Listening to Billie (4 page)

“Well, I do see that your first experience was unfortunate,”
Smith managed to say. “But I’m sure next time it will all work out.”

She was off. “Unfortunate! Poor Evan, he never should have married anyone, especially not me. But I was pregnant, and he felt guilty about me, we both felt guilty. What a way to marry!” She realized that she was speaking too loudly. She stopped, and in the silence that followed she crazily imagined that a ghostly Billie Holiday was singing; she could hear that solitary mourning voice.

“I didn’t know all that,” said Smith. Could this possibly be true? Surely everyone knew she was pregnant; even Daria at that age could count.

“There’s more,” Eliza said wildly; she was on the verge of saying to him what she had not said to anyone in her family, especially not to Daria: Evan fell in love with someone else, a boy.

Now she did not say that to Smith, either; she felt that Smith could handle such information even less than Daria could.

“I’m not even very interested in money,” Eliza feebly said, instead. “Why marry?”

He laughed in a small dismissing way. “That’s easy for you to say.”

Eliza experienced a curious sense of elation: having meant to sound insane, to shock Smith, she felt herself instead coming into focus, as sometimes words did when she was writing.

She stood up. “Well, actually I came down to walk on the beach, but I guess I won’t.”

He stood, too. He said, “You know, you’re really crazy.”

“You’re probably right.”

Eliza had a photographic memory, of a certain kind: certain scenes flashed across her mind like slides. Earlier, talking to Daria, she had
seen
Billie enter the night club on Fifty-second Street, and this short space of time with Smith was another scene that she remembered and reviewed in years to come. But
for a long time that moment of elation was missing from the picture; she might as well have been drunk, or high. Nor, remembering Smith’s pale serious young face, was she sure what made him think that she was crazy.

The wedding was just as Josephine intended: beautiful and conclusive Episcopal words were spoken, and then it was a party, in an orchard on a brilliant, deep blue afternoon. Fall was somehow suddenly in the air, along with smells of apples and of freshly mown grass, of sweet dry hay, and wind. Goldenrod stood beside the road, and Indian paintbrush, beside the low stone fences. And behind the orchard the long house lay low against the land, its long windows reflecting the lowering sun, its shingles silver in that fading light.

All afternoon Eliza had watched the joyously innocent faces of Daria and Smith. Together they looked even younger than either separately did. And, juxtaposed to Smith’s soft face, Daria’s features were finer, sharper and more poignant than before.

To Eliza the sight was terribly sad. But after all, there was always the chance that what happened would be unusual—a good marriage. It was she, Eliza, who was crazy, not Smith Worthington.

Fat and happy and pretty in her flowered dress, Catherine, who was the flower girl, loved everything about this wedding. “I love weddings!” she cried out to her mother, to Eliza. “How many times are people allowed to marry? I’d like to be a bride a dozen times.”

The other guests were mostly old—old friends of Josephine’s, old neighbors. Gently shocked, they now laughed softly at Catherine; they looked curiously at Eliza, never knowing what anyone in this family would say or do.

Josephine was angrily thinking of her third wedding, to Jason Paulus. And at the same time she knew that her rancor was unfair. Jason was not actually a bad person. A Money Person,
yes, in real estate, in Westchester—but not actually dishonest. He simply fell in love with Josephine and she forced herself to marry him—not knowing that marriage to Jason would simply exacerbate her pain at Franz’s loss. Ah, marriages! she thought, and scowled. But no one noticed.

Eliza took her daughter’s hand, and they started toward the house, toward the festively decorated dining room, and the cutting of the cake.

That night, after Daria and Smith and all the wedding guests were gone, Eliza and Josephine sat in the adjacent wicker chairs on the long front porch, watching the flickering lights from the faintly smaller moon as it was reflected in the lake’s small waves. The two women, unlikely mother and daughter, secret enemies, or so they seemed to themselves, conversed in a desultory, pleasant, if nearly exhausted way, as they listened to music from the machine inside the house.

Not Billie; they were listening to someone named Horace Silver, whom Eliza had not heard before—a marvelous, dazzling pianist.

“And a Portuguese Negro,” explained Josephine. “Satisfying two of my positive biases.”

They laughed, and then Eliza said, “Well, yes, but do Portuguese really qualify as a minority?”

“I don’t know about that, but some of them are terribly attractive. One almost broke my heart. A consul.”

An unusual remark from Josephine, and for an instant they were simply two women, talking. Eliza wished her mother would go on in that vein. She would like to ask when? where? was he married? a Catholic? Well, of course he would have been. She would like to say: I, too, had a lot of trouble with a consul (The Consul). How did you handle it—what happened?

But Josephine had her own ideas about mother-daughter conversations, as she did about most things. “In any case, isn’t Horace Silver marvelous?” she said.

“Isn’t he, though,” agreed her daughter, who was thinking that what he is is incredibly sexy, which she did not say.

The record stopped, and neither woman moved to change it.

And into that silence Josephine made her second startling remark of the evening. She said, “Smith—there’s something so very odd about that boy. I don’t know—”

“
Yes.
” They looked at each other, another rare moment of accord. But neither of these highly verbal women was able to say what she thought.

“He’s very ambiguous,” said Josephine, and then laughed, aware that she had echoed what Smith himself said when she questioned him about a certain contemporary political figure, from California—a man who, to Josephine, was an unambiguous villain.

From far across the lake a loon called, and Josephine said, “They always sound somehow female, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

On the other side of the lake, just visible now in the moonlight, were some small and oddly shaped islands, mostly rocks, with dark clumps of trees. Loons lived there, and other wild birds, and squirrels and chipmunks and rabbits. “Someone told me,” said Josephine, “that those islands are very like those along the coast of Yugoslavia, below Dubrovnik.” She laughed. “I must be getting ready for a trip.”

They were quiet for a while, and then they both said that it was time for bed; they were tired.

At the head of the stairs they lightly kissed good night, and separated.

Seated at her desk, Eliza took up the fragments, the patterns of words that she had begun the night before. She crossed out one that was wrong, added a phrase. What was now on the paper was a mess, and so on a clean page she copied it out. She read over what was there, and her blood raced as she
recognized what she saw: a finished poem, small and beautiful, complete.

She got up abruptly from the desk; she hurried to get ready for bed.

Although tired, she was wakeful; her mind raced about, back and forth across her life, those almost thirty years of it. Behind her closed eyelids her past was vividly present: she could see Evan (with diminishing pain, she noted, at last), could see chunky Catherine, as a baby, laughing, Daria, a dark and skimpy little girl, near this house, crying over a kitten that had been scratched by a squirrel—this house that she could see steadily, never changing, over all the years of her life.

Close to sleep now, she all at once sees Billie again, long-awaited and vividly beautiful. Billie enters the club, with her straining gray dog ahead of her: Billie holds the leash up high, she holds her head high, her lovely face, and after Billie and the dog comes the slouch-hatted man with his bandaged hand.

Of course that was how they entered, in that order.

In Paris, Daria and Smith go to dinner at Maxim’s; a great treat, a celebration. The two of them, married one whole week. Married!

But is that possible, only one week since the minister began it all, “Dearly beloved—” in the orchard, in the familiar smells of apple and grass? Eliza looking sad, and Josephine scowling (why?), and little Catherine happy as a kitten. One week: is it possible that they are now at Maxim’s, on an elegant French evening?

Everything there, at Maxim’s, pleases Smith greatly; he is almost swollen with pleasure: their table, a good one; the waiters; and the smooth bare well-tended, well-braceleted arms of the women in the room, all in silk or chiffon, expensive fabrics; and the portentous but well-tanned men in black ties. The mirrors, returning all that, in their Art Nouveau frames. Smoke, perfume.

Smith whispers, “Do you know some of the richest people in the world are in this room tonight?”

“Really? Sounds like a good place for a bomb.” Daria did not mean to say this; it “slips out,” and then she giggles, and then coughs, and sips champagne. And tries to taste her dessert, a peach with ice cream. Pěche Melba.

Smith frowns, and then smiles too quickly, too reassuringly.

Daria closes her eyes against everything, and then for an instant she has a quick apocalyptic vision: Maxim’s
is
bombed; blood and money and champagne and food pour out into the Rue Royale, diamonds and gold spouting out from windows like fireworks. And a crowd of poor people gathers to sift through the spoils, to wash off the jewels and cash. She opens her eyes; the opulent room is still there, quite safe. Of course it is.

They are staying—or, rather, they were staying at the Ritz. Now, because Daria kept getting lost there (silly, really, but there were so many corridors, so lined with such dazzling displays, such diamonds and gold, such crystal), now they are staying at a smaller, more comprehensible hotel, the Montalembert. Except that Daria is afraid of the elevator: a small slow glass cage, with bronze fittings. She does not tell Smith of this fear; he was so nice (sweet, really) about leaving the Ritz. In fact, she senses that he likes his indulgent-husband role: “Darling, you really don’t like it here, do you? Well, easiest thing, we’ll move.” But she senses too that his indulgence will only go so far; she does not want to make him nervous, to be worrisome, an interference with his larger plans.

After the dinner at Maxim’s the elevator makes her terribly dizzy; when they get to the room, she is sick in the bathroom. Too much rich food, Smith thinks smilingly.

Strangely, the bed at the Montalembert feels exactly like the bed at the Ritz: large and soft and terrifying. Hot, smelling of failure and of slime—odors available only to Daria; Smith doesn’t notice.

And a new word has entered Daria’s mind: Fuck. That is what they do, what Smith does to her, repeatedly. Before marrying they kissed a lot, he gently touched her breasts, and
that was nice, and she had thought that “intercourse,” the word she used before this new one, would be an extension of kissing, a loving transaction between two people, two people “in love.” But not so: now she is being “fucked,” and the word itself, its presence in her mind, makes her shudder with its ugliness, its dirt.

Obviously, Smith enjoys what he does, or he wouldn’t do it so often, would he?

Sometimes Daria wishes for Eliza, so that she could ask her—but ask her what? Use what words? “Eliza, do you like to ‘fuck’?” She has a feeling that Eliza does.

But Daria is perfectly happy in Paris, really, and the city is so perfectly beautiful—although that September there is a heat wave, yellowing, bleaching, almost paralyzing the city—so happy, so beautiful, that she cries a great deal of the time.

That perfect space, that vista from Notre Dame—the Tuileries Garden, then the Champs, wide and rising to the Arc—it is lovely enough to break your heart.

And the slow dark Seine, its gray stone embankments, gray stone bridges, fishermen, alone; of course she cries.

She and Smith are a perfect couple, too, beautiful and young and just-married Americans. A couple probably about to live happily ever after, with a lot of children and money and houses in the country.

They are sitting on the terrace of the Flore, pretty, thin Daria in her sleeveless yellow linen, yellow-eyed (she can see herself in everyone else’s eyes), in the yellow September heat. And Smith, who is warm and flushed, very handsome today, is telling her about having come to Paris before, his boisterous undergraduate trip. The Tabu and the Méphisto, Bal Nègre. Juliette Greco. Pernod. “Well, I really didn’t know what had hit me,” Smith is boyishly saying. “I’ve always had a sort of
weakness for licorice, and we really lapped it up that night, like it was going out of style.”

He pauses to light his pipe, as Daria thinks how handsome, how perfect he is. But what has he been talking about?

“… West Indian dancing,” he says, and laughs. She must have lost her place.

She feels like crying. But everything is perfect, isn’t it? “Smith?”

Eliza’s income from the few stocks that Caleb Hamilton, her father, left amounted to about half of what she had estimated that, minimally, she and Catherine would need to live on; thus, she had had a series of part-time jobs. Economically a full-time job would have made more sense. She knew that; she was often broke, often worried. But working full-time left her much less time for Catherine—and no time at all for her own work, her secret poems.

Josephine, who was visibly very well off indeed, sometimes sent checks—always welcome, a help; but Josephine felt that Eliza should support herself, and Eliza agreed. At thirty, she should certainly not be dependent on Josephine.

Early on, Eliza was classified as a Medical Secretary, and so she remained, with one vaguely medical job after another. But it was strange, that series of medical settings; sometimes Eliza thought it another (probably futile) opposition to Josephine, for whom “scientific” was a nearly dirty word. “The scientific mind” was always uttered with Josephine’s most Bostonian scorn. In any case, locked into her Medical Secretary label, Eliza rather liked it there—in a furtive way she liked doctors, was excited by medicine.