“Nothing.” She knew what was happening, though; what had, in fact, already happened. She had stepped out of her usual role, had changed lines and costumes, and now the director was agitated because he no longer knew what play he was directing. Poor Jim, she thought, and reached over and took his hand. “Nothing,” she said again.
They were sitting side by side on the davenport. The house was very quiet. The rain had stopped temporarily, Stella had gone home after surviving another day in the country, and Mrs. Fielding was at a concert with a friend. Prince, the collie, was sleeping in front of the fireplace, where he always slept in bad weather. Even though there was no fire in the grate, he liked the remembered warmth of other fires.
“Be fair, Daisy,” Jim said, pressing her hand. “I’m not one of these heavy husbands who wants his wife to have no interests outside himself. Haven’t I always encouraged your activities?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then? What have you been doing, Daisy?”
“Walking around.”
“In all this rain?”
“Yes.”
“Walking around where?”
“The old neighborhood on Laurel Street.”
“But why?”
“That was where we were living when I” — when I died — “when it happened.”
His mouth looked as though she’d reached up and pinched it. “Did you imagine that what happened was still there, like a piece of furniture we forgot to bring along?”
“In a sense it’s still there.”
“Well, in that case, why didn’t you walk up to the door and inquire? Why didn’t you ask the occupants if they’d mind if you searched the attic for a lost day?”
“There was no one at home.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you mean you actually tried to get in?”
“I rang the doorbell. No one answered.”
“Thank heaven for small mercies. What would you have said if someone had answered?”
“Just that I used to live there once and would like to see the house again.”
“Rather than have you make such an exhibition of yourself,” he said coldly, “I’ll buy the house back for you. Then you can spend all your afternoons there, you can search every nook and cranny of the damn place, examine every piece of junk you find.”
She had withdrawn her hand from his. For a while the contact had been like a bridge between them, but the bridge had washed away in the bitter flood of his irony. “I’m not looking for — junk. I don’t intend making an exhibition of myself either. I went back because I thought that if I found myself in the same situation as before, I might remember something valuable.”
“Valuable? The golden moment of your death, perhaps? Isn’t that just a little morbid? When did you fall in love with the idea of dying?”
She got up and crossed the room as if trying to get beyond the range of his sarcasm. The movement warned him that he was going too far, and he changed his tone.
“Are you so bored with your life, Daisy? Do you consider the past four years a living death? Is that what your dream means?”
“No.”
“I think so.”
“It’s not your dream.”
The dog had awakened and was moving his eyes back and forth, from Daisy to Jim and back to Daisy, like a spectator at a tennis match.
“I don’t want to quarrel,” Daisy said. “It upsets the dog.”
“It upsets the — oh, for Pete’s sake. All right, all right, we won’t quarrel. Can’t have the dog getting upset. It’s O.K., though, if the rest of us are reduced to gibbering idiocy. We’re just people, we don’t deserve any better.”
She was petting the dog’s head in a soothing, reassuring way, her touch telling him that everything was fine, his eyes and ears were liars, not to be taken seriously.
I should play along with her, Jim thought. That was Adam’s advice. God knows, my own approach doesn’t work. “So you went back to Laurel Street,” he said finally, “and walked around.”
“Yes.”
“Any results?”
“This quarrel with you,” she said with bitterness. “That’s all.”
“You didn’t remember anything?”
“Nothing that would pinpoint the actual day.”
“I suppose you realize how unlikely it is that you’ll ever succeed in pinpointing it?”
“Yes.”
“But you intend to keep on trying?”
“Yes.”
“Over my objections?”
“Yes, if you won’t change your mind.” She was quiet a moment, and her hand had paused on the dog’s neck. “I remembered the winter. Perhaps that’s a start. As soon as I saw the jasmine bushes on the south side of the house, I recalled that that was the year of the big frost when we lost all the jasmines. At least I thought we’d lost them, they looked so dead. But in the spring they all came to life again.” I didn’t, though. The jasmines were tougher than I. There was no spring for me that year, no new leaves, no little buds. “That’s a start, isn’t it, remembering the winter?”
“I guess so,” he said heavily. “I guess that’s a start.”
“One day there was even snow on the mountain peaks. A lot of the high school kids ditched classes to go up and see it, and afterwards they drove down State Street with the snow piled high on their fenders. They looked very happy. It was the first time some of them had seen snow.”
“Daisy.”
“Snow in California never seems real to me somehow, not like back home in Denver, where it was a part of my life and often not a very pleasant part. I wanted to go up and see the snow that day, just like the high school kids, to make sure it was the real stuff, not something blown out of a machine from Hollywood... The year of the frost, you must remember it, Jim. I ordered a cord of wood for the fireplace, but I didn’t realize what a lot of wood a cord was, and when it came, we didn’t have any place to store it except outside in the rain.”
She seemed anxious to go on talking, as if she felt she was on her way to convincing him of the importance of her project and the necessity for carrying on with it. Jim didn’t try again to interrupt her. He felt with relief that Adam had been right: the whole thing was impossible. All Daisy had been able to remember so far was a little snow on the mountain peaks and some high school kids riding down State Street and a few dead jasmine bushes.
7
Your mother has vowed to keep us apart at any cost because she is ashamed of me...
The next morning, between the time Jim left and Stella arrived, Daisy phoned Pinata at his office. She didn’t expect him to be there so early, but he answered the phone on the second ring, his voice alert and wary, as if early calls were the kind to watch out for.
“Yes.”
“This is Daisy Harker, Mr. Pinata.”
“Oh. Good morning, Mrs. Harker.” He sounded suddenly a little too cordial. She didn’t have to wait long to find out why. “If you want to cancel our agreement, that’s fine with me. There’ll be no charge. I’ll mail you the retainer you gave me.”
“Your extrasensory perception isn’t working very well this morning,” she said coldly. “I’m calling merely to suggest that I meet you at your office this afternoon instead of at the Monitor-Press building.”
“Why?”
She told him the truth without embarrassment. “Because you’re young and good-looking, and I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong impression if they saw us together.”
“I gather you haven’t informed your family that you’ve hired me?”