Skyscape (34 page)

“Let me take your temperature.”

She blinked, looked upward, in his direction, found him with her eyes. “How much did you give me?”

“You must have what we used to call Viral GOK—God Only Knows,” said Patterson. “Christ, we can't make it without you, Loretta Lee.”

She was rubbing her hip where he had given her the needle. She had the constitution of a buffalo. Almost frightening.

“That Seconal,” he said, “doesn't agree with you at all, does it?”

“What room is she going to be staying in?”

“Margaret? I haven't thought about it.”

The words came slowly, but the woman had a certain clarity of mind even now, pushing her thoughts ahead like heavy furniture. “Of course you have. You think about everything.”

“You choose the room. After all, you're the hostess here.”

“I feel like throwing up,” she said, in a voice so quiet he might have mistaken the words, the spring splashing, the sparrows chirping. “When I look at you.”

“We'll put her in the mirror room,” said Patterson, as though just deciding, although he had always intended to put Margaret there.

“I guessed right,” she said.

It made more sense when Loretta Lee stood, lost her balance, and fell into the pool. Patterson had a certain faith in his knowledge of pharmacology, and he did not like this faith shaken.

He waded in after her, his trousers instantly sodden and heavy, but the water feeling good in the rising heat. He dragged her from the pool, surprised at how heavy she was. That had been the root of the problem with Paul Angevin, that was the continuing physics lesson of his life. An inert body is very heavy.

He had her on the concrete, the surface so hot it hurt her where he stretched her flat. She was thrashing, one hand in his face.

Then Bishop was there—efficient, farsighted Bishop.

Patterson had a sudden, disagreeable thought.
Sometimes I don't really understand Bishop
. Compact, terse, Bishop strained to simplify himself, considered his words before he spoke, said what he believed Patterson wanted to hear. One night Patterson had heard clarinet music, not badly played and too bright-sounding to be a recording, drifting from Bishop's bedroom.

“Get my bag,” said Patterson. Why, Patterson wondered, am I surprised when he obeyed just now, without a single question?

“I know all about you and Bishop,” said Loretta, her wet hair spread about her on the concrete. She spoke like someone addressing the sky. “I've been lying to myself a long time.”

“You are upset about something, aren't you Loretta Lee?”

He must have squeezed her shoulder a little hard, or bumped her hip where he had been just a little clumsy with the hypo, making sure she was out.

She swung at him, a furious, mile-wide slap, as she struggled to sit up. The open hand caught him in the face, a weak blow. It made one ear go deaf with a windy crash, and the point of one cheek tingled.

And it drew blood. He touched his lower lip. There it was, red salt water on his fingers.

She hurt your face, thought Patterson. He tugged his temporarily deaf ear. His hearing cleared. Already he could hear the tinkle of the spring again in perfect stereo.

He wanted to tell her: you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have hit my face. I was going to give you a chance, a nice chance to go on and have a secure, comfy future, and here you are, making a really stupid career move.

She was panting, on her feet, unsteady, trying to look confident, but failing, leaning on a poolside chair for support. “Tell me you didn't listen to my tapes last night. It was just a diary, something I was making because there wasn't anyone else I could talk to. I looked in the nightstand and they're gone. Tell me you didn't give me a shot last night while I was asleep.”

Poor Loretta Lee is near tears, he said to himself, and I'm just standing here watching. “Don't worry,” he said. “I'll give you a chance.”

He held her in his arms. He forgave her. He was good at that. It was important to learn how to let go.

38

“A friend told me that gladiolas are out of fashion,” said Mrs. Wye.

She had an armload of flowers, wrapped in green paper. The paper was worn where Mrs. Wye had clung to it, and made a crackling sound. One end of the paper cone was sodden where stem juice had soaked into it. Mrs. Wye looked very pleased, but pale, holding herself upright against an unyielding force. Margaret said that she should sit down, but Mrs. Wye gave her her look of amused irritation and stood there, cradling the flowers like a bundled baby.

“Imagine a flower going out of fashion,” said Mrs. Wye. “It's like sunset going out of fashion. Can you imagine someone saying, ‘I'm so terribly sorry, but standing and looking at sunsets isn't quite the thing these days'? But I thought about it, and I could see what she meant. There is something just not quite right about glads. Pretty, but cheap, the poor things. I felt sorry for these and I bought them.”

Margaret made a gesture, offering to take the flowers, and Mrs. Wye half turned away. Margaret tried to remember the location of the nearest florist. “You went all the way by yourself?”

“I was perfectly fine, all the way there, all the way back. Slowly. I used to be able to walk there in fifteen minutes.”

Margaret was aghast. “I wish you hadn't done that. I would be happy to take you anywhere.”

Mrs. Wye remained standing, clinging to the flowers. “I will take care of myself.”

“Please tell me you won't do that again.”

“I will make no false promises, Margaret. I am willful and foolish.”

Margaret insisted that she could not enjoy the flowers for long. She was about to leave for Owl Springs. It was a surprise to Margaret when she realized, looking into the bright eyes of Mrs. Wye, that Mrs. Wye had become something like a mother to her, the sort of mother Margaret had imagined herself wanting.

Chatty, accepting, Mrs. Wye was a delight. “Don't worry about the bird. The bird and I will be just fine. You just go and be with Curtis and have a wonderful time. And when the flowers wither, I'll replace them.”

“You could have had—” Margaret couldn't bring herself to say
a stroke
. “You could have fallen down. There beside the golf course.”

“Oh that nice green grass. They overwater it, you know. It's so squishy underfoot. I would rather die trying to live than getting ready to die. I've thought about it.”

Mrs. Wye still held the green-paper cone, and the smell of the flowers filled the room now, an earthy perfume. This time when Margaret held out her arms, Mrs. Wye gave her the flowers.

There was a period of flower arranging, deciding where each flower should stand among its mates. Mrs. Wye sat, her hands in her lap with the peaceful disorder of lifeless things. “You're going to get Curtis, and bring him back,” said Mrs. Wye.

“I think I might,” said Margaret. The flowers were huge and stalky, and aggressively pretty. “It depends on Curtis.”

“You want Curtis all to yourself.”

“Is that wrong?” Margaret was glad she had the flowers to fuss with. “Does someone like Curtis belong to the world?”

“Good heavens, who cares about ‘the world,' Margaret. Thinking that way is something men made up, to make them feel important. ‘I am doing this not for myself, but for the world.'” Mrs. Wye had just then adopted a marvelous voice, Alfred Hitchcock doing General MacArthur, and Margaret laughed.

She was excited. In less than an hour she was due at the airport. Not long after that, an hour and a half or so, she would be with Curtis.

“Men need to feel important,” said Mrs. Wye. “What I need is to feel that I can take care of my life without much help.”

Margaret told her that she was doing wonderfully, and while Mrs. Wye heard Margaret, and acknowledged what she said with a smile, Mrs. Wye seemed to feel that Margaret's compliment was trifling and unneeded. Mrs. Wye managed to stand, and found her way to the vase of flowers.

“Once I had an affair with a very famous director,” said Mrs. Wye, looking at Margaret with wide eyes that said: I have never told this to anyone, not as I am telling you. “If I told you his name you would recognize it at once. Very famous. Handsome in his way. You know how men can have that big, angular, beaky look and still have grace.”

Mrs. Wye continued to shift the flower stalks in the crystal vase, drops of water falling from time to time on the surface of the table. “It was a secret. I was married at the time, and so was he, and I detested it for happening, because despite what you hear about Hollywood and actresses, so many of us were normal.”

Mrs. Wye exaggerated the word
normal
, the word taking on moral weight. Margaret thought that the word
normal
had gone out of fashion, that wanting to be stable, healthily typical had long been undesirable.

“Do you know what the attraction was?” said Mrs. Wye.

It was not a merely rhetorical question. Margaret was expected to ask, and she did.

“Romance,” said Mrs. Wye, with a whisper that caught all the magic, all the candlelight and twilight of the word.

Mrs. Wye looked, suddenly, very tired. She accepted Margaret's help over to the sofa again, and took a deep breath, like someone who has been marching up a long hill.

“It was romantic,” said Mrs. Wye in a very different voice, quiet, confessional. “Even the secrecy of it, the shame, the fact I knew I was doing wrong. I loved it.”

“That's quite understandable,” said Margaret, feeling at once understanding and inexperienced.

“The other night there was a special on Channel Nine about this director. If you stop and look at the television schedule you'll know everything. Well, I watched it.”

Margaret leaned forward with an encouraging expression.

“The narrator, quite a good voice, one of those American voices that really make you proud to hear the language spoken, was saying the most complete nonsense.”

“Things that weren't true?”

“He said that in his films, the director is still alive. That the legacy an artist leaves the world is a piece of the artist still alive among us. And I thought
how untrue this is
. The word immortal was used. This director's immortal enthusiasm for such and such.”

“It's just a manner of speaking—”

“I remember this man, this famous man. I remember the way he laughed, rather like a mule, and the way he would forget to comb the back of his hair so that it stuck out. I remember his love for cherry tomatoes, how he'd eat them stem and all. He was like a horse in some ways, this man. He hated reptiles and he loved Cole Porter. And he's gone. He's entirely gone. And all of his wonderful works—and they are wonderful—do nothing to keep him alive.”

“Please be careful,” said Margaret after a long silence. “If anything happened to you.…”

“What if Curtis wants to stay right where he is?” said Mrs. Wye. “What if he's still not well enough to leave the doctor?”

There were photographers at the airport, not many, but enough. “Do you think it's right that you should disturb your husband's therapy like this?” said a thin, intense woman, holding out a tape recorder the way, in other times, one might have extended a pack of cigarettes.

“Mrs. Newns, what is it that worries you, exactly?” said a small man with a dark mustache and very white teeth, a person who looked much taller and younger on the video screen.

“How long will
your
therapy with Dr. Patterson last?” asked another reporter.

Margaret chose to ignore the questions as celebrities learn to do, pretending that she wasn't hearing them. Someone wished her luck, and Margaret did smile in return. This was a mistake, probably, because it brought the same questions all over again. She made a show of confidence, of being sure that she was doing what anyone in her position would do.

It was clear to Margaret, however, that many people might think her visit unnecessary and unwise. People would understand her motives, but they might think her overanxious, lacking faith in the famous doctor.

It seemed like a long flight to Margaret, the small corporate jet descending at last over the strikingly empty landscape, the wrinkled hillsides, the stark stream-wrinkles, subject matter Georgia O'Keeffe had savored, and, Margaret saw now, had painted because she'd had no choice. This countryside commanded, defeated. Margaret realized how little she knew about desert.

She was so close to Curtis now.

A steward explained that as soon as they landed they would have to take off again. “They don't want any visitors at all,” said the steward with a smile, as though this was good news.

“That's very strange, isn't it,” she said, sipping some cherry-flavored Calistoga water because it was a drink Curtis liked.

“That's the way it is.” He spoke in a southern accent, and, now that the short flight was nearly over, seemed eager to impart something of himself. The network logo was emblazoned on his jacket pocket, and the man was manicured, polished, tailored, so that the residue of regional accent seemed an affectation.

“It doesn't strike you as peculiar?”

“Red Patterson can make up the rules. Why not? Listen—he's got a lot of responsibility on his shoulders. That's what people don't realize. An average person couldn't even begin to understand what goes on in the mind of someone like that. I imagine that if you—well, maybe not you, but me, for sure—were to live twenty-four hours with the kinds of cares and worries Red Patterson has—we'd probably implode under the weight.”

“Do you really think so?”

The steward made a single, silent
ha
in response: are you kidding?

As they descended, Margaret fumbled half-aware for her seatbelt. They were falling from the sky, in that gliding, controlled way of aircraft, and the desert looked featureless. Where was this famous oasis, this estate she had heard so much about?