Listening to Billie (19 page)

“We really should have gone to Italy,” whispered Harry a little hoarsely. “Ravello in August, it would be perfect. Look, why don’t we go back to Mexico City tomorrow? We could get on a plane to Rome, and then—”

Eliza laughed softly, exhaustedly. “Harry, darling, I’m at the end of my stamina for flying. I could
not
fly to Rome tomorrow, or the next day. Take me to Ravello when I’m fifty, okay?”

“Sure, 1980. Who’ll be alive by then? And someone will have bought Ravello, some terrible oil person—” In part, he was referring to the fact that their hotel (they were in the same one that they had come to before, the time they met) had been bought by a Texas oil billionaire, who had horrifyingly renovated it: doubled and crowded the number of units, brought in these uncomfortable “modern” beds and mechanized the service, or nearly so—the maids’ bells often didn’t work, nor did the garish new ice machine in the bar.

With the tips of her fingers, Eliza touched his distant thigh; an enormous effort was required for that reach, and the slight touch seemed intensified, immense. “Harry, it was perfect to come here,” she said. “I would have wanted—”

Impossible even to finish any sentence. Words fell heavily between them; their bodies lay heavily in the sweating sheets. Earlier a mosquito had buzzed around the room, as loud as a bombing raid, until Harry got up and, after a prolonged and clumsy chase, managed to kill it with a slipper against the bathroom mirror.

“Besides,” Eliza continued, “Smith and Daria—”

Who were to arrive the next day. In Smith’s plane; along with his other innovations, the Texan had put in an airstrip.

“Inside my head,” murmured Harry, “I’m dying to make love to you, but—”

“Yes, I know.” She felt the same; in her mind, she remembered Harry’s hands and mouth, while her body was oppressed with humid air, with the hot thick night, overwhelmed with sick-sweet flower smells and the distant droning of the somnolent sea. Not a rustle in the palm fronds outside their window, or in the dusty thick hibiscus leaves. No breeze.

Eliza tried to remember, to imagine, to
feel
, the lake in Maine, the lapping cool, the blue. But she couldn’t. She was relentlessly here.

Toward dawn they both slept dreamlessly, heavily; waking was like coming out from under massive drugs, anesthesia. Harry rolled toward her and said, “Happy birthday, love.” A quick dry kiss.

“Forty. Jesus,” said Eliza.

Laboriously they got out of bed and washed and dressed. “I feel more like ninety-two,” Eliza said.

Texan know-how only goes so far: the lovely open dining room was quite unchanged—was surrounded still with a wild profusion of tropical blooms, and looked out to the flat still sea.
Breakfast was the same: cold fruit and colder bacon, hot tortillas. Strong coffee, which made both Harry and Eliza feel much better.

“I wonder if I’ll ever make this movie,” Harry said. “The one starting with you, at the Kennerlies, in the rain. You wouldn’t believe how often I think of that, and of us here.” He stared at her as though she were new, with his passionate pale eyes.

She laughed. “No, I wouldn’t. When would you have time?” In the last five years, Harry had made four movies, all but one major successes—the failure, of course, being his favorite. And Eliza’s: to her it was like an especially loved poem that no one would buy. (Eliza had recently published one small collection of poems, in a paperback edition.)

Harry continued to stare. “At times you’re very close to being beautiful,” he said.

Unembarrassed—she was used to Harry, used and most fond—Eliza laughed again. “Don’t lose your head. Maybe sometimes pretty, but today I doubt it. Forty-year-old tired person. Daria is beautiful—wait till you see her.”

“I love those fine lines at the corners of your eyes, especially when you’re all nice and brown.”

“Harry, couldn’t we get some more coffee? I need some.”

“Sure. But isn’t it strange without Otto stalking around?”

“Like Alec Guinness. You see? I remember everything you say.”

“I should hope so; it’s all immortal.”

The sky was strange and yellowish, intensely still. Heavy, but with no promise of a break, of rain or storm. And the water was a curious yellow-gray, shining and endlessly flat. A huge white boat, someone’s yacht, was anchored there, beside which the slow-moving fishing boats looked smaller still; they crawled across the water like ants.

“Even the ocean looks hot today,” Eliza remarked.

“I know, we should have gone to Maine. We still could—we could—”

“
Harry
, I can’t fly any more. Not this week.”

“When do you think Smith and Daria will get here?”

“I don’t know. I guess sometime this afternoon.”

“I wonder why two rooms.”

“Oh, Smith being grand, I suppose. All that Washington stuff is going to his head.”

“You are hard on him.”

“That’s what Josephine says.”

Harry mused. “It must be some violent and submerged sexual attraction between you.”

Eliza laughed.

Midmorning. Harry and Eliza were down on the beach when Smith and Daria appeared—Smith and Daria and (“My God,” Eliza whispered) Dylan, Catherine’s tall black-haired son, now two years old. Daria came first, walking buoyantly, wearing white lace over something dark and brief; she was leading Dylan by the hand. Then Smith, somewhat portly, proud, and then a young Mexican girl, whose function seemed to be the care of Dylan—she was carrying some of his accoutrements: a small shirt, a boat, a hat.

“Well—” They all moved quickly toward each other, exchanging kisses, words of greeting, as though surprised, in the pounding sun, there on the sand.

The only true surprise was, of course, Dylan; startled, Harry and Eliza wondered if he had been adopted by Daria and Smith, or if this was just a trip for him. Their idea of a treat for Eliza’s birthday?

Smith, who was always brighter and more intuitive than Eliza believed, read both their minds, and cleared up the confusion: “Dylan’s first plane trip,” he said. “Catherine sends love; she’s busy planting potatoes.” In an awkwardly well-meant gesture, he tousled Dylan’s extremely beautiful black silk hair (as Eliza thought, Ah, you don’t like children either, do you, now?). So Dylan was a treat for her birthday. Her grandson, for
her fortieth. This suddenly seemed to Eliza terribly funny, and she began to laugh, rather out of control. “I don’t know,” she at last got out. “The heat—”

They all walked toward a group of white (new-painted, bright) slatted wooden chairs, some beach umbrellas, and they arranged themselves there, more or less protected from the sun. The Mexican girl took Dylan down to the water.

The chairs were in a row, facing the sea; next to Eliza, Daria said, “I feel as though we were on the porch in Maine.” She was most beautiful at this moment in her life: deep gold eyes, smooth skin, her fine black feathery hair a cloud around her small and shapely head.

Looking at Daria, and then at Smith, whose hair was gray now (he was as distinguished as Josephine had imagined he would be), Eliza sensed that this time, these months and maybe years, would be pivotal in their married life; they were on a happy plateau. Smith was happy with his money and his Washington connections; Daria was visibly happy, too. (With Smith? No matter.) Daria was no longer obsessed.

“
Maine
,” Harry is saying. “I feel that it’s some mysterious place from which I’m forever prohibited. Smith, have you ever been to Maine?”

“Well, yes—in fact, we were married there.”

“Ten years ago.” Daria’s face shone, for whatever reasons.

“Well, you see?” Harry spread his competent knotty hands before him, as though he were helpless.

“Darling, we could go to Maine,” Eliza said. “It’s just never worked out. You don’t have time when I’m going there, or we go somewhere else.”

“Yes, and other places that you like all remind you of Maine. A sort of imprinting seems to have gone on.”

Liking his word, Eliza looked at him with an astonished pleasure; Harry was a delight—her true best friend.

It was the best time that those four oddly assorted people had ever had together. As two couples, they did not really know each other very well. They had met for dinner a few times in San
Francisco, always at Jack’s, the favorite restaurant of both Harry and Smith. (They had that much in common.) But those meetings had been stiff, rather formal, and Eliza had wondered nervously what Smith (always the unknown) made of her connection with Harry. He must have known that they were lovers, but did he then wonder at the off-and-on quality of their connection? Could he
not
think, Well, why don’t they marry, or come to some “appropriate” solution? It was not so much that she cared about Smith’s opinions, or his possible judgments, as that she did not want to be uncomfortably aware of them. Or so she told herself.

In consideration of Smith’s possible prejudices, it had been decided (by Harry and Eliza) that her birthday lunch should be in the dining room, not in their favorite place, which was the beach shack restaurant.

Margaritas, guacamole. Lobsters, champagne. The champagne from a hamper, imported by Smith in his plane. Eliza winced a little at that gesture, and then forced herself to think, Oh, well.

They sat on the gorgeously flowered open deck, the lovely airy space, and watched the sea.

“What nice wine,” Eliza said at last to Smith, realizing that she should have said it before.

“I just bought my fifteenth copy of your book,” he answered, quite startlingly.

“Oh, really? Smith, how nice.”

“Yes, I give it to people. I don’t know what to say to poets, so I just buy the books and sort of spread them around.” But he looked very pleased with himself, conscious of having done and said the right thing. And then he said what was even more surprising to Eliza: “Get yourself a new photographer, though. That picture doesn’t do you justice.”

He looked at her in a plump and kindly way.

“Smith,” she began, and then broke off. She laughed and looked at Harry, as though for help. “This may be my favorite birthday,” she finally said.

They all smiled in pleased and surprised ways at each other; they concentrated on lobsters.

“My God,” Smith suddenly exclaimed a few minutes later; he had just looked at his watch. “Time to phone.” He got up and rushed from the room. Gone.

“Washington. Every day.” In a new way Daria laughed. “I don’t even know who he’s talking to.”

They all laughed, until the sound of their laughter was broken by a sudden clap of thunder from the sea. They looked out toward the gate of rocks, the western end of the bay, and there were enormous black clouds, massed and menacing.

As suddenly as the clap of thunder sounded, they were deluged with rain: huge drops, bucketfuls thrown from the sky, beating down palm fronds, bending heavy hibiscus leaves, crumpling the big flowers to the wilted shapes of bright wet scarves, hanging limp.

The rain washed the air, bringing coolness.

Daria and Eliza looked at each other. And Harry interrupted what they were going to say: “It’s just like storms in Maine. Please don’t tell me that, I
know.
”

“Well, not exactly,” Daria told him seriously. “But a little. That’s something I miss in California. Thunderstorms.”

Harry stared at her (into her, she felt), so that when she looked up at him she blushed a little. Their first sexual moment.

The rain stopped.

In the sudden cool there was only the sound of dripping water, from fronds to leaves, roofs down to gutters, to earth. Daria shivered.

Harry turned to Eliza, away from Daria; he said, “Shouldn’t we—”

“Yes.”

The three of them left the dining room together, and Eliza experienced a wild strange sense that they were all going to bed together. (Would Harry like that? Would she? Well, no.) They left Daria at her door, and continued to their room.

“You’re right, she’s
very
beautiful.”

“You never saw it?”

“Not so much.”

“I wonder who on earth Smith—”

“Our President, of course.”

They both laughed, now half undressed.

“How crazy bringing Dylan. He’s probably in Daria’s room. Her excuse,” Eliza said.

“You just don’t like two-year-olds.”

“Neither does Smith.”

“I have a hunch it was Daria’s idea.”

“You’re probably right, you usually are. It makes me hate you.”

“You know, you’re lovelier naked than with clothes on, much—”

In her room, where in a cot near her bed Dylan lay asleep, Daria took out a piece of paper, and a pen. She wrote: “My darling, Reed, I am wild about—insane—”

Early evening, late fall, in Amsterdam. On a terrace, together, both very beautiful, Reed and Daria were considering how to end their love affair. Again.

Below them the dark canal reflected evening lights. A boat had just passed by: a broad glass-topped excursion cruise that disturbed the surface of the water, so that the reflections were all agitated, the lights all danced. As, on the tables, candles flickered in the cool north fall breeze. The people in the tourist boat could not see the couples dining on the terrace, could not see Reed and Daria near the edge, but they received an impression of romantic opulence, of mystery.

The other diners stared intermittently at the exceptionally handsome couple; Reed, who had always been beautiful, was used to it; not stared at, he would feel cut off from air. Daria took attention less for granted; it still made her shy. She would rather that they were alone; earlier she suggested dinner in her room at the Amstel (the hotel where they met, with Smith, all those years ago). Reed this time was staying at a cheaper place: a tiny upstairs room, but in a beautiful converted house, on one of the loveliest canals.

He said that he would rather go out. “I’ll behave better in public,” he said.

In fact, Daria was quite unused to being beautiful. At
college she was a pretty girl, but so was everyone else. And then a “beautiful bride” (but not really). And then, years of tears, almost crazy with crying, too thin. Then she stopped crying, almost stopped caring about anything at all, and she got away from doctors. She fell in love (or saw that she had always been in love) with Reed, the family friend. Who loved her, too (although at first not so much), who said that she was lovely. And then she was; even she could see it, her extraordinary beauty.