Valley Fever (12 page)

He took such a long time to extinguish his cigarette and make the fifteen-foot trip.

“What is this town going to do with a table of girls like this?” he said. His voice was the same: soft, deep, with rocks in it. I would never not be in love with George Sweet. “Hi,” he said.

Seeing George was easier because I was drunk, and I tried to feel even drunker than I was so that his face and his posture and the cowlick at his temple wouldn't give me a deep pain in my sternum. He sat next to me and put his arm around me and said, “How long are you here?”

“Not long,” Anne told him.

“You should come see my bees,” as if nothing at all had passed between us, no time, no parts of me he owned, no relationship at all. “You should come see my bees,” as if I were a reporter or a distant acquaintance. “I wish you would,” he said.

“What bees?” I said.

Bootsie said, “We use George's honey in the honey vanilla ice cream.”

“I thought you were writing trashy books,” Anne said. “That's what Ingrid said.”

“I didn't say trash.”

“You did, too.”

“I'm sure I would not have said that.”

Bootsie said, “That's all right, girls. George hasn't opened his typewriter for years. Have you, George?”

George said, “I'll tell you, during bad years for pistachios, writing a thriller seems like pretty good money.”

I said, “I didn't say trash, George. I never said that.”

He smiled his bent smile at me. “But no, I haven't written anything for a while. Not even letters. Not even long e-mails.”

“Well, of course, no one writes letters,” Anne said.

“Ingrid used to write beautiful letters,” he said.

“Yes. And then I stopped.”

The girl with the yellow dress came over and took our empty glasses.

“You had the mojitos,” George said. “How many?”

“Too late to catch up,” I said. “Were going home soon.”

It had been such a long night. A sensible part of me thought I should keep going on being angry with Bootsie and especially with George, but anger takes so much energy, and I was running low on energy then. I was so busy being angry with Howard, I didn't have room for the anger usually reserved for Bootsie or George. Anyway, Bootsie had that wild explosion of hair and that smile and George owned a small part of me I couldn't get back and it was impossible to stay angry with either of them.

George said, “Ingrid, do you remember the Post-its?”

I said, “I still have all those Post-its,” scrawled with lines from the movies we watched (“Do you like a cold apple?”) or reminders: “This coffee pot does not clean itself” or “laundry multiplies” or just “I love you.” When we lived together, these pale yellow squares were everywhere, on the walls and floors, in drawers and on window ledges, like moths.

The place was emptying out, and George lit a cigarette from a pack in his breast pocket. He still smoked. “Isn't it funny to think that once you and I ate dinner together every night.”

Even now, he knew exactly the things to say that could knock me over with regret.

“We could eat together now,” I said.

“This establishment stopped serving food at eleven,” said Bootsie.

“We could eat together tomorrow,” said George.

“And the night after that,” I said.

“George,” Anne warned, “you leave my fragile sister alone.”

George removed his arm from around my shoulder. Bootsie got up and locked the front door. “They're fining everyone around here for after-hours cigarettes.” She lowered the blinds at the front window, took ashtrays from behind the bar, and passed them out. People smoking had been ashing and extinguishing on the plank floor.

Anne said, “We're waiting for our drinks to wear off and then we're going home. We have got to stop drinking and driving.”

“They fine for that, too, I hear,” said Bootsie.

George smoked and we all sat and suddenly there was nothing to say.

The girl in the yellow dress sat at the bar, dipping her finger into a rocks glass and speaking quietly to Bootsie's bartender. Two couples had been sitting at separate tables, lingering, smoking.

“Listen, you guys,” Bootsie said then, behind her, to her customers, her voice itself an announcement. “I'm going to make you a deal. Elliot is going to give you all shots on the house. You're going to drink them, and then you're going to leave so we can go home.”

The bartender lined ten glasses on the bar and began to pour shots.

“The end of the night always feels so sad,” Anne said.

“Not for me,” said Bootsie. “At the end of the night I get to count all the money.”

“I liked seeing you,” I said to George.

He said, “You just say that because it's the end of the night.”

“And you feel sad,” Anne said.

“Maybe. I'm drunk, too.”

“Come see the bees,” he said.

“Drunk?” said Anne. “Who is going to drive us home?”

“There are services for this,” Bootsie said, dialing her phone.

Finally the two couples got up from their tables and began to shake the front door. “It's locked,” Bootsie said to us, to herself, to the phone. “It's locked!” she said louder, to her customers. “To keep out the police.”

 

9.

Of course, Howard wrote.

I didn't even want to hear from him. But then sometimes I did. I had been wondering when, or whether, I'd hear from him.

He wrote a letter, typed and printed on the white cotton paper he used at the office. He'd sent it to Anne's house, where it sat for two weeks in a stack of unopened bank statements and small residual checks before Charlie spotted it.

“Look at that handwriting,” Anne said.

“I know, don't point it out.”

“I have to point it out.” Howard's handwriting leaned the wrong way and sloped at a downward angle along the envelope.

“He was neglected by his parents,” I said.

“I have to point it out so you don't make the same mistake again,” she said, running her finger along the diagonal line of my name. “He's practically illiterate.”

I don't have too much of a birth order thing, but would an older child ever get a breakup letter sent to her little sister's house?

“I thought it better if I brought it to you in person,” Anne said. “You don't want to open these things by yourself.”

“Don't I?”

“Do you?”

Howard wanted to apologize for the way things ended on the airplane and for the uncomfortable trip to Aspen and for not helping me to pack my things, but he did not want to apologize for the things he should have, things like asking me to sell my grandmother's armoire before I moved to Los Angeles and for lying about loving me the way he said he did.

Anne counted the apologies. This is the sort of unforgivable thing an older sister will do for you. There were eight. He even apologized for one night he spent out doing coke with his brother, which didn't require an apology. He had padded his contrition. “He wrote this to make himself feel better,” she said.

“Maybe he regrets things.”

“Maybe,” she said. And then, “No.”

“I won't read any more letters from him.”

“There won't be any more.” We were sitting on her bed. Her bed was just next to the window, and looked onto the overgrown tennis court and the green pool, down to the river and across to the vines on the other bank. It was nighttime and the orange light of evening was just sinking under the blue and black. At the ranch, the real dark of night didn't come until a bit later than the dark came in town. Light reflected over the water and took a long time to get past the long, flat vineyards. We were lucky to be out here in the middle of ranches, and not in town, where most of the farmers now lived, in new houses as big as office buildings, lined up one right after the other, surrounded by lawns wet with night sprinklers and the air full of gasoline and the chlorine smells of swimming pools. Out here there was no sound but crickets and dust moving through the willow trees. The night air smelled of bursting fruit. We had slept all day and were still hungover from the night before. “I sort of wish the tennis court and the pool were still just a hill,” she said.

“Less upkeep.”

“Remember when it was just a hill?”

“Why do you always complain about everything?” I said.

“I'm not complaining. I'm talking.”

“Dad likes his pool and his tennis court.”

“It just looks so damaged.”

“There's a difference between damaged and neglected, Annie.” The clay on the tennis court hadn't been groomed for ten years or more. The net had been torn away by weather and ground into the dirt. “Felix will get them a loan.”

“No one ever played on that tennis court anyway,” she said.

“We played.”

“Two seasons.” Those were a couple good years, when Mother had hired a coach to come to the house. Nothing ever came of the competitive tennis hopes she had for us. One coach told me, “You could be really good at this game if you were just slightly more ambitious.” I stopped playing in high school, discouraged by opponents who consistently called the in balls out.

“I'm glad you have a job,” I said.

Anne would leave the next morning. Her sandals and sundresses were neatly stacked in a boat bag by the door. She taped the cartoon three days a week. “I want you to look after our mother,” she said. “And Dad.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” I said. Then the coldness of Howard's letter hit me, or something hit me, it was my hangover probably, and I started to cry. I like to cry in front of Anne because she never asks me to stop. It's like she doesn't even register tears; she is completely resistant. “Of course I am going to look after them. I'm going to stay until Dad sees the doctor.”

“Just make the appointment.”

“He won't go. You know him. He won't go.”

“Trick him.”

“You're the one who's good at tricks, Anne.”

“Maybe I'll do a play,” she said then. “When voice-over is done. I'll go to New York and do a play so people know I can actually act. And you and I can get an apartment together. How's that?”

“We'll have to live in Brooklyn.”

“There are nice parts of Brooklyn.”

“Probably,” I said.

There was nothing in Anne's old room to remind you of Anne—after college she had taken the books and photographs she wanted and had discarded everything else: ticket stubs to football games, teenage journals, old tennis rackets, middle school ceramics class mugs, all went into the dumpster. The room was blank, sterile as a hotel, which is how she preferred to use it. She rarely stayed for more than two nights. “I have to do something,” she said. “I feel like everything is just still. Do you feel the stillness?”

So much about Anne seemed still to me. Every emotion, every scream or demonstration had been stilled into gauzy prettiness. “What will Charlie do?” I said.

“Charlie will miss me.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Charlie is fine.” She waved her hand the way she did. “Charlie's always fine.” Anne stopped taking naps as a toddler, so in the afternoons Mother had slept with a wooden spoon in her fist to swat Anne away. Anne learned early not to come too near. “Are you letting your hair go brown?” she said then.

“I can't afford to go to the colorist as often. Anyway, he's in Beverly Hills.”

“Well, make an effort, sweet pea. Have it lightened up. I want you to look pretty.”

“It's fine.”

“You never listen to me, and later you always say you should have listened.”

“Should I write him back?” I said.

“You should do what will make you feel better.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“He's a liar is what happened.”

“It doesn't make sense.”

“There's something else, Ingrid.”

“Something else to what.”

“Well, there's a girl. Charlie told me.”

“Well,” I said. “It's not like I was planning to go back.”

“He saw them at dinner.”

“When did this happen?”

“She's nothing like you, apparently. She was dressed in business casual.”

“Did Charlie talk to them?”

“It doesn't matter. His letter doesn't matter. The nicest thing he ever did for you was break up with you.”

“Everyone else can see that, right?”

“Yes.”

For a while after Eighty-fourth Street I stayed with an unimportant but doting boyfriend called Quinn, and his apartment was across the street from the editorial offices of one of the food magazines I occasionally wrote for. Of all the apartments and all the windows in New York City, Quinn's looked directly onto my editor's office, so over at
Gourmet
they knew when I woke up at noon or that I was eating packaged doughnuts on the couch or that I was reading the
Post
and not the
Times
. I'd been over there, across the street, and you could see everything: You could see the cereal left on Quinn's countertop and which magazines were on his coffee table. You could see if he'd left his socks on the floor. The day I realized who sat in the offices across the way, I told Anne, “They've been watching me in my underwear all day. Now I can't go out of the bedroom until I'm completely dressed.” She said, “Are you kidding me? Now you know to walk around in your underwear all the time. You'll get a lot more work that way.” Anne took a sensible angle on most everything.

“He doesn't want a letter in return, then,” I said.

“Do what's going to make you feel better,” she repeated. “No need to think about him.”

“Let's have gimlets,” I said. “That will make me feel better.”