Listening to Billie (24 page)

Instead, she drove north to see Catherine and her children: Dylan, whose operation was a success (surgeons, even otherwise-appalling men like Gilbert Branner, still have their uses, Eliza wryly thought), and the other two children—on their small Mendocino ranch, their farm. Jane had offered to lend her car, and then offered to go along, if that is what Eliza would like. And it was.

They drove north along the ordinary California highway: past shopping centers and subdivisions, motels and gas stations and restaurants. And past an occasional sloping yellow hill, with lovely dark spreading live-oak groves. Then they turned westward, off the main highway and onto a narrower, prettier road, through barren gray sheep country, past small country stores and gray beaten barns, wind-battered cypresses.

Catherine had no phone, of course, and so there was always some risk involved in a drive to see her; in rancid, nonmaternal moods, Eliza had sometimes wondered why she bothered.

This time the small white stucco house where Catherine and her children lived (an affront to the countryside) was boarded up. They turned in to the drive, which was simply a partially cleared space in an otherwise bare yard; they got out and walked slowly toward the house. A padlocked door, new pine planks nailed carefully over the windows. No message; nothing but absence could be read from that boarded house.

“You’d think—” Eliza began, and found that she was curiously near tears.

Jane agreed, “Yes, you certainly would.”

“It’s like some old movie, isn’t it? Settlers swept off by Indians.” Eliza gestured toward the bare yard.

“Except no one burned the house down. Everything left in pretty good shape.”

“Well. Well, there’s certainly no point in sticking around?”

“No, let’s head back. We can stop somewhere for coffee, if you want.”

In a slow, discouraged way, they got back into the car, slammed doors and headed out.

Jane drove toward the sea, the cold and gray forbidding Pacific, the great bearer of fog. Short sheer cliffs dropping straight down to the sea. No beaches, and nowhere any look of summer. A gray cold seasonless desolation everywhere.

Instead of crying, Eliza began to talk, in an extended burst.

“
Catherine.
Whatever does go on in her mind, I’ve never known at all. She’s a sort of willfully passive person. People talk her into things, and then she overdoes them. She could have twenty children before she’s through. Or join the Hari Krishnas, or Reverend Moon. Or she could be a real pioneer, somewhere, if there were a frontier. She’s really a throwback, a kind of woman that none of the rest of us ever were. I often feel that I can’t appreciate Catherine because we’re so unlike. I wonder if Josephine ever felt something like that about me, except that we aren’t all that different, only the way we look. ‘Literary women,’ God, how tiresome. You know, there’s a sense in which I don’t
like
Catherine, and it feels very much like Josephine’s not liking me. What is this? Don’t mothers and daughters like each other? Is it terribly different with boys?”

Jane frowned, concentrating on those questions. “I guess, a little. But I really don’t know.”

“This is so irrational. I’m behaving as though Catherine knew I was coming and deliberately boarded up the house to greet me.”

“That’s not so irrational. She did know that eventually you’d come up.”

•  •  •

But irrational was exactly how Eliza continued to feel, over the next few dark cold weeks of late July and early August.

Not writing at all, barely able to concentrate on reading a book (magazines were better), she recognized danger, and she took certain steps. She spent a lot of time waxing furniture, and she continued to walk a lot (and considered, and discarded, the notion of smoking again).

But, walking, she recognized that some claustrophobic pull was keeping her close to home. She walked, but never to those outlying parts of the city that she had once enjoyed. She walked around Russian Hill and neighboring North Beach, her limits. One day she found herself walking all around the park, Washington Square, around it once, and then again. Around the beautifully sloping green space, past the stands of eucalyptus. And she became aware of a great sadness in what she was seeing, and of an emptiness in herself: she was as bare, as bleak, as the park.

Then she thought, Of course, ten years ago this is where all the hippies came and lay around in the sun, in their bright mad clothes, with their guitars and dogs and chunky little children.

She understood that she was staying close to home because Catherine might show up.

There was no word from Catherine.

There was no word, in fact, from anyone, until one afternoon there was a call from Harry. He was flying up in half an hour; he had to meet someone for a drink, but could he and Eliza meet for dinner? Would it be okay if he stayed with her? And he named a restaurant to which she had not been, although it was within blocks of her house. It faced the park she has been walking around, again and again. Washington Square.

Yes, of course she would meet him for dinner; of course he could stay. (The terms of their relationship were delicate: were she to any extent involved with anyone else, she could have said
no, and that would have been all right. Or, supposedly, it would have been all right; so far, she had never said no to Harry.)

But, changing the bedsheets, then getting into her bath, Eliza was aware of a terrible difference between this present moment, her present feelings, and how she usually felt, and had felt for years, anticipating Harry.

Now, in the tub, she looked down at her large wet pale body, big floating breasts and round stomach, dark rising pubic hairs, and hugely foreshortened legs. Gross, pallid jelly—a jellyfish of a body, it seemed to her.

She did not want
at all
to make love.

Which was not to say that she had always, at every moment, wanted to before; of course not. But simply that she usually had, more often than not; she had almost always wanted Harry. What she had never felt was this negative, this
no
to sex.

It was terrible, and frightening. Age? A somewhat early menopause?

Dressed, and downstairs in her kitchen, she made herself a strong drink (also out of character for her) before going to meet Harry.

Half a block from the restaurant, she was almost overcome with what felt like shyness:
could
she open the door and go in and look around for Harry?

She did, of course, and he was there at the bar, mere feet away from her. Harry, smiling welcome, saying her name. They kissed, with great affection. Affection for Harry almost made Eliza cry, which was another new fear of hers: a burst of tears.

They were given a cozy window table, looking out to the park; through immensely thick old Lombardy poplars they glimpsed the neon lights of Columbus Avenue.

Harry had begun to look older, she noticed in the lamplight as he spoke to the waiter, ordering drinks. His bony nose was yet more prominent, and his blue eyes were paler, although still incredibly intense. The most
living
eyes in the world, Eliza thought, and again experienced an awful urge to cry.

Turning now fully to her, Harry said, “My God, it’s so
good to see you. I’ve been so tired, and that last flop was no fun for a man of my years. I’ve got some ideas, and then at other times, you know, I feel absolutely depleted. I think I’ve told every story I know.”

“I know: I’ve said all the poems in my head. Harry, we’re getting old!”

Ruefully they both laughed, thus pushing that moment away.

He said, “You’re a lovely old lady, Eliza.”

She told him about Catherine, managing, she was pleased to note, to sound considerably less worried than she was.

Dinner came, which turned out to be good.

But sometime later, in the midst of what was becoming a much better evening than she had thought possible, Eliza had a sudden and insistent sense of death, of the presence of death. Looking out through the heavy ancient poplars, out to the lights, she imagined death; and she
saw
herself sitting there, thinking of death.

And she thought again of not wanting to make love; herself dry and old, opposed to sex. Obsessed with death—dry—old.

They walked the several blocks back to Eliza’s house, leaning against the marauding wind, the cold relentless fog.

Even inside it was cold. Harry made a small fire, and Eliza went to make coffee, to get out brandy.

And almost immediately the telephone rang.

Not Catherine; it was Daria, from Maine.

“Eliza, I’ve been trying to get you—it’s Josephine. Another stroke. No, really not a bad one. The doctor says that if you come right away you’ll just scare her; he’s sure—he’s sure she’ll be okay. But could you come in a few days? And in the meantime of course I’ll call you a lot—”

Eliza went back into the living room, where, in Harry’s arms, she was overtaken by the long-threatening tears, the sobs that went on and on. “It’s horrible!” she cried out. “I was right.
This feeling I’ve had of death. And you know, I’ve never told you this—nor, God knows, anyone: when Josephine had her first stroke, the first thing I thought was I’m safe from her now. You see? So she had to have another one.”

Harry gave the gentlest possible laugh. “Baby, darling, come on.
You
forced Josephine to have another stroke? Really, powerful in your own way as you are, I just can’t buy it.”

“But what a terrible thing to think, after a stroke—”

“Look, read a few old plays. You’re not exactly the first person who’d find a crippled parent easier to deal with than a powerful one.”

Eliza had only been half listening; everything that he said would make much more sense later on.

“Catherine,” she said, in the same vein. “For all I know, Catherine could be dead.”

“Baby, come on. Catherine is just careless, inconsiderate. Not dead.”

“And I can’t write any more. That’s dead, too.”

Later it was Harry who made their coffee, and then they went up to bed. They did not make love.

And so, after years of talking about it, of plans and delays and postponements, Harry and Eliza went to Maine. They flew to Boston where they rented a car (a small Ford, not quite up to Harry’s usual standards: the Seventies had had their effect) and they headed north, up the turnpike.

Past Portland, they turned off onto smaller roads, and it all began to look overpoweringly familiar to Eliza: the stone-fenced fields, the dark woods laced with birches, the barns and houses, crossroads stores and small libraries.

On the last tarred road, before turning off onto their own private stretch, there was a succession of similar hills, each cresting to a view of fields and woods and farther hills; until from the last one there was, suddenly, the lake! Eliza, at that view, as all her life she had, cried out in triumph (forgetting all that death), “There—there it is—the lake!”

A large bright blue lake, into which long points of land extended. And there were small dark irregularly shaped islands; one long island that was the shape of a fish.

From there on everything was known by heart: the turn onto a narrow white road, between just yellowing fields; another
turn, uphill and through some leafy woods. A gray farmhouse (much larger than its barn) abandoned now, stark and tall above a bare gray yard. More fields, stone-fenced, edged with pine and hemlock, and then the road entered a darker stretch of woods, between huge black trunks of Norway pines. Solemn, a cathedral silence.

Then another lighter, leafier wood, another turn: the orchard (theirs) with small gnarled gray trunks and gray-green leaves. Stone fences. Indian paintbrush, goldenrod.

A driveway, lawn and long low-lying house. The long porch, porte-cochère, the parking area. Cars were there, but no one was in sight. They parked and got out, bringing bags, and Harry said, “My God, it’s the greatest house I’ve ever seen. Eliza, love, it’s marvelous. And the lake—
Why
haven’t we come before?”

They were expected; the front door had been left open. They left their bags in the hall and then went down the steps to the path across the lawn, to the beach. The lake: blue water, lightly lapping at the sand.

They walked along a seemingly empty beach; they came to a familiar rock, high and gray and oddly slanted, and there, on the other side of it, were an unfamiliar (unfamiliar together) couple: Josephine and Smith. Both white-haired, both, in their separate ways, distinguished.

Greetings, kisses, introductions. Smith was now standing, and Eliza knelt on the sand beside her mother, who looked—all right: somewhat more frail, a little tired, but her eyes were as blue and bright as ever; as lively as the lake. An old, but not a dying woman. (But no longer dangerous.)

In almost her old emphatic voice, Josephine said, “
Well.
It’s really marvelous that you’re here.”

And, a little after that, after the perfection of that August day had been remarked upon, Eliza asked, reasonably enough, “Where’s Daria?”

Josephine and Smith looked at each other, and Eliza was
again struck by their air of being a couple, in whatever (surely not sexual) sense. Josephine said, simply, “We don’t know. She left the day before yesterday.”

Two days ago, at breakfast, as she read the paper, Daria had begun to cry; they were not sure about what, but given the news it could have been anything—deaths by plagues and starvation, floods, the homeless, the hopelessly ill. Josephine and Smith did not say that it was like Daria ten years ago; they didn’t have to. She got up, and said that she was going for a walk, and did not come back. They did not know where she was. They were frightened, but at this point calling the police seemed somehow an invasion of her privacy; they both believed that somehow, somewhere, Daria knew what she was doing.

As Eliza did, although, like them, she was frightened. She stood up, and not quite knowing what she meant to do, she said to them, “Don’t worry. I’ll find her.”

With Harry (of whom, at this moment, she was almost unconscious), she walked slowly back toward the house, across the lawn, up steps, across the porch. Inside the house, at the foot of the stairs, Harry started to go up with their bags, but Eliza said, “You go on up. Our rooms are the ones at the end of the hall. I’ll be a minute.”