The Lemon Orchard (10 page)

“It’s kind of cool,” Jenny said grudgingly. “Did Daddy want me to go?”

“We both want you with us,” Julia said. “But he understood.”

Jenny was a savvy ten-year old. She loved her father, but she knew he worked all the time. The best lawyer in a small, wealthy town, he had constant and varied work, and he was much in demand on the golf course and tennis courts. If Jenny had stayed home in Black Hall, there would be babysitters every day.

“See?” Julia asked.

Their tent was semi-permanent, made of green canvas. Julia loved it—how rustic it was, how close she slept to Jenny, the canopy of stars from horizon to horizon at night. She loved that she was showing her daughter self-sufficiency and an exciting side of academia. It made her sad, but she even enjoyed the fact her husband wasn’t there.

She and Peter still loved each other, but that made the rest hurt even more. They were good parents and decent partners. They fought, but in private, where Jenny couldn’t hear. They cared about each other—but in the way friends, or brothers and sisters, might.

Some nights, lying in bed beside Peter, she wanted so much more than easygoing conversation and a quick kiss before bed and sex that felt almost impersonal, more indifferent than passionate. Julia wanted to attack him—not just sexually, but in anger. The rage was powerful, and scared her.

The team was excavating the edge of a mesa where a civilization had once thrived. The mound, known as the Uto-Aztecan Site, contained remnants of a culture—hunting, building, and cooking instruments, caves painted with scenes of tribal movement, the hunt, and Spanish domination. While archaeologists uncovered and catalogued artifacts, Julia and her fellow anthropologists studied the culture, tried to understand the various tribes who had passed through this space—to understand what had caused them to move here.

Jenny had brought her dolls from home, and Julia watched her stage battles against the conquistadors. She had no doubt that her girl dolls would prevail against the armed men on horseback. At night they lit their tent with lanterns and would play on the wood floor, raised up about six inches from the ground, trying to ignore the crawling and slithering noises they heard below. They had seen one rattlesnake at the site, a hundred yards away, but Julia knew the desert night was filled with plenty of other poisonous snakes and insects.

“The Spaniards had every advantage,” Julia said. “They rode in blasting. So the Indians had to be shrewd, use their knowledge of the land, to protect their families.”

“This girl,” Jenny said, intent at play, “found one of the Spaniards’ swords.” She used a spike they’d cut from a prickly-pear cactus earlier. “And when the conquistadors ride in at night, she fights like this!” Jenny waved the spear over her doll’s head. “The girls are too small, so they use magic to help them. All the witches come down the mountain and fight the bad men with their powers, and they win! The invaders are dead and can’t hurt anyone anymore.”

Julia nodded, and while she helped Jenny form a burial mound among their dirty clothes, she knew the truth of history had gone the other way. The occupants of this mesa had been wiped out in less than a month. Her archaeologist colleagues had found graves filled with ancient bones and skulls, even those of children and infants. She did her best to keep Jenny away from the burial sites, but Jenny was wily, and had spied them as the scientists examined and measured tiny femurs and tibiae and rib bones.

“Ready for sleep?” Julia asked when Jenny had tucked her dolls in for the night.

“What if they come back?” she asked.

“Who?”

“The bad guys. The conquistadors.”

“They won’t. They’ve been dead for centuries.”

“Their ghosts, then.”

“Well, we have our cactus swords to fight them off,” Julia said.

“We can protect ourselves,” Jenny said. “Even without Daddy.”

“Yes, we can,” Julia said.

“I know he didn’t want to come,” Jenny said, “but I wish he’d wanted us to stay home with him.”

Julia tried not to react to Jenny’s words. Had Jenny, always hypersensitive to Julia’s thoughts and feelings, sensed the relief she felt being away from Peter? Or had Jenny sensed her father pulling away, too? Either way, it made Julia sad.

“Why don’t you draw him a picture, and we’ll both write him letters, and send them out tomorrow?”

“He’ll be so glad to hear from us.”

“He will,” Julia said.

The next day they wrote letters to Peter and handed them to Lupe Alvarez, Dr. Chris Barton’s assistant, to put in the mail pouch. Chris was lead anthropologist on the project, and he’d brought many of his students, including Julia, from Yale. Chris’s wife, Maxine, and their two kids had come along, so he’d welcomed Jenny and other students’ children.

Older kids took turns babysitting, running a sort of summer camp. They drew cave paintings in the sand, scratched petroglyphs on small rocks, sat around the campfire at night, and told ghost stories. The sky was endless, the stars so close, and every night Jenny wished on the first star that her parents wouldn’t get divorced. Julia knew because Jenny always made the wish in a stage whisper.

Julia longed to reassure Jenny that that would never happen. But deep inside she wasn’t sure what she wanted. Watching Chris and Maxine, she found herself dreaming of a good marriage, two people who not only supported each other but shared their deepest interests—that’s where she and Peter had gone wrong. At night, when the kids were staring up at the stars and making up stories about the constellations, Julia would watch Chris slip his arm around Maxine, watch her rest her head on his shoulder.

One night she heard music coming from their tent and peeked out to see them dancing in the dark, thinking they were alone. She’d felt ashamed but had been unable to keep from watching. The desert night was cold, but Maxine wore a silk slip nightgown; it glistened in the dark. Chris wore jeans and was bare-chested. They danced for a long time, and Julia saw the tenderness between them. When they kissed, it was anything but tender, so she inched back into her tent and hoped they didn’t hear the zipper coming down.

As she lay rigid in her tent, with Jenny breathing softly in her sleep a few feet away, tears burned her cheeks. She remembered the first Campus Dance with Peter, on the Brown green with colorful paper lanterns glowing all around. It had started to rain, coming down hard, drenching her dress and his suit, and they’d kicked off their shoes and pressed so close against each other that they’d felt naked in the downpour.

Like Chris and Maxine, Julia and Peter had fallen in love in college. How had the Bartons’ marriage stayed good while Julia’s had drifted into something so dull? Peter used to hold her face in his hands and stare into her eyes as if he wanted to enter her, become one person sharing skin and bones.
Forever,
he’d say.
Forever,
she’d respond.

She knew it was her fault. She had tried to be too “good”—had put her own interests on hold so Peter could go to law school first. Somehow they’d gotten the idea that his work was important and hers was inconsequential. Peter had fallen into law school almost by default—he’d finished college without any better plan—while Julia had dreamed of Yale, travel, following the teachings of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, and studying other cultures her entire life.

Peter understood on an intellectual level, but by the time Julia actually entered grad school, he was living the life of a shoreline lawyer—he wanted her to golf and play tennis with him, have dinner parties with other lawyers and people who belonged to the Black Hall Beach Club, instead of devoting herself to rigorous study.

“We’ve outgrown that,” he said. “We busted our asses in college—now we can relax.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “I haven’t outgrown anything—this is what I love.”

“I know you love reading about anthropology, and there’s no reason we can’t take an Abercrombie and Kent trip to Machu Picchu—or Samoa, wherever it was Margaret Mead studied, wherever you want to go. But you don’t have to prove anything.”

“I know,” she said.

“So why, when everything here is perfect, are you taking this on?”

“Because when I told you I wanted to be an anthropologist,” she said, “I meant it. Luxury travel isn’t the same thing.”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” he said.

She agreed and apologized. But she kept at her work, knowing Peter considered it unnecessary and inconvenient, and slowly they began to have quite a different marriage than the one they’d started with.

Now, talking to Roberto, she told him about being in the desert with Jenny, how she and Peter had never been the same after that.

“We stayed together,” she said. “But we were not happy.”

“But you had so much,” Roberto said.

“It seems that way,” she said. “And we did in many ways. But not enough of the right things.”

“What are the right things?” he asked.

“I don’t know how to put it—we were broken. We were good parents to Jenny, but we weren’t good enough to each other. We stopped loving each other the way we used to. Before he died, we were planning to divorce.”

“You don’t believe marriage is forever?”

“Not when there’s too much hurt.”

He nodded, as if he understood something about that.

“What about you?” she asked to cover her awkwardness. “Do you have a girlfriend, are you with someone?”

“No,” he said. “No one.”

They drank coffee as the sun rose higher over the mountain, filling the lemon grove with a golden glow. Julia’s stomach flipped; they’d gotten off course, and she still hadn’t told him her plan. Serapio walked from behind the barn, obviously looking for Roberto. A rattletrap Honda pulled up, and three workers climbed out and stretched.

“Time for work,” Roberto said.

Julia paused. She knew she could have gotten him to stay—he would have considered it impolite to walk out while she was talking. But thinking about Peter had made her more emotional than she’d expected; all she wanted was a long walk on the beach with Bonnie. She could tell Roberto the rest later.

“Thank you for the coffee,” he said.

“Thank you for talking to me,” she said.

He paused, as if he wanted to say something more, but instead turned and walked into the orchard.

Lion

Lion knew the last week of October meant craziness in Malibu. When had people started decorating their houses as if for some kind of warped orange-and-black Christmas, trying to outdo each other with hideous and cheap commercially produced ghosts and goblins? Where was the originality? Half the town worked in the industry—if they were going to do it up, they might as well have Industrial Light and Magic come in and create a worthy spectacle.

For Lion, living in a crumbling mansion of dusty dreams, he saw no reason to gild the lily. Decorating for Halloween wasn’t for him. He had the money to hire a studio set decorator and create a true haunted house, but it seemed a waste. If he felt like it, he’d dress up like Dracula on the actual night and hand out Italian chocolates. This might be the very year he’d do just that. His mood had changed recently.

Having Julia just across the mountains made Lion feel young again. Perhaps it was because of all the happy times she’d spent with him as a little girl, when he was dashing, daring, and indestructible the way only certain youthful male movie stars can be.

In those days he could walk down the beach at the Malibu Colony and be one hundred percent sure every eye was on him and every whisper was about him. What an ass he’d been! To think back and remember that level of hubris—God, a midday vodka was in order. He poured Grey Goose into a Steuben glass tumbler and toasted himself in the mirror, gray hair and all.

Julia had always kept him grounded. To her, he was just Uncle Lion. The fact he’d sometimes show up in a movie or in a magazine amused and delighted but never impressed her. She might not realize this now, but she was just the medicine he needed. With Graciela away, and his star fading a little more every awards season when he saw all the new faces up for nominations, he’d been feeling down on himself and his absurd profession.