Adrift in the Sound (13 page)

“Liz, come on,” Marian urged, beckoning with her arm.

Lizette hunched her shoulders and went in, sat in the kitchen chair closest to the door, studied the blisters on her thumb from squeezing the pruning sheers. She still felt ticked about Poland leaving her, about the way Sandy had treated her in Seattle, pissed about her refusal to let her stay at Franklin Street. She felt a twinge in her side, her rib still mending from the attack at the tavern—how long ago? She tried to remember. Before Christmas, more than four months ago. She realized she’d been back at the ranch for two months now. Sandy sat rubbing her belly. Lizette ignored her, realized why she’d quit stripping, understood what she was hiding back then.

Fisher slouched in a chair across from her, a bowl of navy beans steaming in front of him. Lizette felt him look her over. Marian set a bowl of beans in front of her. Fisher smiled his yellow beaver smile. Lizette studied her dirty hands.

“Fisher has to eat and take a nap,” Marian said. She popped open a jar of Abaya’s homemade blackberry preserves and put it on the table with a spoon beside it. “Sandy and I want to go down to the Moran for dinner and hear him play. You need to go, too. I made reservations. Do you have a skirt?”

Startled by the suggestion, Lizette shook her head, stared into her bowl, took a taste, put the spoon down. She looked up and found Fisher staring at her, again, intent. She blinked, adjusted her body in the chair, focused on the thumbtack holes in the wall by the window. Her face ticced, rain fell outside, dropping from the sky, shattering on the ground, the thunder of the falling water getting louder in her ears, terror clawing her stomach and clutching her chest. Her pelvic muscles convulsed.

Shoving back her chair, she fled the kitchen, slipped on the trail, fell once, bounded muddy onto the cabin’s narrow porch, threw open the door, slammed it behind her, fell onto the cot, held her head in agony, wondered what triggered the panic. The smell of moss and vomit came to her. The alley. Men grabbing her. When the fear smoothed out, she got up and took a pill, checked the supply inside the plastic bottle with a shake. Nearly empty. She had to go back to Seattle, hated the thought.

Tucker scratched at the door. She opened it and he went right to his box and curled into a ball. She wiped water from his coat with a rag as best she could, carefully rubbed his bandage clean. They napped.

FIFTEEN

THIS COLOR CAN’T BE REPRODUCED
, Lizette thought, as she crossed her ankles under the table and folded her hands in her lap. The warm yellow glow in the Moran Hotel’s dining room fascinated her, but frustrated at the same time. She couldn’t figure out how to create color that was like the burnished gold in a pawnshop jeweler’s window—worn wedding bands and cuff links glowing with memories lost, precious metal tinged with emotion. How, she wondered, could she cast that color onto canvas.
What color is it?
she wondered, and tried to figure out a combination of pigments that would create it. Maybe lily pollen, glistened with egg white.

“Hey, wake up!” Marian nudged her under the table. Lizette smiled at Marian and Sandy. At least she thought she did. Her tongue felt numb, her body stiff, only her mind remained limber enough to move. Sometimes lily pollen is too brown, she thought, if the flowers are old. She fretted and sorted through the color wheel in her mind.

Marian and Sandy had come down to the cabin that evening and awakened her from a slick, black dream—broad backs, suffocating overcoat, dark water, a scream that stuck in her throat. They handed her one of Marian’s skirts, dressed her and combed her snarled hair in the candle light, twisting it into a chignon on her head, securing it with long pins decorated on the ends with lacquered sea shells, making tendrils in front of her ears to soften her gaunt cheeks. She wore the brown sweater Abaya found at the market, more low-cut than they’d realized at the time. Marian and Sandy smiled at the sweater’s snug fit, said they liked the way it showed off her collar bones.

Walking into the dining room behind Marian and Sandy and the maitre d’, she felt like she was being led by circus midgets. People stopped between bites to stare at her and she could almost feel the St. Lucia crown of candles on her head, like at church. She heard the organ music rolling through the open roof timbers, sensed the feeling of her parents nearby, feeling as if they were smiling from a pew near the front.

Marian leaned over and whispered behind her menu. “Fisher’s playing.” Lizette listened more closely. A Chopin etude, warm and billowy, hovered above the dining room’s clink and tinkle, flowed from the music room in waves, filled gaps in the laughter and conversation. Her father’s spirit came to her, hovered beside the table. He loved Chopin.

She picked up her menu and looked out the windows. “Sounds great,” she said, overcome by sensations and memories. Outside, black was broken only by an occasional whitecap, suggesting a surging tide in the tiny harbor below the hotel. The white masts of sailboats bobbed and rigging pinged as the wind gusted.

Lizette remembered her father bringing her and her mother here a long time ago. In the summer. They ate on the deck overlooking the boat harbor. Her father, excited by the finds during the week’s dig for artifacts, talked about the Lummi tribe and its history, as if he held time in his hands, recaptured and repossessed. Her mother gossiped about local artists, a new clothing boutique in Eastsound, plans for a group show at the Seattle Art Center in the fall, about including a few small pieces of her own she thought might sell.

Her father, always the teacher, leaned over to Lizette and explained the mansion’s design was an example of the Arts and Crafts Movement, part of the hand-crafted reaction to mass production factories and the fussy Victorian style that came before it. Lizette didn’t care, but loved the Tiffany lamps. She remembered the mahogany piano in the music room, the walls of pipes for the organ, the ox-blood leather chairs where she’d sat with her parents, legs too short to put her feet on the floor.

“Excuse me, ladies. Ready to order?” The waiter was speaking to her, his head cocked. Pushing up from the depths of her mind, Lizette squinted at him, couldn’t figure out what he was saying, panicked, nearly burst into tears as the memories receded.

“He wants to know what you want to eat,” Marian prodded, seeing her confusion, looking worried.

“What?”

“What do you want to eat? I’m having salmon,” she said.

“OK.”

“Make that two orders, please,” Marian said. Sandy ordered lamb chops with mint jelly. Another man came and filled the water glasses. Marian ordered a bottle of wine, Mateus rosé.

Lizette scanned the room’s blank walls and remembered her mother complaining long ago that this lovely old mansion had no art, wondering aloud if perhaps her agent could arrange a sale of her work. She said she’d just finished a large seascape that would go perfectly over the fireplace mantle in the lobby. The blues and sand tones would complement the inlaid seashell design in the casing around the firebox, she said, and a good hearth rug in just the right hues would tie it together. Her father said no, that old Moran had considered the view from the windows to be art enough. No painting could ever compare with God’s handiwork, her father had said in a pompous tone.

Lizette remembered the smile sinking on her mother’s face, her father’s smug look as he gazed from the deck to the water, the breeze riffling his hair.

“Do you always have to act superior?” her mother had said in a leaden voice. “You enjoy putting me down, trivializing my work.”

Lizette remembered that her tuna sandwich had started to taste bad, stuck in her throat, and she put it down, refused to eat another bite, although her father pressed her to finish. Her parents fought quietly over this, too, her eating, the way she sat, which hand she used to reach for her glass of milk. It was pressure against pressure, rather than outburst, with her stuck in the middle.

“Do you want wine?” Marian asked as she filled Sandy’s glass. “A little drop never hurt a pregnant lady.”

“This kid has had more than a glass of wine,” Sandy said, picking up her glass and emptying it in two big gulps, patting her round belly, giggling. Marian frowned and poured a half glass for Lizette.

“Once Rocket brought over some tequila and weed to cheer me up,” Sandy said. “We got messed up, I mean really! Rocket pissed the bed. That’s how bad it was. That happened after Al got his sorry cholo butt thrown back in jail. I’m sorry to talk that way about the father of my kid, but the jerk was always coming in loaded and knocking me around.”

She turned sideways in her chair, pouted. Lizette vaguely recalled Al, met him once or twice at the Twisted Owl. She remembered he’d been there with Sandy and Rocket.

“I’m glad he’s not around,” Sandy said. “But, I did like riding his Harley. We rode all the way down to Ellensburg once to meet up with some of his Hell’s Angels buddies. They were at Alta Monte when things started going down. Guy got killed, did you know that?”

Both Marian and Lizette sat watching her. Marian moved her lips to show she was paying attention. Lizette scanned her memory, recalled the Rolling Stones, but couldn’t remember the year of the Altamont Concert, maybe ’69, she thought.

“You heard about that, right?”

Marian nodded her awareness of the concert, but Lizette doubted her. Sandy prattled on.

“The Hell’s Angels tore the place up. Anyway, that was before we stayed at this place, the Antler Motel, in Ellensburg, that was last year. It had this far out vibrating bed and a stuffed deer head on the wall. I thought the stupid thing would fall off and kill me in my sleep. It was far fuckin’ out.”

The gray-haired couple at the next table looked sour about the way she was talking, flapped their napkins as if to dispel a bad odor.

“Here’s dinner,” Marian said, drawing Lizette’s attention back to the table.

“Got ketchup?” Sandy asked as the boy refilled water glasses. “And how about some more wine?” Marian poured the last of the bottle into Sandy’s glass and shook her head “no” to the waiter. “Too bad Fisher can’t bang out some rock. He’s not too bad for a bald drunk with thick glasses. But, he probably has a beanpole dick.”

Lizette got up, looked down on Sandy and almost said something, but couldn’t figure out what. She turned and walked to the mansion’s music room, settled in a leather chair just like the one she remembered from when she was small,
but this time her feet touched the carpet
, she thought. On the table in the middle of the room, a big vase of white star-gazer lilies dropped powdery yellow pollen from their stamen and she studied the color on the polished surface.

Fisher bent over the piano keyboard, just his head and shoulders visible as he played. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his rumpled dress shirt, loosened his tie. Lizette closed her eyes and floated on the music, soaring with Ravel’s Bolero, her breath rising and falling with the notes, seeing swirling red in her mind, following the sounds to crescendo, lolling in the silence that followed. Her hand lifted and warm fingers wrapped her palm. She opened her eyes and Fisher stood in front of her.

“Your hands are beautiful,” he said. “But, I already told you that, didn’t I?”

Lizette focused on remaining calm, wondered why people always needed a response to their slightest comment, when basically she didn’t care, was usually preoccupied with her own thoughts about color and light and her canvases.

“Come sit with me. I’ll teach you to play Rachmaninoff.”

She pushed up, stretched to her full height.

“How tall are you, anyway?” he asked as he led her to the piano bench.

“Five eleven.”

“I’m six three.”

“Oh.”

“Ever think about modeling?”

Lizette sat on the edge of the bench, pondering a question she’d been asked many times in her life, but never had an adequate response beyond “No.” The idea of parading around in front of strangers for money never even seemed like a remote possibility to her.

“Don’t talk much, do you?”

Her exasperation eased when he began to play, his fingers rushing up and down the keyboard, his skinny legs pumping the pedals, sweat beading at his temples.

“Are you a Swede?” he asked. She nodded, watched his fingers fly.

“How do you know Rocket?” Lizette asked, batting away his question.

“The guy saved my life,” he said, running through an arpeggio. “He let me sleep at his house when I first got out of jail. His piano saved me. I would have gone crazy if it wasn’t there. He even got it tuned for me so it sounded better. I practice at the Dog House all the time, hang out with the guys.”

“I know,” she said, wondering if he even remembered her being there, feeling like a ghost. “But I hardly ever saw you doing things with the Dogs. I mean getting high, going out to the taverns with them, and stuff.”

Lizette started to get up, but he put a firm hand on her forearm and pulled her down. She panicked, felt his touch like a stab.

“There you are,” Marian bubbled into the music room, Sandy on her heels. “An old guy in the dining room gave me this ten dollar bill. Asked me to bring it to you. His wife wants to hear something from
My Fair Lady
. Do you know any of those songs?”

“Sure,” he said, pushing his glasses back on his nose and launching into “The Rain in Spain,” but with a jazzy twist. “I’ll throw in some
Oklahoma
too. That always gets ’em.”

“You hardly ate anything,” Marian complained, standing behind the couple and putting her arm around Lizette’s shoulders, slipping the money into Fisher’s shirt pocket. “Weren’t you hungry?”

Lizette shook her head and fingered the base keys in front of her.

“You going to the tavern when you get done here?” Sandy asked Fisher as he launched into “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Whose playing?

“Some group from Bellingham,” she said. “I think.”

“I get off in about an hour. Want me to meet you guys there?”

“Not us,” Marian said. “Lizette works at the farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. She’s already picked the vegetables, right?” Lizette shook her head, shrugged, knew Poland and Abaya had taken care of it. “And, I’m getting ready for the equinox party tomorrow.”

“Far out,” Fisher said, pounding away on the keys.

“I’m here to party,” Sandy interrupted. “I don’t need to get up early. I’ll ride back to the ranch and get my car. Pick you up here in about an hour?”

Fisher gave her a two-finger salute from his forehead and kept playing. The women found Marian’s truck in the parking lot and squeezed into the cab. When they rounded the bend and headed down the hill to the ranch they could see lights on in the house and a couple of cars in the driveway. In the kitchen Greg and Rocket were making sandwiches, helping themselves to potato salad.