A Small Indiscretion (28 page)

But I didn’t know, and I agreed with your father that it would be good for all of us to get out of the city and spend the day at a pool in the sun. There were going to be field games and pool games and a bake-off, and your father insisted on baking a cake with the girls that we could enter in the contest. It was his brainchild, but your sisters provided the hard labor. It took them most of the evening the night before, and all of the morning of the Fourth. When it was done, I wondered what had taken so long. It appeared to be a simple thing—a round, tall, multilayered cake with plain white frosting. But Clara explained there was a secret. They had dyed and stacked each layer, so that when a piece was cut and laid flat on the plate, it would be a miniature replica of the American flag.

We’d assumed you’d be spending the Fourth with your Berkeley roommates, but you surprised us by saying you’d like to come along with us instead.

The store was closed for the holiday, but I stopped in to pick up ten do-it-yourself papier-mâché lamp kits I’d promised to deliver to a client that morning. Emme emerged from the bathroom upstairs with a towel wrapped around her head.

“Sorry to barge in,” I said.

“No worries,” she said.

I asked if she had Fourth of July plans. She said she had “nothing set” for the day. She seemed subdued. Her voice was very quiet, and I felt sorry for her. This was not the first time I’d seen her like this, but I’d also seen her just the opposite—vibrant, expansive, flirtatious. The male customers were drawn to her when she was in that mood, and I told myself it was good for business.

“Come along with us,” I said, immediately regretting it. “We’re in search of the sun.”

“That would be lovely, actually,” she said. “Really lovely.”

“Good,” I said, forcing a smile. “We’ll swing by here on our way out of the city and pick you up.”

T
HE WEATHER AS
we left the house was typical for a San Francisco summer—foggy, with a cold wind—and it seemed absurd to pack bathing suits, but we did. We put the dogs in the backyard and piled into the Suburban and drove to the store. We waited out front in the car, talking of savages and stories. Then Emme joined us, and you looked at the book in her bag, and the conversation turned to Zen koans and happiness. When we arrived at Gold Hill, our jeans and sweatshirts felt like suits of armor. It was not even noon, but already blazing hot. The sky seemed to me tired out by the heat, the blue
nearly sucked out of it. In the parking lot, a bike and pet parade was in progress. Kids were riding around in a wide circle while the national anthem played; dogs wore red and blue and white streamers and had flags tucked into their collars. Polly cried because we had left our dogs and our bikes at home.

The girls changed into their suits and took their place along the edge of the pool, where dozens of kids were sitting with their feet in the water, waiting for the games to begin. How pale your sisters’ skin was compared to those bronzed suburban children. How uncertain they’d seemed tiptoeing over burning cement to the edge of the pool. How tentative they were, at first, diving into the water when the coin toss began. But soon enough they were plunging and resurfacing, side by side, smiling and showing us the coins in their hands. There was a relay race, parents versus teenagers, and an inner-tube race, and a contest to see who could dive over a rope held in front of the diving board.

Now and then, I watched Emme out of the corner of my eye. She had a red cover-up tied tightly around her, only her pale shins exposed. She was on her back, laid out on a chaise with her eyes closed and a white sun hat pulled down over her face. Every so often she looked up and surveyed the scene with an expression—how to describe it—a kind of semidetached malaise. As if she were not quite sure how she’d found herself here, in this alien landscape, and not quite sure how to conduct herself within it.

Then the greased-watermelon race was announced. The idea was to dive in the pool and chase after a watermelon that had been coated in peanut oil and tossed in the water. The first swimmer to push the slippery fruit out of the pool was the winner. There were categories, ten-and-under boys, ten-and-under girls—which your sisters sat out—sixteen-and-under boys and girls, men, women and, finally, coed pairs of any age.

“You two should give it a go,” you said to your father and me.

“No way,” I said.

You looked at Emme. It was as if she could feel your gaze on her face, and her eyes opened.

“How about it?” you said to her.

She stared at you intently, then at the pool. Finally, a smile crept into her face and transformed it. “Why not?” she said.

She reached her hand out and you pulled her up. She dropped her cover-up to the cement. Her skin was paper-white against the strings of her red bikini, and her hair was very, very blond. Her body was lean and long, but with curves in the right places. She moved across the pool deck with a languor, an unabashed sexual energy that made me feel like I was watching porn. Who knew that beneath the many layers of clothing she always wore in the store—the sweaters and skirts and tights and scarves and boots—she’d been hiding this model’s body? She smiled at you sideways, her face utterly changed from that of the woman who had been stretched out so sullenly all afternoon.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” I said to Jonathan.

“What’s beautiful?” he replied.

“The two of them,” I said. “Robbie and Emme.”

He nodded, and we watched you stand side by side in swim-racer position at the edge of the pool. You dived together when the race gun went off. Your dives were smooth and synchronized, as if you’d choreographed the show in advance. Emme kept up with you, stroke for stroke, and you reached the watermelon in the exact same moment, a body’s length ahead of any of the other dozen pairs in the race. You passed the watermelon between you expertly as you kicked to the side. Then you shoved it, with your four hands, up over the side of the pool.

It was all over in less than a minute. Your sisters went wild. I took only one photo of you that day. I took only one photo of you all
summer. I snapped it as you and Emme stood together after your victory, the watermelon held between you.

They say people who are bipolar see colors differently when in a manic state. What did Emme see when I showed her the photo a few days later? What did any of us see? The colors, the curves, the important straight lines? You in blue trunks with your dark skin, brown hair, green eyes. Her white skin and slender hips beneath the strings of her red bikini. The oval of watermelon, the roundness of her breasts, the hardened muscles of your swimmer’s arms. The long, narrow torsos. The splayed feet. The second toe larger than the first. Your slender fingers nearly touching her slender fingers, your four thumbs, your two sets of lips, smiling, lovely as the summer hills behind you—layer upon layer like a tiered yellow cake.

The girls joined in field games. An egg toss. A three-legged race. A water-balloon battle, children chasing one another under the high, hot sun.

Sparklers were handed out. A band set up beside the pool. Barbecues were lit. Picnic blankets were spread on the grass. Card tables had been arranged in the shape of a
U
and covered with red-white-and-blue-checked plastic tablecloths. All day we’d watched as people entered the pool area, carrying baked goods in their arms, setting their confections tenderly on those tables. The area was roped off, and the children, your sisters included, stood close, pressing their bodies against the ropes intended to contain them, until one of the judges warned them to stand back.

What was laid out on those tables was not just an assortment of baked goods. It was the wild ambition—and care, and time, and effort, and love—of ordinary people, in an ordinary suburb, and it moved me as no art gallery ever had. There were brownies and cakes. There were tarts and pies. There were doughnut pops dipped in colored sprinkles, patterned in stars and stripes. There was a two-foot-tall cookie shaped like the Liberty Bell. There were Rice Krispies
treats cut like watermelon wedges, dyed pink and green. There were cupcakes made to look like sunflowers, each leaf of each flower intricately carved out of yellow frosting. There was the cake that had come from our own kitchen, which, when sliced into pieces, formed miniature American flags.

I held Polly against my hip as the winners were announced. The cake your father and the girls had made was overlooked. I exchanged an uh-oh look with your father. He had a hand on Clara’s head, as if to protect her from the shower of disappointment. But your sisters handled it rather well. There was a consolation prize, and they knew it. They knew that in a moment the ropes would come down and they would be allowed to fill their plates so high, the colors and flavors of one sweet would become indistinguishable from the next.

I wondered, a little desperately, if there weren’t some way to preserve all that effort and beauty. But there was not, and in the matter of an hour every single confection had been devoured, or demolished, or discarded, the crumbs left on the checked tablecloths like the rubble of a ruined city.

When night fell, the band played. We drank cold beer in the hot night. The kids danced. They threw their bodies around on the sloping lawn between the band and the pool. Jonathan and I sat beside each other and watched fireworks explode over the neighboring towns. A slow song came on. He dragged me onto the dance floor. I leaned into him. His skin was cool and clean from swimming. I felt as I had so often felt in his arms, as if everything really would be all right. It was one of the times, last summer, that I thought only of him.

Then I looked over and you were dancing with Emme. Your hips were moving together. Your noses were an inch apart. There was no good reason, yet, for the alarm bell that rang in me, and yet it did ring, and the sound was long and loud.

T
HE TRIP TO
L
ONDON
in late August was a last-minute inspiration. A few weeks earlier, after an early-morning rush with so many customers in the store that Emme and I could barely keep up, the whole city took itself off to the Giants game, and we did not have a single customer for two hours. I gave Emme the rest of the day off. I sat in the quiet and sketched ideas for new lights. I had been in the field across from our house the day before, with Clara and Polly. I had photographed them as they leapt back and forth over the branch of a pine tree that had fallen in the shape of a perfect arch. I remembered that I had seen a contemporary floor lamp in that same shape at a lighting show in the spring. The arc had been fabricated out of steel. Six pendant lights had been attached to it, the beams directed downward, perfect over coffee tables, or dining room tables where there was no wiring for an overhead chandelier. It had been listed for thirty-five hundred dollars. I guessed the manufacturing cost was mostly in the arc-shaped steel base, since the lights themselves had been nothing special. But if you replaced the plain pendants with something more remarkable, like the samples of faceted diamond-shaped bulbs that had arrived in the store from a Swedish designer the week before, the light would be truly distinctive. And
if you swapped out the metal, with, say, the branch of a pine tree already bent into an arc shape, most of the cost would be eliminated.

I hauled the pine branch to the store, and the following weekend, I constructed the light. Emme was at a Zen retreat center in Santa Cruz, and your father and the girls were away on a two-night father-daughter camping trip. I had the store to myself. I holed up after closing on Friday and worked on the light. I made three trips to the hardware store for supplies. Once, returning, I noticed a man walking past the store, and for a heart-stopping moment, I thought it was Patrick. But it was only Michael Moss, from the lingerie shop, heading home.

I worked long into the night, then thought perhaps I’d sneak upstairs and sleep in the bed in the loft. But I opened the sliding doors to find a mess so disastrous it was both disturbing and fascinating. There were brochures and books and papers covering almost the whole of the bed. There were gum wrappers and panties and bras and jeans and T-shirts and sweaters and scarves. There were books on Buddhism and meditation and yoga and a few California travel books. There were brochures for meditation centers—not only in California, but all over the world. I picked up a few and flipped through them. I fought the urge to tidy up, and finally forced myself to slide the doors closed. I slept at home and returned to the store early to continue with the arc light, seized with the pleasure of solitude and work. I sunk the branch in concrete inside a half wine barrel that I painted brick red. I crafted hoods for each of the diamond bulbs out of old baking tins and painted them green. I hung the lights, with their forested hoods, a foot apart from one another on the branch, on three-foot-long wires I painted gold. The shape, the colors, the vintage and organic materials, the brilliant diamond bulbs—all this added up to a quirky but elegant light, and I was pleased.

When Emme returned from her weekend away, she stood up close to admire what I’d made.