Erased From Memory (11 page)

I press for brighter lights and wilder details. About Danielle—where’d she come from? But Rita just shrugs. “Who knows? That was a hairy time. Like I said, bed, bed, bed. And dope. Not just pot, real stuff. Hard stuff.

“Yeah,” she says, appraising my expression of discomfort, “not good.”

“Why doesn’t anybody want to talk about her?”

“
I
especially don’t want to talk about her. She stole my guy.”

She holds the bottle up and squints at the light it catches. “She stole both my guys. First she stole Marcus and then she stole Scott. Or the other way around. First she was Scott’s and . . . well, nuts.”

“First she was Scott’s,” I interpret, “and then she left Scott and took up with Marcus. And then she went back to Scott again.”

“Sort of. I hated her.”

“Was she gorgeous?”

“Well, I guess. If you like the type. Something for everybody. Oh,
shit
.”

“So why won’t anybody talk about her?”

Rita shrugs elaborately.

“Where was Egon in all this?”

“Dithering around. Waving his hands. I think Egon is asexual. One of the few cases. I think he really is.”

Now I have to ask it. “And my dad?”

Rita sort of laughs. “Oh, your dad. He knew some of it; I couldn’t tell how much. He’d start quoting from the ancient Egyptians when things got hairy.”

The ancient Egyptians thought sex was fine. But they also believed in marriage. They were sensible and nice. Even if a little obsessed with the afterlife.

“This dig lasted how long?”

“Two and a half months. We found a lot. Lots of stuff in my area, lots of textile scraps, pictures of whatever; I did notebooks and notebooks full. That spring is the only reason I have a job now. See, they had this tomb that was explored, like thirty years ago. And then, much later on, they found this extra passage, under a lot of rock and rubble. And when it was cleaned up, there was a long tunnel and a room that was bigger than all the rest of it. We were the third team there. They’re probably still doing it, still cataloguing and sifting and brushing. Well, you know.”

“And Scott did okay.”

“Studly did wonderful. That was one reason the testosterone got so dense. His field is supposed to be history, so he’s a dynamite whiz on hieroglyphs and he nearly had a seizure over some of the stuff he found; he was taking impressions and translating and talking and making casts and jumping up and down. And falling in love with anything that moved.”

Rita clinks her teeth against her glass and appears to brood. “Y’know, he’s not too irresistible usually, but when he was fired up like that . . . Well. It was like getting the battery back into the rabbit.”

“And Danielle thought so, too.”

“She sure did. At first. Y’know she was his girlfriend from back in college.”

“I heard.”

“And then they started up again in Thebes. And then they had some really great fights. But not about sex. At least, I don’t think. They fought about his hieroglyphs.”

My surprise shows in my voice. “Really?”

“She was a pretty good Egyptologist. Oh, damn it, she was that kind. She could do anything.”

Rita doesn’t know exactly what it was about the hieroglyphs that they disagreed on. “But he was blathering about how they changed history.”

“And she didn’t think so?”

“Well, she yelled at him plenty.”

 
 
The wine is gone. I have had about a third of it, which is an awful lot for eleven-thirty in the morning. I suggest a walk in the garden. “I saw a statue of Hatshepshut down there. And if you keep on going, there’s the ocean. And farther south some railroad.”

“I like the ocean,” Rita says.

 
 
At the Hatshepshut, which has been prettied up some, Rita snorts, “Y’know, I think it’s Egon’s fake pharaohs that make me hate money.”

I’m sufficiently drunk to skip the
oh, so you hate money
response and go on to suggest that maybe inherited money corrupts and she says no, institutional money corrupts; she knows this from working in universities. “First they start out with, they think, principles. This money is going to cure AIDS, solve poverty, educate kids, and then in three years they’re dithering around with godawful fake art or fake cures or ghastly publicity. Look at Studly and his world-shaking discoveries.”

Something in her voice makes me say, “You’ve done okay, Rita. How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.”

Only thirteen years older than me. “You’ve done great.”

“Scott’s a year older and look at him.”

“Quit thinking like that. Think about you.” I don’t ask how she’s feeling lately with her depression. She seems to be managing okay.

Rita says, and maybe it’s a non sequitur, “I think in a way he really loved that bitch. I mean, like, it was easy to be fascinated by her, so I’m not sure.”

We stare down at the beach and watch the waves. “It does something to you, y’know?” she says. “That rhythm. It replicates the human heartbeat.”

“What happened to Danielle?” I ask after a while of listening to the waves thump. “Do you know where she is now?”

Rita shrugs. “I heard she was at the Luxor Museum. She’s the kind who always lands on her feet.”

Chapter 10

It’s evening, and I am out in front of the residence, washed and scrubbed for my outing with Scott.

His car is a red convertible. Of course, it’s a rental, since his home now is at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut. “Since last September,” he says as he helps me into the BMW. “A weird place to live—crowded, dangerous, slummy, elitist. And boy, was I excited to get there.”

“Well, Yale,” I agree. “Pretty okay.”

“In my wildest. The answer to every farm boy’s dream.”

“You’re not a farm boy.”

“Oh, but I am.”

We have already turned onto Highway One and are zipping along with the ocean off to our left, below some cliffs. “I grew up milking cows in Pennsylvania.”

I don’t pursue this. Scott’s aura makes me want to argue and question. I don’t really have any reason to assume, as I’m doing, that the farm he means is the one with the eighteenth-century stone house and barn and fifty-five acres of graded woodland inherited from dear old Grandpa who got it from his dear old Revolutionary-hero ancestor.

“Why were you so mean to Rita?” I ask.

“Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Well, why?” Which is none of my business.

“Reet and I go way back.”

“I guess. That’s not really an excuse.”

He seems to brood for a minute, capably managing oceanside highway curves. He drives too fast, as you’d expect. Finally he says, “People that know each other well . . .” And he warms up into a lecture about familiarity dulling the edge of perception and forgetting about the sensibilities of someone you know well and so on. It’s not exactly blather since he does some quoting of experts and a paragraph or so of dipping into psychology texts. After which, at the end of a sharp, rock-enclosed hairpin, he expels a loud breath. “Hey. Another lecture. I do that too much, don’t I?”

I mutter uh-huh and he says, “Anyway, Reet was mean to me sometimes, too.”

I can believe that, all right.

I decide he’s been pretty good so far about turning the other cheek on my Rita-bashing accusations. A red-and-white highway placard tells us we’ve almost arrived at Conestoga. I open up my other subject—the Thebes one. “And you were a cluster—a set. Everybody that’s around now. Marcus Broussard, too. That’s when he really got interested in Egyptian archaeology.”

“Marcus was interested in everything. He was a wild man. Everything that came along. Wanted to be it and do it. Interesting as hell. I hated his guts.

“But,” he adds, pulling into the Best Western’s parking lot, “I didn’t kill him. If anybody did. Do we know yet?”

“He’s dead, all right.”

“Okay, but did somebody make him be dead? Or just the old heart again?”

“Earlier, you said internal bleeding.”

“Did I? Boy, what presumption.” He holds out his arm for me to emerge from the Beemer, which hugs the ground and is hard to get out of.

 
 
The Welcome Bar at the Conestoga Best Western has a Western theme. Conestoga is a hamlet of, the sign says, 412 people, and the Best Western Bar is the only entertainment for thirty miles in all directions.

A cowboy boot outlined in red neon overhangs the bar; below it is a red neon message, HELLO PARDNER. Boot-shaped glass doohickies to hold peanuts are lined up along the bar counter. The rest of the scene is too dark and too red for other thematic touches to show, but I know they’re there. I waste a minute being inwardly snide about the way this Texas motif has been mercilessly dumped on an innocent California landscape.

Really, I’m feeling snide about arriving here with Scott, who is acting okay. But as if he’s discreetly triumphant. “I told myself this would work out.”

“What would work out?” I ask.

“Our date.” He stands away from me. I’ve just handed my coat to a hatcheck person. “
Great
dress.”

It’s a dark blue sheath that I inherited from my Habitat roommate, who was a South Carolina pork heiress. They grow a lot of pigs in the South.

I debated wearing this outfit tonight; it’s far too dressy for the Best Western. I guess I wanted to impress Scott.

“You know you look sort of Egyptian?” he asks.

“Right. Angular, one-eyed, and all profile.”

He ignores this. “There’s a gawky grace they get sometimes in those drawings. The ones of dancers. Long arms and long legs.”

I could add a few witty remarks here about backbends and no clothes, but I don’t. The room is very noisy and dark, and as we hover at the door, they dim the lights to even darker. Scott, who has been leaning against the hatcheck stand, takes my arm; we follow a sequined person wearing a cowboy hat toward a table. I stare up at Scott, wondering if the compliment really is a compliment, and decide that it is. Those dancing houris are graceful. If just a tad uncoordinated-looking.

“What’ll it be?” Scott shouts over the noise, nudging my chair toward a postage-stamp-sized table.

My usual drink is red wine, but I’ve decided to be ridiculous tonight. I’ll try Rita’s recipe from the other night. “Vodka, brandy chaser.”

He thinks he hasn’t heard and brings his head closer. “Say what?”

I repeat my order and we do an act where he says, “You jest,” and calls me “Lady Blues,” and I say that no, I do not jest, all of this delivered in minishouts, because a small orchestra is warming up, in honor of which the lights are muffled some more to the point where I can barely see my fingernails.

He tries again. I think he says, “You can’t be serious.”

“No, that’s it.” There’s a pause while he asks something else, and I realize I’m supposed to be specific. “Smirnoff and cherry brandy. Any brand.”

He shouts, “Oh, cut it out,” and I shout, “No, I mean it,” and he shouts, “Shit,” and gives the order.

We’re off to a good start. Cherry brandy is one of the most awful drinks there is. I’ll have to carry it away into the restroom, or something.

That about finishes it for the conversation, at least for the time being, because the band has hotted up and has started playing, in dirgelike tempo, something that I think is “Sentimental Journey.” And the lights, in tribute to the music, have been turned down to nada. It’s impossible to talk and almost impossible to see each other, should anybody want to communicate in sign language.

Our drinks arrive. The waitress must have echolocation, to get around in this shrouded room. I taste my brandy. Oh, God. Why am I doing any of this?

When Scott touches my wrist and gestures in the direction of the dance floor, I agree right away.

The band is still dragging itself through “Sentimental Journey.” Slow and with lots of beat.

Scott’s hand around mine feels pretty sure of itself. He leads us successfully on a pathway through tables and out into an apparently free space where we start to move.

He’s a good dancer, with a sturdy, energized body. He finds the right place in my back, and doesn’t hold me too hard. It’s been a long time since I danced like this, face-to-face, fifties style. I’m able to do all the stuff, breaking and coming back, at first in pitch dark. That’s fun, too. Finding a skill you didn’t know you had is always ego-boosting. Then I guess somebody in the really bad orchestra notices us, or maybe it’s the lights person; anyway, suddenly we have a spotlight on us and we’re doing an exhibition.

The orchestra saws its way out of “Sentimental Journey” and starts on “I Love Paris.” Scott and Carla do three minutes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The house lights come on; there’s a lot of applause. “Wow,” I say.

We’re leaving the floor, with me trying to look modest. “Somebody’s waving,” Scott says.

I say, “Oh, yeah. Of course.”