The Last Beach Bungalow (3 page)

“I’m over at the house with Ruben,” he said. “We’re still wrestling with the backsplash tile. I think we’re going to go ahead and build out the wall behind the stove. It’s a hassle, but it’s the only way to make it plumb. You want to come see if you like the height of the hood?”

The hood that was going over the range in our new house was Italian. It was an arc of glass and steel, a piece of sculpture, really, that would draw the eye from the family room. We had pendant lights to hang over the central island that mimicked the arch of the range hood. The lights would be reflected in the granite of the island, a spectacular slab of terra-cotta red. Finding these things—the hood, the lights, the stone, the tile, the flooring, the molding and the perfect shade of white paint—had consumed our limited leisure time for the past two years. Instead of lunch, we looked at tile. Instead of sex, we searched together for a range hood.

“Sure,” I said, “I could stop and get Subway.”

“Great,” he said. “See you in a few.”

There was no one in line at Subway, though the restaurant was full. A young girl with her hair pulled back in a neat ponytail asked me what I’d like. I scanned the menu, and my eye caught on the descriptions of the platters they offered for holiday catering. You could get a selection of small sandwiches that could feed twenty, plus chips and soda. The signs suggested that this would be an easy way to host an office party, or to entertain guests during New Year’s football games. I could have a party to celebrate the fact that I had reached my five-year cancer-free anniversary. I could serve all my friends roast beef and turkey to thank them for how much they’d helped me, for how they’d brought lasagna to our house, picked up Jackie to take her to volleyball practice and sent flowers, cards and soft slippers for me to wear in the hospital.

“Ma’am?” the girl behind the counter asked. There were now three people in line behind me, looking at their watches, glaring at me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take three turkey and cheese on sourdough.”

“Mustard and mayo?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

“Would you like drinks and chips with those?”

“Yes, please,” I said, and as she told me the total, my eyes started to tear up again. I closed my eyes and pressed my hand to my lips to keep from weeping out loud. I would get a turkey on sourdough, a Diet Coke and some Lays potato chips to eat on the gleaming granite counter in the middle of my new kitchen. That’s how I would celebrate this milestone—with a fast-food meal in a house that my husband had designed and built after my diagnosis because he thought it was what I wanted.

“Ma’am?” the girl asked. I was now crying. I was standing in line at Subway at lunchtime, and I was crying.

“Are you OK?” the woman in line behind me asked. She was wearing black pumps. That’s all I could see of her as she grabbed a napkin off the counter and handed it to me. The shoes had pointy toes and a white strap that curved over the top of the foot and ended at a button on the other side. The stitching was black on white and white on black. They were like saddle shoes all grown up and gone to town.

“Why don’t you go ahead,” I said, and stepped aside. I turned to sit down on a red plastic chair by the door. I was like a child who couldn’t get control of her own body. A minute went by, maybe two. The woman in pumps came over and squatted in front of me. She was wearing a black suit with a pencil skirt that had a rim of knife pleats at the hem and a jacket that nipped in at her waist—not the easiest outfit to squat in. She put her hand on my knee, which I thought was incredibly presumptuous and incredibly kind at the same time.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.

“Those are great shoes,” I said.

She looked completely unfazed. “They’re Kate Spade,” she said.

I nodded. I’d written a piece for
Inc.
about Kate Spade many years ago, before I had a child and before Kate got into shoes and dinnerware. I’d sat down to lunch with her at Shutters in Santa Monica and we’d had a great conversation about women’s entrepreneurial spirit. We joked about the hippie purse of the woman at the table next to us. I was young, and I was certain that we had bonded in some profound way—that Kate Spade was going to be my friend. I sent her a thank-you note that referenced the joke we’d shared, included my phone number and never heard from her again.

I lifted my eyes to look at the woman in the black suit. She looked smart; Armenian, possibly. She was probably a lawyer who came home at the end of the day and threw together fabulous dinners with lamb and mint. “Have you ever left a pair of shoes behind in a store,” I asked, “because you didn’t think you needed them or you thought they were too expensive and then one day, years later, they pop into your head—the exact color and shape and even their price—and you think, why didn’t I buy those shoes? Why didn’t I bring them home?”

The black-suited woman nodded. “It happened to me with a pair of Frye boots in college. Remember Frye boots?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “That’s what happened to me today, only it wasn’t shoes I left behind.” She didn’t say anything, just squatted there waiting for me to explain. “What I forgot was how to celebrate that I’m alive.”

I drove with my sandwiches along the beach, dipped down into the grove of eucalyptus that lined the creek near Malaga Cove, and then climbed up into the hills. The whole of the Los Angeles basin opened up in my rearview mirror. From here, on a clear day, you could see each building of downtown and Century City, the Getty Museum on the very far side of the valley and even the Hollywood sign, if you knew where to look. Our house—which was one of only five houses on the cul-de-sac on the ridge—had a view that looked out the opposite direction, south toward Catalina Island. We could stand in our master bedroom and watch the giant car carriers steaming toward Long Beach Harbor. We could see the sailboats as they made their way up and down the channel. And with a telescope, in winter, we could spot gray whales migrating south to the warm waters of Mexico. It was all water all the time from almost every room of the house. It astonished me every time I saw it.

I pulled into the driveway, got out of the car, walked past the Porta Potti, up the front path—and suddenly felt as if I’d run into a wall of ice. I could hear hammering inside, could see a guy on a ladder fiddling with the outdoor lights, but I couldn’t move. Someone yelled something in Spanish, and Rick came to the front door.

“Hey!” he said. He leaped down the front steps and kissed me on the cheek. “Are you OK?” he asked, stepping back from me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The ghost of the woman I wanted to be was just inside that door. Her spirit was there, enjoying the view. Her husband’s spirit was there, too—the spirit of the man who’d designed and built this house for a wife he hoped wouldn’t die. I’d always believed that houses could be haunted. I swore to my mother when I was four years old that there was a ghost who lived in my closet—a friendly ghost who kept the monsters away— but she told me to stop making things up and just go to sleep. Every time I tried to tell her about this wonderful thing, this thing that kept me safe and made me happy, that’s what she said: stop making things up and just go to sleep. We only lived in that house a couple of years, but I never forgot the feeling of that ghost.

After my grandmother died, I looked forward to returning to her lakeside cottage in New Hampshire to see if she’d haunt it in the same way. She’d been such a comfort in real life, a woman who taught me to play the piano, who introduced me to Willa Cather and who seemed to understand my mother’s sadness in a way I never could. I expected her to be a comfort in death, too. While the adults scurried through her house in a frenzy of sorting and packing, I sat in front of the old stone fireplace, squeezed my eyes shut and convinced myself I could feel my grandmother’s presence.

“I feel her here,” I said to my mom, but all she said in return was that I should stop daydreaming and help pack up the books.

With so much experience feeling the presence of ghosts who made me comfortable, I didn’t think much about the other kind until I got to college. There was an old house next to the church where we used to perform choral concerts—a shingled house with gables and a weather vane. All the kids insisted it was haunted by an old president of the college who had been poisoned by his wife. I used to look at the dark windows of that dark house and think—yes, some evil spirit surely resides there. There was something about the house, even from the outside, that gave me the creeps. I never asserted my conviction about the house being haunted, however, for fear that someone would tell me to stop making things up.

I handed Rick the Subway bag. “What would you say if I said I
had
seen a ghost?” I asked.

“Well, that you’re nuts,” Rick said.

That night, in the apartment, I lay wide awake as Rick snored beside me. I watched the minutes tick by on the clock and listened to the noises of the night. It was 2:00 A.M., but somewhere in the building someone was taking a shower, someone slammed a door, a car started in the parking lot. It was too late to take Ambien or even Benadryl. I would wake up in the morning as groggy as if I’d been drunk, and I needed to hit the ground running first thing. I had to pick paint colors for the master bath. I had to research an article on lingerie. At three o’clock Jackie had a volleyball game. It would be better not to sleep than to slog through the day on drugs.

“Rick?” I said. He kept snoring. It sounded exactly like a lawnmower. It was amazing that he didn’t wake himself up. Had he stopped snoring and replied, I was going to mention the bottle of champagne that we had on top of the refrigerator. One of his clients had given it to him upon completion of their house six months ago. We both knew better than to store a nice bottle of champagne on top of the refrigerator where it was hot, but there was no room in the small refrigerator and nowhere else to put it in the tiny apartment kitchen. There were baking pans stored in the oven and cereal lined up on top of the microwave. I had measuring cups in a cardboard box in the bottom of the broom closet, and every time I needed to measure something, I had to waltz with the broom and wrestle with the vacuum cleaner.

What I would say to Rick was that I thought we should toast five years. Right then, in the middle of the night. We should pop the cork and drink in bed. I could climb into his lap and take off the men’s-style button-down pajamas I’d adopted during my season of surgeries, when putting anything on over my head was unthinkable. I would unbutton the buttons slowly, while gazing into his eyes, let the top drop behind me like a stripper, and I would explain that we had a homework assignment.

I looked again at Rick. He was a beautiful man, with a thick head of curly hair, and the compact body of a man who, even at the age of forty-five, thinks nothing of playing an hour-long game of volleyball in the sand or getting up at dawn to surf the big winter swells. He was lying flat on his back. I slipped my hands under his shoulder and shoved as hard as I could.

“You’re snoring!” I yelled.

He turned over and kept on sleeping.

I eventually went to sleep, too. I dreamed about being in a house on fire. It was our house—mine and Rick’s and Jackie’s—but it wasn’t any house I actually knew. The fire was going to consume the house—it was big and bad, with thick black smoke, and it had already drawn several screaming fire trucks to the street out front—but I had the sense in my dream the way you sometimes do of time standing still. I had time to collect our wedding photos and time to get Jackie’s entire stuffed animal collection and her volleyball trophies. I methodically went around to each of the rooms—ours, but not ours—collecting the things that were important to us. Nothing was left behind. There was no rushing or worrying. I got out with everything I needed, and I consciously left everything else to burn.

T
HURSDAY

The next morning after Jackie left for school I had to go back to the house. There were four shades of beige and three shades of blue painted in big swatches on the walls of the master bath, and Rick needed me to choose one by noon. I parked the car and managed to make my way through the front door and up the stairs, but there was no denying that same cold feeling of despair. I sat on the toilet to keep myself from bolting out of there. It was a fabulous room, huge and mirrored, with a shower big enough for a party. A picture window over the bathtub (deep, wide, with molded armrests and Jacuzzi jets) looked out over the sky and the ocean. I took deep breaths, squinted and tried to imagine the bathroom a pearly white, then I closed my eyes and tried to image it Caribbean Blue. So much seemed to depend on the color I picked—the person I would be in that room, the marriage I would have, the life I would lead—but I couldn’t imagine a color that would make it all work.

I got out my phone and called Vanessa.

“Do you have a few minutes?”

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No, I just can’t pick a color of paint.”

“I’m on my way,” she said. “But is something wrong?”

“No, everything’s fine. It’s great.”

“And when I show up you’re going to tell me, what? That someone’s died, someone has some incurable disease?”

“I had a mammogram yesterday.”

“I knew it.”

“It was fine,” I said.

“But if it wasn’t fine, you weren’t going to tell me, were you? You were going to wait until we picked out a paint color for the wall or maybe until after we’d had lunch and a stroll on the beach. You’re so bad that way.”

“But it
was
fine.”

“And you’re lucky, too, because you would’ve pissed me off if something were wrong.”

“So can you come?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” she said.

While I waited for Vanessa to cross the street and walk up the stairs, I looked again at the colors. Light beige or dark beige? Sky blue or cerulean blue? How could this decision be so difficult?