The Decent Proposal (31 page)

And then—and this was strange, but it was Mike's face, not Elizabeth's, that came to him. Beautiful, brilliant,
brave
Mike, who shone in his mind's eye like a lightbulb over his head. What was it she had said?
I thought it was important to tell you how I was feeling, no matter what you might be feeling.
Mike had known before he did. Of course she had; this really shouldn't have surprised
him. He still couldn't quite see how the hell he'd gotten here, but somehow he had.

Richard paused. Deep underground, the roots of a mesquite bush at the edge of the dunes sucked up a bit of subterranean moisture. He turned to her. He opened his mouth. Was he actually going to say it? He was.

“Elizabeth, I love you.”

BEVERLY CHAMBERS DRAINED
her drink to the dregs and let the glass fall from her hand. The smash wasn't nearly as dramatic as she had hoped. It didn't matter. She reminded herself that the time for playing a part was over. She was neither Katharine Hepburn nor Norma Desmond now. She was nothing more or less than herself.

As before, she was sitting on the preposterous couch CharBev had airlifted, giggling, from their favorite Vegas hotel. It looked as though she hadn't moved in the half hour since lunchtime, but she had in fact been busy. She'd made the climb up to her room, and transferred all the sleeping pills from a recent prescription into her pocket. Two had gone into the tea she'd insisted that Peaches drink, and in this way her killjoy of a housekeeper had been safely put away for the rest of the day. She hadn't planned it this way, but as usual there hadn't been much of a plan at all.

Bev slipped into a languid sort of reverie, which was, after all, the best way of riding out a desert afternoon. . . . So it
had
been an inspired bit of thinking to play matchmaker, she mused lazily, even if she doubted whether Hugo Santiago would appreciate her interpretation of his instructions to “check on” his sister and the boy who testified at his trial, to “help them” however she could. His only stipulation had been never to tell them on whose behalf she was acting, and she hadn't violated it. Jonathan Hertzfeld had been a paragon of discretion, even if his underlings had not. She hoped that upon greater reflection, Hugo would be pleased with her efforts, not that she would ever know one way or the other. She would never see him, or anyone, again.

He had been Charlotte's project anyway. Her favorite. How many sessions did they spend with him? She couldn't remember, but many, many more than with anyone else. Charlotte had been touched by his story; she'd urged him up to the very end to make contact with his family, to stop being so stubborn and to let them know he was alive, to let them see him. He was so
extreme
. “He reminds me of
you
,” Char said more than once, joking that she wanted to fix him the way she'd fixed Bev. But she had been getting through to him, she really had—the same way she'd gotten through to so many others.

And then, of course, she died. And when Hugo made his request, Beverly granted it without delay. But for Charlotte, not for him.

Even so, thought Bev now, wasn't she just as forlorn and bereft, as lost and abandoned as Hugo Santiago? No one ever looked hard enough to see the connection between the spinster and the jailbird, but it was there; it was real. And when she argued that society as a whole was at least a
little
responsible for the failings of such fallen individuals, she knew that deep down
what she was really saying was that it wasn't—it couldn't—be her fault entirely that she was going to die alone.

After what she'd seen this afternoon, she couldn't help wondering if
any
two people could be made to fall in love, given time and the requisite motivation. Wasn't this the principle upon which arranged marriage worked for half the world? It was hardly an earth-shattering proposition—quite the opposite: earth-defining—and it made Bev wonder if her brother Tom had been right all along to barrage her with those blind dates. If she'd just picked
someone
, could they have been happy together? It was a shame no man would cross her door again. She had half a mind to fall in love with the next one who did.

A man crossed her door.

HAD ORPHEUS BEEN
warned ahead of time what he was about to see, he couldn't have predicted the effect of Stan's Castle when it came into view because it neither astonished nor intimidated him as he would have expected it to do. He felt immediately that he belonged inside this edifice of absurdity, that his road trip to the middle of nowhere had finally led to the somewhere he was meant to be. Orpheus parked outside the open gate and wandered, slack-jawed, into a kitchen filled with more copper and porcelain than he'd ever seen, through a music room that featured its own built-in organ, and into a great room that held at its center, like a pearl in an oyster, the someone inside the somewhere he knew without a doubt he'd been destined to meet.

He stared at her from the doorway, frozen.

The only way to make sense of what it felt like to look at her was by means of a comparison he never imagined would be possible. He had felt this way exactly twice before. First when presented with his newborn son minutes after he was born and,
second, when meeting his daughter through the glass of a hospital nursery.

Oh
, he thought,
it's you. You're here.

Beverly gestured toward the same chair Elizabeth had occupied a half hour earlier. When he sat, she smelled the sharp tang of cheap, sporty deodorant, which was how her male tennis partners always smelled after freshening up at the end of a session. It was a manly smell, and it made her feel young; it made her feel—it was absurd, but it was true—
bashful
. When was the last time she had felt
that
? Beverly averted her eyes, enjoying the sensation.

Orpheus didn't know what to say, and it was primarily to break the silence that he asked, “Did you drop something?” gesturing to the broken glass at her feet.

Beverly followed the direction of his hand.
Ah, yes.
The other eighteen sleeping pills she had swallowed moments earlier, convinced she was done with life—that nothing interesting or notable other than the persistent ache of Charlotte's absence could possibly happen to her during whatever little time she had left.
Oops.
She had to suppress the urge to laugh, because this was exactly what the young version of herself—the girl running across the lawn in her nightshirt—had been waiting for. It was all too idiotically romantic, like some grotesque, geriatric parody of
Romeo and Juliet
.

“I'm afraid I've taken something,” she said.

“How long?” Orpheus asked softly.

“An hour?” she said. “Maybe less.”

“Huh.” He shook his head. “What a world.”

“That's what the Wicked Witch of the West says while she's dying. At the end of
The Wizard of Oz
. Did you know I went to the original Hollywood premiere? At Grauman's Chinese. Or Mann's, or whatever they're calling it these days. I can still remember seeing Judy Garland in the flesh. She was so pretty.
Of course she was probably on drugs, even then.” Bev paused. “I'm old.”

“Makes two of us,” said Orpheus. “Huh.”

“You have some time,” said Bev, pulling off a final, farewell twinkle with her birdlike eyes before they began fading away. This stuff she took was working faster than she expected. “You know, you could have come an hour later. Or not at all. We could never have met.”

Orpheus nodded. “Anything is possible,” he said, softer than before. And the phrase shone for him again, burnished brand-new and hopeful, like when he told it to his children.

“I believe I am going to pass out soon,” Bev announced, staggering up from her seat. “And since you're here, I'd like you to help me upstairs and into my bed. I hope you're not too shocked. But better you know now, I'm not much of a lady of virtue.”

BEV'S ONLY REGRET
was that she would die out here in the desert and not in Los Angeles, where she belonged. But when she closed her eyes she saw the big white letters of the
HOLLYWOODLAND
sign, and she was home again. Even though she couldn't see him anymore, she could still feel him, her gentleman caller sitting beside her, and before she could help it she thought of
Driving Miss Daisy
, which she'd watched a few weeks after Richard and Elizabeth. (Jonathan Hertzfeld still sent her all their receipts.) This time she didn't have to suppress her laughter because she was too weak to produce it, but she knew others would compare them to the rich old white woman and her elderly black driver if ever they saw them together. She was glad no one ever would.

She couldn't allow
Driving Miss Daisy
to be her last thought on earth, so Bev tried to think of something more profound. The girl in the nightshirt would be angry with her for ruin
ing this moment, though it was silly to continue indulging this mental trick of hers, of treating the girl as someone separate. And why stop there? Bev thought about all the other people who were really a part of her: Charlotte, of course, and Big Stan her father, and her bossy brother Tom. Her new friend Mike Kim, and that charming boy Richard Baumbach. The
not
charming Elizabeth Santiago, too. The darkness behind her eyelids grew darker still, and she realized she could go further: Jonathan Hertzfeld, and Orpheus Washington—but who was that? It was he, of course: the man at her side. His name was
Orpheus
? Oh, that was almost too good to be true. . . . But how did she know that? And suddenly there were so many more: Charlotte's husband, Arnold; Jonathan's wife, Rivka; Orpheus's wife, Rhonda; his children, Sherry and Scott; Peaches, Keith, Ally, and Raoul; Albert Johnson and Death Valley Scotty; Colin Higgins and Hal Ashby; Peg Entwistle and Amber Hudson; Kyle, Selena, Tess, and Angelyne—more names than it seemed possible to know at once.

Bev's body went slack, and she thought about how they were all a part of her, but not in a way that made her any less the Beverly Chambers she'd been all her life. How was this possible? How could she be all people and one person at the same time? The answer was just out of her reach, but it was
there
, and she saw that the world was made up of neither individuals nor a single, coherent entity. It was an amalgamation, a sum greater than its parts. It was a mess. It was love.

The throbbing in her joints, the burning in her lungs, all this pain disappeared and Bev realized with a thrill that this was a vision of the world she could get behind, because it had nothing to do with balance or restraint. She saw now that there was no true opposite to love. People thought it was hatred, or fear, or indifference, but these were all so trivial in comparison to the Great Emotion—a force so pow
erful, a God with so many faces that if its true opposite existed the world would cease to be. There was no need to strive for moderation anymore, no reason to control her impulses; she was going to a place where good intentions were enough, where what she wanted to do and what she ought to do would always be the same. Bev brought her hands together and actually rubbed them in anticipation, and as she did so she felt a pair of hands above hers. Annoyed that the drug hadn't worked yet, she opened her eyes to tell Orpheus Washington to sit back and give her some room, when in his place, just like Valentine's Day 1952, she saw Charlotte. Always Charlotte.

“Get up, you old cow.” Char grinned: young, vibrant, as she was back then.

Bev smiled.

Bev frowned.

“Wait,” she said. “How do I know this is real? That it's not made up? Some stupid dream or something?”

“I guess you don't,” Char said a little impatiently. “But was it a dream last time? In 1952?”

“Good point,” said Bev, springing out of her bed. It took her a moment to realize she had
sprung
, that she too was young, that she was the girl in the nightshirt again, folding her beloved best friend in her arms.

“You know,” Char whispered in her ear, “we actually saw
Driving Miss Daisy
when it came out in the theater. In '89.”

“Absolutely not,” said Bev, stepping back from her and shaking her head. “I would have remembered that.”

“
No
, you
wouldn't
, because you have an atrocious memory.”

“Ah, yes, because yours is
photographic
.” Bev used air quotes.

“Eidetic, not photographic, and don't use air quotes, Beverly,” said Char, in that authoritative, schoolmarmish voice Bev
always conveniently forgot in her fond remembrances of her best friend. “They're tacky.”

“Well, now I'm
sure
this isn't a dream,” said Bev, “unless it's a nightmare. Rest assured if I dreamt
you
up, you'd be a mute.”

Even as CharBev continued to bicker, Beverly could feel herself drifting away. It was as if she were ascending: the greater the height, the more she could see, except that her field of vision was not only space but also time, allowing her to catch glimpses of the future as it played out in the aftermath of her demise.

She saw Orpheus Washington return to Los Angeles under the cover of night, abandoning his stolen Prius off the 10 in West Covina in the effort to keep himself from getting arrested.

She saw a bleary-eyed Peaches discover her body. She had expected Peaches to scream, perhaps even to clutch and tear at her salt-and-pepper bob, but Peaches surprised her. She lifted the bedsheet over Bev's head, bid her employer a simple adieu, and left as soon as the ambulance arrived, headed straight for her sister in Rosemead.

She saw a tired-looking Jonathan Hertzfeld in Century City giving Richard and Elizabeth the rest of their half-million-dollar reward, informing them that Beverly Chambers was dead and they were free never to speak to each other again.

She saw Richard in bed at his apartment in Silver Lake, leg thumping, a wrinkle appearing where none had appeared before on his marblelike brow as an unfamiliar emotion coursed through his body. How was he going to handle this weight, this worry, this
burden
for the rest of his life? How could a happiness this perfect, this profound, possibly last? He couldn't shake the feeling that something awful was going to happen. And then Bev saw him lift the sheet beside him, uncovering a perfectly sleeping (and perfectly naked) Elizabeth, and she saw him curl up beside her and match his breathing to hers.

She saw Rivka in Hancock Park worry her children by refusing to cry when Jonathan Hertzfeld died, much earlier than either of them expected. “What's the point?” she protested. “What's done is done.” But she couldn't sleep properly, not without that arm, till one night she rustled furtively in her special drawer looking for something, anything to make her feel better, and she found the horrible little bottle of perfume, as full as the day he gave it to her. And Beverly saw her take it, and slip it under her pillow, and find the sleep she desired.