Off Course (26 page)

At the Hapsaw Lodge, a truck in the parking lot looked exactly like Quinn's, and her teeth began to chatter. Her breath lost depth. Her heart flopped like a caught fish. She had to pull over to find a bag to breathe into. He'd never leave his wife. Cress knew this absolutely as she swung down the mountain. Although maybe he would. He'd come farther than she ever expected him to already, and if she didn't blow it, if she didn't spook him, if she played her own part just right, he might still come all the way.

*   *   *

“I wish you weren't leaving,” Quinn said.

“You know I'd stay,” she said. “If you want me to. Just say the word.”

He was silent for a long time. “No,” he said. “Let me clean up this mess I've made, then I'll come get you.”

He stopped at a liquor store and demanded her flask. He filled both of their flasks with expensive bourbon. “Drink this and remember me.”

*   *   *

“You're so skinny,” said Tillie. “Not me.”

Tillie looked the same to Cress. Short, cute, energetic. Frizzled black hair. She was cooking vegetarian Indian food, fluttering around the kitchen, frying spices, grating ginger, cubing homemade cheese for saag paneer. Tillie wiggled her fingers over onions simmering in oil; they became crisp, golden strands to scatter on dal.

“Cressida's fresh from the backwoods,” Tillie announced at dinner. The Kalingas, two climate physicists, and the Prosser-Estephes, astrophysicist and meteorologist, turned to Cress with polite interest.

“I was trying to finish my dissertation.”

“Up there among the bears,” said Tillie.

“No, really?” said the female climatologist. “Actual bears?”

The conversation moved into a discussion of weather balloons and obscure atmospheric data-gathering methods that Cress couldn't follow. She was not in good shape. Here in Braithway, it was as if she'd awakened from a dream or, more accurately, been dumped out of a fairy tale like the peasant girls who'd fallen down wells and found themselves in dark forests where animals talked and princes wandered disguised as beggars and you performed test after test until you woke up in your old bed, a silver flask the only proof of your ordeal. Cress felt her ribs. She was skinny, as if she'd been starved or ill.

Tillie gave her her old room on their sun porch, its many windows providing a bird's-eye view of the entire U-shaped court. Reaching to close the red silk curtains, she hardly recognized herself in the wavering old glass.

*   *   *

Applying for a passport took a few days; she had to get a copy of her birth certificate from the county offices in Norwalk, an entire morning's errand. She picked up passport forms at the post office, then found a small photography studio on Lake Avenue to take her photo. For hours post-flash, she blinked away a blazing lilac splotch edged in turquoise. Seeing her wide face and lank hair in black-and-white, she questioned her ability to command anyone's love.

The passport would come within six weeks, whether she needed it or not.

Cress walked around Pasadena with the idea of looking for a job. She could take her time. She'd made her nut and then some. The old places she loved to visit as a teenager—Rosa's Fabrics, the tiny French café with green-and-pink-striped awnings—had been razed for a huge, windowless, sand-colored indoor mall. Ten minutes within its buzzing fluorescent maw and panic flickered darkly in her vision. Outside again, she walked west to an older part of town, to the Disabled American Veterans thrift store. She clacked plastic hangers in a soothing rhythm and found a coral sweater from Italy from the forties that still smelled of cedar. A starched white cotton shell with scalloped eyelet at the neck brightened against her tanned skin, and was as close to lace as Cress would ever wear. She'd wear it for him. Everything she chose now, she chose for him.

June was cool during the mornings, heating up to the eighties by midafternoon. Nights, she and Tillie and Edgar sat in the living room with the windows open and drank chilled white wine. Maddie and the Ellis girls and other court denizens wandered in. They were finding jobs as production assistants, graphic designers. Maddie was on staff now at the
LA Weekly
. “Send them your quarterlies,” Maddie said. “Maybe they'll take you on as an editor.”

Quinn phoned her late, when his mother went to bed and the rates were low. They didn't talk long—both had to keep their voices down. He'd helped his mom put in tomato plants. He'd taken a small job, putting shelves in an office at the Sparkville library. He'd come see her next week, or the week after, whenever he finished. She wandered through the days to get to these few minutes; she curled around the comforting low burr of his voice.

*   *   *

“I went on a little spree,” Tillie announced, bringing large shopping bags into Cress's room. “I need to class up at work. Shall I model?” She nimbly shed a vintage sheath, then pulled on taupe slacks, a linen blouse, and a brown damask jacket with enormous shoulder pads. “My power outfit,” Tillie said, and with a lascivious giggle she confessed that the jacket alone was five hundred dollars. “Don't tell Edgar!” She swiveled for Cress, then paused. “Here comes the electrician.” She pointed outside. “Only two days late.”

A man in a baseball cap sauntered down the court. He wore a short-sleeved sport shirt, jeans, blaring white sneakers. He dropped something, a coin perhaps, and when he swooped over to pick it up, his grace set off a fast cross current in Cress's chest, not unlike fear. “No,” she said. “That's Quinn.”

They watched him search out Tillie's unit. Cress could have opened a window, called to him. But she was shy, and a little embarrassed—that he looked like an electrician—and her allegiances, to him and to Tillie seesawed. Then he was on the stairs, and knocking. Tillie's eyes were too bright, her interest too obvious; Cress wanted to ratchet her down or shoo her away.

Tillie flung open the door. “At last!” she rang out. “The Mighty Quinn!”

Cress had forgotten how he could hold himself back: with perfect poise, amused, hat in hand, he let Tillie's brashness hang in the air unclaimed.

*   *   *

In Tillie's dining room, he pivoted. “Pretty little complex. Like the built-ins. And those old alabaster sconces. They don't build 'em like this anymore.”

He stood, swaying slightly, hands on his hips.

Tillie brought him a beer; poured wine for Cress and herself. They'd taken a sip when his bottle was emptied. He wagged it. “Got another one of these?” Cress went to the refrigerator. There were two more beers. Reaching in, she heard herself pant.

“Let's go buy another six-pack,” she called to him. Anything to get him out of the apartment and alone. “We can walk.”

Beyond Braithway's insular, manicured grounds, the traffic surged and stalled up Los Robles Avenue. This was a transitional neighborhood, its fine old houses long since divided into small apartments into which crowded whole families or groups of men. The morning's marine layer hadn't burned off; with the afternoon heat and exhaust, it was a classic smoggy day. “A far cry from Noah Mountain, eh?” Cress said.

“You look like a teenager,” he said. She was in pedal pushers and the white cropped shell, with its eyelet scallops at the neck. “I like that top.”

His hand slid under it. He pinched her waist.

“Pretty little place, your court,” he said. “I see why you like it.”

She didn't like it! She was only there until he gave her the all-clear! “It's nice,” she said.

“But hey! What's with your friend? She looks like a linebacker.”

He meant the shoulder pads. They
were
excessive. “That's power-dressing,” said Cress. “For her office.”

“Power-dressing,” Quinn muttered. And a little while later: “Power-dressing!”

A flash of annoyance, and allegiance to Tillie. “We all have our own affectations,” she said.

How would they make it through the hours till bed?

Back in the apartment, he and Tillie talked for a long time about Braithway's architecture. Who knew that Quinn was so well-versed in the Arts and Crafts movement? He'd spent a year working here in Pasadena, he said, restoring a Greene and Greene house near the Rose Bowl. At dinner, he and Edgar discussed Lebanon, if there would be war, news that Cress hadn't followed.

She relaxed. She need not have worried. Quinn could hold his own. This was the Quinn she'd glimpsed in the Garshes' booth, the Quinn who met with Hollywood designers and their famous clients, Quinn the laconic craftsman who listened soberly and spoke seldom; his reticence, discretion, and rugged good looks were as desirable and necessary to that clientele as his craftsmanship.

“You never said—” Tillie seized Cress's arm in the kitchen, whispered, “You never told me … He's such … He's such a
man
!”

*   *   *

In the morning, Tillie knocked and brought them cups of tea on a tray. “Coffee's coming, this is just to get you started,” she told Quinn.

“I like this hotel,” he said. “Book me indefinitely.”

As a matter of fact, Tillie said, she had been thinking. Braithway's owner had long been talking about restoring the court to at least some of its former glory, with an eye to condo conversion. Perhaps Quinn could do the work. Many of the built-in cabinets needed repair or restoration, as did mantels and wainscoting, some of the columns and heavy oaken doors. Some cottages needed structural work—foundations were crumbling—but he knew about that, too, right? Braithway could keep him busy for months, if not years, unit after unit. Cress and Quinn could live there for free while he did it, as just a fraction of his pay. “Wouldn't that solve everything?” cried Tillie.

Quinn's eyes narrowed, and he made an obvious decision to humor her.

“Darn near everything,” he said.

“Oh, and by the way…” Tillie stepped closer to the bed. That movie star Quinn had worked for? The one he made the Frank Lloyd Wright doors for? An editor at
City and State
wanted to do a profile of him, but the star's publicist wasn't returning her calls. Did Quinn have a home office number or remember the actor's address, or maybe know the name of his personal assistant?

Quinn's face darkened as Tillie rattled on. “No,” he said. “And if I did, I couldn't give over that kind of information.”

Tillie shrugged. “Worth a try.” With a languid wave, she left them alone.

“Sorry.” Cress patted Quinn's flank. “I didn't know all that was coming.”

Quinn sat up, put his feet on the floor with his back to her. “Sometimes you talk too much.”

“Me?” said Cress. “Because I told my best friend about your big job?”

“It's all over Sawyer about us, and I sure as hell didn't tell anybody, and neither has Sylvia. It's been hard enough on her without public humiliation.”

“Why are you blaming me? Your sister-in-law had her church circle praying me out of town. And you should tell her—it worked.”

“Not until everyone in Sawyer knew all about us.”

“You've hardly been discreet. You took me to the Coach 'n' 4, the Staghorn. You parked your truck outside Donna's house all night long.”

Of course Cress had confided in Donna. Don Dare. Dalia and her judge had seen them. Norma and Ike knew too. As did Jakey. Perhaps she was to blame, perhaps she
had
talked too much.

Quinn's fury, wherever it came from, relaxed in stages. She rubbed his back, and eventually, he swung his legs again into bed and finished his tea.

But when she returned from her shower, he'd found the passport documents on her dresser: instructions, a spare application, an extra photograph. “Going somewhere?” he said.

“My sister's in England,” she said. “At some point I want to visit her.”

“I put my whole life on the line for you and you're plotting a secret trip to England?”

“That's not how it is, Quinn.”

“You can get rid of me with one word, Cress. You don't have to go halfway round the world.”

“I don't want to get rid of you. That's the last thing I want to do.”

Again, she had to calm him bit by bit; she was not going to England any time soon, she said. But her old passport had expired (a lie, she'd never had a passport before), and getting a new one seemed like something she could do here in town. She did not say that England was her contingency plan, if he went back to his wife. He was, she said, reading too much into a stray piece of paper.

As they dressed, she suggested they take a walk up the Arroyo Seco.

He said, “A short one. I pick Evan up at school at two.”

This was the first she'd heard of it. “But today's not your day.”

“I take him every day I can,” he said.

*   *   *

“Where's Quinn?” said Tillie, coming in from work.

“He had to pick up his son today.”

“I definitely get the draw. He has his own gravitational field. So sexy. But a little intimidating, don't you think?”

“I'm used to it,” she said. “But maybe I shouldn't have left Sawyer. He's convinced I'm leaving him. I think I should go back up there, to be near him.”

“Absolutely not,” said Tillie. “Let him pine.”

At dinner Edgar said, “He seems very American to me. Sad, in that cowboy way. What is the word?
Lonesome.
”

*   *   *

Quinn didn't call her that night, or the next; he'd had Evan with him, he explained. But he phoned more sporadically now. Sometimes he sounded drunk. He was most affectionate then.

 

Twenty

On a Saturday afternoon Tillie was browning a roast in the Dutch oven and Cress was peeling potatoes for a dinner with scientists and high school friends. When the phone rang, Tillie grabbed it. “Quinn,” she mouthed.