Love Always (2 page)

The record of the sounds of the sea had ended, and Maureen went onto the porch and turned it over. She lowered the needle back onto the edge of the record. She sat in one of the wicker rockers and stretched her legs: they were long and golden, recently
waxed. The Korean woman who waxed her legs, patting on the warm wax with a little wooden paddle, spoke no English, except to say, in unison with Maureen, “ouch.” Noonan joined her on the back porch. “I also look through people’s medicine cabinets,” he said, “although I guess that’s common. I like to know about people’s secret pains.”

The student with the videotape machine walked onto the back porch, camera grinding away. Maureen and Noonan both looked as if they had been caught at something. It infuriated Maureen: this was what Hildon thought was no intrusion? She put her hand up in front of her face. Carrying the camera on his shoulder, without comment, the boy crouched slightly and moved into the house. He was like a soldier in slow motion, creeping through enemy territory.

“Tomorrow I’m going to give Hildon the big news, but I’ll give it to you first,” Noonan said. “I got another job. I’m going to be working for a paper in San Francisco. It excites me,” he said. “It excites me to talk about a lot of things, but I’ve always exercised restraint. I’m a very uptight person. I’m not going to be that way once I get to San Francisco. I want to be truthful from here on out. I told you about the cheese. I’ll tell you what’s in your medicine cabinet, too: Dalmane, patent medicine, Valium, and Tylenol with codeine.”

“Noonan,” she said, “I’ll tell you something. The people you work with wouldn’t be surprised to hear you saying these things. ‘Murky’ is the word they often use. They think you’re murky.” Waves lapped at the shore.

“I was surprised that Hildon took Valium,” Noonan said.

“He was having periodontal work done.”

“You’re protecting your husband. I like that. That’s a good thing about heterosexuals—that they stick together. Fags move on like flies when they smell meat.”

“That’s pretty awful, Noonan. Do you feel that bad about yourself?”

“Yes,” he said. “It excites me to talk about it. It excites me to be honest.”

Another car pulled into the driveway. It was Cameron Petrus, one of Man’s reporters. Cameron had come here from
Boston, after having a heart attack at thirty. He had recently taken up javelin throwing. Ever since his wife left him, he had been giving Lucy Spenser the eye. Cameron had on gray jeans that made his legs look like tree trunks. The bright green fishnet shirt he wore made him look even more like a tree. She said hello to him when she went out to the backyard.

The food had been disappearing fast. The whole crowd really liked to eat and drink. They were laughing and bobbing in and out of groups; in their bright summer colors they reminded her of voracious, exotic birds. At the edge of the lawn, Lucy Spenser and the girl who had been too drunk to remember her phone number had linked arms and were doing a chorus line kick for the camera. Suddenly the boy began to turn, slowly, as if a pedestal rotated beneath him. He panned the crowd. Maureen found herself stiffening, trying to appear picture perfect. She would probably be the one who looked like a fool, not Lucy, who had kicked off her shoes and who was now talking to another couple, her mop of hair thrown forward, doubled up so that her forehead almost touched her legs. The girl she had been kicking her legs with was talking to Nigel again. Hildon went over and joined their group, pouring wine into Nigel’s glass. The boy continued videotaping. He turned the camera on her, and Maureen raised her hand again.

“This is the best party I’ve been to all summer,” Cameron Petrus said.

“Summer’s hardly started, Cameron.”

“Your party certainly is the official beginning of summer, to my mind,” Cameron said. “What an evening. Look at those clouds off on the horizon. Simply wonderful.”

Cameron was so boring that it almost drove her mad. Apparently he had only two modes: the violently aggressive way he acted when he interviewed people and the mindlessly polite way he was now, ready to sink in the quicksand of his own small talk.

“You’re looking very lovely tonight,” Cameron said. “Thank you,” she said.

“I had some of those spiced shrimp a minute ago. Did you make them yourself?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You really do know how to give a party,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Say,” he said, “I hear it’s going to be good weather on the Fourth.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

“It’s a relief,” he said.

Noonan joined them. One large shrimp was curved over the edge of his wine glass. He dunked it in the wine and ate it.

“May I join the conversation?” he said.

“Cameron was just saying that it’s supposed to be good weather on the Fourth,” Maureen said.

Across the lawn, Matt Smith choked while he was laughing. A woman Maureen had never seen before patted him on the back.

“You know where he got all his money?” Cameron Petrus said. “His great-great-grandfather or some ancestor of the great-great-grandfather invented the jump rope.”

“The jump rope?” Noonan said.

“Wooden handles,” Cameron Petrus said, spreading his arms as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. He twirled his arms and jumped on his toes.

Hildon was walking the length of the large table, lighting citronella candles. Two of the writers were stretched out on the lawn, arm wrestling. The woman standing with Matt Smith dropped her glass and jumped back as the wine splashed. Maureen looked around. A year before, the party had been in a big canvas tent. She had worn a toga. She had served pita bread and hummus. It had rained on the Fourth of July. Two days later she had been on the phone, ordering a set of glasses from the Horchow collection, when she suddenly felt blood soaking her pants, and miscarried, without having known she was pregnant.

T
HE
day after the party, the heat came on so suddenly that the Green Mountains almost disappeared in the haze. Lucy Spenser sat in the grass, on her side lawn, feeling a little sorry for herself. This had been the time, five years ago, that Les Whitehall had gotten a job teaching in Vermont once they had moved here. He had been gone for a year, though the mailbox on the road across from the house was still marked Spenser/Whitehall. It had caught her eye as she returned from her morning walk, and suddenly she had felt the heat, the flies seemed to buzz louder and to be more persistent, and the air seemed as dense as icing.

Since Les had taken off, she hadn’t figured out how to get her life going again. It was not that the two of them had had specific plans that had been interrupted, but that when he left she realized that she had lived so long without thinking of the future that now it was difficult to imagine what she should do. There was really no routine to her life except that once a week Hildon drove to her house to pick up the column. It still amazed her that her oldest friend had started a magazine on the $50,000 profit he had made selling land, and that it had become so successful that it had just been bought by a corporation.

Hildon was quite up front about telling his friends that the magazine’s success was proof positive that the entire country was coked-out. Hundreds of readers wrote in every month—readers who had caught the slightest, trendiest in-jokes. Unsolicited manuscripts rolled in that were either works of such quality that Swift must have rolled over in his grave or suitable evidence of mass psychosis. Thousands of people had filled out
a request form, in the last issue, to have the psychmobile come to their houses. This was one of Hildon’s new concepts; it was modeled on the idea of the bookmobile, but instead of books to check out, there was a staff of psychologists to evaluate people’s mental condition and see whether they should be checked in.

But Lucy’s column was the biggest success, and it had been from the first. She was, as Cindi Coeur, a Latter-Day Miss Lonelyhearts, and the picture that accompanied her column showed her with hair romantically disheveled, eyes wide (presumably with wisdom), and a smile that, coupled with hair and eyes, might have suggested après l’amour, tristesse. The beatific smile was actually après $125 a gram.

These days, Lucy did the column straight—if you could call making up the questions and writing the answers on pieces of pink stationery she had her mother send her from John Wanamaker in Philadelphia and using a fountain pen with lavender ink doing it straight. Lately, Lucy had been thinking that maybe it was time to stop. Just because Jagger was still popping up like a jack-in-the-box, did she really want to be Cindi Coeur at forty? Still, Lucy herself admitted to a morbid fascination with being facile.

The phone rang in the kitchen and Lucy got up to answer it. It was her sister, Jane, calling from California. Jane’s calls were always a sidestep from whatever she was doing. She would call someone, clamp the phone between shoulder and ear, then become so involved in painting her nails or doing leg stretches that when the phone was answered, it caught her off-guard.

“Oh. Hello,” Jane said.

“Hi,” Lucy said.

“I set my alarm,” Jane said. “I wanted to be sure to catch you. It’s seven o’clock here.” She sounded offended, as if Lucy had arranged for it to be early morning on the West Coast.

“What’s up?” Lucy said.

What was usually up was something involving Jane’s daughter, Nicole.

“Nicole’s blue,” Jane said. “Piggy was trying to set up a spot for her on
Saturday Night Live
, and it fell through. Then you know that gorilla that she liked so much—the one they put in a sailor suit, that she stood next to on the deck of the QE
2
for
Vogue
? He just died of pneumonia. I sent a contribution to the San Diego Zoo.”

For the last two years, Nicole Nelson had appeared on
Passionate Intensity
as Stephanie Sykes, an abused child from a broken family, a teenage alcoholic who was being rehabilitated by a woman internist and her husband, Gerald, a wimpy would-be novelist who felt misunderstood not only by his wife but by the world. The woman internist, who secretly subjected herself to experimental surgery to correct sterility, then found out that she could conceive. She faced the dilemma of whether to divorce her husband, who was at last working on his novel, to have a child with her true love, another doctor at the hospital, thereby disrupting the family routine she had established that had put young Stephanie on the road to recovery, or to settle for what she now realized was probably the correct thing: a childless marriage. This was also complicated
by the fact that her husband’s sister, a volunteer worker at the hospital who had always envied her sister-in-law and who had had a brief affair with the same doctor, was now considering blackmail, wanting to force her sister-in-law into the dull routine of motherhood with the wrong man, so that she could make the handsome doctor who would be left behind fall in love with her again. The further complication was that when his wife’s wealthy benefactor died, the wimpy husband had buckled down long enough to put his wife through the last two years of medical school. The day of her graduation, he had had a mental breakdown and, when he was recovering, a brief affair with a woman who worked in the lab. Then he had at last gotten an advance for his book,
Barren, a
fictionalized account of his and his wife’s failure to have children. What no one but the doctor/lover knew was that Stephanie Sykes was pregnant and begging the doctor to abort her. What even the doctor did not realize was that his lover’s husband’s ex-lover, the woman who worked in the lab, had found out that Stephanie was pregnant. She was anti-abortion, and if the doctor performed the surgery, she was going to go to the wimpy novelist and let him know what a farce his happy family life was, in hopes of getting him herself.

“Nicole needs a vacation. I want to send her to you,” Jane said.

“She’d be bored to death,” Lucy said. “You know what happens here? In the late afternoon the cows walk into the field.”