But it was as funny as it was alarming.

Eliza was still laughing, amusement having triumphed, when she understood that Catherine had continued, in a logical way: Catherine had not been taking the pill, and this summer she met this really neat guy (she even said, “really beautiful”) although he had moved on to Hawaii. Had she just now said that she was pregnant? Not exactly: what she said was “And so I’ll have the baby in April—isn’t that neat?”

Eliza, who had been consciously ready for sexual activity, and half-consciously braced for possible pregnancy, for abortion, now understood with dizzying suddenness that a baby, Catherine’s baby, was more than she could contemplate, or sanely imagine.

“Catherine, good God, you’re out of your mind,” she said weakly, hearing the Bostonian echoes of her own voice (and hearing also Josephine).

“Well, Mom, it’s not all that bad. I know your generation is hung up on abortions” (as Eliza thought, We
are
?) “and of course I think if you want one you should get it. But if it’s
you
, someone growing inside you, and you really like the father and all, then it’s really icky.”

“Catherine, you don’t understand.”

Sweet Catherine continued with the platitudes of her generation as, silently and uncontrollably, Eliza did with those of hers. Or so she later supposed. For the moment, she imagined that blood was rushing around, behind her ears; she couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t hear what Catherine was saying, or her own unspoken answers.

Earlier, they had been drinking mugs of soup, their favorite lemon-chicken-yoghurt. Eliza now looked down at the pallid swirls of liquid, at the earthenware handle that she still was grasping, and that, with an effort, she did not crash down to the floor.

As Catherine continued to talk about a farm near Mendocino. Cows. A small vegetarian restaurant.

Christ.

•  •  •

“Well,” said Kathleen, over the phone, having listened to Eliza’s recital (about Catherine; Eliza had not mentioned Reed), “Catherine has never been exactly an intellectual, would you say? What did you think she’d grow up to do?”

“Oh, I guess get married. Have a lot of children. That’s always been in the cards. But, Kathleen, that’s what’s so terrible; I’m behaving like Josephine. I’m reacting in ways that I don’t believe in.”

“Well, I’ve met a lot worse people than your mother. She’s really terrific—you never can see that. You should have met mine; she could fill in for Phyllis Diller.”

While Kathleen went on about her mother, since whose death she had substituted rage for mourning, Eliza thought of what she herself had just said about reacting in ways that she did not believe in, against her principles. And, speaking of Catherine, she saw that she had been half-consciously talking about Reed, and once more she cursed him for so persisting in her mind.

“I don’t much like the idea of abortions either,” continued Kathleen. “God help me if I ever have to perform them; in fact, with my mother’s help I’m sure He would strike me dead, like He was supposed to do when I left the Church.”

Eliza laughed. She said, “That’s absolutely great about med school.” Kathleen’s mother had left her some money; she was applying to medical schools.

“Well, it will be if I get in.”

“I know I’m being unfair,” Eliza said. “Of course the idea of persuading anyone to have an abortion is monstrous.”

“It sure is.”

Their conversation was more nearly a joined monologue than a dialogue. Or sometimes they were simply Kathleen’s monologues. It was always Kathleen who called, and Eliza who continued to wonder why she did.

“You’re not going to believe this,” said Kathleen, in the tone of one not caring who believed her, “but guess who’s suddenly a star? and rich as all hell.”

“A star?”

“
Lawry
, that’s who. He finally cut a record, and it’s this fabulous success. If you read
Rolling Stone
—or
anything
—you’d know.”

“Well, I guess that’s nice.”

“
Nice
, Christ, it’s a fucking crime against taste. He plays the guitar about as well as I do ballet routines. Nice—Jesus. Anyway, did I tell you Miriam had quit?”

“No, where is she?”

“How in hell should I know?”

Eliza got off the phone as soon after that as she could. She dialed Miriam’s number, but no one answered.

During all that warm and lovely fall, the nights continued to be as cold, as fogbound and wind-lashed as at the height of summer. One night, when she was unable to stand anything that was happening, anything in her mind, Eliza did what she had thought of almost daily, and had not done before: she telephoned to Reed in Stinson Beach.

How can one tell when a phone is ringing in an empty house? Eliza could; the insistent tinny sound echoed through those small sea-smelling drafty rooms, where she had never been. He was not there.