I turned onto my stomach, sorted through the jewelry. I tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn't fit over my hand. I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. "I wouldn't."
She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. "Well, say you wanted to."
"It's against my religion." Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.
"What religion is that?"
"I'm a survivalist."
She wouldn't allow that. I wasn't playing. It was against the rules. "Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer."
"I'd get lots of Demerol and wait it out." I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother's list of antisocial acts. I wasn't going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy's plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn't want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.
Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. "You know how I'd do it?"
She was pulling me down that road and I wasn't going to go there. "Let's go to the beach, okay? It's so hot, it's making us crazy.
She didn't even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like somene in love. "I'd gas myself. That's the way. They say it's just like going to sleep."
She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She'd been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn't as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood. I used to dream that I was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in my bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.
I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told her about the Japanese sailor adrift for four days when he killed himself. "They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm."
We heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. She sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. "But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?"
What answer could I give her? I'd been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L'Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume. "Anything can happen," I said.
She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.
She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. I raised up on one elbow. I didn't know what to say. "I feel so unreal," she said. She turned over, her back to me, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.
"If only I had a child," she said.
I felt a twang on a rarely played string. I was well aware I was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what she really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn't need me. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. I'd caught her vomiting after we ate.
"I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I'd ever have."
The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. I would have liked to say something encouraging, but I couldn't think of anything. I plucked the heart off her back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She'd lost so much weight she could wear my clothes now. She did when I was at school. I came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L'Air du Temps. I pictured her in my clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was sixteen, a junior in high school. She did a perfect imitation of me, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way I did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before I talked, dismissing what I was about to say in advance. My uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried me on like my clothes. But it wasn't me she wanted to be, it was just sixteen.
I watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If she were sixteen, what? She wouldn't have made the mistakes she's made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn't have to choose at all. she could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person's clothes. I wasn't anyone she'd want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep wall dive.
Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.
I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn't a guest, you didn't play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn't need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.
IT WAS A RELIEF when Ron came home. She got up, took a shower, cleaned the house. She made food, too much of it, and put on red lipstick. She took off Leonard Cohen and put on Teddy Wilson's big band, sang along to "Basin Street Blues." Ron made love with her at night, sometimes even in the afternoon. Neither of them made much noise, but I could hear the quiet laughter behind their closed door.
Early one morning, when Claire was still sleeping, I heard him on the phone in the living room. He was talking to a woman, I sensed it immediately when I came in, the way he smiled as he talked in his striped pajama bottoms — wrapping the phone cord around his smooth fingers. He laughed at something she said. "Flounder. Whatever. Cod."
He started when he saw me in the doorway. The blood bleached out of his rosy cheeks, then returned, deeper. He ran his hand through his hair so that the paler strips sprang back under his touch. He talked a bit more, arrangements, flights, hotels, he scribbled on a scrap of paper in his open briefcase. I didn't move. He hung up the phone.
He stood up, hiking his pajama bottoms. "We're going to Reykjavik. Hot springs with documented healing powers."
"Take Claire with you," I said.
He threw the paper into his briefcase, shut it, locked it. "I'd be working all the time. You know Claire. She'd sit in the hotel and cook herself into some morbid fantasy. It'd be a nightmare."
Reluctantly, I saw his point. Whether he stayed out of town as much as he could to screw around, or just to avoid dealing with Claire, or even on the off-chance he was what he claimed to be, just a tired husband trying to make a living, it would be a disaster to bring Claire along if he couldn't spend time with her. She couldn't just wander around by herself, see the sights. She'd sit in the hotel and wonder what he was doing, which woman it was. Torturing herself.
But it didn't let him off the hook. He was her husband. He was responsible. I didn't like the way he talked to that woman on the phone in Claire's own house. I could imagine him with a woman in a dark restaurant, seducing her with that same smooth voice.
I leaned in the doorway, in case he decided to try to go back to bed and pretend nothing had happened. I wanted to make him understand that she needed him. His duty was here. "She told me how she would kill herself if she wanted to."
That got his attention, made him stumble a bit in his smoothness, a man tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, an actor who'd forgotten his lines. He brushed back his hair, playing for time. "What did she say?"
"She said she'd gas herself."
He sat down, closed his eyes, put his hands over them, the smooth fingertips meeting over his nose. Suddenly I felt sorry for him too. I only wanted to get his attention, make him realize he couldn't simply fly off and pretend everything was normal around her. He couldn't leave her all to me.
"Do you think she's just talking?" he asked, fear in his hazel eyes.
He was asking me? He was the one with the answers. The man with the firm grip on reality, the one who told us when to get up and when to go to bed, what channel we were watching, what we thought about nuclear testing and welfare reform. He was the one who held the world securely in his smooth hands like a big basketball. I stared at him helplessly, horrified that he didn't know whether or not Claire would kill herself. He was her husband. Who was I, some kid they'd taken in.
I couldn't help but picture Claire lying on the bed, clad in her jewels, pearls welled in her mouth. What she had given up to be with Ron. The way she cried at night, arms pressed tight around her, bent almost double, like a person with stomach cramps. But no, she still waited for me to come from school, she wouldn't want me to find her dead. "She misses you."
"It's almost summer hiatus," Ron said. "We'll go somewhere. Really get away, just the three of us. Camping in Yellowstone, something like that. What do you think? "
The three of us, riding horses, hiking, sitting around the campfire, memorizing the stars. No phone, no fax, no laptop computer. No parties, meetings, friends coming by with a script. Ron all to herself. That would be something to look forward to. She wouldn't want to miss camping with Ron. "She'd like that," I finally said. Though I thought I'd believe it when I saw it. He was a great reneger.
"I know it hasn't been easy for you." He put his hand on my shoulder. Smooth. There was heat in his hand, it warmed my whole shoulder. For a moment I wondered what it would feel like to make love to Ron. His bare chest so close I could stroke it, the gray hairs, the quarter-sized nipples. He smelled good, Monsieur Givenchy. His voice, not too deep, sandy and calming. But then I remembered, this was the man who was causing all the problems, who didn't know how to love Claire. He was cheating on her, I could feel it in his body. He had the world, all Claire had was him. But I couldn't help liking his hand on my shoulder, the look in his eyes. Trying not to react to his masculine presence, solidity in his blue pajama bottoms. She's a young woman, he told Claire. It was just part of his act, the appreciation thing. I bet he did it with all the lonely spoonbenders. I stepped away, so his arm dropped. "You better come through," I told him.
20
IN JUNE, true to his promise, Ron rented a cabin in Oregon. No phone, no electricity, he even left his computer at home. In the forests of the Cascades, we fished in high green rubber boots to our waists. He showed me the fly reel, how to cast like a delicate spell, the glistening steelhead trout like secrets you could pluck from the water. Claire pored over bird books, wildflower guides, intent on naming, as if the names gave life to the forms. When she identified one, she was as proud as if she herself created the meadowlark, the maidenhair fern. Or we'd sit in the big meadow, propped up each by our own tree, and Ron played cowboy songs on his harmonica, "Red River Valley" and "Yellow Rose of Texas."
I thought of my mother in Amsterdam, singing Whoopee tiyi yo, git along link dogies. Explaining to me that a dogie was a calf that had lost its mother. It's your misfortune and none of my own. Ron was from New York, I wondered where he learned songs like that. TV probably. I saw how he looked at me when I sketched by the riverbank, but did nothing to encourage it. I could live without Ron, but not without Claire.
When it rained, he and Claire walked together down the trails cushioned in pine needles, the ferns smelling like licorice. At night we played Monopoly and Scrabble, three-handed blackjack, charades. Claire and Ron did routines from Streetcar Named Desire, Picnic. I could see what it was like when they were first together. His admiration for her. That's what she needed to remember, how he was the one who wanted her.
I'd never spent so much time with Ron before. It started to irritate me, how he was always the one running the show. When he got up, he woke me and Claire up. But when we got up first, we crept around, because Ron was still sleeping. A man's world. It bothered me, the way it was Ron who decided the day's activity, whether it was a good day for fishing or hiking or a trip out to the coast. Ron who said when we needed to go to the store and when we could get by another day, whether we took slickers or sweaters or bought firewood. I'd never had a father and now I didn't want one.
But Claire looked healthy again. She didn't throw up anymore. Her coloring grew vivid. She made gallons of soup in a big cast-iron pot, while Ron grilled fish over the open fire. We had pancakes in the morning, or eggs and bacon. Ron smiled, crunching bacon strips. "Poison, poison. And such small portions" — the punch line of a joke they had. Thick sandwiches in our backpacks for lunch, ham and salami, whole tomatoes, smoky cheese.
Claire complained that she couldn't fit into her jeans anymore, but Ron hugged her around the thighs and tried to bite them. "I like you fat. Enormous. Rubenesque."
"Liar." She laughed, swatting at him.