Long Shot (33 page)

She had a flash of him lifting a bottle of beer to toast the moment, grinning from ear to ear. It was one of Jasper's stubborn notions that people shouldn't get so worked up over owning land, when the land paid no attention. No mention ever made of his own baronial holdings. If he didn't exactly wish for calamitous times, still, he went into a state of alert whenever they came to pass. Word of a flood or brush fire sharpened his grasp of the world around him. He'd watch the night sky and keep an ear cocked, as if to wait for the aftershock. Vivien didn't pretend to understand, but she saw now just how well it suited the haunted edge he walked. After all, he had slipped away as he swore he would, to the bottom of the ocean.

The fans outside the gates had missed him more than she, those first few days. This was because she was busy coming down out of thin air. As long as there was someone else to play at it with, stardom was the perfect place to live. Safe as a bulletproof dome, it rode out fires and slides and all the shifts of the earth but fashion. An open ticket went with it, booked to the ends of the earth. But then, at a single stroke—or two or three, whatever it took to slit the wrists—she had no mirror image up there with her anymore. For days she battled the sense of having arrived from outer space. Like somebody cursed with highborn blood in a country torn apart by revolution, trying to pass unnoticed in a peasant skirt and shawl.

Still, the more she walked, the more she saw that grief was not just tears. It was more like a series of explorations, having to do with everyone else and how they all got by. She must have passed a hundred houses, looking in vain for signs of life, before she caught on to the way they were built. Turned in on themselves like sleeping dogs and shut of the street entirely. Vivien had always thought that only the
really
rich could live in a fortified camp. Now she saw that everyone put up walls who could afford it. They locked themselves in to live as they pleased.

And the reason she knew it was this: A widow was a spy.

She crossed Sunset, but not at a corner, bringing three cars to a halt. Then she made her way into the hills, where the shadows were later still and the green grown deep as ink. A fondness for desert islands notwithstanding, she knew she wasn't the type to simply chuck it. She wasn't out to find a lonely pond to live by. What she needed to ascertain was how much of the world she walked in she could bring home. Was there some sort of quota, like at customs? The road ahead was not just clumps of roses, after all, nor anything so specific as a load of blood-red berries she could tie up in a scarf. It was everything else but the self out here, and nothing to keep it straight but the way one walked.

She had Greg to deal with too, of course. She couldn't pinpoint when it was she knew for sure, but early on, before Vermont. By some fortuitous cross of planets, she'd found another mirror image before the week was out, just when she'd begun to see she had to live without it.

She'd gone after Greg, from the start, on the hunch that he liked to breeze around as much as she. She guessed he had a secret yen to discover what else was out there. They might have turned out to be perfectly matched. More than anything else, she longed to have someone along when she took off for places unknown. She needed the sort who had a higher calling than going to frivolous cities and powder-white beaches. They would go after things off the normal route: Angkor Wat, Stonehenge, Walden. Turreted, whitewashed monasteries high on the sides of cliffs, accessible only by donkey. Painted caves. Mosques.

As if there could be no boundaries. They had more money to get them there than the world had ways to make things inaccessible.

In the end, she'd had to stop herself. She had no right to take him over. It began to seem the only way to keep them equal was apart. Without a thing like the murder spinning out between them, they'd be lost. They were too much alike, too full of opinions, to be satisfied having each other to tea. They weren't the sort who could be seen just twice a year. Better to break it clean, without any sop like Christmas cards, or the invitation now and again to parties on the lawn. If it turned out even Greg was something of a phase—bound to be gotten through, hell or high water—then it had to be said that he read like
Walden
, no less vast for the time allowed.

Out of nowhere, she came to an overgrown fork. There weren't any smartly lettered signs to label the dead-end streets at either hand. They were all full of last year's leaves and the ruck of storms. The shrubbery twisting up on every side grew twice as tall as she, so thick with growth it could have been made of stone. She'd stumbled into a cul-de-sac where three estates backed up. A narrow little warren of service roads that had fallen into disuse with the rise of the new breed of servants, who arrived by the front door.

The gardeners didn't bother tidying it up, treating it rightly as no-man's-land. The city's spiffy street machine, with its four-foot brushes and vacuum ducts, couldn't make it this far into the bush. It was the Beverly Hills equivalent of an alley. Though the amber light of the westering sun still tipped the tops of the trees with gold, it had no further say down here in the deeply shadowed lane. An evening chill had started up. A mountain breeze went riffling through and stirred little twisters among the leaves. There wasn't a human sound.

All right, she was lost.

She did not have far to go to get found. It wasn't as if the trail behind her couldn't be traced right back to the canyon road from which it split. She was only four blocks north of Sunset. But that was all beside the point. She was in a most didactic frame of mind, such that it pleased her to think she was heeding Whitworth's best advice about getting off the beaten track. She sat on an egg-shaped rock to take the measure of the place. Wrapping her arms about her knees, she sniffed the forest air. A bird she couldn't see was singing in the hedges.

She realized that if she tunneled through to the close-clipped yards on the other side, there was better than half a chance she'd know these houses instantly. It only made the moment more delicious. If the fantasy that went with fame was the thought of hiding out in the open—under the public's noses—this took it one step further. A person could still get lost in the places he knew too well.

She studied the bed of leaves about her feet—all coral, russet, here and there shredded as fine as tobacco. A half-eaten orange lay gutted a few feet off, with two bees combing it over. Close by that, someone had flattened a Coors can with his heel, as if to let her see she was not the first. She spied all this with a neutral eye—an eye gone neutral just today, from an overload of seeing. Nothing here wanted the slightest anticipation, human or otherwise.

Things simply happened. A fox-red squirrel ran out of the bushes, saw her, screeched to a halt, and turned tail. He was gone in a moment, absorbed once more by the scenery. Yet she knew more then about squirrels, just from that, than she'd managed to pick up in thirty-two years. She didn't doubt they had them by the hundreds, roaming the hills round Steepside. But who ever got right down and saw them, with all those windows looking out to China?

She knew what people were going to say. When they saw her starting over, venturing out once more to the main event of the week, they'd assume the convenient thing right off: Vivien Cokes was herself again. A little sadder about the eyes—a fraction less inclined, perhaps, to turn toward the camera. She was the only one who'd ever know there'd been any change at all.

Or to put it another way, the only change they'd look out for now was the one they would hold against her: the business of getting old. Her public image served as a kind of camouflage for all that had befallen her. Her going home would be a snap, compared to how it was for poor Thoreau. The townsmen of Concord, seeing him in their midst again, would have spread the word like lightning: The experiment had failed. They must have been lightheaded with relief, to find that a man couldn't last forever in a cabin on Walden Pond.

But the cabin on Walden Pond, she thought, could last forever in him. It was more or less what Greg had tried to tell her. Walden wasn't a place so much as a thing you carried in your head. Well, yes and no. You could look at it that way, certainly, but only once you'd done it. You couldn't get it out of a book. It had to be
gone
through, start to finish. Dead of night to midday.

She decided to wait for dark before going on any farther. She hadn't sat to rest like this in months. Could it be it was just two weeks ago—it seemed a hundred years—that she took a last swim in the waters off Bermuda, late at night? From there to here was a lifetime. After all, she hadn't planned on bumping into that old bucket on the wall. Hadn't meant to go back to the house, nor to ride away with Carl. She would only own up to it now, in the twilight hush that filled this minuscule square of wilderness, that what she planned to do that night was not come back at all.

She'd crossed the earth to the last safe place she knew, the coral sea at Harrington Sound, with the thought of swimming out to the open water. One way only. Something drew her back—she felt it—some small detail unimportant as the taste for a feast of clams.

When she found out Jasper beat her to it—
drowned
, for God's sake—she no longer had the heart. Once the story swept her up and sent her home to widow, she could not seem to recover the one still point in time She began to make these judgments, moving forward, staring at life with a kind of second sight. She assigned the world its qualities as she saw them, on the spot. There was no end to what she noticed.

The hedges were tight as a tapestry. The sky was still a certain blue, though now, as the day cooled down, grown milky as a pearl. A pair of crickets had started up, and they swept each other like radar. A palm frond lay like a plume on a nearby pile of leaves. The dusky breeze was winter dry, and it seemed so light as to hardly be able to blow the hair across her face.

One hand trailed about in the dirt beside the rock. She sifted and brought up close a couple of brackish seed pods—full of chance like a pair of dice. She bit into a seed and did not wince when it juiced out sour and slimy. She smacked her lips and tried to place it. Classed it among the fruits and nuts. Then wondered what it cured.

As if stuff like this—the merest shit in the road—could bring the dead to life again.

chapter 8

ALL THE WAY HOME
from the airport, jouncing around in the back of a ruined taxi, Greg planned to spend the evening up to his eyeballs in junk. He'd had his fill of nuance for a while. Though he knew there would be a week's mail waiting in a pile, he meant to pick it over quickly, looking out for the tawdriest magazine in the bunch. He would leaf it through till a scandal caught his fancy, then prop it up on the kitchen counter and read it as he ate his way through a stack of jelly sandwiches.

By way of weightier matter, he had the semiliterate memoirs of a starlet tramp on his night stand. He'd already gotten up to World War II before he left. He would doze over that till eleven, whereupon he would flick through the late-night movies, going with the lowliest feature he could find. He sent up a silent prayer for the likes of Veronica Lake.

But, as it turned out, he only got as far as smearing currant jelly edge to edge on a slice of bread when the doorbell rang. It did no good to wait it out. He'd let them take the spare key, so they could go on working while he was away. They'd be damned if they weren't going to use it one last time. The bell was only a warning, really, rather as if a play were about to start.
The Man Who Came to Dinner
, say.

“We had a feeling you were home,” said Edna Temple, swinging through the kitchen door. “Didn't I say so, Sidney?”

Sid was only a beat of the swinging door behind her. He said nothing at first, but made a beeline across the kitchen, where he put the light on under the kettle to make himself some tea.

“We didn't do shit, the last few days,” he said with a measure of pride. “Mostly, we sat by the pool and got drunk. Did we get a nice tan, do you think?”

“Oh, Sid,” she said, “can't you tell he's not impressed?
He's
been swimming off yachts.”

He'd been gone a whole week, he realized, without once being spoken of in the third person. Or not in this particular way, while he was right there in the room.

“He'll refuse to go out on the roof with us,” predicted Edna, nudging Sid. “Now that he's seen the real thing, he's never gonna be satisfied with Mickey Mouse again”

Perhaps, Greg thought as he chewed his bread and jelly, it wasn't the packaged brand of junk he needed—scandal sheets and best-seller trash. The normal run of disconnections trailing in Sid and Edna's wake was more the ticket here.

“Come on,” he said, “we'll go out and eat. We'll charge it up to the company.”

“But I'm not dressed,” protested Edna, hugging her peachy wrapper close about her.

“We already ate four times today,” said Sid, as he took a medicinal slurp of his tea.

“She caught up with you, did she?” Edna asked, getting right down to business.

Greg could sense the glimmer of something separate here, as between two women alone. He understood that Vivien Cokes wasn't his exclusive preserve, nor a secret he need keep. He should have been glad to be off the hook, but he wasn't. He was too tied up with making sure nobody got the wrong idea.

“She met me at Carbon Mountain,” he said, as though it were under the chapel clock. Perhaps he was being too cautious. These two were surely the last to wonder where it was all going to lead between him and Vivien.
They
knew the way the wind blew. Yet he felt an edge of caution creeping in. “We did research,” he added lamely.

“Well—who did it?” Sid asked bluntly, cutting through all the red tape.

“It's got to be one or the other,” Greg replied, as he rooted through a drawer to find an opener. He had a bottle of Dr. Pepper in one hand. He wasn't remotely thirsty, but it gave him something to do. “It's either Carl or Artie,” he announced.