After You've Gone Page 7

  A strong light wind has come up, rattling the windowpanes. Standing there, still looking out, Bynum has a brand-new thought—or, rather, a series of thoughts. He thinks, Why do they always have to be so goddam young? Just who am I kidding? I’m not a young man. A woman of my own age or nearly might at last be a perfect companion for me. A woman artist, even, and he thinks, Well, why not Antonia? This place is a dump, but she’s so successful now we could travel a lot. And I’ve always liked her really, despite our fights. This Reeve person must surely be on the way out. She won’t put up with him much longer—so callow.

  “Bynum, come on, it’s all ready,” Phyllis then calls out as at that same instant the doorbell rings.

  It is of course Lisa and the new young man, Perry, who looks, Bynum observes, far too smugly pleased with himself.

  Introductions are made, warm greetings exchanged: “But you look marvelous! Have you been here long? Yes, I’m sure we met at the gallery. How very like Antonia not to be here. But whatever could have happened?”

  “Actually, it is not at all like Antonia not to be here,” Bynum announces. He is experiencing a desire to establish himself as the one of them who knows her best.

  Over dinner, which indeed is excellent—a succulent veal stew, with a risotto—Bynum scrutinizes Lisa, and what looks to be her new friend. Lisa is looking considerably less happy than the young man is, this Perry, in Bynum’s view. Could they possibly have made it in the car, on the way over here, and now Lisa is feeling regrets? Even to Bynum’s somewhat primitive imagination this seems unlikely.

  What Lisa regrets is simply having talked as much as she did to Perry as on the way over they remained locked in the fogbound traffic. She not only talked, she exaggerated, overemphasized Antonia’s occasional depression, even her worries over Reeve.

  And even while going on and on in that way, Lisa was visited by an odd perception, which was that she was really talking about herself. She, Lisa, suffers more than occasional depressions. It is her work, not Antonia’s (well, hardly Antonia’s), that seems to be going nowhere. And Lisa, with no Reeve or anyone interesting in her life at the moment, is worried that this very attractive young man will not like her (she has always liked small, dark, trimly built men like Perry). Which is really why she said so much about Antonia—gossip as gift, which is something she knows about, having done it far too often.

  The truth is—or one truth is—that she is deeply, permanently fond of Antonia. And another truth is that her jealous competitiveness keeps cropping up, like some ugly, uncontrolled weed. She has to face up to it, do something about it, somehow.

  “What a superb cook Antonia is,” she now says (this is true, but is she atoning?). “Her food is always such a treat.”

  “The truth is that Antonia does everything quite well,” Bynum intones. “Remember that little spate of jewelry design she went into? Therapy, she called it, and she gave it up pretty quickly, but she did some lovely stuff.”

  “Oh, Bynum,” Lisa is unable not to cry out. “How can you even mention that junk? She was so depressed when she did it, and it did not work as therapy. You know perfectly well that she looked dreadful with all those dangles. She’s too big.”

  Perry laughs as she says this, but in a pleasant, rather sympathetic way, so that Lisa thinks that maybe, after all, he understood? understood about love as well as envy?

  Below them on the street now are the straining, dissonant, banging sounds of cars: people trying to park, trying to find their houses, to get home to rest. It is hard to separate one sound from another, to distinguish, identify. Thus, steps that must be Antonia’s, with whomever she is with, are practically upon them before anyone has time to say, “Oh, that must be Antonia.”

  It is, though: Antonia, her arm in its bright white muslin sling thrust before her, in a bright new shiny plaster cast. Tall Antonia, looking triumphant, if very pale. And taller Reeve, somewhat disheveled, longish sandy hair all awry, but also in his own way triumphant, smiling. His arm is around Antonia’s shoulder, in protective possession.

  First exclamations are in reaction to the cast. “Antonia, how terrible! However did you? How lucky that Reeve—How awful, does it still hurt? Your left arm, how lucky!”

  Reeve pulls out a chair for Antonia, and in an already practiced gesture with her good, lucky right arm she places the cast in her lap. In a somewhat embarrassed way (she has never been fond of center stage), she looks around at her friends. “I’m glad you went on with dinner” is the first thing she says. “Now you can feed us. God, I’m really starving.”

  “I came home and there she was on the floor—” Reeve begins, apparently about to start a speech.

  “The damn cat!” Antonia cries out. “I tripped over Baron. I was making the salad.”

  Reeve scowls. “It was very scary,” he tells everyone present. “Suppose I hadn’t come home just then? I could have been traveling somewhere, although—”

  This time he is interrupted by Bynum, who reasonably, if unnecessarily, states, “In that case, we would have been the ones to find Antonia. Phyllis and I.”

  “I do wish someone would just hand me a plate of that stew,” Antonia puts in.

  “Oh of course, you must be starved,” her friends all chorus. “Poor thing!”

  It is Lisa who places the full, steaming plate before Antonia, Lisa asking, “You can eat okay? You want me to butter some bread?”

  “Dear Lisa. Well, actually I do, I guess. God, I hope I don’t get to like this helplessness.”

  “Here.” Lisa passes a thick slice of New York rye, all buttered. “Oh, and this is Perry,” she says. “He’s been wanting to meet you. You know, we drove down from Marin together.”

  Antonia and Perry acknowledge each other with smiles and small murmurs, difficult for Antonia, since she is now eating, ravenously.

  “Real bastards in the emergency ward,” Reeve is telling everyone; he obviously relishes his part in this rescue. “They let you wait forever,” he says.

  “Among bleeding people on gurneys,” Antonia shudders. “You could die there, and I’m sure some people do, if they’re poor enough.”

  “Does it hurt?” asks Lisa.

  “Not really. Really not at all. I just feel so clumsy. Clumsier than usual, I mean.”

  She and Lisa smile at each other: old friends, familiar irony.

  Now everyone has taken up forks again and begun to eat, along with Antonia. Wine is poured around, glasses refilled with red, or cold white, from pitchers.

  Reeve alone seems not to be eating much, or drinking—for whatever reasons of his own: sheer excitement, possibly, anyone who thinks about it could conclude. He seems nervy, geared up by his—their recent experience.

  The atmosphere is generally united, convivial, though. People tell their own accident stories, as they will when anyone has had an accident (hospital visitors like to tell the patient about their own operations). Bynum as a boy broke his right arm not once but twice, both times falling out of trees. Lisa broke her leg on some ice. “You remember, Antonia, that awful winter I lived in New York. Everything terrible happened.” Perry almost broke his back, “but just a fractured coccyx, as things turned out,” falling off a horse, in New Mexico (this story does not go over very well, somehow; a lack of response can be felt around the room). Phyllis broke her arm skiing in Idaho.

  Reeve refrains from such reminiscences—although he is such a tall, very vigorous young man; back in Wyoming, he must have broken something, sometime. He has the air of a man who is waiting for the main event, and who in the meantime chooses to distance himself.

  In any case, the conversation rambles on in a pleasant way, and no one is quite prepared to hear Antonia’s end-of-meal pronouncement. Leaning back and looking around, she says, “It’s odd that it’s taken me so long to see how much I hate it here.”

  This is surely something that she has never said before. However, Antonia has a known predilection for the most extreme, the most emotional statement of any
given feeling, and so at first no one pays much serious attention.

  Lisa only says, “Well, the city’s not at its best in all this fog. And then your poor arm.”

  And Bynum? “You can’t mean this apartment. I’ve always loved it here.” (At which Phyllis gives him a speculative, not quite friendly look.)

  Looking at them all—at least she has everyone’s attention—Antonia says, “Well, I do mean this apartment. It’s so small, and so inconvenient having a studio five blocks away. Not to mention paying for both. Oh, I know I can afford it, but I hate to.” She looks over at Reeve, and a smile that everyone can read as significant passes between the two of them.

  One of Antonia’s cats, the guilty old tabby, Baron, has settled on her lap, and she leans to scratch the bridge of his nose, very gently.

  And so it is Reeve who announces, “I’ve talked Antonia into coming back to Wyoming with me. At least to recuperate.” He smiles widely (can he be blushing?), in evident pleasure at this continuation of his rescuer role.

  “I’m so excited!” Antonia then bursts out. “The Grand Tetons, imagine! I’ve always wanted to go there, and somehow I never dared. But Reeve has this whole house, and a barn that’s already a studio.”

  “It’s actually in Wilson, which is just south of Jackson,” Reeve explains. “Much less touristic. It’s my folks’ old place.”

  If Antonia expected enthusiasm from her friends about this project, though, she is disappointed.

  Of them all Bynum looks most dejected, his big face sags with displeasure, with thwarted hopes. Phyllis also is displeased, visibly so (but quite possibly it is Bynum of whom she disapproves?).

  Lisa cries out, “But, Antonia, what’ll I do without you? I’ll miss you so, I’m not used to your being away. It’ll be like New York—”

  To which Antonia smilingly, instantly responds, “You must come visit. Do come, we could start some sort of colony. And, Bynum, you can use this place while I’m gone if you want to.”

  Perry of course is thinking of his article, of which he now can evision the ending: Antonia Love off to the wilds of Wyoming, putting fogbound, dangerous San Francisco behind her. He likes the sound of it, although he is not quite sure that Jackson or even Wilson would qualify as “wilds.” But there must be a way to find out.

  In any case, he now sees that he has been quite right in his estimate of Antonia: she is beautiful. At this moment, radiantly pale, in the barely candlelit, dim room, her face is stylized, almost abstract, with her broad, heavy forehead and heavy dark brows, her wide-spaced large black eyes and her wide, dark-painted mouth. It will be easy to describe her: stylized, abstract.

  She is of course not at all his type (he actually much prefers her friend Lisa, whom he has decided that he does like, very much; he plans to see her again)—nor does Perry see himself in Reeve, at all. He senses, however, some exceptional connection between the two of them, some heightened rapport, as though, already in Wyoming, they breathed the same heady, pure, exhilarating air.

  Antonia is talking about Wyoming now, her imagined refuge. “Mountains, clouds, water. Wildflowers,” she is saying, while near her side Reeve smiles, quite privately.

  And Perry believes that he has struck on the first sentence of his article: “Antonia Love these days is a very happy woman.”

  LOST CAT

  Her cat is lost. Maggie calls and calls, standing there at the edge of the woods, in misting, just beginning rain. In Inverness, California, Maggie’s parents’ weekend house.

  But the cat is gone, is nowhere. Not answering, invisible for an hour.

  And generally sensible Maggie feels that she cannot continue in her life without this cat. Without red-gold Diana, regal Diana, of the long plumy tail and wide, mad yellow eyes. This is the breaking point, the true turning downward of her life, Maggie thinks. It is what she always dimly, darkly knew would happen: Diana gone. No more beautiful cat, whom she never deserved, who was only a visitor in Maggie’s life.

  Still calling, “Kitty, kitty, Diana”—at the same time Maggie knows that what she is feeling is ludicrous: preposterous to care so much for a cat that you think you will die without her. But Diana is me, Maggie next (and even more crazily) thinks. If Diana is gone, I am gone.

  And such thoughts from a woman in the very field of mental health! Maggie is a psychiatric social worker, has had years of therapy; she is steeped in theoretic knowledge of the mind. She spends her days helping others to be a little more sane (or trying to help them), or at least to cope in some way with their given lives.

  Behind her the huge house looms, gray-shingled, mullion-windowed. All tidy now and tightly packed for her leaving, as it has been for the past hour. Her clothes and books in their bags, her parents’ kitchen immaculate. A big sane house. In that moment, though, the moment of calling out to Diana through the rain, everything that once seemed all right now looks crazy, including the house. Crazy that she, Maggie, an independent (in most ways) young woman, long out on her own, should still seek a lonely weekend refuge in the family stronghold—and should spend at least two hours, as she just now has, in tidying, tightening up the house, as though to leave no trace of her own light passage there. As though she, like Diana, were some light-footed visitor. Temporary. A shadow of a person.

  “Diana, Diana, kitty …” she calls, sure that no one and especially not Diana, the wily cat, can hear her.

  In the meantime the mist has become true rain, gentle rain but very firm, persistent. Maggie’s face is wet, and her long hair, her Shetland sweater, her skirt. It’s getting dark. Harder and harder to find a willful cat who could have simply strayed off into the woods. Been attacked. Badly hurt. Or simply lost. Gone, for good.

  On the other hand, a more sensible, practical Maggie thinks, cats generally come home. If she goes back into the house, maybe makes a cup of tea, Diana will very, very likely emerge, from wherever. She will stroll out nonchalantly, not even especially friendly, not imagining that either scoldings or excessive greetings are in order.

  Diana is fifteen now, not remarkably old for a cat, but fairly old; could she have chosen now to go off into the woods to die? In the darkening thickets, tangled bent gray cypresses and tall heavy firs, in the rain?

  An outrageous cat, more outrageous even than most cats are. She is sometimes passionately affectionate; she will press her fine-boned body against Maggie’s leg, or her shoulder, with purrings and rubbings. But at other times, which are wholly of Diana’s choosing, she can be haughty, even cross; she has a large vocabulary of negative sounds, as well as her loud, round purr.

  But where—oh, where is she now?

  Maggie’s chest hurts, and her breath comes hard, and at the same time she is humiliated, deeply shamed by what strikes her as deranged: such an extreme, an “inappropriate” reaction to the loss of a cat, whom she surely must have known would someday die.

  Turning from the woods (where Diana is?), Maggie heads slowly back across the tousled pale winter lawn to the house, the enormous house, every inch of which she has searched: under beds, back into closets, under sofas and chairs, behind shelves and more shelves of books.

  In the kitchen, her mother’s kitchen (now entirely her mother’s, so clean, all traces of Maggie removed), with tranced, slow motions Maggie puts on some water for tea as she wonders, Why is it that by this time of her life she does not have a place of her own, other than her very small North Beach rooms, in San Francisco? Because I can’t afford to buy anything, or to rent something larger, another familiar, more reasonable voice responds. Because in a quite deliberate way I chose an underpaid field, social work. And have chosen (more or less) not to marry, only to like men somewhat similarly engaged—recently Jonathan, a sculptor. Never lawyers or doctors or men in stock or real estate, never.

  Pouring tea into her own blue pottery cup, Maggie then sips, and she tries, tries very, very hard, to think in a rational way.

  One solution would be to spend the night out here, in Inverness; obviously,
the longer she is here, the more time there will be during which Diana could somehow show up. Maggie could redo her bed and get up very early, get back to the city by eight, when she has an appointment with Hue Wan Griggs and his mother, who are always meticulously prompt—coming all the way to the clinic from their Tenderloin (condemned) hotel.

  However, at that vision of herself, raw-eyed with sleeplessness and still quite possibly without Diana, Maggie’s mood plunges once more downward, blackly, into hopelessness, and she has what is really her most deranged thought so far. She thinks, If Diana does not come back, if I never find her, it means that Jonathan will leave, go back to Boston, and that the next time I have a mammogram they will find something bad, some shadow on the film that means I will die.

  Loss of Jonathan and getting cancer are Maggie’s most familiar fears, and at worst they seem (if unconsciously) related, try as she will to separate them rationally.

  Jonathan: a sculptor who works in a restaurant that he despises, for a living. He too lives in North Beach, in an even smaller, cheaper place than Maggie’s. Living together would save them money, they know that; however, they also agree that for them having the two places is much better. Both privacy and a certain freshness are preserved. They can take turns playing host at dinner, enjoying small ceremonies. Or on the nights that they do not spend together (Jonathan often likes to work at night) they will meet for breakfast, fresh hard Italian rolls and morning love.

  That is how in good times Maggie and Jonathan “relate” to each other. (The jargon of Maggie’s profession, mixed with worse from pop psychology, is ironically used by them both, part of a well-developed private language.) In bad times Jonathan hates San Francisco, along with his job in the silly, pretentious restaurant; and sometimes Maggie feels herself included in his discontent.