After You've Gone Read online

  The next summer, the Jamiesons began a year abroad, mostly in London—where Prudence was cold and often very lonely, but where she learned so much in school that on coming home she had skipped a grade, which put her a year ahead of Laura Lee.

  Still, stubbornly, those two girls stayed friends. Even in high school, when both were taken up with boys and with what had become separate bands of other, peer-group friends, they still spent time together. They would choose, though, curiously, to revert to somewhat childish pursuits together; instead of having a downtown drugstore Coke together as either might have with another friend, Prudence and Laura Lee would take long walks out into the piney woods where once as children they had built their dams and explored. Prudence talked about where she would go to college (somewhere up North), what to study, and, closer to home, what certain boys really meant by what they said. And Laura Lee, who had the same concerns, except that she meant to stay and go to school in Hilton, would listen and offer her own views, but admiringly; she appreciated her friend.

  Liza Matthews died young, at forty, of “liver problems.” And then, a couple of years after that, Sophia died, of a stroke; at that time it was discovered that she too had been an alcoholic—she left bureaus full of bottles, which she must have meant to clean up sometime. Apparently, when she left all those parties so early, she would then go up to her room and nip at sherry, by herself.

  Dan died some years later, of a respectable heart attack, before he could marry the young graduate student who by then was his intended. Carlton Matthews lived the longest of those four, possibly because soon after Liza died he took the cure and never had another drink. But he married another beautiful alcoholic, who also died young. When Carlton died a few years later, he left his house to his daughter, Laura Lee.

  Laura Lee married three times, each time a richer man; she had four children, by whom she always seemed quite puzzled, nor could she ever quite understand why her husbands left. Like her mother, she became a pretty alcoholic, at last retiring to Hilton, to her family house, to drink in peace. Prudence, as she had told her mother she would, became a physicist, teaching and working in Chicago, which might or might not have pleased Sophia. Prudence married only once, very early and unhappily but briefly.

  The two women, then, remained close friends, not seeing each other often but phoning at crucial moments or just to keep in touch—drunken Laura Lee and terribly sober Prudence, laughing like children. Remembering flower dolls and muddy dams.

  FOG

  On an unspeakably cold and foggy night one November in San Francisco, something terrible happens to a woman named Antonia Love. She is a painter, middle-aged, recently successful, who has invited some people to her house for dinner (one of whom she has not even met, as yet). But in the course of tearing greens into the salad bowl and simultaneously shooing off one of her cats—the old favorite, who would like to knead on one of her new brown velvet shoes—Antonia, who is fairly tall, loses her balance and falls, skidding on a fragment of watercress and avoiding the cat but landing, bang, on the floor, which is Mexican-tiled, blue and white. Hard. Antonia thinks she heard the crack of a bone.

  Just lying there for a moment, shocked, Antonia imagines herself a sprawled, stuffed china-headed doll, her limbs all askew, awry. How incredibly stupid, how dumb, she scolds herself; if I didn’t want people to dinner, I could just have not asked them. And then: Well, useless to blame myself, there are accidents. The point is, what to do now?

  As she tries to move, it is apparent that her left arm indeed is broken; it won’t work, and in the effort of trying to move it Antonia experiences an instant of pain so acute that she reels, almost faints, and only does not by the most excruciating effort of will.

  The problem of what to do, then, seems almost out of her hands. Since she can’t for the moment get up, she also can’t call her doctor, nor 911. Nor, certainly, can she go on with making dinner.

  Fortunately her coming guests are old close friends (except for the very young man she doesn’t know, although he seems to think he has met her somewhere). And, further luck, she is sure that she unlocked the front door, its bell being hard to hear, back here in the kitchen. And so her friends will arrive and they will come on in, calling out to her, and she to them. They will find her ludicrously positioned, they will help—although possibly she is really quite all right, and will manage to get up by herself any minute now.

  A new flash of pain as she tries to move convinces Antonia that her arm is really broken, and again she castigates herself for clumsiness, for evident ill will toward her friends, determined self-defeat. For steady progress toward no progress at all—oh, for everything!

  In addition to which she has probably scared her cat quite badly. He is nowhere around, although she calls out to him, “Baron! Baron?”

  No cat, then, and no live-in lover either, since Reeve is at the moment off on one of his restless trips somewhere; Reeve who in an off-and-on way lives there with Antonia, the arrangement being that both are “free.” And just as well he is gone, thinks Antonia; he so hates debility, hates bodily things going wrong. (But in that case why has he chosen to live, more or less, with an “older woman,” whose body must inevitably decline?) Antonia wonders if Reeve is alone on this trip (she knows that he sometimes is not), but she finds that she lacks just now the stamina for jealous speculation.

  Her arm really hurts badly, though; she wishes someone would come, and she wonders who will be the first—who will come in to find her in this worse than undignified position? Will it be her old friend from school days, Lisa, who is bringing the strange young man? Or will it be Bynum and Phyllis, who are old friends—or Bynum is. He is a sculptor, and Phyllis, his latest wife, a very young lawyer. Antonia believes they are not getting along very well.

  Or (at this new notion Antonia grimaces to herself) it could always be tall, thin, sandy Reeve himself, who is given to changing his mind, to turning around and away from trips, and people. Reeve, a painter too, is more apt to come home early from trips on which he is accompanied than from those he takes alone; but even that is not a formulation on which anyone, especially Antonia, should count.

  Antonia is aware that her friends wonder why she “puts up” with Reeve, his absences, his occasional flings with young art students. And she considers her private view of him: an exceptional man, of extreme (if occasional) sensitivity, kindness—a painter of the most extraordinary talent. (On the other hand, sometimes she too wonders.)

  Antonia knows too that her friends refer to Reeve as “Antonia’s cowboy” …

  Reeve is from Wyoming.

  She tries next to lie down, believing that some rest might help, or ease the pain, which now seems to have become a constant. Never mind how appalling the spectacle of herself would be, her oversized body sprawled across the floor. However, she can’t get down, can’t reach the floor; the broken arm impedes any such changes of position. Antonia finds that the most she can achieve is leaning back against table legs, fortunately a heavy, substantial table.

  Perry Loomis, the unmet guest, is a journalist, just getting started, or trying to in New York. He could surely sell an article about such a distinguished, increasingly famous woman, especially since Antonia never gives interviews. Now, having cleverly engineered this meeting, and being driven in from Marin County by Antonia’s old friend Lisa, Perry is overexcited, unable not to babble. “It said in Time that a lot of speculators are really grabbing up her stuff. Even at thirty or forty thousand per. She must hate all that, but still.”

  “It’s hard to tell how she does feel about it,” Lisa responds. “Or anything else, for that matter. I think success has been quite confusing to Antonia.”

  The bay is heavily fogged, slowing their progress from Mill Valley into town, to Antonia’s small house on Telegraph Hill. Not everyone slows, however; an occasional small, smart sports car will zoom from nowhere past Lisa’s more practical Ford wagon. Scary, but she does not even think of asking this young man to drive. Th
ey met through friends at a recent gallery (not the opening) at which Antonia’s work was being shown. Perry described himself as a “tremendous Antonia Love fan” and seemed in his enthusiasm both innocent and appealing. Which led Lisa fatally to say, “Oh, really, I’ve known her almost all my life.” Which was not even quite true, but which, repeated to Antonia, led up to this dinner invitation. “Well, why don’t you bring him along when you come next Thursday? I’m almost sure Reeve won’t be here, and poor Bynum must be tired of being the token man.”

  “And she’s so beautiful,” rattles Perry. “Was she always such a beauty?”

  “Well, no,” says Lisa, too quickly. “In fact, I don’t quite see—but you know how old friends are. As a young woman, she was just so—big. You know, and all that hair.”

  “But I met her,” Perry reminds her firmly. “At that thing in New York. She had on the most marvelous dress, she was ravishing, really.”

  “Oh yes, her green dress. It is good-looking. I think she paid the earth for it. That’s one of the points about darling Antonia, really. Her adorable inconsistencies. A dress like that but never a sign of a maid or even a cleaning person in her house.” And just why is she sounding so bitchy? Lisa wonders.

  “Maybe she thinks they’d get in her way?” Perry’s imagination has a practical turn. As a schoolboy, which was not all that long ago, he too meant to be an artist, and was full of vague, romantic plans. However, during college years, in the late seventies, he came to see that journalism might better serve his needs, a judgment seemingly correct. However, his enthusiasm for “artists,” in this instance Antonia, is a vestige of that earlier phase.

  “Well, she’s in any case a marvelous cook,” Lisa promises warmly. And then, somewhat less charitably, “Her cooking is surely one of those things that keeps young Reeve around.”

  “But isn’t he a painter too?” Saying this, with an embarrassed twinge Perry realizes that he has imagined Reeve, described in Antonia Love articles as her “young painter companion” as a slightly older version of himself. He had looked forward to seeing just what of himself he would find in Antonia’s Reeve.

  “Of course he’s a painter, that’s nine-tenths of the problem right there. Reeve’s from Wyoming, we call him ‘Antonia’s cowboy.’ But they should never—Oh, look. Damn. There must be an accident on the bridge. Damn, we’ll never get there.”

  Before them, on the downward, entirely fog-shrouded approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, what now seems heavy traffic is halted, absolutely. Red brake lights flicker as thick cold moisture condenses and drips in rivulets down windshields, windows, as somewhere out in the depthless, dangerous bay the foghorns croak, and mourn.

  “Oh dear,” says Perry Loomis. Although this attractive, rather interesting “older woman” was kind enough to bring him to his object, the desired Antonia, he thinks he really doesn’t like her very much. (Are she and Antonia Love the same age? he wonders. This one looks younger, he thinks.)

  “Indeed,” says Lisa. On the whole an honest woman, she now admits to herself that she agreed to bring this Perry along not entirely out of kindness; there was also (she confesses to herself) some element of fantasy involved, specifically a romantic fantasy of herself with a younger lover (Lisa has been twice divorced, most recently two years back, from an especially mean-spirited lawyer). And then: Oh God, she thinks. Do I have to spend my life trying to be Antonia?

  Reeve, who did indeed start out for Oregon, and alone, has now made a wide detour via the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and is headed for Berkeley. Where, as Antonia might have guessed, had she the energy, there is a girl, Sharon, in whom Reeve is “interested.” At this moment, heading along the foggy freeway toward the Berkeley exits, he longs to talk to Sharon, talking being so far about all they have done.

  It’s very difficult living with Antonia, he would like to tell Sharon. Here she is so successful, everything people work for, and she doesn’t believe it. In her mind she’s still starving and probably lonely. I mean, it’s very hard to live with someone whom nothing can convince that she’s all right. Nothing can convince her that people love her, including me.

  Sharon is one of the most beautiful young women that Reeve has ever seen; he rather suspects that she was hired in the Art Department, where she works, on that basis—she was formerly a model. A darkly creamy blonde, with dreamy, thick-lashed blue-green eyes, Sharon holds her perfect body forward like a prize; she moves like a small queen—and she would not understand a single word of all that Reeve would like to say. To Sharon it would all be the ancient complaints about a wife.

  In fact, the only person who could make the slightest sense of his ravings is Antonia herself. Reeve, a somewhat sardonic, self-mocking young man, comes to this conclusion with a twisting, interior smile. And, on an impulse, passing Sharon’s exit, which is University, and heading toward the fog-ladened Bay Bridge, he speeds up the car.

  “Phyllis and Bynum, Lisa. Perry. I’ll be back soon. Sorry. Stew and risotto in the oven. Salad and wine in refrig. Please take and eat. Love, Antonia.”

  This note, taped to Antonia’s door, was found by Phyllis and Bynum, one of whose first remarks to each other then was “Who on earth does she mean by Perry?”

  “Oh, some new young man of Lisa’s, wouldn’t you say?”

  “But what could have happened to Antonia?”

  “One of her meetings, wouldn’t you imagine? One of her good works.” This last from Bynum, Antonia’s oldest friend, who has very little patience with her, generally.

  That exchange takes place on the long stairs leading up to the small, shabby-comfortable living room in which they soon sit, with glasses of wine, engaged in speculations concerning their hostess.

  “Something could be wrong?” Phyllis ventures. A small, blond, rather pretty woman, she is much in awe of Antonia, whom she perceives as exceptionally strong, in ways that she, Phyllis, believes herself not to be.

  “I doubt it.” Big, gnarled Bynum frowns.

  This room’s great feature—to some its only virtue—is the extraordinary view afforded of the city, even now, despite the thick fog. City lights still are faintly visible, everywhere, though somewhat muffled, dim, and the looming shapes of buildings can just be made out against the lighter sky.

  Phyllis, who is extremely tired (a grueling day in court; but is she also tired of Bynum, as she sometimes thinks?), now lounges across a large, lumpy overstuffed chair, and she sips at the welcome cool wine. (The very size of Antonia’s chair diminishes her to almost nothing, Phyllis feels.) She says, “Obviously, the view is why Antonia stays here?”

  “Contrariness, I’d say,” pontificates Bynum, himself most contrary by nature. “I doubt if she even notices the view anymore.”

  A familiar annoyance tightens Phyllis’s throat as she mildly says, “Oh, I’ll bet she does.” She is thinking, if Bynum and I split up, I’ll be lucky to get a place this nice, he doesn’t have to keep putting it down. This could cost, oh, close to a thousand.

  “Besides, the rent’s still so low,” continues Bynum, as though Phyllis had not spoken, perhaps as though he had read her mind.

  A pause ensues.

  “God, I’m so hungry,” says Phyllis. “Do you think we should really go ahead with dinner?”

  “Baby, I sure do.” Bynum too is tired, a long sad day of not being able to work. And he too is hungry. “Antonia could be forever, and Lisa and her young man lost somewhere out in the fog.”

  The immediate prospect of food, however, serves to appease their hunger. They smile pleasantly at each other, like strangers, or those just met. Phyllis even thinks what a handsome man Bynum is; he looks wonderful for his age. “Was Antonia good-looking back when you first knew her?” she asks him.

  “Well, she was odd.” Bynum seems to ruminate. “She varied so much. Looking terrific one day, and really bad the next. But she was always, uh, attractive. Men after her. But the thing is, she doesn’t know it.”

  “Oh, not even now?” Phyll
is, disliking her own small scale, her blond pallor, admires Antonia’s larger, darker style. Antonia is so emphatic, is what Phyllis thinks.

  “Especially not now.” Bynum’s smile and his tone are indulgent.

  “Do you remember that really strange thing she said, when she told a reporter, ‘I’m not Antonia Love’?” asks Phyllis. She has wanted to mention this before to Bynum, but they have, seemingly, no time for conversation.

  “I think she meant that she could only view herself as created,” Bynum explains authoritatively.

  Phyllis is not sure whether he is speaking as a fellow artist or simply as an old friend. She asks, “Do you mean by the media?” She is aware of enjoying this conversation, perhaps because it is one, a conversation.

  “Oh no, so much more sinister,” Bynum assures her. “By herself. She thinks she’s someone she’s painted.” He chuckles a little too loudly.

  And loses the momentary sympathy of his young wife. Declining to comment, though, and remembering how hungry she is, Phyllis gets up to her feet. “Well, I don’t care how lost Lisa and what’s-his-name are. I’m heating up dinner.”

  She goes out into the kitchen as Bynum calls after her, “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  But several minutes pass, during which Bynum does not follow Phyllis. Instead he stares out the window, out into the dark, the enveloping, thickening fog. Into dimmed yellow lights.

  He is fairly sure that Phyllis will leave him soon; he knows the signs—the ill-concealed small gestures of impatience, the long speculative looks, the tendencies to argument. How terribly alike they all seem, these girls that he marries. Or is it possible that he sees none of them very sharply, by herself—that he can’t differentiate? One of them made this very accusation, referring to what she called his “myopia.” In any case, he will probably not miss Phyllis any more than he missed the others, and in a year or so he will find and marry a new young woman who is very much like Phyllis and the rest. He knows that he must be married.