Blame: A Novel Read online

  Gilles ordered pancakes with ice cream; she had dry toast and tea.

  I sort of assumed it was a gay meeting, she said.

  Gettin’ a little that way, said Gilles.

  But your uncle’s not.

  Auntie? Father of five?

  Is it possible I’ve met him before?

  Well, he owns the Lyster. Were you ever at the Bellwood Hotel?

  Brice took me to the Mojave Club for dinner there once.

  The Bellwood was Auntie’s too, till it sold. The Mojave relocated, you know, to the Altadena Country Club. Anytime you want to go, Mother’s a member. And Auntie too, of course. Oh, hello, Derek.

  A big-bellied man from the meeting came up to their booth. He had a long, skimpy ponytail, and on his chest a brass Maltese cross hung on a chain that might have come off a hanging lamp. Gilles, he said. The guys and I want to know one thing. How come you get to sit with the prettiest girl?

  Gilles said, Oh, Derek, you have it all wrong. The correct question is, how come she gets to sit with the prettiest boy?

  Derek turned to her. Sorry, ma’am, I just want to say hello, and welcome.

  Patsy muttered hello and waited for Derek and his swag chain to leave.

  Don’t mind poor old Derek, said Gilles after. He means well. And you are the prettiest girl in the room.

  She did not consider herself pretty. Too fair, too pink, too easily flushed and mottled. The square MacLemoore jaw was better suited to Burt’s manly face. But god, or genes, had made her tall and blond, a cultural signifier for prey.

  Looking into Gilles’s mischief-lit eyes, she said, And you are the prettiest boy.

  •

  Her father brought a gift: her mother’s copy of Lives of the Saints. I thought you might like it, he said.

  Briefly Patsy clasped the thick, well-thumbed paperback to her chest, then set it on a side table. Her mother had consulted it every morning over coffee.

  I worry that you’re depressed, her father said.

  Well, of course I’m depressed.

  Have you thought of getting any help?

  I’ve only been out of prison three days, she said.

  I’m happy to pay, he said. If you want to see someone.

  Thanks, she said. That’s very nice.

  You’re only saying that to get me off your back.

  How else can I get you off my back?

  They were sitting side by side on the couch and looking at the mountains. He crossed his skinny, stiff legs. So. What have you been doing with yourself?

  I told you, she said. Going to meetings with Gilles. Looking over my textbooks. Making lesson plans. I start teaching ESL on Tuesday.

  Have you seen friends? Had anyone over?

  Brice and Gilles. And Jeffrey Goldstone’s coming over any minute—my parole officer, she added before he could ask.

  How could her father, newly widowed, appreciate the novelty of empty rooms, avocados mashed on Finn Crisp, the deep pleasure of sleeping alone in true darkness and silence?

  I only have a couple more days where I don’t have to be anywhere, she said. I’m enjoying that.

  You’re not isolating, are you?

  You’re here, aren’t you? And you aren’t looking so ebullient yourself.

  No, not so ebullient.

  What’s happened to Eugenia?

  Eugenia was a fifty-year-old woman who had shown up at her mother’s funeral and hovered ever since. Nobody knew her—she’d come to the service expressly to introduce herself. Then she began arriving at his door with roast chicken, beef stew, pork chops. Ballet and symphony tickets. She had two teenagers at home; what were they doing when she was feeding Mr. MacLemoore night after night? None of this disturbed the man himself, who found her interest in him natural, her methods pragmatic.

  Genie’s around, he said. We may go to Australia.

  You should.

  You won’t mind if I leave the country?

  I’d leave it if I could, but I can’t leave fucking L.A. County.

  Pain flickered in his eyes. Tell you what, he said. Let’s go to Bullock’s and buy you a new dress.

  So I can take the world by storm?

  That was his line. If only she’d fix her hair and put on a new dress, why, she could take the world by storm.

  They compromised. He took her to the bookstore and bought her hardbacks, a luxury after prison. She chose Webster’s Third New International—who knew when she’d excavate her her two-volume OED from the storage unit—and the new biography of Jane Addams, whom she had once disdained for being good.

  12

  Pasadena City College was seven blocks to the east, an easy, flat walk. She had taught ESL here after her first year at Hallen. This time, her two sections met at nine and at eleven, five days a week, with sixty students between them. She had native speakers of fourteen languages, including Tagalog, Spanish, Farsi, Vietnamese, Italian (from Eritrea), Korean, Armenian, and a Bantu dialect of Swahili. The first day, she had them write essays in class on “Where I Came From.” Writing in a second language, she’d found, unlocked inhibitions.

  My parents not want me, wrote a Chinese woman, and I am given to good strangers.

  My spouse has a nail in his buttock by a crude bomb of the guerrillas, wrote a Salvadoran woman. My brother’s wife is taken from her house by soldiers. We find her in a campo without the eyes and the tongue.

  Our boat was entered by Phuket, Thailand, and my brothers took to another boat. I do not know where they are today, wrote a Vietnamese pharmacist who worked in Pasadena as a motel janitor.

  They were hungry for English as the key to new life. Patsy taught them doggedly—tenses, sentence structure, idioms, prepositions. She’d be mid-explanation, chalk in hand, when her mind slid into gray fuzz and dread poured through her body. She stood silent and helpless, but they did not rustle or try to set her right. Sometimes they murmured in sympathy, but mostly they waited till she collected herself. Many of them, she was certain, also moved in and out of the present, claimed at moments by random blankness and fear.

  Walking home, Patsy prowled through thrift stores. She had not returned to her storage unit, preferring to furnish her new life piece by piece. A tablecloth from the forties with red roses and blue larkspur spikes, a red blown-glass vase, a crewelwork pillow with pinecones and red berries: blots of color accumulated in her sparse new home.

  •

  Brice showed up at her door with a heavy but beautiful old Electrolux vacuum cleaner, its canister tapered like a bomb, the name in stylized nickel italics. I found it on the street, he said. I thought I’d strip it for parts, but it works perfectly well. Look at that beautiful lettering. Even the casters are good. You need a vacuum, right?

  Yes. Thank you, she said as he shouldered the thing inside.

  She hadn’t been alone with him since coming back. He stood by the sofa, smoothed the nap on the shaved mohair, as if approving his own taste.

  So, she said. Gilles is adorable.

  He did not appear to hear her—an old trick of his, to pretend a person had not spoken. Patsy would not be put off.

  You might have told me. I don’t blame you, he’s adorable. But it was a shock.

  Brice walked over to the windows, made the curtain hang straighter, gazed out at the mountains. I do like having him around, he said. It sounds trite, but he’s always so happy to see me. I like telling someone about my day. I never thought I’d be anything but antsy as hell around another person.

  All good, she said. I’m happy for you. Still, I wish you’d said something.

  Hey, it’s me, Brice. I didn’t know how to bring it up.

  •

  I was beginning to wonder if you were ever going to call, said Sarah.

  I had to get my land legs. Settle in a bit.

  I’ll forgive you, if you come to dinner this Saturday. You have to see the house and meet Henry.

  Yes, but I can’t do crowds yet.

  The three of us, then, said Sarah.
I’ll pick you up.

  Sarah was as plump and tanned as ever. Eternally dieting, but never giving up ice cream or wine, she never lost weight. Patsy had always liked the physical fact of her, her love of the sun and food.

  Isn’t this nice, Sarah said, looking around Patsy’s apartment. Where’d you get that? She pointed to the sofa.

  Brice found it.

  And how are things with Brice?

  He’s good. He has a boyfriend.

  A boyfriend? No! she said, ready to commiserate. Well, you always said!

  I did? I don’t remember.

  You wondered why he wasn’t more enthusiastic. Are you okay with it?

  Why wouldn’t I be?

  Sarah shot her an exasperated look.

  They drove west to an area near the Rose Bowl where, at the turn of the century, wealthy midwestern industrialists built enormous family homes on one-acre lots along curving treelined streets. Together the houses formed a kind of architectural beauty pageant, the Swiss chateau, the Craftsman, the Mission revival, the shingled Cape Cod, not one matching its neighbor. The long, graceful gray limbs of bayberry trees overhung the streets, filtered the sun through bright green leaves. The pea-sized berries, crushed by tires, mentholated the air and made the whole neighborhood smell like a cough-suppressant rub.

  Sarah turned down the driveway of a Spanish-style home and paused so Patsy could admire the dark wood beams, the deep-set windows, the freshly painted turquoise trim. Henry’s a genius with real estate, Sarah said.

  Beautiful, Patsy said, who’d been thinking that the huge house must have been Henry’s idea. Before he came along, Sarah had lived in what they’d called the view unit, a one-bedroom apartment overlooking the 210 Freeway.

  It needs a ton of work, Sarah went on. We couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. But I do have to warn you. There’s a ballroom.

  A ballroom? Patsy said.

  For giving balls, said Sarah. As in Jane Austen.

  Wow. That’s rather a lot to live up to, isn’t it?

  I also have to admit—Sarah lowered her voice—with so much space, I have this urge to populate the place. Fill up the rooms.

  They entered through the back door and a porch the size of Patsy’s living room. Behind her, Sarah said, Oh, you look fantastic, Patsy. So skinny.

  •

  The ballroom was actually three large rooms separated by tall doors that folded back against the walls to form one grand, waltzable space.

  So this is what Sarah had acquired, Patsy thought. While I hacked weeds.

  In the backyard, Henry Croft was washing out a plastic bucket at a spigot. Tall, lean, sandy-haired, he had thin lips and small, pale eyes, and a warm smile that made him handsome.

  Patsy remembered those thin lips from a faculty soiree at Anne Davis’s house. She’d gone to the porch with a tall glass of bourbon to drink the way she liked to drink, in big, hot gulps, and to pet the Davises’ basset hound. Henry had followed her, and, the dog between them, they’d kissed over the broad, spotted back. But nothing more kindled. She’d found his kisses, and him, dull. Who could have guessed he was a real estate genius with a ballroom in his future?

  So glad you’re here, said Henry, smiling. We’ve been on hold, waiting for you. I don’t think Sarah will settle in until the house has your approval.

  It’s true, Sarah cried. I tell Henry, you’re the one who knows so much about houses and architecture. I was perfectly happy in the view unit.

  Patsy said, It’s far better than anything I imagined. So grand!

  Henry was tiling an upstairs bathroom and had a friend helping. Better get back to it, he said.

  Patsy noted an appealing self-possession she hadn’t detected that night on the Davises’ porch.

  Isn’t Henry nice? Sarah said when they were alone in the kitchen. He is the nicest man I’ve ever met. So much nicer than I am. When you were away, he’d nag me. You have to go see Patsy. He grew up in a religious home. He’s rejected all the rubbish but kept the essentials. You know, being kind, feeding the poor, visiting the prisoner. You can’t believe how much money he sends to charity. He can’t pass a panhandler without forking out. He says this house is going to bankrupt us, but if we do go broke, it’ll be because he gives to every beggar who sticks out a hand.

  Sarah made tea, put a casserole in the oven, talked. The brilliant new nineteenth-century person, she said, had a shy, stuttering wife. Also, the new building was ready. I hope you like where they put you, Sarah said. I lobbied to have you down from me.

  Patsy shrugged. Anywhere’s fine.

  I guess you had to develop a pretty thick skin where you were, said Sarah.

  Or something.

  You do seem so quiet, Patsy.

  Patsy was not intentionally quiet. They hadn’t found a subject yet. Their old standbys, departmental gossip and men, were not serving them. Why Brice wouldn’t spend the night or when exactly Sarah’s long-distance lover Dan took up with someone else had been yearlong conversations. Patsy had no man to talk about now and, with Henry, Sarah’s whole life had fallen into place with a resounding thunk, all tendrils of dissatisfaction shorn clean off.

  •

  They were four for dinner after all. The smell of moussaka baking had drifted upstairs, and Henry had invited his tiling friend to dinner.

  Sarah said, Gosh, Patsy, is that okay?

  To force a retraction of the invitation was ruder than Patsy cared to be.

  Sarah sent Henry down to the basement for a bottle of wine. It’s lamb, she said. Some earthy red. Or retsina, if we have any.

  Henry turned to Patsy. I told Sarah that maybe we shouldn’t drink tonight out of solidarity with you—

  And I said bullshit! Sarah rang out, then added, I told him you’d be fine.

  Yes, fine, Patsy said, at once touched by Henry’s willingness to forgo what was clearly a ritual pleasure for them, and alarmed by Sarah’s ferocity.

  And Ian drinks too, Sarah added in a softer voice.

  It’s fine, it really is, Patsy said, and hoped it would be.

  Ian was a compact, sharply handsome man—half Japanese, as Sarah had informed Patsy—who spoke with a Southern accent.

  Virginia? said Patsy.

  No’th Carolina, he said.

  Ian’s an amazing painter, Sarah said. We have one of his paintings, but it’s still up in a show at the David Devine gallery.

  Patsy, certain Ian had been filled in on her past in the same excited whisper she’d been told of his half-Japaneseness, said little. They ate in the dining room, with its oak paneling and curly wrought iron chandelier. She monitored the wine levels in their glasses, marveled at how slowly Henry and Ian drank. Sarah went at hers with more gusto. Patsy checked herself for craving or a sense of deprivation. If anything, abstinence gave her an edge and seemed a superior state of being. Poor Sarah, still in alcohol’s thrall.

  The phone rang, for Ian. Girl trouble, Sarah whispered when he left to take the call. He returned shortly, embarrassed and grim. Minutes later, the phone rang again, and this time they heard him speak harshly.

  I won’t answer next time, Sarah murmured as he returned, and it rang right then. For eight long peals they looked at their plates, the glistening salad, the ruined layers of casserole. All three wineglasses emptied swiftly.

  •

  After dinner Patsy followed Sarah upstairs. Henry is strictly forbidden to come in here, Sarah said, opening a door and waving grandly at a bed covered with bridal magazines, rental company price lists, swatches of cloth and ribbon.

  Should I give you a shower? Patsy asked. Wasn’t that what best friends—and putative bridesmaids—did? Not that Sarah had asked her to be part of the wedding yet.

  Oh no, that’s the last thing you need to worry about. Now, everybody says I should get a dress right away and not leave it to the last minute. So far, I’ve bought two—I’ll take one back. But I need your opinion.

  Okay, Patsy said.

  Dress number one. Sarah p
ulled a billow of smoky pink chiffon from the closet; it settled into a strapless gown. You have to wear it with a crinoline, Sarah said with authority and, reaching back into the closet, produced a stiff, waist-high freestanding silk petticoat.

  One thousand smackeroos, Sarah said.

  Dress number two was an oyster-gray silk suit—cropped jacket and bell skirt. This was only four hundred, she said. Only! Listen to me. Shall I try them on?

  Absolutely, said Patsy, standing by the door. Sarah stripped to her panties, climbed into the crinoline, pulled the swirling dress over her head. Muttering about girdles and strapless bras, she presented her back for buttoning.

  Patsy wiped her hands on her jeans, addressed the many cloth-covered nubs.

  Maybe a little much, Sarah said. What do you think?

  Sarah’s tumbling chestnut curls, the pale, trembling expanse of her uplifted bosom, were beautiful. But the yards of floating, wafting chiffon were a little girl’s daydream on a stout thirty-four-year-old woman.

  Meeting Patsy’s eyes in the mirror, Sarah said, You seem a little down, Patsy. Is something wrong? You don’t really like it, do you?

  Let’s see the other one, said Patsy.

  13

  She’d called a number in Knock-Knock’s service directory, and here she was, on a rickety glassed-in sunporch at the Pasadena Mental Health Center with a woman around her mother’s age. Unlike her mother, who’d been a slapdash dresser and eschewer of makeup, this Eileen Silver was a former beauty settling graciously into manicured middle age. Her nails were painted pale pink, her dark, syrup-colored hair curled into a squared, sprayed coif. Her beige snub-toed flats matched a linen suit—surely, Patsy thought, this person was far too conventional to be her therapist.

  Patsy, Mrs. Silver said, her voice deep and calm. What can I do for you?

  Well, everybody says I’m depressed. My friends, my father, everybody.

  Are you depressed?

  I don’t know. I’m trying to adjust, get back into the flow of things.

  You say “get back into the flow of things.” How were you out of the flow?