The more she remembered of the evening (“You’re Ryder’s best girl in the Valley,” the girl had said, taking Martha’s hand and smiling up at Ryder, “I’ve heard so much about you”), the more she resented Ryder now, and it was with a palpable knot of hatred in her stomach that she returned the yearbook to the librarian, crossed the street to the post office, and waited in line ten minutes to see that the clerk gave immediate attention to the key for Ryder, the silver dish for Nancy Dupree.
Rid of the boxes, she started back across the Plaza to the car, but because she felt both dizzy and a little silly, she stopped and sat on the edge of the fountain long enough to smoke two cigarettes and to chew, since an old man lay passed out at the foot of the water fountain, one of the phenobarbital tablets the doctor had told her to take three times a day. There were lighted Christmas wreaths strung across J Street and as the phenobarbital began to work she forgot about Ryder and began to wish, suddenly, that her father were alive, that Sarah could come home for Christmas. There was something about Christmas as managed by Lily that was not quite Christmas, although everyone tried very hard to pretend it was and although Edith Knight always came to stay on the ranch for a few days, decorating everything in sight, hanging stockings for Knight and Julie, and helping China Mary make quantities of eggnog which no one ever dropped by to drink.
A few minutes after she got back to the ranch, Ryder called her from a bar. She knew he was in a bar because she could hear the juke box.
Well, what a surprise. She wanted to offer him all her congratulations.
Oh, he said. He had called to see if she was home. He had planned to drive out and tell her himself. He had not thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers.
No, of course he would not have thought of her seeing the San Francisco papers. He had been on the ranch not more than a thousand, fourteen hundred times during the past four and a half years, and no one could have expected him to notice that they got the San Francisco papers. It wasn’t a bit nice to think about how life went on — papers got delivered, papers got read, that kind of thing — when one wasn’t counting on it, was it. But never mind. It was all very, very nice and she had only an hour before sent off her blessings to that most fortunate girl, Miss Nancy Dupree. Who was, she believed, the same Miss Nancy Dupree known to her friends in the East Bay Junior Assistance League as “Bugsy”? Just so. Nicknames. Cute as a bug’s ear. You knew that any girl who’d call herself Bugsy had a sense of fun. There was one little thing. She did think, couldn’t help thinking, that since his plans must have been more or less settled last night, he might have told her his surprise then. Of course they had been pretty busy last night, sorting his laundry, wondering where she had put the razor blades she had brought the day before, typing out his application for an extension on his personal loan at the Wells Fargo. There had been scarcely a minute for surprises, had there. Or possibly he had not known then. Possibly he and Bugsy had just decided late last night on the long-distance telephone and Bugsy had thrown on her forest-green blazer and rushed the news right over to the Chronicle. What a stroke of luck, deciding in time for the Valley Edition.
He did not know why he had called her at all. He should have known that she would only behave as stupidly as she was behaving now. Count on her to act like a gauche, bitchy little girl.
Oh. So he was drinking. She supposed he must be fairly proud of himself. She knew he was drinking or he would not have had the courage to call her in the first place. Drinking or not, his character was nothing to write home about. Even to his home, wherever and whatever that was. And as for that talent of which he was so proud, she could walk out the door and get it better from the first picker she came across. Without any of the games.
She could go to hell.
But Jesus Christ, baby. Anybody who’d call herself Bugsy.
Although she had torn the announcement from the paper expressly so that Everett and Lily would not see it, they would know by sundown anyway. Everyone on the river got the San Francisco papers. She had wanted them not to know because she did not want Ryder’s name taken in vain. In the strictest sense, which was the sense Martha prided herself upon, Ryder was not in the least in the wrong. Ryder was simply the way he was, and she had known all along how he was. To have persisted, knowing that, was to have taken the responsibility upon herself. I’m quite old enough and more than smart enough to know what I’m doing, she had told Everett three years ago, had told Lily before that, had told even her father although not in so many words. She had known it so thoroughly that for the past two years she had not even thought of marrying Ryder, except as a dark contract they could undertake if all else failed, an unattended ritual during which both would avert their eyes, a civil ceremony incorporating the more lurid aspects of a black mass. But despite what she knew, she had, every time he smiled and put his hand on her neck and said whose girl, smiled back. Your girl.
To avoid Lily and Everett, she sat in her room for the rest of the afternoon, knitting and trying to call up a catalogue of Ryder’s virtues against the probability that someone would question his possession of any. Ryder loved small children, at least if they were clean and attractive. He delighted in giving people presents. He had once driven straight through from Los Angeles in order to be at the ranch in time for her birthday. Occasionally when he thought she was asleep he would kiss her ear and whisper that he loved her, although he rarely did either when he thought she was awake. (That, however, was not a widely employable defense, and neither was the fact that he had once at a party knocked out a drunk, someone they did not know, for pointing at Lily and saying There goes the easiest lay in the room, I can always spot them, something scared in their eyes. As she had explained to Ryder, she had appreciated it for Everett’s sake.) He always asked her if his tie looked all right with his jacket, expressed concern about the correct length for her skirts, and had once gotten up at four o’clock in the morning and met every plane into Sacramento until noon on the off chance that she might be flying home from Carmel that morning.