On a Night Like This (2 page)

“The omelette’s delicious,” Blair said, staring at it.

“You had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon,” Amanda said.

“You don’t miss much. You’re a pain in the butt.”

“My specialty.”

“Yeah, I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“And?”

“I’ve got some bug. Some virus. The doctor wants me to take a break from cooking for a while.”

“What is it?”

“A virus. I just need to rest some. And I need to eat omelettes. That’s the magic cure.”

Blair picked up her fork and started eating. Her stomach was rototilling and she could barely swallow her food. Amanda still watched her.

“You’re lying,” Amanda said.

“I’m not lying,” Blair barked. “Don’t accuse me of lying. I’m sick. You think I’m happy about it? You think I want to stop cooking after all these years?”

Amanda’s chair banged back against the wall and she was gone. The door to her room slammed shut just as the chair clattered to the floor. Blair pushed her plate away and dropped her head to the table.

The good doctor had said, “Do you have family?”

“No. My parents died years ago.”

“There’s a support group at the hospital.”

“I don’t need a support group,” Blair had said.

“You’re not alone in this,” the doctor said. “You have to think about your daughter.”

“That’s all I can think about.” Blair had walked out. Leaving prescriptions for pain that would come. Phone numbers for people who would tell her how to cope. Pamphlets that would describe how she would die.

She walked out and kept walking, from the Haight to the Mission, from bar to bar, drinking a shot of tequila, moving on. When she met the man with the deep voice and the soft touch, she was numb enough to go home with him, numb enough to make love until they slept, numb enough to forget Amanda. Until she woke up.

She picked up her fork and took another bite of her omelette. Her hunger was gone. She drank her wine. Hours of tequila, sex and pot and still she couldn’t turn off her brain.

“Amanda?” she called.

The door flew open and Amanda appeared.

“What?”

“I’m sorry I yelled. I hate being sick.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Amanda asked suspiciously.

“I told you.” Blair drank the rest of her wine. “A goddamn virus.”

“What kind of virus?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand their mumbo jumbo. I’m tired, that’s all. Maybe it’s that fatigue thing. Where you can’t get out of bed.”

“I’ve never seen you not get out of bed.”

“Speaking of which,” Blair said, pushing back her chair and turning toward her daughter, “you have school tomorrow. It’s past midnight. Get your sorry ass in bed.”

Amanda walked up to Blair, leaned over and kissed her on the top of her head. Like a blessing.

“’Night, Mom.”

“Good night, sweetheart. I love your omelette.”

“That’s two lies in one night,” Amanda said, heading back into her room and shutting the door behind her.

Blair heard Amanda rattle around in the kitchen early the next morning. She didn’t move. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Wouldn’t that be nice? Too tired to care. She listened to the noise of Amanda’s morning routine:
Now she’s getting the milk; now she’s pulling her cereal from the pantry; that’s the cabinet for the bowl, drawer for the spoon. See. She doesn’t need me.

Where does a kid live when she’s sixteen and she’s an orphan? No way she’s going to an orphanage. Does she stay here in the cottage, take her books and head to school, come home and make herself dinner, go to bed, wake up, take her books and head to school?

Blair buried herself deeper in the bed, smothering the sounds of Amanda surviving without her. When she came up for air, the cottage was silent—Amanda was gone. And somehow Blair slept.

Until she heard the door open and thought,
She’s home; I’ve slept all day.
No, an hour had passed.

“Amanda?” she called out tentatively.

And for the first time she thought:
It’s an intruder, a rapist, a madman. He’ll kill me. Hot damn. I won’t have to spend so much time dying after all.

But still, there was the problem of Amanda.
How could the best thing in my life,
Blair thought,
become the worst thing in my life? My daughter.

And then another door opened, her own bedroom door, and the madman stood there in the form of her landlord, Casey.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Checking up on you.”

“I don’t need checking up on. And you didn’t knock.”

“I have a key.”

“You don’t have a right to use that key. Unless there’s an emergency.”

“I’d call this an emergency.”

“You’re horny every day. What’s new with that?”

“You’re dying.”

“That’s got nothing to do with your being horny.”

“Thought maybe you’d want to forget about your troubles.”

“Casey,” Blair moaned, but she pulled back the covers, and he walked toward her, throwing off his clothes on the way.

Casey was tall, skinny, balding and bearded, a caricature of an aging hippie. But he loved sex, almost as much as he loved drugs, and if he wasn’t high on anything other than pot, he was a wonderful lover. So Blair let him in her bed from time to time—though he asked too often and stayed too long.

“Get a girlfriend, Casey. Get a wife,” she said, looking up at him.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. He reached down and stroked her arm.

“For about another minute.”

She wasn’t beautiful, but men found her exotic or sexy or something—it had proved true through all the stages of her life. Now, at forty-two, she was still fit, probably because she walked back and forth to work, ate little because she spent so much time around food, and seemed to be in motion all the time—even in the small spaces of her restaurant kitchen or tiny cottage. She was dark, her hair cut short but untamed, with loose curls that framed her face and fell across her eyes. Her features were all a little large—her eyes wide, her nose long, her lips full—and though she saw the faults in that when she looked in the mirror, men saw a kind of lush, ripe territory they wanted to explore.

“You contagious?” Casey asked.

“No. Climb in.”

“You hurt anywhere?” he asked, sliding into bed beside her, curling his body around hers. His hands started moving over her skin, sending little shock currents through her.

“Not anymore,” she murmured, moving closer, breathing him in.

“What is it, Blair? What’s wrong with you?” he asked, moving over her body, their legs tangling, their breath finding the space in the crook of each other’s neck.

“Not enough sex,” she whispered.

He pushed himself down in the bed, drawing lines with his tongue over her full breasts, between them, down along the flat slope of her stomach. When he buried his face between her legs, she moaned and felt herself open—her legs, her chest, her heart. And then she was crying, but he didn’t notice, so he kept sucking her, and her legs wrapped around his neck so that he wouldn’t stop.

When she came, she pushed him over and climbed on top of him, sliding his cock inside of her, not waiting for his rhythm, his desire, his need. She rocked against him, pulled away, her body lifted, her head thrown back. She was still coming.

Then he sat up, pushing her back, so this time he was leaning over her, plunging into her, hard, so hard that she thought he might break her, and she wanted him to go further, to make her body hurt from so much feeling. And suddenly he pulled out of her and grabbed himself in his hand and let himself come all over her stomach.

She looked at him. He had his eyes closed, and his mouth spread across his face in a sweet smile. Stoned. He was probably stoned at nine o’clock in the morning.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You’re crying,” he said.

She shook her head.

“We should do that more often,” he said.

Again she shook her head.

He lay down next to her, upside down in the bed.

“Go away, Casey,” she said.

“Give me five minutes, darling. Just let me lie here next to you.”

“Five minutes,” she told him. “Then go away and never come back. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

He leaned up on his elbow, gazed down at her.

“Did I hurt you?”

“Not enough,” she said. She closed her eyes, rolled away from him. “Please,” she said, her voice hard. “Go.”

She kept her back to him while he stood, put on his clothes, moved toward the door.

She waited, turned away from him, until she heard him leave.

When the door clicked closed behind him, she lay in bed for a moment, contemplating sleep. But she thought about the cancer in her body and felt heavy, weighed down by so many black cancer cells, pressing her into the mattress. She pushed herself upright and began to tremble.

She would die. She would die before her daughter finished high school, before she finished growing up. Before she found boyfriends, lost boyfriends, chose careers and changed them again, found new cities, new homes. Blair would die, and someone would take her place in the kitchen at the café; someone would move into the cottage; Casey and Perry would find other women to love for a moment or two. But no one would step in as Amanda’s mother. No one would love her daughter with the same passion, the same joy.

Blair forced herself out of bed. She needed to stop the shaking in her body. She threw on a kimono, went into the kitchen to put up water for tea. The kettle wobbled in her unsteady hand. She remembered a moment in her childhood—she had watched Hitchcock’s
The Birds
one evening; she might have been eleven or twelve—and she woke in the middle of the night, screaming. Her mother was in her room before she herself was fully awake, the screams just beginning to subside. Her mother held her, quietly, stroking her head, waiting until Blair mumbled something about the black sky of birds. “Shh,” her mother said, holding Blair, letting her fall back to sleep in her arms.
I need someone to hold me,
Blair thought.

Her parents were killed when Blair was twenty-six. They had taken their first real vacation, a fishing trip to Mexico, and chose to drive to Baja because flights were so expensive. The police said they must have been lost, to have ended up in such a godforsaken town in the middle of the mountains. A couple of teenage boys stopped their car, robbed them, and when Blair’s father had a heart attack, the boys panicked and shot Blair’s mother. They stole $345 and the old Buick, leaving the couple in a ravine at the side of the road.

Blair thought about her parents, guns pointed in their faces. Was her mother holding her father, who would have already fallen to the ground? Was her father already dead, her mother already mourning him when the bullet pierced her own heart? Or had her mother been shot first, and her dad’s heart stopped cold at the thought of life without her? Did either have time to think about death? Did they die instantly? Were they lucky to die so quickly, with so little time to spend contemplating death?

A policewoman came to her apartment in SoHo, where she was living at the time, where the latest boyfriend had just moved out, where she had just learned that she was pregnant, that morning, and already she had an appointment for an abortion at the clinic in the Village. “I’m sorry, sugar,” the cop said after telling her about her parents’ deaths, and Blair had looked at her, confused:
Why is she calling me sugar? My mother called me sugar. Did she know that?
The woman repeated the story to Blair, as if she hadn’t heard enough the first time, and still she couldn’t react, couldn’t make sense of any of it. Until the policewoman left, and Blair crumbled.

Blair found things to do to keep herself busy—collect her parents’ bodies in Oakland, find a cemetery, bury them, sell their house, give away their belongings. And when she was done with it all, she was still pregnant, still aching with grief.

I want my baby,
she decided.

She never went back to New York. She found an apartment in Berkeley, a waitressing job, a day-care center. When she yearned for her parents, she gathered Amanda in her arms instead. She was the grown-up now. She was the mother.

Over time, when she thought about her parents, her memories shifted in her mind, like pieces in a kaleidoscope. They reformed themselves, reorganized, rewrote her history. She had only hazy memory of the fights with her father when she was a teenager—about the way she dressed, her politics, the pot she smoked, the bad boys she dated. She forgot her anger at her mother for sending her to private school on a full scholarship—her mother thought she would belong to this other world but instead she inhabited its shadowy fringes. Blair remembered, rather, cooking with her mother, fishing with her father; she remembered their sweet love for each other and how she felt blessed when she heard the horror stories of everyone’s parents’ divorces. At home, she was safe. And when the world proved to be dangerous, she secluded herself in the cocoon of her childhood home.

Now she needed her mother, her father. She stood in the middle of the kitchen in her own cocoon, this tree-house cottage, and listened to the wail of the teakettle.

Chapter Two

W
hen the phone rang, Luke was startled, forgetting he had a phone, wondering where it was and whether, if he picked it up, he would remember what to say.
Hello. How are you? Fine, thank you.
He had to remember that—the niceties of civilized behavior.

The phone rang a fourth time and he pulled it out from under the overstuffed chair, dragging along a sock he had lost months before.

“Hello,” he called into the phone, like an old man leery of technology.

“Bellingham,” the voice said. “You’re a hard man to find.”

“Who’s this?” Luke asked. He fell into the chair and let Sweetpea rest her chin on his knee. The dog, too, had been unsettled by the ringing phone.

“Harrison Driver,” the man said. “Reese Academy.” The guy paused, then raced on, giving Luke a chance to move through his memories. “We were on the basketball team together senior year. I went out with Trish Keller after you broke up with her.”

“Right,” Luke said, though he had no clue. Who remembers this stuff?

“So, you’re a hermit, huh?”

“Something like that,” Luke offered.

“Didn’t like fame?” Harrison asked.

So that’s what the press had offered.

“Something like that,” Luke repeated.

“Well, hey, man. I can imagine it. Head to the mountains. Leave the adoring fans clamoring for more. J. D. Salinger did it and people would buy any piece of shit he wrote now just to get him back in the world.”

“What can I do for you?” Luke asked. He reached for the glass of bourbon on the table next to his chair.

“Class reunion. Numero twenty-five. Can you fucking believe it?”

Luke didn’t answer.

“So we’re planning a reunion. Class party. Raise money for the school. Find out what the old girlfriends look like now.”

“I’m sorry, Harrison—”

“Having your name on the committee list would be a good thing. For the school. For the class. Hey, you’re a success, man.”

Luke drank, finishing the warm bourbon in the glass.

“I can’t imagine there aren’t plenty of success stories. You don’t need mine.”

“There’s money. Shitloads of money. Silicon Valley and all,” Harrison said. “But you’re Hollywood. You’re Mr. Academy Award. You’re also a goddamn golden boy.”

Luke laughed. He was sitting in the middle of a five-hundred-square-foot log cabin with his dog, a few articles of clothing, a few pots and pans. He hadn’t seen anyone except the guy at the market and the woman at the Lookout Bar in three months. He read books, made furniture in the studio out back, hiked the hills with Sweetpea. A goddamn golden boy.

“I can’t help you, Driver. Sorry, man.”

“Come to one meeting. Tomorrow night. At Coco’s Café in the Mission.”

“I don’t get out much.”

“Come see Trish,” Harrison said. “She’ll be there.”

“Give her a kiss from me,” Luke said, and hung up the phone.

And then as if three months of solitude hadn’t cured him, he imagined a scene in his mind: He’d find Emily in the kitchen and come up behind her, placing his hands on her shoulders. Would she flinch? When did she stop responding to his touch? Did he miss every clue, every signal?

“I got a call,” he’d say. “High school reunion. Twenty-five years. How the hell did that happen?”

Would she stir the sauce for the salmon, not hearing him, not feeling his hands on her shoulders, as if she were already gone, disappeared, a ghost to him? Or would she turn to him, trace the lines in his face, kiss his lips, whisper, “My old man.”

She was ten years younger than he was, twenty-three to his thirty-three when they married, thirty-three when she walked out of the screening of his latest film and never came back.

“Do you want to go?” she’d ask.

“No. Yes. Aren’t they always awful?” He’d lean toward her, smelling the lemon scent of her thick hair.

“Depends what you’re looking for.”

“What am I looking for?” he’d murmur, burying his face in the back of her neck, pressing his lips against her warm skin.

“You tell me,” she’d say, pulling away, walking away, walking out, never coming back.

Dinner,
he thought.
Sweetpea first.

So he got up from his chair, walked to the food bin, scooped out a bowlful of chow. He turned toward the kitchen with its small oven and mini-refrigerator. A couple of shelves of canned soup, pasta, cereal. He reached for the bottle of bourbon instead.

He drank quickly, then picked up the phone.

Dialed information. San Francisco.

“Do you have a listing for Emily Peck? I don’t know where. Anywhere.”

When the operator told him no, he said, “Try everywhere else in the world.” Still, there was no listing. Emily wouldn’t make it so easy. She never made it easy.

He picked up a book, tried to read, tossed the book aside.

He picked up the phone again and dialed a number he knew by heart—still—even though he hadn’t dialed it in months.

Dana answered, first ring, out of breath, as if she had been waiting for his call. He sighed, his heart suddenly heavy in his chest, and then realized: He was expecting his wife.

“Dana,” he said finally.

“She’s not here,” Dana said.

“I know.”

He remembered the first weeks after Emily left him—he called Dana daily, twice daily, hounding her: “Where’s my wife? Why did she leave me?” She politely took his calls, politely refused to answer. Until he gave up and headed to his cabin in the woods. Three months of silence hadn’t helped his anguish or his search for answers.

“I won’t tell you anything.”

“I know.”

“Good.” He could hear her breathe deeply. “How the hell are you?” she asked.

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Well, let’s keep it simple.”

“You ever coming back?”

“Back to what? San Francisco? My old house? My old life? Making movies and making love with my wife? What exactly are we talking about?”

“Back to life. Let’s start with that,” she said, sounding already weary.

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice softer. “How the hell are you, Dana?”

She paused for a bit and he waited. “I’m pregnant.”

He smiled. “Weren’t you and your sister going to do that at the same time?”

She didn’t answer. He felt a stone in the deep center of his stomach.

“Was there another man?” he asked quietly. “Just tell me that.”

“No.”

“No there wasn’t, or no you won’t tell me.”

“No, Luke.”

“Right. Then I don’t know. Good luck. Or something. Tell her—”

“I won’t tell her anything,” Dana said quickly. “She doesn’t want to hear from you.”

“Why?” Luke said, and then he couldn’t say anything more. He knew he’d be crying if another sound escaped his lips.

“She was lonely, Luke. You have no idea.”

He put the phone back on the cradle.

Lonely. A scene came to mind as if lifted from a screenplay. He’s sitting at the desk, writing. It’s evening, and the fog’s rolling in over the city, tucking them in for the night. Emily’s stretched out on the couch in his office, reading, sipping a glass of wine. Sweetpea’s at her feet. Luke’s happy she’s there while he’s working in the evening. The work is going well. And then she picks up the phone to call Dana, starts talking about something foolish—a dress she saw in a shop on Fillmore. He stops typing, turns and stares at her, not needing to say more, and she gets off the couch, taking the phone and her glass of wine with her, out of the room. She slams the door behind her. End of scene. Did he make love with her that night? Did he promise her a weekend in Mendocino, no work to distract him?

Does your wife leave you without a word of explanation because she’s lonely?

“Come on, Sweetpea,” he said, and the dog leaped to her feet as if waiting for months for this moment.

Luke grabbed the keys to the truck and walked out the door. He had vowed he wouldn’t leave the cabin until he was rid of Emily in his mind. But maybe he was wrong—he had to find Emily to get rid of her.

An hour later, he turned up the street toward his house on Potrero Hill. He pulled into the small space in front of the garage and stared up. No lights. No life. He had left three months before, locked the place up and hadn’t been back.

It was dusk and the reflections of the setting sun cast an amber glow on the house. Haunted. Maybe he’d find his own ghost knocking around the old place. “Hey, Luke, my man. I was wondering where you’d gone. Left your soul behind, didn’t you?”

Luke opened the car door and fumbled with his keys.

Maybe she’d been back. Maybe she was back, living there, out for a run, back in a moment.

He dropped the keys, picked them up, almost got knocked down by a wild Sweetpea, tearing out of the car and up the steps of the house. Home. Poor old dog.

He followed Sweetpea up the steps and stood awkwardly at the front door. Ring the bell? No.

He turned the key in the lock and the dog nosed the door open, tore through the entrance in a blur. Barking. Howling. She had been so quiet for so many months in the woods. Luke could hear the tapping of her footsteps as she raced through the rooms of the house.

“She’s not here, my dog,” Luke whispered. “Not anywhere.”

He pulled the door closed behind him and looked around. The vestibule was bare—no jackets slung over the antique wooden bench, no hats thrown on the mantel. The place looked heavy, coated in a layer of dust, sunk into itself somehow.

The living room was elegant, spare, sophisticated. He felt like a stranger seeing it for the first time.
Cold,
he thought.
Did I ever like this room?
Emily always led guests into the living room—he preferred to have everyone stand around the cozy mess of a kitchen. Everyone. Their lives were always crowded with friends, business associates, people dropping in, staying, parties full of people who never went home.

Once, he and Emily had come home from a screening, drunk, amorous, and had landed on the black-and-white-striped couch to make love—or to finish what they had started in the car on the way home—and when they were done, exhausted, stretched across couch and rug, a pair of hands had clapped for them. Dana. Sleeping off her own drunk on the opposite couch.

“You do that very well,” she said.

Emily had smiled sleepily, turned her head away from her sister’s stare. Had Emily known she was there?

Luke had not missed the social whirl of their lives while holed up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. That had been Emily’s sphere. To ward off loneliness? How many nights had he quietly escaped a party going on in his own living room to sit undisturbed at his computer for an hour or so? To live with the characters in his scripts instead of the characters in his house, Emily had once accused.

Luke walked through the living room and on to the kitchen, turning on lights as he passed through rooms, scaring off ghosts and memories.

Automatically he looked at the refrigerator, as he had for days after she left. When she walked out of the screening for
The Geography of Love
that day, three months ago, she had stopped home, packed a bag, left a note. She had posted the note on the refrigerator door, and he had left it there, dangling like a mere shopping list from a penguin magnet:
Buy milk, leave your husband.

He didn’t have to read it again, but he would. For days he had stood in front of this note, written on paper from the pad kept by the phone, artfully rimmed by dancing lions. She loved lions. She left him, framed in lions. He read, drank another bourbon from the full bottle he found in the liquor cabinet, read again, hoping this time to find more, to discover a code that he had missed the first three thousand times through. But drunk or drunker, the words were the same.

I’m sorry. I couldn’t do this any other way. I’m leaving. Don’t try to find me. It might not mean much, but I did love you. Em.

Em. As if the intimacy transformed the rest of the words into a love note:
Off for a run. Take off all your clothes. Meet me in bed. Em.

He pulled the note off the refrigerator, jammed it into his pocket. The poor penguin magnet clattered to the ground. He kicked it across the room and it disappeared under the dishwasher.

Sweetpea howled from upstairs.

“Coming, girl,” Luke called out, his voice echoing in the hallways.

He ran up the stairs, heard whimpering from the bedroom. He didn’t want to go in there, didn’t want to be so close to that empty space.

“Come on, girl. I’ll get you a treat,” Luke called from the top of the stairs.

The dog didn’t fall for it. Luke headed into the bedroom.

Sweetpea was trying to stuff herself under the bed, moaning from the strain.

“Get out of there, old girl,” Luke said, going to her side and pulling her back. He leaned down and scanned the underbelly of the king-size bed. A slipper. Emily’s slipper.

Luke reached for the furry thing and passed it on to his dog, who snatched it between joyous lips.

“Lucky you,” Luke told her, half-smiling.

And then he was crying, tears covering his face faster than he could wipe them off with his flannel sleeve.

“Let’s get out of here, girl,” he said, but Sweetpea had plopped herself down at the side of the bed—Emily’s side—and was happily chewing on the slipper.

It was then Luke noticed the difference, noticed how the room had changed since he had left it three months before. The top of the dresser was bare, stripped free of jewelry box, photographs, comb and brush. He threw open drawers, now empty of lingerie, of T-shirts and tank tops, of bathing suits and running clothes. He pushed the closet door open—dresses, shoes, pants, blouses, gone. When she had left him, she had filled a suitcase, perhaps. Not much more. And he had waited for her to come back—if not for him, then at least for her clothes. Now she had done that. When? A week ago? Months ago? Had Dana called her, wherever she was hiding, on the day he left town? Told her the coast was clear. Come and get it.

The emptied bedroom was somehow more real than the note on the refrigerator door. What did it mean that she left without a word? That she couldn’t talk to him, fight with him, make up with him?