The Last Beach Bungalow (12 page)

April Newton

I drove down the hill and parked across the street from the bungalow, then sat there fiddling with the charm around my neck. I finally got out, crossed the street, opened the gate and walked up to the front door. I reached out and slipped the chain around the doorknob, then stood there a minute to fold the note around the chain. I finally turned, took a step down to the sidewalk, glanced up—and saw Rick standing on the other side of the gate with a flier in his hand.

We always see the people we love at such close range—across bedrooms and kitchen counters. It was a shock to see him standing there in someone else’s yard, like a stranger who had just happened by. He was an attractive man with a friendly, open face. His skin was wet with sweat and his shirt clung to his chest. If I hadn’t known him, I might have smiled at him. We might have exchanged a few pleasantries. Perhaps, if the moment was right, we would have had a conversation where we made an actual connection, like the one I’d just had with the cashier at the store. But then we would pass out of each other’s lives, back into the small circle of people whom we love but don’t necessarily see.

Rick raised his free hand and waved sheepishly at me. I waved back and met him at the gate.

“What did you leave?” he asked.

I blushed and looked at the ground. “Just a note,” I said. I waited a split second to see if the half-truth would stand on its own but it wouldn’t. “And a necklace like this one,” I said. “They’re talismans of peace.” I expected him to tease me, or to ask how on earth I had come to be the owner of a pair of necklaces that were talismans of peace. We were, after all, still in the middle of a fight. Instead he nodded, as if, out of all the choices of things to bring the owner of a house I had fallen in love with instead of the one he had built, a necklace like mine had been a good one.

“So you’ve met the owner?” he asked and glanced at the flier in his hands. “Peg Torrey?”

“You learn a lot about her just by walking through the house,” I said. “She likes games and bright colors. There’s this huge fireplace in the living room made of the most gorgeous Catalina tile—reds and oranges. It reminds me of Gram’s.”

“I’m sorry about last night,” Rick said. “I shouldn’t have teased you.”

“I’m sorry about the house. Or the houses. I mean, I’m sorry about what I said about our house. And I’m sorry about this one. I didn’t plan on it. I never intended it to happen.”

“You have to admit that this is a bit odd.” He swept his arm across Peg Torrey’s lawn and front porch, the front door and the transom windows with the arts-and-crafts flowers.

“Haven’t you ever thought about living in another house—about what our lives would be like if we picked up and moved to a colonial in Boston or an adobe in Santa Fe or even just another house on another part of the hill? Don’t you ever just fantasize?”

I hadn’t intended to use that word—the same word Rick had used the night before in the restaurant when he’d all but said that dreams about houses were as illicit as dreams of flesh—but I did, and in response, Rick laughed. It was a sickening sound like an inside joke you’re not in on.

“Sure I fantasize,” he said. It was clear that he wasn’t talking about houses anymore.

“Are you sleeping with someone else?” I blurted.

“I fantasize,” he said coolly, “but I don’t act on it.”

My mind reeled. I thought of my mother, silently waiting all those years for my dad to come back from Cincinnati or Chicago or Atlanta after a weekend leadership conference or sales meeting or incentive trip, waiting and knowing the whole time that he was with someone else. She would smile when he returned, ask how his trip was, serve a steak, a potato and beer in front of the TV if there was a game on. How could she have done it?

“You’ve thought about sleeping with other women?”

Rick shrugged. He had lush, curly hair, and on that day he was in need of a haircut. There was a place just behind his ear where his curls hit the soft skin of his neck, and I could see those curls, plastered against his sweaty skin. The thought skittered across my mind that I might never touch that place on his neck again. It was the corollary to a thought I had often had over the years when, at a party or one of Jackie’s sporting events, he’d slip his hand from the small of my back onto the rounded curve of my bottom, or place a hand around the knob of my bare shoulder in a gesture that was intimate and proprietary. He was allowed to touch me in those ways in public because I was his wife. The rules allowed for it. I loved that sense of privilege, and it had been so long since I’d felt it.

“All guys think about it,” he said.

“So what stopped you? Why didn’t you?” I expected that he’d say something vague about guilt or it just not being right. He was, after all, the kind of guy who wouldn’t cross a double yellow line even if there wasn’t another car in sight.

“I love you,” he said, then smiled a wry, sideways smile, “and I thought that things would get better when we got into the house.”

So that was the rub. I was thinking that things would fall apart in that house, and he was thinking that things would get better.

The longest-running feature in an American consumer magazine is the
Ladies’ Home Journal
column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” It’s been a regular part of the magazine for fifty years. A man and a woman take turns saying what’s wrong in their relationship and then a counselor comes in to give her advice on what, if anything, they can do to move forward. People love it because it forces them to see all sides of a story in a three-page spread. Even without the astute therapist, I could see that ours was a marriage that could be saved. We both had faith in wallboard and wood to transform a life, it was just that our faith took a different shape.

“It’s a beautiful house,” I said. “It’s one of your best.”

“The movers come in two days.”

“So we’ll move, then,” I said.

“What about the talisman of peace?”

I fingered my necklace. The cool hardness of the little square felt comforting. I could feel the place on the back where the word
peace
was carved into the metal. “We’ll just have to see.”

Rick folded up the flier and slipped it into the pocket of his running shorts.

“Can I have a ride home?” he asked.

We walked to the car, but before we even got our seat belts buckled, my cell phone rang. It was Jackie, asking if she could stay at Max’s house and study.

“Are his parents home?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Do you want to talk to them?”

“I have to,” I said. “It’s my job.”

A woman came on the line and said, “Hello? April? I’m Wendy Callahan, Max’s mom.”

“Nice to meet you, Wendy. Are you sure it’s OK for Jackie to stay longer? I don’t want her to intrude on your Sunday.”

“It’s no intrusion,” Wendy said. “We’re delighted to have her.”

“And you’ll be home the whole time?” I asked, feeling like an actress reading a script.

“Absolutely,” Wendy said, saying the lines of her script back to me in perfect time.

When I hung up, I turned to Rick. “Do you ever get the feeling that Jackie’s already gone?” I asked. “I thought we got her for another year and a half, but we don’t really have her at all, do we?”

“She’s supposed to be gone,” Rick said. “If she wasn’t gone, there’d be something wrong.”

I took a huge gulp of air and let it all the way out. “Don’t you ever get tired of being so damn reasonable? Don’t you ever just want to do something that makes no sense whatsoever?”

Rick looked at me and in a voice that was dead serious, he said, “No.”

We spent the afternoon packing, exchanging excruciatingly polite questions and answers about where we were putting the linens and whether we thought we should leave out any pots to cook for the next few nights or if Baja Fresh would be nourishment enough. We exchanged masking tape and Sharpie pens as the stacks of boxes in the apartment grew like walls around us. At one point, Rick came and stood in the doorway of the bedroom, where I was packing up shoes.

“Do we have anything for Jackie for Christmas?” he asked.

“I was thinking we could do an extreme makeover in her new room—new bedspread, a new beanbag, maybe a desk. I’ve got stuff scouted out at IKEA.”

Rick nodded. “That sounds good.” He paused several moments before talking again. “And what about you?” he asked. “What do you want?”

I thought of a thousand things to say before I decided on the simplest version of the truth. “Surprise me,” I said.

Late in the day, I went over to the house with the few remaining plants we had kept alive in the apartment. I slowed when I got to the driveway and saw Lucy, the young Mexican woman Rick used for his construction cleaning. She swept up the sawdust, scrubbed the new tile and mopped the floors of the multimillion dollar houses Rick built all over the South Bay. Sometimes other women worked with her—women with brown skin and open faces—but often, she worked alone. She was reaching into her little pickup truck to set down her bucket of cleaning supplies, and the moment I saw her, she saw me. She smiled and waved—the boss’s wife.

“All done!” she called. “So now you can be moving in.”

“Thank you, Lucy,” I said.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said, shyly.

I could feel my throat begin to itch. I pushed my tongue against the top of my mouth to try to stop it, and my face screwed up in a kind of agony. I didn’t even know where Lucy lived—not the town, not the circumstances. I didn’t know where she worked during the day, whether or not she had family, whether or not they were in this country legally, if she was counting the dollars she could send home as she brushed and mopped and scoured. This spectacular house of glass and granite and bamboo was mine. I was the queen. This was my castle—and I was so ungrateful. I started to cry.

“Señora?” Lucy asked.

“It
is
beautiful,” I said, through my tears. “Thank you.”

“Why do you cry?” she asked, and put her hand on my arm. Her hand was warm and plump.

Lucy didn’t know a single one of my friends. I wouldn’t see her at church or at Jackie’s school, at the grocery store or the gym. She would never be at one of the parties we might throw in this house—cocktails at sunset, a dinner party for eight, a celebration for Jackie’s graduation. She was just a warm body, just someone standing there a few days before this house would officially be mine. “I fell in love with a house by the beach,” I said. “An old house being sold by an old woman.”

“Oh!” Lucy said, her face brightening, her head nodding. “The house from the paper.”

I gaped. “You know about it?”

“My father,” Lucy said. “He has a friend who mows the lawns on that street.”

“Are you serious?”

Lucy nodded vigorously. “My whole family, we went there when you could walk around inside. We took flan.”

“Your family is trying to win that house, Lucy?” I asked.

She beamed. “My five uncles. One of them owns a nursery in San Diego.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Gardena,” she said. “Five brothers and sisters and two cousins all in one house. It’s hot there in the summer. I try to study at night, you know, and it’s always hot. I love to live near the beach.”

“You’re going to school?”

“To work for a dentist,” she said.

“You’ll be very good at that,” I said.

When I got back in the car after leaving the houseplants, I called Vanessa.

“So you’re not mad at me?” she asked.

“I’m completely pissed at you,” I said.

“I figured.”

"But can I ask you something about the house by the beach?”

“No, ma’am,” she said. “I’m staying out of that one. I’m staying a mile away.”

“I just want to know how many people have made bids for it. I mean, is it hundreds? Thousands?”

“I personally know seven people trying to get that house,” Vanessa said, “not including you, since I don’t really know where you stand. And between the rest of the agents in the office, I know of several dozen more. And every other agency in town is the same. I heard the
Today
show is going to do the story,” she said.

“What is it about that house?”

“You mean besides the chance to walk away with a two-million-dollar property for three hundred thousand? ”

“Besides that.”

“It’s a house that’s lasted a long time in a world where nothing much lasts anymore,” Vanessa said.

“You’ve been there, haven’t you?” I asked.

“April, I’m allowed to go to an open house, for God’s sake.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you think I’m crazy to try to get it?”

“I’m a real estate agent,” Vanessa said, “and your best friend. Crazy is par for the course.”

“So did you learn anything that might help me? Did you learn any secrets?”

“She loves dogs,” Vanessa said.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I pictured Rick with a woman in a pale yellow polo shirt stretched taut across her chest, and a pale yellow skirt that rose impossibly high on her legs. Her shoes were white. Her teeth were white. She knew exactly how to apply eye makeup. And her skin. The skin of her breasts. My mind kept coming back to her skin. That, after all, was the thing you touched. It was the thing you kissed, the thing you licked. Skin was the thing that was talked about incessantly during my treatment for breast cancer—the skin they would radiate; the burns it would induce; the way skin would look without hair of any kind; the difference in the quality of the skin they would take from the stomach compared to the skin they would be replacing on the breast; the way the tape that held the gauze would make the skin raw, over time; the way a wound would fill in until it became even with the surface of the skin and then how the healing would change so that a scar would form, stretching across the skin. I tried to picture another man touching my scars, licking my tattoo, gently removing the chocolate brown bra, but all that did was make my skin crawl.