Emerald City (13 page)

The first time I saw her, she was waiting in line for a chairlift. “There’s Catherine Black,” someone said. “Jack Delancey’s girlfriend.” I saw a tanned, buxom woman in her late twenties (the authenticity of whose breasts I immediately questioned), wearing a pair of skintight blue ski overalls. One strap ran straight down the middle of each breast. She had a wide, pretty mouth, and struck me as someone I knew without having to meet her: sexy and brash, filled with loud and abundant laughter, not afraid to drink too much. The sort of woman married men dream about, but who is rarely married herself. And of course, I disliked her instantly.

Jack Delancey was part of the crowd my husband, Ted, and I belonged to, young stock brokers and investment bankers and their pretty wives, all of us making money, having children, and intending
to do a great deal more of both. Most of us had moved to San Francisco recently from drab Midwestern towns (Springfield, Illinois, in our case) and regarded our arrival here as a near escape from a disaster. We were giddy. While other people our age were protesting the Vietnam War and experimenting with communes, we were buying and redecorating vast houses, overextending ourselves on private schools, and throwing summertime parties in Belvedere and Tiburon, where late at night you were likely to be shoved, fully clothed and still holding your glass, into someone’s swimming pool.

Catherine Black must have been at most of those early parties. I hardly remember her, though, except at one Ted and I gave, where she wore a white backless summer dress with a high collar. Her back was tanned and very smooth, the skin tight over her ribs so they rippled like a seashell. We were the same age, more or less, but she had that perfect seamlessness of waist and hip that comes of not having been pregnant.

“Charlotte,” she cried as the evening wore on, “I’ve broken my glass.”

She held it out for me, the long, thin shards like blades of ice. “I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling drunkenly, then looked as if she might cry.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Forget it.”

I took the shards from her, but by the time I reached the garbage, I’d cut myself. Blood ran between my fingers, gathering around the nails.

I try sometimes to remember what dessert I served that night (my frozen avocado mousse, which sounded so awful and tasted so good?), or who told the funniest story at dinner, or whether anyone ended up pitching into the deep beds of ivy outside our front door. But I can’t recall. Once I’ve released Catherine’s glass from my bloodied hand, that evening blurs in my mind with other parties we
gave—the living room crowded with laughter and smoke, the sweet odor of gin, our daughter, Jessica, pigtailed and barefoot in her nightie, proudly serving drinks. And here I am, fifteen or so years later, pausing on this foggy street while the black Labrador puppy I still cannot believe I own snaps at dry leaves. For years my children begged me for a dog, but I wouldn’t allow it. I call her Rover, hoping irony will rescue me from self-contradiction.

It’s nearly dark. Below me the bay is covered in fine, watery light. I’ve taken a break from emptying my closet, pulling out clothes I haven’t looked at in years, clothes bundled in plastic. I’ll send them to Jessica, back East, where she is a sophomore in college.

I was making soup for dinner once, and as I placed the pot in the sink and lifted its lid, Ted came up behind me and reached around my waist. The windows above the sink were squares of bright black, and steam clung to them like frost. As it melted away, we saw ourselves reflected in the glass. Ted kept his arms around me. We listened to the thump of Joel’s and Jessica’s feet above our heads.

“God knows what they’re doing up there, the little hell-raisers,” Ted said, grinning at our reflection.

“God knows,” I said.

We rocked back and forth, watching the picture we made. Neither one of us spoke. Ted’s heart seemed to push directly against my ribs, and with each breath his stomach filled the hollow of my back. Our life pulled in around us for a moment, a thing we could measure and hold. We had what we wanted.

Now I wonder why I remember that night. There must have been a hundred other times when Ted and I stood before that sink, endless pots of soup whose lids I lifted. We even made love on the floor of that kitchen once, when we first moved in—a sort of earthy christening. I know that happened, but I can’t remember it. Instead,
what comes back again and again is the two of us standing there, watching ourselves rock. And of course, I’m glad to have it. When it comes to memory, I suppose, we’re all passing the hat.

Catherine Black and Jack Delancey were together two years, and after they broke up he married someone else. Catherine dated Chuck Peyton after that, one of the last single men left in our group, then had a series of shorter affairs with people I knew less well. When our friends Wally and Clara Davidson separated, Wally dated Catherine, and the rumor was that they’d been involved long before that. Clara Davidson disappeared from sight. People were cool to Wally at first, but it was hard to sustain—he and Catherine were everywhere that winter, giving parties, going to parties, having long, boisterous lunches in the ski lodge at Sugar Bowl, where Wally owned a house. Catherine had never looked happier, I thought, as if there were some thrill, some rarefied pleasure most of us would never know, that came of stealing a man from his wife.

I ended up in Wally’s sauna that winter with a group that included Catherine, who wore a sparkling green bikini. Her torso and limbs looked stringier than they had a few summers before, and her skin seemed leathery from one too many Caribbean vacations. She was drinking a glass of wine, and began dipping her fingers into the glass and then flicking white wine onto the hot, dark stones of the grate. The stones gasped, and a burst of winy steam filled the room. We felt its tartness in our throats. My daughter watched, wide-eyed with amazement and delight, as if Catherine had shot columns of flame from each of her long red fingernails.

The next morning, after putting the kids into ski school, I discovered too late that I was right behind Catherine Black in the lift line. We both feigned delight at the coincidence, this long-awaited chance to really talk, then struggled to fill the silence.

“Where’s Wally?” I asked as the chair lifted us from the ground.

“He went up early with Mike Minetta,” she said. “I think they’re skiing Siberia.”

“Ted, too,” I said. “They must be up there together.”

The lift whispered along its track. It had snowed the night before, and beneath us the untouched hill was smooth and white as eggshell. The small trees buckled under their load, slim trunks bent. I looked down at Catherine’s thighs, then at mine, pleased to find hers slightly thicker. Her perfume was strong for so early in the day.

“You’ve made quite a hit with my daughter,” I said, groping for some topic.

“Really? With Jessica?”

It surprised me that she knew my daughter’s name. “Oh yes,” I said. “She thinks you’re wonderful. She told me you looked like a movie star.” My words amazed me—what compliments dislike could generate!

“God,” Catherine said. “What do you know.”

Without turning my head, I glanced at her broad, tanned face, the eyes deeply lined by now, the cheeks faintly shiny with makeup. It had been five or six years since I’d first seen her, waiting in line for the chairlift. It seemed to me she wasn’t aging well.

“I like kids,” she said.

“That’s funny,” I said. “I never liked kids until I had them.”

“I’ve had longer to think about it.”

This puzzled me. I had always assumed Catherine chose the sort of life she led; a taste for children didn’t seem to fit. “Well,” I said, “if you and Wally …”

Catherine laughed—a loud, reckless laugh that startled me. I felt I’d been caught in a lie, and blushed to my neck. “Come on. Wally won’t marry me,” she said.

“I hadn’t given it much thought,” I said, “frankly.”

“Well, he won’t,” she said, lighting a cigarette with a slim, ovalshaped lighter, then snapping it shut. “Everyone knows that.”

I watched her face arrange itself around the cigarette, as if every crease had been formed by this act. Strangely, I had an urge to smoke one myself, which I hadn’t done since college.

Catherine wasn’t laughing anymore, but looked as if she might start again at any moment. “It’s funny,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “There are things you’re just positive will happen to you. Then there’s that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won’t.”

She was watching me closely. Her eyes, I noticed, were bloodshot. I shifted the ski pole under my leg.

“Have you ever had a feeling like that?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” I said, uneasy. “I guess I have most things I wanted.”

“You’re lucky.”

I felt her envy, sharp as the tang of her cigarette smoke on the cold air. We were far apart, I realized then, and this filled me with relief.

Catherine flicked her half-smoked cigarette into a snowbank. “Of course,” she said, “getting what you want is only the beginning. The hard part is holding on to it.”

I was annoyed. “How do you know?”

Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. “I just know,” she finally said.

As I head toward home, I find myself studying the neighborhood, now that I’ll be leaving it for good. Houses have changed color again since I last noticed, houses whose hues seemed so indelible when we first arrived that the neighborhood will always look fake to me. Most of our friends have split up and moved; different cities, different
countries, strange, unlikely fates. Someone told me Katy Alistair’s daughter is a stripper in Guam; Joel’s childhood friend Bobby Zimmerman was found hanging from a light fixture in the Tenderloin. But these are only the most dramatic cases; most kids have simply gone off to college, their parents divorced, husbands married to younger women and starting second families. I see young, strange faces through the windows of houses I’ve been inside so many times, unfamiliar children hitting tennis balls against garage doors. It galls me, how at home they seem. I have a lunatic urge sometimes to go up to one of those kids and say, “Understand something, junior: you don’t really live here. Not like we did.”

Two different families have lived in our house since we moved. The second, the Weisels, invited me to a dinner party several weeks ago. Against my better instincts, curiosity led me to accept. I wandered through the familiar rooms, remembering the paint samples and fabric swatches Ted and I had argued over—all gone, the curtains gone, the walls a different color, a vast Chinese urn where we used to put our Christmas tree. I could almost hear the scuttling of Joel’s footed pajamas across the floor—those same boards! I searched the walls and corners for some trace of our lives, something left behind by mistake. But there was nothing. The house might never have existed before that night. As I ate my lemon mousse, I felt lightheaded, giddy, as if I myself had narrowly escaped the same oblivion. I drank another glass of wine. By midnight, I had to ask where to find the bathroom.

Catherine Black shot herself in the South of France two summers ago. People were shocked, of course, but less so than they might have been if she’d done it a few years before. She had gone, as they say, downhill, appearing more and more often alone, distracted, without the high spirits she was famous for. It was assumed that the
men she saw were all married. I’ve tried lately to imagine the scene of her death: Was she staying in some man’s villa? Aboard his yacht? Was it a fit of passion, or did she simply look up one day at the palm leaves flapping against a blue sky and know that it was time?

Rover and I take a detour and stop before what used to be my house. I almost never do this, although my apartment is only a few blocks away. But in two days the moving trucks will come and take me to my new apartment on Russian Hill. After so many years in the same ten-block radius, I feel like I’m leaving the country.

It’s finally dark. The foghorns honk and call, sounds as familiar to me as my own voice. The house is a strange gold color now, the ivy overtrimmed, without the chaotic appeal it had while we lived here. It must have been the vitamins my children used to toss into that ivy each morning as they left for school (after pretending to swallow them) that made it grow so wild. Once, during a hard rain, dozens of half-disintegrated pills washed onto the path.

Rover pants quietly beside me as I watch the lighted windows of our old living room. Beyond the open curtains someone moves, and I wait, half expecting to catch a glimpse of Ted tossing a log on the fire, of Joel running past with a tennis ball in his hand. Or myself, reading the evening paper, drinking tea. If I saw us, I suppose I would believe it for a minute, as if those memories were still real, my presence out here the illusion. But as Frank Weisel moves into the light to adjust the volume on his stereo, I feel unexpected relief. I’m weightless. There’s nothing left here—I’ll take it all when I go.

Like most things that happen well after they should, my divorce from Ted three years ago was unpleasant. In one of many confessions I could have lived without, he admitted to having been involved with Catherine Black off and on over the years.

“How many years?” I asked.

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“ ‘Years’ is not specific,” I said. “I want a number: two? three? five?”

“Calm down,” Ted said. “It was insignificant. You know Catherine, she was around. She made it easy.”

“When did it start?”

“I don’t know when. It was some years, all right?”

“ ‘Some’ means a lot.”

“It meant nothing, Charlotte,” Ted said, growing frantic. “Zero. Nada. We were treading water, she knew that as well as I did.”

“Probably better,” I said.

Ted glanced at me, but seemed afraid to pursue the topic. I went on packing books into boxes; books from college, Book-of-the-Month Club books, so many I still hadn’t read. I thought of that day when I’d ridden the chairlift with Catherine (six years before? seven?), and was appalled at what an idiot I might have been—how, that whole time, she might have been laughing at me. The thought haunted me for months after Ted had gone. But eventually I stopped wondering whether or not it had already started between them. How could it matter? What I felt on the chairlift with Catherine wasn’t spite or cruelty, not even smug satisfaction. She’d been left outside my world, that was all. And from there she saw how quickly it would pass.