“Really something.”
We walked out on the terrace. I felt dizzy, remembered an evening of dancing, Brazilian guitars.
Something to show you, Alex.
Late September. I got back to L.A. before Sharon did, $4,000 more solvent, and lonely as hell. She’d left without leaving an address or number; we hadn’t exchanged as much as a postcard. I should have been angry, yet she was all I thought about as I drove down the coast.
I headed straight for Curtis Hall. The floor counselor told me she’d checked out of the dorm, wouldn’t be returning this semester. No forwarding address, no number.
I drove away, enraged and miserable, certain I’d been right: She’d been seduced back to the Good Life, plied with rich boys, new toys. She was never coming back.
My apartment looked dingier than ever. I avoided it, spent as much time as possible at the hospital, where the challenges of my new job helped distract me. I took on a full caseload from the waiting list, volunteered for the night shift in the Emergency Room. On the third day she showed up at my office, looking happy, almost feverish with delight.
She closed the door. Deep kisses and embraces. She made sounds about missing me, let my hands roam her curves. Then she pulled away, flushed and laughing. “Free for lunch, Doctor?”
She took me to the hospital parking lot, to a shiny red convertible- a brand new Alfa Romeo Spider.
“Like it?”
“Sure, it’s great.”
She tossed me the keys. “You drive.”
We had lunch at an Italian place on Los Feliz, listened to opera and ate cannoli for dessert. Back in the car, she said, “There’s something I want to show you, Alex,” and directed me west, to Nichols Canyon.
As I pulled up the driveway to the gray, pebble-roofed house, she said, “So what do you think, Doc?”
“Who lives here?”
“Yours truly.”
“You’re renting it?”
“No, it’s mine!” She got out of the car and skipped to the front door.
I was surprised to find the house furnished, even more surprised by the dated, fifties look of the place. These were the days when organic was king: earth tones, home-made candles, and batiks. All this aluminum and plastic, the flat, cold colors seemed déclassé, cartoonish.
She glided around exuding pride of ownership, touching and straightening, pulled open drapes and exposed the wall of glass. The view made me forget the aluminum.
Not a student’s pad by a long shot. I thought: an arrangement. Someone had set the place up for her. Someone old enough to have bought furniture in the fifties.
Kruse? She’d never really clarified their relationship…
“So what do you think, Doc?”
“Really something. How’d you swing it?”
She was in the kitchen, pouring 7-Up into two glasses. Pouting. “You don’t like it.”
“No, no, I do. It’s fantastic.”
“Your tone of voice tells me different, Alex.”
“I was just wondering how you managed it. Financially.”
She gave a theatrical glower and answered in a Mata Hari voice: “I haf secret life.”
“Aha.”
“Oh, Alex, don’t be so glum. It’s not as if I slept with anybody to get it.”
That shook me. I said, “I wasn’t implying you had.”
Her grin was wicked. “But it did cross your mind, sweet prince.”
“Never.” I looked out at the mountains. The sky was pale aqua above a horizon of pinkish brown. More fifties color coordination.
“Nothing crossed my mind,” I said. “I just wasn’t prepared. I don’t see or hear from you all summer- now this.”
She handed me a soda, put her head on my shoulder.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said. “Not as gorgeous as you, but gorgeous. Enjoy it.”
“Thank you, Alex. You’re so sweet.”
We stood there for a while, sipping. Then she unlatched the sliding door and we stepped out onto the terrace. Narrow, white space cantilevering over a sheer drop. Like stepping onto a cloud. The chalky smell of dry brush rose up from the canyons. In the distance was the HOLLYWOOD sign, sagging, splintering, a billboard for shattered dreams.
“There’s a pool, too,” she said. “Around the other side.”
“Wanna skinny-dip?”
She smiled and leaned on the railing. I touched her hair, put my hand under her sweater and massaged her spine.
She made a contented sound, leaned against me, reached around and stroked my jaw.
“I guess I should explain,” she said. “It’s just that it’s involved.”
“I’ve got time,” I said.
“Do you really?” she asked, suddenly excited. She turned around, held my face in her hands. “You don’t have to get back to the hospital right away?”
“Nothing but meetings until six. I’m due at the E.R. at eight.”
“Great! We can sit here for a while and watch the sunset. Then I’ll drive you back.”
“You were going to explain,” I reminded her.
But she’d already gone inside and turned on the stereo. Slow Brazilian music came on- gentle guitars and discreet percussion.
“Lead me,” she said, back on the terrace. Snaking her arms around me. “In dancing the man’s supposed to lead.”
We swayed together, belly-to-belly, tongue-to-tongue. When the music ended she took my hand and led me through a short foyer into her bedroom.
More bleached, glass-topped furniture, a pole lamp, a low, wide bed with a square, bleached headboard. Above it, two narrow, high windows.
She removed her shoes. As I kicked off mine I noticed something on the walls: crude, childish drawings of apples. Pencil and crayon on oatmeal-colored pulp paper. But glass-framed and expensively matted.
Odd, but I didn’t spend much time wondering about it. She’d drawn blackout drapes across the windows, plunged the room into darkness. I smelled her perfume, felt her hand cupping my groin.
“Come,” she said- a disembodied voice- and her hands settled upon my shoulders with surprising strength. She bore down on me and lowered me to the bed, got on top of me, and kissed me hard.
We embraced and rolled, made love fully clothed. She, sitting, with her back against the headboard, legs spread and drawn up sharply, her hands clasping her knees. I, kneeling before her, as if in prayer, impaling her while gripping the top rim of the headboard.
A cramped, backseat position. When it was over she slid out from under me and said, “Now, I’ll explain. I’m an orphan. Both of my parents died last year.”
My heart was still pounding. I said, “I’m sorry-”
“They were wonderful people, Alex. Very glamorous, very gracious and courant.”
A dispassionate way to talk about one’s dead parents, but grief could take many forms. The important thing was that she was talking, opening up.
“Daddy was an art director for one of the big publishing houses in New York,” she said. “Mummy was an interior designer. We lived in Manhattan, on Park Avenue, and had a place in Palm Beach and another on Long Island- Southampton. I was their only little girl.”
The last sentence was uttered with special solemnity, as if lacking siblings were an honor of the first rank.
“They were active people, traveled a lot by themselves. But it didn’t bother me because I knew they loved me very much. Last year they were in Spain, on holiday near Majorca. They were driving home from a party when their car went off a cliff.”
I took her in my arms. She felt loose and relaxed, could have been talking about the weather. Unable to read her face in the darkness, I listened for a catch in her voice, rapid breathing, some evidence of sorrow. Nothing.
“I’m so sorry for you, Sharon.”
“Thank you. It’s been very hard. That’s why I didn’t want to talk about them- it was just too much to handle. Intellectually, I know that’s not the optimal way to deal with it, that keeping it bottled up only leads to pathological grief and raises the risk of all kinds of symptoms. But affectively, I just couldn’t talk about it. Every time I tried, I just couldn’t.”