23

Liz didn’t call back. Not Wednesday evening, not Thursday or Friday. This possibility had not occurred to Sarabeth, and its fulfillment lodged in her gut and began to grow, a noxious weed sprouting terrible new leaves by the hour.

The phone didn’t ring at all until late Friday afternoon, and it was only then that she understood the trade-off she’d made: in order to get voice mail (in order to be able to call Liz without the danger of speaking to her), she’d finally gotten rid of her ancient answering machine, but with it she’d also gotten rid of her ability to screen her calls.

Answer? The phone stopped after the third ring, and the decision was made for her. She waited awhile and then lifted the handset, pressed TALK, and heard the stutter tone. She called in and heard a message saying that the Paper Place was calling a second time to alert Sarabeth Leoffler that her prepaid order had arrived.

The phone was silent for the next several hours. When it rang again she was in bed, or not quite in bed but on bed, dozy, her overhead light still blazing. She let the voice mail get it.

“Uh, Sarabeth,” said a voice she recognized as Mark Murphy’s, strangely gravelly as it played back to her a few minutes later. “I’m calling about something nonprofessional, just a question for you, really, and if you get this by, like, ten-thirty, could you call me back? I’m on my cell. Thanks, bye.”

What was this? She felt a flutter of curiosity, the first flutter of any kind she’d felt in days. It was almost nine-thirty. Where was he? If at work, why ask her to call the cell? If at home, why ask her to call the cell? If neither at work nor at home, why call her at all? She punched in the numbers and waited.

“Sarabeth,” he answered after one ring. “Hey, how’s it going? Thanks for calling me back.”

“Sure.”

“The thing is—actually, can you hang on for a sec?”

“OK.”

“One sec,” he said, and there were loud voices that got louder as she held on. And then silence.

“Sorry about that,” he said, coming back. “Noisy bar.”

“You’re in a bar?”

“No, I’m outside a bar.”

“Oh. Ha.”

“Bunch of idiots watching hockey in there.”

“So why were you in there?”

“Sarabeth, Sarabeth,” he said. “Too many questions. I’m the one with the question.”

“So you said.”

“But—oh, can you hang on again for a sec?” This time he didn’t wait for her assent but did whatever he had to do without further comment. She had no idea what was going on, but she was very curious, almost unbearably curious.

“Sorry,” he said. “Another call came in.”

“What’s going on, Mark?”

He blew a raspberry. “Crazy night is all.”

She heard herself sigh. Was he drunk? Her curiosity began to shift, toward annoyance.

“Sarabeth,” he said. “This has not begun well. Do you have a minute?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your address again?”

“My address?”

“It’s something I have to ask you in person.”

“What is this?” she exclaimed. “What’s going on? Are you drunk?”

“No,” he said. “Good question, fair question, but no. Can I come over?”

She looked around the room, certain it, she, the entire house, smelled to high heaven. “I’m in my sweatpants,” she said, and then regretted it.

“Not a problem. Is this OK? I’ll be fifteen minutes, twenty max.”

She gave him her address and then hung up and sprang into action, a cover-up job, since real cleaning wasn’t possible and she had to leave at least five minutes for her body. She kicked some of her discarded clothing under the bed, tossed the rest into the closet. She pushed open windows, ran for the kitchen, moved the piles of dirty dishes into the refrigerator and then back out and into the oven in case he wanted something to drink. Passing through the living room, she saw for the first time in days the array of objects still cluttering the floor. Fuck, she thought, but kept going. In the bathroom she took the fastest shower in history, no time for her hair, then dried off and put on a different pair of sweatpants, clean, and a pale green funnel-neck sweater for which she’d spent far too much last winter.

It had been ten minutes. She had another five or ten to go, and she hurried to the bathroom mirror, where she discovered that her hair was revoltingly dirty. She should have washed it—so what if it would have been wet when he arrived—but it was too late now. She brushed it and worked the impossible curls, then pumped on hair spray to get it to stay in place. Lipstick? Too studied for a woman in sweatpants. She felt tremulous and ran for the kitchen and a piece of bread, and she was wiping butter from her lips when he knocked a couple minutes later.

“Sarabeth,” he said from the doorstep. He was unshaven, untucked, unsmiling. She’d forgotten the porch light, and all was black behind him. She permitted herself a quick glance at the Heidts’: no sign of life.

“Sorry,” she said, flicking on the light. “Come in.”

In his shop the ceilings were about twenty feet high, and while she’d known he was tall, she hadn’t known quite how tall. He came in and instantly made of her house an elves’ hut. He was seriously tall, taller even than Billy, who was six feet two. She led him to the sitting area and waited for him to choose the couch before settling into a chair herself. His giant knees nearly touched the coffee table.

“So,” she said. “You have a question.”

He rubbed his bristly cheeks, then spread his arms along the back of the couch. Hollow cheeks, a twitch in his eye: he looked terrible.

“Got a beer?” he said.

“You couldn’t have asked the bartender that?”

A tiny smile flitted across his lips. “That’s not the question.”

“It’s a question.”

“There you go. I’ve always found you to be very insightful.”

She went to the kitchen for a beer. For herself she got a glass of tangerine-grapefruit juice. She’d been on a tangerine-grapefruit juice kick for several days. Her pee had started to smell of it.

He’d left the couch and was squatted at the spread of stuff on her floor. “Having a garage sale?”

She held out the beer, and he stood and took it, then went back to his seat. She remained standing.

“This is very hard for me,” he said.

“I’m intrigued.”

“Do you think—” He stopped and sighed hard. “Do you think there’s such a thing as evil?”

He was perfectly serious. He watched her as he sipped from the beer bottle, watched her as he put it on the coffee table. After a while she returned to her chair. Her juice glass felt cold, and she reached it toward the coffee table, then changed her mind and set it on the floor at her feet.

She said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, I’ve-given-it-a-lot-of-thought-and-haven’t-figured-it-out? Or I don’t know, it-doesn’t-interest-me-I-don’t-care?”

“Don’t know that either.”

He reached for his beer. He sat looking straight ahead, rolling the bottle back and forth between his palms. She knew she was in his peripheral vision, knew he was highly aware of her presence. She really didn’t think he was drunk, but he was something. Had he meant to touch her, the other day at his shop? She saw herself lying on the couch, exactly where he was now: an hour ago, all afternoon, most of yesterday. It was almost as if she’d left an imprint, almost as if he were sitting on her, and with this idea came an intense longing to be fucked.

He looked over at her. “What’s with your hair?”

“My hair?” she said, her face warming. “Nothing is with my hair. My hair is very much alone. Well, my head is sort of with my hair, but you couldn’t really say they’re together.”

“Sarabeth, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong with you?”

He scooted toward her. “I went to SFMOMA today—I was playing hooky. And there was this thing in the gift shop that made me think of you, this necklace—different-colored puff balls on a thin cable.”

“I’m flattered.”

“No, it was cool—it made me think of you lampwise, not jewelrywise. Like it could be a pull.”

“Oh.”

“But it had a name. I mean, a little card near it. And guess what it was, guess what it was called?”

She shrugged.

“It was a Fudabi Schmuck.”

She giggled; she was feeling odd, almost high. “What does that have to do with evil?”

“I don’t know—I guess it made me think of Hitler.”

“He was definitely a Fudabi Schmuck.”

“The biggest,” Mark said. And then, “I really want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you since the day we met.”

“Mark, don’t.”

“Don’t kiss you?”

“Don’t say you want to.”

“Too late.”

She stood and backed away from him. Her heel knocked against something, and she looked down as one of the silver candlesticks fell over. She said, “You’re married.”

He shrugged, then held up his palms as if to say he couldn’t deny it.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s going on with Mary?”

“Maud is going on with Mary. And Mary is going on with Maud. They’re going on and on and on.”

“And you feel left out.”

He tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling. His knees were splayed, and the crotch of his jeans had an inviting roundness to it. She looked at his Adam’s apple, watched it bob and then go still.

Her heart pounded. She went and straddled one of his legs, then sat and kissed him, kissed him, the warmth of his lips, the taste of beer, his heat—

She was insane. She scrambled off and said, “You have to leave.”

She could see that he’d begun to get hard. He stood and swiped at his erection, ran his hand over his chin. He gave her a broad, collusive smile, but he couldn’t keep it going; it melted off him and he was simply unhappy. Back to him she went, and on tiptoe she kissed him again, moving her lips until his moved again, too. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and then she made for the door and opened it, and after a moment he raised his eyebrows and gave her a little wave and left.

         

She thought about it, for days. Picturing his forearms, she thought about it. Picturing the fade on the thighs of his jeans.

As an antidote she went to movies. She even sat through a documentary about the politics of famine, the longest 107 minutes of her life. She was shallow, callous; she couldn’t deny it. As if to make sure there could be no doubt, she went straight to Walgreens afterward and spent an hour reading gossip magazines.

Then she forgot a staging.

“Uh, honey?” Jim’s message said. “That condo?”

It was Wednesday morning, the day before the open house; she was beyond screwed. Her mover was busy, so she went to her storage unit, gathered everything she could fit in her car, and sped to the condo building, where the loading zone out front was occupied by a painter’s truck.

Just what she needed.

She parked around the corner, grabbed what she could carry, and headed back to the building. At least Helen’s furniture was bland rather than garish. And the rolltop desk might turn out to be a lot lighter than it had looked. It might even come apart.

Helen had left the place spotless, though there was a closed-in 409 smell that Sarabeth would have to banish. She dumped her stuff, took a very brief peek at the desk, and went back to her car for the rest of what she’d brought.

DIAMOND PAINTING, said the writing on the side of the painter’s truck. Were they going to park there all day?

Back upstairs, she began by taking down the Impressionist posters, and right away the living room looked better. Into a closet they went, along with Helen’s cheerful Marimekko throw pillows, which Sarabeth felt sure had not been in the condo two weeks ago. (Had Helen bought them for the sale? Did she not understand staging?)

In the bedroom, she took Helen’s unfortunate nylon-backed bedspread off the bed and replaced it with her own nice ivory matelassé coverlet. She tried different combinations of shams and pillowcases. Was she brave enough to face the desk?

It was in the corner. The top was rolled up to reveal a warren of cubbyholes—empty, thank God. The writing surface was slanted, with a little tray at the bottom to catch pencils and pens. The base was made of two banks of drawers, also thoughtfully emptied.

Standing at one end, she hooked her fingertips under the half-inch lip and tried with all her might to get the desk even a couple inches off the floor.

She was ruined. What was she going to do? Whom could she call? Not Jim. Nina was at work. She couldn’t call Mark, ha-ha.

She locked up and went downstairs. There was a little Mediterranean food shop on the corner, and though it was barely 11:00 a.m. she got herself a falafel pita and sat eating it on a low wall. Leaving the desk in the bedroom was the only option, but the more she considered it, the worse it seemed. People would take one look in there and think: no. Jim would take one look and fire her. Honey, she could imagine him saying. I’m really sorry, but we are over.

She bit off another mouthful. The cool chunks of cucumber were soothing next to the hot, oily falafel.

Back she went. On the second floor, the painters had stretched a tarp from the stairwell all the way to the open door of the unit where they were working. They were responsible painters, then. She’d seen some who left so much paint on the access, they could have billed for it.

She had forty dollars in her wallet. Would painters be insulted if they were asked to help move a piece of furniture for forty dollars?

Slowly, in case she changed her mind, she moved toward the open doorway. It seemed rude to place herself where she could see in, so she stopped short and reached around for the door, knocking as best she could given that the door moved as soon as her knuckles touched it. She waited and then tried again, this time knocking on the outside wall.

She heard footsteps, oddly uneven footsteps: first the sound of a hard shoe, then a soft thump, then the hard shoe again. This did not exactly jibe with a painter, and when someone appeared it was not a painter, it was Peter Something, in a pressed white shirt and khakis, and a cast on one leg.

“Oh,” Sarabeth said.

He gave her a quizzical look, his straight, dark eyebrows coming together, his head tipping slightly to the side. “Can I help you?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just—I thought there were painters here.”

“There are.”

She looked down and saw his toes poking out of the cast. They were sexy toes, actually, with clean, squared-off nails. Was he cute? Shut the fuck up, she told herself.

“I’m upstairs,” she said, “and—” She looked past him into the apartment. “Wait, are you listing this place?”

“Next week. Why, you interested?”

She explained her situation, why she was there, what she needed—she was pretty babbly, but he hung on till the end.

He said, “Well, that’s both quite a jam you’re in and also highly resolvable.”

“It is?”

“Which one do you question?” He smiled and said he’d be right back, and he left her on the doorstep and disappeared into the bedroom of what appeared to be a mirror-image version of Helen’s place. She heard him speaking Spanish, heard another voice, heard laughter.

“They’re going to quit for lunch soon,” he said, coming back. “They’ll come help you then if that’s OK.”

She stared at him, embarrassment beginning its long, vinelike climb up her insides. She was aware that even if she knew what to say, she might not be able to say it.

“I’d offer my services as well,” he said, “but under the circumstances—” He gestured at his leg.

Still she stared.

“Is that OK, then? Half an hour or so?”

“Yeah, no, it’s just—” She took a deep breath. “I’m completely mortified.”

He gave her an incredulous look. “Why?”

She shielded her eyes for a moment, her face on fire. “Sorry,” she said, “this is absurd. It’s just—I feel like a little kid. I needed someone to take care of my problem, and it happened.”

“To me you had a problem and pursued a solution and found one.” He had a sweet look on his face, a look that was both gentle and amused, and she felt herself begin to relax. “Like an adult,” he added.

“Oh, so you’re nice.”

He grinned and pulled a card case from his back pocket. “Peter Watkins. Coldwell Banker.”

“Sarabeth Leoffler. Um, home sale design.”

“Really? I thought you were one of us.” He gave her a long, appraising look. “OK, then,” he said, “half an hour or so,” and she thanked him and waved and turned away.

I thought you were one of us.

He’d meant one of us realtors, of course, and his saying so meant he recognized her, but all she could think, her earlier despair returning, was that the real mistake he’d made was in thinking she belonged to the community of the competent.

         

She was in bad shape. To make matters worse, when she got home she had a message from Mark. “Hi, Sarabeth. I’ll bet you know who this is. Nothing important, just saying hello.” She pressed 3 for erase and hung up so quickly, the handset fell from the charger. She hurried to her room, got into bed, and pulled the blankets over her head. Early on with Billy, tortured with indecision but unable to stop herself from seeing him, she’d fled Berkeley one Friday afternoon when his wife and kids were going away for the weekend and he’d said he could spend the entire time with her. Forty-eight hours! She hightailed it to the Mackays’, and Liz gave her a glass of wine and dinner and the guest room, where, once everyone else was asleep, the two of them sat together on the bed, legs crossed, and talked and talked. “I’m worried about you,” Liz said. Meaning not Travis, not Zeke, not Her, though when Sarabeth brought them up Liz said she couldn’t imagine it not affecting them as well. “But I don’t know them,” she added.

It had been October, maybe November. Rain falling: thumming the roof, rattling the leaves on the trees.

“You think he’ll hurt me?”

“I can imagine a lot of things that might make you suffer.”

“But I’m suffering now.”

“I know. I wish you weren’t.”

Liz didn’t tell her what to do. Not until much later, when some kind of impatience had taken over, or moral disgust, or something. “Why am I still doing this?” Sarabeth had asked her, and Liz had said, “Why are you?” In other words stop—and so for a while Sarabeth didn’t tell her any of what was going on.

What would Liz think of Mark’s visit? She’d be horrified. Or was that wishful thinking, the same thing as wishing Liz knew? As wishing she’d called back.

It had been a week to the day since Sarabeth had sent her the voice message.

“Jim?” she said into the phone a little later. “Can I come over?” And then she blurted out the entire story of Lauren and Liz.

Jim and Donald lived way up in the Oakland hills, in a house they’d built on the site of a house they’d lost to the ’91 fire. When she arrived half an hour later, she found they’d made a space for her in the short, steep driveway, and they both came to the front door to welcome her.

“I told Donald,” Jim said. “I hope that’s OK.”

“Of course,” she said, and Donald enfolded her in his long, skinny arms. She stayed close for an extra moment, breathing in the wool smell of his sweater.

In the living room Jim poured her a glass of red wine, and then he and Donald settled on the couch while she took a seat on the floor, on the thick rug that lay in front of the fireplace.

“So what’s next?” Jim said. “What are you going to do?”

She was surprised by this. “Nothing. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t call again.”

“What do you mean? That’s ridiculous, of course you can call again.”

She looked away. Behind the couch, a sliding glass door led to a wonderful multilevel deck: the number one item on the wish list Jim and Donald had given their architect. They told stories about how invigorating it had been to start over, to get exactly the house they wanted, but she couldn’t imagine how they’d borne so much loss. Among many other absences, they now had no pictures of either of them from birth to the day of the fire.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sleeping well. I’m so tired it’s affecting my social skills. Why do you feel you can’t call again?”

It had to do with respect, with not being the kind of person who hammered and hammered. She didn’t know how to explain this, though. She said, “I’ve been really tired, too. Do you suppose we have chronic fatigue syndrome?”

“Everyone’s tired,” Donald said. “Haven’t you heard? It’s the new depressed.”

“Where does that leave depressed?” Jim quipped, and Sarabeth smiled and rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t muster the energy to take it any further.

On the coffee table there was a platter of bread and cheese, and he slid it toward her. “Eat. Want any of this? Or I can cook you something.”

“Oh, I’m fine, thanks.”

He sliced off a piece of Brie and put it on a cracker. “Here.”

She let him hand her the cracker, and after a moment she took a bite. In her mouth there was texture, the cracker crunching, the buttery smoothness of the Brie, but she didn’t taste much of anything.

“You could write her a letter,” he said, and she shrugged.

“I suppose so. Actually, I think I just have to wait.”

Donald cleared his throat. “I’ve been thinking that your mother must feel very close right now. Her death, I mean.”

Sarabeth felt a caving sensation in her chest. It did and it didn’t. She did and she didn’t. The fire crackled, and in the quiet afterward she heard the faraway barking of a dog. She brought her glass to her lips and let the rich, dark wine bleed across her tongue and into her throat.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I overstep?”

“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s fine.”

And it mostly was. There had been times when she hadn’t talked about it—in college, in her early twenties—but she’d gained some distance somewhere along the line. She had even, in her mid-thirties, had a friend whose father had killed himself, and the two of them had done little other than talk about it—to the point where they had a kind of routine going, the suicide sisters, that they performed for and with each other. It had made them fast friends for a time, and then embarrassed and awkward former acquaintances ever after. “My mother didn’t leave a note.” “My father left a note and didn’t mention me.” An integral part of the routine was competition.

“Let’s go into the kitchen,” Jim said. “I’ll make some pasta.”

“I’m—”

“Come on,” Donald said. “He won’t do it just for me, and I’m starving.”

Jim stood and offered her his hand, and she let him pull her to her feet. He’d been so nice about the condo earlier, praising her when the job she’d done was merely adequate.

She followed him into the kitchen. While he and Donald moved from refrigerator to sink to stove, she sat at the table and glanced at some of his work papers—flyers for the condo, comps on a house in Kensington, a stack of photocopies of a newspaper article about the housing market. “Top-Priced Bay Area Communities” read the heading of a sidebar, and she looked, as she always did, for Palo Alto: the median price for a house was $1.2 million.

She had, from time to time, thought of asking Jim to figure out what her family’s house on Cowper might fetch in the current market, but she didn’t really want to know. Gazillions would be the answer. And it wouldn’t matter, because it had been necessary for her father to sell it when he did. Necessary in every way.

Life on Cowper Street, life in that house, with its elegant, unlivable rooms. What she remembered was a fear of displeasing her mother, of her mother becoming angry at her—or angry at herself, which was just as bad. There was loud anger in the kitchen, where plates could be broken, and silent anger upstairs, where Lorelei simmered and sulked. Sarabeth remembered hysterical anger in the garage, when she hid once behind a wheelbarrow and wasn’t found for a long time.

Toward the end, Lorelei changed. She became quieter, and she cried a lot. She was almost always in bed when Sarabeth left for school in the morning, and the last thing Sarabeth did before heading out was stop in and say goodbye. Very occasionally there was something lovely about Lorelei in bed—the stack of pillows, the crystal carafe of water—and at such times Sarabeth could feel drawn by the room, by the idea that Lorelei might absorb peace from the room, even by Lorelei herself. On the last day, though, it was just a mess: curtains drawn, abandoned clothing all over the floor.

Sarabeth hadn’t discovered the body, but only, she sometimes thought, through sheer determination not to. When she returned home from school in those days she occupied herself with avoiding the parts of the house where she might come in contact with her mother. On that day, the kitchen bore traces of her mother’s having been up for a while: there was an unsuccessful soft-boiled egg lying near the sink, most of the yolk congealed on the counter. Sarabeth cleaned it and then took her homework to her father’s small office off the living room.

She worked. The house was very quiet, as it could well remain until he got home. Liz was still at school—she was on the yearbook staff, and they were working furiously to get the final pages finished and off to the printer. From her father’s desk, Sarabeth had a narrow tree-impeded view across the street to the Castleberrys’ front door, and she was simultaneously watching for Liz and listening for Lorelei. She would realize many years later that she had made a deal with herself, the deal being that when she saw Liz she would go and check on Lorelei. Life was usually best when Liz was home—best best when Sarabeth was over there with her—but on that day, as she looked up again and again to see if Liz was pulling up across the street on her bike, she was relieved each time to see nothing but the Castleberrys’ front door.

Cowardly then, cowardly now.

Though she had called Liz. She had. She had agonized, and then she had called. And now…it was true, what she’d said to Jim earlier. She just had to wait. Waiting was, after all, something to do; it was its own small kind of solution.

On the other side of the cooking island Jim chopped shallots, and Donald stood at the sink washing lettuce. They had been together thirty years, longer than any other couple she knew. Jim looked up. For a moment, he seemed surprised that she was watching him, and then he gave her a smile and waved at her, and she waved back.