Love Always (34 page)

“What do you mean you’re going to Boston?” she said.

“For a while,” he said. He chewed his bottom lip. She was still looking at him. “I’m going to move there for a while,” he said. She still stared. “Get out of the house,” he said, lamely.

It was such an off-the-wall explanation that it made her laugh. “Hildon,” she said, “if you ever decide you want to explain
all this to me, come over or give me a call. I’ve got to get back to Nicole.”

“Don’t be self-righteous,” he said softly, and bit his lip.

“Hildon,” she said, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying today, including that last remark. Would you mind driving me home? I have things to do.”

He stared straight ahead. The child and the dog walked through his line of vision. He looked at the sun, which had just come out strong, shining on the blue roof that Lucy loved. “I’ve never been closer to anyone than I am to you,” he said, “yet I’m able to just leave.”

“I seem to be quite an inspiration to people in that way,” Lucy said. “Think of me as Tintern Abbey.”

“Don’t turn it against yourself,” he said. “I hate it when you do that.”

“Take me home,” she said. “I’m really upset.”

“I know you are,” he said. He touched the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it on. “You’re going to get mad at me for saying it,” he said, “but shit kickers don’t go through stuff like this. They don’t introspect.”

“I didn’t realize we were being introspective. I’d say that what I am is baffled.”

“Cindi Coeur?” Hildon said.

“I’m not Cindi Coeur.”

“I know,” he said. “So it was such a peculiar thing for us both to arrive at. That everything was such a joke.”

“You don’t think that most of the time and neither do I. We never have.”

“Hey, Lucy!” a man hollered.

There was one other car at the overlook. Andrew Steinborn and Lillian were there, still trying to decide what to do about their marriage plans. She wanted time to think. He wanted them to get a blood test and get married immediately. So far, the only compromise that had been agreed upon was that however the afternoon turned out, they would go out that night to a fancy restaurant, for an expensive dinner with wine. Andrew Steinborn leaned out of his window, waving madly.

“Who’s that?” Hildon said. “It’s a man who’s writing a book, actually.” Andrew continued to wave, shouting something Lucy couldn’t hear.

“Shit,” she said. “Just a second.”

She opened the door and began to walk across the gravel. Cars passed on the highway. Hildon could tell, watching her walk, that she was depressed. There was no spring in her step, no toss of the long hair. He opened his own door to go with her. The grocery bag tipped over and several potatoes rolled across the seat. In a hurry to catch up, he threw two back in the bag and leaned in to straighten it, saw another potato on the pavement and picked it up and put it in the pocket of his denim jacket. When he caught up with Lucy, she had already greeted the people in the car.

“We’re getting married,” Andrew said. “Isn’t it the perfect day to decide that? We knew it before, actually, but sitting here, looking out …”

“We’re thinking about it,” the woman sitting next to Andrew said, leaning across his lap. Lucy smiled and nodded. She introduced Hildon.

“A fellow writer,” Andrew said. “I am very, very glad to meet you. Lillian and I were reading your wonderful magazine out on the lawn at the inn the other evening. A very good, very unique piece of work.”

“Thank you,” Hildon said.

“He just quit,” Lucy said.

“You’re leaving?” Andrew said.

“He’s moving to Boston,” Lucy said. “He wants to get out of the house.”

Lillian straightened up and sat waiting for the conversation to end. A big, shiny convertible careened around the half-circle, radio blaring James Taylor and Carly Simon singing “Mockingbird.” Hildon put his arm around Lucy’s shoulder instinctively as the car made the turn. Kids, out having a joy ride.

“Good luck with your wedding,” Hildon said.

“I’m going to need it if my fiancée keeps these cold feet,” Andrew said nervously.

“You’ll get a sign,” Hildon said. “I’m a great believer in mystical revelations.”

“What do you mean?” Andrew said.

“A signal. A bolt of lightning will flash. Something will tell you.”

“Oh,” Andrew said. He looked uncomfortable. Hildon leaned forward. “Stay posted,” he said to Lillian. He raised a hand to say goodbye. Lucy smiled. As they turned away, Lucy could see Andrew stiffening. Hildon took his hand out of his pocket and dropped the car keys. As he bent to pick them up, he took out the potato and jammed it into Andrew’s tail pipe.

“What in the name of God are you doing?” Lucy whispered.

“Come on,” he said, his hand on her back, steering her toward his car. “There’s going to be a major explosion when that guy drives off.”

In the car, with Lucy laughing into her hands, he said, as he turned on his own ignition, “You don’t know that trick? You a goddamn stupid
girl
or something?”

As they pulled out, she looked happier. It had passed—for the moment, the tension between them eased up. He hadn’t had to bog down in all the details he didn’t have the desire, or the heart, to go into today.

For the next minute, as the clouds rolled in front of the sun, she was still smiling: Hildon could sniff a jackass a mile away. She liked his nerve. She liked his sense of humor. She depended on him for that—if nothing more tangible; she could not imagine what her life would be like if he went to Boston, and because she knew he knew this, she didn’t think he would really do it. He meant to, though. What he had not had to come right out and say to her was that he was a coward—that it was not only in being a prankster that he was still a schoolboy.

He dropped her off, and she went in carrying the groceries. The Mylar balloons had begun to deflate; if she looked quickly, the tree now looked like a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture. Nicole, whom she said she had to get back to, was nowhere in
sight. She was always gone—jogging into town when she didn’t have Lucy drop her off after they did errands. It worried Lucy that she was overly concerned with physical fitness. She thought that Nicole was grieving; she had no way of imagining what way Nicole had found to deal with her mother’s death. Lucy began to unpack the grocery bag, on the verge of tears: things to be wrapped, washed, put away—it was so ordinary, life’s continuation, so banal it was painful. She heard Nicole suddenly. She had not gone off after all; she was upstairs, bathing.

A few minutes after she heard the water begin to drain, Lucy walked upstairs. Nicole was in her robe—Piggy’s robe, embroidered PP, that she had always coveted and that he had given her in L.A. She was sitting in front of the desk that she had fashioned into a dressing table, a three-paneled glass mirror hung above it, with photographs of herself scotch-taped to the border. It was much like the desk that had metamorphosed into an all-purpose treasure trove for Jane, years ago, when she lived in the tiny apartment in New York City.

“Hi,” Nicole said, as Lucy walked into the room. The robe was huge; she looked anorectic inside it, a little child lost in a satin tent.

“Let me do that,” Lucy said, taking the brush from Nicole and beginning to slowly brush her hair, from the very front to the very back, sensing where the hairline began instead of looking in the mirror to see, gently pulling the brush, over and over.

“Thanks,” Nicole said, relaxing in spite of herself. She was remembering the day St. Francis ran away, the day of Les’s visit, when Lucy told her that things were complicated. She wanted to sit and have Lucy brush her hair, but she was late already. Harry Woods had the afternoon off, and if she didn’t get to his apartment in time, he would go off with one of his friends instead of waiting around to go to bed with her. If she didn’t blow it—if she let Lucy feel helpful, and if she herself enjoyed the hair-brushing—it would all work out. She was glad that she had better survival skills than her mother. That she understood how to be patient. Her mouth turned up in a
smile, as if the slight tug of the brush through her hair moved her mouth as well as her neck, which was now tipped back, hair spilling over the back of the chair.

Lucy had brushed Jane’s hair—brushed it so often that their mother complained that it made it oily and that then Jane had to wash it too often. In truth, Lucy loved to brush more than Jane liked the feel of it. She had always hoped to hypnotize Jane, mesmerize her. She remembered how frustrating it was when Jane abruptly struggled to sit up and get on with other things. “Sit still,” she could remember saying, half pleading with her sister. “Let me brush your hair. Stay still.” Whispering urgently, “Stay still, Jane. Just stay still.”

T
HE
boy wondered if, after he finished this assignment, Hildon would call him again. When he had videotaped three things for someone, he considered him a steady customer. He stood in one spot in Hildon’s office for the most part, taping Hildon as he took the pictures off the wall and stacked them in a carton. The boy’s father and mother were crazy about
Country Daze
. He had never read it, but he thought that Hildon was probably a very good editor. In his experience, crazy people who fixated on something accomplished a lot. If he had thought it was any of his business, he would have asked Hildon why he was leaving. For most of the summer he had taped weddings—recording drunken relatives and red-eyed brides and hovering grooms in large tents or on green rolling lawns, moving through crowds while infants had their diapers changed behind bushes and panting dogs stuck their snouts in fat ladies’ crotches. Everyone always got drunk and clowned for the camera, or made fools of themselves by accident, trying to straighten up and act proper, but managing only to lurch around like passengers on the deck of a ship in a storm. The boy insisted on two-thirds payment up front, because there had been some tense times when people didn’t like what they saw. It was as if they thought they’d hired Renoir but gotten footage from the Maysles’.

The boy would not have to edit the tape. Hildon didn’t want it edited. He let almost everything be filmed the way the boy thought best, except for telling him about the few things he wanted him to come in on close, such as the contents of his top drawer, a pan of the desk top … Though Hildon wasn’t very
talkative, he had said that he loved video because it allowed people to make their own time capsule.

He stepped closer. Through the lens, he saw the clutter of the top drawer: the bright red of a Swiss Army knife, some wrinkled dollar bills, new ones, quite green, like uncurling Jack-in-the-Pulpits that pushed out of the ground in the spring. Loose change, a checkbook, some SX 70s, a wooden letter opener. Junk.

Hildon took a break from packing and stood looking out the window. The boy filmed his back until that got boring, then moved the camera to the coffee table, littered with more things: a pile of magazines, a bottle of vitamins, a stone statue of what looked like an Eskimo woman with a glass ashtray balanced on top. The boy moved in on it. For a second his hand was a blur in front of the lens, while he figured out how the ashtray was balanced. It was glued. There were matchbooks thrown on the table, a squeeze bottle of Cutter, an extension cord, and pens pointing every which way, like pick-up sticks. He moved the camera back to Hildon as he pulled the telephone out of the jack and put it in the carton with the pictures. He filmed him taking the books out of the bookcase and stacking them on the desk, then looking around for something to put them in. Through the lens, everything on the desk top took on a sameness: the brass box looked very much like the silver compass, which in turn looked very much like the paperweight. What the boy took to be a picture of Hildon’s wife was Lucy Spenser—a picture taken the summer before at a town fair. He focused on that for a while, because he was sure that it had more sentimental value than, say, the metal ruler, or the dictionary.

He photographed Hildon from the top of the stairs, holding the camera on him as he walked gingerly down, carrying the first of many cartons.

Later, when the videotape was delivered to Hildon, he looked for a long time at his back and his shoulders. Then he fast-forwarded through the long descent and ascent of the stairs. He went back to regular speed and found the sweat on his top lip of some interest. He looked at himself closely. He
was definitely more handsome than Les Whitehall. He was surprised now, as he watched the pictures come off the walls and saw the pillows removed from the long sofa, how quickly the office seemed anonymous, that it seemed never to have been his at all. The letters and telegrams might have been sent to anybody; the pictures were almost generic, the maps also a quite ordinary form of decoration. The view through the window wasn’t special. You could see a blur of trees. The rooftop of another building. The metal file cabinets were ordinary, the Perrier bottle with dried flowers quite typical (somebody on the staff had put it there). Everything might have been anyone’s. Looking at the videotape, he was convinced, long before it was over, that he had never been there at all, in spite of all the things he saw himself lugging away. It was interesting that the boy had decided to hold the camera so long on Lucy’s photograph. The way a real card shark knows by instinct, by touch, what card is going to turn up, the boy had turned the camera with an unerring sense to Lucy’s pretty face. It was where Hildon would have freeze-framed it, anyway, and the boy had the same impulse.