“Just a little coffee and then that’s it.” My hands were shaking.
He went into his endlessly forming smile, leaning toward the water. “It’s full of submarines,” Marsh said.
Around eight-thirty I stopped at a doughnut shop to call the wife. Out all night with the car, still suffering from performance anxiety, and by no means just the one kind. A honey-I-fucked-up-again job.
She said, “I’ll cancel my classes. We’ll go to the beach.”
15
THE LAST FRINGE OF afternoon has disappeared. With curtains drawn back, light in #6 is part blue, part gray. The radio says we should have unseasonably cool temperatures through tomorrow.
“Really, I have to leave.”
I slide up and kiss her eyes. “That’s what you said half an hour ago.”
“I can’t keep claiming I had engine trouble.” Her jutting teeth clamp on her underlip.
“Ten minutes, ten more minutes, and I’ll dress you myself.”
“Shit.” She reaches across me for the cigarettes. “I want to sleep beside you. We’ve never really done that.”
The phone goes off and we look at each other. If Heidi’s husband calls looking for her, Opatowski usually lets us know. She’s already got her panties on by the time I pick up.
But it’s Violet.
“Hi, sweetie. Going my way?”
I shake my head at Heidi, pat her half of the bed. “It’s been a while.”
“I know. Hectic out here. We had mudslides two weeks ago. You probably heard.”
“The place is all right?”
“More or less. A couple of new trees in the backyard, but the rest of it missed me somehow. Anyway, I’m sitting here listening to those Dinah Washington records and it made me think about you.”
Heidi looks inquiringly at me from the foot of the bed. Her arms hang like pale siphons.
“I always hated the arrangements. All those violins.”
Heidi mouths: I’m going. I pull her down next to me.
“But so romantic.” And there’s that Violet laugh, like water over cool rocks. “I always see a penthouse with the moon shining in.”
“Who is it?” Heidi whispers.
“Actually, this isn’t the best time for—”
“You’re put out with me, my long silence. Is that it?”
Heidi blows smoke in my eyes, flicks my nipple.
“I’m a little pressed right now, that’s all I meant.”
“Hurry, hurry. All right, good for you. I’ll give you the hard news and let you get on with whatever it is.”
“Don’t sulk. Please.”
“I’m not. Just shifting gears. I thought you might like to know a friend of mine has offered me a job in Virginia. He’s team leader on a dig starting up next month in Surrey. Seventeenth-century village, underwritten by the Ford Foundation, I can be their physical anthropologist if I want.”
“Real auspicious, Violet. Have you decided?”
“Violet?” Heidi’s tipped off now, pokes me hard. “Who’s Violet?”
“I can get a six-month leave of absence and…Is there someone with you?”
“In fact, yes.”
“You must be in bed. My God, where else could you be in a motel room?”
“Look, Violet…”
“Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed. You were incapable when I knew you.”
I’m wondering about this “friend” of hers. Probably an ursine type, pipe and corduroys, always under control, collects Elizabethan limericks. But not above exacting a favor in return for one of his own. I don’t like him.
Violet is tracing the mandatory ambivalences, teasing herself, while Heidi tugs on the phone cord.
I say: “Go ahead, talk to her.”
Heidi freezes up once she’s got the receiver. I can make out Violet’s voice, flat and clipped like a taxi dispatcher, but no words.
“I didn’t know,” Heidi says finally. She marches to the bathroom. Wham goes the door.
“What the hell did you say to her?”
“I can’t imagine. It was all perfectly neutral, factual. Is she upset?”
I sense Violet’s lecture-hall personality emerging. Maybe I can still head it off. “So you’re soaking up some Dinah, huh?” And I sing the last verse of “That Old Feeling.”
“I’ll miss you, Violet. Over there in Virginia with your relic brushes.”
“No need. They have telephones there.”
“But the geography is different, the mileage. You won’t be nearby anymore. Means nothing in practical terms, but that feeling, I don’t know, it always seemed important.”
Violet breathing into the mouthpiece is like a light rain on fallen leaves.
“You’re awfully sweet,” she says. “I should come and see you on my way across. I think I will. But go on now, you have to take care of your friend.”
Click.
I have neglected to tell you how beautiful Violet is. She knows it, too. No wonder her students kept calling at all hours. There is no excess in her face, no one element that dominates. Everything about her is smooth and light. Touching her skin had the delicacy of floating. And I remember her walking away from me one afternoon along a row of Lombardy poplars; she was tall and streamlined, like the trees, and her fox-red hair coiled around her head in the wind. “You don’t need me, you need an entourage,” I said. She kept on, but her stride shortened.
I open the bathroom door and Heidi’s hands come up over her breasts. Indignation has dissolved the casual laxity of fifteen minutes ago. Her mouth is tight and her lungs are pumping hard. On the edge of speech, she changes her mind and shoulders past me. Silently, and so vehemently I’m worried they’ll tear, she gets into her clothes.
“Heidi. We’ve been divorced for over three years.”
“And you still talk to her that way. ‘Ooo, Violet, it’s been such a long time.’” Her imitation is fruity, singsong.
“Am I obliged to hang up on her?”
Heidi curses the zipper on her dress, turns her back to me. “I don’t really care what you say or how. Forget that part. What hurts is you made her a secret.”
“Not like that, not like I was purposely keeping anything from you.” She jerks away from my hand as if it’s electrified. “So I was married for a while. That doesn’t amount to shit right now, right here.”
Heidi gains momentum as she untangles her hair, smears blusher on her pitted cheeks. “Right here. It’s like a coded message when I’m with you. We never talk. You never tell me things.”
“What is it you’d like to know?”
“Miss the point, go ahead.” She pops the p and a mist of saliva settles on my chin. “This thing or that thing, it’s not the facts I’m after. An even chance is all. You’re supposed to be so smart and I have to lead you by the nose. What does it come down to when people make secrets? What do you suppose it means when two lovers…We are supposed to be lovers, verdad? Or am I in the dark on that too? I’m not a pickup, goddammit.”
I know it’s a mistake, the contrition I give her. I know I should protect her from expectations. But I’m not a complete prick. Heidi’s entitled to some comfort. On any reasonable scale of operation, this comes under the heading of being polite.
I hold her, rock her. I promise not to hide things anymore. Running my hand up the back of her dress, I come upon a dot of crusted secretion, hers or mine. She says all I have to-do is trust her like a friend, and I say okay. We’re standing by the window, saturated by the yellowish light of the Golconda sign. WEEKLY & MONTHLY RATES. A trailer truck rolls past, air brakes snuffling. Dishes clank in the cafe and the jukebox comes on; someone’s pushed the buttons for a ranchero.