Bread Alone (6 page)

I cringe, thinking of my back.

“We’ve had worse,” I say, smiling. “Remember that place we rented in Laguna that summer?”

She laughs. “The closet with the adjoining sponge?”

I kick off my shoes and pull up my knees, resting my chin on them. “Tell me about Neal. I’m so embarrassed I just dumped all my toxic waste on you when you called. I didn’t even ask about him.”

“We made it to eighteen months, three weeks, three days. That’s our new personal best.” She shrugs philosophically. “But it was going downhill for a while before he left. I think it started when he lost out on a teaching job he was sure he had. He got in this downward spiral where he couldn’t work. He got very clingy and insecure. Then he started dropping hints about how it was my fault—”

“Your fault?”

“Yeah, you know. Like I pressured him to move up here when he really should have stayed in L.A. and worked.”

“You know he’ll come back. He always does.” It’s about the best I can do in terms of comforting.

“I don’t think so.” She lets out a weary sigh. “We’ve never lived together before. It was …”

Instead of finishing the sentence, she goes to the kitchen, comes back with a bottle of champagne and two juice glasses. After a solemn toast to the Amazons—our high school nickname—she says, “What do you think’s going on with David?”

I set down my glass and press my fingers into the ridge of bone above my eyes, where headaches are born. “I honestly don’t know.” The lump in my throat makes conversation difficult. “It hasn’t been good for a long time. I guess I was trying to avoid it, just hold it together till things magically got better.”

“Did he say why he’s so unhappy?”

“He said he felt trapped—not by me, of course. It’s marriage in general. Too confining. And he might want to change jobs. He doesn’t want his options limited. I think for the first time in his life, he’s looking for self-realization.”

She looks at me. “Sounds more like he’s looking to screw around.”

“Thanks, Mayle.”

“Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say. It’s just that I never knew David to
have a
philosophical thought in his pretty head.”

“He isn’t stupid.” My voice sounds stiff and hollow inside my head, the way it does when you have a bad cold.

“If he’d dump you, how bright can he be?” she says, indignant on my behalf.

I don’t say anything.

“Come on, hate his guts. You’ll feel better.”

I take another sip of champagne and study her bare feet, curled over the edge of the couch. God. Even her feet are beautiful. Strong, slender. Maroon-painted toenails.

“You know any lawyers?”

My stomach turns over. “We’re not talking about the big D. Yet. Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe if I just give him some space …”

She lets it hang there for a minute, and then says, “Well, if it does come to that, be sure you check around. Ask some of your rich-bitch friends. Preferably a female lawyer. I think the men all subconsciously identify with the husband. If you can’t find one you like, you should call my friend Jill Trimble. In Silver Lake. She divorced Roy a couple of years ago. Took his ass to the cleaners.”

“Could we talk about something else?”

She leans over to hug me. “I’m sorry, Baby. It just makes me furious that he’d do this to you.”

The sofa bed is like every other sofa bed in the world—lumpy and saggy. I dream strange, exhausting dreams about swimming or drowning, wake up, roll around, drift back to sleep, into another dream. Finally, at eight I get up, pull on my sweats, and sit in one of the bay windows, stare at the fog hovering over the water.

I left CM’s phone number on three message pads—in the kitchen, in David’s office, and in the bedroom. Just in case he gets an uncontrollable urge to hear my voice. I could call him right now. To let him know I got here okay. But Sunday’s his one morning to sleep late. He’d probably be pissed off if I woke him up.

I picture him sitting on the flagstone patio with the
New York Times
and his coffee. That’s what we do on Sundays when the weather’s good. In the spring, there’s the perfume of creamy white gardenias, wet from the sprinklers. On dry fall days, the pepper berries crunch underfoot, spike the air with their sharpness. He’d be all dressed, of course, but I’d be wearing his high school soccer jersey that I cut the sleeves out of, and my flip-flops. He used to tease me about sleeping in the jersey, said he felt like he was sleeping with some jock. I thought it looked kind of sexy. Maybe not.

CM wanders out, yawning. She looks at the rumpled bed. “You didn’t sleep, did you?”

“I was a little restless.”

“I heard you thrashing around once or twice. Is the couch awful?”

“It’s not that bad. I’m just having weird dreams.”

“Liar. You can sleep with me.” She dismisses my protest. “I’ve got a queen-size bed. It’ll be fine. Hey, in Laguna we did it in a double. Besides, since we’re having such a bad time with men, maybe we should become born-again lesbians.”

She insists on going out for breakfast. “There’s a great little bakery just down the hill. We can have a brisk walk, get coffee and scones, and read the paper. I have to go to a meeting this afternoon at the studio, so you’re on your own till dinner.”

“You have meetings on Sunday?”

“Not usually. Right now we’re working out an itinerary for a series of master classes at schools back east, so things are a little crazed.”

It’s nine by the time we leave the building, me bundled up in sweats, a windbreaker, Dodgers baseball cap, long scarf wrapped around my neck, velour gloves. CM, oblivious to the cold wind off the water, wears tights and a Seattle Mariners jersey.

I should have realized that her idea of a brisk walk just down the hill is my idea of a forced march, particularly when I haven’t had my coffee. We weave through a maze of streets, commercial and residential. Small shops, cafés, a few bars. Victorian houses, craftsman bungalows, Spanish/Moroccan stucco, New England saltbox. Some old, some new, in varying states of renovation and decay. Sprawling magnolia trees, velvet-green pines, a few magnificent old hardwoods. Gardens spilling over with flowers, neatly manicured lawns. One shabby cottage has a wooden sign stuck in the weed-infested ground. It says “We like the natural look.”

Half an hour later, we arrive at the block of squatty brick buildings that includes the Queen Street Bakery. By now, the sun has burned through the fog. I’ve removed the scarf and gloves, tied the windbreaker around my waist, and I’m still sweating like a prizefighter. The crowd of couples and families and kids and dogs spills out onto the sidewalk. One guy has a red-coated cat on a leash. I hear him tell someone it’s an Abyssinian.

CM points at a vacant table near the open French doors. “Better grab that. I’ll, get the food.”

I drop gratefully into a chair, disentangling my layers of clothing and looking around me. The place is laid out shotgun style; from the front you can see behind the counter to the serving station, past the backs of the big black ovens, straight through to the back door. The café part is full of mismatched tables and chairs, with bright cushions, artworks of wildly divergent styles and levels of expertise. There are plants everywhere—spider plant, wandering Jew, devil’s ivy—obviously chosen by some unrepentant flower child. But it’s the smell of the place that grabs me—not just the food, but the space itself—old brick and sun on freshly mowed grass.

When I was growing up, my family always vacationed at Lake Tahoe, in the High Sierra, right where Nevada’s elbow pokes California in the ribs. We rented the same cabin every year, two weeks in the summer, a week at Christmas.

On Saturday mornings, my father and I would drive over to Truckee, a little town with a high concentration of Basque sheepherding families. There was a bakery there called Javier’s, and we always tried to get there just as the huge round loaves of sheepherder’s bread were coming out of the oven.

The owner of the place was named Jorge, and he and my father had a running joke about the nonexistent Javier and where he might be that morning. They would talk about the weather and the sheep and the fishing while I wandered around, eating cookies and watching the bakers in back. I could never get enough of the smell of that place—the bread, the strong coffee, the creaking, splintered wood floors—or the feel of the loaf, warm in my lap on the drive home.

The Queen Street Bakery has some of that same flavor about it.

CM sets down two mochas and an earthenware plate with two scones. “Don’t thank me, just leave a big tip.”

One bite of the scone makes me smile—golden brown and crisp on the outside, meltingly tender inside and not overly sweet, with just enough chewy nuggets of currant to provide counterpoint. Funny how
the tiniest perfection can make you believe everything’s going to be all right.

When CM parks herself in a chair and crosses one long leg over the other, every male in the place between thirteen and eighty is checking her out, some surreptitiously, some not so. It’s always like that, no matter where we go. One look and their eyes keep drifting back to her like compass needles to magnetic north.

It’s funny. Most women would kill to look like CM. They think if they were only beautiful, all their relationship woes would be over. They’d probably be surprised to find out that CM has just as much trouble with men as they do—sometimes I think she has more. Sure they stare at her, but a lot of them are too intimidated to do anything beyond that. Her looks scare off a lot of perfectly nice guys, and her in-your-face independence takes care of the others.

And then there’s Neal. He keeps breaking up with her—or acting like an asshole till she breaks up with him—and coming back. Does that mean he really loves her? Or that he enjoys emotional upheaval? Or is he into the power trip of making a beautiful woman cry over him?

Oblivious to the testosterone wafting our way, she takes a long sip of her mocha and her eyes close in contentment. She sets down the cup and folds her arms.

“You know you’d be better off without him.”

My head falls back. “Don’t. I came up here to decompress.”

“You came up here because you wanted me to talk some sense into you.”

“No, I didn’t. Between my mother pestering me to hang on for dear life and you nagging me to cut loose, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just want to float for a while.”

“If you ask me, that’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven years.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“Wyn, can you honestly say you’ve been happy? I mean, there you are tooling around L.A. in your sports car and sitting through boring committee meetings and eating little artistic arrangements of sushi for
lunch and giving dinners for people you loathe and spending shitloads of money on clothes that don’t even look like you. Is this really what you want to do with your life?”

“What do you want me to do?” I say crossly. “Become a medical missionary in Zimbabwe?”

“I want you to do whatever makes you happy. Are you happy?”

“I love David and—”

“Why?”

I stare at her. “Why do I love him?”

“Yes. What is it about him that you love?”

“For Chrissake, Mayle. I love him because I love him. It’s a feeling. You can’t break it down into components. I know you can’t stand him, but—”

“Never mind how I feel about him. In fact, forget him for the moment. Is your life making you happy?”

“I knew when I married him how our life was going to be, and I accepted that.”

“Answer the question.”

“How many people are really happy?” I’m shredding my napkin.

She leans forward, grips the edge of the table. “Answer the fucking question. Are you happy?”

“How should I know? Stop badgering me.”

She leans back in her chair. “I rest my case.”

“Are
you
happy?”

“Yes.”

“Even though Neal’s gone.”

“That makes me sad. I miss him. I like getting laid regularly. But for the vast majority of the time, I’m happy with my life.”

Every morning on her way to the studio, CM drops me off at the bakery. I have coffee, read the paper, have more coffee, eavesdrop on the conversations floating around me, watch the women who work there. Most of them seem to be roughly my age, and it interests me how different
their lives are and how hard they all work. Pretty soon, they know who I am, that I’m visiting CM, and I know most of their names and what they do.

There’s Ellen, one of the owners, with eyes the color of espresso and short, dark hair. She wears long dresses with black Doc Martens and wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down her nose while she’s waiting on people, and she must know every single person within a ten-block radius. She asks about their husbands, wives, kids, pets, always by name. She’ll talk local politics with anybody who shows the slightest inclination, and she’s a fount of neighborhood gossip—what shops are closing and why, who’s moving in or out, who’s pregnant or getting a divorce, whose cat or dog is lost or found.