“You’re lying to me,” Ryder Channing said.
“Ryder. Stop shouting.”
“You lied to me. Get her on the telephone.”
“You’ve been drinking. Go to sleep.”
“I said get me Marth.”
“Ryder. Please.”
“You’re lying to me. Get her to the phone.”
“I told you. She’s dead.”
“Screw you,” he said. “Screw you all.”
Everett sat by the bedroom window, the rain splashing from the peeling window sill onto his knees.
“Who called?” he asked without looking up.
She put the tray on the table in front of him and closed the window. “My mother,” she said.
22
The third spring after Martha died (it was 1952, but that was not the way time was reckoned on the ranch) Lily asked Everett if he wanted to divorce her.
He did not. Of course he did not.
What, then, did he want.
He did not, he said, want anything.
It was the year they seldom talked. When they did talk, they talked always about the same thing, although they never called it by name, never even referred to it out loud except very late at night or when they were very tired: You made me get it, she would say. Over seven years, the August day she went to San Francisco by herself had become, in its manifold evidence of mutual error, the heaviest weapon in both their arsenals, the massive retaliation each withheld until all else had been exhausted. She was convinced that year not only that she had gone to San Francisco for Everett (in a sense she had, and he knew it, and there was the lever) but that Everett had in fact robbed her of her womanhood: she had heard stories of women who after abortions could not become pregnant again, and although she did not want another child, Everett did. You made me get it. At such times she would pack a bag for Knight and Julie and take them to stay at her mother’s. There in her own room, with the ebony chest brought from the Orient, the stacks of unread Dominican alumnae magazines, and the flowered lawn curtains she had made on her mother’s treadle sewing machine the summer she was thirteen, the corrosiveness within her would subside, and she would begin to see Everett not as the blight of her womanhood but, on the contrary, as her only hold on sanity. He had not held on to Martha but he would hold on to her. She would imagine Everett dead then, and cry inconsolably for half an hour or forty-five minutes. None of the others could help her. Joe could not help her and none of the others could help her, none of the one-night, two-night stands, none of the times when she had simply not known what else to do, how else to talk to someone, none of it could help her but Everett, and she would make Everett love her. After she had stopped crying she would resolutely put on her dark glasses, kiss her mother goodbye in front of the television set (if it was an afternoon when the Dodger games were being televised, her mother sometimes seemed not to have known she was even in the house), and drive back to the ranch. Occasionally she would be gone only a few hours, and she would not then tell Everett that she had left him again.
The fourth spring after Martha died, Lily decided that it would be all right if they could go away together occasionally, leave the ranch. Again and again she asked Everett to take her somewhere, and at last they went, one weekend in June, to a party in San Francisco with some people Everett had known at Stanford. There were two views of the Bay Bridge, one of California Street, and four potted avocado trees (all the girls with whom he had gone to Stanford were now, Everett explained, mysteriously bent upon breaking the Calavo trust); there were repeated assurances that (alternately) Herb Caen or Barnaby Conrad or Dolly Fritz would be dropping by later; and there was Ryder Channing.
She had not seen Ryder since before Martha’s death; she had not even talked to him on the telephone since those first few months, when he would sometimes call the house, drunk, and talk, about nothing in particular, for thirty or forty minutes. When he called during the day she had talked to him, but when he began calling late at night she had finally, without telling Everett, made a point before she went to bed of muffling the telephone so that they could not hear it ringing. After that she had only heard about him, here and there, from one or another of the few people they saw: none of the reports quite tallied but none of them were good. She would hear first that he was seen with a succession of unidentified girls in bars frequented by the very young; then that he was never seen, had become a virtual recluse. He was asking for sympathy all over town; he was rude, abusive, burning all his bridges. Nancy was leaving him; he had left Nancy. He had been taken off the Riverside City project because he was pulling some fast ones on Larry Dupree; he had been removed because he never appeared, showed no interest. Finally: he had moved to San Francisco to follow Nancy; they had moved together to San Francisco because her father ordered them to.
When she first saw him, standing by the bar and laughing, none of it seemed possible: Ryder had never looked better. Deeply tanned and wearing a blue blazer, he had about him the air of the men one saw in liquor advertisements, an air which suggested untroubled afternoons spent sailing off Belvedere, expensive steaks in good restaurants, and the smooth absence of eccentricity achieved only by the recently rich. It was not until she had talked to him for a few minutes that she saw that there was something about his face which belied the sun tan, made the blue blazer seem a kind of fancy dress. His gaze flickered around her without ever quite settling upon her; his smile was less a smile than a tic.
He had, he assured her, the world by the tail. Or just about.
“I’m glad, Ryder.”
He just about had it licked, he insisted. He guessed she had heard things were rough for a while, but she could rest assured that it would be smooth sailing from here on in.
“I’m glad,” she said again. She had heard that he sometimes hinted, drunk, that Martha’s death had caused the disorder in his life, and wondered if he had so deceived himself. The disorder had been there always. Even Martha had seen it: He’s the kind of man, she had once said, who when your father’s dying or you’re having a miscarriage or a note’s due at the bank, depend on him, he won’t be around.
“How’s Nancy,” she added.
Nancy, he declared, could not be better. Nor could he. And they had been meaning to get in touch with her because — what a coincidence running into her tonight! — they were moving back to the Valley. He was going into an operation of his own, had some deals going, nothing he was free to talk about but very big irons in the fire. He’d be working his ass off but it was going to be worth it.
“That’s fine, Ryder,” she said; she wondered where Nancy was.
Although she heard, in July, that Ryder and Nancy Channing were in Sacramento again, she did not talk to him until one afternoon in September when he called and asked her to meet him in town. She couldn’t possibly, she told him; please, he said, all pretense gone from his voice. I need you. You’re the only friend I’ve got.
When she arrived at the address he had given her, a one-storey house in a new subdivision south of town, she saw that he had been alone for days, perhaps weeks: there were books thrown on the floor (he had always been sloppy and she recalled Martha saying that he did not sleep well), dirty shorts and socks and shirts strewn on the chairs, and every flat surface was littered with the remnants of whatever he had been eating — celery stalks, stale ends of bread, the torn plastic wrappings from processed cheese. In the bathroom there were dark hairpins on the floor, distinctly not Nancy’s, and the sheets on the bed where she sat with him and finally lay with him had not been changed when Nancy would have changed them. He looked as disheveled as the house did, and talked incoherently: he had clearly been drinking. Nancy was in Piedmont, he did not know for how long. The deal on which he had been working had not quite gone through, but never mind that. It would. You had to wait these things out, they didn’t build Stonestown in a day.