A cardinal was in the road. A brightly colored, male cardinal. It stood there like a vulture — a vulture ready to feed on an animal that had been killed. But nothing was dead. The bird was small for a cardinal. No more a real omen than the little piece of paper you pull out of your fortune cookie that misspells something you should believe.
“Ash,” I whispered. “How could you?”
I put all the mail in the mailbox but his letter. I ripped that to pieces as I crossed the road. The cardinal flew away. The bee that had been buzzing around me disappeared. The letter was ripped into pieces as tiny as confetti by the time I dropped them in the mud, by the stream, looking behind me for tiny white pieces I might have dropped, as guilty as a murderer whose knife drips blood. He didn’t deserve her. He really didn’t. That was no illusion; it was a dirty trick that if space curved, you thought that one star was two.
Todd’s MG bumped slowly into the driveway. He held up something round and shiny. “Got this at a lawn sale,” he said. “Can you believe it? Paella for a hundred, or we could take a bath in it. You know that Degas painting? The woman in the tub?”
I went in and poured some vodka over ice. I sat on the porch, shaking the glass. On the lawn, Todd was cleaning the gigantic pan with steel wool, washing away the dirt with a strong spray from the hose. I remembered making love to Jason at the end of the dock. Diving into the water. The long white hose that stretched from the back of the house to where the boat bobbed in the water — the East Hampton equivalent of the snake in the garden.
Simple, fortune-cookie fact: someone loved Holly more than anyone had ever loved me. Linda called again, four days later, and there was no second message from Jason. I hadn’t really expected one.
Linda had sprayed the plant. The plant was sure to recover. She said she took it out of the sun for a few days, because the combination of light and chemicals might be too much.
Holly and I were mistaken for sisters, but she was more beautiful. Our long blond hair. Slender bodies. The way, in the city, people would smile at us with the same lack of embarrassment people have when they smile at twins. Oddities. Beautiful exceptions.
When I found out that I was pregnant, I had thought first about amniocentesis, because a first cousin had had a baby with a slight birth defect. My first impulse was to protect that baby in any way I could. At the end, I had just thought about what it would feel like to have my cervix pricked, the baby sucked out. That crazy romantic lunch — pink petals all over our laps, on the table — and I couldn’t tell him. I had on a wrap-around skirt, and he slid his chair close to mine and was teasing, putting his hand underneath it, and I said to him, “I am eating, Jason,” and “I love you — I can’t eat.” He wanted to go to my apartment. “I have an appointment,” I said. “Tonight,” he said. “I can’t tonight,” I said. “Another night. Some other night.” He thought I was kidding. When he called, hours later, expecting to come over, I was lying in my bed, after the abortion, Linda sitting in a chair reading, watching, and I was trying not to sound woozy, in spite of the fact that they’d given me so many pills Linda almost had to carry me from the building to the cab. I had done it because I didn’t have the nerve to test him — to find out if he loved me more than he loved his wife. Ash loved Holly, and that went a long way toward explaining why we looked so much alike, yet she was more beautiful. She walked like somebody who was loved. She didn’t avoid looking into people’s eyes for the same reason I did when she walked through the city. I thought how lucky she was — even though sometimes she could be frighteningly unhappy — the night I held her and rocked her in my lap. I knew for sure that I was right about her good luck a week later, when I stood at the window, about to pull the shades in my room to take a nap, and I looked out and saw Ash’s old car, parked at the end of the treacherous driveway, and Ash, running toward the house, a huge torch of red gladiolas raised above his head.
WINTER: 1978
The canvases were packed individually, in shipping cartons. Benton put them in the car and slammed the trunk shut.
“They’ll be all right?” the man asked.
“They survived the baggage compartment of the 747, they’ll do O.K. in the trunk,” Benton said.
“I love his work,” the man said to Nick.
“He’s great,” Nick said, and felt like an idiot.
Benton and Olivia had just arrived in L.A. Nick had gone to the airport to meet them. Olivia said she wasn’t feeling well and insisted on getting a cab to the hotel, even though Nick offered to drive her and meet Benton at Allen Tompkins’s house later.
The man who had also come to the airport to meet Benton was Tompkins’s driver. Nick could never remember the man’s name. Benton was in L.A. to show his paintings to Tompkins. Tompkins would buy everything he had brought. Benton was wary of Tompkins, and of his driver, so he had asked Nick to meet him at the airport and to go with him.
“How was your flight?” Nick said to Benton. All three of them were in the front seat of the Cadillac.
“It was O.K. We were half an hour late taking off, but I guess they made up the time in the air. The plane was only a few minutes late, wasn’t it?”
“Allen and I are flying to Spain for Christmas,” the driver said.
On the tape deck, Orson Welles was broadcasting The War of the Worlds. Cars seldom passed them; the man drove sixty-five, with the car on cruise control, nervously brushing hair out of his eyes. The last time Nick rode in this car, a Jack Benny show, complete with canned laughter, had been playing on the tape deck.