See You in Paradise (36 page)

Ellen and Ray had been her landlords, that’s how she met them. They lived right down the street. Occasionally they came by on the weekend to pace the yard and look things over, and Julia had heard them argue from time to time, right out in the open. They didn’t seem to be arguing about anything personal. It was mostly Ellen doing the arguing, actually.
How could they let India get nukes?
Julia heard her shout once.
Jesus fucking Christ, Ray!

One night a storm window blew off in a winter squall and the next day Ray came over to replace it. She invited him in for coffee. The next time he came it was to put mouse poison in the cellar. They had more coffee. On his way out, Ray fixed her with a piercing look and reached out and smashed a glass doorpane with his hammer. He said, “I’ll have to come over tomorrow and fix that.”

“Don’t you have a job?” she said, eyeing the glass shards scattered around their feet.

“I’ll take the morning off.”

She at last returned his gaze. “Take the whole day,” she said.

When he came, she led him up to her studio. At the time, she was hard at work illustrating a book called
Self Esteem Through Self Love.
The easel, walls, and floor were covered with photos, drawings, and paintings of attractive men and women getting themselves off. He turned to her and said, “So tell me about your work.” It was four months later that she had the dream. Not long after that, Ray filed for divorce. By March it was all over: joint custody of Ryan; one house for Ellen and one for Ray. Ray chose the house that already had Julia in it.

On one of their first semi-legitimate mornings together, Julia threw open the bedroom curtains and looked down at the yard. The newspaper lay soaking in a patch of melting snow. Nearby, yellow crocuses were blooming, forming patterns in the grass. Recognizable patterns, actually, spelling out the words FUCK YOU. She remembered her dream.

Her initial response to the crocus affront was to hand-deliver to Ellen, gaily wrapped with a big red bow, a freshly printed copy of
Self Esteem Through Self Love.
As Ellen tore away the heavy paper, Julia saw how cruel the gesture was, and she had to restrain herself from grabbing the gift from Ellen’s hands. But Ellen’s reaction was curious: a quickening of breath, a biting of the lip. A slow fanning of the pages. She raised her face to Julia’s (Ellen is so much taller, but it didn’t seem that way at the time) and said, “I’d invite you in for a drink, but I’d like to be alone now.” And the door swung shut.

She was beginning to sort of like this Ellen.

Of course they had to come in contact; Ryan sometimes had to be fetched. And so Ellen and Julia have become friends, after a fashion. They sit in one kitchen or another and have chats. Ellen doesn’t offer anything to eat or drink, she simply sits down and begins talking. Julia wouldn’t call her self-absorbed; in fact, she rarely says anything about herself at all. Instead she pours out whatever’s occurred to her that day or hour in the form of rants. She asks herself pointed questions and answers them. Julia’s role is to nod or say “Of course you’re right” or frown or laugh in order to keep her going, like one of those people who stand on the sidelines of a marathon and hand the runners little cups of water. In the wake of these chats Julia likes to listen to the silence, the myriad sounds that comprise it. Sometimes she thinks of her MFA thesis defense. To every question the committee asked her, she responded by holding up a small landscape she’d done, with blue sky and a cloud and a hill and a farm. She never spoke. They awarded her the degree with less than five minutes of debate.

It is now Friday afternoon. Ray is due home any minute. Of course they’ll go to the party together; to do otherwise would be to betray her sort-of-friend. She is dressed in black: black jeans and a sweater. Her hair is tied back and she wears no jewelry, except for her wedding ring. She designed the rings herself, silver bands engraved with creeping roses. They had a reclusive silversmith from out of town execute the designs. They were married in a fire tower in the NYTech Experimental Forest, among the genetically altered pines. Only about ten people could get up there at once, and Ellen was one of them. Yes, she was stunning: even in her hiking boots, she had the cold beauty of a metaphor, a Lady Liberty stamped on a coin. Ryan wore a tux and seemed very afraid, though of heights or his father’s remarriage, there was no telling.

When something stands between Julia and Ray, it is usually Ryan. It isn’t that she’s jealous of the boy; on the contrary, she loves him. It is the way Ray treats him that hurts her, his sickening attunement to Ryan’s every eccentricity, no matter how slight. It is Ray’s antipathy for the half of Ryan that is Ellen’s: his lurching forehead-first walk; his pencil-gnawing and scab-picking; his tendency to say things, lots of things, in some weird concocted foreign accent. These things are not Ryan’s fault, and what’s wrong with them, anyway? She herself had a few bad habits when she was a kid. She smoked. She pulled long strips of skin off her lips and dried them in the pencil trough of her desk. She masturbated during social studies: and look how lucrative that turned out to be!

The other night Ryan came to their door. It was nearly midnight. He rang the bell and turned his waxy divot of a face toward their bedroom window.

“I’ll go let him in,” Julia said.

“Please, no,” said Ray from the bed.

“No?”

He buried his face in the pillow. They still smelled of each other, from sex. “Please. It’s Ellen’s night tonight. He should be at home.”

At home, she thought. The sting made her say, “You are a cold-hearted man, Ray.”

“Please don’t give me that. He’s seven years old. He can’t treat our house like a room down the hall. I know how it sounds, but trust me.”

She wondered if he really knew how it sounded, how completely awful. She stood watching until Ryan was gone. She watched him pick up a soft drink cup that had been tossed in the yard and stuff it into the trash can at the end of the driveway. After that he went home. He didn’t seem broken up about the snub.

She went to the bed. Ray was on his back again. She reached down and feigned grabbing at his crotch. Then she made a fist and pressed it to her own.

“What the hell was that?” he said.

“I took the sex back.”

He laughed, though he wasn’t supposed to.

Now she can see Ray approaching, walking back from the college. He is too far away to hear, but she can tell by the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, that he is whistling. When he passes Ellen’s place, he bows his head a little and jams his hands into his pockets. That’s Ray’s problem: he is terrified of his ex-wife. A sudden rush of affection threatens to topple the tower of chilly detachment she has so carefully erected. He mounts the front steps and shouts her name, and she goes down to greet him.

“I saw you whistling. What was the tune?”

He frowns at being reconnoitered. “I’m surprised you couldn’t tell by sight,” he mutters.

She sits at the kitchen table arranging toast crumbs into floral patterns while he leans against the sink eating an apple. He is forty and she wishes he had a little gray. She likes gray, she likes the idea of his being an older man. But he neither looks nor acts like the older man he is. When he’s finished eating he makes a loop of his arm and she hooks hers through it. He kisses her forehead. The tower crumbles. They walk to the party, already late.

Through Ellen’s windows, the town’s activists can be seen affecting solemnity, their caftans and rimless spectacles and gaunt, squirrellike bodies moving through the emptied front room. Here is Lydia Speyer, who lies down in front of idling bulldozers. There is Paul Waller, architect of the local scrip, earned in local health food stores and restaurants and redeemable at same. Julia knows these people from the paper. She drags Ray through the open door and into the shaggy crowd. They are all here, the editor of the anarchist newspaper, the brewer of medieval beers, the used bookstore owner, the wan naturopath. Where is Ellen? Nowhere to be seen. A low table in the center of the room is covered with a white cloth but not with food. The food and drink are on a wheeled cart parked against a wall. There is something ominous about the empty cloth, she can’t put her finger on it. Her throat begins to itch: dogstink. She fortifies herself and Ray from the cart and endures the overtures of the alternative dentist, then excuses herself and sneaks out the kitchen door to the backyard.

The children are here, hard at play. They seem to be running around randomly, waving brightly colored objects and hollering nonsense words. From time to time one of them collapses in gales of laughter. She is surprised and unsettled by the realization that they are being ironic, “playing in the yard.” She stops one of them—it is Ryan’s companion, Philip—and watches his smile deflate as he removes himself from the game.

“Where’s Ryan?”

Philip points to the back of the property: the doghouse. He hoists a plastic replica of the Empire State Building in the air and leaps back into the fray.

The yard is full of halfhearted holes and uninflated kickballs. Weed-tufts sprout everywhere, and maple saplings form a ragged border. The doghouse is surrounded by bare dirt, the grass having succumbed to Bounder’s years of puttering. She bends over and peers inside, but the house appears to be empty.

“Ryan?”

“Hi.”

Ah. There he is: a gray blob in the darkness, crouched against the far wall. She sticks her head in farther. Her eyes adjust, and she can see he is playing solitaire, the cards splayed before him on the ground. Wedged into a far corner is a shredded plush toy and a pocked rubber ball.

“What are you doing in here?”

He looks up and smiles at her, a smile full of understanding and patience. Not the smile of a child. Her heart dislodges for a moment and swings free from a vein, and it occurs to her that Ray should not fear the half of this boy that is Ellen, but the half that is him. He says, “Same thing you’re doing in here. Getting away from those cuckoos.”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

She fits easily; it’s a big doghouse and she is a small woman. She says, “Do you miss him? Bounder?”

“I will, I guess.”

A jagged splinter juts from a ceiling beam, and she reaches up and plucks it off. “He was a good dog,” she says. “Farewell, Bounder.”

He looks up at her. God, what a look! It’s the spitting image of Ray, this thing he does where he focuses suddenly on her face as if he has just now noticed it for the first time, and he reaches out and touches her cheek, and some small emotion floods his eyes. But Ryan doesn’t touch her. The look grows quizzical.

“Do you know what my mom is going to do in there?” he says.

“No, what?” Her sinuses are filling up.

“With Bounder? Did she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

He leans past her suddenly and pokes his head out. Sunlight screws his pupils to pinpricks. When he ducks back inside, he puts his hand on hers and says, full of concern, “Just stay here.” It is no expression of need, but a kind of warning. She has no choice but to heed it. Her nose clogs and begins to run, and as if anticipating this very problem, Ryan reaches into the pocket of his pants and hands her a tissue.

Through the closet door Ellen hears Ray arriving: arriving Ray, with her rival Jane, Julia rather, who remains alive, having survived the rivalry. It’s time for meet-and-greet, it’s time for beat-the-band, it’s time to dive into the light and await the vet van. Bounder’s in a ball on the closet floor, boring, no not boring, snoring, or rather heavy breathing, wheezing, heaving, sneezing. Dying. Crying. No: crying’s all done now, it’s out. Out like the light. And now it’s time for the dying. All right: she’s ready: what’s the time?: okay, ready: out.

Hi! She says Hi!, making rounds, shaking hands, taking names, rounding friends. The holy whole of them is here, LydPaulTomSydMattPatJanetBob, seeing off the hound, the mutt, the mound in his hut. Except he’s in the closet half-asleep, hurting. No—pain is ending, heaven pending, heart is mending! Breathe in, breathe out. That’s it.

“I’m so sorry to hear—” It’s Lovely Fat Lydia, anti-development maven, swimming in her muumuu, beautiful, they hug, they kiss, It’s okay, His time has come, That’s old for dog years, Thankyouverymuch. And now the dentist with his giant choppers, size and shape of postage stamps, grips her shoulders, gives them a little massage, “We’ll have to get together, come to my place for dinner some night—” Imagine!, a come-on at a time like this—

Wait. Close eyes. Calm. Yes. Better.

“Hi, El.”

Open eyes. “Hey, Ray.”

She can see herself in the set of his face, the way she seems to him. Poor man. Never understood. She tried to be the girl he thought he saw when first he saw her. Attractive, productive, what they call vivacious yet not in the least bit dumb: she was a catch. Loved, loves him. But he never knew what he was getting; she kidded herself that he did. One night at the copy shop it came out. She was pregnant, it was almost their second anniversary, they were xeroxing invitations to the party they were throwing themselves. Next to her in line was a punk rocker with a poster for his band. That poster: so intricate, so patient, she had to say something. She placed her finger on it on the counter and said what came to mind.