On a Night Like This (9 page)

They didn’t make love; they swam. And after they were warm enough to slow their pace, they moved toward each other, exploring each other’s bodies underwater. Someone yelled from the beach for Belle. They kissed, once, and Luke felt his heart ache with the kiss—not with desire but regret. Emily was home, in San Francisco. He was learning about Hollywood. Some lesson. He let Belle swim alone to shore and paddled around in the darkening sea for a long time before he made his way back to the party.

Did I love Emily so much,
he wondered,
or did I need so desperately to believe in our marriage?
He had vowed so long ago to be a different kind of man than his father, to make a marriage that would last. Was that good enough?

He sat in front of the Healys’ house for a half hour, when the gate opened again and the car backed out of the driveway. Mr. Healy. Hair a bit messed, clothes a bit askew. Wrestling match with the athletic Mrs. Healy? Luke pulled out behind him and followed him down the street.

He imagined the scene—Mrs. Healy raging, Mr. Healy fumbling for words and explanations.
Is it easier that Emily walked out on me and disappeared? Would I have wanted the chance to call her a cheating whore? Not my style,
Luke thought.
Emily knew that.

He followed Gray Healy as he wound his way through the city. Heading toward Noe Valley. Luke felt his adrenaline kick in; he felt the rush of the chase, something he used to experience when a script neared completion or his agent told him about the deal that he was about to make. So why was the finished script, the finished deal never as satisfying? Why was he always let down, somehow, as if the chase were better than the catch.

Did he want, now, to catch Emily? Or should he stay like this, hot on the trail of something, for the rest of his life?

Gray Healy and his black BMW turned into a parking space, half a block ahead of him, and Luke had to act fast if he wanted to stay with him. He pulled into an alleyway and parked illegally, caught a glimpse of Healy turning the corner, left the truck and followed close behind.

Luke stopped at the corner, eyeing Healy in the doorway of the first house on the block. He stayed back, pretending to read a sign for yoga classes stapled onto the tree curbside. But in his peripheral vision he could see Healy extract a key from his pocket, insert it into the lock, turn the handle, enter the house. The door closed behind him.

Emily’s house? Luke suddenly couldn’t imagine Emily—here or anywhere. He knew what she looked like—yes, tall, blond, drop-dead gorgeous—but that was a picture, a still life of wife. Emily in this house was impossible to imagine. Emily greeting Gray Healy, asking: “What happened, darling? Why are you here? Oh, my God, she knows? No, I didn’t send any flowers!” Luke couldn’t run the film through his mind, couldn’t write the scenes, couldn’t hear the dialogue.

He stood there, on the corner, reading the sign for yoga classes,
yoga now,
as if yoga were something to be insisted upon.

Healy was gone. Inside Emily’s house. If it was Emily’s house. It could belong to Healy’s best buddy, Frank. A big, fat Italian guy who listened with avid interest to Healy’s stories of lurid sex with the screenwriter’s wife, egging him on all the time. Yes, Frank lived here, alone and miserable. And now, here was Healy, crying on his shoulder: “I ruined everything for the sake of sex.”

Sex. With tall, blond and drop-dead gorgeous.

“Go for it, man,” Frank says. “The wife? Who needs a wife when you can have Emily?”

Luke tore the yoga poster off the tree, dropped it in the street. He spun around, away from the house, and headed back to his truck.

Some big guy leaning out of a Porsche in the alley was screaming at him: “How the hell am I supposed to get out, motherfucker?”

Luke surrendered with a weak wave of his hand. He climbed into his truck and pulled out. The guy in the Porsche looked vaguely like Frank, the character he had just invented. When he was writing, this happened all the time—characters appearing in real life, edging too close to him. He liked Frank. He’d use Frank if he ever wrote again.

He drove past the house, took note of the address, the windows upstairs with lime-colored curtains. Emily would never choose those curtains.

Frank would not have curtains.

He had to get out of there. So he drove home, dogless, wifeless, hungover, as miserable as Frank.

Sometime in the middle of the night (but it was only eleven o’clock—he had been sleeping for what seemed like hours), the phone rang, and when he picked it up, miraculously, Blair was there, talking sweetly to him, as if in a dream.

“I love your dog,” she told him.

“I know,” he said. “How are you? How are you feeling? God, I’m sorry.”

“Shh,” she said. “Let me tell you about your dog.”

“Tell me,” he said. He didn’t get out of bed, didn’t sit up or turn on the light. He stayed in that blurry state, sure that light or too much motion could scare her away.

“Tonight I gave her salmon for dinner. Is that OK? Can she eat salmon?”

“It’s perfect,” he told her. “She should eat salmon for dinner for the rest of her life.”

“Daniel came over and he brought me dinner and I shared it with Sweetpea because I couldn’t finish it, which made Daniel happy; even though he hates dogs, he didn’t hate Sweetpea—”

“Who’s Daniel?” Luke asked, though he hated to interrupt her, but he hated more the idea of a man who was let in when he couldn’t sit by her side, a man by her side, eating salmon for dinner, sharing it with Sweetpea.

“My boss. A man I love—”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He’s gay. Christ. Everyone’s gay.”

“I’m not gay.”

“Yeah. I noticed. Now listen. So Sweetpea charms Daniel, an impossible thing, no one charms Daniel except Daniel, and we all eat salmon, and then Daniel leaves and I lie down to rest and Sweetpea jumps in bed, cuddles up right next to me—”

“Which side of the bed?”

“What?”

“Which side of the bed? Left or right?”

“I’m on the right side. Why?”

“Go on.”

“And she throws one paw over my waist. Like a lover. And she breathes her salmon breath in my ear.”

“I know.”

“Does she sleep in your bed?”

“No. Not for a while.”

“You were married?”

“I was married. Sweetpea loved Emily. When Emily left, she stopped sleeping on the bed. She sleeps on the floor. On Emily’s side of the bed.”

“The right side.”

“Yes, the right side.”

“What happened to Emily?”

“I don’t know. She just disappeared one day. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

“You don’t know why?”

“No. How can you think your life is good and then one day someone tells you it was all a lie?”

“Why was it a lie?”

“She walked out. Without telling me. In the middle of my happy life.”

“She wasn’t happy.”

“And I thought we were doing fine. That’s the lie I was living with, I guess.”

Blair was quiet for a moment. Luke could hear her breathing in the phone and he pulled up his blanket, as if drawing her closer to him.

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention,” she said finally. Gently. As if she didn’t want to hurt him.

Luke sighed. “I thought I wasn’t one of those guys. My work is different. Writing makes you pay attention. But maybe I fooled myself. Typical guy dressed in sensitive guy’s clothes.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about those clothes.”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“You’ve been in the woods too long. You look like a mountain man.”

“I didn’t know I was going to stay in the city this long,” Luke told her. “I thought I was driving in for the night.”

“What made you stay?”

“The Search for Lost Souls.”

“Mine or yours?”

“Touché.”

“You found me. So now why are you staying?”

“My dog is missing. I can’t go anywhere without my dog.”

“Can she spend the night? I think I’ll sleep better if she’s here.”

“Of course she can spend the night. I wouldn’t think of taking her away from you.”

“Thank you. She’s kind of a comfort.”

“You could ask a human being for comfort, you know.”

“I’m not a very big girl about being sick.”

“I noticed.”

“And I don’t have many friends.”

“Why not?”

“Work. Raising a daughter alone. I never seemed to have the time or the inclination.”

“Where’s the father?”

“Beats me.”

“Ancient history?”

“Real ancient. He was a cute guy I hung out with once; he moved on; I got pregnant.”

“Does he know? That he has a daughter?”

“He wouldn’t even remember my name. If I found him. If I cared.”

“Does she?”

“We play a game. We invent fathers. We sit in a café and watch the guys go by and choose one to be Father for a Day. We invent his life, his loves, his fatherly habits. And we watch him disappear from our lives at the end of the game.”

“She likes this game?”

“She loves me. I’m enough for her.”

“How was she at the hospital?” Luke had left before she arrived—Blair had wanted it that way.

“Scared. Hiding it. Family tradition.”

“Can I bring you breakfast in bed?”

Blair was quiet. Luke waited, but she didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t ask if you’d marry me. I asked about breakfast. Croissant. Coffee. That sort of thing.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know.” Luke waited a moment, thinking about it. He wished he were in his small bed at the cabin, not lost in the king-size bed of his old house. “I know you didn’t see my movie.
Pescadero.
When you do see it, talk to me first.”

“Why?”

“My wife used to say I was stuck in the past. And somehow you’re a part of that past. Even if I didn’t really know you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But you’ve haunted me somehow.”

“It’s usually the golden boy who haunts the outcast girl.”

“Not this time.”

“Don’t fall for me.”

“I’ll do my best,” he told her.

She was quiet for a moment, and Luke waited for her.

“Come by at ten,” she said finally. “I want to sleep for a very long time.”

“Good night, Blair. Kiss Sweetpea for me.”

He could hear the sound of her kiss before she hung up the phone.

At 7:00
A.M.
Luke was parked across the street from the house in Noe Valley, the house Gray Healy had run to the night before. Sometime in the middle of the night, Luke had decided that he was done searching for Emily, that he had found Blair, his true Lost Soul. Blair’s soft voice had hummed in his ear all night, weaving through his own troubled dreams. But by morning his resolution had faded and he had fled his house before breakfast, before a shower, before finding something other than mountain man clothes to wear.

He waited for Emily to emerge. When they lived together, she always woke early, went to a yoga class or for a run before work. He couldn’t make those assumptions anymore. She walked out on him, proving that he knew nothing about her.

He listened to music on the radio, changing stations impatiently with every lousy song. He felt irritable, angry at himself for stubbornly sitting there and waiting for her. He tried to imagine the scene: She walks out of the house and then what? He’s furious, his anger exploding in words hurled in her direction? He’s overcome with love, runs across the street and into her arms? Shouldn’t he know this before he confronts her? Does he want to see her because he loves her or because he hates her?

He decided then: He loves her and he hates what she’s done to him.

What did I do to you,
he thought,
that made you capable of such cruelty?

He remembered this: There had been an evening in fall a couple of years before, a surprisingly warm evening in the city, when he had finished work and then picked her up at her office—this was before she was working at home. They had walked along the Embarcadero, arm in arm, telling each other about the day. His was good—he was finishing the script for
The Geography of Love
and liked it. In his own life his father had died while out sailing with a neighbor’s son, a boy who should have been Luke if Luke had agreed to sail with him every weekend. If Luke had been in the sailboat instead of in the garage, turning wooden bowls, destroying them, turning new ones. In
The Geography of Love
the father and son are so close that the son can hear the father’s thoughts. When the father dies in a boating accident, the son’s on board, and though he tries like hell, he can’t save him. His father’s voice stays in his head, but his own voice leaves him. Luke knew the young man would find his voice by the end of the script—he was writing for Hollywood after all. And as he told Emily on their walk, “I can rewrite my life. I can give my father a different son.” She had said, “You can give yourself a different father.”

She talked about a poster she had created for the arts festival, one that she was sure would win the competition, and at that moment she was happy because she didn’t know that it wouldn’t win, that like most of her work, it was good but not good enough. They had walked and kissed and walked some more.

When they got cold, they decided to stop at a restaurant, and suddenly they were ravenous for oysters and white wine, which they ate till they were giddy. Someone came by their table—an older woman they didn’t know—and said, “Excuse me for interrupting, but you two are blessed, we can see that, sitting near you and watching you this evening.” And the woman moved on, as if she had bestowed a blessing upon them.

After dinner they found a cab and headed home, and Luke couldn’t stop touching Emily, her hair, her face, her bare arms, her narrow waist. “I am blessed,” he told her, and she giggled, thinking he was teasing her when he was more serious than he had ever been in his life.

The door opened. Across the street. Luke held his breath. He thought of taking off quickly, before glancing toward the door even once. He thought of ducking, like a child, hiding on the seat until whoever was there would go away.