The Good Life (27 page)

“Old Lester-Less. I wonder where I would be if I lost you, not her.”

Aless glares at her wineglass. “Where would you be?”

“Back in India, probably. Eleanora was my soul mate, but you're my—head mate, if there is such a thing. You see the same world I do. I wanted to see the world Eleanora lived in, but the best I could do was glimpse it. It was like she lived in a soap bubble.”

“Yes,” Aless says.

“I want to memorialize that,” he says, and Aless has not drunk quite enough yet to tell him that a soap bubble cannot be memorialized. “For one thing, it's time to scatter her ashes.”

“Do you have a place in mind?” she says. If he wants to go back to some ashram, she'll offer to counsel students while he's gone.

“There's an outcropping up in the foothills that she loved. You can see in every direction; she said it was a place where the world gathered its energies. If we drive to Tahoe, it shouldn't take more than a day or two.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, then tries to get him in focus. “Let me get this straight. You and I drive to Tahoe, hike into the mountains for a day or two, and another day or two back, and drive home?” She doesn't know which is more absurd, the idea of taking off a week when half of
Camelot
hasn't been blocked yet, or the idea that she can hike four days up and down a mountain. Has Patrick looked at her? She weighs 105 pounds and has trouble carrying a half-gallon of milk into her apartment.

“The weather is clearing now, so we shouldn't have to worry about snow.”

“Patrick, honey, remember who you're talking to. Voted Least Likely to Walk Across the Street If She Can Drive. I couldn't survive a four-day hike.”

“If I promise to carry you over the hard parts, will you do this for me?”

“That is not a promise you want to make.”

“Don't you tell me what promises I want to make. Who else could I spend four days with?”

Once again, the space between them feels as if it's collapsing, and Aless might as well be falling into his arms, right through the table and bowl of spaghetti that separate them. She would agree to hike to the Taj Mahal with him.

“This is the portal to my next life. Do you want me to enter it by myself?”

“No,” she says, as if he doesn't know. Patrick is not the only one confronting a portal, and Aless is already clambering through.

 

The pigeons seem excessive. Patrick calls them doves and intends to release them as part of his ritual. Their cage is lashed to his backpack, and he claims not to notice the cumbersome weight swinging behind him any more than he notices the weight of Eleanora's ashes, the box holding them a discernible square inside his pack. Aless drops farther and farther behind, trying to avoid the tiny feathers and bits of filth that fly from the cage toward her mouth.

The tawny dirt path isn't steep, and Aless is able to keep up with Patrick so long as she isn't expected to talk. Caught in his own thoughts, he is making the hike easy for her, and in the absence of his usual monologue Aless acutely hears other sounds—their crunching footsteps on the sandy dirt, her huffing breath, remote stirrings that she hears without recognizing. At a clearing he points down the slope. “We saw a bear there once. A mother.”

“How did you know?”

“Eleanora knew.”

“Were you afraid?”

“It was a long way away. Eleanora blessed her.” Patrick keeps staring downhill, and Aless steps back, shifting her own gaze to the sky. Across the valley floats a hawk, one of the few birds she can identify. The quick wind that curls around her is tangy with pine. On the drive from Lompoc she vowed to maintain what Eleanora would have called a right attitude and to respect the ritual Patrick has chosen. But he is trying to conjure a bear, and Aless is left with her unruly thoughts, which now include stories of hikers mauled by wild animals.

“I try to think that she's still here,” Patrick murmurs.

“Yes.”

“If I could just see things the way she did.” The pigeons' prattle ascends a tone, then settles back to
cdllcdllcdll
, indifferent to Patrick's sorrow.

“I keep seeing chipmunks diving into their holes,” Aless says carefully. “I think they're chipmunks—they're very quick. Look at the sky. It doesn't look that blue at home. She must have loved it here.”

“Love was her great gift. She could love a garage.”

“But you didn't want to leave her ashes in a garage,” Aless says.

“You know what they say—funerals are for the living.” Sluggishly he starts up the trail again, and after a few beats, Aless follows.

She wishes she could ignore the stinging burn down the front of her shins, her thirst, her overall unhappiness, which is not improved by the soundtrack from
Camelot
circling through her head. The pigeons maintain a steady, liquid gurgle, and Aless is ready to sacrifice them right now. Still, she sees the dejection in Patrick's shoulders, his trudging gait. And she can't help remembering what they are here to do.

“Feel the wind,” she says. “And look.” She points at a tree ahead of them, although Patrick doesn't look back to see her. “It must be two hundred years old.”

“Not much, for a tree.”

“Eleanora would have blessed it.” When he doesn't lift his head or answer, she plows on, “She would have loved that tree. She is a part of it now.”

“Aless, stop,” Patrick says, turning so fast that the chittering birds are tossed to the side of the cage, which they do not care for. “It's a tree, okay? It probably has ants and wood rot.”

“I thought I was saying what you wanted to hear,” Aless says stiffly. She hasn't heard Patrick sound like this in years, and her heart trips.

“I didn't ask you to come so you could do third-rate imitations of Eleanora.”

“It wasn't third rate,” she says.

He shrugs the pack to straighten it on his sagging shoulders, loosing another chorus of protests from the pigeons. “Why did you agree to this?”

“Your friend comes to you in grief and asks you to help with that grief. It's a pretty lousy friend who says no.”

“Even if you think it's crazy?”

“I never said that,” Aless says.

The pause hangs between them. Eleanora used to talk past these halts in the conversation, while Patrick looked at her adoringly and Aless looked at a chair or a wall and thought about love's obduracy, not to mention its blindness.

He says, “Eleanora always told me that I could learn from you. She said that even though you were undeveloped and your energy was negative, you had learned how to inhabit other lives. In order to escape your own limitations you poured yourself into other people.”

“I had no idea she had so many opinions about my limitations,” Aless says.

“She thought it was a good thing when you came up to Lompoc to teach. You were just hurting yourself in L.A., trying to have a singing career.”

“And why would that be?” Aless says tightly.

“Eleanora said it was too much tension around the mouth. She offered to give you specialized massage. I don't know if you remember.”

She remembers clearly. The idea of Eleanora probing with her skinny, sandalwood-scented fingers around Aless's mouth and neck seemed creepy. Still does.

“She felt sorry for you. You wanted so much.”

Aless's voice has retreated into her throat. “To want something is to be alive.”

“It was hard, stretching between you two,” Patrick says.

“I never asked you to stretch.”

“You are my friend,” he says.

They stare at each other, the sky around them so brilliant that it seems to transcend blue and leap to some other color, beyond words.

Patrick says, “Have you ever watched yourself sing? Your face changes. You become somebody else. I always thought it was deliberate.”

“A singer has to open up the muscles of her face to shape the sound. It's not mystical.” She hopes he will not remember her many classes in mime and musical theater. She owns two copies of
An Actor Prepares
.

“Another dream gone.” He swings back onto the trail, the pigeons on his back chuckling, and she lets them get five steps ahead. Then, arranging her face in the shape of grief, she forms her lips around the melody. “
Geliebte, schön Tod
.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Patrick asks.

“No,” she assures him. It's supposed to be mean.

 

“We'll get to the ridge tomorrow,” Patrick says after they have finished their dinner—two cheese sandwiches. Because this is his pilgrimage, he insisted on carrying their provisions, although he had little room in his pack, what with the box holding Eleanora's ashes. Aless is famished, a state not likely to improve after Patrick pulls out a baggie with a skimpy joint and lights it. “Here's the end of what she left. After this—what?”

“We'll drive home and get a drink. In the morning we'll go back to work.”

“I'm supposed to be changed.”

“That will come when you scatter the ashes.” Since he likely can't see her in the fading light, she shrugs. The words might be true.

“What if nothing changes? What if everything is exactly the same, except that I don't have her ashes anymore?” After giving her the first hit, he draws hoggishly on the joint, inhaling half of it. Aless watches the spark end travel up the paper.

“Get the candles out of your apartment. Take up jogging. Make a date with somebody.”

Patrick is nodding. “Sensible. It's what anybody sensible would say. It's just “—he gestures with the joint but does not pass it to her—“not what Eleanora would say.”

Aless's stomach roars, reminding her of the bear, blessed by the ineradicable Eleanora, the Undead. “Here's what Eleanora would say: ‘Every moment, every world is coming into being. When we observe that, we honor and join in all creation.'”

“Stop it.”

“‘Our senses are the small door through which we enter the infinite universe.' ‘In darkness we seek light; in light, shade. Harmony is constant evolution.'” It isn't hard to capture Eleanora's breathy tones or to arrange her face into Eleanora's expression of rapture. It isn't even hard to feel rapturous, given her lightheaded hunger.

“She believed those things.”

“I am escaping my limitations.”

“You're just making sounds.”

“What the hell do you think she did? Who knows if she ever had an actual thought?”

His expression cracks apart, and he staggers up from the fire before Aless can say anything else. Blundering toward the stand of scrubby pines behind them, he knocks over first his backpack, then the birdcage that he covered with his vest when the sun went down. The pigeons yelp, startling Aless, who didn't know they could make such a shrill sound. They remind her of Melanie Montrose. Aless takes one good breath, then scrambles up to help Patrick. The cage is rolling away from him.

The site where they have camped is flat, but it slopes on one side—gently at first, then dropping straight to canyon. Patrick is crashing behind the cage, bellowing and ripping his way through waist-high brush. For a moment Aless, her brain spongy from marijuana, follows him, but then she sees the footpath. It zigzags next to the bouncing, screaming cage, and she races down it. She thinks she's racing. Pointy branches rake up her arms, and Aless has no trouble imagining Eleanora's spirit in them, as she can imagine Eleanora in the vine that snarls around her ankle. She trips twice before she finally snags the wire handle and pulls it to her, the hysterical birds beating their wings and screeching. When Patrick catches up, she is cradling the cage, rocking it and murmuring to the terrified birds. Beside her lies an empty potato chip bag that she has smoothed out and will carry back to camp. Eleanora is around them like a fog. From a distance, though Patrick will later deny this, something roars.

 

The morning sun vaults into the sky with an alacrity that strikes Aless as malicious. She feels as if someone went over her with a Brillo pad during the night, and the sound of Patrick patiently striking match after match to start a fire scratches on her nerves.

“Did you sleep?” he says. She's surprised he knows she's awake. His eyes are fixed on the thread of flame under his cupped hand.

“I dreamed I was running down a mountain.”

“There's a lot of that going around.”

Patrick pours water into the dented saucepan and opens a foil pack of coffee. The pigeons are preening as best they can inside the cage, apparently untouched by their trauma. Aless hauls herself from the sleeping bag, her shins like chipped glass. “How far is the ridge?”

“This is it.”

“You said it would take two days.”

“This is a ridge, too. And it's close enough.” He blows on the little fire, his face unreadable.

“I don't think this is a time you want to cut corners.”

“Nothing is being cut. Don't worry, Less.” Coaxing the water to a desultory boil, Patrick is not behaving like a man on the verge of a ritual. He is still wearing the bright green pajama pants he slept in. He takes fifteen minutes to brew up bad coffee and set two more cheese sandwiches on the plastic plates they used the night before. When she joins him, he bows his head long enough to murmur “Namaste”—the holiness in him greeting the holiness in his cheese sandwich. Then he looks at her with the same mild, unreadable face. “How is the show coming?”

His eyes are level, his voice steady. He rarely asks her for simple civility. “It's a train wreck,” she says. “The boys only want to rehearse the fight scene, Lancelot can't dance, and you've heard Melanie.”

“So you're hoping for a miracle.”

Aless thinks for a moment. “At the fall recital a girl skipped an entire verse and just stood there while the orchestra kept playing. I mean
stood
, her hands in her pockets, staring at the stage. Her proud father had a video camera. He never saw a thing wrong.”