The Decent Proposal (29 page)

Richard's eyes widened with surprise, and Peaches turned her head for what would have been the mother of all head shakes if Beverly hadn't dismissed them both with an imperious wave
of her Parlie-free hand. Richard followed Peaches to the door, glancing backward in hopes of catching Elizabeth's eye. But Elizabeth only had eyes for Beverly Chambers, who was offering her a seat with a birdlike bob of the head.

Elizabeth sat, never breaking eye contact with her host. The footfalls of their companions faded away on the hard ceramic tile. They were alone.

“RICHARD AND ELIZABETH,”
Bev singsonged. “Tell me, did you ever acknowledge the happy coincidence of your names?”

“I don't know what you mean,” said Elizabeth.

Beverly tsked. “Don't you?”

“No.”

“Richard and Elizabeth? Surely you've heard of the famous pair . . . ?”

“I haven't.”

Bev sighed dramatically. “Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor? Only the most popular love story of the twentieth century.” She took another drag of her cigarette, careful not to breathe in too much. “Although I suppose it's been fifty years since the world was incapable of gossiping about anyone else. The twentieth century was a long time ago, wasn't it?”

Elizabeth decided this was a rhetorical question and did not respond.

“It's what first gave me the idea,” Bev continued, “though there were other, more substantial considerations, of course.”

“Such as?”

Bev sighed again. She couldn't help comparing Elizabeth Santiago to Mike Kim, and there was no question whom
she
would have preferred. But then, her tête-à-tête with the latter had begun in exactly the same sort of no-frills, antagonistic manner. (If these two were any indication, women had certainly mastered the art of candid and plainspoken communication: an
improvement from her day.) Perhaps she wasn't giving Miss Santiago enough of an opportunity. On a perverse impulse, she held out her pack of cigarettes, waving them temptingly.

“No thank you,” said Elizabeth firmly. “I've never smoked.”

“How wonderful for you,” said Bev, ashing on the floor even though there was an ashtray beside her. “I hate to disappoint you—”

No you don't
, thought Elizabeth.

“—but I didn't bring you here to tell you why I chose you for my little,
ahem
, experiment.”

“So then why did you? Bring us here.”

“For the pleasure of your conversation,” Bev said tartly. “And to see how you two were getting on. So tell me,” she smirked, “what do you think of him?”

“Why ask, since you obviously think you already know the answer?”

Tiresome. And insolent.
“Has anyone ever told you it's rude, my dear, to answer a question with a question?”

“Is it?”

Bev smirked again, nodding, as if they'd been fencing and she was bound by honor to acknowledge a hit.

“It doesn't matter what I think anyway,” said Elizabeth, breaking eye contact for the first time, and glancing backward to confirm they were still alone.

Bev raised what was left of her eyebrows, in what was meant to come across as a question.

“It's not going to work,” said Elizabeth, a slight tremor to her voice.

Interesting.
“No?” asked Bev softly.

“No. But I'll keep putting in my time like I've been doing. I'll get to the end of the year and I'll get my money. All of it. You owe me that, for—for—”

“For what, my dear?”

Elizabeth couldn't finish the sentence, so Beverly did it for her:

“For making you hope?”

Elizabeth stared at the tiles on the floor. They were big—about the size of the plates on a baseball diamond—and every so often there was a glass mosaic inside one of them depicting a mythological creature: a hydra, a basilisk, a mermaid. Elizabeth was staring at a centaur when she heard Beverly's voice again, so soft it was almost a whisper:

“You have to tell him.”

The hairs rose on the back of Elizabeth's neck; the centaur took on a new association of horror she knew it would retain for the rest of her life. She looked up at Beverly Chambers. There was no way this harpy could know about
that
. What she meant, what she
had
to have meant, was that Elizabeth needed to tell Richard how she felt about him. She looked down again at the centaur, forcing herself to think about this other secret—the blameless one, the one of much more recent vintage.

It wasn't love at first sight; Elizabeth didn't believe such a thing existed. Love at first sight always sounded like revisionist history to her, more like love in hindsight, a good story at the expense of the truth. The problem was that love didn't creep up on a person the way it did in so many books and movies. It didn't advance in fixed increments; it wasn't an accumulation of tiny affections and kindnesses; there was no internal scale to be tipped in the eleventh hour by some shared quirk, unlikely remembrance, or grandiose gesture. Like every other miracle, it came all at once, fully formed, and once seen, it was impossible to
un
see. It was only natural, yet erroneous, to assume it had always been there, even in the very beginning.

She hadn't loved Richard that first moment in the lawyer's office—not even close. But she'd been attracted to him; she'd been intrigued by him; and from that first encounter she'd been
launched down a path that led irrefutably to love. She supposed that for others the path was meandering, a maze with false turns and dead ends, any number of riddles and obstacles to be overcome before the end came suddenly into view. But for her it had been a straight path; it was so obvious, so inevitable, now that it was there, try as hard as she might to ignore it or look elsewhere. It was love
from
first sight and it couldn't be denied, as much as she wished it could.

“My best friend and I used to play a game sometimes,” Bev said, after a long break in the conversation—occupied on her end by the arduous business of lighting another cigarette. “We'd divide everyone we knew into two categories based on the way they related to a single qualifying factor. It was a way to make sweeping generalizations that were wildly inaccurate, but invariably amusing to pronounce. For instance, people fall into two categories, those who listen to music to
put
them in a certain mood, and those who listen to music because they're already
in
a certain mood. Do you see what I mean?”

Elizabeth nodded dumbly.

“And when I learned about you two—even though I won't tell you why it was I sought you out—I thought of a new one, maybe the best one
ever
. Can you guess what it was?”

Make her stop
, Elizabeth pleaded silently, even while shaking her head in the negative.

“People fall into two categories!” Bev trumpeted. “Those who need to
be
loved by someone, and those who need to
love
someone. Here, I said to myself, are two people who belong in opposite categories, what a perfect pair! And you see,” she stamped out her half-smoked cigarette with a flourish as the sound of footfalls returned to them, “I was right.”

Richard and Peaches were carrying two heavy, overburdened trays. Back in the kitchen, Peaches had insisted on displaying every variety of fruit, vegetable, cold cut, cheese, and
condiment available and asking Richard which ones he liked, and he had been too polite to say he didn't like any of them. It had helped that by this point he was truly ravenous; the last thing he'd eaten were a few hors d'oeuvres at the premiere after party the evening before. Apparently a well-behaved, handsome young man with a healthy appetite was on the extremely short list of things Peaches approved of, and she had been happy to transport nearly every foodstuff out of the kitchen. Bev was astonished to see what appeared to be the first smile on that sallow, sour face in ages:

“Well, well, Peaches is in love!” she cried. “Wonders never cease.”

Peaches shook her head, but for once there was no violence in the gesture, and when Richard leaned down to deposit his tray on the table she actually patted him on the head. Beverly laughed to see his cheeks burn, but the sound was nothing like the pretty jangle Mike had remarked on a week earlier. Her smoker's cough had worsened, warping her girlish laughter into a throaty cackle.

“There's no question which category
she
belongs to,” Bev said, winking at Elizabeth.

Elizabeth resented the wink. She felt no intimacy with this horrible crone, but did her best to keep up with the conversation while Peaches began serving them lunch.

“Have either of you been to Death Valley before?” Bev asked.

“No,” said Elizabeth, accepting a cup from Peaches and lifting it to her lips.

“But I've been meaning to go for a while,” added Richard.

“Oh, well then, you'll have to look around! There's so much to see here: Artist's Palette, Badwater Basin, Devil's Golf Course, the Red Cathedral, Scotty's Castle—but then, you'll hardly need to go there.”

Bev explained about the replica. “And of course there are the Mesquite Sand Dunes—”

“Sand dunes?” echoed Richard.

“Oh, yes. They were the ones used in the filming of
Star Wars
.”

Richard almost choked on his sandwich. He turned to Elizabeth.

“We
have
to go there,” he garbled through a mouth half full of ham-on-rye.

Elizabeth nodded at him vaguely.

Beverly beamed at them both. “Of course you do. I'll give you directions.”

She made Peaches print out directions. The sand dunes were only an hour away.

“Pardon my rudeness,” said Bev as they were finishing their meal, “but I'm an old woman and I tire easily these days.” She wiped her shriveled mouth daintily with a napkin. “Take your time exploring the desert, but please know that your obligation to me is over. I'll be resting for the rest of the day. You're free to return to Los Angeles whenever you like.”

Her implication was clear enough: their time at the castle was up.
We drove five hours for this?
thought Richard.
What the hell?
He glanced at Elizabeth, who nodded at him ever so slightly, and somehow he understood her immediately:
don't say anything, let's just go
. Had Beverly Chambers already told her everything when they were alone? Did she know what it was that connected them?

“You won't be disappointed!” were Bev's final words as she waved them out the door. She was overcompensating. The problem wasn't the boy; she had noticed immediately how he deferred to the girl; it was subtle (as most meaningful relations between two people were) but wonderfully clear that he'd already grown to depend on her. Even so, Bev worried that dis
appointment was exactly what lay in store for them both, if that unpleasant girl didn't learn to speak up.

“WHAT DID SHE SAY
to you when I was gone?” Richard asked the second they got back in the car.

Elizabeth paused to crank up the air conditioner. It was boiling inside the Honda—the kind of trapped, greenhouse heat that imperiled unattended pets and children.

“She told me she wasn't going to say why she picked us,” said Elizabeth, passing through the gate and starting down Big Stan Way. “She said she just wanted to get a look at us. Together.” Her eyes flicked toward him before returning to the road. “I'm sorry. It was a total waste of time.”

“Unbelievable!” Richard threw his back against the seat in a tantrumlike gesture. “Well, we are
absolutely
seeing those dunes. Maybe we should see some of that other stuff she mentioned too. We've got to make this trip worth
something
, right?”

“Sure,” replied Elizabeth, turning from Big Stan Way onto Death Valley Road again, too preoccupied to take more than passing note of the silver Prius parked by the side of the road. “Might as well.”

MESQUITE IS A PESKY PLANT
, with long thorns prone to puncturing car tires and poking the soft parts of children playing on the ground. It prefers semiarid climates like the southwestern United States, where its ability to suck up water has alarmed more than one rancher trying to maintain a steady water table. Its roots grow deep; it's nearly ineradicable, and many consider it a pest, the rabbit of the plant species. It is perhaps not a small consolation that mesquite wood burns slow, hot, and flavorful, adding a distinctive twang to barbecue grills across the region where it thrives.

Thousands of years ago, the Mesquite Sand Dunes were a muddy lakebed teeming with mesquite. When the bed dried out, conditions became less than perfect for the plant but, true to form, it refused to vacate the premises. Over time, the desiccated area acquired bits of feldspar and quartz swirling in from the surrounding mountains. The sandy debris
piled up—in some places as high as 150 feet—and spread out over fourteen square miles. The sand dunes were born. And yet the mesquite hung on.

“Wow, can you believe plants actually live out here?” Richard trotted up the first sandy hill, which was about fifty feet from where they'd parked on the side of the road. He marveled at the low-lying clumps of vegetation dotting the shallower, outlying hills. Farther in, there was nothing but sand.

He already loved the dunes. They were just sitting there on top of the boring, scraggly, southwestern desert, a bit of Tunisia grafted onto California: a beach with no ocean, or a beach where the ocean
was
the sand, each individual dune like a giant wave frozen in place, its surface rippled by a wind that must have gone elsewhere for the day. The air was perfectly still.

They were the only ones there. This was no surprise, since it was the middle of the week and well past noon, though fortunately for them the weather was mild, the air temperature hovering somewhere in the 80s. Elizabeth joined him, carrying a backpack retrieved from the trunk of her car. He watched her walk up to a plant at the edge of the sand. There were two shriveled, yellow flowers on one side of it, but as far as he could see it wasn't much to look at—unremarkable, other than for its existence.

“Those flowers look pretty rough,” he said. “The Beverly Chambers of flowers.” He was still annoyed they hadn't learned anything useful at the castle, and on the ride over he'd made several other clunkers at the old woman's expense. Elizabeth nodded mechanically. He could tell she wasn't listening.
What's her deal?
he thought, his eternal refrain. She'd been quiet on the ride over—quiet even for her. “What's that smell?” he asked, mainly to say something, sniffing at the air like a bloodhound
on the trail. “Must be coming from the plant. Smells sort of . . . smoky?” He had an inspired thought: “I guess it's mesquite! Mesquite Dunes, right? And the smoky smell makes sense. Mesquite grill.”

Elizabeth gave an infinitesimal shrug of her shoulders. If she'd been paying attention, she could have told him he was wrong, that the plant was creosote, not mesquite, and that the odor it emitted was responsible for its name since it smelled similar to the creosote leftover from burnt coal or wood. All this information lay in her brain somewhere, buried yet accessible. But she was too lost inside her head to recall it now.

Richard gave up on her, racing up the face of a much steeper dune. When he reached the crest and got a better look at the vast expanse of sand stretching before him, he turned around, exclaiming, “It really
does
look like Tatooine!”

He wished Elizabeth would catch up with him so that he could tell her about the Skywalkers' home planet, with its dual suns and endless deserts. But she was too slow, so he bounded ahead again, eyes trained on the largest hilltop in the center.

Elizabeth's calves began to ache as she slogged her way through the dry, shifting sand. She paused, scanning the dunes for Richard. He was already far in the distance, and the perfect, pristine silence closed around her like a physical presence, a massive swaddling blanket she found either comforting or constricting, she wasn't sure which. She watched as Richard scaled another dune without hesitating, his knees practically touching his chest with each deep stride he took, arms pumping, head thrust nearly straight up in the air.
I love you, I love you, I love you
, she thought, certain now that the silence was, in fact, intolerable. She wished desperately for something to break it—the distant whir of a motor, the caw of a bird overhead, the devastating
crack of an earthquake. Maybe then she could have whispered the words aloud instead of just thinking them. And if she could have whispered them, she could have spoken them, and if she could have spoken them, she could have run over and shouted them directly into that stupidly perfect, pink beach shell of an ear of his. But the silence was impregnable, and the words remained stuck inside of her.

Richard reached the crest of the center dune and put his hands on his hips to catch his breath. He turned in a full circle. The valley floor stretched well beyond the dunes in every direction, ending in a continuous mountain range that encircled them like a giant, purple-and-silver-fingered hand, the dunes the golden treasure cupped in the middle of its palm.

He peered down, looking for Elizabeth, and experienced a rush of vertigo. In an effort to regain his balance, he focused on the dune directly beneath him. It had two distinct sides, he realized: a gentle one, up which the wind coaxed individual grains of sand, and a much steeper face, down which the sand tumbled. He saw now that he'd made things harder for himself by going up the steep face of the dune:
against the grain . . . s
, he thought, relishing even this pathetic little wordplay. The two sides met in a long, peaked ridge upon which he now stood, venturing another glance down the steeper side to check on Elizabeth's progress, or lack thereof.

A portion of the topmost layer of sand shifted, in a cascade that began with the grains directly under his sneakers and ended about five feet down the slope. Elizabeth was another fifteen feet below this and didn't notice a thing. Richard ran to an untouched section of the ridge, and did it again.

It was cool to see a miniature avalanche of sand, but this spectacle was not the source of his fascination. When all those grains moved together, they made a magnified version of the
sound of pouring sand, and even though it was magnified, it was a sound so gentle, so delicate, that hearing it was like an affirmation of the silence that reigned before and after. It was like a negative sound, Richard decided, highlighting the otherworldly quiet upon which it intruded for a moment. Somehow it left things more peaceful than they were before—like a shushing, as if the sand were telling him to hush, to listen, to appreciate the stillness of the world in this untouched, magical place.

His leg shook as he watched Elizabeth trudge up the last few feet. When she reached the top, she put her hands on her knees, panting slightly. She was in good shape, but she never climbed hills. Venice was unvaryingly flat.

“Slowpoke,” he teased her.

Elizabeth lifted her head without moving, shooting him a glare that would have been icy if they hadn't been enveloped by sun, sand, and heat.

“Okay, I have to show you something,” he said.

She dumped her backpack on the ground, producing two Poland Spring bottles from inside it. Richard took one without opening it, waiting impatiently as she took a long swig from the other. To his annoyance, she insisted on returning it to her bag, from which she then produced a gargantuan tube of SPF-85 sunscreen, offering it to him.

“Do you want any?”

“Nah, I'm good.”

“You should at least put some on your face.”

“I'm fine!” he exclaimed, a little shortly, because he knew she was right. He was without a doubt in the process of getting a burn. Out here in this unembellished landscape, the sun showed its true character—like a veiled woman with tempting eyes who, when she removed the shroud from the lower half of her face, revealed nostrils flared with hatred
and a leering mouth full of needlelike teeth chomping hungrily:
I will destroy you
. But there was no room to worry about the sun.

“Okay, so you have to be
really
quiet for this.”

Not a problem
, thought Elizabeth, rubbing the thick, pastelike cream into her arm.

“You have to look!”

She sighed, but good-naturedly, looking up. Richard was crouched over the peaked ridge, and he was almost too beautiful to behold. It would have been easier to look at the sun.

He put up a finger. “Now, listen!”

He pushed down with one foot: another plain of sand fell away, accompanied by the soft, low
shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
sound he had already grown to love. He looked up at her, grinning.

“Isn't that the coolest thing ever?!”

Elizabeth clenched her eyes shut, pressing her temples with the thumb and middle finger of her right hand. It looked as though she had a sudden and catastrophic headache. Richard stood up.

“What's wrong?”

She shook her head, and her right hand along with it, while with her left hand she made a fist at her side. Richard regarded her uncertainly, relieved when a few seconds later she dropped both hands and opened her eyes, a more collected expression on her face than he expected.

She pointed to the ground:

“Sit.”

He obeyed her immediately.

She took the spot next to him, on the peak of the dune. This time she did look at the sun, allowing it to burn a hole in her vision. She closed her eyes. Against the black backdrop of her eyelids, the spot pulsated an electric silver-green. She opened her
eyes again. The spot turned red against the boundless blue sky, and over the next few minutes it lost its radiance more quickly than she wanted it to, fading to a bruised-looking purple that marred the otherwise spotless firmament more faintly as each precious second fell away. She held on to this stain as long as she could, but at last it disappeared completely. There was nothing left.

And yet, she still delayed.
Just pretend it's Orpheus
, she told herself, and the thought of him strengthened her just enough to bridge this terrible pause. She cleared her throat.

It was time.

“I was the perfect child. I know that sounds obnoxious, but it's true. I was like a poor Chicana version of Hermione Granger. I did everything right and I always followed the rules. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was number one in my class, the editor of the school yearbook, and captain of the girls' soccer team. I taught CCD after school at my local church. I was a National Merit Scholar. I represented my school district in the Young Republicans of California.

“I was offered full scholarships to a lot of colleges.
A lot.
I was leaning toward UCLA because I wanted to stay close to my neighborhood. I wanted to stick around there during college. That way I could become a congressional representative for my district as soon as possible. I had my career all mapped out. I was going to become the first Latina president of the United States.

“My brother Hugo was smart too. But he was shy. He was two years younger than me and he leaned on me a lot. My parents worked long hours, so a lot of the time it was just him and me. He looked up to me. He asked my advice on everything. I was like his second mother, and I liked it that way. I encouraged it.

“He came to me in April. I could tell something was wrong, but it took a while to get it out of him because I was the first person he told. He said he was gay. He said he'd been attracted to boys since he was twelve, and he couldn't stop thinking about this one boy in his class, who he was pretty sure had feelings for him too. He said he didn't know what to do.

“I told him his impulses were wrong. That the church and community he belonged to condemned them for a reason. I said he had to figure out a way to stop having these thoughts, not just for his family's sake but for his own sake too, for the sake of his soul. I lectured him about how we couldn't as human beings give in to our baser impulses, how showing restraint was what separated us from animals.

“He listened to every word. Like he always did. And when we were done I told him I wouldn't tell our parents if he promised not to act on his desires. I said he had to try as hard as he could to improve himself. I said I was willing to help him, but only if he helped himself. I made an analogy to how hard it was for me to get a perfect eight hundred on my SAT math, since verbal came so much easier, but how I studied hard and made it happen. He said he would try. He promised.

“A few days later I came home early from soccer practice. My parents still weren't home. I called out to Hugo and he yelled to me from his room. He said he was doing homework, but something was off, I could tell.

“There were no locks on our bedroom doors, but we always knocked—we were always respectful of each other's privacy. I figured it was worth barging in just this once to make sure everything was okay. Given what he'd told me before.

“They were on the bed together. With their shirts off. I threw the other boy out without saying anything to him, not even a word. Then I marched back to Hugo's room and told
him I was going to have to tell our parents everything, because he hadn't kept up his end of the deal. He looked at me, and he was crying and he said, ‘I can't help it, Lola. I love him.' And I told him, ‘You don't even know what love is. That's not love. It's disgusting.'

“He started to cry even harder, so I left. An hour later I was done with my homework and I went looking for him. But he wasn't in his bedroom. He wasn't in the bathroom either. He wasn't anywhere.

“He ran away. So I did end up telling my parents everything. They weren't even angry with me, at first. They just wanted to find him. So they filed a police report, but the thing is, even though my brother and I were born here, my parents weren't. They came here illegally, and if they were deported it would only make things worse. So there wasn't much they could say when the LAPD told them they were ‘working on it,' but didn't seem to be doing much of anything.