Keeping Secrets (30 page)

Emma rolled her eyes, “Please, don’t get me started. The hours I spend traipsing back and forth to the hardware store, lumber store, plumbing, paint, tile, socket, plug, wrench, hammer, screw store.” She paused, knife in hand. “You know, Rosalie owned some rental properties, and when it came to fixing them up my daddy used to bitch. I always thought he was just lazy, but I’m beginning to see his point. If you don’t love the process, it is
the
world’s biggest drag.”

“But it will all be worth it someday, don’t you think? When Skytop’s finished?”

Emma poured them each a glass of iced tea and joined Maria at the dining table.

“I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but no, I don’t. Besides, we’ll never live that long. Jesse gets off on tangents, like those stained-glass windows in the great hall—they belong in a church! Four of them, each six feet wide and twelve feet tall. Do you know how long that’s going to take? And he didn’t even
do
stained glass before. He’s up there teaching himself to be a Renaissance man. Meanwhile, the porch is still falling down, the kitchen is a shambles, the bathrooms—just the everyday carpentry work always takes three times as long and costs twice as much as he plans. It’s like owning a boat—a hole in the water you pour money into. Sometimes I think about going up to Skytop and burning it to the ground.”

“You can’t convince him to stop, to sell it and get out? Go back to his art?”

“I’ve begged him, but he’s lost all perspective. It started as a little break, remember, a diversion? Right after that Montalvo retrospective. But for Jesse it was a dream too, and I guess I bought into it. We were going to create this hotel with a gallery and a restaurant. Jesse would do such a wonderful renovation, it would be a showplace—with the Tree touch. I think he had visions of Frank Lloyd Wright. I would be the chef. Then, after it opened, a manager would take over, and Jesse would go back to his art. I’m afraid by that time they’ll have forgotten who he was.”

“No. Jesse was on top.”

“What if he’s had his time in the sun?”

Maria stirred her tea. “Fame’s not
that
fickle.”

“He gets calls. His agent in New York thinks he’s gone nuts.”

“Is that what
you
think?”

“Sometimes, I swear to God, I believe he thinks if he tries hard enough, if he does every little thing about Skytop perfectly, he can go back and do his childhood over, his parents won’t divorce, he and his mother will be just like
that
.” Emma held two fingers twisted together close.

“Does he talk about that?”

“He talks
around
it, sometimes.”

Up at Skytop, Jesse and Clifton were leaning over a worktable stretched across two sawhorses.

“I never did glass,” Clifton said. He picked up the soldering torch. “Show me how this goes.”

Jesse smiled. “Going to let
me
teach
you
something, old man?”

“’Bout time, don’t you think?”

Jesse joined the pieces of carefully fitted glass, explained that this was the easy part. It was cutting the glass that was difficult. He had a pile of bright shards of discarded pieces and Band-Aids on his fingers to testify to that fact.

“It’s different from wood. Every color is a completely different experience. You never know how it’s going to act until you start working with it. And in the same sheet, the minerals can run different, making strong, resistant spots that you don’t know about until you start to make that cut.” He held a piece of amethyst glass up to the light, and it cast a pool of violet across his shirt.

“Ain’t it that way with most everything?” Clifton asked.

Jesse turned and looked at him. “I guess so.” Then he dropped the amethyst and picked up a piece of emerald which was to become part of a lily, turned it in his hands, inspecting it as if it contained a key to the universe. “Say, what do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Just that most things aren’t what they seem, I mean you don’t know much about them till you handle them a while, get down in the dirt.”

“That’s for sure,” Jesse nodded.

Clifton approached the stairs that led to the gallery level, where Jesse had carved a magnificent newel post. The stairs themselves were still broken.

“Fine-looking piece of work,” Clifton said, running his hand over the flowering cherry wood forms that swirled around a woman naked to the waist.

Jesse turned away and walked the full length of the great hall, thinking of the little brunette who had modeled for it. She hadn’t been able to keep her hands off him—or vice versa. He stared for a long moment at the painting of the woman with Emma’s eyes he had done on the wall, what now seemed like eons ago. Ah, Emma. He hadn’t meant to be unfaithful to her—but then that was
her
fault.

Clifton came up behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. “When you getting back to it? Ain’t you fooled around here long enough?”

“What are you talking about? I haven’t been fooling around.” Jesse’s tone was suddenly sharp.

“Don’t shit a shitter.”

“Exactly what are we talking about?”

“I don’t know. You tell me—pussy or art?”

Jesse stared at him for a moment.

“Don’t stand there looking like a chicken deciding whether or not to cross the road. You think I don’t know you better than that? I’d hoped Emma would settle you down. I hear things, too, you know. I know you been philandering. Sounds to me like the symptom of a man who’s lost track of his priorities, all tangled up in this place that don’t mean a goddamned thing.”

“Careful, old man.”

“Careful, shit. Careful is what I was being when I stepped on the mine.” Clifton tapped loudly on his false leg. “I’d been going on, taking care of business, never would have happened.”

“Nothing to do with me,” Jesse grumbled.

“We’re not talking about careful, son. What we’re talking about is that it’s time you got back to paying attention to your marriage
and
your work.”

“Emma been talking to you?”

“Emma don’t have to talk to me. She probably don’t even know. To me looks like she’s still in love with you. Don’t quite have that down-in-the-mouth disappointed look—yet. But close, close. You keep messing around, boy, she soon will.”

They had stepped out on the front porch now, looking out across fir and redwoods. The Pacific was in the distance.

“I know you’re right—about Emma,” Jesse said. But what he didn’t say was how more and more, as Skytop grew, he felt Emma slipping from his grasp. Was there some correlation? Or was it just the passing of time?

At first she’d been right there. She was spirited, of course, that’s one of the things he’d loved about her. But then she drifted. When he’d take her arm to lead her through a door, something just as simple as that, she’d shrug him off.

“Is this some kind of fucking symbolic act?” he had asked. “You don’t want me to open doors for you? Go on ahead. Help yourself.”

“Don’t be silly, Jesse,” she had said. But she went right on doing what she wanted to do. And they just didn’t feel as close.

She
was
busy, he’d grant her that. Out in the world with her teaching, her students, catering clients were calling all the time for her. She was booked for special dinner parties, at seventy-five dollars a head, past the first of the year. And he was proud of that. But it felt like she was spreading herself awfully thin, like there wasn’t enough of her left.

“That’s because you’ve locked yourself up in Skytop,” she said. “You really need to get out. You never see a soul anymore. All that isolation will make you nuts.”

“I’ve always spent time alone. Artists
do
!”

Emma had given him a look. “I’m not your evening entertainment, Jesse, after your day up the hill.”

Why couldn’t she understand how important the lodge had become to him? It represented—well, he found it hard to talk about. A
big
canvas. A monumental work. When he was dead and gone people would come to see the Jesse Tree House. It would be the noblest thing he’d ever done. Couldn’t Emma see that? Couldn’t Clifton? Couldn’t they sense the enormity of his vision?

“Come on,” Clifton was saying. “We better get back and give those pretty ladies a hand.”

A while later, out in the screened-in lanai, Jesse tipped open the lid to the heavy rectangular smoker. “Never made a better investment in my life than this baby crematorium,” he said.

Everyone laughed, though all of them had heard the joke before.

“That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?” Jesse said.

“Indeed it does, my man,” Clifton answered.

“Can I freshen your drink?” Jesse asked. “Anyone?” They all shook their heads. “No takers, huh? Well, the Fourth is young, and I say you’re all a bunch of pikers. I think we have an obligation to drink to our country’s birthday and keep these home fires burning till—well, at least until Rupert comes.”

“Did he call?” Maria asked.

* * *

Patriotism is a funny excuse for drinking, Emma thought. Especially for a man who referred to “your President” and “your Governor” as if Nixon and Reagan were
her
responsibility and he weren’t a citizen of the country or the state.

But then, in a way, he wasn’t, for Jesse had always seemed to occupy his own particular territory. She wondered sometimes what its geography looked like, for the longer she lived with Jesse, the less the felt she knew him.

There were those things that hadn’t changed. He was still a most handsome man. In fact, his looks seemed to improve with age—his carriage, his imposing presence, this larger-than-life black prince. When he entered a room, conversation stopped. And he had a wonderful way with words. The two of them were so clever, they thought, that once sitting at the table after dinner they’d made a tape of their conversation. It was still here somewhere, in the bottom of a bureau drawer. And there was drama about the man: his beautiful bass-baritone that even when he talked with her quietly in a restaurant caused heads to turn. In the realm of the practical, he could do those things she hated to do: fixing locks, plugged sinks, creaky doors. (How, she asked herself often, could a woman who wasn’t interested in hanging a picture let herself be talked into Skytop? What
could
she have been thinking about?)

And, of course, he enjoyed a certain fame, or he had when they’d met. Everyone in Bay Area art circles, and beyond, even in New York, knew Jesse’s name. That, perhaps, had changed. As had their bank account. More and more of the reserve that Jesse had saved when he was at his peak was pouring into Skytop. He needed to get back to work.

Not just for the money. He needed a wider audience. He hardly saw anyone outside of Clifton—and his old friend Rupert from time to time. So it fell to Emma to provide the applause.

It was tough being an audience of one, especially when she was tired of the same old show. The burden was far too great; he wanted her to see,
come up and see
, every little bit of work. She had begun to feel like a mother watching her child in the swimming pool:
Look, Ma, look.

Besides, if she was the only audience, she had to be perfect, didn’t she? And Jesse’s rules of perfection were unwritten. Yet if she loved him, she would know them or intuitively figure them out.

Just as she ought to know how he’d like her to iron his white shirts, cook his eggs. She ought to know what size washers, screws, nails he’d like her to pick up at the hardware store on her way home.

She needed to be finely tuned to hear the vibrations of the mines that lay in the fields of the territory that was Jesse’s private world.

For when she misstepped, made the wrong move, said the wrong words, the explosions were fast and furious. They burst out of Jesse like cherry bombs. Then the silence would fall.

The ensuing quiet covered the house and the yard like a thick blanket of fog. It was familiar; it reminded her of Jake, whose angry outbursts had punctuated his long silences throughout her childhood. Once, when he had already been angry at Rosalie, he’d flown at Emma in a rage because she hadn’t swept under her bed. The price for those dust bunnies was a stillness that lasted two months.

Jesse’s silences weren’t as long. But they were long enough, so that by the time he decided to speak again Emma had developed a rainbow of bruises from beating her head against his implacable will, and they hurt. She wanted them kissed and made well before she kissed and made up again. Jesse, on the other hand, wanted to be rewarded for returning from his muffled kingdom back into her less-than-perfect world. So he’d pull the drawbridge back up before she even crossed it, and she would fall back into the moat to swim alone.

After a while, she’d gotten used to it, to being alone again. For hadn’t she been like that for most of her life? Hadn’t she protected herself from all those names in her little notebook, the names she’d inscribed in purple ink, of men she’d given her body to but from whom she’d oh so carefully hidden herself? And maybe she’d been right to do so. Maybe the mistake had been in giving in to Jesse, who had seemed so different from all the others, who had charged in and swept her up before she had time to think.