A Small Indiscretion (12 page)

When the evening ended, I found myself outside with Louise and Malcolm under a city sky lit by a bright round moon. Patrick appeared in their car. Louise insisted on dropping me at Victoria on the way home. Patrick drove, since Malcolm was too drunk. Louise sat up front with Patrick and I sat in back with Malcolm. He had to be laid down, so that his head was nearly in my lap and one of his arms was draped over my legs. I was terrified Louise would look back and see us in this position. Or worse, Patrick would. But neither of them did. They were alone together, and I was alone with Malcolm, and I was pierced with indignation and jealousy.

When we reached Victoria, it was Patrick who walked me up the front steps of the boardinghouse. He held the door open for me, and I thought that was going to be the end of it. But he said quietly, “Come to the gallery, won’t you? Come tomorrow afternoon.”

S
AY IT
, I tell myself.

Say it, even if it’s not the only name that matters.

Emme.

One syllable.

Like the letter
M
.

She worked out well enough, last summer, as a tenant and assistant. She was smart, and she listened well, and she was efficient. Every morning I gave her a list, and by evening she had it all done. She didn’t ask many questions. She figured things out on her own. She didn’t seem to have many plans, besides yoga classes, and I felt a little sorry for her. I began to ask her to babysit now and then, in the evenings. She seemed happy to do it. She came to the house on time. It was always clean when your father and I returned from dinner or a movie, and Clara and Polly were always asleep in their beds. They had a pet name for her, Emme-and-Emme, and they liked her accent and her long hair and her exotic clothes. They liked that she taught them to play card games—gin, gin rummy, even hearts. Her moods were unpredictable, though. Mornings, she could be quiet and subdued, then by late afternoon, she was often radiant and expansive. Sometimes she retreated again by evening, and as
the summer progressed, I began to feel a nameless discomfort when I headed home and left her alone.

The retail space next to the Salvaged Light had been vacant for half a year, then the
FOR LEASE
sign disappeared, and one morning last July, Emme pointed out that a new sign had finally gone up,
THE GREEN UNDERTHING: LINGERIE WITH A CONSCIENCE
. The day after that, she told me she’d just introduced herself to the owner, Michael Moss, whom she described as “a lovely man.”

“What is ‘lingerie with a conscience,’ exactly?” I asked her.

“Environmentally correct lingerie,” she said. “Chemises. Camisoles. Teddies. Bras. Panties. All in hemp, silk and bamboo. Never cotton.”

“Why not cotton?”

“According to Michael, cotton lacks a conscience. Cotton production requires massive pesticide use. Developing countries account for less than thirty percent of global pesticide consumption, yet the bulk of pesticide poisonings occur in the developing world.”

“It sounds a little like a marketing gimmick.”

“Not to me,” Emme said.

Was there something off about her? Her eyes seemed glassy, and her manner too bright. Had she been getting high with Michael Moss next door?

I walked over a day later to introduce myself. He was very good-looking. He also had a ring on his finger. To me, he seemed like just the sort of man who would be attracted to Emme. But what did I mean by that? Every man was that sort of man.

A week later, I stopped at the store on my day off and found him leaning back in a chair with his feet up on the dining room table, beneath the chandelier display. Emme was wearing a skirt and cowboy boots, and she was sitting on the table with her knees pulled up, offering him what I imagined was quite a display of her own.

Then, on Tuesday morning, I saw him leaving the store just as I was arriving. To me it was unseemly—the two of them together. I wanted to tell her to stay away from him, and him to stay away from her. But who was I to say so? It was none of my business with whom either of them spent their nights.

W
HEN
I
LEFT
home this morning, there were gray clouds in a pale-blue sky and a feeling of impending rain. I drove out of the city to Gold Hill to collect the girls. I was early, so I parked in the little shopping center and got a cup of coffee at the neighborhood café. I had brought along a couple of magazines and a book in a tote bag I’d grabbed from the hall closet. The tote bag was one you’d decorated for us some long-ago anniversary. It had a child’s drawing of an oddly intricate human heart ironed on it and words written across the top:
Mom and Dad: I love you. From Robbie
.

Mom and Dad. Words you’ve strung together, without thinking, all your life.

On the other hand, I didn’t string those words together about my own parents for the more than twenty years after my father left. Then, last fall, the phrase returned to the lexicon of my life.

“My mom and dad are here helping out,” I’d say to people, feeling like a child telling a hopeful fib. But it wasn’t a fib. They were indeed here, together, and they took care of things while Jonathan and I shuttled between the hospital and the Mermaid Inn. My father walked the dogs. My mother took the girls shopping for school clothes. My father took it upon himself to pack up your apartment in Berkeley. He assessed the damage of the flood at the Salvaged Light and hung a sign on the door announcing that the store was closed for remodeling. Then he appointed himself investigator of your accident.

We knew that sometime that night, after Emme came to dinner and made a scene, you climbed into the passenger seat of her car. We knew she was the driver at the time of the accident. We knew she had a valid New York State driver’s license. We knew she was interviewed by the police, and that she rode to a hospital in Santa Cruz in an ambulance, and that she passed the sobriety test. We knew she was released with barely a scratch—and after that, she disappeared.

My father made some calls and scoured the web. He found a few dated photos of her online as a hand model but none of those leads pointed us anywhere useful. The modeling agency she worked for in New York provided an address in Manhattan, different from the address on her driver’s license, but she hadn’t resided in either location for years. The emails we sent to the address the agency provided us bounced back. She seemed to have willfully dismantled herself, then vanished.

We didn’t press you to tell us what happened that night. It was clear, when you emerged from the coma, that you had no memory of it, so we simply chose not to speak of it. In the end, I was the one who told my father to give up the search; I didn’t see a good reason for trying anymore to find her.

I
HAD NO IDEA
what time I ought to arrive at the Photographers’ Gallery the day after Louise and Malcolm’s party. I didn’t know what time Patrick’s shift started or ended. I didn’t even know if his invitation still stood. But at two o’clock, I took the tube to Covent Garden and walked until I found the gallery. I had another reason for being in Covent Garden that afternoon, an alibi of sorts, which was that I was hat shopping. Malcolm had arranged a chartered train to take the two of us and a group from the London Docklands Development Corporation to the horse races at Newbury—a boondoggle intended to favorably dispose the committee toward our bid—and I had gotten it in my mind that I would need a hat.

The café at the gallery was very different in daylight. It was a single, stark, narrow room with white walls and gray concrete floors and photographs sparsely displayed on the walls. There were long wooden communal tables with benches down the middle of the room, and a counter at the far end that had served as the bar the night before.

There was no sign of Patrick, so I ordered a cup of tea and pretended to read the newspaper. The gallery was full of students and artists wearing dark, grungy clothing. It’s exactly the sort of place I would avoid now—the trendy crowd, the self-conscious modernity
of the space, the harsh white walls and hard benches and humorless fluorescent lights.

Patrick arrived, finally. He walked down the stairs and saw me.

“You came,” he said, smiling and embracing me and giving me the idea, right then, that everything was settled. “What shall we do?”

“I need a hat,” I said. “For the races. Malcolm’s chartered a train to take us to Newbury on Wednesday.”

“It must be Ladies’ Day, then, if you’re in need of a hat?”

“I don’t know. Malcolm said I would need a hat.”

Malcolm had not said I would need a hat; I had thought of that on my own. I had imagined all the ladies would be wearing hats at the races, and the matter had been troubling me for a week. I did not have a hat, and moreover, I did not have anything appropriate to wear with a hat if I bought one. I had only my plain work skirts and blouses and my cheap, low black leather heels.

“A hat it is, then,” he said, and we set out. It was raining. Patrick’s camera was slung over his shoulder and he held an umbrella over us as we made our way to Covent Garden Market. The market was originally built for fruit and vegetable wholesalers, he said, converted to retail in the seventies. He said he knew a shop there; he knew the shopkeeper.

“Now is it only a hat you need or an ensemble?”

“I don’t know,” I said, as he looked me up and down.

“We’ll see, shall we? We’ll see what we can find. My mother always dressed spectacularly for the races,” he said. Then after a pause, “She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It was ten years ago, when I was at university. But when she was alive she was quite fashionable. Famous in our little corner of Ireland for her dinner parties.”

I imagined the scene—an elaborate dining room, an antique
table set with china and glittering crystal, a female version of Patrick holding court in an elegant dress. It was that image that would have given Patrick his idea of what a woman should wear and say and be.

He pushed open the door of a shop.

“Henriette!” he said to the woman inside.

“Hello, Patrick,” she said brightly. He took her hand and kissed her on the cheek.

The shop was small but airy, with fans turning in the ceiling even though it was spitting rain. There were a few sweaters folded on dark wooden tables. Blouses on metal rods against the walls. Fur-lined gloves in glass cases. Hats on hat stands. Scarves—wool and cashmere and silk—tied over round wooden hangers. There appeared to be no prices on the tags of the garments.

Patrick began to pick out articles of clothing—dresses, jackets, skirts, blouses—holding them up not for me but for Henriette.

“What do you think, Hen?” he’d say, and Henriette would nod and murmur and smile.

He held one or two things up against me, his hand touching my shoulder, then my hip. He seemed not to be aware of this touching, but I was. I was also aware of a particular feeling of foolishness. On the one hand, of course, I wanted to be beautifully dressed. On the other hand, I felt the time and energy the enterprise demanded was the worst kind of waste. I had an urge to demonstrate to him, and perhaps to myself, that I was a person of substance. But here I was letting him speak about what I ought to wear as if I weren’t there, and hold garments against me, and touch me, and talk about my body as if it were only a collection of parts.

“Accentuate the legs,” he said. “Camouflage the hips. That was always my mother’s policy.”

“There aren’t any price tags,” I said quietly.

“Aren’t there?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Not to worry,” he said.

Henriette held up a dress. “We just got this in. Would you like to try it on?”

It was a black knit dress with a fitted bodice, a white fur collar and a purple suede belt. It had a full, short skirt, puffed up by a kind of netted slip.

Patrick took the dress from her and held it up to me. “This would be excellent on you,” he said, “with your legs.”

He held the dressing room curtain open and I took the dress from him. While I worked at the zipper, Patrick’s hands appeared beneath the curtain—long white hands with long clean nails that I watched remove one of my shoes. A moment passed, then Patrick’s hands were again under the curtain, sliding in a pair of knee-high black boots and a black felt hat with a wide brim and a white sash.