Autobiography of Us (19 page)

“What are you, crazy?” A wave caught me across the face and I sputtered, furious. I saw a cap of gleaming hair, a pair of blue eyes staring at me indignantly in the early-morning light. People gathered by the edge of the water behind him, their bodies silhouetted against the sky. They stayed until my rescuer waved and then turned away.

“Maybe,” I said. “You?” I hadn’t meant to laugh, but my legs were kicking underwater like mad and my head was light from the cold. I felt suddenly, giddily alive—hysterical, almost. It must have been the shock—of the water or of what I’d just done, I can’t say.

“Jesus.” He sounded disgusted. “That was quite a stunt.” One hand broke the surface and rubbed at his eyes. I could see even in that dim light that he was extraordinarily handsome. His head under that golden cap was finely shaped, his nose aquiline; he looked, I thought as my arms began to numb, like a statue, something carved from stone. “Can we go in now?”

We paddled back a foot or so until we could stand. Goose bumps stood out all over my arms, my toes slowly prickling back into consciousness.

“I was just wondering,” I said apologetically, rubbing my upper arms, “about the pheasants.”

He shook his head, looking bewildered, but then he squinted into the sky. “Those are gulls,” he said. “Plain old seagulls.”

“Not here.” I was speaking too urgently. “In Vietnam.” I could feel him looking at me as we walked up the sandy incline; I was conscious of the way my wet clothes clung to me, my skirt wrapped around my legs like a second skin. “I heard the soldiers kill them for fun.”

“Another radical, is that it?”

“I happen to know someone over there,” I said stiffly.

“Everyone knows someone over there. One of my best buddies from law school shipped out just the other week.” We stood next to each other, shivering.

“So you’re a lawyer.”

“Nearly.”

“Aren’t you supposed to care about defending life?”

He sighed. “I know this is when I’m meant to say something brave and all—”

“God, no,” I broke in. “Honestly. I’d rather you didn’t.”

He stood there looking at me appraisingly. “I’m just glad it isn’t me over there.”

“Of course you are.”

“We better get you warm—”

“Rebecca,” I said.

He took my outstretched hand and I started to shake, the gesture oddly formal out there on the damp sand. But then he turned my hand over, palm up, and kissed me on the underside of my numbed wrist.

“Happy New Year, Rebecca,” he said.

“Paul,” he said, nodding gently. “Happy New Year,
Paul.
”

* * *

It wasn’t so uncommon back then, marrying someone you hardly knew. Of course, Isabel made a fuss over my leaving before the year was up, though she quieted down after I paid her the next three months’ rent in cash and left her the small bureau I’d bought for the room. My suitcase and a few books were all I had to take with me. Another girl might have found that unsettling—sad, even, the fact that my life could be reduced to such an undistinguished heap—but I was glad for it. “I escaped,” my mother always said, “I got
out
,” and I thought of her as I left my key on the coffee table for Isabel and ran down the stairs to where Paul was waiting. I was free, wasn’t I? In a gesture I found both surprising and touching, the girls at the restaurant threw me a going-away party. There was no need for me to work anymore, Paul said. We would live together in his apartment in Pacific Heights until we moved at the end of the summer, Paul’s family in New York and a position waiting, he said, at a prominent firm.

In retrospect, I wish I’d asked one of the girls from the restaurant to serve as a witness. It would have been nice to have a familiar face there in the courthouse that June, someone to applaud when the justice pronounced us man and wife or to throw a handful of rice at our retreating backs. We’d decided to tell our parents after the fact, Paul declaring it would be a “hoot” to elope, that Bitsy and Jed, as he referred to them, would love it, love the adventure of the whole thing. Of course I was relieved to have an excuse to leave my own parents out of it, but as a result I’m afraid the only bit of festivity to the day was the flower Paul brought with him, tucked into the inside pocket of his vest. He surprised me with it as we stood at the front of the room, waiting for the justice—an elderly, taciturn man—to shuffle his papers into order.

“To love
,
” Paul declared, the cluster of yellow blooming in his hand. It was flowers, really, plural, a bunch of tansy he’d spotted on our way in and doubled back to pick on a whim. I stood in the dim cool of the courthouse, clutching the tansy in my hand, the stiff cotton of my shift gone soft against my upper leg where I kept pressing the palm of my free hand against my thigh. I felt strange: not myself, or as though I stood outside myself, looking in. I kept waiting for the thrill of it, the sparkle. I remember looking around the room knowing that I ought to be recording the moment, that later I would regret not having taken down every detail: the dusty lamp with its tangled cord, the lone chair in the corner, its seat cushion covered in cracked green leather. I fixed my gaze on a poster someone had tacked up on the far wall, a faded print of Rosie the Riveter in her blue shirt and polka-dot kerchief:
We Can Do It!
She looked not much older than I was, though it was hard to tell with all the wear and tear, one side of her face gone yellow and cracked in places where the sun had burned her skin away.

I’d written my parents the week I arrived in San Francisco, saying the apartment I’d found lacked a telephone, of all things. They could write me if they liked. My mother wrote back the very next week, saying formally that she was happy to hear I’d arrived safe and sound. The heat was killing the rhododendrons, she wrote, and last week there had been a terrible accident on 101 involving a truck full of chickens and a family of four—had I heard? Of course they missed me terribly, she added at the end. They had been worried, she said. Did I have the right sort of coat for the chill? The evenings in San Francisco, she had heard, downright cold. At the end of the page, as though it were an afterthought, my father had scrawled his signature. I don’t have to tell you that hurt me more than I cared to admit at the time.

Now I could write to tell them I was married.
A lawyer
, I wrote that next morning.
Paul is studying litigation. He graduates at the end of the summer. We’re thinking New York.
On the subject of our wedding I said only that it was very small, that my husband (I took particular pleasure at the look of that word on the page) had cousins with a house north of the city and we had been married there with just a few witnesses. Outside, I said, in the shaded grove of an old peach-tree orchard.
Paul’s friends played Pachelbel,
I wrote.
A string quartet.
I wrote that last bit knowing it would please my mother to think of me walking down an aisle, however makeshift, to music, that at those words she would no doubt stand from the dining room table where she and my father sat with my letter and walk to the cabinet and put on a record of Pachelbel, her head tilted just so. I said nothing of the tottering old justice, the peeling walls, nothing of the strange sensation I had of looking in at myself as I stood next to the man who turned after those brief vows and kissed me chastely on the lips.

I’m embarrassed to admit I kept the tansy pressed between the pages of a book for years, the color of the bouquet fading from marigold to butter, the stems and buds drying to brittle but somehow miraculously left intact. I don’t believe I’ve ever told anyone until now. I used to take it out from time to time and hold the dry little stem, as though the feel of those crisped petals might take me back to that afternoon, to that younger self who seems now little more than a bewildered stranger, a girl standing stiffly in a county courthouse wearing a cotton shift and a pair of Mary Janes, her hair pinned back behind her ears. As our marriage began to pull apart at the seams, I looked at those small, flat buds with the discerning eye of a forensic examiner, as though the dissolution of a marriage was something I might be able to trace back to its beginnings. As though I might have known all along we would come to no good end.

* * *

How do I explain your father? He appeared that night in the cold waters of the Pacific like the perfect solution, the final number to one of Einstein’s beautiful equations. You’ve seen the pictures, those Polaroids from our old apartment in Pacific Heights, where we lived that spring and summer—me on the front steps in a shift and a pair of sunglasses I believed fashionable at the time, Paul holding a tumbler full of something. He really was extraordinarily handsome. A tall drink of water, my father called him once. Broad-shouldered but lean, with that shock of golden hair. The sun browned his skin until he looked half Indian, his classmates teasing him that he must have Navajo blood. “Christ, Bitsy would have kittens if she heard them saying that,” he told me. “Her father’s father’s father—my great-great-grandfather—came over on the Mayflower, and she’ll never let you forget it. She’s an original, Bits. You’ll see.”

He was all of twenty-six when we met, but even as a student he dressed beautifully. He had impeccable taste, an unparalleled sense of what Mother called the art of presentation. I believe I fell for that as much as anything else. Every morning before he left for class, I watched as he shined his Italian-made black leather shoes with a little brush and a cake of polish; he combed pomade through his hair until it gleamed; he shaved meticulously in front of the mirror, clapping his cheeks with a hot towel and applying aftershave with even, synchronized pats.

“Are you happy?” This one morning not long after we married. He stood in front of me in his jacket and tie, his shirt freshly ironed, the collar turned down just so.

I wrapped the sheet around me. “I don’t think I’ll answer that question.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that it may incriminate me.”

He stood there looking at me: I can’t tell you what that felt like, to have a man like your father look at me that way. “Bingo,” he said finally, grinning. “Girl’s got taste.”

“The fifth?” I gazed up at him.

“My favorite amendment,” he said, bending down to kiss the top of my head.

In early September, we went to Aspen on a belated honeymoon. It was all for me. Paul has never, as you know, particularly cared for the outdoors. He has always had what in those days I considered, on the basis of my own father’s predilection for neatness, a lawyer’s love of order, a certain impatience with anything that made a mess. Paul kept everything at a level that bordered on the fastidious—his golden hair, the collar on his shirt, the lapel of his jacket, the pen clipped to his pocket, his toothbrush placed at exactly the same angle in its little cup. Even, I’m embarrassed to admit, the sheets on the bed after we made love had to be stripped immediately, the bed remade with fresh linens before he could lie back down. I have often thought that was part of what drove him to drinking, the fact that it transported him to some other, more perfect place.

Still, in those early days of marriage, Paul’s desire to see me happy eclipsed everything. The week before we left for Colorado, he bought me a pair of binoculars, tying the box up with a clumsy bow.
For Rebecca
, he wrote,
who deserves a better view.
The binoculars came with their own carrying case, black leather and lined with green felt.

Spectacular waterfowl!
The Aspen guidebooks exclaimed.
Unparalleled buntings, red-tailed and chicken hawks, rosy-cheeked finches, buzzards, owls!

We sat in our hotel room and watched the rain.

WE moved to New York in late October. Our apartment was on West 79th Street, a large, airy place on the twelfth floor of a building that must have struck me at the time as terribly luxurious, though what I remember of those first moments in our new home is the liquid way the sun poured down over the Hudson, a light clear and lovely as any California afternoon. Within days of our arrival the skies had sealed over, turning the view from our window into a wide, seamless stretch of gray, like wax that has been melted into a mold and left to cool.

I quickly found myself housebound. Oh, there were any number of things I might have done. Museums I might have visited, societies I might have joined. No sooner had we arrived than the invitations began pouring in, the wives of the other lawyers at the firm asking me to charity events and teas, cocktail parties, lunches, afternoons at the salon while our husbands were at work. I put on fresh lipstick and took taxis to strangers’ apartments, where we went around introducing ourselves and then sat with our plates of melba toasts, the other wives turning to one another immediately to ask about teething, was it true about letting them cry it out during the night because, honestly, they were at their wits’ end, and did anyone know of a really good hairdresser uptown? There were firm holiday parties and dinners at the partners’ homes, which I attended with Paul, the men retiring to the study with their cigars and cognacs the moment the dishes were cleared, us wives left to chitchat over our tea. You can imagine how well I did with that.

That fall was when everything began to change. With Paul and me, I mean. Or: That fall was when everything began to shift. Like the fog parting around the Golden Gate, the truth slowly emerged, its own awful miracle. For a while there I remained deliberately blind, preoccupied as I was with my own unhappiness, the inertia I felt taking hold of me a little tighter each day like the torpor into which certain birds, Oliver once informed me, descend come winter. Snow fell that November in great, shining drifts, and I began staying home for days at a time. I was newly pregnant with your brother, ill and confined to staggering around most mornings as though I’d been dropped on a boat somewhere miles out to sea, the horizon dipping and rising with alarming speed. All at once the effort required to pull on a hundred layers and battle the crowded streets seemed too much. You’ll recall that I had never lived anywhere outside California, the farthest my family had ever gone for a vacation a weekend we took in the Grand Canyon when I was very young, my mother later declaring the whole thing a disaster. In the absence of any concrete activity to occupy my hours, I spent far too long unpacking the boxes and setting up. The apartment was much bigger than our place in Pacific Heights, and I took weeks to pick out the rugs and draperies, arranging and rearranging the furniture—a project for which you must understand I had neither the talent nor the patience—and trying out small, colorful accents I found ridiculous but that
Ladies’ Home Journal
assured me were
confident
. Paul seemed pleased to see me taking such an interest—“thatta girl!”—though in truth he’d already begun working long hours and hardly had time to notice much of anything, his mind already absented, focused on other, more important things.