Halfway Home (11 page)

The wind still whipped about me, flapping my parka like a flag. Halfway up I stopped to catch my breath, slumping against the banister. Runnels and rivulets trickled on all sides, and there was a great gash where a bank of the ice plant had broken away. I climbed more slowly, scoping the beach below, for the moment loving the isolation, and more convinced than ever that I was the first explorer here.

I reached the top, gasping as usual, but as charged as the day I jumped in the water, exactly a week ago. As I tottered across the terrace, the clouds above me gaped, and a shaft of sun shot through, splashing the side of the house. It was going to be perfect tomorrow. I went in by one of the parlor doors, thinking I'd set the table now, still grappling with whether to set it for four or five, so the Indian couldn't say no. Instantly I noticed something in the air, but I couldn't place it. Sweet, like a floral air freshener out of a spray can. I walked through the archway into the dining room.

In the center of the table was a great vase of flowers, pink lilies and callas and tuberoses, drunk with the promise of spring. The vase I knew—a green Craftsman pot, with an overglaze of white seeping down the green like icing—for it usually sat on the sideboard. I could already feel my heart racing as I circled the table, knowing something had gone awry. A folded note was propped against the vase where it faced the kitchen. I picked it up and opened it.

"You must be out for a walk—or a date with Judas. I was so restless I had to get out myself, so I must be all better. Thought you'd like a centerpiece. Now don't fuss too much—Foo's even plainer and earthier than I am! See you tomorrow."

No signature. He never signed. For some reason this made me furious, and I glared at the stupid flowers, though I knew it was all frustration because I'd missed him. I turned and bolted through the kitchen and out to the yard, but of course he was long gone. I trudged across the spongy lawn to the driveway. The tracks in the mud and gravel were very clear. You didn't have to be a Chumash scout. I stamped my foot in one of the ruts, flattening the imprint of the pickup's tread. It was only when I saw bits of white paper in the mud that I realized I was ripping up the note.

Fuck this epistolary life! Stung with disappointment, I headed back into the house. I was gearing up for a real pout, sick to death of being by myself. I couldn't have said what I wanted then. Gray seemed only a symptom. Certainly I longed to talk to him again—had felt it all week, ever since the night we drove to AGORA. But the missed connection sent me back to a larger solitude, the old glum certainty that nobody knew a fraction of me. And nobody ever would now because there was no time.

I hung up the parka and felt the weight of the pad in the pocket. There was no chance at all that I'd finish the letter to Brian, not now. What I'd learned from this thing, I thought with corrosive sarcasm, was how to feel sorry for myself. I stamped upstairs and burrowed under the covers, wincing at the optimistic sun flashing among the broken clouds. And slept for want of anything better, because I was damned if I would sort out all the tempest of emotion.

Which was basically how Mona found me Monday morning. Not in bed, but stubbornly unsorted. The day was as flagrant as all its promise, gaudy cerulean, every leaf and flower craning at the sun. I set the table for five. Mona sailed in at 11:30, foxy in a white silk dress, plumping down her bags from Irvine Ranch.

"You'll be proud of me," she said, nuzzling my cheek. "I made Daphne give me my keys back, and I'm having my number unlisted."

"Mm," I replied tepidly, sniffing at the pasta salad. She'd done as much three different times. I believe she once dug a moat and filled it with alligators, and still Daphne got through.

"Are we in a pissy mood?" she asked.

"Cabin fever," I grumbled, pulling serving dishes from the china cupboard, preparing the transfer from plastic. "Haven't talked to a soul all week."

She wandered into the dining room, and I heard her gasp at the flowers. "Who sent you these?"

"Gray left them."

"Oh, of course," she replied. I perked at the queer inflection in her voice, kind of smutty-sardonic, even as she continued. "I'm surprised he didn't leave you a diamond solitaire."

Icily I stepped to the doorway. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She smiled. "Sweetie, he's so in love with you."

I stared at her. Because my throat constricted and I couldn't speak, I blurted out "Ha!" Darting back into the kitchen, I muddled about among the takeout containers, but now I was in a genuine panic. I felt as if I'd come to after a spasm of dementia, and couldn't remember what happened in between. Total blackout.
Let her be wrong,
I pleaded with the powers of the air.

She stood in the doorway, puffing a Merit, studying me through the smoke. "That's news to you?"

"I think it would be news to
him,"
I said, somehow failing to give the irony its proper topspin. "We're barely friends."

"Oh boy. And here I thought you guys were an item." She cringed slightly, then looked helplessly about for an ashtray. I handed her one of the empty takeout tins.

"Why don't you wash the fruit?" I suggested dourly.

I figured I'd finish unloading the takeout, then excuse myself to go up and take my pills. And maybe get ten minutes alone to stop the racing in my head. Mona pulled out the peaches and grapes, spraying them clean in a colander. She knew she'd made a misstep with her idle gossip, but already she was over it, back to chattering about showing the door to Daphne. Gray was no big friend of hers. So what if he had a crush on me? All she really cared about was my welfare, and if I was oblivious of Gray's tender feelings, then the matter was closed. Besides, her kind of passion was the battering kind, accusations and smashing dishes—
Wuthering Heights,
not
Emma.

But even if I had been oblivious before, now I was racked with guilt. Had I given Gray the wrong signals? Because if I did, he was on his way to getting very hurt. I dumped the calamari salad in a cut-glass bowl and flashed on the drive home last Sunday night from AGORA. I should never have laid my head in his lap. That was the moment I must have led him on, though it certainly came to nothing. He'd let me off at the end of the drive and gone on his way up the mountain road.

But listen to me, trying to play innocent—a disgusting ploy of Catholics, lapsed or otherwise. Mona saw something in Gray, the two times she met him, something more than the puppy-dog loyalty, the fine-tuned self-effacement. She saw a man in the throes, and for being so blind and self-absorbed, it was all my bloody fault.

Mona gasped beside me. "I almost forgot, you're an item all by yourself today!" She wiped her hands on a dish towel and grabbed her alligator bag—endangered species are not on Mona's list of priorities. She rummaged through and produced a newspaper clipping, triumphantly handing it over. "This morning's
Times."

It was a column from the Calendar section, called "Backstage." A weekly effusion by Nancy Marlowe, a lady of indeterminate age who you felt was the very last person on earth who still wore a hat and gloves to matinees. Mona tapped a fingernail on the final item, headed "Second Coming?"

There was an unannounced special guest last Sunday at AGORA, the performance space in Ocean Park that's always on the cutting edge. "Miss Jesus" made an appearance. First performed three years ago, Tom Shaheen's piece produced a mini firestorm of protest, with picketing church groups and statements of outrage. Shaheen is the only artist ever to be officially censored by the County Board of Supervisors, as a "public threat to decency." The controversy all but blurred the genuine cracked brilliance of the work. It's good to hear that Shaheen has surfaced again. Rumors of his demise are apparently greatly exaggerated.

"Don't you love that 'cracked brilliance'?" enthused Mona. "Just what I always say about you."

Well, well. Good old Nancy Marlowe. Silently I took back a decade of snarling venom I had vented over that lady's mawkish "theatah" notes. "Does this mean if I live long enough that I will achieve a mainstream following?"

"Hey, why not? Play your cards right, and before you know it you'll be opening for Madonna."

"Or wait—how about a benefit performance in Jerusalem, before all the world's religious leaders? Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, clasping hands at last! The NEA'll fund it in a minute."

We were very merry, practically dancing, me waving the clipping about. I lied about reviews; I'm as shameless as everyone else. We were riffing on it all, but dimly at the back of my mind I could see the special Tony, voted by the Board of Governors, presented by Miss Lansbury to the cracked and brilliant Tom Shaheen in his wheelchair. I grabbed a banana to use as a mike.

"I want to thank the Ayatollah and Mother Teresa for coming tonight, as well as the Senior Nazi from North Carolina. It's a special thrill to be honored by your peers. And to Father Mulcahy of Saint Augustine's, if you're out there, thank you for showing me the way every Friday after catechism class—that if Our Savior took it up the bum, then so must we."

Mona was laughing uproariously, and then her eyes flicked over my shoulder, and she blanched a little, as if we'd been caught
in flagrante.
I spun around—and there was Gray, poking his head around the kitchen door. "Sorry to break up the workshop," he said with a grin, "but the caravan's here."

I shot a glance at the clock above the stove—12:17. They were early! Leave it to WASPs. Gray had already ducked out again, and through the kitchen window I could see Merle striding by, carrying an improbable bundle of bones and linen in his arms, across the shamrock green of the lawn toward the front terrace. My ten minutes alone upstairs had been snatched right out of my hands. I followed Mona dumbly through the dining room and parlor, nothing thought through and no face prepared. We threw open the double french doors, and there between Merle and Gray, on her own two feet now and propped on her owl-headed cane, was the Ancient of Days herself.

"Foo," said Gray, not loud but close to her ear, "this is Mona and Tom."

And she turned with a loftiness and fluidity untouched by her bone-thin frailty. Her hair was in a thick braid wound on the crown of her head, white with glints of yellow still. Her eyes were giant blue behind magnifying glasses. The thousand lines and creases of her face sprang into laugh lines as she grinned and bobbed her head at Mona.

"How-de-do," she said, then peered delightedly at me. "So you're the young man I can't talk about with the vicar."

I squirmed but couldn't look away from her great blue gaze. "Well, I... I'm sorry if I..."

"That's all right, the vicar's a simpering fool. Why wasn't your picture in the paper too? Who does your publicity?"

"Uh, nobody."

"Just as well. Make 'em want to see you in the flesh." She turned to Merle. "Why don't we have our drink out here?" He nodded and headed back across the lawn, and I wondered if he was her personal servant. "I'm having a bullshot," Foo announced. "You're welcome to join me. I bring my own ingredients because people don't always keep beef broth. Me, I live on beef broth, with or without the vodka."

Leaning firmly on the cane, she pattered in baby steps across to one of the outdoor chairs. Gray hurried over to cradle her as she sat down, and once settled, she beamed with pleasure, gazing out over the bluff to the aching blue of the white-capped sea. I declared that I would go see to the drinks, and Mona and Gray piped up that white wine would be fine. As I rushed back to the kitchen, I realized I hadn't so much as locked eyes once with Gray.

Merle was already fixing Foo's cocktail, so all I had to do was fill two wineglasses and a Coke for me. I'm on too many pills to be drinking at all, but certainly not at noon. Beside me Merle measured the vodka very carefully, half a jigger, as if he knew the lady's capacity intimately.

"I set a place for you," I said, as offhand as I could.

He grunted softly by way of reply, setting all the glasses on the tray, which he handed to me. He didn't follow me out, but I had the impression he would join us for the food. This gave me a nice little liberal lift, as if I had done my part to heal the breach between red man and white. When I came outside the three of them had their chairs grouped in an arc, and they were laughing.

"I was the
baby"
Foo exclaimed, the joke on her, as if who could believe this wizened thing had ever been so young. "Just thirteen when we built this place." She took a stiff gulp of the bullshot as soon as I handed it over. "And Cora was twenty-seven, and Nonny was twenty-two." She seemed quite fiercely proud of getting the numbers exactly right. She waved her glass at Gray. "Your father was three the first summer we lived here."

"Foo, you should have a hat. You'll get too much sun."

She harrumphed. "I can't get enough of anything anymore, except beef broth," she said, then tilted her face to the sky. "It feels grand. I could die right here and be happy."

"Well, don't die before lunch, please," her great-nephew admonished dryly. "Mona and Tom have gone to a lot of trouble."

Mona and I burbled a protest, no trouble at all, and Foo threw an insouciant look in my direction. "Sunstroke wouldn't be such a bad way to go, now, would it?" I shook my head. "Quick and clean. You could toss me right off the bluff." And she gestured with the glass toward the brink, as if toasting the whole vast watery grave between here and Japan.

She wasn't drunk. It was just high spirits, that and a clearly practiced facility for saying whatever she liked. I glanced across at Gray, locking eyes at last, startled to see the worry in his. But I understood immediately: he was fearful the talk of death would pain me. His mouth crinkled as he gave a tiny shrug, as if to say she was incorrigible. I couldn't have cared less. But the other was so obvious now, the way his uncomplicated gaze lingered on my face. How had I managed to miss it before? Even to notice how happy he was. He smiled at me over his wineglass with an openness that choked me with dread.