A Bigamist's Daughter (32 page)

How she began packing at midnight. Bill lying in bed, his voice low. “I’m not entering into your little drama, Elizabeth. I know what you’re doing and I won’t play along. You’ve got no reason to leave and you’ve got no place to go. You’re acting. I’ve got meetings tomorrow. I can’t spend the night battling your made-up problems. This is not
The Late Show,
for
God’s sake.” And later, “I love you. I love our life together. What more do you
want
from me?”

How she was crying when she walked out the door.

She could tell him that she left because she was willing to admit that Sarah was the love of his life, but not that there was no love of his life at all.

She could say that she left because he believed that his love, which was smooth and featureless and solid as a wall (a blank wall where she was pinned, where he stopped at the end of a day), which had been worn so smooth by others whom he once had loved but now loved no more, was enough to sustain her.

Or she could tell him again (for where is the evidence to contradict her?) that it was Sarah who parted them. For he had loved her first and he was a romantic. Tall and handsome and too loyal.

Instead, she tells him, lying in this strange room, the arc of firelight making the ceiling seem high and touched with gold, “Even now, I’m not always sure I’m over him.”

She tells him, and there is nothing in the air, in her memory or his, to contradict her, that there was no loss involved, she had made herself his wife. She recalls that even on the train as she was leaving him, even now in this dim room, her love could bring tears to the eyes of strangers.

Chapter 19

She wakes with some dream of Bill, Bill talking to her, talking endlessly. Tupper Daniels sleeps beside her with his mouth closed and his hand over his heart. If the revelations of the night are still with him, they don’t disturb his sleep. His face is serene, neither his mouth nor his eyelids twitch or tremble. All she has told him is safe, well below the surface.

And she’d said he was her mythical other half. Said: Even now, it isn’t over.

The light behind the heavy curtains falls softly, weakly, into the room, dulls the edges of the dresser and the tops of the bedposts, fills the room with odd shapes. Staring hard, she can see the shadow of a fish, what seems to be a distant line of mountains at the foot of the bed, a dark madonna in a corner, a long shadow boat, perhaps a battleship, on the ceiling. She closes her eyes for a moment and when she opens them again, the images have disappeared.

She would like to wake him, to ask, What next? What should I tell you next and when will you find your ending? And what after that? When does it all take shape, the ads, the distribution, the bright young editor who turned vanity publishing on its ear?—but she has never been good at waking her lovers. She has always wanted either to shake them or to kick
them, or, as with Bill, never to wake them at all, and so she merely lies beside him, thinking how she might some day describe this moment to her children, to the press, to some future biographer who asks about the weekend in which she discovered the first best seller of a house that until then had been known as a joke.

She imagines Bill reading it, wondering why he isn’t mentioned, and then smiles at her own dreams. She smiles at Tupper in his dreamless sleep.

Later, she gets up quietly and slips into her robe, walks down the silent hallway. In the bathroom mirror, she looks different to herself. Somehow sharper and more clear. It may only be the strange surroundings, the wide bevel on the mirror, the blue-tiled wall behind her (although, she realizes, she doesn’t feel strange, feels quite at home among all the small surprises of a place she’s never seen before). She brushes her hair, holds it for a minute in a ponytail at the back of her head and lets it fall to her shoulders. It may just be that she always looks better on a morning when she hasn’t slept well.

As she opens the door, she sees Hedda in a loose black robe with long, winglike sleeves, going silently down the stairs. There is something gracefully feline about her movements; as Elizabeth steps from the bathroom, she stops, and, like a cat, slowly turns her head.

“You’re up,” she whispers hoarsely.

“Yes,” Elizabeth says.

“Good. Come have coffee with me.” Without waiting for a reply, she turns again and moves slowly down the stairs. Elizabeth glances down the hall to their room. Last night he had asked her, If you’re still in love with him, where does that leave me? You also said you loved me. She hadn’t answered, but perhaps, she thinks now, waking alone he’ll begin to understand: She is no ordinary lover. Her love for Bill hasn’t
ended; her claim to love Tupper ends nothing. She follows Hedda to the kitchen.

They take their coffee into Hedda’s library, a small room lined with books on brick and plywood shelves and centered around a large stereo/television console. The rain has stopped and bits of sun, full of shadows from the trees, stream through the mesh curtains. Hedda sits on the plaid couch, putting her feet up on the seat and pulling her black robe over them. Elizabeth sits on a brown leather recliner beside her.

“Your friend tells me you didn’t quite find what you were looking for yesterday.”

Elizabeth smiles. “No, not quite. Although we did take your advice and check with the library.”

Hedda nods. “So he said.” She lights a cigarette, blows the smoke to the ceiling. Her neck is long and freckled and taut. The wide yoke of her robe shows the deep, tanned hollows around her collarbone, and Elizabeth feels certain that she is naked under the robe. She imagines that Hedda spends a great deal of time naked, wearing her freckles like a fur.

“I think your job is fascinating,” Hedda says.

Elizabeth laughs, modestly.

Hedda puts her fingers to her breasts. “Well, to me it’s fascinating.” Moves the same fingers to her mouth, touching them to her tongue. “The book’s about bigamy, then?” she asks slowly.

Elizabeth sips her coffee. “Yes.”

Hedda laughs or says
Hmph
and shakes her head. “About a man who commits bigamy?” She leans forward, hands on her knees. “Is that correct, you
commit
bigamy?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth says. The editor. “I believe so.”

“But you don’t commit monogamy.” She pulls her lips together, makes her eyes wide. “Do you? Or marriage. You don’t
commit
marriage.”

Elizabeth laughs, “No, that’s true,” and Hedda looks at her for a moment, frowning, as if she has just corrected her in some obvious error. “The language is biased,” she murmurs, putting an elbow to her raised knee and resting her head upon her hand, a pinkie to her forehead, the cigarette dangerously close to her dry red hair. “His wives must be very patient,” she says, eyebrows raised.

Elizabeth nods over her cup, smiling wisely. “Like Penelope,” she says.

“Who?” Smoke curls from her cigarette.

“Penelope. Ulysses’ wife. From mythology.”

Hedda brushes some smoke from the air. “Oh, yes.” She takes a final drag of her cigarette and leans to stamp it out. “I suppose she was patient”—smoke pouring from her mouth and nose—“if you call filling your house with boyfriends while your husband is away patient.” She lifts the cup, blows. “I call it a romp.”

Elizabeth is uncertain that she follows and Hedda, looking up at her, throws her head back and barks a deep, dry laugh. “Well, anyway, I’m all for it,” she says. “Bigamy. I think it would make me feel positively ambidextrous.”

Elizabeth tries to remember the story, Ulysses, Penelope. She recalls that he killed off all her suitors as soon as he got home, but she is uncertain of Penelope’s reaction.
Did
she consider them boyfriends? She hears the toilet flush upstairs.

“And it makes so much more sense,” Hedda says, standing. “Simultaneous husbands.” Her eyes go to the ceiling. “There he is, I’d better tell him we’re here. What’s his name?”

“Tupper,” Elizabeth says. She feels she is handing him over to her.

“Right.” Hedda leaves the room and Elizabeth hears her call from the stairs, “Tupper, darling, you haven’t been deserted. We’re down here in the library. Can I get you some coffee?”

Elizabeth can’t hear his reply, but she hears Hedda in the kitchen and hears the phone ring and Hedda’s bright, “Why it’s
you
!”

She thinks it a wonderful thing to be able to call someone darling, so naturally, without even making it a joke.

She reaches for one of Hedda’s cigarettes, lights it, and then leans back in the chair, putting her feet up and her robe over them. She tries to imagine what it would be like to live here, alone, lovely, smoking cigarettes, reading books. She sips her coffee and stares at the books along the wall. There’s Hemingway and Mailer and Ian Fleming. And Solzhenitsyn. Other books whose authors she doesn’t recognize, but whose names imply cowboys
(Catch the Wild Appaloosa)
or soldiers
(The Bloody Stand)
or spies
(To Save the Munich Papers).
There is also a number of history books and movie-star biographies (Gable, Bogart, Montgomery Clift, Gary Cooper), but nothing she would call a woman’s book. Perhaps, she thinks, because Hedda doesn’t need that kind of reassurance.

Or perhaps this is her own way of filling her house with boyfriends.

She hears Tupper come down the stairs and Hedda call to him. A minute later, he enters the library, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand. “She’s on the phone,” he says. “She’ll be off in a minute.” He kisses her head and sits on the couch where Hedda had sat. He is wearing blue jeans and a pinstriped shirt. His feet, like hers, are bare. They have both made themselves at home.

“You didn’t wake me,” he says, surprising her with his smile. After last night, her story about Bill, her refusal to make love, she’d expected him to be cool, even distant.

“You looked so peaceful, I didn’t want to disturb you,” she says.

He winks. “There are nondisturbing ways to wake someone.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know any.”

“Remind me to teach you some”

She wonders if this friendly intimacy isn’t their own kind of distance.

Hedda walks quickly into the room. “Sorry,” she says. “That was an old beau of mine out to ruin my peaceful Sunday.” She looks at them both meaningfully. “He’s coming over at noon.”

“We’ve got to get going anyway,” Tupper says.

Hedda stands before him with her hands on her hips, her shoulders slouched, her pelvis thrown forward. The shadows of the sunlight and leaves fall over the hem of her robe and her just-visible white feet. “Yes,” she sighs, almost regretfully. She looks at Elizabeth over her long black arm. “They’re so adorable,” she says, as if Tupper were a piece in a museum. “But so impossible to live with. It’s a shame we can’t bottle them or do without them completely—or maybe keep them in the attic and just take them down when we need them.”

Tupper blushes and Elizabeth laughs. She likes Hedda’s
we.
“Like
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,”
she says.

Hedda throws her head back. “Yes,” she says. “A ghost might be the answer after all!” Her eyes flashing:
“Two
of them!”

Tupper says later, as they change in their room, that for a woman who claims she’ll never marry again, she sure was excited about getting laid.

And later still, as they pull away from the house, Hedda in her “riding clothes,” a man’s long sweater and blue jeans, waving from the drive, “Something tells me we just spent the night in a one-woman whorehouse.”

“Let’s try to follow it through,” Tupper is saying. The day has grown bright and she digs in her pocketbook for sunglasses. “We need to give Beale a past, a logical past, so let’s try
to follow it through. We’ve got a man like your father, right? A man who begins traveling when he’s fifteen, gets his wealth from a man like your uncle, conceives this sense of wanderlust, continues to travel …”

Falls off the edge of the earth, she thinks, steps through the looking glass. Who cares? She has put Bill between them, claimed she still loves him so that, last night, she brought tears to his eyes, and today he hasn’t said a word to protest it. He hasn’t said a word, not when they dressed in their room, not through brunch, not during their short walk through town, about loving her. Who can look for a father when a lover so easily disappears. Becomes all business.

Let’s talk about us, she wants to say. That’s enough about him, what about us?

She wonders if she should bring up Bill again, tell the story a little differently this time. Retell it. Say, perhaps I only think I love him. I’m not sure. Help me forget him.

But, as she finds her sunglasses and puts them on, and turns to watch him driving beside her, she feels again what she felt so surely last night, feels it again like the pain from a muscle tested after a night’s rest and found still sprained. She loves him, always will, and even to admit the possibility of change, of being talked out of it, seems a grave betrayal.

Tupper Daniels is too pale; or he pales in comparison.

“Here it is,” he says and pulls the car onto a grassy shoulder. Across the street there is a high knoll and just behind it, the first few rows of stones.