FRANK’S RENTED TUXEDO WAS ON A CHAIR NEAR THE END OF THE BED. LILLIAN COULDN’T REMEMBER SLEEPING WITH HIM LAST NIGHT. SHE WONDERED WHERE HE WAS.
SHE RETRIEVED HER NIGHTGOWN FROM THE MASTER BATHROOM AND CAUTIOUSLY ENTERED THE REST OF THE HOUSE. SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE WOKE UP, SHE FELT AS THOUGH SHE WERE
putting on her home with her clothes. This was the house Frank had built on spec—they were never supposed to move into it, they had never wanted to live in a town like Orange. As much as she had tried to dress it up and make it over, it still had the provisional quality of a tract home. This morning, she wanted to take an ax to every piece of furniture, dig up the floors, and burn it down.
She quietly opened the front door and entered the day. When she reached the driveway, she saw that her house was surrounded by huge vehicles—Phil and Arlene’s camper was in front of her, Frank’s Buick was beside her, and John Wayne’s green station wagon was parked at the curb near the end of the lawn. Her son Danny was sitting on the front seat, his head bobbing in and out of view as he inspected the dashboard. Frank was behind her in the garage. She heard him setting down something heavy on the workbench.
Frank moved toward her.
“The roof’s been extended,” Frank said. “He loves station wagons, but I guess they’re not quite big enough for him.”
“I see.”
“Listen, Lillian, I’m so sorry. I remember it all. Nothing like that’s going to ever happen again.”
Lillian turned toward him. “It won’t ever happen again because I’m going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“What do you mean, Lil?”
“Fuck you, Frank.”
Just then, Arlene and Phil emerged from their camper. Arlene stepped warily onto Milford Road, as though she were afraid it had disappeared during the night. Phil stepped out jauntily after her.
“Did you guys sleep well?” Lillian shouted.
“Just fine,” Phil announced. “I don’t even know why we keep the house, it’s so comfortable in there.”
Arlene made a face to convey that she didn’t agree. Lillian laughed.
“You guys want to wait for me inside?” Lillian said. “And we can fix some breakfast?”
Arlene and Phil marched toward the house. Danny now watched his parents through the windshield, the green tinting darkening his face.
“Lillian,” Frank said. “Jesus, Lillian.”
“I’m going to go in and fix breakfast for our friends.”
She followed them inside. Arlene and Phil were seated on stools across the counter from Lillian’s stove.
“God, I’m so hungry,” Phil said. “Drinking always makes me hungry.”
“Are you okay?” Arlene asked Lillian.
“I’m fine. Scrambled eggs and bacon? Toast?” Lillian’s hands were trembling as she reached for the refrigerator door.
Lillian’s daughter Alice shuffled through the dining room toward the kitchen. She was imitating her little brother, who ambled awkwardly beside her, attached to her hand.
“I was afraid you weren’t ever going to get home,” Alice said. “I waited and waited and then I fell asleep.”
“Come over here, sweetheart,” Arlene said.
Alice reluctantly surrendered her attachment to her brother Chris, who floated like a spaceman before he dropped happily to the ground.
Alice kissed Arlene, but she kept her eyes on Lillian.
“What were you doing while you waited?” Arlene asked. “Were you reading?”
“Your mother never taught you how to read in the dark?”
Alice’s eyes narrowed in dismay.
Lillian smiled tightly and began to concentrate on breakfast. She set the kettle to boil for instant coffee as Phil hauled Chris from the floor and set him ceremoniously on his lap. She pulled down a skillet and stood for a long moment watching it, touching the handle as though she were amazed by its substance.
When the phone rang, Lillian left the skillet clattering on the range. She reached the wall before the phone could ring again.
It was John Wayne. “Lillian, we made a little mistake last night. Frank drove home the Oldsmobile, and it’s full of Christmas presents. I need those back here as soon as possible. I’m sorry—I should have given him another car.”
“He’ll get them back there this morning.”
“Did you have a nice time last night?”
“Sure.”
“I’m glad. It was good to see you. So, Frank can take care of that?”
“Sure.”
“Great, great.”
When she returned the phone to the wall, Phil and Arlene and even Alice seemed to know that something important had happened. John Wayne’s station wagon was full of Christmas presents. Why was that important?
“That was Duke Wayne. He needs his car back.”
Lillian walked through the kitchen into the garage. Frank and Danny were already standing behind the huge green station wagon, staring at the colorful boxes and wrapped packages, each a different size and shape.
She stood beside her husband and son, but refused to share their wonder. “Wayne wants you to bring them back,” Lillian said, and then she turned toward the house.
“I need someone to go with me,” Frank said.
Lillian turned around. She wanted to scream at Frank, but the first thing she saw was Danny’s face.
“Call Jimmy.”
“Jimmy’s with his girlfriend in Palm Desert.”
“Go across the street and ask Randy.”
Frank looked at the house across the street and quietly said, “I’m not driving to Newport Beach with fucking Randy.”
“Frank, I don’t care.”
“I’ll go with you,” Danny offered.
“You can go,” Lillian explained, “but that doesn’t solve the problem. Your father needs someone to drive him back.”
Danny seemed relieved that his participation was not essential.
“Listen,” Lillian said, “Arlene and Phil need to eat. Duke can wait until after breakfast. Phil will go with you.”
“Why don’t we wait until after breakfast,” Frank asked, “and then you can go with me?”
“Because I don’t want to go with you. Anywhere.”
Danny winced, but Lillian walked away toward the house. After a moment, Frank and Danny followed her.
Once inside, Lillian stood before the beginnings of her breakfast: a frying pan lying off-center on her radar range. Arlene had made coffee, which she handed to Lillian and Frank. Alice abandoned the room with her baby brother in tow, which left four people staring at Lillian. She addressed Frank in a cold attempt to prevent him from speaking.
“I’m fixing breakfast. I’ll be done when I’m done. Don’t wait around on me if you need to go now.”
Lillian retrieved a package of bacon and several eggs from the refrigerator, and then she fumbled with both bacon and eggs until Arlene slid off her stool and took everything from Lillian’s hands. Without any more protest than she could show in her pained eyes, Lillian sat down on the stool next to Phil.
The phone rang again. Frank stood in the middle of the kitchen, unwilling or unable to move. Lillian reached awkwardly toward the wall. It was John Wayne’s secretary, Pat Stacy.
“Hi, Lillian, it’s Pat. Mr. Wayne made another mistake. He needs the station wagon right now. Can someone drive it over right now?”
“Hold on a second, Pat.” Lillian covered the receiver and addressed Frank.
“They need the car now.”
Frank watched her before he said, “Will you come with me?”
“We’ve got guests,” she said, but she looked at Phil as she said it. She stared at him.
Arlene picked up the cue. “Phil’s been looking for an excuse to see the Wild Goose one more time. Phil will go with you.”
Both Frank and Phil seemed disappointed.
“That’d be great,” Phil said. “Maybe Duke will change his mind and give me a job on his next picture.”
Frank said nothing. Lillian dug through her purse and came up with a set of keys, which she placed in Phil’s hand. “Follow Frank in the Buick. That camper makes me nervous. Danny, you go with them.”
Frank continued to watch her without offering anything. Danny watched the floor. Phil smiled at his wife, and then at Lillian, who did not smile back.
———
When the children had been fed and the dishes cleared, Arlene suggested a walk. According to her, she had become accustomed to the great open spaces near Lompoc, and she felt stifled by the more conventional suburbs of Orange County. Lillian recognized an attempt to be a good friend.
Lillian’s house was at a dead end beside a field where a crop of new houses had just been framed. Beyond the end of Milford Road, streets had been graded but no cement had been poured. Lillian had never walked through the tract before.
They set out down the dirt road that turned out and away from Lillian’s house. Every new home would be a one-story like her own, and every fourth house would be exactly the same, except for paint and trim, which would come later. Arlene was fascinated with the half-built homes.
“Now, what’s the deal with something like this? Would John Wayne give Frank the money to build a tract? Is this the kind of thing that Frank wants to get into?”
They had turned toward the Santiago Creek, which was really just a big ditch for flood control, pouring down from the Santa Ana Mountains toward the Santa Ana River. Last spring, it had been so full that it had almost washed away Lillian’s home. These new houses were built right up to its edge.
“I have a feeling,” Lillian said, “that this is a little too complicated for Duke. Apartment buildings are mostly what they’re talking about. Keep it for a couple of years, enjoy all the tax advantages, sell it. I think that’s much simpler.”
Lillian noticed herself getting interested in her husband again. It was insidious the way his problems had become her problems, his opportunities her opportunities. And it saddened her, the thought that she might no longer file his tax returns.
“Duke just wants to give him the money and have a problem-free real estate investment,” Arlene said. “I can understand that. Frank’s job is to make it as easy on him as possible.”
“Yes,” Lillian said. “That’s it.”
As they approached the flood-control channel—the Santiago Creek—Lillian could feel her insides rising to the memory of last spring’s deluge. The children had been taken out of school, the area evacuated, and for a moment, it had looked as though their houses would be flooded in order to save a reservoir somewhere up in the mountains—a reservoir Lillian had never seen, never even heard of. She looked over the edge of the ditch and saw only a muddy trickle sixty feet below, winding through weeds and broken bicycles and incongruous stands of bamboo.
“You know what I’m thinking of?” Arlene asked.
“No.”
“I’m thinking of the famous people I’d like to invest money in your apartment buildings.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“What? You don’t want me to tell you?”
“Sure, but tell me about it on the way home. This ridiculous creek bothers me even when it’s empty.”
As they turned away and started toward home, the sky above them was dissolving into blue. Near Christmas was the most beautiful time in Southern California. The sky was clear like the sky above her childhood. There was no smog on days like this, and the cool air made her feel awake. More than awake—alive.
The unfinished street was a little lower than her house, and when Lillian looked up toward Milford Road, she saw her daughter walking toward them. A small fear leapt in her chest before she could remind herself that she was doing nothing wrong.
Alice proceeded toward them with awesome concentration. She had changed from her pajamas into a playsuit.
“Where’s your little brother?” Lillian asked.
“He’s watching TV. A man called.”
“What was the man’s name?”
“He didn’t say. He wanted to talk to you. I told him that you’d be right back.”
“Did you recognize his voice?”
“No.”
Lillian knew who it was. She could predict John Wayne’s behavior by imagining a smarter, stronger Frank with more tolerance for alcohol. John Wayne was a Hollywood blowup of her husband. Better in some ways, but still annoying.
“Alice,” Lillian said, “why don’t you go make sure Chris stays out of trouble? Will you do that for me, sweetheart?”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“Daddy had to drive to Newport Beach to return Mr. Wayne’s car.”
“Why couldn’t Mr. Wayne come here to get his car?”
“Because that’s not the way it works, sweetheart. When you borrow something, it’s your job to return it.”
“Mr. Wayne was the one who called.”
“Thanks for telling me that, Alice. Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“You just reminded me of what he sounded like.”
“Alice, go home and take care of your little brother the way I asked you to.”
While Alice walked ahead of them, Arlene took greater notice of Lillian; she studied her with an intensity that Lillian could feel.
“Don’t look at me that way, please.”
“How was I looking at you?” Arlene asked.
“You want to know if something’s wrong. Yes, something’s wrong. You know as well as I do what’s wrong.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know whether I’m going to divorce him, but it really feels like I’m going to divorce him.”
Arlene looked over Lillian’s shoulder toward Alice, who was trudging back toward the house. “Think hard,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like something someone should say.”
Arlene bent down to recover a short piece of two-by-four with a long, jagged nail in its head. She threw it off the road toward what would one day be a sidewalk. “Another thing I’m supposed to say—oh, the hell with it, I’m not going to say it.”
“Doesn’t he seem like an asshole to you? Didn’t he seem like an asshole last night?”
“I love Frank.”
“And he’s worse this morning. He’s pathetic.”
“I’m supposed to say that he’s a good provider. You’ve got good kids and you’ve got a nice home and you should think about all those things because they’re important. Not everyone can give you those things. Not everyone would want to.”
“This isn’t about that Michael character,” Lillian said. “This has nothing to do with that Michael character.”
Arlene looked as though she’d been caught snooping. She turned away and took a last look at the unfinished homes.
“I know that,” she said.
As soon as they walked in the door, the phone rang. Arlene crossed the kitchen and carefully lifted the receiver off the wall.
“Hello? No, this is Arlene. Hi. Yes, she’s right here. Yes, I had a wonderful time, thank you.” Arlene handed the phone to Lillian, who accepted it as though bad news was about to find her. Arlene sat down without taking her eyes off Lillian’s face.
“Yes. Yes, he left here an hour ago. Yeah, he should have been there by now. I’m sorry, I’m sure he’ll be there soon. No problem. Absolutely. Bye.”
Arlene couldn’t help smiling. “Frank’s not there yet.”
“Yeah.”
“Phil will keep him out of trouble.”
“I doubt that. I’m worried about Danny.” Lillian stood away from the counter and tried to rally herself. Arlene waited.
“No, it’s not good. He’s drinking somewhere, and he’s not letting Phil or Danny get him home.”
“Where does he drink down there?”
“I don’t know. I bet Jimmy knows.”
She called Frank’s brother Jimmy, who she guessed would be home. Palm Desert sounded too ambitious for a heroin addict who liked the inside of his own apartment better than most places. He answered after ten rings.
“Jimmy, it’s Lil.”
“Yeah. Hi, Lil. Why are you calling me so early?”
“Listen, Frank’s off somewhere and he’s got John Wayne’s car. Danny’s with him and our friend Phil, and I’m a little worried. He left here about an hour ago, and he hasn’t showed up at Wayne’s house yet.”
She heard the receiver change hands, and Jimmy waited too long to respond. Breathing heavily, he said, “Lil, what do you want me to do?”
“I want you to find him and get the car over to Duke’s house and then get Danny back here.”
The background disappeared as Jimmy covered the receiver. He spoke to someone else in the room. When he returned, there was a rush of complicated noise.
“I can’t go right now. I have things to do.”
“Jimmy, what the fuck are you doing that you can’t help me?”
“Calm down, darling. I’m going to help you. I just can’t drive over to Newport Beach. I’ll come over to the house later. Do you have a pencil?”
“Yes, I have a fucking pencil.”
“There’s a place off Newport Boulevard—I think it’s on Esplanade—called The Lighthouse. It’s going to be there or at a place called Honey, I’m Home, which is on Harbor. If he’s not at either of those places, maybe he went to The Rusty Pelican. Sometimes he likes to have lunch at The Rusty Pelican.”
When Frank worked closer to home, she had her own map of where he might be. She wrote down all three names, but she put a box around The Rusty Pelican, which sounded like the only place he could bring Danny.
“Is that it?”
“If it’s not one of those, maybe I can think of somewhere else. Call me if it’s not one of those places. I’ll be here until I come over to the house. Hey, how was the party?”
Lillian hung up the phone.
“What is it?” Arlene asked.
“I’ve got to go find him.”
“What’s the matter with Jimmy?”
“He needs to screw his girlfriend a few more times.”
Arlene placed her hands on the table and accepted Lillian’s fury.
“I’m sorry,” Lillian said. “I’m not mad at you.”
“I know you’re not.”
“It’s just that he’s such trash. They’re all such trash. I look at my kids and I just hope that none of them grow up to be … trash.” Lillian cried for the first time that morning. Her grief came over her with shuddering pain.
“Oh, honey.” Arlene stood beside her at the kitchen counter. Arlene was an awkward woman who couldn’t help but overwhelm her friend. As she felt Arlene closing around her, Lillian regained control. She stood up and gently opened Arlene’s arms.
“I’m okay. I’m going to be okay. Can you watch the kids?”
The Newport Freeway was empty except for families on outings and working men in pickups. She felt conspicuous, alone in her red Dodge Dart. The sky continued blue until she reached the frontier between Irvine and Costa Mesa, where the coastal fog made the horizon look like a stiff white sheet of paper. She couldn’t imagine anything beyond it but the kind of death that borrowed its terror from nothingness: falling from an airplane, drowning in a sea, smothering in a vast unpunctuated darkness.
She passed both Esplanade and Harbor and didn’t turn off Newport until she’d reached Pacific Coast Highway. The Rusty Pelican was a carefully weathered copper-colored box on the harbor side of the road. In spite of its facade, it still seemed unfinished, as though the builders, in their zeal for an authentic seafaring surface, had forgotten to put a restaurant behind all the antique paint.
Both cars were in the parking lot, but not many others. She parked beside John Wayne’s station wagon and waited for a few minutes with the sharp sense that she was about to repeat herself. For the thousandth time, she was going to stand between Frank and his drinking.
Lillian turned to look at the Christmas presents, which were just visible through the window. They were so many and various. She could recognize at least five different wrappings, and the frilly doodads that sparkled on top must have been the work of professionals. Maybe the presents were fabulously expensive and couldn’t be replaced. Lillian couldn’t imagine buying something that couldn’t be replaced, but maybe John Wayne could. There were many things in the world a rich person could buy that no one would ever be able to have again. The thought of something that precious made Lillian afraid for herself and the world in which such things were possible.
As she sat in her Dodge, watching the presents, a car quietly snuck up behind her and smacked her rear bumper with enough force to jolt Lillian into screaming. It was her brother-in-law Jimmy with an embarrassed-looking blonde beside him. Jimmy was grinning extravagantly, his hands choked up on the steering wheel of his old fin-tailed Cadillac, his drug addict’s eyes pegged to Lillian’s fear. Lillian got out of her car and walked around to him.
“Just a kiss,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You scared the shit out of me, Jimmy.”
“I felt guilty, so I thought I’d come help you.”
Lillian tried not to see the blonde, who sat too close beside Jimmy, but she looked like the kind of woman Jimmy favored: pretty, but damaged. Jimmy himself could be a handsome man, but he was also damaged.
“Lil, this is Barbara.”
Barbara started to extend her hand, but Lillian returned her attention to Jimmy.
“If you’d told me you were coming, I could have stayed home and watched the kids.”
“I figured he was probably here,” Jimmy said. “I had to think about it for a minute.”
Barbara drew herself the smallest bit away. Lillian didn’t like the look in Jimmy’s eyes.
“Did he call you?” she asked.
“Yeah, he called me.”
“Why didn’t he take the station wagon back? Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t say anything about the station wagon. He said he wanted me to come down because he had to tell me something and maybe later we’d go see Duke.”
“How drunk was he?”
“He was working on it.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Jimmy led her through the parking lot toward the front door. The Rusty Pelican was too dark. A waterfront restaurant, it was lit like a cave in order to avail itself of the quaint scenery just outside. Lillian’s anxiety bloomed as she followed Jimmy and Barbara past the hostess stand toward the only bright table in the dining room, which was populated by her husband and son and Phil.
“There are too many fucking wonderful things in this area,” Frank spoke to the table. “You can live like a king here. I don’t understand why you want to live like a peasant somewhere else.”
“I like Lompoc,” Phil said.
Frank saw Jimmy and smiled. But the happy expectation that his party would be enlarged soon gave way as he saw Lillian. He started to stand from the table, and then, thinking better of himself, he sat down.
“Look at that bitch. Did you come all this way to rescue the Christmas presents? You care more about the fucking Christmas presents than you do about me.”
Lillian remembered why she was there. She checked her son’s face for the trouble she knew she’d find, but he was completely preoccupied with his father.
John Wayne’s station wagon was well known around Newport Beach, and the manager must have called Wayne’s house because before Lillian had the chance to confront her husband, Wayne himself was standing behind her.
“You must have really liked the car,” Duke said, “because you never planned on giving it back to me.”
Frank stood up. A young man appeared behind Wayne. Wayne nodded to Lillian and half nodded to the rest of the table. Jimmy smiled as though his dreams were all coming true, and Barbara held herself behind Jimmy as though she needed defense.
“We just stopped for a bite is all,” Frank said. “And a little hair of the dog.”
“Oh,” Duke said, smiling at Lillian particularly, but smiling all around. “I know that dog. That’s a bad dog.”
Wayne approached the table and pulled up two chairs, forming an awkward semicircle around the circle of Frank’s table. The young man who had driven him looked on. Jimmy and Barbara pulled over chairs from the other side of the room.
“That’s okay, Bernard. You can go home now. Thanks for the ride.”
Bernard, who seemed happy to be released from his responsibility, left the restaurant. As Lillian watched him go, she let herself imagine that John Wayne had come to make everything right. This wish was so concrete to her, and his help seemed so inevitable, that for a moment her body flushed with happiness.
“Have a seat, Lillian.”
John Wayne drew a cigar from the vest pocket of his sport coat and accepted a matchbook that Jimmy tossed over the table. Jimmy’s face was glowing. He’d met Duke before, but this was the first time Lillian had seen him so big with hope.
Watching Jimmy gave her the courage to watch Frank. Frank was sometimes more comfortable talking about John Wayne than actually being in his presence. His hands rambled the edge of the table, and his eyes were wide with bewildered cunning. To his credit, Frank wasn’t a sycophant, but he was awed in a way that sometimes amounted to the same thing.
Wayne’s motives were inscrutable. As he took his first self-pleasing puffs from the cigar, Lillian was trying to rationalize his immediate need for the car with his current laziness. As much as she would have enjoyed watching Frank squirm, she needed to make some sense of things.
“Don’t you need to return the Christmas presents?”
Duke turned from his cigar and smiled at her.
“They want the Christmas presents,” he said. “I want to smoke my goddamn cigar.”
Phil smiled inexplicably. Frank raised his eyes toward Lillian. Jimmy and Barbara looked at each other. Danny watched his father.
“Everyone was so agitated,” Wayne continued. “You would have thought I’d sold one of the kids into slavery. ‘Where are the presents?’ ‘What’s going to happen to the presents?’ They wanted to know where you lived, whether it was a safe neighborhood, all sorts of crap. I didn’t want to pester you, but it was choice between my pestering you and them pestering me. Now we’re both free. Let’s just relax and have some drinks and we’ll all go home soon enough.”
The waitress, as though listening for this sentence, appeared beside Lillian. “What would you like, Mr. Wayne?”
“I’d like an Irish coffee. Can you make me one of those?”
“Certainly.”
“And whatever anyone else wants.”
While Jimmy and Barbara and Phil made their drink orders, Lillian watched her husband sit before his nearly empty glass of scotch. In the company of John Wayne, she felt free of him, almost dispassionate. She didn’t care whether Frank had another drink or not—she was going to divorce him anyway. As she settled into this new clarity, Duke touched her arm and asked for her order.
“I’ll have a coffee.”
Duke winked at the waitress. “Give her a little less whiskey than mine.”
Lillian’s voice rose in protest, but she found that she didn’t have the heart to contradict him.
Danny turned his attention from his father to his mother. Lillian smiled and tried to project the thought that they would leave soon.
Duke, maybe realizing he was the only glue this party had, began to speak. Lillian imagined he was picking up some conversation from last night, but last night seemed further away than any other night of her life.
“The only good memory I have of Manhattan was getting drunk there with a bartender on the West Side. I just wandered off one night and I found this guy and we talked until the next morning. My heart was broken over some thing that I don’t remember now, but I remember thinking, No one knows where I am, in the whole world, no one knows where I am but this goddamn bartender. Well, that was about as good as it ever got. Every other fucking time I was there, I hated it. It’s such a nasty city. The whole deal there is about making everyone else feel stupid.”
“What year was that?” Lillian asked.
“With the bartender? That must have been ’57 or ’58.”
Lillian leaned back. The drinks arrived. Frank had ordered another scotch, and she was happy not to care anymore. Her own Irish coffee looked too hot to touch.
“Frank and I were broken up for a while,” Lillian said. “That was about the time I went to Bermuda with a bunch of my girlfriends.”
“I wish I could remember the name of the bar,” Wayne said. “Sometimes I think I’d like to give that guy a call or send him a picture or something. If he’s still alive.”
“What neighborhood was it in?” Frank asked, clearing his throat.
“Hell, I don’t know neighborhoods in New York. It was near Broadway on the West Side.”
“Hell’s Kitchen?” Jimmy offered hopefully. “Maybe it was Hell’s Kitchen?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne said. “That could be right.” Duke took a sip of his Irish coffee, which seemed to give everyone else permission to take sips from their own drinks. Frank picked up his scotch and then put it down again. He seemed sad and uncertain. His son watched him and seemed to sadden, too, although Danny did take a sip from his Shirley Temple after freeing the cherry from its stem and carefully eating it.
“Hell’s Kitchen,” Phil said absently. “What a scary name.”
“Irish, it’s all Irish,” Jimmy added. He looked to Barbara, Lillian thought, rather than to Wayne. “It’s all Irish there.”
For a while, everyone just drank their drinks and watched John Wayne. Danny finished first, and as though this gave him some new freedom, he smiled around the table at everyone, forcing everyone to smile back at him. Everyone could feel that the party was over, but Danny and John Wayne were the first to recognize it. Wayne stood up from the table, pushing himself off Lillian’s chair and then holding her by the shoulder. She turned to watch his hand. It was puffy with age, but still gracefully formed. He was holding her, but he was also leaning on her.
“And now I really ought to return those goddamn Christmas presents.”
Among the rest of the party, only Frank stood with him. “All right,” Frank announced. “Thanks for having a drink with us, Duke.”
“Well, thanks for bringing my car back, Frank.” Lillian thought she heard mockery in Duke’s tone. Her husband and Wayne faced each other awkwardly, neither of them quite able to get to the next thing in their lives until Lillian realized what the problem was.
“The keys, Frank.”
Quickly, Frank brought up the keys and handed them to Duke. Duke touched his forehead and nodded to the table before he walked out of the restaurant.
Lillian could feel the vacuum left by Duke’s departure, and it made her sad to be so suddenly back in ordinary reality. Everyone at the table seemed empty. Unspectacular drunkenness and drug addiction were showing in Frank’s and Jimmy’s eyes. Barbara and Phil were completely bewildered by their part in this drama. Danny stared at his mother.
“It’s time to go home,” Lillian said.
The waitress appeared beside her. “Mr. Wayne has taken care of it. You don’t owe me anything.” She spoke with small enthusiasm, as though she’d absorbed the malaise of the table.
Everyone started to leave but Frank, who seemed to be taking inventory of the scotch left in his glass. Lillian realized that he hadn’t yet touched it, but the story wasn’t over. As long as Duke sat with them, Frank’s life had coherence. But now Frank was about to leave the restaurant for a life he could do nothing to prevent.
Danny, maybe knowing all that Lillian knew, offered him the courage to get home. “Come on, Dad, let’s go.” Lillian couldn’t guess whether it was generosity or irritation on Danny’s part, but it seemed to do the trick. Frank walked away from the last drink of the morning.
As they left the restaurant together, Frank seemed bolder as a result of his self-denial. He walked beside his wife, and when she opened her car door, he stood right behind her and placed his hand on the roof.
“What are you doing?” Lillian asked.
“I think we should drive home together,” Frank said.
“Leave me alone.”
Danny appeared at the passenger door, testing the handle, but not opening.
“We need to talk,” Frank said.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” Leaving the car and Danny behind her, Lillian faced her husband. For the first time that day, she let him look at her. She didn’t back away. She didn’t slouch. She couldn’t hide from herself anymore the thought that had been behind everything all day long—she wished he were dead. Everything would be so much simpler if Frank were just dead.
She almost smiled at the simplicity of the thought that came to her next: she couldn’t afford to feel that way about her husband. A woman who could feel that way about her husband was the wrong kind of woman—a tremendously unfortunate human being. She wouldn’t stand for it a minute longer.
“Get a lawyer, Frank. I don’t ever want to talk to you again.”
Danny opened the passenger door, and he sat down in the seat meant for his father. Frank bent down and watched him through the window. Danny looked back with a kind of sullen victory. He was tired, Lillian could see, and he couldn’t bear to help his father anymore.
Frank walked away, and Lillian started her car without watching him leave. As she turned onto Pacific Coast Highway and drove past the marine supply stores and restaurants and bars and beach clubs, she imagined herself a powerful woman who had just finished taking control of her life.
“Are you really going to get divorced?” Danny asked.
As she looked over at him, she remarked to herself for the thousandth time what a strange child he was. He watched her now with as much intensity as he had watched his father earlier.
“Yes,” she said. “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“You have to.”
“Thanks for understanding that, sweetheart. Your father’s going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”
Danny had a large sharp head and dark serious eyes. He watched his parents as though his life depended on the outcome of their marriage. She was certain that her inability and fear had hurt him—maybe even before he was born—but she couldn’t think about that today. She had too much to do. She made a mental shopping list of what would be required of her over the next few weeks—a meeting with a lawyer, a talk with her children, a restraining order—but none of it seemed so insurmountable as it had a few hours earlier.
“Are you going to start working again?” Danny asked.
“As long as you’ve been alive, I’ve never worked for anyone but your father, but I’ve always worked.”
“You know what I mean. You’re going to be finished with school soon. I was just wondering.”
“I was thinking about teaching.”
“That’s a good idea, but don’t teach at my school.”
“No, I don’t think I want to teach at your school, honey.”
She turned left at the intersection of Coast Highway and Jamboree. The haze was starting to burn off the beach towns, and she was no longer afraid of the coast, now that she was leaving it. The hills near Fashion Island were richly green, like the hills of some other country.
They just drove for a while without talking. Danny seemed more comfortable than he’d been all morning. He’d resisted her since the day he was born, but sometimes he resisted her less. She wondered what he’d be like if he’d had a different father. She tried to imagine him as Michael’s son, and then John Wayne’s, and then Phil’s. She imagined him as a Jew, the son of a movie star, a quiet boy growing up in Lompoc. Each time, she had to deprive Danny of his essential quality, the quality she didn’t think he could live without—his vast sadness.
“What do you think of John Wayne?” Lillian asked.
“Not too much.”
“You’re not impressed with such a big movie star?”
“He’s an old man. He drinks as much as Dad does.”
“I can just tell.”
When she reached the end of Milford Road, her driveway and curb were thick with cars. She wanted to reach out her hand and swat them all away. She had imagined she was returning to her own home, but this thickness of vehicles proved that Frank still considered it his home, too. As she parked across the street in front of Mary Beth’s house and counted them—her husband’s pickup, her husband’s Buick, Jimmy’s antique Cadillac, Phil and Arlene’s absurd camper—she realized that she couldn’t go inside. She couldn’t stomach another moment of any of them. Danny was once again staring at her, his face disorganized by anxiety.
“I’m going to take a little drive,” Lillian said. “You go into the house and tell everybody I’ll be back later.” As she said it, she didn’t know if it was true.
“We just took a little drive,” Danny said. “I want to come with you.”
“Listen, nothing bad’s going to happen except everything bad that’s already happened. You’ve been a great friend to me today, but now I need to be alone.” She wondered how honest she could afford to be. “I just can’t stand the thought of talking with any of them right now. Do you understand that?”
“I don’t want to talk with any of them, either.”
“But, sweetheart, you’ll be the only sane man I’ll know in that house, and I’m going to need a sane man in that house.”
“I’m not a man. I’m a boy.”
“Don’t be smartass. You know what I mean.”
And it seemed he did know what she meant. But what she meant was nothing like what she was saying. What she meant was: I need everyone in one place so that I can get away from you all. She smiled with great care and kissed him on the cheek. He slowly removed himself from the car and walked across the street while she watched him.
She turned left on Tustin Avenue and tried to avoid the whole issue of the freeway. After a few miles of pushing through the small businesses and shopping centers that clotted along the road, she realized she was driving in a familiar direction, toward Tustin, where Frank’s office and shop were. The truth was she had nowhere else to go and Frank would never think to look for her there.
It was as she drove toward the lumberyard where Frank rented a building that she first imagined she might never see her children again. She dismissed the thought, but the flavor of her thinking had been changed. In her thoughts, she was moving toward the kind of hell her mother had promised her, a place for people who embraced their desires rather than their duties.
And so, by the time she sat down at the first desk in the front room of the office—her desk—she was compulsively thinking about Michael Grau. As the dusty chair squeaked beneath her, she had to admit that her memories of him were hard to grasp. The two years before she met Frank were years of hope and desolation. They were the years in which she’d gone to college and then decided to quit college. They were also the years when it became clear that she would have to marry a Catholic or give up any hope of her mother’s love. Consequently, what she remembered was garbled by self-justification and hatred. Some things she couldn’t remember at all. What was it like when she started Hunter College? She didn’t know. What was it like when she decided to quit Hunter College? She didn’t know that, either. She’d noticed this effect before. At certain milestones in her children’s development, for example, she had tried to remember herself at that age and discovered that where once there might have been a memory, now there was only imagination.
But Michael was her lost life come alive. She danced her fingers across the adding machine and sat up straight in the old office chair. His face was at the center of a vacuum that was the most important years of her life. His face was at the center of a decision she hadn’t yet made.
What did she remember? He talked a lot about the cars he would one day have, she remembered that. He seemed to know everything there was to know about the French Foreign Legion. He always stood up from the table when Lillian introduced one of her girlfriends, and he dressed much better than his income. She also remembered that when he kissed her, she couldn’t tell where his mouth ended and hers began. Kissing him was like finding her home, unexpectedly, just around a corner, in a city she’d never been to before.
She arrived at her desire just as a compressor on the far end of the building erupted into rhythm. Her fingers abandoned the adding machine and touched the telephone.
She got his number from the operator. He picked up on the third ring and spoke his last name clearly.
“It’s Lillian Barden.”
He waited for a moment before responding. “I liked Hedendal better. Not that Barden’s a bad name, it just doesn’t sound right.”
“I never liked Hedendal,” Lillian admitted. “It never sounded like a real person’s name.”
Lillian considered the decoration in her husband’s office. There were framed drawings of houses he’d built, one of them the house he’d built for her. There was a framed photograph of John Wayne on the wall beside the file cabinets. A light dust covered everything, a gift from the cabinet shop next door.
“What was I like when I was Lillian Hedendal?” she asked. She tried to give her tone a lightness that she didn’t feel.
“You were a tall, skinny girl with the energy of five tall, skinny girls.”
Lillian’s stomach shrank. She could feel the way he’d kissed her and it was like remembering a time when she’d lived in someone else’s body. She looked around the office for some detail that might bring her back. Beneath the air conditioner on a small wooden table stood the ceramic priest they’d bought in Tijuana the year Chris was born. Everything was quiet except for the humming of the compressor in the background.
“You still don’t remember me?” Michael asked.
“Not very well.”
Lillian wanted to hang up the phone, but it seemed too late for that. If she hung up now, she’d only call back later, and that would be one more humiliation in a day full of humiliations.
“Then I’m wondering why you called me?”
“I don’t know,” Lillian said. “I remember dating somebody like you.”
She was beginning to feel dusty sitting in this chair. She could feel the dust settling into her skin.
“Who do you think I am, then?” Michael asked.
She stared at the door to the cabinet shop, the source of all that dust.
“I know who I am,” Michael said. “I’m the ghost of every bad decision you’ve ever made.”
“You’re a smart boy, aren’t you?”
All of Frank’s tools were waiting there in the darkness of the cabinet shop. The compressor was only one thing that might waken into frightening life. There were jigsaws and sanders and routers and planers and so many other things to fear.
She leaned back and closed her eyes. The chair squealed like something dying. She could see Michael’s face. He was handsome, but empty of the kind of sacrifice Lillian had made. Children, even when you were abandoning them, left marks all over you. Michael’s face was radiant with good health. He had always slept enough. He had always been admired by his friends. His eyes were dark, but unconscious of real darkness.
She started to speak, but then she didn’t speak. Again, Michael spoke for her.
“It sounds like you’re having a rough time.”
Lillian laughed. The compressor stopped pumping, and the silence that resulted was louder than the noise.
“I’m not looking for anything in particular here,” Michael continued. “But I think you’re better than any of the trouble he’s been giving you. Maybe it’s time to get out.”
“I have kids.”
“That’s just an excuse.”
“Did you want to marry me?” Lillian asked. “I mean, before.”
“I might have.”
“Why didn’t I let you?”
“Because I was Jewish, probably. What do you think?”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“I apologize, but from my perspective, it feels like no time has passed at all. Last night, you looked like the same girl I dated from Hunter College.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“Oh, it’s a compliment, Lillian. Don’t worry about it. It’s a compliment.”
“You’re mad?”
“Hey, I don’t look for this kind of trouble in my life, but when it comes, I’d rather deal with it. Just tell me why you called me. That should help.”
Suddenly, she remembered it all. In her mind’s eye, she saw a moment fifteen years earlier when a boy—and that boy was Michael—had pleaded with her to change her mind. Michael wasn’t pleading with her now, but his request came from the same distant source—a nervous desire that she do the right thing. Then, as now, she was appalled by how much power he thought she had. Then, as now, the idea that she could reject him made her feel strong and free and terrified.
As she stood from the chair, a part of her was three thousand miles and fifteen years away from this shitty little side building at the end of the Mullen Lumber parking lot. She was watching Michael’s face near an ice skating rink in Manhattan, and she was deciding why she didn’t want to see him anymore.
She had felt compelled to throw him away because she didn’t know how she would live if she kept him. She didn’t know how she could become the wife of a Jew any more than she knew how she could become the wife of a man who spoke so earnestly with her about all that she was interested in. Michael had taken her to jazz clubs and foreign films and restaurants without liquor licenses. He listened carefully to what she said, and he knew why that was important. He was beautiful, and kissing him made her wet between the legs. There was nothing she could do but turn him away. It must have been shortly after that when she quit college.
Standing in the middle of Barden Construction Company, feeling the thick dust settle into her skin, she was aware of herself as the same woman who had thrown away Michael, who had quit college, who had been enthusiastic to do both.
“You don’t know what you want to do next,” Michael said. “I can tell.”
“You’re a mind reader now?”
“No, I’m just a man who wants your attention and can tell when he’s not getting it.”
It was thrilling to remember. She’d had a childhood of screaming mothers, and poor baskets, and no room for herself, and no father, and maybe Michael had been present for the only moment in her younger life when she could have turned her direction.
“I have to go now,” Lillian said.
Lillian could imagine the arguments he might make. She could make them herself. But Michael didn’t say anything.
“I’m going now,” Lillian said.
“This is almost as abrupt as it was the last time,” Michael said.
“There wasn’t any last time,” Lillian said. “You dreamed that up.”
It was late afternoon. The sky was immense and startling. The trees, which had been planted only a few years before, poked up at it.
Her driveway was empty. Frank’s truck was parked on the street, and she guessed that the Buick must be in the garage. Jimmy’s Cadillac was parked thoughtfully in front of Mary Beth’s house. Lillian paused beside Phil and Arlene’s camper, feeling protected for one last moment before she turned into her driveway. The day had become warm and she imagined them all on the patio, admiring Frank’s latest project.
She turned in front of the barrier that separated Milford Road from the new development, and she parked on the left side of the driveway, knowing that the Buick would be on the right side of the garage. She had never disliked her own house so much. The concrete, which she had watched Frank pour; the grass, which she had chosen herself; even the high-quality shake shingles on the roof—all of it seemed obscene. As she turned off the ignition and set the parking brake, she tried to imagine herself a much braver woman than she had shown herself to be.
Frank was already at the door when she walked around the garage toward the house. Because he was sober, he was bruised and incapacitated. She had spent six months of her twenty-second year studying his face and wondering if he could be trusted to provide a life for her. Now she saw what she might have seen then: the eyes of a child, not a man who would learn anything from his pain, but a child who was bound to be overwhelmed by it. What had happened to him that he could afford to be so terrified of his life?
As she approached the door, Frank backed away from it.
“Chris is asleep, and the kids are playing in the backyard,” he said.
“Where’s Arlene and Phil?”
“They’re out on the patio with my brother and …”
“Barbara.”
She walked past him into the living room, where the curtains were drawn and the Christmas tree glowed with annoying cheerfulness in the far corner. Her daughter insisted that it be left on all the time during the holiday season. Lillian sat down on the couch near the fireplace. For a moment uncertain, Frank chose the recliner on the other side of the room. Once sitting, he looked as though he regretted the choice. Lillian could feel his tremendous awkwardness, like a pain in his groin, and she wished she had more of this pain to give.
“Where’d you go?” Frank asked.
“None of your goddamn business.”
In the dim light, she saw a cardboard box beside the fireplace, looking like a dreary unwrapped Christmas present. She wanted to ask Frank what it was, but she didn’t want to hear his answer, so she stood up from the couch and walked to the fireplace. In block letters not at all like her own, the box was labeled JOHN WAYNE MEM.
“What the hell does ‘MEM’ mean?” she asked.
“Memorabilia,” Frank said. “I wasn’t sure how to spell it, and you weren’t around to ask.”
“Is that what you did while I was gone?”
“Arlene fixed lunch, and then she put Chris down to sleep. I was showing some stuff to Phil and Jimmy, and afterwards I thought I should give it all one home. I took one of the packing boxes from the garage.”
Frank had collected everything he could find of John Wayne in the house, and then put it all into this box beside the fireplace. He was more of a child than she knew. She pulled on the top flap of the box and turned it over onto the living room floor. Mostly paper and trinkets, the contents spilled like liquid onto the carpet, spreading nearly three feet into the room. She watched Frank as his body stiffened. She wished he had the courage to beat her for what she was about to do to him.
What covered the floor was unknowable at first. The living room was too murky to see much. Lillian bent over and grabbed a handful to bring back to the couch with her. Sitting down, she switched on the lamp beside her. The new light startled Frank’s face into clarity.
The first was a picture of John Wayne with his youngest son, Ethan, who was about Alice’s age. Duke was wearing the eyepatch from True Grit. His son wore one, too. Wayne was looking toward the sky and seemed to forget about his son beside him. His son was also looking toward the sky. Lillian thought it was a picture about distance and loss and the inability to love well. At the moment the photo was taken, Duke must have been very tired.
Lillian shuffled the picture back into the pile. Behind it was a Polaroid of her son Danny standing in the backyard holding a rifle that was a foot taller than he was. She held that picture up. Frank leaned forward.
“It’s a Revolutionary War rifle we brought home one afternoon to show Danny. I don’t know where you were that day.”
She tossed the rest of the pictures aside, but set the Polaroid of Danny on the end table beside the couch. She returned to the pile of papers on the floor and spread them even farther into the room. From underneath another True Grit publicity shot, she extracted a Zippo lighter bearing the inscription SPECIAL FORCES, DA NANG. IT’S A GOOD DAY TO DIE. She threw it at Frank, who awkwardly caught it between his forearm and chest. He inspected it.
“It’s from The Green Berets,” he said. “Someone must have given it to Duke when he was over there filming. Duke gave it to me.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know.”
Lillian abandoned the contents of the JOHN WAYNE MEM box and returned to the couch, where she looked one more time at the photo of her son. The picture had been taken sideways so that the length of the gun would be even more dramatic.
“You want to go outside, on the patio?” Frank asked.
She was so tired of him. As she began to cry, the Christmas tree sparkled and the whole room softened. She could hear her own breath as though it were being squeezed from her body.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Lillian said. She cleared her eyes with the back of her hand and stared past the Christmas tree into the dining room, where her youngest son was standing inexpertly, mesmerized by the light.
“Oh, sweetheart!” Lillian hurried toward him. “How did you get so far into the house by yourself?”
Christopher smiled, stunned by the sudden attention but eager to shift his focus from the tree to his mother. He lifted his arms as though he would condescend to fly toward her, and she picked him up as though he were the sweetest package she would ever lift. Christopher squealed and shouted and tried to make sentences from his unexpected happiness as Lillian carried him back to the couch. Surveying the festive room over his mother’s shoulder, he locked gazes with his father, who was cajoled into a smile.
“He’s the happiest child,” Lillian said to someone, but probably not to Frank. “Of the three of them, he’s the happiest. He loves Christmas even more than Alice. Don’t you, sweetheart?”
Frank stared at the back of his son’s head. He knew when to keep his mouth shut.
“He really pulls the other two together,” Lillian continued. “The only time they work with each other anymore is when they’re trying to make him laugh.”
She lifted Christopher and swung him from his shoulders. He held his breath for a moment before he was certain she would not throw him across the room, and then he smiled in a way that would have been horrible for anyone but a child. Frank sat forward in his chair.
Alice and Danny appeared beside each other where the living room met the hallway. Alice was holding a book in her right hand, but Danny’s hands were empty. Lillian smiled at them and set Chris down beside her.
“Look at my two sweethearts,” Lillian said. “Why aren’t you over here with your mother?”
The children stepped down into the sunken living room and cautiously approached her. Lillian felt very old, but still miraculously adequate to their grief.
“Did you have a good day?” Lillian asked.
Alice smiled as though she knew what the question really meant, and Danny just stared.
Alice said, “Arlene helped me draw pictures of the people in the neighborhood, and then she said that her pictures weren’t as good as mine.”
“Will you show me later?”
“Okay.”
“And what did you do this afternoon, Danny?”
Danny looked past her and his face tightened. He was starting to look like his father, but he was still soft and skinny, like Lillian herself. She could tell that she had betrayed him, but she wasn’t sure which way her betrayal cut. Was he angry because she had left or angry because she had returned?
“I helped Dad in the garage. We got some of that John Wayne stuff together.”
“Can we open some Christmas presents tonight?” Alice asked. “While Arlene and Phil are still here.”
The wrapped boxes in front of the tree were just tokens, but Alice didn’t know that. Lillian would wrap the real presents much closer to Christmas. She took a lot of care with Christmas—although Frank often spoiled it—because it was her job, as deeply and importantly as anything had ever been her job. Was it her job to let Frank fuck her? No. Was it her job to be humiliated in front of famous men and women? No. But it was her job to design and execute a Christmas that not one of her children would be dissatisfied with.
Two hours earlier, she’d had a moment when she could have walked away from all of it. But now that moment had passed. What had happened here while she was gone? What was the important thing she had missed? Why was she here again, in the middle of a marriage she hated and children she couldn’t possibly love well enough?
Frank watched her carefully. He knew she was somewhere else, but he was afraid to ask where. The children were disturbed by her sudden silence and they kept silent themselves.
After she had hung up on Michael, she stood for a long time staring at the walls of Frank’s office. They were paneled with dark wood veneer, and they made her feel safe from a world of other people. She thought about everything that had happened that day, which became everything that had happened in the last ten years. The dark walls told stories about leaving New York, about long, painful births, about working late into the night as a small construction company began to grow. From the doorway of her husband’s office, she watched First Street and wondered if she would ever have the courage to drive away.
That was probably the moment, she realized now, when the box came out and John Wayne was assembled in her living room. As she sat between her husband and her children, Lillian’s imagination of that moment took on the clarity of a vision, like the first time she saw Manhattan, like Bernadette seeing the Blessed Virgin, like seeing her babies’ eyes opened up after her own huge pain. As clearly as she could see the Christmas tree sparkling across the room, she could see Danny emerging from the hallway with some treasure of Frank’s recent employment. No distance or device would have let her escape this scene. There were many things, she knew, that hadn’t been put into the box, larger or more dangerous objects that lived in careful corners of her house. In her vision, Frank was distributing posters and framed pictures and Green Beret cigarette lighters and commemorative handguns and big knives and even a box of cigars. The joy that these trivial objects brought to Lillian’s house was unexpected and almost miraculous, and she could see that it wasn’t the simple joy of small people who longed for a bigger, brighter world, but the complicated joy of brokenhearted people who desperately needed something between them, something more substantial than sandwiches and soda pop.
Frank was getting more concerned. He leaned forward in the recliner and threatened to stand. He wouldn’t abide her silence a moment longer. His arms tightened as the chair creaked and stuttered. His children stared at him, hoping that somehow he would help her.
Lillian cried as her imagination touched both Frank’s weakness and his strength. She cried because she knew he wanted to be a great man, had sacrificed a lot for his dreams, had worked hard to be as sturdy as he was. She cried, too, because he was such a piece of shit as a husband and a father. For all the moments like this one, when she could see his beauty and his strength, there were moments just afterward when she knew that he was incapable of satisfying anyone around him.
She knew what presents were in the back of John Wayne’s station wagon. They weren’t the irreplaceable treasures that she had imagined—they were the ordinary gifts that only Lillian Barden couldn’t afford. A good marriage was in one box, the good men she might have married in another. Happy vacations and pleasant Sunday afternoons and parties where wives could be proud of their husbands—all those gifts were there, too, wrapped boldly and scattered around the back of the station wagon like an afterthought. None of it would ever belong to her, though. Her husband was a drunk, and he would continue to steal from her life with his false bravery and ineffective strength. John Wayne himself was an illusion, and Frank Barden was even further from the truth than that. The world was small. And no one in it had much power over themselves.