8
OVER THE YEARS, I OFTEN ADVISED GUY THAT WALLOWING never did anybody any good, but I admit that stewing in various uncharitable thoughts improved my mood at that moment, despite Mia’s indisputable care. A full-length mirror hung next to the closet, and I avoided my reflection, at which I could not bear to risk a cursory glance. Did my skin really need collagen-infused broth? If I were expected not only to attend an artistic dinner party, but additionally to produce conversation, I could not examine it closely now. I began to rummage as instructed. After pawing tentatively at a selection of gossamer dresses and feather-light sweaters, I gave up and lay down, still naked, across the bed. Who had undressed me, I wondered. Still I don’t know. And my box of Classics . . . my friends, my Aeschylus and Sophocles with a decade of penciled notes. A wave of laugher crested in the other room. Were they laughing at me? I recalled the hook of the wave about to engulf the stick figure from the pamphlet I’d collected on our honeymoon.
In my hungry, shaken state, I now see that this momentary fit of self-consciousness was childish, but Guy had a habit of sharing our intimacies when trying to impress others. He said that divulging our jokes and memories made him feel more connected to me, but I felt exposed. The sanctuary of our secret life cracked open. I could hear his voice, louder than the others, and concentrated a bit harder to catch hold of whatever private anecdote he might be sharing. I heard only further compliments about the house and Mia and Manny’s generosity.
Their house was especially lovely at night by all the candlelight, I cannot deny. Mia makes her own beeswax candles, and you really can tell a difference in the warmth of their glow, as if the air were made of that belly-to-throat glimmer of falling in love. The candlelight flickering in shades of honey dipped under the door, jumping as if to merge with the light of the candles by the bed. I sat up and decided that I didn’t care about how I looked. I did, of course, but I wanted nothing of Mia’s. I left her clothes where they were. Dressing in my things, dirty and well-traveled jeans and college sweatshirt, I walked down the hall barefoot.
“Darling.” Mia’s purr of concern overflowed in my direction as I entered the main room, and she practically floated from the cluster of women sitting around the kitchen island. “Nothing fit?”
“You have a lovely home,” I said, looking around. “As beautiful as Bellinas.”
Their friends, the three attractive artist couples, the members of the Bohemian Club, exuded calm, infuriating concern for my health while they picked at skinned almonds and slices of gritty seed bread on a wooden cutting board. The men gathered around a wood-burning stove that stood in the room’s center. An arrangement of blankets and wooden toys held a handful of milk-blond dozing babies. Not once in my time here, nearing three months, did I hear one of their children cry or fuss. I didn’t notice then, but their eyes were all blue. Each was so disquietingly fair and catalogue-perfect, they could have been interchangeable. Like their mothers, I suppose. All the residents looked the same, just as every day was the same.
Every now and then, one of the women moved from the island in the open kitchen to offer, in smiling silence, snacks to the men or to remove a sated baby from her breast to the blanketed children’s nook. Pyramids of nuts and warm olives glistened in the candlelight, another loaf of the so-called life bread—a barely heated brick of seeds and what I could swear tasted of rye flour, despite their gluten aversion. It always smelled slightly of mold, but they sold it proudly in linen bags printed with a portrait of blue-eyed Father M.
“It’s nothing,” she said in answer to Guy’s compliments about her creations. She’d cast her pottery in thick slabs of speckled and marbling earth tones that suited the elegant lines of her home. Lengths of driftwood flirted with the pink folds of whelks, and smooth, iridescent shells of abalone shimmered from built-in bookshelves and tastefully minimal end pieces. Warm wood paneling and long windows overlooked the good town, the thick forest, the Pacific and its mysteries, and the wind that moved from one to the other connected them all.
“Yes, Vogue wants to come out and do a feature on us,” I heard Manny telling Guy. “On our decision to leave fame behind and get back to the land, you know? It was super brave of us, they tell me.” He bowed his head as if acknowledging his own courage. “But I told them—Guy, I told them—‘Look, I won’t do it unless my cousin, a great photographer, takes the pictures himself.’”
I watched them confer like this for a few moments, exchanging grunts and claps on the shoulder.
Guy made a show of swooping around the long dining table—“Manny carved it from a felled redwood, darling,” Mia would tell me later—and coming over to embrace me in front of the crowd. He kissed my forehead and rubbed my back before returning to the group of men in front of the fire.
Mia directed the women in completing small kitchen tasks, sliding rosemary needles from their stalks and blending spices with a mortar and pestle. I sat with nothing to do, feeling as if I had interrupted their party. Had I been in the bedroom for that long? It didn’t seem like it, but then I had no way to tell without my phone.
My sulking did not go unanswered. Another cup of fragrant tea had appeared on the table in front of me, and as I sipped, I began to feel better. Grounded, as the good townspeople would say. Like an airplane waiting out bad weather. An open window let in the sound of ocean waves from the coastal side of their property, and the wind crept in behind their crashes. I never expect the chill of night in California. At home, a summer day leads to a summer night. I listened to the roiling crush of dry eucalyptus leaves as they fought the rising wind with silvery palms and streamers of peeling bark that crackled and crunched against its force. The wind rose like this every night, I would come to learn, as if the pleasantness of the days had been exchanged for inescapable creaking, rushing gusts.
“Dinner is ready, my darlings,” said Mia with a lilting authority and a soft clap of her hands, to which the room responded immediately.
My attention having been with the wind and its battle with the trees, I hadn’t noticed these women gliding from the kitchen to set the table. Final touches had been laid, including wine bottles and small jars filled with assorted flowers. I felt more connected to the blooms, so calm and quiet, than to the rest of the group.
At Mia’s announcement, the men dispersed from Manny’s orations to lead their wives to dinner. Already a few steps toward the table, Guy hesitated before backtracking to escort me, as the other men had done with their wives, and pulling out a chair. The conversation had stopped as the group watched Guy’s tender ministrations. With no little pettiness, I can say he was never so tender as before an audience. “Mia’s made this tea,” he said, as if I hadn’t been already sipping at the cup I’d placed on the table that he pushed toward me. I smiled, breathing in the vapor still rising from the cup to keep calm. One. Two. Three. Four.
There should be as many names for the smiles of women as for the wind. The smile offered to avert a confrontation. A placating look to keep the conversation going. The understanding that passes among women as men talk only to one another. The smiles traded in that situation of embarrassment or excuse. The one that says, “I can see from your face that you know better.” The wind carried through the window a melody from hollow bamboo chimes I could see dancing outside. It drowned the tinkling of both Manny’s anklet and the laughter of the beautiful women, like delicate glasses clinking in a toast, all passing smiles around the table like schoolgirls trading notes when the teacher’s back is turned. If it was advisable never to turn your back to the ocean, as suggested by my county-funded travel brochure, then I would offer the same rule of thumb to a man about a group of smiling women.