After You've Gone Read online

  Cancer: Maggie’s history is “unfortunate.” Her mother and two aunts had fairly early mastectomies. However, all three women are still alive and seemingly well: successful surgery. Conscientious (frightened) Maggie has yearly mammograms, and she worries. Especially when Jonathan rails against the city, when he says that he is sure he could find a better job in Boston, or even in New York—then, imagining his departure, Maggie imagines too that in her grief she will also find a lump. And her full awareness of the total irrationality of this view is not much help.

  And now—Diana.

  Her tea, though, has imparted some hope to Maggie, along with its comforting warmth. Or, having gazed for some moments at the wilds of her own unreason, she feels more reasonable?

  In any case, she stands up resolutely, and stretches a little before taking her teacup and saucer over to the sink, neatly washing and drying and putting them away. Of course Diana will show up sooner or later, Maggie now thinks. If not tonight, tomorrow. At worst, she, Maggie, could call in sick (a thing she has never once done); Hue Wan and his mother, and her five or six other appointments could get through the day without her. Couldn’t they?

  Going outside to try calling Diana again, and again, she thinks that now, for sure, Diana will emerge through the trees, with her slightly loose-jointed walk, her mad yellow blinking eyes, in the dark.

  At the upward slope of the house a wide path leads to the crest of the hill, from which one can see the ocean—on clear days, the brilliant Pacific. Almost nothing would be visible up there now, in the gathering, thickening dark; still, Maggie has an odd impulse to take that path, to hike up across gullies and fallen trees and rocks to the top of the ridge, to look out at the black space where the sea must be.

  However, even for Maggie in her current state of unreason, this seems too extreme a step, and she finds herself thinking instead about Hue Wan Griggs, whom she might or might not see tomorrow. Hue is part Vietnamese, part black, very dark and small for his age, with wide, amazingly beautiful, luminous, heavy-lashed eyes. And diagnosed as autistic—no contact, just hitting, bumping into things, staring off. But last week he smiled, he actually smiled in what Maggie believed was her direction. And now she feels a pang of loss at the thought that she could miss another such smile.

  But no Diana. In the light steady rain and the increasing cold, Maggie stands and calls, and calls, and no cat comes. And all her plans and half-decisions seem then to dissolve in that rain. Whether she stays overnight or goes back to the city is wholly unimportant, for nothing will work, she now thinks. Her superstitious wooing of Diana or perhaps of fate itself was to no avail. Of course not.

  Sodden-hearted, she turns again toward the house, without a plan. Irrelevantly and painfully she is remembering a weekend that she and Jonathan (and Diana, of course they brought her along) spent at this house last summer, a time that she later came to think of as perfect. Or as close to perfect as imperfect humans can arrive at. (And cats: Diana, a non-hunter, chased mice and squirrels, and lost, but seemed to enjoy the chase.) Perfect soft bright weather for hikes and picnic feasts. Amazingly brilliant views of the sea, and of further piney ridges, cliffs of rocks. Amazing love.

  Looking up at the huge square gray house before her, Maggie now sees it as inhabited by shades. By Jonathan, and by her parents. By beautiful, gone Diana.

  Reluctantly she opens the front door. She goes into the living room, and there, an orange-gold mound in the middle of the sofa, there is Diana: Diana entirely engrossed in grooming her tail, licking, burrowing for a probably imaginary flea. Not even looking up.

  And of course there is no way to find out, ever, where she has been, and much less why: why she should hide for what is now almost three hours, why hide when she must have heard Maggie call, and call, from wherever she was, in however deep a sleep.

  An hour or so later, Maggie is driving her small car back across the Golden Gate Bridge, in the murky yellow lights (the supposed suicide-deterrents). Her overnight bag and the small sack of leftover food and her books are on the back seat, and Diana, as always, is sleeping on Maggie’s lap; she is simply there, asleep and lightly purring, shedding golden hairs on Maggie’s dark, still-damp skirt.

  And Maggie can no longer even invest the return of her cat with magic meanings: Jonathan might still decide to throw it all up and move back to Boston, or New York; a mammogram could still hold bad news for Maggie. None of her wildest, her most despairing thoughts are assuaged for good. Tonight when she gets home she will call Jonathan, who may or may not feel like coming over to see her. And tomorrow morning at eight she will meet with small, doe-eyed Hue Wan Griggs, who may or may not smile.

  TIDE POOLS

  For some years I lived alone in a small white clapboard house, up on a high wooded bluff above the Mississippi River, which I could hardly see—so far down, glimpsed through thick vines and trees, and so narrow just there.

  This was near Minneapolis, where I was an assistant professor at a local college. Teaching marine biology. And I thought quite a lot about the irony of my situation—a sea specialty in the landlocked Midwest. (I am from Santa Barbara, California, originally, which may explain quite a bit.)

  During those Minnesota years, despite professional busyness, a heavy teaching load, labs, conferences, friends, and a few sporadic love affairs, I was often lonely, an embarrassing condition to which I would never have admitted. Still, and despite my relative isolation, at that time I regarded the telephone as an enemy, its shrill, imperative sound an interruption even to loneliness. When my phone rang, I did not anticipate a friendly chat. For one thing, most of my friends and lovers were also hard-working professionals, not much given to minor social exchange.

  Thus, on a summer night about a year ago, a rare warm clear twilight, reminding me of Southern California, I was far from pleased at the sound of the telephone. I had just taken a bath and finished dressing; I was going out to dinner with a man I had met recently, whom I thought I liked. (Was he calling to break the date? Native distrust has not helped my relationships with men, nor with women.) We were going out to celebrate my birthday, actually, but I did not imagine that the ringing phone meant someone calling with congratulations, my birthday not being something that I generally talk about.

  What I first heard on picking up that alien instrument was the hollow, whirring sound that meant a long-distance call, and I thought, How odd, what a strange hour for business. Then, as I said hello, and hello again, I heard silence. At last a female voice came on, very slurred. But then words formed. “Judith? Have I got Miss Judith Mallory? Dr. Mallory?”

  “Yes—”

  “Judy, is that you, truly? Truly, Jude? Judy, do you know who this is?” An excited, drunken voice, its cadence ineradicably familiar to me—and only one person has ever called me Jude. It was Jennifer Cartwright, my closest early-childhood friend, my almost inseparable pal—whom I had not heard from or about for more than twenty years, not since we both left Santa Barbara, where we grew up together, or tried to.

  I asked her, “Jennifer, how are you? Where are you? What are you doing now?”

  “Well, I’m back in our house, you know. I’ve come back home. I’ve been here since Mother died, and I guess I’m doing okay. Oh, Judy, it’s really you! I’m so happy …”

  Happy was the last thing that Jennifer sounded, though; her voice was almost tearful.

  “Oh, Jennifer.” I was assailed by an overwhelming affection for my friend, mixed with sadness over whatever ailed her just now, including being so drunk. I had not even known that her mother was dead. Nicola—Nickie Cartwright, whom I had also cared about a lot.

  My own parents had both been dead for some time, which is one reason I had had no news from Santa Barbara. Also, since they died of so-called alcohol-related ailments, I was perhaps unreasonably alarmed at Jennifer’s condition. A nervous stomach, which is no stomach at all for booze, had kept me, if unwillingly, abstemious.

  “And oh!” Jennifer’s voice sounded in
deed much happier now. “I forgot to say happy birthday. Judy, Jude, happy happy birthday! Every year I think of you today, even if I haven’t ever called you.”

  “You’re so good to remember,” I told her. “But really, tell me how you are.”

  “Oh, you tell me! First off, you tell me just what you have on.” Such a perfect Jennifer question—or Nickie: Nickie too would have asked me what I was wearing, in order to see me, and to check on how I was.

  To please Jennifer, I should have described a beautiful, colorful dress, but a lack of imagination, I believe, has kept me honest; I tend to tell the truth. My former (only) husband observed that I had a very literal mind, and he might have been right, as he was with a few other accurate accusations. In any case, I told Jennifer, “Just a sweater and some pants. My uniform, I guess. But they’re both new. Black. Actually, I’m going out to dinner. This man I met—”

  Jennifer began to laugh, her old prolonged, slow, appreciative laugh, and I thought, Well, maybe she’s not so drunk. Just a little tipsy, maybe, and overexcited.

  “Oh, Jude.” Jennifer was laughing still. “You’re going out on a date, and we’re so old. But you sound like you’re about sixteen, and wearing something pink and gauzy.”

  Rational, sober person that I am, I could have cried.

  But Jennifer went on in a conversational, much less drunken way. “I think about you so much,” she said. “And everything back then. All the fun we had. Of course, since I’ve moved back here it’s all easier to remember.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear about Nickie,” I told her.

  “Well, just one more terrible thing. Everyone gets cancer, it seems like to me. Honestly, Jude, sometimes I think being grown up really sucks, don’t you? To use a word I truly hate.”

  “Well, I guess.”

  “Your parents die, and your husbands turn out bad. And your kids—oh, don’t even talk to me about kids.”

  Her voice trailed off into a total silence, and I thought, Oh dear, she’s fallen asleep at the telephone, out there in California, in that house I know so very well. The house right next door to the house where my parents and I used to live—in fact, its architectural twin—on what was called the Santa Barbara Gold Coast, up above the sea. I wondered what room Jennifer was in—her own room, in bed, I hoped. I called out “Jennifer!” over all that space, Minnesota to California. Calling out over time too, over many years.

  Her laugh came on again. “Oh, Jude, you thought I’d gone to sleep. But I hadn’t, I was just lying here thinking. In Mother and Dad’s big old bed. You remember?”

  “Oh, of course I do.” And with a rush I remembered the Sunday morning when Jennifer and I had run into the Cartwrights’ bedroom, I guess looking for the Sunday papers, and there was blond Scott and blonder Nickie in their tousled nightclothes, lying back among a pale-blue tangle of sheets. Not making love, although I think we must have caught them soon after love. They may have moved apart as we came in; Scott’s hand still lingered in Nickie’s bright, heavy uncombed hair. At the time, I was mostly struck by their sleepy affection for each other, so clearly present. I can see it now, those particular smiles, all over their pale morning faces.

  The room, with its seascape view, was almost identical to my parents’ bedroom, and their view. My parents slept in narrow, separate beds. They were silent at home except when they drank, which loosened them up a little, though it never made them anywhere near affectionate with each other.

  In any case, I surely remembered the Cartwrights’ broad, blue-sheeted carved-mahogany bed.

  I asked Jennifer, “Your father—Scott died too?” Although I think I knew that he must have. But I used to see Scott Cartwright as the strongest man I ever knew, as well as the most glamorous, with his golfer’s tan, and his stride.

  “Just after your mother died. They were all so young, weren’t they? Dad had a stroke on the golf course, but maybe that’s the best way to go. Poor Mother was sick for years. Oh, Judy, it’s all so scary. I hate to think about it.”

  She had begun to trail off again, and partly to keep her awake, in contact, I asked her if she had married more than once; I thought I had heard her say “husbands,” plural, but it was hard to tell, with her vagueness, slurring.

  But “Oh, three times!” Jennifer told me. “Each one worse. I never seem to learn.” But she sounded cheerful, and next she began to laugh. “You will not believe what their names were,” she said. “Tom, Dick, and Harry. That’s the truth. Well, not actually the whole truth—I can’t lie to my best old favorite friend. The whole truth is, the first two were Tom and Dick, and so when I went and got married the third time I had to call him Harry, even if his name was Jack.”

  I laughed—I had always laughed a lot with Jennifer—but at the same time I was thinking that people from single, happy marriages are supposed to marry happily themselves. They are not supposed to make lonely, drunken phone calls to old, almost forgotten friends.

  Mostly, though, I was extremely pleased—elated, even—to have heard from Jennifer at all, despite the bad signs, the clear evidence that she was not in very good shape. As we hung up a few minutes later, I was aware of smiling to myself, the happy recipient of a happy birthday present. And like most especially welcome, sensitive presents, this gift from Jennifer was something that I had not known I needed, but that now I could no longer do without: a friend for talking to.

  I went out for dinner with my new beau in a rare light-hearted mood, but I may have seemed more than a little abstracted. I was thinking of Jennifer, her parents, and California.

  When Jennifer and I were friends, all that time ago, I truly loved her, but I also coveted almost everything about her: her golden curls, small plump hands, her famously sunny disposition, but most especially and most secretly I envied her her parents. I wanted them to be mine.

  I have since learned (hasn’t everyone?) that this is a common fantasy; Freud tells us that many children believe they have somehow ended up with the wrong set of parents. But at the time I naturally did not know this; guiltily I felt that only I had such an evil wish, to be rid of my own parents and moved in with another set. If it could somehow be proved, I thought, that I had been stolen by this dark and somber couple with whom I lived, while all along I was really a Cartwright child—then I would be perfectly happy. And if Jennifer’s parents were mine, then of course Jennifer and I would be truly sisters, as so often we spoke of wishing that we were.

  From the moment I saw them, even before seeing Jennifer, I was drawn to Scott and Nickie Cartwright, a tanned couple getting out of a new wood-paneled station wagon to look at a house for sale, the house next door to our house. I liked their bright splashy clothes, and the easy, careless way they walked and laughed; I wanted them to be the people to buy that house.

  I thought that they looked too young to be parents; that they turned out to have a little girl just my age was a marvelous surprise, a bonus, as it were.

  My own parents did not like the look of the Cartwrights, at first. “Lots of flash” was my Vermont mother’s succinct summation. And my father’s: “That garden they’re buying needs plenty of solid work. I hope they know it.” But fairly soon the four grown-ups took to dropping in on each other for a cup of coffee or a Coke, maybe, during the day; and at night they all got together for drinks. The Cartwrights, from St. Louis, had a sort of loose-style hospitality to which even my fairly stiff-mannered parents responded.

  What must initially have won my stern parents’ approval, though, was the Cartwrights’ total dedication to their garden. Even before actually moving in, they began to spend their weekends digging among the dahlias, pruning hibiscus, trimming orange blossoms, and probing the roots of ivy. And once they lived there, all during the week beautiful Nickie in her short red shorts could be observed out clipping boxwoods, often mowing the lawn. And watering everything.

  On weekends, around dusk if not sooner, the four of them would start in on their Tom Collinses, gin rickeys, or fruity concocti
ons with rum. Eventually one of the grown-ups (usually Nickie Cartwright) would remember that Jennifer and I should have some supper, and the two men (probably) would go out for some fried clams or pizza. Later on they would pretty much forget all about us, which was fine with Jennifer and me; we could stay up as long as we liked, giggling and whispering.

  All the grown-ups that I knew at that time drank; it was what I assumed grown-ups did when they got together. Jennifer and I never discussed this adult habit, and “drunk” is not a word we would have used to describe our parents, ever. “Drunk” meant a sort of clownish, TV-cartoon behavior.

  My parents as they drank simply talked too much; they told what seemed to me very long dull stories having to do with Santa Barbara history, early architects, all that. The Cartwrights, being younger, listened politely; Nickie laughed a lot, and they sat very close together.

  Certainly my parents were never clownish or even loud; God knows they were not. In a bitter, tight-mouthed way they might argue at breakfast; a few times (this was the worst of all) I could hear my mother crying late at night, all by herself.

  Because I had never heard them do so, I believed that the Cartwrights never argued, and I was sure that beautiful happy Nickie Cartwright never cried, and maybe she did not.

  In the days that succeeded that first phone call from Jennifer, I thought considerably about her, about her parents, and mine. With terrible vividness I remembered the strength of my yearning for the Cartwrights, and I was assailed—again!—by the sheer intensity of all that childhood emotion, my earliest passions and guilts and despairs.

  Quite as vividly, though, I also remembered the simple fun that we used to have, Jennifer and I, as children, especially on the beach. Since I had always lived there in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, and the Cartwrights were originally from inland Missouri, I was Jennifer’s guide to the seashore. Bravely kicking our sneakers into tide pools, Jennifer and I uncovered marvels: tiny hermit crabs, long swaying seaweed, all purple. Anemones. Jennifer would squeal at dead fish, in a high, squeamish way, as I pretended not to mind them.