‘Go get yourself a Kleenex. Come on, my girl.’
He never called her my girl, but it had come out so naturally, as if he said it all the time. Maybe that’s what he called her. The evening petered out unmemorably, except it was the night his fling was spelled out in the air for her to read and reread. When she pictured her life a few years ago – contentedly married with two children, and a sister she loved and hated – well, that seemed like a very faded postcard now. She was on an overloaded boat with a dead engine, and the rip tide was pulling them further and further away from that place in the postcard. She was seasick.
Time passed. Elisabeth moved into her new bedroom in the garage. Willy moved out of his parents’ bedroom, into Elisabeth’s old room. The three boys grumbled that they still shared a room, so they moved into the larger master bedroom. A man walked on the moon and everyone sat on the sofa and floor to watch it, while Billie stood by the set, twiddling the vertical knob and wriggling the aerial whenever the picture started flipping up. Three weeks later, a music festival happened on a farm on the east coast. The older children talked of nothing else and began wearing headbands, and making the peace sign whenever possible. Hellos and goodbyes were fingers flipping V’s, and for days Billie thought they meant victory over something. Everything seemed to be happening at once, fast, fast, fast, and meanwhile her husband was loving some other woman. She could hardly pay attention to it all, and still get dinner on the table every night, still keep clean socks in drawers and spare toilet rolls in the bathroom cupboard. The world made a rushing noise in her head, and she hunkered down inside herself. Focused on the essentials of day-to-day life.
Soon Billie could not remember a time when she was not aware of the affair. She lived with this invisible third party always present. For Jack, it was the same, so each of them – separately and secretly – had more in common than they’d ever had before. They were each living a double life. Jack with Colette, and Billie with the idea of Colette. But all affairs have their lifespan, their own plot line, and finally came the climatic night. Billie had been sensing an increasing urgency, coupled with an increasing carelessness. Did Jack want her to find out? It seemed like it, with his openly flirtatious phone conversations, his coldness in bed, his transparent excuses for everything from a late night home to yet another overnight meeting in Santa Barbara. It was a Saturday night, a night that still had some of the heat of the day, and flies were buzzing in circles in the kitchen. No one noticed them usually but tonight Jack ran around with a fly swat, cussing and slapping. He tried to mend the screen door, but it still wouldn’t close all the way.
The phone rang. Billie was standing right next to it, but before she could answer it, he grabbed it, covered the mouthpiece and hissed to his wife:
‘Do you mind? This is private.’
‘What do you mean? Who do you need to be private with?’
‘Work! It’s Bob from work, about the new writer he signed up. He gets pissed off if he thinks anyone’s listening.’
‘It’s not a work day. It’s Saturday night,’ she answered limply.
She left the room, and two minutes later he went out too, saying offhandedly:
‘I’ll be back later, honey, don’t wait up.’
Impossible to be forty years old and feel this way, but here he was, driving like a teenager, heart pounding, head bursting, to his lover’s house. She’d given him an ultimatum.
Leave Billie.
Leave her and live with me.
Do you love me? You said you loved me.
He might never again in his life have such great sex, and he could easily die of this deprivation. He knew this sounded melodramatic, but he couldn’t help it. If he said no to Colette, he’d be saying no to life. Imagine if he’d never slept with Colette! He’d never have discovered how amazing it felt to do this to a woman, and have that done to him. And he used to scoff at D.H. Lawrence, think nothing was really that horny. People didn’t really act like animals, not in his experience. It was all pretty hot, especially in the honeymoon period, but even then there’d been no torn clothes, no begging for it in coarse vocabulary, and certainly no anal sex. Colette called it love. He didn’t have a word for it. Sex with Colette was like being stunned by gunshot. Violent, thought-stopping, cutting to the bone every time. He slammed on the brakes in her driveway, hurtled to her door, which was locked. Knocked loudly, indifferent to the neighbours. At first he thought he was too late. He stood there and called her name, with a world of wretchedness in his voice.
Six thirty in the morning, and Billie heard the car. Without thinking, she got up and pulled on a coat – his raincoat, because she was too upset to see what she was wearing – and slipped out the back door onto the deck. Huddled in the dawn, behind the barbecue. She heard him walk in, switch lights on, use the bathroom. Then through the closed door, she heard his voice call her name. She heard her name in his voice, and it was like an executioner’s voice, cajoling the prisoner to place his head in the noose. Indifferent. Impatient, even. It was a midsummer morning, not a cloud in the sky. It was going to be hot later, hot enough for a swim, she thought. She thought of that time she and Louise dared each other to jump off the bridge into the Sacramento River, and they’d held hands and jumped together.
Her bare feet were wet from the dew, and all she had on under the raincoat was her thin nightgown. A mourning dove in the lemon tree sang those elegiac notes, high for one count, then low for four counts. LA la-la-la-la. LA la-la-la-la.
‘Billie? Billie!’
She shivered. Held her breath. Inside the house was her life, her old life. There it waited, and she would not go in to say goodbye to it. She would not. More footsteps, more doors opening and closing. He’d wake the baby if he wasn’t careful. Then she’d have to breathe again. Finally, he called in a tone she recognised from way back. From those days by the Bay. Her red dress with the yellow roses, and his Old Spice cologne. It was as if layers had been stripped off him during the catastrophic night and dawn, and here he was again at last. A skinny, shy kid who hated to be alone in the house.
‘Billie? Hon?’
LA la-la-la-la.
IF YOU COME TO SAN FRANCISCO
EIGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER
July 8th 1967
San Miguel, Marin County 5:32pm
Early evening, but still in the low nineties. The blinds had been closed all day, the windows all wide open. Jack sat in the living room in his white T-shirt and khaki shorts while she cooked. He drank a cold martini, an especially strong one, and watched the news. Vietnam was heating up again. The world was going to hell. Did Johnson know what he was doing or not? Jack was a loyal democrat; hated these doubts. Yesterday, six reported American casualties, forty-two Viet Cong casualties. Helluva word for it, casualties. Euphemisms made him cranky.
He went into the kitchen and made another drink. He carefully peeled the lime, added one green olive to the glass, measured the gin and vermouth in a tiny silver cup, then poured it and added two ice cubes. Tasted it. Added another dollop of gin. Tasted again. Yes! Absent-mindedly he kissed the back of Billie’s head as she peeled potatoes for mash. This made him happy too. He loved mashed potatoes. Then he went back to his chair and watched a clip of an anti-war demonstration in San Francisco. Thousands marching down Market Street, then up Powell to Union Square. Disjointed chanting and singing, and under the words, steady drumming on something metallic. And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. We’re off to Vietnam! It was amazing how many pretty girls were marching – and even without his glasses he could see they were not wearing bras, most of them. Unbelievable. Nipples just out there, poking through tight T-shirts for anyone to see. Sure, the war was upsetting folk, but look at them – all the marchers had happy faces. These days the world was a fun place all right, and San Francisco in summer was the centre of the universe. Everyone said so. Lots of songs did, anyway. If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. From all over the country, everyone was coming here for a…love-in? He could hardly think the phrase without smirking. Jack had smelled patchouli dozens of times before he heard the word patchouli, and it was another three months before he knew how the word looked on the page. He imagined Union Square now in a patchouli cloud. It reminded him of sex somehow.
‘Billie!’ he called.
She drifted into the living room, wiping her hands on her jeans. She owned several aprons given to her by his mother, but thought them very unflattering.
‘What is it, honey?’
‘Where are the kids?’
‘In their rooms. Homework. You told them, remember? No TV.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right. Good.’
‘Uh-huh. Why?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just wondered.’
‘Okay. Dinner in half an hour.’
Something about the way they interacted these days made passion difficult to initiate. Were they too familiar to each other? Too self-conscious? Had they become like competitive siblings? Goddammit. He nursed his martini, felt the lust fade in a sweetly melancholy way.
Ah, Life!
In some ways, he felt he was still at the beginning, still making his plans, but here he was already: almost forty. The life expectancy for a man was seventy, which left him thirty more years – assuming the final decade was not spent as a dithering idiot. He felt panicky.
He’d begun painting last year because his latest great novel was stalled in chapter three as usual, and it depressed him. He’d never got beyond a third chapter. Sailing had become a bore too. All that preparation, and later all the putting away of sails and hosing down the decks. Plus Elisabeth and Billie whined whenever it got windy. No one talked to him when he was painting, and a painting could be finished in a day. He’d fallen in love with the smell of linseed oil and the image of himself as an artist. At first he’d copied the masters: Leonardo, van Gogh, Picasso. Then he tried painting from life, from photographs. His own house, the children, the beach, sailboats under the Golden Gate. But it was abstract expressionism that really caught his imagination. The challenge of expressing emotion about a thing, without painting the thing itself. To strip all effort at contrivance away, and rely on shapes and colours alone. Surely this was the epitome of art. Pollack, Motherwell, de Kooning had become his idols.
