Twenty-Five
I KEEP MY WORD. MORNING comes and I dress before Ginny wakes. I sit on the edge of her bed and touch her shoulder. She opens her eyes. “Let me make you coffee.”
I shake my head. “I have to go.”
At lunchtime, she watches me from across the room, saves an empty seat next to hers, but I sit with the girls instead.
That’s all it takes. We go back to rarely speaking.
Now, it’s not only me who averts my gaze when we’re near each other.
A few days later, she’s at Lionel’s house when I drop by.
She pretends to remember an appointment, leaves in a rush.
I’ve hurt her. I’ve hurt myself. But also, I warned her.
I thought that one night was better than never and she decided to go along.
Spring comes. A rainstorm. Headlines in the paper about Senator McCarthy and sexual deviants.
“The thing is,” Claire says, “these people live in the shadows, so they’re more susceptible to blackmail.
Once the Soviets find them, there’s no telling what a homosexual might do to save face.
” Pressure in my chest. Nerves shot. Elise calls me one evening after the children are sleeping.
Asks me how I am and I let it spill out, grateful for the darkness and the distance between us.
I tell her about my night with Ginny, I tell her about Delphine—the agony of the hospital, the terror of her threat—the first time I’ve told it.
Elise listens closely. Asks questions along the way.
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. I let her be dead. I never called again, just like she wanted.”
She clears her throat. Her voice is thick the next time she speaks. “I wish it could go another way for you with Ginny. But I understand it. You have your children to consider.”
“The strange thing is, I feel so guilty about Felix now. Not telling him.”
“But he sees men without telling you about them.”
“Yes. But I know that he does. He’s made it clear. And I’m lying to him now when he’s never lied to me.”
“Could you tell him?”
I close my eyes. “I’m too afraid,” I say. “I believe that he wouldn’t tell anyone. But what if he did?”
“I know,” she says. “I understand. You aren’t doing a single thing wrong.” We’re quiet for a while, breathing together over the line. “Listen,” she finally says. “I called tonight because I’m inviting you to a dinner party.”
“Are you?” I ask. “You sound like you don’t really want me to come.”
“It’s just that I’m selfish,” she says. “I love having you all to myself. But I suppose it’s inevitable that I’ll need to share you at some point or another. Plus, I like my friends to know each other. That way, if I ever die suddenly, everyone will have a better time at the funeral.”
“Oh, Elise,” I say. “Don’t be morbid.” But I’m grateful for her jokes, the turn in conversation. A party. My first-ever invitation to her house. She tells me her home address, the date—a week away—and the time.
“Your actual house,” I say. “The place where you live. I was beginning to worry you were ashamed of me. Or that you might be a spy.”
“Hopefully it won’t be terribly boring,” she says, and I laugh and she asks me if I’m okay.
“I am,” I say. “I’m better having talked about it.” And we hang up.
I wear my chartreuse dress, spend more time than usual on my face and my hair.
Darken my brows, outline my lips in pink before applying lipstick.
Rouge on the apples of my cheeks, a shimmer of eyeshadow, careful mascara.
My hair is dark and shiny, loose waves past my shoulders.
When I step back and appraise myself, I’m pleased.
I scan the Thomas Guide for the intersection and open to the page.
I’ll take Western through the city as though I’m going to the plant, but after I turn left on Hollywood Boulevard I’ll go right on Laurel Canyon and up into the hills.
I write myself a list of turns, climb the garden steps, rest my pumps and purse on the seat next to me, and I’m on my way.
It makes sense to me, turning onto Hollywood, how natural it was that we met at Pickwick’s—how I drove north and east from the plant, and she drove the same distance south and west. There’s an expansiveness to all of this.
Driving through Los Angeles on my own on a Saturday night, heading to dinner with strangers, and the sensation intensifies as I climb the hills, and the road winds and bends, and everything’s lush up here—citrus trees and enormous palms; giant birds of paradise and old, unruly cactuses.
A coyote slinks along the side of the road and, everywhere, so many birds.
I climb higher, deeper, and I understand a bit more about Elise’s life now, passing the charming old houses and the sleek modern ones, the shiny, expensive cars in the drives.
I knew a bit already, of course—her stacks of rings, her social calendar—but it’s now clear as can be.
I turn onto her street. It’s called Wonderland and I have to laugh.
Huge, ancient agaves and willow trees, and here’s her address.
I pull into her sprawling drive. A few cars are already parked here and there’s still plenty of room for mine.
The house’s facade is flat and plain. I can’t see in at first and then I follow the path to the doorway and I’m met with a giant pane of glass.
I ring and Elise answers. Opens the door to glass walls and wood ceilings and plush rugs, bright artwork and sleek European furniture and ceramic lamps and stacks of books.
She sets a glass of champagne in my hand and steers me to a grand credenza behind the sofa. She’s in a black dress, effortless. “Canapés,” she says. “One is spinach and the other is crab.”
“I didn’t know you could cook like this,” I say, reaching for one.
“Oh, no, I don’t cook. We have a friend come by to cook for us a few times a week, and whenever we host.”
“Nice friend.”
She bites into a canapé. “We pay him, of course.”
“I should hope so.”
“All right, well. I suppose I should introduce you around. Can’t keep you to myself forever.
” We head toward a man and woman, standing by the glass walls at the far side of the living room, overlooking the lights of the city.
All this glass, the drop below. Truly a different world, to pay so much for a sensation of precarity.
“This is my friend Odette. I met her at Pickwick’s, and she disagreed with one of my rants so I knew I could trust her.
Unlike Sylvie here, who just nods along to everything, so I never know what she’s thinking of me. ”
The woman opens her mouth in shock. Sylvie, I suppose.
She’s dressed in buttercup with a string of pearls at her throat.
Elise pays her no attention. “Odette’s an artist and a very good one, undiscovered as of yet so no need to pretend you might know her work.
This is Fred, Espen’s and my dearest friend from Stanford, and his wife, Sylvie, who I can’t help but pick on but only because she is so lovely and young that it’s nearly impossible to be around her sometimes.
Over there is Norman. Norman, here’s Odette, the artist I was telling you about.
” He waves at me from across the room. “The Alastairs—Melinda and Harry—are always late but they’ll show eventually. For now, that’s it.”
“Your home is spectacular. Something out of a magazine.”
“Sunset magazine,” Fred says.
“Fred’s our archivist,” Elise says. I can’t tell if she’s joking, or if he is. But then she goes on. “Anyway, it was a disaster. We had to move half our stuff out so it wouldn’t look too crowded, and then they didn’t even photograph all the rooms.”
“The story was gorgeous,” Fred says. “She’s just bitter.”
“Bitter?” I ask.
“We didn’t get the cover. ‘Arizona Vacations’ won out. We were relegated to pages thirty-two through thirty-eight.”
“A six-page story in Sunset magazine doesn’t sound so bad,” I say.
“They even had a full-color spread,” Fred adds.
“That’s the thing. It’s humiliating to care so much about something so frivolous. Espen swears he’ll never step foot in Arizona out of spite. We’re vain people, Odette, there’s no getting around it.”
At the dinner table, over beef Stroganoff, Espen says, “I’m sorry your husband couldn’t make it. I’d like to meet him sometime.”
“He’d like that, too.” He really would. He loves beautiful things, beautiful people, and there’s less of a holding oneself together here than there is at my sisters’.
Less effort of any kind. Theirs is a life spent doing whatever pleases them.
I wonder what Felix would make of it. And then—reflexively, alarmingly—I wonder what Ginny would.
“What does your husband do?” Norman asks, and everyone’s eyes are on me.
“He’s a train porter,” I say.
Melinda’s eyes light up. “A train porter!” she says. “How romantic. I love trains. I’ve never met a train porter.”
“What on earth do you do with your luggage?” Elise asks.
“I mean, in everyday life,” Melinda says. “Elise, you do give us all a hard time, don’t you.”
“I thought they were mostly colored men,” Harry says, lighting a cigarette.
My stomach clenches. “He is colored,” I say. “We both are. We’re Creole, from New Orleans.”
Silence, stretching a moment too long. Melinda leans closer to me, examining my face. “Fascinating,” she says. “I suppose I can see it.”
“Elise,” Espen says. “We should have invited Walter. I had drinks with him just the other day.”
“Walter is our other colored friend, so clearly you would have had much in common,” she says, winking at me.
“Please, I didn’t mean it like that,” Espen says. “And it isn’t even true. There’s Timmy and Serge—”
“Yes, in Europe we know more colored people. The races are more divided here. But you know that, of course.”
The conversation swerves into politics and I’m grateful for the shift away from me.
But as the night goes on, Sylvie sneaks little glances at me and I have an urge to take her by the hand, drag her into the light, and say, “Go ahead and stare until you’ve seen what you want to, and then leave me alone. ”
Still, the night’s everything I hoped it would be.
Sophisticated, adult, full of conversations about art.
And thrumming under all of it is how Elise introduced me, how all of them see me as an artist. When I tell her it’s time for me to go, she says, “No, wait. I haven’t even shown you the back yet,” and leads me through the giant, heavy glass doors and down a set of stone steps and here’s a pool, black and glistening under the dark sky.
“Now that you’ve been here, you’ll have to come back and swim soon. ”
“Were you hiding all of this from me before?”
“Maybe, a little. So you’ll come swim?”
“I’d like to bring my kids. They’d love it here.”
She sighs. “Fine.”
I don’t listen to the radio on my drive home.
Instead, snippets of the night’s conversations come back to me as I glide down the hill and through the city.
Until I reach my street, my tall fence, my garden steps, my little house.
And I’m glad for the rest of the quiet night to myself—Nathalie and Clément tucked in safe at Adele’s house, Felix hurtling through the Northwest on his train—a little more time to be who I am tonight.