The Astral Page 5

  So much, he thought, for the fantasies that had kept him burning in his bed night after night. She had looked right through him, had looked downright unhappy to see him—could not, in short, have made her disinterest any plainer.

  And what had he expected, anyway? That after all these years she would throw herself into his arms, would tell him that she did after all love him, that nothing mattered any more but them, together at last?

  Just by passing by she has stolen my heart. Surely, all those thousands of years ago, Ramses had meant those words to be joyous, but remembering them now, they filled him with anguish.

  He cursed himself for a fool and looked around in a daze. He had forgotten entirely what he had even come here for. Disgusted with himself, in despair, he followed her path out into the rain of the parking lot.

  * * * *

  At home, Catherine stripped off her sodden clothes and slipped into a robe. The telephone rang but she ignored it. A fire was already laid in the living room fireplace, and she lit it and poured herself a glass of cognac.

  She didn’t often drink these days, was afraid that she would find that too convenient a relief. Now, though, the burn of the alcohol in her throat was welcome.

  She was still unnerved by the meeting with Jack. Seeing him...my God, how that had shaken her. The thought of resuming sexual relations with Walter had sickened her. She’d had to force herself to make the effort, futile as it had turned out to be. A day ago, an hour ago, she would not have imagined that she could feel—would ever again feel—desire of that sort.

  Yet she had only to lay eyes on Jack McKenzie and she had been panting like a bitch in heat. No use dressing it up in fancy words, my girl.

  It wasn’t only sexual heat, though, now that she’d had time to consider. It was another kind of heat as well that had permeated her. Seeing him, however briefly, however disappointingly, was like stepping from an icy cold outside into a warm, fire lit room. She could almost feel the frigidity within her begin to thaw, like the heat from the fireplace leaching the chill from her body. She turned her glass in her hand, watching the gleam of firelight caught in the amber like some prehistoric insect.

  The clock struck, giving her a start. Walter had said he would be home for dinner. She couldn’t bear the thought of struggling through an evening with him. Though she and Jack had done nothing more than chat in a desultory fashion, she felt oddly guilty. Surely Walter would see her desire written on her face.

  She dialed the restaurant, meaning to plead an excuse. She would say she was going to a movie with her mother, or perhaps that she had a headache and wanted to be alone.

  None of which turned out to be necessary. A girlish young voice she didn’t recognize informed her, “Mr. Desmond isn’t in today, it’s his day off. Can I help you?”

  She hung up without reply, relieved and puzzled at the same time. He had said he was going to the restaurant, hadn’t he? Oh well, she thought, he surely isn’t finding my company any more enjoyable than I do his.

  For a moment, she considered trying his cell phone, and decided against it. Out of the blue, it occurred to her that he might be having an affair. And what if he was, she wondered? She could hardly blame him. Could hardly care, truth be told. Anyway, after the desire—oh, hell, call a spade a spade, she thought—after the lust Jack had inspired in her, she wasn’t in a position to cast stones, was she?

  Maybe, she thought wryly, in Gilbert and Sullivan style, they had become the very model of a modern messed-up marriage.

  The phone rang again. She almost answered it, thinking it might be Walter, and then changed her mind, letting it ring for several long minutes before it finally stopped.

  * * * *

  Walter was not home for dinner after all. She was already in bed when she heard him come in. She listened, and concluded from his stumbling around and muttered remarks that he was drunk.

  She got up to see if he needed help, but when she came near to the bedroom door, she heard him crying. She crept back to her own room, Becky’s room, where she lay in the darkness and imagined, though it would have been impossible, that she could still hear his muted sobs.

  Or perhaps they were Becky’s sobs that she heard. With that thought, there seemed to come to her a chorus of weeping. Children, a vast multitude of them, crying.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At first, when she woke in the morning, she could not quite think what was different—something about the light? She turned on her side and saw the glow of sunlight beaming into the bedroom. Going to the window, she pulled the curtains aside. The rain that had fallen for days had ended and the sky was blue and high above.

  What was really odd, she thought, as she slipped out of the oversized tee shirt she used for a nightgown, was the fact that she had slept the night through, like the proverbial log. For months her sleep had been fitful, periodic, punctuated with awakenings when she would find herself bathed in sweat and the bedclothes tied in knots.

  She was in the shower when she realized with a sense of discovery that something had happened to her, something was different inside, in the very core of her being.

  She tried to analyze it, and came back to her meeting yesterday with Jack. It was as if that electrical shock of seeing him, of sexual remembering, had jump-started her feelings, all the emotions she had so carefully locked away.

  Out of nowhere, she began to cry—the first tears she had shed since that horrible moment in the parking lot, clinging to the door of a truck, fighting for her daughter.

  She sat on the edge of the tub and let them come. The sobs wracked her body, the tears rolled down her cheeks unstopped. It was painful, but at the same time, she felt alive in a way that she hadn’t been before. It was like being born again. Was this what the church people meant when they said that?

  Walter gave her a concerned look when she came into the kitchen. Probably, she thought, he had heard her sobbing in the bathroom. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I’m going to be,” she said, and gave him a hug and a kiss on the cheek. He seemed pleased, if a bit mystified. She was grateful that he didn’t question her further. She didn’t have the answers yet herself.

  She did, however, have some plans made. When Walter left, she went to the garage and took down the boxes of Christmas ornaments and without opening them set them on the front step, and called Goodwill to pick them up. She told Goodwill the boxes were Christmas ornaments, but in her mind it was a big chunk of self-pity she was disposing of.

  Then she went to see her mother. She drove up Beverly Glen, seeing for the first time how green the hills were from all the rain, and took Mulholland Drive, following its twisted route across the ridge of hills that separate the valley from West L.A.

  In the summer the valley would be thick with smog and visibility limited to no more than a few miles, but now, the air washed clean by rain, it spread out before her in all its immensity, seeming to go on and on forever before it collided with the purple-gray mountains in the distance.

  She turned off Mulholland to weave her way down Laurel Canyon into the valley itself. It was Saturday, nearing Christmas, and traffic was busy. People were intent on going here and there, some of them chatting with companions in their cars, some of them appearing to talk to themselves. They looked happy, sad, frenzied, spaced out, the whole gamut of human expression. The sidewalks were mostly empty. People didn’t walk much here, though there were groups of children playing, and a mailman plodded wearily along his route, a terrier yapping at him from behind a wire fence.

  Perhaps after all it wasn’t so bad to be alive. She still had her grief. Probably she would have that within her for the rest of her life, but maybe there could be room as well for the rest of it, the common threads of humanity that held life together.

  Her mother was still in her bathrobe, not one of those pink and frilly woman’s things, but a man’s white terry cloth robe, several sizes too big for her. Somehow Catherine found it endearing.

  Sandra was surp
rised to see her, and faintly alarmed, not sure what to expect. She had been worried since she arrived at Dominique’s yesterday and found Catherine gone. Several times she tried to phone, but there had been no answer. Now, suddenly, here Catherine was, stopped just inside the front door.

  “It’s funny,” Catherine said in the way of greeting, “I was thinking that no matter where you have lived or for how long, coming to your mother’s house is always ‘coming home’.”

  Sandra gave a timorous smile. “Strange you should say that. I said almost the same words to your grandmother many years ago.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Catherine said, and then they were in one another’s arms, both of them crying and talking at the same time, and even laughing, and it was minutes before Sandra could steer them into the kitchen.

  They sat at the little table there and had coffee and bagels and cried and laughed some more and after a while, to the great good pleasure of both, their chatter settled into the kind of frank, woman-to-woman conversation they had enjoyed so often together in the past.

  They spoke of Becky, the first time Catherine had been able to speak of her to anyone: of how precious she had been to both of them, and they shared the horror they had suffered over what had happened, and the anger that had been too long suppressed.

  “I’ve been so selfish,” Catherine said, “I was so wrapped up in the pain of losing a daughter, I forgot that you had lost a granddaughter.”

  “I felt as if I had lost a granddaughter and a daughter.” She made of it less a rebuke than a statement of fact that produced another round of tears and hugs and a spilled cup of coffee.

  “It’s all right, really, I do understand,” Sandra said as she mopped up the coffee. “When your father died—it’s nearly ten years now—but I thought for a long time that my life was over. I simply couldn’t imagine how I could go on without him.”

  “It’s so strange, you seemed at the time to be handling it so well.”

  “I wasn’t any better at sharing my pain than you have been. We’re two of a kind, I suppose. The point is, time is the answer. It’s such a cliché, but time is what does it. It’s early days yet. Wait, be patient, the wounds will heal. She’ll never leave you, and that’s all right too. It just won’t hurt so much when you think of her. When I think of your father now, it’s mostly with pleasure.”

  They both thought of that for a moment while Sandra got up to pour some more coffee.

  “Do you ever,” Catherine asked and hesitated slightly, “Do you ever miss the, you know, the physical part?”

  “Sometimes.” Her mother smiled shyly. “Until he got sick, your father was a very passionate man.”

  Which Catherine found awkward to contemplate. One never wanted to think of one’s parents that way, though she was sensible enough to realize how altogether silly that was.

  “But you’re still young.” Her mother was fifty-four and could surely pass for ten years younger. “Haven’t you ever thought about finding someone else?”

  “Yes. I actually did, well, ‘see’ someone a few times. You remember Mr. Adams, the widower?”

  “Johnny Depp?” Catherine said with an incredulous laugh—that was their nickname for the neighbor across the street, who did indeed look uncannily like the actor. “Are you telling me you slept with Johnny Depp?”

  “He’s a very handsome man.” Her mother gave her a stern look, which quickly deteriorated into a giggle. “And slept is not quite the right word. He always went home afterward.”

  “Well?” Catherine raised an eyebrow. Inwardly she was scoring her mother some serious points. Mr. Adams, “Johnny Depp,” couldn’t have been more than thirty-something. A teacher, he had been married only a few years when he lost his wife in an auto accident. Despite the obvious efforts of numerous women in and out of the neighborhood to provide solace, there had never been any suggestion that he was seeing anyone—until now.

  Sandra shrugged. “Well, nothing, really. Oh, not that he wasn’t very willing, and so far as I can say, he seemed to have all the moves right. It’s just that for a woman, for some women anyway, at least for me, it doesn’t really work on a purely physical level, it needs that special something. Not love, necessarily, but something more than just bodies banging together. I think for me, if he’s someone special, a private glance across a room is very thrilling, and if he is not, it doesn’t make much difference what he brings to you in looks or technique or, if you want to know, size.”

  Catherine gazed pensively into the distance. “I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the same with me.”

  “You’re thinking of Walter?”

  Catherine looked directly at her mother. “I was thinking of Jack McKenzie,” she said frankly.

  “Oh.” Sandra sounded not particularly surprised.

  “I seem to have loved him forever. And to have been unhappy about it nearly as long.”

  “Oh, my dear, love has nothing to do with happiness. You can be quite happy with someone and not love him. And you can love him and despise him at the same time. It’s something spontaneous and, it seems to me, quite unmanageable. And endless, too, I don’t think once you love someone you can ever really stop loving, although you can certainly end the relationship.”

  “I’d have to agree. I know I tried hard enough to get Jack out of my heart, but try though I will, he’s still there.”

  “I don’t think I shall presume to advise you on that score. You remember your Dante, don’t you? When he first starts his journey it is Socrates, the intellect, who guides him, but when they reach a certain point, he turns the job over to Dante’s beloved Beatrice. Which was Dante’s way of saying, as I see it, there comes a time when reason be damned, you have to let your heart lead the way.”

  What a dope I have been, Catherine was thinking, to have deprived myself of this wonderful woman.

  * * * *

  She stopped at the mall again on her way home. At the entrance to Macy’s Christmas department, she had to pause to steel herself. All the bustle, the noise, Christmas music piped over speakers, the babble of voices and the jangle of cash registers. In the far corner a line of children waited to see a thoroughly unconvincing Santa. Or perhaps the children were happy to allow themselves to be deceived—children were often wiser, she thought, than parents gave them credit for being.

  She made herself go in. She picked up two strings of lights, and got a third one for good measure. Four boxes of ornaments, that ought to be enough, wouldn’t it? Tinsel, some garlands. She even got an angel for the treetop, and immediately named it Becky.

  Those purchases made, and they were the hardest, she went to men’s and found a cashmere sweater for Walter, and to women’s, where she picked out a Pashmina stole for her mother. She chose black first, and then, thinking that too funereal, traded it for a fire engine red; but she could hear her mother saying, “What on earth would I wear that with?” She settled finally for one in pale lilac.

  “It’s going on sale tomorrow,” the silver-haired saleswoman whispered in a conspiratorial voice. “I’ll ring it up for you at the sale price.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Catherine thanked her. That was something she must work at remembering: there were kind people in the world too, good people. One mustn’t think that everyone was evil. To do that was to let the villains win.

  She took her packages to gift wrapping and had them wrapped. That, she decided, she still wasn’t up to. Anyway, she had never been very good at it.

  Satisfied that she had taken several good steps in the direction of recovery, she left the store. On her way home, she stopped at her regular flower shop, Rose’s Roses. They had ordered their Christmas trees from Rose Leiberman for years, always—Rose’s little joke—calling it a Hanukah bush.

  The tinkle of the bell over the door and the familiar blend of flower shop scents, the sweet of fresh and the rotten of aging flowers, welcomed her.

  The pale, blonde woman by the window was new to her however. In the past Ro
se had always managed the shop alone. “I was looking for Rose,” Catherine replied to her greeting.

  “I’m here to help you,” the woman said.

  A new employee, then. Catherine was disappointed. She would have liked to see Rose herself, but Rose was getting up in years and the shop was probably too much for her to handle alone at this hectic time of year.

  “I’d like to order a tree,” Catherine said.

  “You must keep trying,” the woman said.

  “Oh. You mean you don’t have any trees this year?”

  “Traveling is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets,” was the puzzling response.

  Catherine tried to digest that, but could make no sense of it. “I’m sorry, I don’t think I understand.” Did she know this woman? She looked vaguely familiar, but standing just in front of the window as she was, with the bright sunlight streaming in around her, it was difficult to make out her face. If one were fanciful one might almost imagine that the light made a halo about her head.

  “I’m sorry about the pain, but it will get better too with practice. It does sort of go with the territory, unfortunately. You were shot in the head, after all.”

  Catherine gasped. “How could you possibly know...?” she started to ask, taking a step towards this strange woman.

  “Mrs. Desmond! Catherine!” Rose Leiberman came through the curtained doorway from the back room. “What a wonderful surprise.”

  Catherine turned to greet her and was swallowed up in a determined embrace, crushed against Rose’s enormous bosom. “I was so sorry, so very, very sorry,” Rose said. “You poor darling.”

  Catherine felt a cold draft across the back of her neck. It was a moment before she realized the shop door had opened and closed behind her. She jumped back and looked around. The woman had gone.

  “Oh, wait,” she cried. She ran outside and looked up and down the street. A huffing Springer Spaniel impatiently tugged along a thin man on the end of a leash. Two boys tossed a football back and forth, and a young woman in purple Spandex that ought to have been too skimpy for the chilly day teetered perilously on a pair of inline skates. The woman was nowhere to be seen.