The Obituary Writer (23 page)

“I have matching pieces,” the girl said. “A small creamer and sugar bowl.”

Vivien didn’t answer. What could she say? The pattern was a rare one, made in England to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria, and never produced again. She knew too that David had given several pieces to his wife as a wedding gift. He had removed the milk pitcher from their home on Nob Hill and used it every morning to froth the milk for coffee.

“I’ve never met anyone else who owns it,” the girl said.

The teakettle whistled. Vivien poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds to wet them, then counted to thirty before she filled the rest of the pot. She tried to make sense of this girl. Perhaps she was related to David’s wife. Margaret had died shortly after the earthquake, from cholera like so many others had. In her panic and grief, Vivien had gone to the house, hoping that David was there, alive. But Margaret came to the door, tall and thin and ashen, clutching a pale orange silk kimono closed. She was already ill, too ill to say all the things she wanted to say to Vivien.
I have imagined our meeting for years. And now I am too weak to scream all the things at you that I have screamed in my head.

Slowly, Vivien pressed the plunger, watching the water turn dark with coffee.

“Where did you get it?” the girl was asking.

“It was a gift,” Vivien said.

She poured the rich, strong coffee into cups and placed a few anisette biscotti on a plate. Queasy, she took one and bit into it, letting the licorice flavor fill her mouth. Licorice had healing properties, she knew. It settled stomachs and soothed throats. Some believed it helped insomniacs to sleep.

The girl followed Vivien into the living room, and perched on the loveseat where she had sat during her last visit. They set about the business of fixing their coffees, adding cream and sugar, stirring. Vivien dipped her biscotti into the coffee, and chewed the softened cookie, waiting.

But the girl did not say anything. Again, she took in everything around her, narrowing her green eyes, taking stock. Her hair shone a lovely red as the morning light grew brighter.

Watching her, Vivien became aware of her own dull hair, pulled back into a messy bun, and of how she must look with the deep lines that had developed over time between her eyes and around her mouth. Sorrow lines, that was how she thought of them. She saw these same lines on younger women who had experienced great loss. Not this young woman, though. Her skin was smooth, her cheeks rosy, her eyes lively.

Vivien cleared her throat.

“How sad about your husband,” Vivien said. “And so young too.”

The girl smiled ruefully. “My husband is quite a bit older than I am, actually.”

“Oh?” Vivien managed. She found herself shoving back the idea trying to force its way into her brain. Her hands trembled when she picked up her cup, sloshing coffee onto her lap. She wiped at it halfheartedly.

“He’s almost sixty,” the girl said. She now turned her scrutiny on Vivien. “Does that surprise you?”

“Older men marry younger women all the time,” Vivien said.

The girl simply stared at her.

“I don’t even know you,” Vivien said. “I certainly am not judging you. Or your husband.”

Again, the girl said nothing.

“Tell me about him,” Vivien said. She placed her hand at her chest, wanting to slow her racing heart.

“Why?” the girl demanded.

“How can I write an obituary if I know nothing about the deceased?”

“He’s not deceased yet,” the girl said softly.

“Of course. Forgive me.”

“Actually,” the girl said, staring down at her lap, “I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not the one who wants you to write my husband’s obituary. He asked me to come. He wants you to write it.”

She looked up, her eyes wet with tears.

“Do you think it’s bad luck to write the obituary before he dies?” she asked.

“I don’t believe in luck,” Vivien said. “Bad or good.”

“Our maid does,” the girl said. “She’s always reminding me not to put shoes on the table or death will walk in. She makes me cross my legs if the wind blows from the west. Or is it the east? I can never remember. And if I tell her my dream before I’ve eaten any breakfast, she covers her ears and hums. I say, ‘Fu Jing, how can you remember all these silly rules?’ and—”

“Fu Jing?” Vivien asked. Listening to the girl talk, she felt her throat go completely dry.

The girl tilted her head. “Yes,” she said. “Fu Jing. I believe it means Fortunate One?”

Lucky Light. Vivien knew Fu Jing meant Lucky Light. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. Coughing, she got awkwardly to her feet and hurried into the kitchen for water. Standing at the sink, she let the water run cold, then drank a glass straight down. Still, her throat felt parched. She drank another.

Vivien heard the door slam shut. Without turning off the water, she ran into the living room. Once again, the girl had gone. This time, Vivien ran outside. She stood in the middle of the street in her lavender robe, looking left and then right. But the street was empty. It was as if the girl had vanished. Or had never been here in the first place.

Slowly, Vivien went back inside. There, on the table beside the girl’s coffee cup, lay a white business card with black writing. Vivien knew what it would say without having to pick it up and read it. But she did pick it up. She read the familiar words:
DAVID GARDNER AND DUNCAN MACGREGOR, ESQ.
On the back, the girl had hastily scrawled a note.

My husband would like to meet you. Please come to our
home in San Francisco. Soon.

Vivien read the address the girl had written below her note. It was her own flat, the one David had bought for her. Trembling, Vivien stood trying to figure out what to do next.

“I have to go,” Vivien told Sebastian. “You see that, don’t you?”

He had arrived on Friday night with a bottle of Robert’s best wine, a small posy of flowers tied with kitchen twine, and a look of such hope it almost broke Vivien’s heart.

“You think this girl is . . . what? Married to your
amante
?” Sebastian said. The brightness that had been in his eyes when he’d first walked in was replaced with a flat steeliness.

“I don’t know,” Vivien admitted.

“And if she is, what will you gain from seeing him?”

“I’ll know,” she said. “Finally.”

Sebastian rubbed his hands together as if he were worrying away a problem.

“What if he’s alive?” he said at last. “What if he wants you back?”

These same questions had troubled Vivien since the girl’s departure. Was she married to David? And if so, where had he been all these years? What had happened on that long-ago April morning? Did he want some deathbed confession?

“Would you go back to him?” Sebastian was asking. “After all this time?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Vivien said. “I would need to understand what’s happened.”

“But you might?”

Vivien sighed. “I’ve waited so long,” she said.

At first, she refused to have Sebastian drive her. But he insisted. He insisted she let him take her there right now.

“But we won’t arrive until so late,” Vivien pointed out.

“Then we arrive late,” Sebastian said, putting on his tweed hat and the coat he had taken off so hastily when he’d arrived.

He drove too fast along the dark country roads, and it was with great relief that Vivien saw the city lights ahead. She exhaled, and loosened her grip on the seat. When she directed him through the city streets, it was the first time either of them had spoken.

Once, she had had calling cards printed up with her name and that address on it. She used to write it on letters beneath her name. That address had been home. Saying it now felt familiar on her tongue. At last, after all the time spent getting here, Vivien calmed down.

They pulled up to the house.

“This is it?” Sebastian asked, peering out the window.

Vivien peered out too.

“Yes,” she said. “This is it.”

The first time Vivien had walked up these steps, she was a twenty-three-year-old young woman in love. The door was open, as if the entire house was waiting for her to arrive. When she’d stepped inside, she paused in the foyer, unsure of where to go or what to do. Dust motes danced in the air in front of the large bay window. Vivien stood and watched them. The air held the strong smell of furniture polish, and she breathed it in, remembering how the first day of school always smelled like this.

Then David had come down the stairs, opened his arms, and said, “Welcome home.”

Vivien had run into those arms, and let him swoop her up and spin her around before taking her hand and leading her on a tour of the house. It was a tall skinny thing—“Like you,” David had teased her. Those stairs went up three floors, the empty rooms unfolding like secrets and a beautiful stained glass window of a single pink tulip on the landings in between.

“So this is what it feels like,” Vivien said, standing in the room that would become their bedroom.

David turned to her, lifting one eyebrow.

“To be happy,” she said.

Two weeks later, after furniture had been delivered and the kitchen cupboards filled with dishes and glasses and the bureau drawers lined with pale blue fabric and filled with sachets of lavender and Vivien’s clothes hung in the closet on hangers covered with peach silk, she had walked up these stairs again, this time hand in hand with David. At the door, he lifted her and carried her over the threshold. “Soon,” he whispered, “you will be my bride.”

Even though Lotte, newly married and already pregnant, had warned Vivien that he would never leave his wife for her, Vivien knew he would. The wife lived in the large house on Nob Hill where she’d grown up, an heiress to a shipping fortune. She spent months abroad, traveling with her two sisters to Paris and London to shop and see theater.

“Did you ever love her?” Vivien had asked David one night, months after she’d moved in and made the house her own.

He shook his head. “I thought so,” he said finally. “But now I know what it feels like to be in love. I can hardly think straight, and when my mind wanders, it always lands on you. I never felt this way with her.”

“That’s not love,” Lotte had reminded her. “That’s infatuation. Love is worrying together and enduring each other’s moods and smelly socks. It’s not all beautiful and romantic, Vivvie. You are living in a make-believe world.”

But to Vivien, love was indeed exactly what Lotte called infatuation. It was her heart racing when she heard David’s footsteps on the stairs. It was the time spent making herself beautiful for him. It was the feel of his hand on her inner thigh as she drifted off to sleep. It was hope—for the future, for life itself.

“I will wait here,” Sebastian said, not looking at her.

Vivien did look at him, though. She knew in that moment that she could never love him, or any man, the way her younger self had loved David. But perhaps she could find another kind of love with him, a safe steady one. She knew too that she would not be able to have that unless she went into the house.

“Sebastian—” she began, but he held up his hand to stop her.

“Tonight it will be finished,” he said. “One way or another.”

“Yes.”

“When you walk out that door, our life together will either begin or it will be finished,” he said.

She almost smiled at his melodrama. Vivien had grown fond of the way he saw things in almost operatic terms. But she didn’t smile. Instead, she took his hand in hers and brought it to her lips.

“Go,” he said, pulling his hand away.

At the steps leading up to the house, Vivien glanced back and saw the ember of his cheroot glowing.

Slowly, she began to climb the stairs. No longer hopeful or young, she was thirty-seven years old, a spinster, an old maid. A woman who had silver strands in her hair and whose days were filled with stories of grief. She could hardly remember what it felt like to be lighthearted. She could only catch a glimmer of that girl who had raced up these stairs and into this house, who had stepped so boldly into an unknown future. Yet here she was, once again at this threshold, unsure of what lay ahead.

Vivien pressed the doorbell. Inside, chimes played a familiar melody. Ah! Vivien thought at the sound.
Ode to Joy
. David had installed this doorbell for her twenty-fourth birthday. She waited, then pressed again, listening to the first notes of
Ode to Joy
. Then silence, followed by footsteps. And then the door creaked open.

A scowling middle-aged Chinese woman stood in the doorway.

Vivien recognized her immediately.

Fu Jing had been a young Chinese girl, the daughter of immigrants who owned a laundry and lived in a crowded apartment in Chinatown when she came to work for Vivien and David in 1905. The woman who stood scowling before Vivien now, although fatter and older, was Fu Jing.

Unsure of what to say, Vivien took a step inside. She could smell garlic and ginger, smells she always associated with Fu Jing, who had often cooked dinner for Vivien and David in a wok, adding fresh gingerroot and garlic to it and stirring them together in oil over high heat. Later, as she served them their dinner, that smell lingered on her.

“Fu Jing,” Vivien managed to say.

The woman narrowed her eyes.

“I looked everywhere for you,” Vivien said, memories of those horrible days after the earthquake flooding her mind. She’d gone into the chaos of Chinatown, where Fu Jing’s family’s laundry was in ruins and panicked people fled, unable to understand her questions.

Fu Jing just shook her head. Vivien had never been able to read her expressions, and she could not do so now.

They stood together in the foyer, at the bottom of the stairs. Vivien saw that the banister with its curved railing gleamed with care, and the Oriental carpet that covered the center of each step had been well kept. The deep blues and violets on its pattern of birds and flowers had barely faded.

As Vivien stared up them, the young woman who had come to her house appeared at the top of the stairs. Today, her hair was loose, like Vivien’s. But she wore a short skirt that stopped just below her knees, a sleeveless blouse with several long necklaces, no stockings. Vivien had seen such a look in magazines recently, and didn’t like it at all. Instead of emphasizing their hips and bust, it made women look flat-chested and hipless, almost like adolescent boys.