Listening to Billie (25 page)

“Okay. I need a shower.”

Eliza turned back to the still-open front door; she went out and sat on the porch, in one of the wicker chairs, as though she had a plan. She looked out blankly at the bright, bright lake, thinking desperately of her sister. Of Daria.

Eliza could see her: thick-lashed, yellow-eyed, with tawny skin.

She saw a very young Daria, in a trim gray flannel coat, who had come up to see her older married sister, and who for the first time in her life was staying alone in a hotel. (While Evan was teaching at Raleigh, a month or so before his suicide in that same
hotel.) Daria was saying, “This is the most wonderful place I’ve ever been! Did you see the floorboards in the hall? They’re so
uneven
, it’s wonderful—it’s like being on a boat.”

The Ark was the name of that hotel, the place that young Daria loved.

Eliza had no other ideas, and this was no crazier than doing nothing at all.

But what name would Daria use? Worthington—Paulus—Hamilton?

When, finally, she got the desk of The Ark on the phone, Eliza said that she was looking for three friends who might be staying there, and she gave those names.

A long creaking pause, and then, “No, Miss, I’m sorry, we’ve got none of them here.” The finality of New Hampshire vowels.

Eliza’s heart fell, although she knew that what she was doing was crazy. She thanked the voice on the other end, and was about to hang up, when on a probably crazier impulse she said, “How about Erskine? Do you have a Daria Erskine?” Josephine’s maiden name: Josephine Erskine Hamilton; Eliza Erskine Hamilton Quarles; Daria Erskine Paulus Worthington.

“Yep. Miss Erskine just now came in. I’ll ring her room.”

Two trilling rings.

Daria said, “Eliza, how
did
you—?”

“By magic. Divination. No help from you, God knows.”

“
Eliza
—” Daria began to explain. “I was sitting there feeling so unhappy, as though I weighed five hundred pounds, so heavy and so miserable that I could never move again. And then in the midst of it, all that crying and helplessness, I saw that I had to do something, almost anything but just sit there and cry—I’d been doing that for years. And so I walked into town, and there was a bus just stopped at the crossroads, with ‘Raleigh’ on the front of it. Oh, you’re right; I know it was bad to do, to worry everyone. But I only meant to walk into town. It was seeing that name on the bus, and remembering the place.

But, Eliza, it worked, my mind cleared. I’ve got an idea.”

“Well—good.”

“Look, I’m just two hours away, and there’s a bus at four. Would you ask Smith to meet me? I want to talk to him first.”

Eliza returned to the beach, to Smith and Josephine and Harry, and told what had happened, how she had found Daria. She had an uneasy sense of being praised overmuch for something that was easy. Sometimes, she had even had that feeling about a poem: anyone could have written down those particular words, in that order. She said, “I just called her. It just came to me where she would be. After all, it’s quite near, and I knew she liked it there.”

Early that evening—Smith had gone to meet Daria; presumably they would stop and talk for a while—the phone rang and Eliza, somehow prewarned, rushed to answer it. And it was Catherine, calling collect, from Boston.

Very tired, tired beyond anger (tired of Catherine?), Eliza said, “Well—well, of course I’ve been worried. What do you think?”

“You didn’t get my cards?”

“Cards? No, I didn’t.”

“I’m sure I sent them.” Long explanations followed: Catherine and the three kids and these new friends were going up to Canada to stay with some neat friends. Farms, animals, self-sufficiency. Listening, Eliza experienced an unfamiliar, at first not recognized reaction: she was bored. Bored, tired and beginning to be relieved; she was beginning to see that she had done all she could for Catherine, over the past twenty-five years. Some other time, with Catherine in some other phase (she hoped, and it was quite possible), they could have a new relationship, but all the old mother-anxiety was over now.
Catherine would have to attend to herself, as Eliza would.

At the end of the explanations, Eliza simply asked, “How long will you be in Boston?”

“Oh, a couple of weeks. We have to sort of get things together here. Why? Are you coming down?”

“No.” No, Catherine, I’m not. “Look, give me your number, where you are. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

Later, out on the porch with drinks, in their adjacent chairs, Harry and Eliza regarded the silent lake in the clear and cooling August evening air. Eliza was thinking of the bottom of the lake, in the shallow waters, where she used to see ripples in the sand, ripples shaped like delicate human ribs, like skeletons. And then thinking of the deepest parts of the lake, observed from a canoe, in which giant, rounded, possibly Ice Age boulders were terrifyingly visible. She was thinking of those darkest depths of the lake. Of drowning there, among rocks and small translucent fish. It would seem an easy—a familiar death, she thought exhaustedly.

Harry was thinking of a movie he would like to make, to be filmed, at last, in Mexico. In Ixtapanejo.

But for the past few days, the days since Daria’s phone call from Maine to San Francisco, about Josephine’s stroke, they had not made love. Had hardly talked, in fact.

Was it over, then, their remarkable friendship-sexual rapport?

They both wondered that.

Driving to meet Daria, at the crossroads from which she left—driving over those roads that by now are familiar to him, Smith thought of when he had come here first, of the drive with Josephine. (Was Catherine, then a small child, in the back seat that day? He believed she was, but couldn’t remember. Josephine’s
obvious attempts to draw him out; his resistance, and his strange thought: If you really knew me, if I let you know me, you would stop this marriage. But what could he have meant by that? He loved Daria, he wanted her for his wife.

Then, as now, late August. Goldenrod and a few bright maple leaves. Brilliant sharp blue glimpses of the lake. Smells of grass, and wind, and sweetly rotting apples.

Smith was almost surprised to see her, standing there where she was supposed to be, the bus having come and gone somewhat ahead of schedule. A thin dark-haired young woman in dusty jeans and a clean, unironed yellow cotton shirt. Beautiful, really, with a nervous, elegant walk, in spite of those clothes.

She got into the car and leaned to kiss him, in the brushing way that they had kissed for years, parting or greeting each other. Smith noticed that despite the jeans she looked very clean: scrubbed and tired, eager-looking,
young.
The sight of her made him tired.

She said, “I’m sorry, really. I do know that was childish, running away. But it just came to me—I sort of had to. And I did think a lot. Smith, how much money do I have?”

“Money?” He fussed at starting up the car. And although it was Daria, his wife, who had asked this, Smith automatically resisted; in his world large sums of money were vaguely referred to, never explicitly named. “A bundle” was the phrase his people (the Money People) currently used, which could mean anything at all.

Daria had a lot of money in her own name, a big bundle, but why should she want to know just how much?

And he was quite right to resist.

“Let’s stop here,” she said as they reached the small meadow just past the forest of Norway pines.

They stopped, parked, and she told him that she wanted to get a job, in Boston, or probably Cambridge, maybe just a volunteer job, but with people she liked: “You know, my kind.
Do-gooders, bleeding hearts, some do-good organization.” She said that hurriedly, breathily. And then she said that she wanted to give away all her money.

Smith was forced—partly from sheer fatigue in the face of so much energy—to take her seriously, although many of his instincts were outraged. She—Daria was outrageous. But still she was a person, with rights. Smith believes in justice. And the money was indeed her own. He gave it to her.

Daria had, in her own name, about a million dollars.

Her eyes grew wide as he named the sum—warm yellow eyes; so much money to give away. And her voice was high, quite childlike. “But, Smith, that’s wonderful, how wonderful of you, to make so much money. I can’t wait to give it all—”

Smith then said
NO
, so firmly that she listened. He said, “It would be much better for you to keep the money and distribute the income every year. Look, suppose you give one of your favorites—United Farm Workers?—say, five hundred grand. They’d have to invest it—choose a counselor, someone, pay for advice. My point is I really think I’m better at that than their person would be. You know I’m great at making money. Let me handle the money for you.”

Daria was convinced, although it would have been more fun to give away huge sums than the income from huge sums. However, she could admit to herself that this was a little infantile, grandstandish. Smith sounded right.

He further explained about I.R.S. rulings on contributions, et cetera; it all made sense.

In a curious way, Daria and Smith became business partners, of a somewhat original sort.

Daria said to Smith, “We’d better get on to the house, don’t you think? Josephine—dinner—”

Smith was experiencing strange physical sensations: a dizziness amounting to nausea. Was this a heart attack? Or madness? He managed to start the car, to drive over the remaining mile or so of the narrow white road, to the orchard, to
the house, without letting Daria know that anything was wrong. Whatever it was, it gradually passed.

At dinner, Josephine, in her old flounced and flowery dress, talked almost incessantly, as she did when she was nervous. She said, in part, “I don’t know why, it must be loss of recent memory, but lately I’ve thought so much of Franz, the summer we spent up here, when you were a baby, Eliza. He was my second husband, who died in the civil war in Spain,” she explained to Smith, who probably knew this already. And then to Eliza: “Your Harry looks remarkably like Franz. The same deep face lines.”

Having been told in a general way of Daria’s plans, Eliza suddenly thought, Catherine will leave Dylan in Boston with Daria. This sentence or prophecy flashed across her mind, and she further thought, Daria has always wanted to have Dylan; she will take an apartment for the two of them, and send Dylan to Shady Hill or some other good school there, in Cambridge or in Boston. A “good school” will be the excuse between her and Catherine for Catherine’s leaving him there. The real reason being that Daria wants him more, and it will probably be better for him with Daria.

“Do you realize that Daria and I were married just fifteen years ago tomorrow?”

This sentence was spoken quietly by Smith to Eliza. Daria had gone to bed, and Harry and Josephine were inside, talking. Like dancers, these two strange couples had momentarily shifted partners. Eliza and Smith were walking along the beach, alone, in the cooling night.

Smith’s words seemed to explode within her head, and she
was ricocheted back to that moment when she and Smith were sitting on the porch, and Smith was saying—what?—and she was imagining Billie. She saw the lake as it was then, and now: the heavy waning moon and its glittering path.

Then she looked out to the beach where she had meant to walk, where now, on the cold coarse damp sand, she walked with Smith.

He was saying something even more startling, though still in his rather proper, quiet voice: “Why didn’t you stop us, Eliza? You must have seen something. Christ, if only I could have married someone like you.”

“But Smith—” She had begun to say: You’re crazy, or—we don’t even like each other. And had realized that neither of these things was true, or was no longer true.

“You must think I sound nuts,” he said, with a tiny laugh.

“No, but I always thought you thought I was.”

Somewhat self-consciously they both laughed at that as, seemingly an echo, a loon called from somewhere out in the rocky islands.

Partly to change their mood, and also because for years she had wanted to know (for five years, since her birthday in Ixtapanejo), Eliza asked, “Who were you talking to in Washington—all those calls, during—those years?”

“Oh, no one, a girl. A reporter. She looked a little like you.” This curious last an afterthought.

Later he said, “Daria doesn’t want a divorce, although she doesn’t
not
want one, but I think we should. I like to have things clear; you know how I am.”

I do? Eliza asked, “Shouldn’t you tell her that?” This conversation with Smith was beginning to sound as crazy as their first, when he talked about appropriate places to live.

With the most terrible sadness, he said, “It’s too late, isn’t it? I made all the wrong choices too early.”

Not entirely sure what he meant (political or sexual choices—possibly both?), Eliza did what she had vaguely thought of doing, fifteen years back: she stopped walking and she
grasped Smith’s arm; she leaned upward, on tiptoe, and most gently kissed his mouth, finding it as smooth and soft as she had imagined.

She said, “I really like you, Smith.”

With one hand he pressed her shoulder, saying nothing.

The next day no one mentioned a wedding anniversary.

A few days later, Josephine and Smith and Daria decided to go to the beach—the Atlantic coast, a few hours away. Harry and Eliza stayed at home. To Josephine, Harry said, “I can’t bear to leave this house, and we have to get back to California in a couple of days.”

Having made love lengthily the night before, and quickly again in the morning (whatever was wrong suddenly, miraculously healed), they were warm and comfortable and friendly with each other. I like Harry more than anyone, Eliza thought for the hundredth time.

It was a lovely day for them; they spent most of it on the beach, near the edge of the water, the dark blue lake beneath a brilliant deep blue sky; an early fall sky, although the day was warm.

And, in a desultory way, as they did and had always done on beaches, Eliza and Harry were making a movie, talking about it; perhaps they would make it together.