Authors: Michelle Huneven
T
HE DRIVE
up to the Fitzgerald adobe was flanked by a particularly graceful type of eucalyptus, their trunks virtually bark-free, pink and naked as scalded flesh. Although he’d once fantasized that this historic rancho would be half his, via the state’s community property laws, Lewis had never seen the place: the massive, stuccoed structure sat high on a riverbank and looked more like a California mission than a private home. The roof was faded red tile matted with eucalyptus debris. Creeping fig and passion fruit vines overspread the walls. In places, stucco had fallen away, quaintly revealing the thick, crudely formed clay bricks. There was even a tower complete with rusty iron bell. Recessed windows and doors were sage green, and the front door was thick, dark wood bolted together with daunting iron straps, like the gate to an old castle or prison.
“Okay, God, you gotta stick by me,” Lewis muttered as he put the Fairlane into park, “because a wild fucking bitch lives here.”
Billie answered the door herself. Seeing him, her pupils constricted. “Hello, Lewis,” she said. In black slacks and a loose gray sweater, she appeared well groomed, wealthy, graciously middle-aged. Her spongy black hair, pinned in a twist, was white at the temples. Her lipstick was wine red. “So, you’re the ambassador.”
She turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open behind her. He followed her through a cool, dark entryway, where he saw himself—T-shirt, jeans, in need of a haircut—float through a mirror the size of a billboard, and out into a large interior garden.
The house that looked so massive from the outside was, in fact, mostly garden within. In the center, arched bronze dolphins held multiple tiers of a fountain in which water trickled a whispered music. The path was decomposed granite, raked clean. Round rocks bordered beds of exotic cacti and succulents and fragrant tropical flowers. A mature, wide-spreading California oak grew in one corner, and Billie walked into its shade. A movement further down the path
caught Lewis’s eye: a man in gray work clothes was on his knees, cutting blades off an aloe plant with a machete.
“Libby doesn’t know I’m here,” Lewis said. “I came because I’m so worried about her.”
“Oh, I know. Terrible about Red.”
“She doesn’t understand why you haven’t come to see her.”
“No? Do you?”
“I know that when I’m in pain, I have a tendency to pull back, keep to myself, lick my wounds.”
“Please.” Billie snorted. Her lips curled. “Besides, Libby has more than enough friends to comfort her.”
“That’s not true. She needs you. You’re her closest friend.”
“Not really,” said Billie.
Lewis looked around. Billie’s garden had more round rocks than he’d seen in one place, all of them perfectly formed. Dozens cobbled the base of the oak and hundreds more lined the beds. Several huge rocks, three to four feet in diameter, slumbered among the cacti.
In the corner, the gardener worked steadily. Each juicy vegetal slice sounded like someone whacking through bunches of celery.
Billie gave a low chuckle. “Now that Red’s gone, she’ll probably marry Dave, don’t you think?”
“Dave who?” said Lewis. “I don’t know all their friends.”
“She’s certainly rich enough for him now—if Red left her as much as I think he did.” Billie cocked an eyebrow at Lewis. “She do okay, or were there prenupts?”
“I don’t know,” Lewis said, confused. “I’m sure Red was generous to her.”
“Or were you planning to move back in?” She winked.
“No, no …” He had to turn away. The fountain sang its weak tune, counterpoint to the machete’s juicy whacks. How had he ever considered this woman even remotely attractive?
She moved closer. “Tell me something, Lewis. Does Libby seem smarter to you now that she’s rich? Is her mind—how did you put it?—lively enough for you?”
“Ow,” he said, and briefly faced her. “I did say those things, didn’t I? What a jerk, eh?”
Billie shrugged lightly, as if to say, Hey, we’re all jerks, so what?
Heartened by this concession, Lewis said, “If you’d just tell her
why you aren’t speaking to her. That’s what drives her crazy: not knowing what she did.”
“Oh, she knows.”
“I don’t think so,” said Lewis.
Billie’s black shoes had a spade-shaped opening at the toe, from which peeped wine-red nails.
“Okay. I’ll tell you what. You tell her I’ll come back around once she gets rid of David Ibañez.”
“David Ibañez?” Lewis couldn’t make sense of this information. The man chopping aloe stood and brushed off his knees. He had laid the aloe branches on a burlap sack, which he now dragged by one corner to the rear of the garden. “What do you care about him?”
Billie fingered her forehead, as if locating a headache. “Tell me, Lewis, do you think Red would be so happy to see Libby consorting with a Mexican gigolo?”
He laughed involuntarily. “Libby’s eight months pregnant. Her husband just died. She’s not ‘consorting’ with anybody.”
“Oh, don’t be naive. This started long before Red died.”
The man with the aloe trimmings was going through a door in the garden wall. Lewis wanted to call out to him, to retain some link to the reasonable human world. Would you come witness this, please?
Lewis said, “I better go.”
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?” Billie, chuckling, trotted after him as he retraced his steps through the garden and house. At the front door, Lewis stopped. He had no idea how to open it. Fear and disgust sang in his limbs. Billie glided up next to him, brushing his arm, lingering. “Believe me, Libby’s just fine without me,” she confided.
“I know that,” he said, taking in a noseful of her dense, expensive scent. “She doesn’t.”
Billie chuckled, approving his retort, then slowly slid the flat, wrought-iron hasp aside. Lewis sprang, gasping, from the house.
Yet Billie followed. Lewis opened the car door, and she was at his elbow. He turned. She crossed her arms over her chest, flattening her breasts. “I just wish you’d seen Libby when she first came here. She was married to that worthless architect. A rich kid. You know the story, right?”
Lewis shook his head.
“Mr. Daw had been disinherited in college for selling drugs. So he found Libby and married her. She worked three jobs, sent him through school. He won some big award right out of the gate. Young Architect of the Year. His work hit the magazines, his parents reclaimed him. I’m talking old, rotten Savannah money. He didn’t need Libby anymore, so he stashed her up here, found himself an actress, hid all his assets. Hid ’em so well that during the divorce, it looked as if Libby would have to pay
him
alimony. She felt lucky to get the land—and that’s all she got. The land and that death-trap trailer. She couldn’t finance a doghouse when he was done with her.”
Billie gazed up at the trees. “I found her out in the groves bawling her head off. We took her home, gave her dinner here. Took her to movies, restaurants. Dad tried to
give
her money to build herself a home, enjoy some independence. First close friend I’d had since college.”
Billie nudged his arm. “No offense, Studly, but I had Red picked out for her long before you came along. She needed somebody stable, devoted. Somebody who liked her and wasn’t afraid to show it.”
Lewis, he told himself, just keep your ears the hell open.
“Then, when her trailer burned down, Libby moved in with us. And where were you then, oh friend of friends?”
Lewis considered this a rhetorical question.
Billie rolled on. “Red was over every night, of course. They were up there in her room doing some kind of weird no-sex routine. They must have worked it out eventually—she got pregnant, didn’t she?—although there’s no telling who the father really is….”
She backed off a few paces. “I gave her a wedding shower. I bought her the suit she wore at her wedding. Two thousand bucks worth of Jil Sander. I was her maid of honor. And what does she do? She takes up with the person who ruined my life.”
Lewis was halfway through a full-body surge of guilt when he realized Billie couldn’t possibly be talking about him.
S
INCE
taking on more administrative tasks, David Ibañez had fashioned a small office in what was once an old sunporch on the first floor of the Blue House. Lewis found him there scheduling speakers and panels for the AA meetings.
“Hey, Lewis,” he said, glancing down at the open datebook on his blotter. “Want to lead the meeting tomorrow night?”
“Maybe.” Lewis paused. “Look, I went to see Billie Fitzgerald.”
David looked down at his calendar, then up at Lewis. His face was still as glass.
“She won’t have anything to do with Libby unless you leave.”
“I was afraid it would be something like that.” David closed his eyes. “What do you think? Should I go?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
They listened to the small air conditioner laboring in a window.
“I left this valley for twenty years,” David said, “against my will. To humor her. I had that health scare recently, and realized I had to change some things. When this job came up, I really—”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” Lewis said. “But Libby has to be told.”
David scratched his pen on the blotter, drawing a craggy rock formation or febrile heartbeat.
“Right away,” Lewis added.
“Okay.” David slowly closed his appointment book. “Will you come with me?”
L
IBBY
was in bed, reading a parents’ magazine. Gustave was on the rug next to her, tied to the bedpost, when Lewis and David filed into the room. “Uh-oh,” she said.
“Well,” David said, “there is something I need to tell you.”
She turned to Lewis, scanning his face. He nodded: she could handle whatever was coming.
“What is it?” she said.
“Bill Fitzgerald?” said David. “I guess you call him Little Bill?”
Libby’s hands went instinctively to her belly, as if the news might be perilous to her pregnancy. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” David said. “He’s my son.”
L
EWIS
had heard parts of this story before, from David. But what he hadn’t heard riding up in the car from L.A., was that Billie Fitzgerald also attended Sally Morrot’s Thursday-night dinners, and
that she often showed up in the groves those evenings when David was walking the irrigation lines with Sally.
Billie was called Mina then, short for Wilhelmina. She wasn’t one of Sally’s charity cases, of course, and in fact seemed to have formed a voluntary attachment to the old woman, and clearly admired her style and respected her half-baked utopian discourse. Mina even dressed like Sally, same muddy boots and jaunty hoe.
One night, after they walked Sally back to the mansion, Mina drew David into the trees and kissed him with her mouth open. For the next three years, they met secretly in the groves and hills during the summer. During the school year in Ojai, where they went to different private academies, they met discreetly on trails and in the stables at Mina’s school. They had to be careful. For all her free thinking, Sally Morrot never would have condoned David’s incursion into her elite corner of the social fabric. And David’s uncle Rafael, who knew without being told of his nephew’s involvement with Mina, warned him: “Watch yourself,
mijo.
El Cuarto kills for less”—El Cuarto being Mina’s father, William Fitzgerald IV.
“Old Bill,” said Libby.
“Yes,” David said.
Sally passed away midway through David’s senior year, when he and Mina were living together in San Francisco. He was at Cal, she a junior at Stanford. Each left dorm rooms unoccupied to share a gloriously squalid studio apartment on Eddy Street in the sorriest part of the Tenderloin. They commuted to school by day, and at night studied in coffeehouses, smoked pot, drank cheap red wine, and lived on tomato sauce dumped from the can onto boiled spaghetti. Heaven. The winos, prostitutes, addicts, and assorted desperadoes who were their neighbors seemed exotic and unexpectedly kind, bringing them trinkets from Chinatown and shooing drug dealers away from their doorstep.
Mina attended Sally’s funeral, where she heard that the nephew had turned the ranch over to an agribusiness corporation that pledged to halve operating costs in the first two years. Immediately rumors flew that the resident workers would be evicted, although nobody believed such a thing was legal or enforceable. In a separate maneuver, the nephew soon discontinued David’s stipend and the stipends of all the other people Sally Morrot had supported. David,
in no position to contest a will he’d never seen, took a job busing tables in a restaurant on Market Street.
Coming home from a double shift at midnight, he unlocked the apartment’s door and found Mina sitting on the bed and staring straight ahead. She was either in a trance or very stoned. The only light in the room came from a sand candle on the nightstand. His first thought was that somebody else had died. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Four months pregnant.”
David oscillated between baths of masculine pride and clear, liquid terror. She’d been so certain of her elaborate rhythm method that he couldn’t understand how this had happened. He wanted to clean out one of Mina’s trust funds and move to Mexico or Thailand. “We’ll write our folks when we’re already married, when the baby is born.”
Mina surprised him with a naive conventionality. She wanted a wedding, a large and elaborate ceremony, and was confident her parents would concur. “Oh, they’ll bitch and moan and try to browbeat me, but after a while they’ll give in and accept you.”
“No,” David said. “They’ll send you to South Africa and kill me. I’ll be hit by a bus or I’ll simply disappear.”
“Dad’ll yell, Mom’ll cry, and that’ll be that. Then you’ll be one of the family.”
David did not want to be one of the Fitzgerald family, with its autocratic father, soused mother, and much-belittled son who had long since fled. David had his own family, and there was no talk of Mina becoming one of them. Once, after his first year at college, Mina had half-begged, half-dared him to bring her home for dinner. His mother served the meal, then refused to sit down at the table. His father never looked up from his food.