Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
After marriage, Joan was dismayed to discover that Bill was an extrovert.
He liked to go out: to baseball games, dinner, people’s homes.
At parties, he’d promise to stay by her side, but soon there would be a hand on his shoulder, some acquaintance he hadn’t seen in years —and Joan would be left on her own, floundering among strangers with dazzling teeth.
In August, one of Bill’s “good friends” (he had a lot of good friends), a fellow real estate developer named Trevor Hall, turned forty.
Trevor was a rather handsome strawberry blond whom Joan found stiff and prone to extended silences.
Bill said Trevor was a hoot, you had to know him better, but she was doubtful.
Trevor’s birthday party had been planned by his wife, Dina, a frequent entertainer who almost exclusively wore one-shoulder dresses and believed in seating spouses apart at dinner.
At the party, held in their palatial home in Woodside, Dina placed herself in between Miles Keller, a thirty-one-year-old scion of a publishing dynasty, and Antonio Garcia, an architect who’d worked on their home in Sonoma.
Bill was seated across from Dina, while Joan was at the far end.
“The beef was delicious, wasn’t it?” Joan’s neighbor Inez asked.
If Joan tilted her head, she could spot patches of Bill through Dina’s enormous snapdragons down the table; he looked delighted to be next to Candy Gill, who had huge breasts and had inherited a majority ownership of a hockey team from her father.
“Yes, it was very tender,” Joan agreed, slapping herself lightly on the leg to stay awake. Inez could be dull, but she was also extremely pretty, which was likely why she had been stowed in social Siberia by the cunning Dina.
“Everything is so pretty. The tablescape. I’ve always thought it’d be nice to be a floral designer. Though I wonder how they feel about all their work eventually dying.” Inez patted her lips with a napkin. “What do you do again?”
“I recently graduated.” Joan had finished Stanford last month.
That she possessed a master’s in mathematics and spent her days polishing wood and dusting drapes was depressing; it wasn’t that she had to do such work, it was that she couldn’t even do it well.
Falling House was intimidatingly large, and as soon as Joan moved in, the housekeeper, Enid, who under Bill had enjoyed a cosseted employment in which she spent the majority of her days listening to talk radio and baking for her grandchildren, had resigned.
Joan had yet to hire a replacement—she didn’t know how to hire one.
Until recently she had been a sort of housekeeper herself; she had no idea how she could presume to exhibit the gravitas of an employer.
“That’s nice,” Inez said. “To have graduated.” A stretch of drunken laughter erupted from the other end of the table.
Inez blinked her big eyes, waiting for a response, and now Joan would have to think of something, and the conversation would continue like this, lobbing tedious little bombs back and forth indefinitely.
Oh, how did people do any of this? Sometimes Joan wished there was a place she could visit to feel less alone: a restaurant with very friendly servers, perhaps, where she might order a bowl of spaghetti and casually surrender her insecurities.
When she was little, she used to daydream of a place she named in her head the Satisfaction Café, which had friendly employees and nice food and pretty toys; even as a child, Joan’s imagination had not stretched to fantastic outcomes but, rather, a reasonable amount of happiness.
It seemed to her incredible that the world’s collective adult population, with all its resources and understanding of loneliness, had yet to produce such a space—though in the absence of such, Joan wished she could at least speak to another wife, and specifically a younger one.
The May–December pairing was common enough in Bill’s crowd, and at some parties Bill and Joan appeared practically the same age, so extreme were other gaps.
And yet at such events the wives seemed to shun Joan’s attempts at contact—they murmured quick niceties and then edged away, back to their husbands.
Though, wait: Wasn’t Inez married? Joan vaguely recalled Bill speaking of her husband, that he had some sort of business with chemicals. And Inez was certainly young .
“I’ve been having some trouble,” Joan ventured. “Some trouble, ah, adjusting. To married life.” Oh God , Joan thought. I said it wrong. She’s going to think I want to have an affair!
“I understand.” Inez smiled patiently. “Do you hate Bill?”
“No!” Why had Inez thought this? Now Joan was paranoid that she had been emitting some misleading energy—husband-hating energy, as it were. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Well, I hate Ronald,” Inez said. “He’s awfully cheap.”
“Oh,” Joan said stupidly.
Inez rested her chin in her palms. A pear-shaped diamond gleamed from her left ring finger. Her right hand featured a blue sapphire the size of a gumball, which mirrored her necklace and earrings.
Inez caught Joan’s glance. “My own,” she said, wagging the gumball. “Nearly all my good pieces are from my mother. Ronald would never . He likes people to think he does, though. He wants me to wear them for precisely that reason.”
“That’s not very nice,” Joan said, indignant. “I’m sorry he behaves that way.”
“Oh, don’t be. I wouldn’t want him to buy any jewelry.
He’s got terrible taste, and he’s cheap on top of it all.
Even when he does give me something I want, it’s rarely actually mine.
The house in Napa, for example. Who found it, who renovated the whole goddamn thing?
There’s not a napkin or chair in there I didn’t choose.
But it’s all in Ron’s name, at least on paper. ”
“That’s not fair,” Joan murmured.
“True. But there are other entertainments.” Inez nodded toward the center of the table. “Even if Ron’s a drag, I find ways to make life bearable.” Antonio, the architect seated by Dina, returned to Inez a private smile.
While Joan absorbed this, Dina rose and began to walk the table.
She passed in a flash of gold—a squeeze on Joan’s shoulder, “It’s always so nice to see you and Bill”—and a square envelope was placed before each guest. From hers Joan pulled out a record, the seven-inch size, and then she recalled that Trevor liked music, it was the one thing she knew about him, that he spent his weekends going to concerts.
She spotted him by the bar in a gray suit, laughing with his arms crossed.
She hadn’t spoken to Trevor at the party, not even to wish him happy birthday.
Which was strange, wasn’t it? It was his dinner. He was why she was here.
There was a clunk on the table. Dina had dropped another party favor: shiny chrome lighters with 40 engraved in elegant script.
Joan stroked the lighter. It was beautiful, heavy in her hand and sleek.
Well, the whole evening was beautiful—the food and wine and flowers.
The guests and decor. Though even among the splendor Joan found she preferred the simple round kitchen table in Falling House.
Which was her house now too, at least a little each year, which she couldn’t help but imagine in literal terms, Bill taking a saw and slicing off a bit of the sun porch, were they to ever divorce.
She had managed that much with Nelson, though not before some uneasiness with Bill.
“I didn’t know you were such a little negotiator,” he’d commented, and Joan had thought she might collapse from shame.
But she’d held. And the awkwardness—though dreadful—had eventually gone.
A lesson for her. Feelings pass. Decisions remain.
“Anyway,” Inez said, downing the rest of her champagne. “All we can do is try, isn’t that so?”
Yes, Joan agreed. She and Inez had made their choice, and now look how much surrounded them.
Waking each morning to the soft light drifting in and great wood beams above; the lush boxwoods guiding her morning path, the stone terrace set by the Japanese maples.
It was the sort of existence Joan would have thought pure fantasy only a year earlier, such an immense concentration of beauty as to be unfair, surely impossible.
And yet it was possible. She lived it each day.
She shouldn’t take any of it for granted.
So Joan tried. She met the Rommels, Bill’s elderly neighbors who always spoke of how much they’d loved Agatha, and gritted her teeth and asked for gardening advice.
She attended school fundraisers though she did not have children and was not sure whether she liked them.
She volunteered to manage the gift table at Dina Hall’s own birthday party months later (it wasn’t that Dina actually cared about gifts, but it was necessary to keep track for recordkeeping, didn’t Joan agree?).
And in November, when Joan was invited to the opera, she quickly accepted.
The invite had come from Sue Strong, another wife of one of Bill’s friends, a former dental assistant with a fondness for Tahitian pearls.
Joan suspected Sue had been prodded by her husband, Randy, into the invitation—Joan had caught Randy observing her at Trevor’s birthday with what appeared to be light pity—but an invitation was an invitation.
That the opera outing was “ladies only” was intimidating, but it was through such events that Joan believed she’d best integrate.
Better to complete difficult tasks right away: after all, she had gone straight to stabbing Milton.