I Think I Love You (28 page)

“Shut up,” says Marie, suddenly feeling protective of Crazy Woman. The woman’s voice had had a serrated edge of despair to it.

“And the friend,” says the Boss, who is pursuing his own train of thought, far away from the others now. “The long-lost friend, she might be good value. I wonder if we can dig up the Cassidy quiz.”

His bewildered underlings make respectful noises and start to pick up their files and their cigarettes.

Marie is grateful now that she answered the phone. Declan was right; they just have to hope that Crazy Woman is presentable, not too many cat hairs. Airbrushing can work wonders these days, but there are limits. And David Cassidy, she’d forgotten about him. Is he sane and nice, or damaged goods like so many of those poor bastards who found fame young?

The Boss holds the boardroom door open for her. They walk together down the corridor in silence until suddenly he says, “You know, Marie, there’s a lot to be said for the midlife crisis. People are often at their best during a crisis. You see who they really are.”

Marie laughs, not sure if that’s the correct response. If she didn’t long for the Boss’s admiration, she might be less insecure.

Through the swing doors up ahead they see the head of marketing approaching.

“Hi, Baz, can I see you in my office for a minute?” the Boss says.

Barry gives Marie an ironic little wave, using just his fingertips.

“Sure,” he says. “No problem, Bill.”

S
o, what’s the worst that can happen? Either you find yourself in the presence of the guy you worshipped and adored or he’s a sort of pickled Liberace.”

Carrie fishes the tea bags out of the mugs and drops them in the sink. “Do you want milk?”

“And sugar, please.”

“Milk in tea I can just about do. Sugar is kind of against my religion as a person from San Francisco,” Carrie says, reaching for the box of Tate & Lyle, which is soggy from standing too long on the draining board. “One lump of type-two diabetes or two?”

Petra doesn’t reply. It’s the start of the working week and she is fiddling with her bow. She takes some rosin and draws the bow across it, giving a little shudder at the beginning and the end. She pulls the cello to her and makes the loudest noise she can. Lately, for some reason she has taken to playing a few bars of Led Zeppelin as a warm-up. When she was in the sixth form at school, Led Zeppelin was what all the boys who couldn’t play the guitar played on the guitar. It doesn’t sound all
that great on the cello, but she finds the burst of aggression strangely soothing.

The rain is tapping out a furious rhythm on the windows of the center. Inside, the two women feel as snug as if they were in the cabin of a tiny boat lit by oil lamps. The harsher the elements outside, the deeper their contentment. Carrie and Petra get a lot of client referrals from local hospitals and social services, kids from homes of scarcely credible brutality who often have an angry response to the therapy, at least at first.

“Shut yer face, woman,” one boy said to her over and over.

Karl, with a body two sizes too big for him, smashed an impressive number of percussion instruments, including a drum that, strictly speaking, should have been unbreakable. Such cases have lost their power to shock her. If you’ve never known harmony in your brief life and your days lack any rhythm because your drug-addict parents keep such strange hours, why wouldn’t you take it out on a snare drum? Many of the children Petra sees have severe learning difficulties.

“Your nutters.” That’s what Marcus called them. “For God’s sake, Petra, why are you wasting your talent on those nutters?”

Let me in, let me in
, the rain taps irritably on the windows. The staff room overlooks a small park, really a picnic rug of grass that functions as the local dog toilet. When people in London talk about green spaces it makes Petra laugh. If you come from South Wales, the grass on the other side never looks greener; it always looks yellow, or shitty brown. As she gets older, she finds she suffers more from
hiraeth;
a word with no exact equivalent in English, it means a powerful yearning for the place you came from. She has lived in London longer than she lived in Wales, more than half her life, yet there is some stubborn part of her that prevents her calling this city home. The
hiraeth
feels like an extra muscle of the heart that contracts painfully whenever she thinks of the hills and of the rain falling in a curtain over the sea.

It is supposed to be summer, but the south of England has been hit by freak floods. In London it has been raining so continuously that you notice the deluge only on the rare occasions that it stops. Dogshit Park has become a lake of mud.

Carrie passes Petra her mug of tea and a packet of fig rolls, which
have become the women’s private joke and their public addiction. Petra takes two and breaks one in half before biting into the figgy ooze.

“Hey, since you got back from Wales you’ve been inhaling sweet things?”

Carrie’s drawl swoops up at the end of the sentence, turning every statement into a question. It’s an inflection the Welshwoman and the Californian have in common.

“Stress,” Petra says lightly. “Death, divorce and what’s the third thing that’s meant to be one of the most stressful life events?”

“David?” asks Carrie.

“You’re just jealous.”

“Jealous? Of you going to Vegas to meet
David Cassidy?
” Carrie shakes her sleek gray head and her hoop earrings tinkle with silvery mirth. “C’mon, I wouldn’t have given David a suck of my ice pop. I was a Bobby Sherman girl.”

“Who’s Bobby Sherman?”

“Oh. Just the fluffiest, cutest-smiled, swingiest-hipped, hottest teen idol who ever lived, that’s all.”

“
Bobby Sherman?
” Petra speaks the name with the incredulous condescension that the true believer reserves for any teen idol besides her own. “How many fans did
he
have then?”

“Just thirty million, plus me and Marge Simpson,” says Carrie.

Petra sets down her bow and checks her watch. Nearly time for her next session. She must pop to the loo first; you never leave a class in the middle, it breaks the spell.

“Marge Simpson had a crush on Bobby Sherman? I thought she was a cartoon character.”

“They’re all cartoon characters, Petra, my dear, that’s the point. Bobby was my psychic pocket just like David was yours.”

“Psychic what?”

Before she specialized in music therapy and followed her husband, Don, to England, first to Oxford and then London, Carrie had trained as a Jungian analyst. In general, she speaks English around the center, but sometimes she drops one of her more obscure psychoanalytical terms into the conversation. Petra studies her friend fondly. She can see that Carrie is about to launch into one of those melodious explanations that drop from her lips like a waterfall. Rangy and athletic, Carrie looks
like she was born with a golden tan and hiking boots. With her clear blue eyes and cinnamon sprinkling of freckles over nose and cheeks, she could be Robert Redford’s sister. Blessed with thick silver hair that somehow looks chic instead of elderly, she seems ageless and enviably self-possessed. On weekends, she loves to climb cliffs, and she is just as nimble at finding the mental toe- and handholds to get you through a difficult patch. Carrie has two grown-up daughters, one a doctor, the other on a permanent gap year, and she has been a lighthouse for Petra as she attempts to navigate Molly’s teenage storms; they start early these days. Twelve is the new sixteen. She knows she would be lost without the older woman’s relaxed assurances that bitter rows and equally savage silences are completely normal. Once or twice lately, Molly has even made Petra cry.

“What d’you expect? She’s a teenager. Put on earth to test the theory that maternal love can withstand any amount of shit.”

Petra envies Carrie; or rather, she wants to
be
her, to know what it feels like to live in a mind and body that certain and true. Compared to Carrie, Petra feels she is still driving with an emotional learner’s permit. Her mother’s death was such a shock. Not the fact of Greta dying; it was obvious for months that not even her mother could stare down the cancer, which had moved, without mercy, from organ to organ like an advancing army. No, it was the fact that Petra hadn’t expected to feel like an
orphan
. Not at the age of thirty-eight. Not when she was an adult. Nonetheless, orphaned is what she feels. Grief for her dad has surfaced again through the grave he now shares with her mother. She manages to be glad that neither parent lived to see the breakup of her marriage. Since Marcus left, Petra likes to sit near Carrie in the staffroom, the way animals lie beside each other in a stable.

“Psychic pocket,” Carrie elaborates; “it’s like the basket into which you put all your needs and longings.”

Petra frowns. “Isn’t that called love?”

“No, it’s pure fantasy. Very common, but also hopeless and inappropriate.”

“Sounds like love to me,” says Petra, picking up her cello and maneuvering it into the case. “Hopeless and inappropriate at love. I have a degree in that.”

At the door, she remembers something and turns back to Carrie,
who is busily scouring a cup with a brush. “Why did you have to say that stuff about pickled Liberace? You know that’s all I’m going to be able to think about when I go and see David. You’re supposed to be supportive. As my friend.”

“As your friend,” says Carrie, “I’m not here to make you feel better. I’m here to feel envious and competitive and subtly undermine you while pretending to be real sympathetic.”

“Oh thanks. You, you”—Petra stammers toward the insult—“you
therapist,
” she finally spits out. Laughter makes her body feel better. Her shoulder has been acting up lately, and she winces as she lifts the cello through the doorway.

The room she works in is a couple of doors down the corridor. Bare and tranquil with pale, clackety wooden floors, it has bulbous, podlike windows set in the ceiling. After dragging the instruments from the wall and setting them up on a table in the middle, Petra takes a seat at the keyboard and starts to play a few chords. On the flat roof above her, the rain creates a percussive hiss; it sounds more like static on the radio than water. Why is rain so comforting when you’re miserable and so damned annoying when you’re not?

As her fingers fall into formation over the notes, through the static a woman’s voice comes to her unbidden, one of the most beautiful voices she’s ever known. It is no strain to recall the song the woman is singing, no strain at all. Petra hums the intro and hears the woman come in on an impossibly low B-flat, a man’s note really. A woman had no business being able to sing that well that low.

“Talking to myself and feeling old.”

She and Sharon used to sing it together. When they first learned those words they were so young, babies; they couldn’t know. How could they possibly have known? What do thirteen-year-olds know about feeling old?

“Rainy Days and Mondays.” Luxuriating in the song’s sadness, Petra surprises herself by launching with sudden gusto into the saxophone solo. That shot of brass in the middle of such a melancholy tune, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. Respectfully, she doffs her musician’s cap to Richard Carpenter. How well she remembers the chocolate-brown cover of the album and that ornate rococo lettering.
Was it really gold? The Carpenters were supposed to be cheesy, a taste you kept to yourself she learned much later at college, but their melodies had outlived those of nearly all their cooler contemporaries. Far more complex harmonies, with words that felt like they sprang naturally from the tune.

She and Sharon used to love harmonizing on “Close to You.” Petra took the tune and Sha did all the
waaaa-aah-ar-ahhh
bits.

Karen Carpenter, lost to anorexia at—what, thirty-two? Such a stupid waste. Petra sees that beautiful face, framed by jubilant brown curls. Critics called Karen’s face cherubic, so the poor woman must have decided to starve it. Her cheeks were just bonny, that’s all. Karen’s voice had no strain in it whatsoever, no gear change; it moved from low to high as though a voice traveled through liquid, not air. Who else could do that? Ella, Barbra. Not many in pop, that’s for sure.

How she had longed for a dress she saw Karen Carpenter wearing in
Jackie
. Petra can remember it now, remember it far better than most of the clothes she actually owned. Long, frothy cream cheesecloth, with a high neck and strips of broderie anglaise down the bodice. It was the dress the sisters in
Little House on the Prairie
wore in their dreams. Didn’t Katharine Ross wear the same dress on the bike with Paul Newman in
Butch Cassidy?

Bowler hat. Paul Newman, not Katharine Ross. Now she is confused. Memory can do that to you. She is no longer sure if she is remembering things as they were or as she’d wanted them to be.

She must tell Carrie; she’s bound to detect some hidden meaning in that long cream dress with its hint of bridal chastity. When they first met, Petra had been quietly appalled by the American’s habit of treating her like a puzzle that needed solving. She was too Welsh to feel entirely at ease with the way Carrie picked over even the most minor detail of her life, hunting for clues. Petra’s bad headaches were just migraines, for God’s sake, not a sign of a crippling inability to assert herself in her marriage, as Carrie had suggested. One day over lunch at their local café, Petra mentioned a thank-you letter that had arrived from her mother that morning. Coming from Greta, it was a no-thanks thank-you letter. Only her mother could express gratitude without sounding in the smallest bit appreciative. Reading the letter a
second time, Petra felt what small reserves of confidence she had deflating, as though her soul had a slow puncture.

“Well, what d’you expect? Your mom’s such a bitch,” Carrie said mildly, spearing a gherkin.

It was like a shotgun going off. The volume of the world changed. A fork that a woman put down on the neighboring table reverberated like a timpani section.

Who dared to call her mother a bitch? It had never occurred to her that she, Petra, was allowed to judge Greta. It was Greta who judged Petra and found her wanting, not the other way round.