Keeping Secrets (40 page)

“Come on.” Lowie took Emma by the arm. “Let’s leave the men to their drinks. I need to take a walk.”

Emma held back. She’d seen Lowie only once during the past year, and that had been at a party where they’d never been alone. What if Lowie had found out about Caroline and Rupert?

“It’s too dark,” she said.

“Don’t be such a sissy. Come on.”

“Go ahead,” Jesse said. “Just holler really loud, and we’ll come to the rescue if the boogeyman gets after you.”

Emma capitulated.

“Let’s go this way,” Lowie said, heading up the hill. Emma
never
walked in that direction, up the road which dead-ended at Minor’s house. She couldn’t think of a good excuse not to. Then Elmer wagged his way out from under their house, carrying a rock.

“You want to go, boy? Give it here.”

Elmer dropped it. Emma threw it up the one-lane road, and Elmer scampered on ahead, wriggling.

“Takes so little to make that dog happy,” she said.

Lowie took slower steps now, scuffing up dirt. “Takes a lot more for people, doesn’t it?”

Uh-oh. Emma’s stomach lurched. Here it comes. She’s going to ask me about Caroline. She willed her not to. God, I don’t want to be the one to break her heart.

“Are
you
happy, Emma?”

Emma relaxed. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. She could answer this. One word. Easy. “Sure,” she said.

Lowie kicked at a rock, then took a deep breath and looked Emma straight in the eye. “There’s something I think someone ought to tell you.”

Emma froze. Elmer was waiting patiently for her to throw his rock again. Finally he barked.

Oh, shit, she thought. This isn’t what I suspected it was at all. She’s not
asking
me about Caroline. She’s going to
tell
me—about her and Jesse.

“I don’t think I want to know.”

“But you ought to.” Lowie’s voice was eager, almost as if she were delivering good news.

Don’t tell me, please don’t. If you tell me, I have to
do
something about it. I have to figure out what I want.

Then Lowie let her have it, all in a rush. “Jesse’s making a fool of you with a woman named Caroline. Everybody knows it.”

There
. There it was. She’d pretended ignorance for a whole goddamned year, and now Lowie had laid it out for her to see as clearly as if she’d written the words here in the dust.

She was cold, clammy. Something acrid burned her nose. She felt as though she was going to throw up.

“I know Caroline,” Emma finally answered in a thin tight voice.

“Yes, she was here, last Fourth of July, wasn’t she? I’d forgotten that.”

“Forgotten it?” Emma turned to her. “How could you forget it if you knew she was with Rupert?”

“Oh, Rupert,” Lowie said with disdain as if she were naming a little-loved pet. “He’s always played around. I don’t let it bother me anymore.”

“Then why are you telling me about Jesse?” Emma’s voice rose. “Isn’t it the same thing?”

Lowie shrugged and looked away, up the road. Then Emma understood. Lowie wasn’t telling her this because she wanted to save her or her marriage. And it wasn’t that she didn’t care about Rupert. She cared, all right. She wanted Emma to care, too. She wanted Emma to feel exactly what she felt. She wanted to spread the hurt around.

“They meet at our house sometimes,” Lowie said in a conspiratorial tone, as if she were gossiping about someone else’s life.

Emma tried not to rise to the bait but failed. “In Oakland? All the way up there? They involve you and Rupert—after he and Caroline…” She let it trail off.

No, Lowie wasn’t going to have any answers. That wasn’t in the bag of tricks she’d brought with her to unload on Emma’s doorstep. She’d already done what she came to do.

“It’s been going on for a long time,” Lowie said. “I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out.”

They were at the last big loop in the road now. Above them gleamed Minor’s living-room windows which looked across the canyon and down toward the Trees’. Inside there somewhere was Minor’s telescope. Was he looking at them now? Could he see how masklike, how closed, her face had become?

Emma felt exactly the way she did in an emergency, cold and calm.

Lowie wanted an answer, and until she had it she was like Elmer worrying a bone. “Didn’t you even suspect?”

Emma turned and stared at her. She felt she hardly even knew this woman, an acquaintance, not a friend, who was serving up the cold remains of her marriage to her on a platter and asking, “How do you like it? Does it taste good?”

“No,” she answered, “I never knew a thing.” Then she turned her back, her hands clenched so tightly her nails cut her palms. Had she been fooling
herself
all this time, thinking that she really didn’t care? Then why did she feel so awful inside? She understood now why kings once killed the bearers of bad news, and it wouldn’t take much more for her to push Lowie off this mountain. Then the messenger reached out to her with a small neat hand, which Emma shrugged off, saying, “I’m going back home now.”

“Well, you needn’t be so…I mean, it’s not
my
fault.” Lowie’s big eyes were full of tears.

For whose hurt is she crying, Emma wondered, mine or hers?

“No,” Emma said. Her voice seemed to her to have the most peculiar ring, like high heels clicking on marble, cold gray marble tombstones laid side by side. “No, it’s not your fault at all.”

* * *

Lowie and Rupert left shortly after the women returned, Lowie insisting that she had a bad headache. “I need to go home and lie down in my own bed, Rupert,” she said.

Yes indeedy, Emma thought, the one you’ve made. And I, in mine, in just a few moments—if I can get you out the door. But Lowie had signaled Rupert, and in no time at all they were gone.

Emma stood staring at the closed door. Is this a scene that’s going to play over and over forever on the night of July Fourth, she wondered, my ushering people out of my house who’ve stayed too long, who have left me with ashes in my mouth and a sink full of dirty dishes? Though this year there were no shards of slivered glass to clean up.

But maybe if I’d looked into those pieces of mirror more closely last year, if I’d looked at my face in those fragments that Caroline left behind and asked,
What do you want, Emma?
I wouldn’t be asking myself that now. When you cleaned up that broken mirror so quickly you didn’t save anybody from bad luck.

“What are you doing?” Jesse asked. He was settling into the sofa with a drink. “They sure ran off in a hurry. Did you and Lowie have some kind of argument?”

“Jesse,” she said, crossing the room toward him. She felt so very odd. She wasn’t thinking about what she was doing, just standing off watching herself do it.

He heard something in her voice, looked up like Elmer with his ears perked, his expression watchful, sniffing the wind.

“I know about Caroline.”

His gaze didn’t waver. She’d give him that.

“How long have you known?”

“Lowie just told me.”

“Lowie.”
He spit the word out like a bitter seed. “That cunt.”

“It’s not—” She began, but he cut her off.

“It’s none of her goddamned business. She’s always sticking her nose in where she doesn’t belong.”

The room was so dark and quiet around them, Emma felt that she was floating, as if the two of them—she in a high-backed chair he had bought at an auction, and Jesse on the leather sofa— were suspended. She blinked and the edges of the sofa seemed to be rimmed in light. The whole world had come down to this. There was nothing outside this room, nothing anywhere. Was this what it felt like when two people faced each other with drawn guns, life narrowed down to just one pinpoint of space and time? But that was life or death. This was
love
, or it used to be. She wasn’t sure what any of it was about anymore, or what she was doing here, but whatever it was, she had to play it out.

“You didn’t know before?” Jesse asked.

She had rehearsed this scene so many times in her head, the moment of confrontation when she would play the wronged wife. She’d run her lines, his. But that question had never been in the script.

She hesitated. This was crucial. He was very crafty, Jesse Tree, turning this into a game. What was he holding in his hand? What should she show him in return? There was real danger when the stakes were this high and you had to make up the rules as you went along.

“No.”

“No what, Emma?” His full attention was upon her. He leaned forward, studying her face.

“I didn’t know!” But her voice was rising. He’d win if she got rattled.

“Come on, Emma. You’re a very smart woman. You knew all the time.”

“I didn’t.”

“Don’t play stupid with me.”

And she rose to the bait, the challenge to her intelligence, as he knew she would. “Yes, goddamn you, I’ve known from the beginning!”

“So why didn’t you say something?”

Why, he was pushing the move back to her, putting her on the defensive. Wait a minute.
She
wasn’t the one in the wrong here.

“What could I have said? If I’d asked you to stop seeing her, would you have stopped?”

Instead of answering, Jesse rose and left the room. Then from the kitchen she could hear the tinkle of ice falling into his glass.

“You want anything?” he called, his voice light now, as if this were any other time. He was stalling.

Did she want anything? As in:
I’m going to the bank, can I bring you anything? Sure, how about a million dollars?
But what
did
she want? Even now, as she stood upon the precipice, knowing that any step could be the one that tumbled them over into the abyss, she didn’t know the answer to the question.

“Emma?”

“Some cognac, please.”

For a woman who had almost always known her mind—who could run her finger down a row of dresses, through a catalogue, yes, no, yes, no, ticking them off—here, in the big time, she was adrift.

More than once she’d flipped a coin and said to herself. “Go, stay,” to see how she felt about which way it fell.

She’d sat in bed with a pen and a yellow legal pad. One of the items she’d written under “Stay” was: “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”

Them? Them, the people who whispered, “
Mixed marriage
—it’ll never fly.” All those people she watched avert their eyes quickly, pretending they weren’t looking. Rosalie and Jake—if they knew. Which raised another question, the one voiced by perfect strangers who didn’t know what the Sam Hill they were talking about, to use one of Jake’s expressions, who harumphed, “Well, a Southern girl marrying a black man.
That’s
a pretty obvious rebellion, don’t you think?” There were people who had suggested to her, to her face, that she had married Jesse as a
statement
. Well, fuck them very much. If it had been a statement she ought to have told Rosalie and Jake—right?

How easy it was, she thought, to look at other people’s lives and see them in terms of yes/no, good/bad, black/white.

Jesse was back now, holding a balloon glass half filled with cognac in one hand, in the other his scotch. He set them both down on the table before her, ever so politely. He still hadn’t answered her question: If she’d asked him to stop, would he have stopped?

But while he was in the kitchen he had thrown off his watchful look and exchanged it for one she absolutely hated—righteous indignation, which made his back ramrod straight. His mouth turned down at the corners, yet with a whisper of contempt, as if he smelled something nasty, as if he were Prince Hamlet. Yes, that was it. There was something rotten here, which was certainly not
his
fault, and he was going to weed it out, then rise above it.

But he never pulled it off as tragedy. No, Jesse, she thought, your princely posturing is melodrama, and it stinks.

“I never would have started it, you know,” he said now as if he were speaking from some lofty place, a balcony, “if you hadn’t wanted me to.”

“I
wanted
you to have an affair with Caroline?” Had she?

“Who told me that very first day,” he looked down at his watch, “exactly a year ago, that she was attracted to me?”

“Yes. I did. I said that. And it was true, wasn’t it, that observation? But that didn’t mean I wanted you to go right out and screw her.” Emma could hear herself, an angry woman, her voice raised way too loud.

Jesse flared his nostrils as if she had said something unforgivably inelegant.

She pushed on. “Is that not what we’re talking about—your screwing Caroline?”

He rose from the sofa and leaned against the fireplace, punctuating his speech with gestures of his glass. “Not really. What we’re talking about is
why
. Which you know very well, Emma, is because
you
didn’t want to. You never wanted to be close.” His lip trembled, and his voice shook.