Curled in the Bed of Love (13 page)

In my first years here I was taken up with the struggle to pay off the loans I'd cobbled together to buy the land, immersed in rebuilding the greenhouses, installing insulation, benches, a drainage system. Vince came and went, helping me add on to the one-room house. There were other men, and I exercised the freedom to choose my working hours so that I had time for the beach, hiking, the long evenings at home that were essential to any love affair out here. I was making something, my own pleasure, the space in which I could live my life as I pleased.

When I decided I wanted a child, Vince happened to be available and willing, once I assured him that I wouldn't expect him to stay around because of the baby. The romance of Nuala linked us even when other kinds of romance failed us. Vince spent the winter of her sixth year in Thailand and sent her postcards every day—he finds postcards of cats to send her no matter where he is in the world—and he came to dinner the night he came home. I was seeing Bennett then, a field biologist who lived north of town and who was friends with Vince in the way most people who've lived here a long time end up either friends of a kind or enemies. Nuala had learned to read while Vince was away, and after dinner Bennett, Vince, and I sat on the sofa to listen to her, standing with a picture book held open in her hands. By the time she was finished, I found I'd locked my fingers with Vince's, an automatic reorientation and an easy one either to wander into again or to let rest.

Elena helps me wash dishes after dinner while everyone else sits around the cleared table to play poker, Nuala cradled in her father's lap so they can play together. The kitchen still smells of dinner, the tang of balsamic vinegar, the sweet heaviness of garlic and rosemary and roast chicken. Elena clatters dishes in the sink, Susan mutters over her cards, Andrea and Sam exchange lazy comments with Bennett, and Vince refills wine glasses like a good host. Bennett complains about the group of people who last week lay down in front of the bulldozers when the county attempted to cut down a stand of eucalyptus on the road into town.

“They give us tree huggers a bad name,” Bennett says. “All this uproar, when eucalyptus are invaders. They're non-native.”

“I'm surprised they could find more than three people in Bolinas who could agree to do the same thing at the same time,” Andrea says. She sighs. “Sam and I have been trying for years to get the neighbors to fill in the potholes on our road, and nobody
will agree to it, not even if we pay for a truckload of gravel ourselves.”

The clay roads out here are shaped into craters and hillocks by winter rains, then baked by summer sun till they're swirled like a lava flow. They're hell on the undercarriage of a car. The county doesn't maintain our roads, by mutual consent with the residents, who have a knee-jerk fear of any form of organized authority.

“But why not?” Elena asks. “It's such a simple, practical thing.”

Everyone laughs, and only Vince bothers to answer. “The potholes keep outsiders from using the roads. So they'll leave us alone.” Bolinas has something of a siege mentality. Stinson Beach, just down the highway, is jammed with tourists and city folk in summer. The county road signs directing traffic from U.S. 1 into Bolinas are routinely torn down as soon as they're put up.

Vince takes his turn as dealer and changes to another deck of cards, a deck he spent the afternoon arranging in order to rig the game so that Nuala would win a huge pot. I have to enjoy Nuala's triumph, so I come to the table, loop an arm over Bennett's shoulder, platonic remnant of our brief affair. Elena comes after me and drifts around the table.

Susan grumbles when Vince insists they raise the ante in this game to fifty cents. When Elena leans down to look at the cards in Susan's hands, Susan folds the cards in her palm. “Look, if you're not playing, could you step back from the table?”

Susan resents having no chance to win this hand, and besides, her lover left her a few years ago for a younger woman, and she is only too ready to be outraged on my behalf. Before we sat down to dinner, she hissed in my ear, “He has no right to bring her here.” Her righteousness amuses me; she had a flirtation with Vince herself during one of those periods when he and I were just friends. Elena will suffer if she wants to be possessive: I've shared a lover, somewhere along the line, with most of my women friends, and I've slept with most of the men I know, or they've slept with a
woman who's slept with a man I've been with. How else could it be in a small town full of aging hippies?

When she wins the hand, Nuala scoops the mound of coins toward her and then slides out of her father's lap to count them.

Elena takes Nuala's place in Vince's lap.

“Now do we have to let Elena win a hand?” Susan says.

“Susan,” Sam scolds. “You need another drink.”

Elena yawns and curls against Vince's shoulder, her hands fluttering across his chest. Her poor little hands—in addition to the raw mess she's made of the skin around her fingernails, she's slashed her fingers and knuckles working in the greenhouses. But she won't wear gloves.

Vince flicks one of her hands out of his way so he can throw a few more quarters into the pot. “Come on, honey, I'm trying to play cards.”

Nuala sidles up beside her father and says to Elena, “That's
my
lap.”

Vince grins and cocks an eyebrow at Elena.

“
OK
,” Elena says, rising to her feet. “I get the message.”

“Oh God,” Vince says. “I'm getting too old for this.”

Elena turns her back on him, reaches the door in three steps, and slams it behind her on the way out.

Vince bows his head as if he has to hide the grin that lingers on his face. But then he chugs the last of his wine, hugs Nuala, thanks me for dinner, and rushes after Elena. His boots clatter on the porch, and then we hear the blur of beseeching words with which Elena deluges him when he catches up to her in the yard.

I could not be so easy about the promiscuity of my twenties if not for the decade I spent with Vince, a decade in which the easy attachment I felt for him revised what had come before, enabled me to see myself as living loosely by intention, not by accident,
a woman who did not depend on men for much even when she enjoyed them.

We split up when I was pregnant with Nuala because Vince fell for a woman from New York who was backpacking through California. He went to New York with her for a couple of months and then came back alone. He wanted to talk to me about her—she'd been rigid and difficult, and things had ended badly between them. We took long walks on the beach nearly every afternoon, and soon enough his confessions led to our holding hands, kissing, exploring the mechanics of accommodating my big belly when we made love.

We were walking at Abbott's Lagoon up in the Point Reyes headlands when Vince asked me if I wanted him to be with me when I gave birth. The lagoon was thick with birds, but aside from their cries it was quiet enough that we could hear the surf pounding just beyond the sandbar that shaped the lagoon, hear the hollow thwack of the pelicans beating their wings against the water, like the clapping of erasers.

“Do you want to be with me?” I said.

I'd become practiced at answering Vince's questions with questions. It was our way of flirting. He'd been away for most of the pregnancy, and it seemed the season for needing him had passed. Every now and then, I'd get irritated that we hardly ever spent the night at his house, that when we did I'd have to forage for a towel or clear a space for my clothes. He'd built onto the original shack in piecemeal fashion, not like a contractor but like some kind of pack rat, adding nooks and crannies or a sleeping loft when the house became overstuffed, till the place was a maze of rooms, jammed with old bicycle tires, car parts he might someday find a use for, seven years of back issues of
The New Yorker
stacked against the wall of the loft. There was hardly room for him to move in it, much less another person.

“I could get a beeper, so you could reach me,” Vince said.

“If you had a beeper I might start calling you five or six times a day, like your New York woman.”

“She just about drove me crazy,” he said. “Every conversation turned into an interrogation. She reminded me of my mother.”

I didn't even know his mother's name. His father, he let slip once, had been a lawyer. Vince had a degree from some college back East, but I didn't know which one. He was a determined dropout, never taking contracting jobs that promised big headaches and big profits. My brothers had loaned me money to help me start the greenhouse, my mother was already sending me crocheted blankets for the baby, but Vince lived as if he had entered the world all alone. Just because he never spoke of his family, I imagined them as rich, cold, aristocratic.

Snowy plovers, fat as chickadees, and narrow-breasted dowitchers rose into the air with aggrieved cries as we approached them along the shore of the lagoon. I wondered if the pelicans clustered in the water would scatter at our approach too, if in a flock of hundreds they could be scared off by just two intruders. I ran at the water before Vince could stop me, as awkward as the big heavy birds that swerved away from us as one, beating their wings against the water, rising into the air, and then wheeling to land a little farther out in the lagoon.

Vince kept walking, head down, as if to make a point of dissociating himself from my rude trespass.

“How come your mother's never come out here for a visit?” I said. “Is she sick or something?”

“You're awfully curious all of a sudden.”

“Maybe I should know a little of your medical history, for the baby's sake.”

“She has Alzheimer's,” Vince said. “She's in a nursing home.”

“That's it?” I said. “You're so fucking grudging.”

I thought about running at the birds again, repeating that momentary
thrill of power when I drove them to flight. But I already knew how they'd react. If I asked Vince to get a beeper, he would, but then he would put it down somewhere, and like any foreign object in the organic chaos of his rooms, it would be repelled, expunged.

Which is why it surprises me to learn that Elena has moved into his house.

When I go to fetch Nuala from the greenhouse so she can start her homework, I find her playing with Elena. Elena is inserting a toothpick into a catasetum, prodding the club-shaped column that pokes up from the heart of the flower. Orchids have such simple, elegant geometry: just three petals and three sepals, always with one petal, the labellum, larger or more ornate than the others, a lascivious mouth beckoning an insect to the nectar guarded by the column.

When Elena presses on the pollen cap at the tip of the column, it spits out a sticky, yellow clump of pollinia, startling Nuala, who laughs with delight. A bug backing out of a flower would be forced to press on that hinged pollen cap, with the same effect. Simple but devious. Of course it would have to be the right bug—each species of the finicky orchid is constructed so that only one kind of bee or moth can pollinate it.

Elena and Nuala jump when I announce myself. “Fooling around on the job again?”

“Mom, you've got to see this,” Nuala says.

“It's my trick,” I say. “I showed Elena.”

Elena transfers the pollen to another flower and promises Nuala that when the flower grows a pollen tube down the stem, they'll plant the seeds. I'm surprised at her inaccuracy, because she's trained in science. It can take three months or longer before the seedpod bursts, spilling grains as fine as face powder. Those tiny seeds, lacking endosperm, can germinate only if they're invaded
by a specific fungus. I'd have to send the seeds to the lab in Santa Barbara and wait a year to get plants back. Orchid pollination leaves so much to chance that it's amazing the plants reproduce at all.

“Nuala was a real help,” Elena says. “We finished all the repotting.”

“But she cut her hand real bad,” Nuala says.

“No, I didn't,” Elena says.

“Let me see,” I say.

Elena reluctantly holds out her right hand. Already a scab is forming over this newest scratch, which crisscrosses older ones, oddly neat, straight scars.

“You should have washed this out,” I say. “It's real easy for a greenhouse cut to get infected.”

“Oh, I don't care,” Elena says in a blurry voice.

I've come to expect this sudden shift into another key, but Nuala is puzzled. “You don't want an infection,” she says.

“We had an awful fight,” Elena says.

“Mom, is she talking about my dad?” Nuala says.

“Go start your homework,” I say.

“Mom,” Nuala says. “You never let me stay for the good parts.”

“Go.” I push her shoulder, but she only gives way when Elena's face puckers.

Once Nuala has gone, I tell Elena, “You're having too many accidents.”

“I bought him a shirt,” Elena says. “A plain blue dress shirt. You'd think I bought him a straitjacket or something. We were screaming at each other.”

Vince doesn't scream. He turns silent and separate when he's mad, is humiliatingly indifferent to the plea of touch.

“He's middle-aged,” I say. “He's not interested in changing.”

“He's so selfish. He just assumes I'm going to fit right into all his
ways, all his habits. I told him to stop acting like a fussy old biddy. We both said terrible things. He said he wasn't going to let me
ride
him.”

Elena stares at her hands, the unreadable pattern of cross-hatched slashes. She starts to cry. “That bastard! He had the nerve to encourage me to apply to grad school. ‘Go wherever you want.'”

Elena seems to have led such a pleasant life up until the day that boy dumped her. Somewhere, on the peninsula south of San Francisco, she has two parents and a brother and a sister, a home where her school portraits still adorn the wall and her mother has saved her school essays in a box. She met her boy, Jeremy, at Cornell, where they were both placid, excellent biology majors. They were to have spent the year in Europe before going on to graduate school together.