The Middle of Somewhere (9 page)

Dante looked as if he was about to dip his toe in a pool of piranha. “Were you happy?”

Liz exhaled. She'd half expected him to take this first tidbit in a different direction and speculate about what trouble might be hiding in their relationship. After all, she and Gabriel were old news, but the secrets she kept from Dante were right here, walking with them every step of the way.

“No, we weren't. Not for most of it.” There. She'd said it. Now what? How long would the entire story take to unravel?

Dante propped himself up on an elbow. “And no one knew?”

“You'd be surprised. People see what they want to see.”

“But you must have been happy when you first got married.”

“I thought so. Optimistic, anyway.”

“You weren't married very long, right?”

“Less than three years.”

“So what changed?”

Liz almost said Gabriel had. It was an easy reach, especially since he was gone forever, and Dante had nothing to go on but her say-so. “I'm not sure.”

He turned onto his back and examined the tent ceiling. “Well, you guys were pretty young.” He was marking the distance between her failed marriage and their relationship.

“I was twenty-one when we got married.”

“That's young.”

Age had to be the reason. No one to blame, just immaturity. She said, “Maybe I didn't know him as well as I thought I did.”

A long pause. “How well do you suppose you know me?”

“Oh, Dante. That's such an impossible question for me. Getting closer to someone doesn't necessarily clarify anything. It's like staring at an electron micrograph. You're closer but nothing's any simpler.”

“So much for optimism.”

“I'm trying to figure it out. I really am.”

“I know,
carina
.” He leaned over and kissed her lightly. “I'm so tired. Let's sleep.”

She repositioned her makeshift pillow and settled into her bag, her limbs sinking into the ground. She conjured an image of Gabriel. His features were vague, but distinct enough that she winced with shame. Maybe she had never seen him for who he was, never understood what he wanted from their marriage. Maybe she never realized that she, the person who had had so little, was the one who wanted more.

L
iz and Gabriel went to high school together in Santa Fe, but ran with different tribes, or, more accurately, he was a member of a variety of tribes while she had only a small circle of friends, mostly two. She might have been more than a bit player in high school except her sarcasm and wit were underappreciated. That and she didn't give a damn about being popular.

Gabriel Pemberton didn't have to give a damn about being popular. He just was. And he managed it without being a jerk most of the time. He as handsome in a clean-cut, East Coast prep school way, and disarmingly candid, and girls found their way to him. He befriended them all and dated only three. It could have been forty. Liz was not a prospect. She was more than pretty enough, but chose not to put herself forward. Boys, including Gabriel, assumed she was aloof, awkward or a lesbian, possibly all three. In truth, she didn't think much of men, and teenage boys did nothing to argue the opposing case. She went out a few times with a couple of boys from other schools (simpler all around), but thought she might wait until the selection improved, or she died, whichever came first.

They both ended up at UCLA, he on a track scholarship (middle distances) and she because it was the best school that offered her a place. In the spring of their second year, they met outside a dorm party where he was helping a friend vomit into the bushes. She watched them from the steps, deciding if she would wait for Valerie, already a half hour late, or simply return to her aunt's house. By the time she'd thought it through, the vomiter was taking a nap on the lawn. Gabriel climbed up and sat beside her.

“You're Liz, right?”

“Guilty.” She was surprised he remembered her. “And you're the fellow who needs no introduction.”

He flashed his knock-the-girls-out smile. “You cut your hair. I like it.”

She'd worn it chin length when everyone in high school had tresses streaming down their backs. Now it was cut in a pixie-style. “You like guinea pigs. What a coincidence. So do I.”

For the next two hours their conversation flowed as freely as the beer they were missing upstairs. Turns out, sarcasm is an acquired taste. As for Liz, it was now permissible to fall for a guy like Gabriel. In a city of fifteen million, teeming with actors, would-be actors and surfer dudes, he really wasn't all that popular.

In the days that followed, their conversation continued between classes, over meals and, after two weeks, in bed. They talked as if no one had ever listened to them before. For Liz, this was more or less true, particularly where men were concerned. She had grown up without them. Her mother, Claire, was a sculptor with a small talent and a large trust fund. When Liz was eight, she asked her mother why she and her father were not married. “We're both much too selfish.” Liz took it as the truth, at least about Claire. Her father did marry, but she had no idea how it turned out, because her mother waved aside her questions with a bored flick of her wrist. And Liz never dared to ask her father directly.

So she lived with her mother in solitude. Claire fed and clothed her, but played with her or read to her only sporadically. Some days she'd invite Liz into her studio and hand her sticky lumps of clay or pots of watercolor. More often she'd ignore her, not assiduously, but as if she'd forgotten she had a child. There were nannies from time to time, but Claire couldn't adhere to any sort of schedule, and they soon left for steadier work. When Liz was a teenager, she asked her mother why she'd bothered to have a child. Claire wasn't offended by the question.

“Every woman should have one. I thought it would be interesting.”

Apparently not.

From an early age, Liz learned to keep her own company. When she tired of her books and toys, she began to disassemble household objects using a screwdriver and various kitchen implements. She began with simple things—a picture frame, a stapler, her desk chair—but soon graduated to toasters, radios and door locks. Claire was amused and told her daughter that if she couldn't put whatever it was back together, she'd buy a replacement. Liz electrocuted herself only once, when she reversed the wiring on a night-light. It hurt enough to ensure she would not make the mistake twice.

Wiring was easier than making friends, but Liz's humor and lack of malice guaranteed she always had one close friend, which was plenty. When she was old enough to compare her family to others, the contrast evoked more curiosity than self-pity. Fathers were the strangest element, present in her friends' lives at sports games, dinner tables and movie nights, followed closely by doting mothers. She knew about boys from school. They were like her, but louder.

In junior high, the simple understanding of people and relationships she had assembled crumbled under the burden of puberty (hers and everyone else's). Claire moved them from Seattle to Santa Fe in the middle of seventh grade. “For my art,” she explained, and Liz could not voice her anxiety over losing her tiny social toehold. As a newcomer to the school and her own body, she turned to sitcoms for information about families. Her favorite was
Home Improvement
, because she also learned about carpentry and power tools. She survived high school and braced herself for college.

She needn't have worried. Even before she began dating Gabriel, she had Valerie's friendship and enviable accommodations in her aunt's house in Beverly Hills, a half mile from campus. Claire's sister, Georgette, was a professional socialite whose ridiculously large mansion was filled regularly with celebrities, politicians and the merely rich. The glitterati didn't attract Liz (she failed to recognize the names of most of the people her aunt went on about), but she did appreciate her lodgings. Her aunt installed her in the au pair suite, for which Georgette had no use, as she had no children and, during Liz's tenure, no husband. The suite was as large as her Santa Fe home but, more important, completely private, with a view of the lush gardens. She'd seen the dorms. The cramped quarters she could live with. All those noisy, sloppy kids she could not.

Georgette was indifferent to Liz's activities and made few social demands on her, asking her only from time to time “to say hello to some people.” For these occasions, she'd provide Liz with an expensive outfit and trot her out for show. “This is my niece, Elizabeth. She studies medical engineering next door. Isn't she lovely?” Liz wasn't thrilled with being treated as an accessory, but it seemed a small price to pay for what she received in return.

Gabriel listened to Liz's story as he would a documentary about an aboriginal people in a remote and hostile country. His history couldn't have been more at odds with hers, balanced and normal in every way. Liz had long known his father was a Presbyterian minister who, together with his tall, handsome wife, had raised five children, none of whom, she suspected, had ever been left alone with a screwdriver and a toaster. The Pembertons were well respected. It was what gave Gabriel, the middle child, his easy confidence.

From their courtship conversations, Liz pieced together a more complete tableau of the family. The youngest son, Daniel, had Down's syndrome, but even this seemed more of a blessing than an affliction; God had given them Daniel because they were that good. The Pembertons perpetrated all manner of charity among areas of Santa Fe Liz had no contact with: Rotary Club, Meals on Wheels, Boys and Girls Clubs, soup kitchens, hospice groups and Native American reservations. The most her mother had ever done was donate art supplies to the schools when she ran out of space at home.

Gabriel could readily have become a sanctimonious bore, but didn't. He was serious about his goals (he wanted to be a computer jock), but was typically lighthearted (although never goofy). Liz warmed to the idea that there was something to all this God talk—the Pembertons' version of it anyway—and sensed she'd missed an important part of her development. She had gills while other people were breathing with lungs. There was, however, no point in dwelling on it, as it was too late to grow up differently.

She waited for Gabriel to voice a complaint about having wanted to play video games instead of working at a food bank, or having to suffer personalized sermons from Pastor Pemberton, but he never did. This made her worry he was too good for her by far, and she might represent a spiritual and emotional charity case to him. When they'd been dating three months, she got up the nerve to ask him what he saw in her.

“What do you mean? You're amazing.”

“I am? I thought I was cynical, aloof and unusually twitchy.”

He laughed. “You are. Twitchy, I mean. And, yeah, you can be pretty cynical, but who could blame you, the way your parents were. Are. I don't think you mean it.”

“I don't?”

“No. I think you want what everyone wants.”

“And what's that, pray tell?”

“A normal life.”

So she shouldn't have been surprised when, the day after they returned to Santa Fe at the end of the semester, Gabriel invited her to meet his family. Liz had been concerned Pastor Thomas Pemberton and his wife, Eleanor, would be less than thrilled about their son's choice of a Godless geek for a girlfriend, but if it was true, they hid it well. She was asked to join them for dinners, walks, charity events and, of course, at church. The pastor's sermons weren't as sermony as Liz expected. Some were posed as friendly suggestions, which an individual could take or leave. Others were parables, delivered in a way to make the ending seem more of a question than an answer. She asked Gabriel's father how much time he spent creating a sermon.

“Usually twice as long as I need to.”

The internal yapping of her cynical self was soon drowned out by the Pembertons' collective genuine good nature. They weren't the least bit stodgy, mixing the work of church and family with laughter, self-deprecation and a good deal of wine. The eldest daughter was married, and brought her two toddlers to see her parents a couple of times a week. Everyone took turns watching the children, including Liz. As she shepherded them away from myriad dangers lurking in the Pembertons' childproofed home, she realized it was pure chance she had survived her mother's lackadaisical parenting.

When Liz wasn't working at Radio Shack, she was with Gabriel, and usually his family, too. Her mother dropped comments about never seeing her, and said one day she had missed Liz while she was in California. Liz answered with a shrug, and doubted it was true.

“It was so quiet without you,” Claire said.

“Maybe you should get a cat, Claire.” She had been on a first-name basis with both her parents since high school.

“Or a dog?”

“No. A cat.” Dogs expect too much.

Gabriel asked Liz to marry him on the anniversary of the first time they met, on the steps of the same dorm. She said they were too young, but what she meant was he couldn't possibly love her as much as he appeared to. Six months later, he asked her again, and she refused him in the same way, for the same reason. Finally, on their second anniversary, Gabriel led her to the steps once more. His eyes pleaded with her. His love was palpable.

Gabriel was the first man to love Liz, to truly love her. So she said yes.

Her father, Russ Kroft, showed up at the wedding to give her away. Every time Liz thought of that phrase, “give me away,” she wanted to laugh, or puke. Gabriel and his earnest family had quashed most of her cynicism, but she had a secret stash of it for her parents. She'd have been content to walk down the aisle alone, but Eleanor Pemberton couldn't bear the thought.

“Whatever he is or is not, he is your father. You don't want to regret this opportunity to help him become a better man.” Gabriel's mother could utter this with a straight face and mean it. There wasn't a hope in hell that Russ wanted help from Liz—and she doubted he was keen on self-improvement—but she couldn't tell Eleanor that.

The last time she'd spoken to Russ was more than two years ago. He had called to say he would be in Santa Fe in a few days' time and hoped to see her. She had informed him she had been at UCLA for nearly two years.

“You don't say,” he said. “What are you studying?”

“Biomedical engineering.”

He let out a low whistle. “You don't say. Good jobs in that field?”

“A few.”

“Well, good luck with that.”

“Thanks.”

A long pause. “I guess that means I won't see you next week.”

“I guess not.” And it's way too much trouble to get to Los Angeles.

“That's too bad. It's been a while. What? A year?”

“Two.”

Another whistle. “You don't say. Santa Fe would have been convenient.”

“I'd move the university for you if I could, but it's awfully big.”

He guffawed. “That's a good one! Okay, I got to go. You take care.”

“'Bye.”

The conversation about the wedding hadn't been much better.