Dinner Along the Amazon (23 page)

She listens to the house. Her sister will not be glad to see her here and, as always, Arthur’s smile will be cool and patronizing: “Nice.” Her fingers touch the banister. It doesn’t matter. Here she is:
away
. That’s all that counts—that matters: to be safely away somewhere else. The rest of anything is possible to deal with. Anything and anyone.

She looks up the stairs. She closes her eyes. The house smells of safety and cut-flowers, of lemon-wax and musty-rugs, of her childhood. And Addie sits down, neither partway up nor partway down but exactly in the middle of the stairs. A vantage point from which she can see through the doors who will come to be with her first.

Arthur is watching the ketch through his telescope. There sits Edward Kiley and Emmaline, his gorgeous wife. So far so good. They have not ascertained that the Andersons have a guest. For a change they are sailing alone. Edward Kiley has a strange expression on his face. Arthur adjusts the lens. Yes, fascinating.
Fascinating
. Is Edward Kiley…amazed? Or…desperate? Or…angry? Or
afraid
?

He’s afraid.

Arthur, in his own amazement, claps the telescope shut and then at once reopens it to see what Emmaline is up to. Below him, on the beach, Ishmael is reading Alicia’s screenplay, piling it page by page under the stones as he reads. He is a good deal over halfway through, and it passes through Arthur’s mind:
I wonder if he’ll forgive her
? And then, at once, he is searching for Emmaline Kiley.

There. In a shirt, with her hair tied back and her dark, southern skin deeply oiled, almost black with her passion for the sun. Her face is flat and broad and her features wide: Ava Gardner’s chin. Her breasts have always been the cause of turbulence, of a wincing disquiet in Arthur’s soul. Her figure can truly be described as being made up of handfuls of flesh. Even now, as he sees her, his fingers sink round the phallus of his telescope, twisting it out of focus. Dear Jesus—that woman…But what is she doing? Here, now—something is very wrong. She too is angry and alarmed and she sits unnaturally forward (damn her breasts), with her hands full of halliard and her movie-star’s chin unsheathed and knife-like pointed at her husband—
screaming
. She is screaming invective—god!—the worst that a taxi-driver could think of—flailing at him with the words until the words are not enough and the forces behind them suddenly possess her hands and she leaps at him, driving him backward over the rear of the boat and the tiller snaps free and all the lines are let out and the ketch begins to make a crazy drunken course across the Sound that is so irrelevant to all the rules of sailing that everyone else on the shore begins to watch it, wondering what can be the trouble. And then, it must be, beyond the curtain of the sails, that Edward has regained his balance and has somehow fought her off, for on the next turn beachwards he is sitting there calmly, fitting the tiller back into place. And Emmaline has resumed her seat to one side of him, not screaming now, but adjusting her shirt and rubbing her arms.

“Who’s winning?” says a voice behind Arthur’s right shoulder. He turns like a child caught stealing loose change from the bureau and sees that his fellow eavesdropper is Lydia Harmon. Not liking her makes Arthur’s predicament worse. He cannot share her smile, with its twist of lemon. He hates the way she stands, which is like a disturbingly seductive boy, hipless and smooth and wet. She is lightly beating time to the music of someone’s transistor, blathering rock from nearby.

“Uhm…winning what?” says Arthur like a fool.

Lydia makes a face and touches Arthur’s cheek with a deprecating pat. “Never mind, Sweetie,” she says. “I’ll find out later for myself.” Arthur grits his teeth at her touch. And then she says: “You and Ali going to the Powells’ tonight?”

Arthur would be delighted to say no, they are not going. But the fact is they are going, and have to go, because Alicia would bring the house down if they didn’t. So he says: “Maybe.”

Lydia smiles. “Chapter two, baby.” And she looks out towards the ketch. “And you wouldn’t want to miss chapter two, now, would you?” Her big toe caresses the leather instep of Arthur’s boot.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” says Arthur. “And will you please take your God damn toe off my boot?”

Lydia pouts and Arthur is not quite sure the pout is not genuine. Maybe she needs to seduce someone, he thinks. After all, there isn’t much game for a Lydia here on the beach. It must be difficult, not to have an outlet for all that…(looking away from her) whatever it is. And worst of all, he is disturbed. She has moved him, for no one has placed her toe on the instep of his boot for a very long time.

He gathers up the telescope and makes to move away. But Lydia beats him to it. She has suddenly stripped off her jeans and gone running out to the water, which is shallow and will not hide her.

“Does she call that thing a bathing suit?” Arthur says aloud, and turns at once to see if Ishmael is nearby. But he is not, and only the screenplay under its pile of stones remains to show where his guest has been seated. This afternoon, that should have been so lovely, has been ruined by the fact of everyone’s unfinished business.

That argument, for instance, Arthur thinks as he picks his way through the slime revealed by the ebbing tide.
Is the Kileys’ argument ever over
? All they do—or certainly all they do in public—is rage at one another; batter one another with words and fists. Now, it seems that Edward and Emmaline want to kill one another. What, then, keeps them together? Edward’s money, bulging in Emmaline’s pocket book? Emmaline’s beauty, sagging from Edward’s arm? They’re the perfect age for divorce, Arthur thinks—and smiles. As I am. And Alicia. The Kileys will and we won’t, that’s what everyone thinks. The perfect age. Like the perfect age for marriage and the perfect age for giving birth and the perfect age for heart attacks and cancer…

Arthur—one foot lifted to begin his ascent—is confronted by the open mouth, the merry eyes and the filthy paws of Kileys’ dog. It has just come bounding down the steps to say hello to everyone: to anyone. Kileys’ dog is always looking for its owner; and its name. It is large and brown with one black patch on its back near its tail: a kind of square, curly dog—close cropped. Almost an Airedale. It has no name and is simply known as “Kileys’ Dog.” This does not suit the dog at all, who wants a proper name like any other dog. No one has ever been witness to how the Kileys summon it. for meals or for guard duty. Probably they cry; “here, Dog!” or “here, You!” or some such thing. Its lack of a name can be seen in the dog’s expression. It seems to be waiting—always—for someone to say; “your name is Spot.” Or George. Or whatever. Anything can satisfy the dog. It is friendly to the point of wretchedness. The expression in its eyes, the tilt of its head, the incessant movement of its tail are downright melancholy.

Arthur moves toward one side and decides he will sit with the dog on the sea wall. “Poor old dog,” he says and lays his hand along the side of the dog’s head. “Poor old everyone,” he adds, surveying the crowded stones and all the people known to him by the numbers on their houses, by their license plates and the names of their phobias and manias and not much else. “Poor old us.”

Slowly, the dog begins to fawn on Arthur’s hand and Arthur wonders how often any other hand, especially a Kiley hand (Edward’s with its dreadful rings—Emmaline’s with its sun spots) is ever laid this way, receptive of an ear to scratch and received so gently into the wet of that eager mouth to have its fingers chewed. Probably never.

The first one through the door is Ishmael.

Addie watches him. His hair looks wet, as though he’s been swimming. His hands are full of stones and paper, some of the paper enfolding the stones. He does not see her, lost as she is in the dimness of the stairwell.

Her eyes are yellow-green.

The stones are very hard to manage and Ishmael wants to put them all down and rearrange them into one hand, to make a package of them in the paper, but the table tops are all covered in the hallway with Alicia’s bric-a-brac. So he bends and kneels and places them, smelling of the dead sea-Sound, on the lower steps.

Outside there is going to be a storm and the sky is turning green with distant electricity and the smell of copper is lifted from the screens like dust and there is a long, long pause.

Ishmael smooths out the page of screenplay, and the words “
CUT TO: INT: NIGHT: GLORIANNA’S ROOM
” lean up at him, seemingly three-dimensional, off the paper. He begins to arrange the stones in the centre, leaving the corners foldable. One-two-three—twenty stones. Each different, but all a memento of Cheeverland.

Ishmael makes his package and rises.

A woman is seated on the stairs—someone he had not known was in the house.

“I beg your pardon,” he says and turns towards the doors. Crazily it goes through his head that somehow he is in the wrong hall, has wandered somehow into the house of a stranger. But then he recognizes the walk beyond the screens and turns again to Addie.

She smiles.

“Hello.”

“Hello…uhm…do you live here?”

“No. I visit. You visit, too, I take it.”

“Yes.”

Their eyes are locked so tight that Ishmael has to turn away.

“Don’t drop your stones,” Addie warns him.

“No.”

She rises.

Her feet are still bare, but she has changed her dress and now she wears something white and Mexican, with silver chains and rings.

“I have been sitting here, almost for an hour. My sister is asleep on the lawn. Alicia. Yes, I’m her sister. Addie—or Adele, if you prefer. I don’t prefer, I’m afraid. I think it kind of sounds stuck-up—or
French
—or something: I don’t know—I just don’t like it.” She is coming down the stairs and there is only the living room to go to. Or, the walk outside. “I suppose Alicia neglected to tell you I was coming.” Ishmael nods. She is backing him into the living room. “Well…” and a dazzling, broken laugh: “I forgive her.
I forgive her
.” More laughter. “I phoned her up once and I said: ‘This is
Addie
. This is Addie,’ and she said: ‘Addie who?’ Do you believe it?
Believe it
! You probably know that she
writes
. Well, people who write are a pain!” (Does she know what she’s saying? Ishmael blushes. But Addie knows what she has said and she turns to him and wins him over completely.) “Unless, of course, they write
well
!” Rosetta had told her who Ishmael was. “Do you drink?” He nods. “Then let’s. Here it is after five and I haven’t even started…”

They enter the living room and Addie attends to the record player while Ishmael attends to the bar. The stones, still folded in their paper, are laid on a sofa, where bit by bit the tension eases and the paper opens.

Page one hundred and twenty-two.

INT: NIGHT
: (etc.)

THE STRANGER
enters
GLORIANNA’S ROOM
with his
KNIFE
…

“Do you dance?” Addie asks.

“Oh yes. But…not well.”

“With me it couldn’t matter less.”

Johnny Mathis
: “For the Good Times.”

On the lawn Alicia is sitting up, more Woolf-like than ever, one hand on the back of her hat, holding it down under the rising wind. Her expression is pained. Perhaps she has had a dream, or several, and she is longing to talk and she is talking to Arthur, but Arthur is not really listening. Arthur is wondering if the Kileys will be at the Powells’ tonight, but Alicia is saying something: “And yesterday, sitting there with Doctor Toffler—sitting there after so many sessions where nothing has happened, nothing has
emerged at all
—I suddenly realized, all at once, that for the longest time, I have had this…
thing
inside me: a desire—a wish—a need—a longing, Arthur, to forgive someone.”

Alicia looks at her husband and blinks and after a second it sinks in, apparently, exactly what she has said to him, for he turns and gives her a stare of grateful amazement.

“No, no, dear,” she says. “Not you. Not you. I don’t know why, but somehow this need is a desire to forgive some…
stranger
. Do you see? I have this desire: this need to
forgive
someone. And Dr Toffler says it doesn’t matter who I forgive as long as the ‘forgiveness’ emerges. It’s the
feeling
that matters. The feeling. Of having done something…” (searching for the word) “…magnanimous, gratuitous, and…
lovely
, for another human being.”

She was through. That was it. What Alicia had to say.

Arthur stares into the sky. He takes a deep breath.

“That’s terrific, dear. Terrific. Good for you,” his voice absolutely toneless. “I think you’re going to make it.”

“So do I,” says Alicia, fishing for, finding a piece of Facelle and blowing her nose. “And so does Dr Toffler.”

“Good.” Twenty-six miles away, there is thunder. Arthur knows it is exactly twenty-six miles because he has counted the seconds between the sound and the previous strobe of lightning.

The doors burst open and the dancers are interrupted.

“Will you, for god’s sake, come and help? Alicia’s hat has blown itself across the lawn and into the trees in front of the Professor’s house…”

Alicia stands in the kitchen and pours herself a glass of milk.

“I find if I line my stomach before a party,” she says to Ishmael, who sits in a handsome sweater at the table, “then the results aren’t nearly so devastating.”

“The results of what?” he asks.

Alicia blinks and smiles, ingratiating, not believing for a moment he can be serious. She crosses to the sink and rinses out the glass. Still letting the water flow, she turns and looks at Ishmael.

“I know you’re upset because of what I’ve done to your story,” she says and turns the tap off, flicks her fingers and reaches for the towel across the table. Then she sits down opposite him and removes her many rings with a sense of ceremony, staring at each one, laying them all in a row on the cloth, and one by one she dries her fingers, so many pieces of silver, knives and forks and spoons, laying them out like the rings for inspection—silver fingers and pewter nails. “I’ve only added the murder to the script because people insist on that. It’s an element of fiction they won’t forgive you for leaving out. In the movies, Ishmael, there has to be violent death—or people won’t go. Surely you must see that?” On with the rings. “It’s not that your book isn’t good. It’s just…”