“Sometimes,”said Marissa as she stood at the railing, gazing out at the white-sailed boats sliding through the blue-gray water, “you think everything is upside down and the sailboats are clouds scattered across the sky.”
Stretched out on a chaise lounge, I looked up. She sensed I was watching and turned to me, a little embarrassed.
“Why?”I asked. “What were you thinking?”
“What we were talking about last night: Ariella and Jeremy Fullerton—what they must have talked about that night, the night he was killed. Whatever they said to each other, I imagine it was a good deal more interesting, and a good deal more surprising, at least to her, than what she said in court.”
“More surprising? What could be more surprising than what she said in court: He was going to leave his wife and marry her because she was going to have his child?”
Her long black lashes slowly closed and then sprang open; her eyes started to dance.
“It's not as surprising if you don't know he can't have children. It isn't surprising at all when you consider who they were—or who everyone who had never met either one of them thought they were,”she added with a cunning smile. “Jeremy was a United States senator who was going to be president. Ariella was the beautiful and intelligent daughter of a rich and powerful man. People like that are forgiven anything they do, if they sin for love and their sins are private. They're not just forgiven; they're applauded in some measure for being so much like the rest of us: no better, no worse. It proves, I suppose, how democratic we all are: Nobody much cares anymore when a husband leaves his wife for another woman, do they?”
She said it without bitterness, though it had happened to her; and perhaps because she had not made it personal to herself, I thought of someone else. I was surprised I had not thought of it before.
“If Fullerton had left his wife to marry Ariella, it would not have been any different than what Augustus Marshall did. He divorced his wife and married the daughter of the man who could do the most—and did the most—for his career.”
Marissa brushed her hair back over her shoulder. “Men with power, women with wealth and influence, each using the other,”she said, summarizing my effort to draw the parallel. She gave me a look meant to tell me that it was only good for as far as it went.
“Jeremy was different,”she began, as her gaze drifted back toward the boats that scudded over the shiny silver surface of the bay. “Augustus Marshall had always been a part of that class of people who have everything and always want more; the people who have wealth and want power or have power and want wealth. Jeremy was not like that. Even when he seemed to have it all, he was still an outsider. He would always have been an outsider.”
She turned around, a pensive look in her large dark eyes, as if she were inviting me to share her thought. She twisted her head a little to the side, pausing for a moment before she asked, “Do you know what I mean? I think you must. You're a bit like him in that respect: someone who is always an outsider, a kind of stranger in whatever society, whatever group he happens to find himself.”
She straightened her head and looked directly at me, a smile, whether of sympathy or amusement I could not quite tell, flickering at the corners of her mouth.
“It's rather enviable, in a way. Things look better when they're seen from the outside. Imagine looking in, on a cold, wintry night, from outside a restaurant, peering through the ice-glazed window, watching well-fed people dining, laughing, having such a wonderful time; and you never for a moment suspect—you're too cold, too hungry, to suspect—that all these people you're looking at are going through the motions of a meaningless life; wishing, many of them, they were somewhere else; wishing, some of them, they could go back to the beginning and become someone else.”
She smiled at me, half embarrassed, but only half embarrassed, by the passion with which she had said this.
“Would you rather have been that poor, cold, hungry wretch, staring through the window?”I asked, wondering at the tendency of people to romanticize the life they never led.
“I suppose I'd like to think so,”admitted Marissa candidly. “Things came too easy for me; everything was given to me. I chose my parents well, and I was not unintelligent. School was easy; friends were easy—too easy. I became a dilettante, afraid to make a serious effort at any one thing—not because I might fail, but because there was no reason to try. I had everything: What was there to sacrifice for? What do you have to dream about when there is nothing left to have—nothing except the sense that you were doing something worthwhile? I lived on the surface of things, always more interested in saying something clever than doing anything important. Everyone liked me,”she added with a quiet, irrepressible laugh.
“Maybe that's why, despite everything I now know about him, I still can't quite help … I don't know—not admire, exactly, but in a way respect what Jeremy Fullerton was able to do. He was an outsider, a stranger, and he changed the way everyone thought about everything. He became the one person they could not ignore. He did what he wanted, and all those other powerful, ambitious people—all those important, well-established people—did what they had to. He had nothing in common with someone like Augustus Marshall. If there was anyone who was a little like him, it was Lawrence Goldman,”added Marissa with a shrewd glance. “They both lived a lie about who they were and where they came from.”
“And both of them extremely intelligent,”I remarked.
Marissa tossed her head. A warm smile flashed across her full mouth.
“Shrewd, ruthless, and engaging. But extremely intelligent? No, I wouldn't call either of them that.”
I thought she was wrong—about Fullerton, at least. I reminded her what his wife had told me about how he read everything and about the way he had used the quotations of famous men—and invariably blamed it on his speechwriters—to say something serious in a way that made his audience believe they were just as serious as he.
“I don't know what Meredith Fullerton had in mind when she said he read everything, but I doubt that Jeremy Fullerton had a mind trained in any more rigorous discipline than an occasional weekend perusal of
Bartlett's Quotations
. Which isn't the worst thing anyone can read. It does give you a certain breadth of vision,”said Marissa, laughing with her eyes. “And, with people who have never read a book and seldom look up from their television sets, perhaps a reputation for profundity.
“You know what I'm talking about. There was nothing deep about Jeremy Fullerton. You didn't get the idea he was someone who ever wanted to be left alone to think through a difficult problem. He did not have that kind of intelligence; he had something much more valuable, much more useful. He had the ability to grasp things only half understood; the ability to pick up the thread of someone else's thought and follow it out. He could do something else as well: He could supply the word, the phrase, that clarifies the thought, that gives it the expression the person who first struggled with it immediately believes is exactly what he was trying to say all along. Jeremy Fullerton was a thief who made you think that he had given you as a gift what he had just stolen from you.”
The last light of day glimmered soft and golden on the side of her face. She folded her hands in front of her and lowered her eyes. Whatever she was thinking, I knew it was not about Jeremy Fullerton or Augustus Marshall or any of the other people who had figured so prominently in the trial. It had something to do with us. With a distant, modest look, she lifted her gaze and waited for me to say something.
“I like being here—with you,”I said, as I swung my legs around and sat up on the edge of the chaise lounge.
“I like your being here,”she replied, waiting for something more.
There was a short, awkward silence, before she finally asked what, until that moment, we had almost gone out of our way to avoid discussing.
“What are you going to do when this is over?”
I was still trying to avoid it, not so much because I did not want to talk about it, as because I was not sure what I wanted to say or even where to begin.
“You mean if I don't get killed?”
A look of disapproval darkened her gaze. “You'd like me to think you were a coward, wouldn't you? Why? So you can surprise me with an occasional act of bravery? You're not scared of those people, whomever they are. I think you're more scared of me than you are of them.”
“Scared of you?”I asked, sitting straight up, more than a little astonished.
She brought me through her eyes deep inside her, a kind of intimacy that, if it lacked the intensity of passion, produced a kind of wonder I am not sure I had ever known before.
“Scared of hurting me,” whispered Marissa softly. She touched the side of my face and slowly drew her fingers down to the edge of my mouth. “Don't be,”she said with a trusting smile. “I want you to do what's right for you.”
Her eyes started to glisten, and her hand dropped away from my face. “It's late,”she said with a self-conscious laugh. “I have to get ready.”She opened the sliding glass door to go inside. “We have reservations—remember?”
In the middle of the living room, she spun around on her heel.
“Of course you don't remember. I made them myself—this afternoon. One of the things to know about Sausalito is that we have one restaurant that was started by a madam and another that was originally a whorehouse. That's where we're going tonight; but don't worry,”she added, making an attempt at a sly grin. “Tonight all you have to pay for is dinner.”
I started to reach for her, but she left me with a quick shake of her head. Three steps later, each one echoing sharply on the gleaming hardwood floor, she stopped.
“I bought you something. It's on the table next to the CD player. Mozart: the violin concertos. Itzhak Perlman.”She lifted her chin, her eyes flashing. “I like Mozart better than Beethoven, and I like Beethoven more than anything that came after. Do you know why? Because Mozart is full of clarity and light, and Beethoven is full of passion, and because the twentieth century was just full of noise. I imagine, if you put your mind to it, you could trace the same downward spiral in other things as well,”she added before she vanished down the hall.
We went to dinner together and then we came back and made love in the night and slept late in the morning. We did the same thing the next night and the night after that. We spent our time talking about what had happened in our lives and what had happened to the people we had known best. We talked about everything, but we never once talked again about what might happen later on, when the trial was over and there was nothing to keep me here, nothing except how much I liked being with her and how much I wanted to stay. She stayed home, and I never left at all, until Saturday, when, because I had promised him weeks before, I had to go with Bobby to a football game at Cal. When I left, Marissa kissed me good-bye, and for just a moment I had the strange but comfortable feeling of what it must be like to be a happily married man.
It was homecoming; Cal was playing USC; and Bobby was afraid we were going to be late. As soon as he gave the tickets at the gate, he started jogging up the steep cement steps that led up to the back side of the stadium. The weather was dry and hot, and when we found our seats, high above the field, where the stadium curved around the corner of the end zone, the teams were lining up for the kickoff. I was still trying to catch my breath when Bobby nudged me hard with his elbow.
“Watch this kid,”he said, as the ball sailed five yards deep into the end zone. The Cal player who caught it knelt down for a touchback. The referee blew his whistle, took the ball, and walked briskly out to the twenty-yard line.
“Did you see that?”asked Bobby. Nothing had happened. There was no return of the kickoff. It was a touchback. Cal would take possession on the twenty-yard line.
“It was the third game of my sophomore year. Freshmen didn't play then. I was the second-string halfback and I was the backup kickoff return man. During warm-ups, the guy who was ahead of me, a senior, Charlie something, pulled a muscle. He couldn't play. Funny how things happen. If that had not happened—if he had been able to play—I might not have played all year. We won the coin toss, elected to receive. We were playing USC, just like today; only then USC was great, and we weren't.
We elected to receive, and I stood back there, just where that kid was standing—same end of the stadium—waiting for the ball to come down out of the sky. It seemed to take forever, and I remember thinking that maybe this guy had actually managed to kick it right over the stadium wall. I caught it five yards deep in the end zone. I didn't hesitate for an instant; as soon as I had it in my arm I was gone.
“I knew I was going to go all the way, a hundred and five yards. I knew I was going to score. I knew more than that: I knew there were at least three different ways I could do it. I could see the whole thing out in front of me, the same way you can see a map spread out on the floor in front of you.”
Bobby described it to me, every part of it: the way he moved, the way he changed pace, how he cut back and the angle he took, what he did each time an opposing player tried to stop him. It was like listening to someone describing to a blind man everything going on that very moment. He had not forgotten anything. It was extraordinary. He could sometimes not remember the plot of a movie he had seen just a week before, and by his own admission he had nearly flunked out of law school because he had such difficulty recalling the things he had read; but when it came to what he had been able to do better than anyone else at the time, he possessed a memory that was as close to perfect as any I had encountered. He dismissed it as unimportant and explained it as unremarkable.
“The dumbest guy in the world can tell you what happened to him in a car wreck. You remember things that happen to you.”
I went along, but only to a point. “Because when they're happening to you, you're concentrating on it with everything you have.”
“Sure,”he agreed. “Like you do during a trial.”