Everything and More (60 page)

“You’re always so loyal, but this is pushing it too far.” Marylin stood as if to emphasize her words. “Althea Cunningham is one of those people who should be avoided.”

“Oh, Marylin.”

“She’s like a snake. It’s her nature to spit venom.”

*   *   *

Though it was not yet May, ovenlike heat blew from the inland deserts, and the following day the temperature soared to the nineties. Fortunately, the funeral limousines were air-conditioned.

Roy, in the first car with her mother and Marylin, was battling nausea—she had drunk her breakfast. Despite her grief and physical
discomfort, a small ripple of excitement ran through her. Gerry was waiting for her at Forest Lawn. She was on her way to him. Continually she reminded herself that he was dead, dead, dead, yet she could not quell this crazy idea that she was gliding toward a date with him.

NolaBee had suggested the rector from All Saints Episcopal, where she was a communicant. He conducted the funeral service in the gray stone church. Afterwards six mortuary employees directed the congregation to their cars.

A long, slow procession followed the hearse through the rolling lawns of the necropolis to a deep gash in the lavish grass. Here, a dozen wooden chairs were sheltered by a marquee. The chief mourners sat while others gathered beneath elms and sycamores mopping their brows.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. . . .” The rector had a fine bass delivery, but a treeful of sparrows drowned him out.

The casket began its slow descent into the grave, and as the creaking mechanism lowered the massive coffin, Roy was plunged into the brutal knowledge that Gerry, wearing a brand-new navy striped worsted suit, was being set down with jolting movements into the clayey yellow soil.

Until resurrection. . . .

Forever.

This was our date, Roy thought. He below, me above. . . .

Her body shook in uncontrollable spasms.

NolaBee and Marylin put consoling arms around her, BJ leaned forward with a loud, warm-voiced whisper of courage, and Joshua pressed a clean handkerchief into Roy’s shaking grasp. Billy, his craggy adolescent face for once drawn into sober lines—no wise-ass stuff today—said, “Aunt Roy, hey, Gerry’s not really dead. People will look at his work in museums, and that’s being alive.” Sari’s tenderly loving pats fell on her hip.

Roy, encapsulated by her family, Roy utterly alone, Roy gasping out her torturous grief for her estranged husband.

People would have approached her, but the mortuary men formed a protective phalanx around the family, so there was a general dispersal to the cars.

After a few minutes Roy’s wild outburst subsided. She blew her nose on a fresh handkerchief from Joshua’s apparently inexhaustible supply.

A tall, slender woman in black was moving uphill through the sunlight and shade toward them. Her shoulders were curved inward and her large-brimmed black hat was bent low.

The woebegone posture was so unlike Althea’s arrogant carriage that she had nearly reached the open grave before anyone in the family recognized her.

“Takes a whole lot of nerve, her comin’ here.” NolaBee’s aside, spoken to nobody in particular, was surely audible to Althea.

“Come along, old dear,” Joshua said, taking Roy’s arm.

Roy peered through narrowed lids at the suppliant figure edging toward the grave. Hot possessiveness swept through her, and in a burst of jealousy she understood she could not permit this final encroachment on her husband. Eluding Joshua’s grasp, she took a few tottery steps, her narrow high heels sinking into immaculately mowed grass.

The two women halted on either side of the open pit.

Tears oozed down Althea’s rigid face, making red blotches on the fine-pored skin. “I know I shouldn’t be here,” she murmured, slightly raising the hand that held the crumpled scrap of handkerchief, a gesture that managed to convey contrition and a fragile hope of forgiveness.

Roy’s incoherent determination to guard her dead husband wavered: what must it have cost proud, aloof Althea to humbly beg permission to share in Gerry’s final rites? The ties of friendship, so indestructible in Roy, tugged at her, and tears again welled in her eyes. She took a stumbling step around the heaped-up earth, opening her arms.

Althea moved toward her. “Oh, Roy, you understand? I kept thinking he was meeting me here.”

“Yes, yes,” Roy sobbed. “That’s exactly what I felt. . . .”

The widow and mistress shared a desolate embrace.

  
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For I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The red edging of tissue-fine pages had worn to a trace of pink, the black leather binding was separating from its caramel-colored linen. Roy’s paternal grandmother’s Bible.

Reaching for her tumbler, Roy sipped, letting time bear her like a slow-turning torture wheel. Thus I would revolve—resolve?—for all eternity.

She had promised the Finemans to return to work after a week, but those seven days following Gerry’s death had passed in a blur of visitors and NolaBee’s cigarette smoke; thus she had no time to resolve things present, nor things to come. Both Mr. and Mrs. Fineman had sympathetically urged her to take off as much time as necessary. A month, two even. More difficult by far to convince her mother to let her alone: NolaBee, in the clutch of unrelenting maternal instinct, had to be shoved from the house.

But what was so pernicious about nipping in solitude? Why shouldn’t she weep alone in her tedious grief?

The door knocker tapped.

Roy’s head tilted. A neighbor? Friend? Her mother? The restless tapping continued, punctuated by the buzzer.

Setting down the Bible and glass, she went unsteadily to the front door.

Althea stood there. Pale hair slicked back. Pale, elegant cream sweater and matching skirt. Pale jacquard silk blouse.

Roy drew backward in the dim foyer. She couldn’t bear close proximity to this tall, slender, immaculate body that Gerry had cherished and caressed. (In retrospect, the hysterical, graveside embrace seemed an impossibility, and several times during the last days Roy had caught herself boozily pondering the course of events had she been holding a gun.)

“May I come inside?” Althea asked.

Roy was loaded enough to forget manners. “Why?” she asked truculently.

“My father’s much better and I’m on my way home. I came over on the off-chance you’d have dinner tonight.”

Dinner? Roy realized it was dusk.

“Are you free?” Althea asked.

In the gloom behind Althea, a mourning dove preened atop one of the triad of spindly silver birches. Funny name, mourning dove. What do you mourn, you slim gray bird? Death? Loss of love?

“Roy, is anything wrong?”

“Oh, God, oh, shit, shit, shit. What could be right?”

Althea stepped over the threshold, switching on the living-room light. She stared at Gerry’s huge, smoothly executed paintings, blinked, then took in the couch with its Bible, bottle, and sad, solitary glass.

“It looks,” she said quietly, “as if you’re in as bad shape as I am.”

“You?” Roy gave a discordant titter. “You look like you stepped off the Rue de la Paix.” Balancing herself against the couch, she poured all that remained of the fifth of Scotch into the glass, drinking, shuddering as the line of heat traveled down behind her ribs.

“Roy, listen, you shouldn’t.”

“Are you implying I’m a lush? Isn’t it enough for you to steal my husband? Do you have to defame me, too?” “Defame” came out oddly: “de-vein.”

“I have enough on my conscience without you turning into an alcoholic.”

“Is that what you call having a little drinkee before dinner?”

Althea’s long, delicate jaw tensed and her hazel eyes focused on a faraway point, as if she were hearing an interior monologue. Then she moved with swift intent through the living room to the kitchen.

Roy careened after her.

The liquor cabinet was open. Althea reached for the first bottle, wrenching off the top, letting the amber bourbon gurgle into the stainless-steel sink.

“That’s my property!” Roy cried, grabbing a Haig & Haig pinchbeck to her midriff.

Althea reached up again. Roy, attempting to force Althea from her stash of liquor, dropped the Haig & Haig. It shattered loudly. Althea continued tearing gold foil from the neck of an unopened bourbon bottle.

“Stop it,” Roy whimpered, striking out at Althea. A faraway sector of her brain informed her she might slip on the broken glass, so
she flailed like a mechanical toy boxer, but she was not close enough to impede Althea. After a minute, she ceased her efforts, snorting her tears as Althea spilled out every bottle. Finishing this task, Althea wadded and dampened quantities of paper towels to pick up the shards. She deposited the full yellow plastic weave wastebasket outside the back door.

“Where’s your spare room?” she asked, her first words since she had come into the kitchen.

“I don’t want you in my house!” sobbed Roy.

“I’m going home for a few things. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”

“Didn’t you hear me?
Get out!
I can’t stand being near you.”

“That I know, dear heart. But if I’m not here, how will I make sure you aren’t backsliding?”

“I am not an alcoholic!”
Roy screamed, weeping.

“Not yet.” Althea’s voice was steely quiet. “Not quite yet. But keep on like this and you’ll take the prize. We’re going to get you through a week without benefit of the bottle.”

“Stay out of my life!”

“Things have gotten too dire for you, Roy. And as for me, I can’t stand any more guilt.”

*   *   *

For the first three days of Althea’s watchful presence, Roy either stayed in her own bedroom or went out alone into the backyard. The weather was drizzly, as it often is during a Southern California May. Roy hugged her molting college camelhair around herself, trudging the perimeters of the small square of wet dichondra, around and around like a poor, blinded mill donkey.

She missed the liquor less than she had anticipated.

Though booze had hazed her anguish, Roy, forthright by nature, found it preferable to come directly at the truth, however cruel and raw. He is dead, she would think, circling her wet garden. He is buried in Forest Lawn. Low, keening noises escaped her lips.

Those first days she avoided her surveillant—no easy matter when you are trapped together within the confines of a twelve-hundred-square-foot house.

Those three long nights when Roy saw every motion of the phosphorescent green clock hands, a mournful acceptance began to seep through her. He is dead, she would think. Dead. The need to howl her misery subsided to a dull, resolute ache. She began to accept that Althea shared honors with her as chief mourner. Gerry’s death, which had forever lessened them both, had forged a fresh bond between them.

On the fourth morning, when she heard Althea moving around, she went into the kitchen. Althea was sipping coffee and eating a slice of apple-custard Danish—the freezer was stuffed with funerary offerings.

Roy, giving a sheepish smile, spooned out some instant coffee.

“There’s no cream left,” Althea said.

“I have some powdered junk for emergencies,” Roy said, reaching into the storage cabinet for the brown-glass jar before she slid into the booth opposite Althea. At the sight of the uncomplicated friendship in Althea’s face, the remains of Roy’s embarrassment and resentment faded entirely. “Hey, jailer, good morrow to you.”

“How’s it going?” Althea smiled.

“No pink elephants or crawly spiders, which must be proof positive I’m not about to hit skid row.”

“That’s good news.”

Roy stirred white granules into her coffee. “I do sort of miss Dr. Buchmann, though. He’s my shrink.”

“I’ll drive you over.”

“So I’m not a trusty yet?”

“In a couple of days the parole board will discuss your case.”