‘You’re sure,’ I said, not hiding my disappointment — it had been my last desperate hope. ‘A real marriage.’
‘I’m afraid so. Married by the clerk of Inyo County about a month and a half ago.’
I felt that emptiness well up inside me, instinctively — then it subsided as I sipped my drink. Why was Blythe being so crazily stupid? Why Tayborn Gaines of all people? But I thought I knew the answer to that. And then I remembered how at her age I had slipped into the bed of my homosexual uncle and asked him to make love to me. We are not logical beings, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart.
‘However,’ Cole said, his expression unchanging, ‘Tayborn Gaines never served in the US military. There are no records. Certainly not in the Eighty-Second Airborne.’
Now, I felt a little bloom of elation. Now I had my way in, my fifth column to destabilise this union. So Gaines was no soldier, as I had suspected. What fantasies of warfare and warriorhood had he spun for Blythe?
Back at the Heyworth Travel Inn, in my room, the air conditioner at full blast, I took my time over the letter I wrote.
Darling Blythe,
It was both lovely and, I have to be honest, a bit disturbing to see you in your new life. Believe me, I understand better than anyone your desire to be happy and I understand that you are convinced that you have found that happiness with Tayborn. I love you and all I wish for you is to be happy — it’s as simple as that. But I also wish you hadn’t done everything so swiftly. It takes time to truly come to know a person and, I wonder, what do you truly know about this man you are so deeply in love with?
I ask because I’ve discovered that one thing he claims to be isn’t in fact true. Tayborn Gaines was never a soldier. He was never in the 82nd Airborne. He never served in Vietnam. Now, I ask you — if a man can lie so convincingly about something he claims is of fundamental importance and significance to his being what then does that imply for—
I stopped. I felt that sickness in me again. It was a conscious realisation that I was wasting my time and the absolute knowledge of this fact made me want to vomit. I stood up and walked around the room taking deep breaths. Then I sat down at the table again. It was Blythe’s life and she had every right to live it as she wished. Slowly I tore up my letter to her about the lies of Tayborn Gaines. As I arranged the shreds into a small neat square pile I found I was weeping inconsolably. I knew I had finally lost my daughter.
CODA IN BARRANDALE: 1978
My mother died in 1969. Greville died in 1972. The Clay family, diminishing.
Is it true that your life is just a long preparation for your death — the one thing we can all be sure of, all the billions of us? The deaths you witness, hear about, that are close to you — that you may cause or bring about, however inadvertently (I think of my dog, Flim) — are preparing you, covertly, incrementally, for your own eventual departure. I think of all the deaths in my life — the ones that left me riven, the strangers’ deaths I happened to see — and understand how they have steered me to this position, this intellectual conviction, that I hold now. You don’t realise this when you’re young but as you age this steady accumulation of knowledge teaches you, becomes relentlessly pertinent to your own case.
But then I wonder — turn this notion on its head. Are all the deaths you encounter and experience in fact an enhancement of the life you lead? Your personal history of death teaches you what’s important, what makes it actually worth being alive — sentient and breathing. It’s a key lesson because when you know that, you also know its opposite — you know when life’s no longer worth living — and then you can die, happy.
*
I met Blythe at a coffee shop down in Westchester, on West 82nd Street off Sepulveda Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport. I was on my way home so it was convenient even though I could see the neighbourhood was run-down and shabby. Our order was taking its time to arrive and Blythe left our booth and went to speak to the waitress. To me she sounded like an American, now, her English accent all but gone. She was wearing a black and white striped shirt and jeans; her hair was cut carelessly short — there was a long untrimmed strand at the back — and she was wearing no make-up. She returned to our booth and sat down, managing a genuine smile, it seemed to me.
‘Something’s gone wrong in the kitchen. It’ll be two minutes.’
‘Doesn’t matter, darling, seeing you again before I go is the main thing.’ I reached for her hand and squeezed it and then let it go and turned the gesture into an airy wave, indicating the streetscape out of the window.
‘So this is where you work.’
‘Just round the corner. You have to go to the needy — they won’t come to you.’
‘Of course, makes sense.’
‘There’s nothing to see — just a room with a coffee machine and a few small offices.’
‘Well, at least I have a picture of the neighbourhood.’
This was the third visit I had made to the US to see Blythe in the eight years since she crossed the road in front of the San Carlos Motel and went to rejoin her husband, Tayborn Gaines, who was waiting patiently for her in his jeep.
I suppose it was some private consolation to me that the marriage didn’t even make its first anniversary. Some months after I’d left, the Willow Ranch Community was raided by the police and significant quantities of LSD and marijuana were discovered. Gaines was prosecuted but acquitted for lack of convincing evidence. He and Blythe moved to Los Angeles and then some weeks later he left. I don’t know what happened — I had all this information from Annie who was more closely in touch with Blythe than I was — but I suspect that Blythe’s Farr legacy had finally run out. Time for Tayborn to move on.
Curiously, Blythe kept Tayborn’s name — she was Blythe Gaines from now on, not Farr. I think I understand. The name was all that remained of the dream-life she thought she had acquired and then lost so suddenly and cruelly. Or, now I come to think about it, maybe it was a harsh aide-memoire — don’t get fooled again, girl. In any event she stayed on in Los Angeles and picked up the career in music she had abandoned; writing songs, playing in bands in and around the Los Angeles area.
On my first visit to see her she was living in a ramshackle house on Coldwater Canyon Drive with half a dozen other people — young men and women, all musicians, I think. She had dyed her hair auburn and parted it in the middle — I thought it didn’t suit her. She smoked as much as I did. In the few days I spent with her we must have consumed a dozen packets of ‘smokes’, as she called them. The significant fact I remember about that trip was that she asked if I would mind if she called me ‘Amory’ rather than ‘Ma’. I said it was fine with me.
She was better, more like the Blythe I knew than the Blythe of the Willow Ranch experiment, but she was more distant, cooler with me — hence my name change, I surmise — consciously treating me as an equal rather than her mother. I knew why: she was feeling a residual shame about the whole Tayborn Gaines period, for being so hopelessly duped by him. I tried to raise the subject in the hope of expiating it. I said she should forget all about that period of time, not feel ashamed. She was still very young; I started to list all the mistakes I had made at her age but she cut me off abruptly and said she never wanted to talk about it again. So I let it go. People are opaque, even those closest to you. What do we know about the interior lives of our children? Only as much as they choose to reveal.