Eighteen
“I’ll just get my degree and teach,” she said. “That will give us a good base income. We can still live up here. I can commute.”
He said, “I don’t care where we live, so long as we’re together.”
She was more marvelous than she knew.
“I’d like a little log cabin, in a meadow,” she said.
“Can do,” he said. But there were college towns he liked, too. Claremont, in the orange groves up against the mountains would do. Davis—the Sacramento Delta had some appeal. Even New York City, if they lived on Long Island, or the Jersey Shore. She wouldn’t have to take any old job. Or any job at all. He’d support her. That, frankly, was his dream. To give her all she wanted. To take on her well-being as his responsibility. He’d be honored. The economy was picking up. He’d find work. Cabinetry or, if worst came to worst, framing.
* * *
Tillie said, “That’s all very romantic and stirring, Cress, especially for you, given your stingy dad. But let’s be practical. You will have to work. Because by the time your guy’s paid his alimony and child support, there won’t be much left for the two of you.”
“I don’t care about all that,” Cress said. “Any of it.”
* * *
Sunday morning, Cress went with Donna to the Sparkville swap meet. In the dusty vacant lot across from Food King, she bought three big boxes of Limoges china, the pattern a simple rectilinear band in gold-on-white porcelain from the last century: platters, soup terrines, coffee and tea pots, plus place settings for twelve, all for sixty dollars—which was still the most she’d spent on any household item in her life. When she held a plate up to the sun, she could see the shadow of her fingers through the china. She imagined the gold rims drawing light on a long pine table within dark log walls. Once she hauled it back to Donna’s, the china seemed presumptuous, ill-timed, and she was too shy to show it to Quinn, who didn’t notice the boxes stacked atop all the other stuff in her room.
The next week, with Donna at the much larger Fresno swapper, a bearskin sprawled on the hood of a vendor’s Chevy pickup, a large old pale-snouted black bear backed in billiard-green felt. A persistent slice of sunlight had striped one thick paw; otherwise, the fur was thick and shiny, the snarling head intact, the glass eyes a rich brown, the teeth yellowed with varnish, the tongue a genital-pink plaster hump. He—Cress assumed so large a specimen was male—could not have been her former hungry visitor; this skin was clearly old—but it might have been her fellow’s grandpapa. She trembled, knowing she would buy it even before a price was named; this would be her engagement present to Quinn, handed over when he gave her a ring. (Engagement present! The very idea of an engagement present came to her at the exact moment she laid eyes on the bearskin—the term itself must have seeped up osmotically from the stacks of women’s magazines beneath her bed.) The skin, she knew, would make him laugh. It would go, of course, in front of their fireplace. Their hearth. The vendor asked for three hundred dollars and took her check for two. He folded the skin ceremoniously into a tight package, felt side out, which he wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with multiple loops of hairy twine. Cress and Donna carried it together, heaving it into the Saab’s trunk. On the drive back to Sawyer, remorse set in for gutting her bank account. “Don’t let me be so impulsive,” she told Donna. She left the bundle in the Saab’s trunk, pending its presentation.
That was the fourth Sunday in May. Annette was graduating on Wednesday.
* * *
Beech Creek Country Club counted nine graduating seniors among its member families. The party was set up for a hundred. Tri-tip roasts were grilled on a big drum barbecue wheeled to the ninth hole. Bartenders poured unlimited soft drinks, which the kids fortified in the parking lot. After dinner and a short ceremony, a local rock band launched into “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and the dance floor filled.
Cress watched this, as she did all such celebrations of provincial life, with a mixture of wonder and contempt. Her own high-school graduation had been marked by a long, boring commencement at the Rose Bowl—her mother left to finish dinner before Cress’s name was called—and that night a lady’s Timex in its clear plastic case appeared beside her place mat. The thin brushed-gold band was designed for another kind of girl, the sedate, pretty, jewelry-wearing daughter Sylvia Hartley would have preferred. The tiny watch face with its speck-like numerals was virtually unreadable. Cress feigned pleasure for the gift and never wore it. She noticed the watch was missing her sophomore year, no doubt stolen from her dorm room still twist-tied in its original packaging.
Dalia came up beside her by the dance floor. “See that big kid with the butch cut?” She nodded to a likely linebacker, a pale, thick teen clearly raised on tube biscuits and grease gravy.
“Good dancer,” Cress said, for despite his bulk and self-satisfied smirk, the boy moved nimbly, even delicately.
“See her?” prodded Dalia. His partner was a buoyant, curly-maned girl who pranced and swiveled in patent-leather kitten heels. She made little come-hither motions with her hands, then scram-scram ones; she tossed her masses of hair and tottered away, only to mince backward and collapse laughing in her partner’s arms.
“Cute,” Cress said.
“That’s your girl.”
“Mine?” Then a comic sternness in the girl’s brow recalled a broader, manlier brow, and the bright mischief in her eyes was altogether familiar. Annette. And Cress began to love.
* * *
“I told her,” Quinn said in a low rasp.
Clutching the extension at the end of its spiraling cord in the dim hallway outside of her bedroom, Cress sat on the carpet. “Where are you now?”
“My mom’s. I’ve moved out. We’re getting divorced.”
“You okay?”
“Not so much.”
“You want me to come up? You want to come down?”
“You’re sweet. I can’t right now.”
Cress said, “Sylvia took it hard.”
“No idea it was coming.” Sylvia knew he’d been unhappy, he said. But not that unhappy. And not unhappy with her.
“You didn’t tell her about me.”
“It’s not about you.”
“Good,” she said.
It was weird, he said. He’d been so mad at Sylvia for so long, about so much, but now that he’d finally had it out with her, he couldn’t recall what had made him so furious. He had some weird kind of amnesia. Or he was in shock.
(He shouldn’t be telling me this, Cress thought. But she didn’t stop him. She needed to hear whatever he might say in order to gauge her own position and relative safety.) He knew he wanted out of the marriage; he’d wanted out for months. Years, honestly. But he couldn’t remember why. He was exhausted. His mind and emotions had shut down.
He didn’t remember that Sylvia bored him? That she’d failed to console him after his father’s terrible death? That twenty years of anxiety and timidity had worn him down until his last tie to her was pity, and even that pity had lost its grip, like old glue that dried and flaked away? Cress would not remind him, of course. It was not her place to remind him.
He didn’t seem to remember that he loved her, either.
“I need a few days,” he said. “To take it all in.”
“Yes, yes.” Cress got to her feet. “Of course you do. Take your time.”
“We’ll talk. When the coast clears a little.”
Cress beelined past the large fiancés lounging in the living room. Outside, by the Hapsaw, in the warm humid dusk, she shivered as if cold. A soiled white mist crept upstream. She was frightened to think that she’d caused pain—even if Quinn hadn’t named her. What if Sylvia did something drastic? Cress imagined her sprawled facedown on that shiny, baby-blue bedspread, dark curls fanned over a pillow.
Cress shuddered and looked around. The ever-trundling Hapsaw was a midsized roil of muddy water with suds along its banks. Crabgrass choked Donna’s lawn, and lawns up and down the riverbanks. Even the towering, white-armed sycamore appeared lopsided and ungainly, devoid of enchantment.
* * *
In the morning, he had to see her. It was urgent. He missed her. No, he didn’t need more time to think things through. He was sick of thinking. He needed to see her warm, wide-open face, feel her smooth long fingers on his skin, smell her hair, which always reminded him of sleeping in the grass in the sun. He should be suffering alone, he knew, yes, yes, in exile; spiraling down to some essential truth about himself and his marriage, but he just couldn’t bear to be away from her.
It was Saturday, and Cress was working the 320-person Franklin–Gillette wedding reception, whose setup started at noon; the meal, toasts, and dancing would last deep into evening; she probably couldn’t meet him till sometime after ten, and only then if Dalia let her off before the very end.
He’d been drinking when she got to the Staghorn. He looked ashen, walloped, ill. She nosed his neck; his hair felt damp and hot underneath, he’d bathed and perfumed himself for her. His body quaked as she held him. “Nobody is making you do this,” she whispered. “You don’t have to go through with it. I’ll be fine no matter what.” She meant to soothe, to remove pressure; never mind if, for the moment, she exaggerated her own emotional capacities.
They hurried to Donna’s house, to the tiny close gray room where they could speak only in the lowest whispers. He yanked her clothes off, gasping and determined, and they made love in desperate silence. Yes, it was as always, their great comfort and relief. His color returned, he stroked her face, looked long into her eyes. On the other side of the thin wall, Norma and Ike debated between prime rib and baron of beef for their wedding dinner. Surf and turf—excitement amplified Norma’s voice—was only a dollar twenty more per person. See? On the list? Murmuring, and then, “No, Ike, we need the cobbler. Wedding cake doesn’t count as dessert.”
* * *
In the morning Cress was carrying two cups of coffee down the hall when Norma emerged from her room in her white terry-cloth robe. “Morning,” Cress said softly. The robe brushed past, flattening Cress against the wall. Coffee slopped on her bare foot.
She and Quinn huddled in bed with their mugs, gazing at the blank white closet doors. “I’ll talk to Annette this week,” he said. “She’ll know, of course. She’s home with her mom. I really want her to meet you. Down the line.”
“In due time,” Cress said.
“Evan will be the hardest,” said Quinn. “I’ll have to be very careful how I tell him so he doesn’t take it on himself.”
She touched his hip under the covers. They both felt ill, feverish, here, mid-gauntlet, the numinous months on the mountain behind them, the future a blur. They were together right now, in bed, naked, the coffee strong and delicious: weren’t these the very components of their previous bliss? Would these elements ever again coalesce into happiness?
* * *
Cress was grateful, later, for the mindless setting up and taking down of banquets. The waitresses unfolded heavy pipe-legged tables, arranged, clothed, and set them; they hauled out the parquet dance floor in plywood-sized pieces. Because Cress had a “good eye,” Dalia assigned her boxing and skirting duties, which meant she created virginal, linen-wrapped head tables, gift tables, tables for the cake, for champagne-glass pyramids.
A few weeks of weddings had made the waitresses into experts and brutal, mocking critics. “Not another mauve-and-ice-blue color scheme!” one of them would cry across the hall as they set up. “Not another peach wedding!”
“Should I ever marry again, my color scheme will be plaid,” declared one waitress. Lisette, the head waitress, claimed polka dots; another waitress gingham. Cress said, “Maybe I’ll have a striped wedding—or make that a leather wedding— No! no! not black leather, you pervs. More like a tanned-hide wedding … Oh shut up, everyone!” They uniformly disdained dyed carnations and any silk flowers; Cress alone defended a red rose, pine bough, and pinecone centerpiece. They were ruthless on wedding dresses and anything-but-black on groomsmen. “More powder-blue poufters!” a waitress sang into the break room to announce the arrival of yet another wedding party.
* * *
Cress drove home at midnight, her shift drink sweating between her knees in a waxy, twenty-ounce to-go cup. When she awoke, her tiny room was humid and cloyed with the evaporate of undrunk bourbon.
Between her lunch and evening shifts, Cress sat in the sun in Donna’s backyard. The river had clarified and darkened; the low tones in its juicy passage resonated with the ache in her chest. She’d given up on the semi-porn novel. Her mind clicked and calculated. She was not a cost-effective choice for Quinn. He’d lose daily access to his children, the house in town, not to mention a wife’s beauty and faultless housekeeping. And for what? A broad-faced, homeless All-but-Disser with a bank account in the mid–three figures? (Four hundred and twenty-eight dollars to be exact, thanks to her swap-meet splurges.) Also, Quinn knew she’d lived with boyfriends; he knew—in the vaguest way—that she’d dated Jakey. Having had Sylvia exclusively to himself might mean more to him than he realized. His generation put a premium on that sort of thing, while hers considered virginity and, to some extent, the monogamous impulse itself, a liability.
* * *
He phoned her midday as she fed the lady golfers. Dalia let her take the call in her office, for privacy. Annette had been sweet, he said. She, too, had said, Whatever makes you happy, Daddy. Also, If you don’t love Mom anymore, you don’t love her—and I hope you find someone you do.
“I love you, Cress,” he said. “I wish this part was over.”
* * *
Sylvia was the hitch. Sylvia was why this part wasn’t over. Sylvia was suffering. He hadn’t been able to talk to her yet about the next steps: hiring lawyers, dividing accounts. She was weeping all the time, and calling in sick to work. Perhaps she was too timid and fragile to survive on her own.
“She managed well enough when Quinn was on the mountain,” Donna said. “And why would she want to stay married to him? If I was her, I’d wash my hands of him. Once guys start tomcatting, it’s a hard habit to break.”
Cress was grateful that Donna had reminded her: Sylvia had a job. She worked, she could support herself. She’d be fine. She’d get the house, and alimony. She’d remarry, too. Men liked her: a fox.
Then Annette announced that she would put off college for a year and stay at home to see her mother through this patch. For both of them to leave at once, Annette told Quinn, was too hard on her mom. No big deal, Annette said, really. She’d take classes at Sparkville Community College, get a job. Of course, Quinn forbade Annette to do this, although how he planned to prevent her—Annette was eighteen now and free to do as she pleased—he didn’t say. He was also proud, Cress could see, of his daughter’s generosity.
Cress did not want Sylvia to be miserable. But Sylvia should accept reality. Quinn was unhappy, and had been for years. Did Sylvia expect him to stay around just to keep her unhappiness at bay?
Cress worried, of course, that Sylvia might commit suicide. How had Quinn put it? The meanest thing a person can do to someone else.
* * *
Sylvia didn’t kill herself. On a tip, she asked her daughter’s pale, burly boyfriend to drive her to the Staghorn, where Quinn’s truck and Cress’s Saab mingled openly in the parking lot. The boyfriend peered inside, reported back. Sylvia directed him then to Corky Ned’s Liquor Stop by the lake, where, being too distraught to go inside, she sent him in for a flat pint of whiskey, which he purchased with his fake ID. Back at the Staghorn, they parked around on the side, passed the flat warm bottle, and waited. In half an hour, they caravanned unseen behind Quinn and Cress to Donna’s house. Sylvia was slipping out from under her seat belt by then, and so the boyfriend drove her home.
The next morning, Sylvia awoke and drove herself through woolly Thule fog, visibility thirty feet, the ten miles back to Donna’s house, where Quinn’s truck was still parked. She wasn’t surprised, she’d told Quinn. On some level, she’d known all along.
“I’m sorry. She had a real bad night,” Cress whispered into the phone at the Petrocchi–Evans reception. “I know you wanted to keep me out of it.”
“That’s because you are not the cause,” said Quinn. “Our marriage has been dead for a long time.”
“Does Sylvia agree that it’s dead?”
“She had no idea I felt that way. Which tells you how little she knows me. How little she noticed.”
Men, Cress knew, sometimes said that their marriage was dead when their wives lost interest in making love. Mustering her courage, she asked.
“No, no. That was always the one good thing between us,” Quinn said. “I never got tired of her that way.”
* * *
Cress had her lady golfers on Monday, and a small dinner for the Old Duffers, a seniors-only male golf club that night. By the time she walked into the Staghorn to meet Quinn, it was ten o’clock. She was the only woman in the room. Men, mostly older, clumped around the small wobbly tables, and a few more sat scattered along the bar. She took a stool at the far end, near the sink, where the bartender, who knew her now, could run interference should she need it. No, he said, Quinn had not been in yet. She ordered a beer and sipped it, and after ten minutes, she took out a scrap of paper and, to appear occupied, pretended to write a shopping list. Coffee, pork chops, razors, heroin, hanging rope. The bartender set down another beer even as she still had most of her first. “He says hello, is all,” he said, when she tried to refuse it. Her benefactor—white-haired, sixty-ish, handsome—saluted her with a finger to his curly eyebrow. She slid off her stool. Let Quinn find her at Donna’s; he could tap on her window or pitch a handful of gravel.
But he never did tap or pitch and it was her turn for a sleepless night. The streetlight cast its chilly violet glare through the thin curtain. She forbade herself to get back into the Saab. She wasn’t a person who drove all over in the middle of the night to spy on her boyfriend and his wife, even if an effort was required not to be that person; even if speeding down dark highways was far more alluring than tossing and turning in this airless clutterbox of a room.
In the morning, the phone rang, and Norma hit the receiver against her hollow-core door, three short, rude raps.
He was sorry. Sylvia had wanted to talk. She’d swapped shifts with another waitress and driven up to Noah Mountain. She stayed till midnight. He couldn’t phone Cress with Sylvia there, and it was too late after she left. They’d had to hash out everything. He owed her that much. Sylvia said if more attention was what he needed, she would love to provide it. In fact, she told him, she would do anything, anything he wanted, if he would come back home.
“And you said…,” said Cress.
“The time for doing is past. What’s done is done.”
Cress slid down the wall and sat on the gritty hall runner.
He needed to see her. What time was she getting off work?
They made a plan and, stupid from the one-two punch of terror and relief, Cress wandered into the kitchen for coffee. In the living room, Donna and Norma sat on the boxy old-fashioned maroon sofa. Cress lifted her cup in greeting. In her thick white bathrobe, her hair turbanned in a towel, Norma stood and steered herself out of the room. For days now, Cress realized, whenever she’d entered a room, Norma left it.
Donna patted the sculpted mohair. “Cress, come sit for a minute.”
Norma’s heat lingered on the cushion, and the air there smelled of crème rinse. “Until the wedding,” Donna said, “this is Norma’s home. You must see that it’s hard for her to have you and Quinn carrying on in the next room.”
Carrying on? “But we’re completely quiet! Never a peep.”
“What you two are doing goes against everything Norma and Ike are moving toward.”
“It’s got nothing to do with them!”
“And I don’t like it, either,” Donna said quietly.
“I thought you liked Quinn. You knew that he and I…”
“I knew Quinn had gone back home to his family.”
“I didn’t expect it to blow up like this. I never dreamed—”
“Please don’t bring him here anymore,” Donna said. “And this—you being here—isn’t working out, either. You can stay till June 14, which gives you time to find another place.”
A week! “You’re kicking me out? Why? What’d I do?”
“For one, I’d like you to stop wearing those black sneakers.”
“Oh! But I thought you didn’t…”
“I lent them to you for one hike. And you’ve been wearing them ever since. I’d also appreciate it if you stopped using my makeup and perfume. And I’d like you to replace that earring.”
Cress gaped at Donna. “What earring?” she said.
“The gold one that’s a jointed fish.”
“I never borrowed any of your earrings,” Cress said.
“Well, it’s missing, and since you help yourself to things that don’t belong to you, it’s logical to assume you had something to do with it.”
“A touch of lip gloss is hardly the same as stealing a gold earring.”
Donna set her cup down and frowned. “There’s a carelessness about you, Cress, and a blurriness about what’s yours and what’s not. That earring disappeared since you’ve been here…”
Cress did not know what to say. She’d assumed it was okay to wear the sneakers again. Given Donna’s vast inventory of stuff, who knew that she closely monitored drugstore lip gloss, musk oil, and secondhand shoes that didn’t fit her and she never wore? And yet, to hear Donna list her crimes, Cress had to admit: it did sound like thievery. Thievery and thoughtlessness.
“Ask Don if you can borrow his room here in town.” Donna’s tone softened. “He never uses it. But Norma deserves to feel comfortable in her own home.”
* * *
Rosellen, the day bartender at Beech Creek, was a humorless older woman with a gray beehive who’d been working there for more than twenty years. She motioned Cress up to the bar. “What’s your whole name, Cress?”
“Cressida. Cressida Hartley.”
“I thought so. Listen. I don’t want to scare you, but you should know. Some people in this town are not your friends.”
“Like who?”
“That little storefront church behind the market? My daughter goes to prayer circle there. She came home last night and said you were on the prayer list. They were trying to pray you out of town.”
* * *
Her mother phoned from the Meadows, and asked Cress to meet them for breakfast at the Sawyer Inn. The three of them took a booth in the log-lined dining room. What were her plans, they wanted to know. Was she done with the A-frame? Could they start renting it out? “We sure can use the revenue,” her father said. “After the bath we took from Rick Garsh.”
Go ahead, rent it, Cress told them. She could move her boxes over to the new house. At any rate, she’d be driving up in the next few days to get her summer clothes. She was thinking of going to Pasadena for a while.
Her parents exchanged glances and mutually decided not to press her. She guessed then that they’d made a vow not to mention the diss. Grateful, she wished she had something more to offer them—and she did, a wisp: “So you know, I’ve been seeing somebody. Uh—a man. We might be getting married.”
“Married?” her mother said. “May we ask this man’s name?”
“I can’t say yet. It might not happen.”
“Why can’t you say?”
“Can’t say.”
Her parents looked at each other. “Well, let us know when you can say,” her father said.
“It won’t be for at least a year. Probably a little longer than that.”
“Does this fellow know he’s marrying an heiress?” said her father.
“I’ll be sure to tell him, Dad.”
“Sam,” her mother said, “will you do me a favor and get me a couple of aspirin out of the car? They’re in the blue tote bag, behind the front seat.”
Her father, sixty-six years old, stood. “Anything else while I’m up?”
“Pay,” her mother said, and handed him the check on its little tray.
Her mother waited until he’d left the restaurant. “So let me guess,” she said. “He’s married, right?”
Cress dipped her head.
“The finish carpenter.”
“How did you know?”
“A little bird. Is he getting a divorce?”
“Supposedly.” Cress’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I’m not sure he can go through with it. She’s putting up a fight.”
“Oh, Cress.” Sylvia Hartley reached for her daughter’s arm and searched out her eyes. “I can’t believe this is happening. I vowed never to let anything like this happen to either of my daughters. It’s the worst pain. I know.”
She knew because something similar had happened to her, with her drama teacher at Penn, a man eighteen years her senior, who was married, with five children, a three-story house in Melrose Park, and tenure. They’d fallen in love her junior year during a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona—she’d played Julia—and that love hadn’t gone away or lessened over time. She’d had no choice but to stay on after graduating. He rented her a tiny furnished room downtown, where all she did was wait—for his visits, his phone calls, his divorce. At some point, his wife called her parents, who showed up, moved her out of the apartment, and shipped her across country to Aunt Shula in Hollywood.
Is that what happened? According to family myth, Cress’s mother moved to Hollywood to further her acting career. “Did you ever see him again?”
“After your grandfather spoke to him, he wouldn’t even answer my letters. It almost killed me. I suffered till I met your father, and even then … Your Quinn might have more courage. Does his wife know about you?”
“We tried to keep me out of it, but she spied on us. And now they’re having these long talks.”
“Some of the worst marriages have very deep roots,” her mother said gently. “For your sake, Cress, I hope he doesn’t pull it off. You don’t want stepkids. And you’ll never be shed of her, between the children and alimony.”
“I don’t care about all that,” said Cress.
“I do,” her mother said dryly. “I want so much more for you. But here. Before your father comes back.”
Sylvia Hartley rummaged in her blue leatherette handbag, pulled out a checkbook, and scribbled intently. “Go away,” she said, pushing the folded paper across the table. “Go see your sister. Take yourself out of the equation. It’s your only chance. Let them sort it out. If he’s serious, he’ll come after you. If he doesn’t, you’re well rid of him.”
Her father walked up, shaking a large bottle of aspirin. “Is the coast clear?”
“For God’s sake, Sam,” her mother said. “I only wanted a couple.”
They left the restaurant together. Her parents climbed into the Jeep and drove off. Cress unfolded the check. Five hundred dollars.
* * *
“If you leave me,” Quinn said, “I would still divorce her.”
“I’m not leaving you,” she said, now for the fourth or fifth time. She was just going out of town till the dust settled. How could Sylvia believe that Cress wasn’t a factor if Quinn was with her all the time?
Besides, Donna had evicted her. And those prayers nipped at her heels, she could feel them. All signs pointed out of town. She’d only be in Pasadena, a hundred and sixty miles away. They’d talk every night. He could visit anytime. Once the coast was clear, she’d come back. He need only say the word.
She didn’t mention London; London was her contingency plan.
“I don’t know if I can bear your not being here,” he said.
“We could always move to the A-frame,” said Cress. “Nobody’s rented it yet.”
His face brightened, then he shook his head. That would only inflame the situation. No sense rushing into anything, when reason and gentleness might prevail. So. Hmm. Maybe her leaving town for a bit was a good idea.
* * *
“Tell Quinn to settle things with his wife in the next few days,” Dalia said. “June is crazy busy, and if you leave now, I just don’t know how I’ll manage.”