She was speaking quite loudly. The people at the next table were looking at them and pretending not to. He knew he should do something to pass it off, so he gave them a little smile, but he was drunk and the smile spread too far over his face; what he was giving them was an evil smirk.
“What a family. Cal with his mansion on Long Island, never liking what the decorator does, having some goddam vegetarian decorator who paints the walls the color of carrots and turnips. He gives better Christmas presents to his decorator than he does to Jason. Poor Cal, out in East Hampton, and poor Ena, who’s staying in Wesley’s house when he’s dead because he wouldn’t have her there when he was alive. The only person in the family worth anything was Wesley.”
They sat in silence, drinking, until the set was over. It was slowly starting to sink in that he was not in California — that lantana would not be growing outside when they went out, that it would be dark and cold. He usually said that he loved California, but when he was back East he felt much better. He began to wish for snow again. When the musicians climbed down from the stage he asked for the check. He left money on the table, wondering if he was crazy to suspect that the people at the next table were going to take the money. Since no one ran out of the bar after them in all the time it took to start Elizabeth’s car in the cold, he decided that it was paranoia.
He thought that he remembered the way back and was glad that he did. Elizabeth’s eyes were closed. He put on the heater. Elizabeth put it off.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“Better ways to keep warm.”
He was looking at the speedometer, to make sure he was driving fast enough. It felt like he was floating. He accelerated a little, watched the needle climb. Drunken driving.
“Pull over,” Elizabeth said, hand over her mouth, other hand on his wrist. He did, quickly, expecting her to be sick.
Wind blew in the car as she jumped out and ran through the leaves unsteadily, over to a stone wall. He looked away as she bent over.
She came back to the car carrying a cat.
“I got myself something nice,” she said, shivering.
“It’s somebody’s cat,” he said.
“He might be your friend, but he’s a real bastard. Telling Jason that lizards are called Lizzie.”
“Get even with Benton,” he said. “Don’t get even with me.”
She looked at him, and he knew exactly where Jason got his perturbed expression, the look that crossed his face when his mother told him that Uncle Cal’s mattress was not a toy.
“That’s what they’re all doing,” she said. “They’re all at Wesley’s house getting even. Olivia singing in the tub to pretend that everything’s cool, Cal being nice to Ena because his last EKG readout scared him and he wants to be sure she’ll nurse him. Benton playing Daddy. That one really kills me.”
The cat hopped into the back seat. He looked at it. Its eyes were glowing.
“What I like about animals is that they’re not pretentious,” she said.
“You’ve taken somebody’s cat,” he said.
She was pathetic and ridiculous, but neither of those things explained why the affection he felt for her was winning out over annoyance. He couldn’t remember if she had propositioned him, or if he had just imagined it. He put his head against the window. It seemed like a situation he would have found himself in in college. It was a routine from years ago. He took her hand.
“This is silly,” he said.
He did not know her license-plate number, so he put down *?—#! on the registration form. Then, realizing what he had done, he blacked that out and wrote in a series of imaginary numbers.
The motel was on Route 58, just off the Merritt Parkway. He was careful to notice where he was, because he thought that when he went out to the parking lot, she might simply have driven away. He gave the woman his credit card, got it back, slipped the room key across the counter until it fell off the edge into his hand instead of trying to pick it up with his fingers, and went out to the parking lot. She was in the car, holding the cat. He knocked on her window. She got out of the car. The cat, in her arms, looked all around.
“I know where there’s an all-night diner,” she said drunkenly.
“You seem to know your way around very well.”
“I used to come see Wesley,” she said.
She said it matter-of-factly, climbing the stairs in back of him, and at first he didn’t get it. “And I know for a fact that he didn’t intend to use all the servicemen Ena used, and that when he had wood delivered it wasn’t going to be the famous Hanley Paulson who brought it,” she said, as he put the key in the lock and opened the door. “He might have left New York to nursemaid Ena, but he was only going so far. He was a nice person, and people took advantage of him.”
He held her. He put his arms around her back and hugged her. This was Benton’s ex-wife, Wesley’s lover, standing in front of him in a black sweater and black silk underpants, and instead of its seeming odd to him, it only made him feel left out that he was the only one who had no connection with her.
“Who was the man who drowned with him?” she said, as if Nick would know. “Nobody he cared about, because I never heard of him. I didn’t even know he was Wesley’s friend.”
The cat was watching them. It was sitting in a green plastic chair, and when he looked at the cat, the cat began to lick its paw. Elizabeth drew away from him to see why he had stopped stroking her back.
“Would you like to forget about it and go to the diner?” she said.
“I was thinking about the cat,” he said. “We ought to return the cat.”
“If you want to return the cat, you go return the cat.”
“We can do it later,” he said.
Later, he got hopelessly lost looking for the road where they had gotten the cat. He thought that he had found just the place, but when he got out of the car he saw that there was no stone wall. He carried the cat back to the car and consulted Elizabeth. She had no idea where they were. Finally he had to backtrack all the way to the bar and find the road from there that they had been on earlier. He got out of the car, carrying the cat. He dropped it on the stone wall. It didn’t move.
“It wants to go with us,” Elizabeth called out the window.
“How do you know?” he said. He felt foolish for asking, for assuming that she might know.
“Bring it back,” she said.
The cat sat and stared. He picked it up again and walked back to the car with it. It jumped out of his arms, into the back seat.
“What he says to Jason is very clever,” Elizabeth said, as he started the car. “I’d be amused, if Jason weren’t my son.”
When he found out that she and Wesley had been lovers, it had been clear to him that she was sleeping with him to exorcise Wesley’s ghost, or to get even with him for dying; now he wondered if she had told him to go to the motel to get even with Benton, too.
“If you want Benton to know about what happened tonight, you’re going to have to tell him yourself. I’m not telling him,” he said.
Her face was not at all the face in the picture of Benton’s wallet from years ago. Her eyes were shut as if she were asleep, but her face was not composed.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m used to it,” she said. She rummaged in her purse and pulled her brush out and began brushing her hair. “If the family had known about Wesley and me, they’d write that off as retaliation, too. They love easy answers.”
They were on the road that led to the house, passing houses that stood close to the road. There was nothing in California that corresponded to the lights burning in big old New England houses at night. It made him want to live in this part of the world again, to be able to drive and see miles of dark fields. The apple orchards, the low rock walls, the graveyards. A lot of people went through them, and it did not mean that they were preoccupied with death. The car filled with light when a car with its high beams on came toward them. For a few seconds he saw his hands on either side of the wheel and thought, sadly, that what Wesley had seen about them had never come true.