I Cannot Get You Close Enough (21 page)

“What for? We paid that fairy ten thousand dollars and now I've got to start paying some shrink to fuck up her head. Remember what happened to Louise when she went to that shrink? She turned into a nut.”

“Yes. She left us, didn't she. Well, she seems happy. She's working on some film in England now. A documentary about Stonehenge.” Niall reached over and put his hand on his brother's knee. “Take the morning off, Daniel. Stop worrying. Things work out. We could go swimming. We could be back by three.”

“I can't.” Daniel stopped the car in front of Niall's house. “I've got those Japs in town. I got to get down there and talk to them.”

“Let's see each other more often. Let's take time to know each other.”

“If I can. If I ever get some time.” Niall got out then and stood on the sidewalk by his tulip beds watching his baby brother drive off down the street. Daniel's huge freckled hands gripped the wheel of the car. His face was pointed toward the east.

Thank you, God, Olivia was saying to herself. If you're there thanks and if you're not thanks anyway. Now I'll have to work my ass off. I'll have to have a tutor and I have to go to counseling. I guess I'll have to talk to Lila all the time. I saw her looking my dad over. No wonder she's so nice to me with such a good-looking unmarried guy for my father.

I guess she thinks she'll be coming over to see me at my house.

After they got through talking to me this morning I went back to history class and Mrs. Braxton was talking about the Korean war. She was saying they promised they'd get the troops home for Christmas and all I could think about was that Christmas when Bobby and I went out to the old Methodist camp and built a fire by the creek and sat around and smoked a joint. Then we got the idea to go down the river in the snow. We got one of the canoes from the camp and went all the way down to the island where the crows nest in winter. I don't guess I'll ever smoke dope again or get laid by anybody I like, but that's okay. I guess that's my childhood I have to leave behind.

Yeah, I won't ever be that way again. All cocky and stretched out and fine like it was that day I lay back in the canoe and heard those crows and felt the small soft snow falling on us. Oh, baby, baby, he used to say. I bet all my life I'll be a sucker for anyone who calls me baby.

A SUMMER IN MAINE

1

TRACELEEN So it was summer and Miss Crystal had decided we should all go up to Maine and get to know that part of the country. She borrowed this very large house which is actually an estate. She borrowed it from Mrs. Noel Chatevin, who is a friend of ours and lives around the corner from us in her room. She never leaves that room although once she was a great actress and was in plays in Paris, France, and London, England, and Madrid, Spain. She is very old now but she is still beautiful and has skin so pale you can see right through it. She is very strong-willed, more strong-willed than Miss Crystal even and she is very interesting to talk to. I get sent over there to take her flan and angel cakes and things Miss Crystal cuts out of magazines. They have a large collection of things from magazines. Miss Noel started it and now Miss Crystal is in it too. INTO EACH LIFE SOME RAIN MUST FALL, it says over the door to Miss Noel's room. “Raindrops keep falling on my head” is a song she plays over and over on a little crystal music box she keeps beside her bed.

NOEL Noel was alone in her room. Holding the letter from Helen Abadie begging to see Anna's letters. Please let us have them, Helen had written. You can't be that selfish. Don't you want to help preserve her memory? She wrote to you all her life. Why won't you give them to us? Why won't you talk to me?

It was eight o'clock in the morning and the terrible letter had come and then the roofers and plumbers and electricians had appeared at the door. The ones the lawyers sent to fix the things that were broken by the storm.

“The hurricane,” she told the repairmen, calling down from the window when they appeared. “Well, come on in. Marissa will let you in.”

“They said to replace the windows,” the good-looking boy from the glass company called up. “Is that all right?”

“Come on in. Come on in.” She pulled her head back in the window and padded over to the door that led to the stairs. She called down the stairs to the Spanish maid: “Let them in. It's all right. They want to fix the broken things.
Hombres a trabajar
. Let them in.”

So now the roofers were crawling all over the roof and the glass people were changing the windows and the electricians were everywhere and she was going to be forced to go downstairs. She put on the raincoat she kept for such emergencies, a pink raincoat she had bought one spring in Paris, and slipped on her bedroom slippers and took the dogs and went downstairs and holed up in the unused living room. She sat down upon a velvet loveseat facing the fireplace, the spaniels all around her.

“‘Now every third thought is of my death,'” she began, playing to the spaniels. “What am I doing in this aging body? Where is the spark that kept me warm? I won't let Helen get the letters. Anna was nuts to leave the things to Helen. Back to the family, back to the killers. I'll send Lydia to get them. I will send Crystal and Lydia. Yes, that's it. Lydia will bring them to me. Lydia won't tell Helen where they are.”

Noel opened the drawer of the table beside the loveseat, took out the chess set, began to lay the players out. A classic problem. The old queen cornered with her knights gone. A bishop left and two pawns. Noel lifted a knight and held him in her hands. How many years since Julius died? Nine? Ten? A moment in time. Darling, damned Julius, who said no ships were coming in. Who said tomorrow would not be better, who said goodbye and meant it. Was that all in the letters? Yes, it must be. What had he wanted that the world did not give him? Gorgeous Julius in his velvet breeches, doing
Hamlet
at the RSC, doing anything he wanted to. You could have stayed around to console me, Noel thought. You could have finished out the play.

But of course the letters were not about darling, damned Julius Key or anything else of much import or weight. They were simply a packet of letters Anna Hand had written to one of her greatest and most flattering admirers. You are so wonderful, Noel would write to Anna. There is no one like you, no one can touch you, divine Anna, Anna of light. Write to me, please. I haven't heard from you in so long.

Then sooner or later Anna would stop whatever she was doing and sit down and write back to Noel and tell her everything that was happening in her blossoming career. As Anna's career moved toward its zenith, Noel's moved into darkness, sickness, despair. Send poems, Noel would write. Here they are, Anna would reply, and mail off first drafts of things she supposed were poems. So an illusion was created, an illusion of meaning, life, action, art. It was not the last illusion these letters would generate. Anna's sister Helen, living in sin with a poet in Boston, dreamed they would bind him to her. She believed he would be so greedy to edit Anna's letters that he would never tire of her, never send her home to her husband and children, never notice she was aging, never long for younger arms.

The maid came in and found Noel crying and tried to get her to return to her room.

“Not until they leave. Not until they get off my roof.”

“I will get your pills. You must take them. I think you forgot to take them today.”

“It was too late to save him,” Noel said. “He was dead. There was nothing I could do, Marissa. You know there was nothing I could do. I did everything I could.”

“Of course you did. I will get your pills for you. Let me get your pills.”

“In a rose bedroom facing east. So long ago. He did it to punish me. He did it because I failed him.”

“They shouldn't send those men here so early in the morning. Now they make you leave your room.”

“I have to get the letters. I'll get Lydia to help me. Lydia will go and Crystal. They'll bring them to me, won't they? Don't you think they will?”

“Of course they will. You sit still and I will go and get the pills for you.” The maid covered Noel's legs with an afghan, put a pillow behind her head, ran up the stairs for the bottles of lithium and Valium and the blue cut-glass Venetian tumbler Mrs. Chatevin always used to take her pills.

“Lydia will get them,” Noel was saying. “Lydia won't let Helen find them and put them in a book.”

CRYSTAL So now Noel has it all figured out that we are going to go up to her house and spend the summer. I can't believe I said I'd go and invited all these people. Now I can't back out. Traceleen is planning on it and her niece Andria and King has invited Daniel and his girls.

Maybe Alan will come. Maybe he'll give me a piece of ass for a change if he comes up there. Maybe he's impotent or he thinks I'm too old. I'm not old. He's just a gold digger and a social climber but he's the best thing I've got.

I'd try to make my marriage work but what's the use. I married Manny for his money and now I have to pay. Well, I can't help it. I have to raise my children and do the best I can. Life isn't perfect.

Maybe we'll have fun up there. Lydia's coming and she's always fun. We're never bored when we're together. Well, the main thing is I'm going to please Noel. She is so sweet and brilliant. The sweetest woman I've ever known. She has been all over the world and now she's old and in that room. It's all loss. Sooner or later it's always loss. So go on up to Maine and see what happens. If Jessie comes I guess that will seal King's fate. Well, he could do a lot worse. He could fall in love with someone we don't know. Some girl from any kind of family.

It might be great up there. I might meet someone. Who knows, a fisherman or a simple country man who only wants to fuck and doesn't want anything from me. I'm tired of people wanting things from me, taking things from me, never giving me anything in return.

LYDIA The minute I got the letter I knew I should have thrown it away, but no, I got on the phone and called New Orleans and got sucked in. As much as I hate to travel, I have agreed to fly halfway across the United States on an airplane and then drive the other half with Crystal and her children. I end up doing anything those people want me to. Leave my psychiatrist and my rational friends and go on down to the land of twenty-four-hour azalea bushes. Not to mention gardenias, cape jasmine, night-blooming jasmine, honeysuckle, golden raintrees. You name it. If it smells like sex, it grows there. Once I went down there for a year and all I did was paint butterflies and flowers, ladies leaning against tombs, black jazz musicians. Well, the paintings of the musicians were pretty good. Actually all the paintings were pretty good. Actually I can't stay away. Garden of Eden. It's all so hot and surprising.

My psychiatrist was worried about my going. “Where exactly are you going?” he asked, getting his hooded look.

“To an estate a friend owns. There are some papers she wants me to bring to her. She's going to pay my expenses if I'll go and get them. I guess they're about Anna.”

“Wait a minute. I'm getting confused. What does Anna have to do with this?”

“She was Noel's friend. They corresponded for years. God, it's impossible to believe she's dead.”

“She's the one who had melanoma?”

“She killed herself. She wouldn't let them treat her.”

“Do you know any normal people, Lydia? People who are married to each other and come home at night? I know you think they're boring.”

“They are boring. There's a studio in the place in Maine. It has everything I need to paint. So I'll be working. I won't just be wasting time. Why don't you want me to go? You never want me to have any fun.”

“I don't care if you go. I just want you to understand what you're doing. You're still in the family dynamic with these people, Lydia. You're still letting yourself be treated like a child. This woman, Noel, wants to pay your expenses. This is not the independence you've been striving for.”

“I'm tired of striving for independence. Daniel's coming from North Carolina. I've been in love with him for years. He's so gorgeous. I can't believe he won't get interested in me.”

“Then go on. It's fine with me.”

“I'm going. I told them I was going and I can't back out now.”

TRACELEEN So one morning in March, right after Mardi Gras, Miss Crystal says to me, “Traceleen, I have an adventure planned. Mrs. Chatevin wants us to go up to Maine and stay at her house all summer. You could take your niece Andria and let her earn money for college. If I go, will you go?”

“What is it like?” I asked, getting cautious. I have traveled with Miss Crystal before and I have learned to ask questions before I agree to go. Once she took me to an island off the coast of Belize and that is the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my life. There was an outdoor toilet and the worst food I have ever tasted. But back to Maine.

“It's this house Noel bought years ago when she was a hit on Broadway. It's very old and has about twenty rooms and there is a caretaker there. It's on the Atlantic Ocean. Think how good it would be for the children.”

“I'll think it over.”

“It's on a peninsula. The Atlantic Ocean, think of that. We'll be cool and breathing pine trees while the people of New Orleans swelter. If you don't like it you can leave. Will you go and try it?”

“Let me talk to Andria. If she wants to go I might.”

“Noel really wants us to go. She's got it all planned out.”

“She doesn't have anything else to think about.” It's the truth. Miss Noel lives through other people now. She is always thinking about the ones like Miss Crystal who are her favorites. When she wants them to do something she is very good at talking them into it. Sometimes she calls here very early in the morning wanting Miss Crystal for something and Miss Crystal throws on her clothes and goes right over. They are extremely close friends.