The Carriage House (18 page)

Chapter 19

R
ock Harbor was boring, but at least there was water, and now Louise had the novel to keep her occupied. She watched everything that occurred in the rental house with an eagle eye. She imagined her tiny bedroom was a writer’s den, and adopted a writerly schedule. She woke up at six and took a run on the empty beach, avoiding landed jellyfish the size of frying pans. From seven to nine she wrote, eating peaches until her stomach hurt. At nine she brought Margaux her breakfast, which Margaux preferred to eat alone. At the Rock Harbor house, Margaux had dropped some of her recent anxieties about getting ready to leave, falling back into the routines of her customary solitude. This was helpful, because it allowed Louise to return to her writer’s den after the breakfast delivery. At this point in the morning, she took care to leave the door open a crack for maximal spying efficiency. Next she applied a Crest Whitestrip and settled in to wait.

The first rush of motion passed through when Elizabeth herded the girls downstairs to be fed before camp. There had been three camps so far: two weeks of tennis camp, and now a camp for aspiring marine biologists. The pre-camp rush was sometimes interesting—there was the morning when Lucy renamed her cereal options Honey Slut Cheerios and Golden Damns—but it wasn’t the children Louise was interested in. She watched Elizabeth carefully. Since the move to the shore, she seemed to have gotten things together a bit. There was less to-do about minor events. She’d joined an experimental theater group at the Rock Harbor Community Center, and she carried a pocket-sized notebook everywhere, which she filled with ideas for performance art. She sat down more; in Breacon she’d seemed allergic to chairs. Now there was less rushing past, bracelets clattering, scarves flying. The experimental theater group practiced three nights a week. During the day, Elizabeth spent hours hunting for props at local garage sales. A heap of ancient housewares—including an old rusted refrigerator—began to accumulate in the garage.

It was a strenuously recreational universe they lived in, Elizabeth and her daughters. There was an ever renewing supply of camps, acting projects, and minutely scheduled trips to the beach. They were active, at least. They had none of the others’ inertia. Once they had gotten themselves out of the house, a hole opened in the mornings. William ate breakfast in the kitchen only if Adelia were there, and her presence had waned. She came down the first two weekends that the Adairs stayed in Rock Harbor, but she never materialized the next weekend and came for an afternoon the following Saturday. Louise took careful note of this visitation schedule. The first weekend Adelia was there, she made a big show of staying in the downstairs bedroom, but Louise caught her sneaking upstairs, guilty in her nightgown. So she was sleeping with the old dog after all. This gave Louise hope for the plot of her novel, but sadly, the next weekend Adelia failed to arrive, and the weekend after that she came only long enough to let Diana visit with her family and then to cart her back to Breacon to continue “work” on the nonexistent carriage house.

Adelia’s absence was strange because she had been such a constant presence in the house on Little Lane. Why risk neighborhood scorn in Breacon, then refrain from visiting the rental house? When Adelia did show up, she was strangely tentative. On Little Lane she ordered everyone around as though directing a ten-million-dollar movie every time she cooked a rubbery chicken. She was so bossy that Louise had privately taken to calling her “Adelia Big-deal-ia.” In Rock Harbor, however, Adelia hung around the outskirts of conversations, watching William, blinking, looking lost. This new development presented a massive hurdle for the novel. How could Louise explain the undramatic dribbling off? Her tagline started to falter: lifelong friend moves in while demented mother is still living upstairs, then lifelong friend moves out, sadly, but without much dramatic ado.

Louise found herself wishing that William would buck up a bit. He obviously loved Adelia. Once Louise witnessed him reach across the table after breakfast to hold her hand without speaking, just looking across at her and holding on as if he could sit there forever. If he wanted her so badly, why couldn’t he get her to stay? Instead, he settled into his Rock Harbor routine, showing as much spine as a jellyfish. In the mornings, when Adelia wasn’t present, he took his breakfast up to sit with Isabelle; in the afternoons, he prepared himself lunch on the screened-in porch. For hours, he watched Margaux garden. He took to going out and attempting to help, kneeling beside her on a green foam pad he purchased at the garden emporium so that his knees wouldn’t get dirty. At first Margaux packed up her things and moved inside as soon as he hitched up his khakis and knelt on his pad. He learned to keep a little distance, placing himself at some remove from Margaux’s current project. He figured out that it was better not to insist too much on his own usefulness to her garden. Soon Margaux let him kneel beside her, even occasionally instructing him in the art of trimming herbs or staking tomatoes. Afterward, William proudly hung up his pad in the garage and removed himself to the screened-in porch to gloat over his progress as a gardener.

After a week of camping in the bedroom, reading children’s books and eating melted peanut butter sandwiches that William carried up to her, Isabelle came downstairs. She’d lost weight and somehow looked younger since her accident. The first thing she asked for when she came downstairs was a new tennis racket, and as soon as the cast came off, she and William spent their mornings at the public courts. This became the peak moment of activity in the Adair family schedule, which faded into stillness toward the end of the afternoon. During the Adair family dinner, which Louise attended through a crack in her door, Elizabeth spouted the narrative of her illustrious day. The eminent architect pulled out weeds and his Hollywood-actress daughter performed at the community center, while his teenager read children’s books and toyed with her food. William didn’t seem unduly perturbed. He wasn’t leaping around for joy, that was for sure, but he wasn’t beating his fists on the walls. For the sake of her book, Louise wanted to remind him that these were not lofty occupations. She could not write a novel about a mildly content puller of weeds.

Louise worried about this for several days, until she came to the conclusion that all ambitions—no matter how grand—are incomprehensible to people who don’t have them. You have to be caught up in the dream of something to believe in its importance. As soon as you take one step out of your dream, you suddenly know that it was only an excuse to avoid the fact that you’re just another sad old tosser living out your boring life before you die. It takes guts to face life without any ambitions, facing reality each and every ambitionless day. Knowing all this, Louise began to feel that she should give up on the goal of writing a book, until she decided that her book would be about a family whose ambitions had dried out, and therefore it would still be a real contribution.

If she didn’t let the Adair family dinner get her down, Louise could stay in, microwave herself a bowl of rice with melted cheese and ketchup, and read Margaux’s diaries all night. She’d pillaged the entire stack from Margaux’s desk when the family moved down to the shore, and she kept them in a plastic crate under her bed. She perused them religiously. After reading about Dr. Worthington’s original suggestion that Margaux might merely be depressed, Louise started to wonder whether Margaux had suspected her illness before she was diagnosed. Maybe she’d been waiting to inherit her mother’s disease and had found it in herself before it could be medically confirmed. Her decline had been monumentally slow, even for an early-onset patient. She failed several comprehension tests, but in the beginning Dr. Worthington wasn’t convinced her condition was Alzheimer’s. It would have been impossible to know for sure. Unless you bored a hole in her skull and captured her brain on X-ray film, you couldn’t know which parts of Margaux’s tissue had faded to white.

Later, the voids in her memory became increasingly obvious. In her diaries, she took to occasionally asserting that Isabelle hadn’t been born yet. Before Louise was hired, Margaux got seriously lost twice while taking a walk. Once they found her stuck in the middle of Kennedy Drive, cars screeching around her. And after Izzy’s accident, with the anxious packing of bags and waiting by the door, Margaux acted more and more like a traditional patient lost in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Still, there was an odd degree of watchfulness involved in the forgetting of the early diaries. Louise suspected that the seeds of the disease had lurked for some time in her mind before they took root. Pre-Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s. Who knew how many of us had it? This idea also depressed Louise, so that between Margaux’s anticipation of decline and William’s blank acceptance of his family’s fallen position, Louise sometimes had the urge to go out for a drink.

There was a tiny local bar called the Grubby Tub where Louise gravitated in these instances, to sit in a dark corner with one of Margaux’s journals and a Guinness, trying to revive herself. Sometimes an Aussie tennis pro with a peeling nose and a yellow Jeep Wrangler arrived, each night with a different girl who always looked about seventeen. When he sat down, he winked at Louise, recognizing a fellow citizen, and once or twice he bought her a drink, but Louise was absorbed in the journals and didn’t have time to run around in search of diasporic Aussies to shag. The second weekend that Adelia did not stay at the beach, however, the novel hit a wall and Louise fell into a new depth of malaise. That night at the Tub, she felt compelled to replace her Guinness with whiskey, at which point the tennis pro showed up on his own.

It was a tired old drunken story. Somehow Louise found herself back at his apartment, drinking crap red wine, smoking weed, reading him passages out of Margaux’s journals, drinking more wine, waiting patiently while he pawed around. At some point a glass of wine was spilled. There was excessive laughter of the kind that hurts your distorted face after it dies down. Then there was more weed, more pawing, more wine, until Louise finally fell asleep in his asymmetrical arms.

In the morning, she woke up and took stock of the situation. She hadn’t brushed her teeth, and her mouth tasted like an old sponge. She sat up: explosions in her cerebellum. On the floor there were two wineglasses, one broken, an empty bottle, and Margaux’s journal, ruined by a wine stain the size of a tennis ball. Louise groaned. She struggled to swallow, then picked up the journal and inspected it more closely. Oddly, the wine stain on its pages made her want to cry, and if she weren’t so dehydrated she might have. She felt literally homesick, as if her distance from home had translated directly into cottonmouth and the throbbing in her temples. Oddly, she had the distinct feeling that she had betrayed her own mother by having read Margaux’s journals to a stranger and then allowing him to douse them with wine. The bottom right corner of the page was unreadable:

November 1993

Today I asked William to send me to a home for the final time. I would like to remember that. I asked him over and over again, as if I didn’t remember asking him only yesterday. Today I finally stopped. It was for their good that I wanted to go. I am aware that it is hurtful every day to be reminded that your mother can’t remember the logic of your bond. It would be better for them to be with Adelia; she has a memory as loyal as an elephant’s. But I can’t insist anymore. He hasn’t wrapped his head around the reality. He feels that nothing dramatic has changed. I want to explain to him that it’s because there was never an enormous change. It was in me from the start. I’ve adjusted to it well. They say people with a strong sense of identity make the worst Alzheimer’s patients. It’s lucky, then, I suppose, that I was always a little apart from myself. It’s only a surprise that William didn’t notice from the start; I was not a woman with whom he should have had children. It was my fault, too; I thought maybe I’d become more real. Tod

went to the kitchen and there was a cake that said “Happy Twelfth Birthd

that Isabelle was born twelve years ago. It was a startling recollec

strange, but I sometimes think that Izzy hasn’t been bor

Margaux hasn’t yet been born. When are we born in

rather not stay here and fill her with doubt. I c

me stay. If it were not for him I could just disap

whether or not to remember me, but in any case they’d

 • • • 

Louise’s chest ached. Forever, the bottom quadrant of Margaux in November 1993 was lost because Louise had taken it upon herself to shag a tennis pro. Because yet again Louise had forgotten the importance of her task. Because Louise was drunk and stupid and never could keep hold of any motivation, and this was why even a person as pathetic as Bradley didn’t want to marry her. Because she was careless. She couldn’t hold on to ambitions. Even her ambition to let go of ambitions got ruined. She was the kind of person who could discover a secret journal of forgotten things and decide to write a novel about it, then get drunk and spill wine on its pages, ruining the one thing she’d discovered and wanted to keep.

Chapter 20

F
or Elizabeth’s experimental performance, William selected a pair of white khaki pants and a royal blue polo shirt. The belt he chose was embroidered with yellow whales. He had never thought of himself as a beach man, and he felt no different even after over a month in Rock Harbor. He did not like to sit on the sand. He did not like the endless leisure or how often people commented on the precise stage of their relaxation. He did not like how the only tennis courts in town were a set of eight old concrete courts, cracked by the sun and surrounded by a ten-foot wire fence as though they were basketball courts in an underprivileged neighborhood. At the beach, William was a man living in exile. He was born on Little Lane. He was a boy on Little Lane, he grew up on Little Lane, and he raised his children on Little Lane. When they packed him up in the rental car and shipped him off to the beach, there had been no other option but to leave his history there, on Little Lane, with the ruins of the carriage house.

Regardless, life continued. He was still a good-looking man. Outwardly, there was no visible sign that part of him was missing. There was no reason for him to give up entirely just because an important element of himself had been amputated and left behind. His resolve in this regard had been fortified by the recent improvements in his family’s appearance. Since taking up with her performance art group, Elizabeth had started wearing simpler clothes. The flailing scarves had made him nervous, as if she were Amelia Earhart getting ready for a misguided flight. Now she wore sporty tank tops and jeans, and she had developed a healthy tan. Comforted by the thought of Elizabeth’s improvements, William pulled a pair of yellow sport socks onto his feet, then slipped them into his Docksiders. He would not go to Elizabeth’s performance sockless, though so many of the men in Rock Harbor had dispensed with socks for the summer. Even if it was an experimental art performance, William would not sink so low.

He examined himself again in the mirror. He was ready to go. No one could say that he had attended his daughter’s performance in anything less than a dignified outfit. He carried himself down the stairs as an optimistic man carries himself, then joined his family in the Acura with a cheerful salute. He was pleased that they were going together, despite the fact that, in general, he did not like experimental things. His attitude toward them was this: experiment when no one is watching. Once your experiment was proved, he was ready to admire it. And yet there was a definite glow to Elizabeth, and less of those scarves, and William was determined to applaud the development. When he climbed into the car, which Diana was driving, he noted that the rest of his family had also improved since coming to the beach. This alone was enough to make William resolve to continue at the cottage. Their looks, earlier this summer on Little Lane, had caused him to question everything from his genes to the state of his country. Because his children had always represented life in America to William, and they had always been hopeful-looking and fresh. In their mature years, it began to look as if they didn’t care about anything at all. Having taken their looks for granted, they had allowed them to fade away. Isabelle, for instance, might have emerged from her hospital bed deformed, because she simply hadn’t cared. Thankfully, she did not, except that she was missing a spleen and part of her collarbone was now a shard of titanium.

William glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She was gazing out the window. Something about her had settled since the accident. She bristled less. She wore sundresses and spent whole days at the beach, reading her books. Nearly every morning, she asked him to play tennis with her, and this was certainly a positive development. He started playing against her in his Docksiders, but recently, she had gotten good enough that he asked Diana to pick up his tennis shoes on her next trip back to Breacon.

For that matter, something had changed about Diana also. In the recent past, looking at Diana had given him a stomachache. Arthur Schmidt was right when he said she had changed beyond recognition from the girl who was student body president. She was still different—quieter and less athletic—but she had improved. He wished she would stay more often, without running back to Breacon to dredge up the carriage house, lugging tote bags of architecture textbooks. She indulged in excessive studiousness, and Little Lane was a depressingly hopeless cause for her to take on, but at least she had found her determination. She looked less perpetually limp. In recent weeks she had even developed a tan. He would have liked to have asked Arthur whether she was still changed beyond all recognition; for his part, William couldn’t tell.

When they pulled into the parking lot of the Lee W. Greenfield Rock Harbor Arts Center, Adelia and Margaux were waiting on the sidewalk. Adelia was wearing sunglasses. Margaux had on a large straw hat that suited her well, particularly at the beach. A straw hat and a fluttery dress. When William first met her, she was sitting in the back row in art history class, spreading out a lunch for herself that was old-fashioned in its intricate presentation. She was a woman from another time in history. A more delicate time, or so he had imagined. He was twenty-one years old; what had he known about anything? She was, at any rate, exactly opposite Adelia, which at that point was enough to satisfy William. Adelia’s refusal had stung him; in the aftermath, it was pleasant to impress a woman such as Margaux, with her nervous fingers and artistic eye for impractical details.

After all these years, it was strange to see her standing beside Adelia. Adelia watched the Acura pull up as though it were an incoming volley, as though she were ready to take it early, facing it down. Margaux gazed off into the wind. They were like two birds from entirely incompatible ecosystems, nestled on one branch. It was for his sake that they had both flown here. William knew this, and although he did not like the beach, he was not ungrateful for the unlikely migration they had made on his account.

When they walked into the arts center lobby, William appreciated that no one who saw them would think they were an unattractive flock. One might go so far as to say that they were handsome in their way. It wasn’t the same surge of pride he’d felt when the girls were younger, when he took them out in a gleaming troupe and knew that everyone who saw them would be dazzled. But still. In the arching, spare lobby of the arts center, surrounded by glass and circulating strangers, they were a striking little tribe. William knew, of course, that it was considered vain to care so much about looks. In his case, it wasn’t mere vanity. He believed that looks were representative of deeper qualities. He trusted—and he was not sure how others could bear to live without such belief—that a person’s deepest self must be represented in his outward appearance. If not, then the world was a deceitful place. The fact that his family was attractive again settled him as he had not felt settled in weeks.

He chose a seat with Margaux on his left and Isabelle on his right. It appeared, from the program on his chair, that Elizabeth would perform second, in an experimental piece entitled “The Divorce.” The first piece was entitled “A Diary of My Life in Sensation.” The third and final piece was called “Birth.” William did not look forward to either the first or the third. He did not like when people forced their diaries upon you, and he did not like the vaginal aggressiveness that defined much of the theater to which his daughter had exposed him. He allowed himself a moment to wish that his daughter had joined a Shakespearean troupe rather than an experimental gang. He had once seen her play Goneril in a production of
King Lear
and had been deeply moved by her regal carriage. He liked to imagine each of his three daughters in Shakespearean roles. Diana once could have played Portia, doling out mercy and punishment in the Venetian court. Isabelle could have been any beautiful heroine she desired to play. They tried to deny it, but they had presence
,
all of them.

And yet this piece—“The Divorce”—meant something to Elizabeth, and it was part of the improvement that he had seen in all his daughters since coming to the beach, so he settled into his yellow plastic chair and focused his eyes on the empty center, which soon would be occupied by the Diarist of Sensations. She arrived in a lab coat. Her face was unremarkable, and her body was shaped like an egg. “Please reach under your seat,” she said, and William grudgingly did as he was told. There he found a glass jar, which he pulled out and held in his lap. “Please smell the contents of your jar, then pass it to the left.” William opened his jar and smelled: nothing. From its viscous cherry-colored wash, he could see that it was cough syrup, and yet even this knowledge did not produce the illusion of scent. The next jar that Isabelle passed him was full of lotion. Again, nothing. The next contained a pile of grass cuttings. The smell of grass once reminded him—while walking across the golf course—of tennis and possibility. And now nothing: a nothing he would have to live with.

When the smelling exercise was over, the diarist placed empty watercooler bottles, their necks sawed off and their outer plastic smeared with Vaseline, over each audience member’s head. Sealed inside his helmet, William could hear his own breathing. He looked around. Isabelle’s face was blurred, but he could tell that she was smiling at him, so he smiled back. On his left, Margaux’s face was distant, disappearing slowly while he watched. He reached out for her hand and found it on her lap. She let him take it. Her head was a watercooler bottle. They were both strange beings, headless and blurred. He squeezed her hand. It was like seeing her through tears, like seeing her when she had faded further than she already had. He wanted to hold her close. When the Diarist arrived to remove his helmet, Margaux’s sudden clarity took his breath away. And then she released his hand, and the group was subjected to more sensory abrasions that William was able to withstand because he understood that if he waited long enough, Elizabeth would arrive, and the world would resolve itself into the intensity of focusing on one of his girls.

“The performance will conclude with a slow dance,” the Diarist announced, wheeling out a coatrack laden with gray wool jackets. “Please dance with someone you do not know.” William considered staying in his seat. He did not like when artists demanded that he participate in their performances. But Margaux was standing and walking over to the jackets, and when she put one on, she looked just like a young girl wearing her beau’s coat on a cool night. Suddenly, William found that he, too, was standing, and then he was asking her if she would dance with him. The lights went out and an old waltz played. Above them, a disco ball cast flecks of light on the walls and the floor and the ceiling, and William pulled Margaux close to him so that her head was against his chest. He could almost imagine the way her hair used to smell when they were both young and flecked with a different kind of light. He held her against his chest, and after he danced with her for a while, a light mood struck him and he stepped back and twirled her away from him, the way they danced when they were young. She twirled twice in the rotating lights before her hand slipped out of his and she stopped twirling and looked at him from across a widening space.

The music dropped off and the lights switched on, and in the normal glare of the Lee W. Greenfield Rock Harbor Arts Center, William realized that Adelia was watching him, and had probably been watching the whole time he danced with Margaux and tried to remember the scent of her hair. He moved over to say something to her, but she became livid with energetic motion and a great bustling return to her seat. William, too, returned to his chair. He sat there in the harsh light, caught between performances, ignored by Adelia, and grew irritated again that he hadn’t been able to smell the cuttings of grass. It wasn’t long before Elizabeth came out, wheeling a refrigerator on a dolly behind her. William focused on his daughter, wearing an old-fashioned dress and bright red lipstick, her hair coiled in a bun. She faced the pea-green refrigerator in silence. Neither one of them moved.

The refrigerator became hateful as the silence deepened. It was too rectangular. His daughter was so detailed. Each feature of her face asserted itself, important, beside the bluntness of its right angles. The refrigerator glared; Elizabeth did nothing. William’s toes tensed in his shoes. Time stretched out, expanding, compressing him so that the tension spread up his legs and into his diaphragm. If no one did anything, William was going to have to stand. He would have to go outside for air. He glanced around. No one else seemed as infuriated as he was. He wanted to batter that refrigerator into the ground. How dare it hunker there, unmoved, in the presence of his child. He was going to have to stand, but just as he started to, she moved. She hit it with her palm. William breathed. Again she hit it with her hand, then took off her high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the pea-green monster. The shoe bounced off, clattering on the floor. Elizabeth left the stage and returned with a crowbar. William loved the crowbar’s sleekly evil shape. Elizabeth lifted it high above her head and let it fall on the refrigerator’s crown. She did it again and again. William breathed in and out. This was motion. This was something
happening.
This was his daughter fighting, beautifully.

She was tearing into the refrigerator. One of the metal hinges on its door sprang off and flew across the stage. The door swung open like a broken wing and revealed the bare skeleton of its inner shelves. Elizabeth took to its side. She left great visible dents in its metal frame. The crowbar was coated in pea-green paint. To his right, Isabelle was laughing, and William was so relieved that he could have braved the flying crowbar to hug his daughter, whose hair had come out of its bun. She continued to fight. The refrigerator had taken new shape, as though crouching closer to the ground, cowering in fright. There was a great crack and sigh, and then it was falling backward, out of the dolly, onto the ground with a crash that caused a brief sharp pain in William’s skull and scared three audience members out of their seats. Elizabeth considered the ruins before her. Then she sighed and dropped her crowbar, but something important had been accomplished. When she faced the audience and said, “The end,” William leaped to his feet to applaud.