The Obituary Writer (6 page)

Despite everything, she did not end the affair right away. Instead, she waited until after the election. Perhaps it was part of her recklessness then, but she kept meeting Miles. Every Monday night she went to campaign headquarters in the law office and sat beside him, calling people to urge them to vote for JFK. They sat at big desks, and drank cold bottles of Coca-Cola, the fat White Pages open in front of them. At nine o’clock, they left along with everyone else, and went to their separate cars, and drove around the block, meeting back in the parking lot where she got into his car and they drove off together. They had one hour to say all the things they wanted to say to each other, to touch each other, to wonder how they could be together. Usually, they parked in an empty bank parking lot down the street. Claire believed that they were in love, and they had just that one hour on Monday nights and Wednesday afternoons together.

On election night, in the Hilton Hotel ballroom, under a ceiling of balloons and streamers, she had kissed him for the last time.

“We won,” he’d said into her mouth. His hand was on the small of her back, and she stood slightly on tiptoe to reach his lips.

By then, she had learned she was pregnant.

“We won,” she said back to him, letting him press his body against hers. She said it, even though she knew it wasn’t so.

While Peter went to call Birdy, Claire tried to feed Kathy the hot dog. She had woken up, fussy and disoriented. In their rush to leave, Claire had forgotten to take Mimi, Kathy’s stuffed bunny, and now Kathy was in a panic, demanding it. “I need her!” she wailed. “Go get her! Get Mimi!”

“Mimi’s at home asleep,” Claire said.

“I need her!”

The waitress walked by, carrying a tray of empty glasses.

“Excuse me,” Claire said, stopping her. “Could you fill this bottle with warm milk please?”

Kathy’s cries pierced the restaurant.

“Tough having to take her out in a storm like this,” the waitress said, taking the bottle.

Claire busied herself with getting Kathy out of the high chair. All of her movements were so clumsy now it was hard to imagine she had ever been graceful. Her face and hands were puffy, her breasts achy and large. She felt like she inhabited the wrong body.

Finally she wrangled Kathy out of the high chair. The child had made her body go rigid, and Claire held her awkwardly on her lap.

Peter appeared beside them. “Well,” he said, “the party’s on.
You only turn eighty once,
she said.”

He frowned down at Claire. “Can’t you quiet her?”

“The waitress is getting some milk,” she said. She didn’t mention that she’d forgotten Mimi.

“What a mess,” Peter said.

Kathy’s screams were giving Claire a headache. The baby inside her rolled. The bright noisy restaurant was almost too much. Tears fell down her cheeks. Everything was a mess. She was a mess.

“Claire,” Peter said. “Come on. Stop that.” She could hear in his voice that he still loved her, despite himself. Despite everything.

He tugged on her arm, pulling her up and out of the seat. Claire felt everyone’s eyes on her, a pregnant woman with a screaming child and an angry husband. She cried harder, awkwardly holding her stiff wailing daughter as Peter urged her forward. At the door, the waitress ran up to them, holding out the bottle of milk.

“You’ll need this,” she said, looking at Claire with pity.

Outside, the snow covered everything. It seeped into the tops of Claire’s boots. She pulled Kathy’s hood up.

“Wait here,” Peter said. “I’ll bring the car around.”

Claire watched as his charcoal gray coat disappeared in the snow. Again, she found herself imagining him really disappearing, and never coming back. She imagined calling her old roommate Rose and asking her to come and pick her up. Rose would take her and Kathy back to her house and help her figure out what to do next. Claire squinted at the line of cars inching along beyond the parking lot. Rose had married a pilot and moved to New London, Connecticut. She wondered if that was nearby.

But then Peter drove up, the station wagon skidding to a halt. He leaned across the front seat and opened the door for her. When the interior light came on, Claire paused to study his face illuminated like that. He was handsome, her husband. Even with his dark hair wet with snow and the beginning of stubble along his sharp jaw. Even with his face set hard and his eyes cold.

“Hurry up,” he said. “All we need is for Kathy to get sick on top of everything else.”

Claire sighed, and handed Kathy to him. She had fallen asleep again. Her cheeks were red from the cold and she had snot hardening between her nose and mouth. Peter placed her on the backseat, tucking her little powder blue blanket around her.

He didn’t shift into first gear. Instead, he stared out the windshield, already covered again with snow.

The car grew dark as the snow accumulated on the windows.

“Claire,” he said, his breath a puff in the cold air.

She waited.

“This baby,” he said, but nothing more.

Claire reached for his hand. The leather of his glove was cold beneath her woolen ones. She was glad he didn’t pull away.

Peter turned to look at her. She thought he might be crying.

“Peter,” she said softly, her heart breaking for him, for the mess she’d made of everything. “Don’t even think it,” she told him.

He looked away. “I need to clean off the windshield,” he said, and got out of the car.

They had met on a flight from New York to Paris. Claire had been a TWA air hostess for exactly five years. You flew until you found a husband, that’s how it went. By the time they had stopped to refuel in Gander, Claire already thought Peter would make a very good husband. He had gone to Columbia University, and graduate school at MIT, and now he was off to work at the Pentagon for Hyman Rickover, the man known as the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Peter had an air of importance about him; all of the other girls noticed too. But he only noticed Claire. In Shannon, as they waited to refuel again, he asked her if she’d have dinner with him that night in Paris. They ate in the Eiffel Tower, and had their first kiss at the top. Such a storybook beginning could only lead to happily ever after, Claire had thought.

She had loved her light blue uniform with the silver wing pinned to her chest and the way her hat fit just so above her blond French twist. She loved mixing cocktails for the passengers and the way the men eyed her when she walked down the aisle past them. She and Rose shared a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan on East 65th Street. They placed an Oriental screen in the middle of the bedroom, with their beds on either side of it. Before they fell asleep, they shared stories about their layovers: the places they’d seen—the Acropolis and the Pyramids and the Eiffel Tower—and the men who had taken them to dinner or for a tour of the city.
He’s the one,
she told Rose when she got back from that trip. They would move to a big house outside Washington, D.C., and have babies and always remember that dinner in Paris, that dramatic first kiss.

She was lucky, that’s what Claire thought. She was a pretty girl from a small town in Indiana, and she had the whole world right at her fingertips. Then Peter walked onto that Super Constellation, and everything changed.

4

The Key to the Majestic

VIVIEN, 1919

E
very Friday morning Vivien went to the library. Today she would return the Cather novel, and Booth Tarkington’s
The Magnificent Ambersons
. The library was small, just three rooms and a sagging front porch. On cold days like today, a fire roared in the hearth in the largest room, and Kay Pendleton, the librarian, had a pot of strong coffee warming. Vivien poured herself some in a chipped cup decorated with pink roses and sat in her usual place at the long oak table in the Reference Room. Kay collected castoffs, like the mismatched coffee cups she kept here and the out-of-print books she bought at estate sales and the like. The books lined a shelf with a handwritten sign hung from it:
Kay’s Personal Oddities and Curiosities
.

Kay Pendleton herself was something of an oddity and a curiosity. She appeared to be a woman who could plow a field and birth a dozen babies easily. But as far as Vivien knew, Kay was a spinster like her. Her fine blond hair was always falling in soft tendrils from the bun she wore, and her pale blue eyes behind her wire-rimmed glasses showed a hint of mischief. Kay wore low-cut blouses that showed off her ample cleavage and the sprinkling of freckles that dotted her chest. Sometimes, Kay Pendleton wore men’s trousers that on her looked feminine and chic. But more often, like today, she wore skirts that hugged her hips seductively. Vivien had seen men have to avert their eyes when they checked out their books, or risk blushing or ogling. How she had landed here in Napa, unmarried and working in a library, remained a mystery to Vivien.

As she did every Friday, Vivien opened her leather-bound scrapbook and read the first page, a habit now since she could recite it by heart.

The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into the “organic” or the “functional.” Organic causes include damage to the brain, through physical injury, neurological disease or the use of certain (generally sedative) drugs. Functional causes are psychological factors, such as mental disorder, post-traumatic stress or, in psychoanalytic terms, defense mechanisms.

Her fingers touched the words, as if she were reading Braille. Physical injury. Post-traumatic stress. David, she knew, could have suffered either. Vivien thought of that April morning, how she had run into the street, Fu Jing screaming at her in Chinese. After that first shock, Vivien had climbed out of her bed and crawled under it. She couldn’t remember what a person should do in an earthquake, even though she had read it somewhere.

When she heard the heavy front door slam, she had been certain it was David coming home to rescue her. Vivien had slid from beneath the bed and run downstairs, calling his name. She could still smell sex on her, and taste him on her lips. Barefoot, her ice blue silk nightgown tangled around her, she’d found not David, but her maid Fu Jing, wild-eyed and covered in dust, speaking in rapid-fire Chinese.
What has happened?
Vivien said, taking hold of the woman’s shoulders and shaking her roughly.
Zai nan,
Fu Jing had said. She said it over and over.
Zai nan.
Later, Vivien would learn that
zai nan
meant catastrophe.

A hand on her arm startled her and Vivien let out a little yelp.

“I’m sorry,” Kay Pendleton said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Vivien, eye to eye with Kay’s breasts rising above her lemon yellow silk blouse, got to her feet. “No, no,” she sputtered. “I apologize for overreacting.”

Kay was holding out a newspaper.
The Denver Post
. “I thought something in here might be of interest to you,” she said. She was a person who looked you right in the eye when she spoke, another unnerving trait of hers.

“Oh?” Vivien said.

“Page nine,” Kay said. She placed the newspaper on the table and sashayed back to her desk in the other room.

Without sitting again, Vivien opened the paper, flipping the pages impatiently until she got to page nine. Her Friday morning routines were a comfort to her, and she didn’t like them interrupted. She glanced at an article on mountain lions, and another on a disease affecting cattle in Colorado and New Mexico. From where she stood, she could clearly see Kay adding books to her shelf of oddities and curiosities, her body a curvy figure eight, her bun lopsided. Vivien sighed. Sick cattle? She shook her head, trying to think of a polite comment to give Kay when she asked what she’d thought of the article. But then a smaller headline caught her eye.
Man Found Wandering Down Colfax Avenue; Claims He Has No Memory of His Past.

Sinking into her chair again, Vivien lifted the paper closer to her face, as if it would bring the man himself closer to her. Phrases leaped out.
No identification . . . Utterly confused . . . Otherwise healthy . . .
And then:
Doctors confirm that the man is suffering from amnesia.

Vivien glanced over at Kay, who had paused to watch her.

“How did you know this was my particular interest?” Vivien asked her.

“I see what’s in that book,” Kay said. “I don’t ask questions.”

Vivian nodded and returned her attention to the newspaper article. The man was estimated to be fifty to sixty years old, in good health except for his lack of memory, and had in his pocket a key to a room at the Hotel Majestic on Sutter Street in San Francisco. The Hotel Majestic, the article continued, opened in 1902, and was one of the few hotels to survive the devastating earthquake of 1906. Vivien’s heart beat faster. She and David had spent a weekend at the Hotel Majestic. Not just any weekend, but their first weekend together. Despite Lotte’s warnings, Vivien had met him for dinner that night. He was older than she’d remembered, ten years older than her.

They’d finished dinner before she’d blurted, “What about this wife of yours?”

“We’re unhappy,” he’d said matter-of-factly. He sipped his cognac, then stared into the glass. “But she won’t give me a divorce.”

“So you seduce young women to stay happy?” Vivien asked.

He’d smiled up at her. “Have I seduced you?”

She blushed.

“It is my intention,” he admitted, which made her blush deepen.

“I don’t go out with married men,” Vivien said. It was what Lotte had told her to say.

“But you’re out with me now.”

He was teasing her, she saw that. But it angered her enough to bring her to her feet and pull on the jacket she’d draped over the back of her chair. How she wished that she’d kept it on instead of revealing her collarbone and flesh below it to him. Had she intended to reveal so much of herself so readily?

David stood too. He reached over and very carefully buttoned her jacket for her.

“There,” he said. “Now I’ll call a taxi to take you home.”

For three miserable weeks, she heard nothing from him. In that time, Lotte got married, and Vivien dutifully danced with the dentist from Boise and even let the neighboring vintner kiss her outside as the band played the last dance of the evening. He kissed her too roughly, and groped at her, and invited her to come to Napa soon. She’d agreed, anything to keep David out of her thoughts. Then Lotte and Robert left for their honeymoon in Yosemite, and for the first time in her life, Vivien was alone. She had other friends, of course. But there was only one Lotte, who had been by her side from the start.

When finally David’s calling card arrived in her mailbox, Vivien almost cried with relief. The way he’d buttoned her jacket that night, so tenderly, had made her feel safe. With Lotte ensconced at Robert’s family’s vineyard in Napa, Vivien needed to build a new life for herself, to create a new family.

I will find a way. Trust me,
he’d written.

Don’t trust him,
Lotte had warned her.

That very night she had hurried to meet him at Coppa’s, and she had decided that, yes, she would trust him.

She could imagine what Lotte would say, that this was a coincidence. The fact that Vivien and David spent their first night together—a night that turned into an entire weekend—at the Hotel Majestic, and that this amnesiac who happened to be the age David would be had he survived had a key to a room there, all of it Lotte would write off to coincidence.

But how could Vivien dismiss it so easily? She went to the atlas that lay open on a table behind her, and flipped first to the United States, and then to the western United States. There was Colorado, a big square state roughly a thousand miles, Vivien guessed, from where she stood. She allowed herself to believe for a moment that the only thing between her and David was one thousand miles. That she could be on a train this very afternoon, heading eastward. That she might walk into the hospital where he was held for observation and that his memory would return when he saw her. Thinking these things made her breathless, and Vivien gulped air, trying to breathe normally again.

She had barely known him when she’d agreed to go with him to the Hotel Majestic that spring night. They had gone to Coppa’s in North Beach for dinner and Vivien had recognized the writer Jack London there, sitting at a big table in the middle of the restaurant.

David was telling her about the case he was preparing for trial, and Vivien had put her hand on his—the first time they had touched, really—and whispered, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying. All I can do is stare at Jack London.”

David took her hand in his, closing his fingers over it, and followed her gaze to the crowded table. “Which one is Jack London?” he asked her. “So I know which one to beat up.”

“He’s the handsomest one at that table,” Vivien said.

“I’m going to have to break that perfect nose of his,” David said, leaning into her. His mouth on her ear made her shiver, and Vivien leaned her head back, allowing his lips to graze first her ear, then her neck. “Would you find me too forward if I invited you to come with me to the Hotel Majestic for the night?” he whispered.

She did not look at Jack London again as she placed her stole around her shoulders and left hurriedly with David.

Lotte would tell her to be sensible. She would tell her that rather than get on a train and travel a thousand miles, she should contact the hospital in Denver. Vivien’s breathing slowed. Yes. That would be the sensible thing to do. More than anyone, she could tell them about the thin white scar beneath his chin. She could even tell them how he got that scar as a young boy, trying to jump a fence. She could describe the constellation of freckles on his back, and the distance one would have to travel to reach his thighs from his toes.

The sharp smell of earth and spice brought her out of her reverie. That Italian man, the one who knew Lotte and her husband, who always asked her to dinner, stood in front of her, a worried look on his face.

“Miss Lowe,” he said in his halting English, “you need to sit? You need some water?”

“No,” Vivien said. “I’m fine.”

He peered at her. “Your face,” he said, “it’s very . . .” She watched him struggle for the word. “White,” he said finally, defeated.

“You mean pale,” she said.

“Pale,” he repeated, giving the simple word too many syllables.

“Well,” Vivien said. “Nice to see you again.”

“Sebastian,” he said.

She had started to walk away from him, but she turned. “What?”

“I am Sebastian,” he said.
Se-bah-sti-ahn.
He held a black hat in his hand, and worried the brim as he spoke.

Vivien nodded. “Yes. Of course. Sebastian.”

The light was changing, morning becoming noontime, and here she did not even have her books yet. She left the Reference Room and went into the smaller room where Kay sat at the circulation desk, immersed in a book.

“Is the new Zane Grey in?” Vivien asked her.

“I put it aside for you,” Kay said. She retrieved it from the Reserved shelf behind the desk.

“How’s that one?” Vivien said, motioning to
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
opened in front of Kay.

Kay hesitated. “I have no idea,” she admitted, blushing.

Vivien laughed. “I knew you were listening.”

“Guilty,” Kay said. She lowered his voice. “Poor guy. He comes in here every Friday morning, just hoping to have a few words with you.”

“You sound like my friend Lotte. Just have coffee with him, she says. What could it hurt?”

The two women watched as Sebastian studied a copy of
National Geographic
, frowning over it.

“I think he’s handsome,” Kay whispered.

He was short and well-built, with dark wavy hair and a voluminous mustache. No matter what time of day Vivien saw him, he appeared to need a shave, his cheeks always covered in five o’clock shadow. His eyes were large and deep brown, and gave him an air of sadness somehow.

“I suppose,” Vivien said. “I . . .” She considered explaining to Kay Pendleton how she was in love with a ghost, but stopped herself. Vivien knew too well how easy it was to open your heart to strangers.

Kay waited, but Vivien just shook her head.

“I’m not interested,” she said finally.

Kay held up her book. “You can have this one if you’d like.”

Relieved for the change of subject, Vivien agreed.

Kay stamped the books in red and handed them to Vivien. “I would remind you when they’re due,” she said, “but I know you’ll have them back next week.”

Vivien tucked them into her bag, beside her scrapbook. “I wonder,” she began.

“You want that newspaper?” Kay said.

“I know the rule is not to let them leave the library—”

Kay leveled her gaze at her. “I’ve never followed a rule in my life,” she said. “And I suspect you’ve broken a few yourself.”

Vivien looked away from her.

“Go on,” Kay said. “Take it.”

“Thank you,” Vivien said.

She went back to the Reference Room and carefully folded
The Denver Post
, sliding it too into her bag. When she looked up, Sebastian was watching her. He
was
handsome, in a way, Vivien thought.

Sebastian smiled at her, and she noticed that his front teeth were slightly crooked, which made him even more attractive.