Part 8 (1/2)

Marjorie frowned; this was not the kind of thing you said to her. Too personal, too confessional. Alice would have liked her just to nod, but Marjorie said briskly, ”Well, I'm sure it will be fine. You remember plenty, I'm sure. And certainly, you're doing him a favor just to spend the time with him. He should be grateful for that. I certainly hope he thanks you. I certainly hope he knows to be grateful.”

By the time they reached the kitchen door, Marjorie had grown even more indignant about the writer's antic.i.p.ated ingrat.i.tude. It was her way, Alice thought, of offering solidarity: she didn't quite understand what she had been asked to give, but she knew she'd been asked to give something, and this at least felt like impa.s.sioned reciprocation. Marjorie interrupted herself, bending with a towel to dry one dog and tossing a towel for Alice to use on the other one, to ask if Alice needed anything to round out lunch. ”I have some crab cakes in the freezer, I think; and there's a lot of that chicken left from the party the other night ... No? Some soup?”

Alice said thanks, it was very nice of Marjorie (it was), but she was all set.

Charlie and Liza were almost an hour late, and were cowed by the sight of the house. ”Oh, my G.o.d,” Charlie said.

”It's like Gatsby,” Liza said.

”I don't even know where to pull up. Which door, do you think?”

Alice, though, seemed to have been watching for them; she flew out to the car and was saying, ”Welcome! Welcome!” before they'd even had a chance to climb out, looking somewhat dazedly around them. She had tousled hair, cut quite short, which was either dyed blond or else had turned the kind of white that is closer to yellow. Very blue narrow eyes, behind gold-rimmed gla.s.ses. A soft, drooping, nearly unwrinkled face. Red sweater, loose jeans. Her voice was a little hoa.r.s.e. She had a wonderful smile.

”And who is this?” she was saying, bending to look into the backseat while Liza unclipped the straps of the car seat.

”This is Veronica,” Liza said.

”Veronica!” Alice said to the baby, as Liza drew her out of the car. She'd woken up about fifteen minutes ago and, surprisingly, had not yet cried to be fed. ”Your name is Veronica? Such a big name for such a little person.” Alice was holding out her arms, glancing at Liza: ”Will she let me?”

”Let's see,” Liza said, handing over the baby.

”Veronica,” Alice said softly, looking into the baby's face. ”I think you may be the first Veronica I've ever met. What do you think? Have you encountered many other Veronicas?” Veronica looked back at Alice with her usual mild gravity. Alice laughed. ”Ah. She's considering the question.”

Still carrying Veronica, she led Liza and Charlie to a door at the far end of the house where it angled and joined with a row of large, old-fas.h.i.+oned garage doors, and then up a narrow stairway to another door. ”Here we are!”

It was a big, cream-colored room, with a row of windows at the back. A worn couch and chairs on a balding Persian rug. A couple of low white bookcases. A galley kitchen against one wall; a single bed, covered with a tan comforter, on the other.

Liza went to the windows and saw hedges wrapped in burlap, long beds covered with hay, brown-yellow gra.s.s, more garden beyond, big cold gray sky, and, from the last window, a small slice of dark gray ocean. Charlie saw that he was going to have to find a tactful way to ask Alice about her position in this household; clearly she was not, as he had imagined when they first drove up, the wife of a billionaire. Although: Was her current situation really relevant to his project? Was he going to introduce himself, and today, into the book? I finally found Alice in a one-room garage apartment attached to a fabulously grand house? Or was he just going to write straight history-In 1958 (or whenever it was) Denis Carlisle met a young woman named Alice at (wherever they had met)-objectively planting Alice in the part of her past that mattered to the book and leaving her there?

Alice made coffee, and Charlie pulled out his notebook (he hated to use a tape recorder: not the process of using it but the dullness of the transcript afterward. He felt that sending tapes out to be transcribed was like sending a suit out to be cleaned and having it run over by a steam roller instead-it came back so flattened that it was unrecognizable. For him, reading transcripts of his own interviews was the opposite of verification; a transcript made him doubt what he knew he'd heard).

They sat on the couch and began with the basics: Where were you born? What did your parents do? How many brothers and sisters? Alice answered with an air of eager cooperation that Charlie hadn't seen in any of the other people he'd interviewed. Some had been grumpy and impatient (Giles), some straightforwardly factual, or wistful, or thoughtful and almost dreamy, finding that the interview process took them back to things they hadn't thought about in years. But he'd never seen anybody lay herself bare as-as cheerfully, he would later say to Liza.

(But that would come later, in the car, driving to Vermont, that debriefing with Liza. Checking in with her-You were there, what did you think?-which would feel satisfying to Charlie in some ways, and not in others. You were right there, Liza-why are you acting as though you weren't?) Right now, jotting down preliminary facts about Alice, he was faintly annoyed that Liza was there, and a little embarra.s.sed at being his professional (serious, earnest, slightly full of s.h.i.+t) self in front of her. She sat nursing Veronica in one of the chairs, her knees practically touching the arm of the couch where he and Alice sat. He was listening to Alice, nodding, writing things down-but he kept seeing Liza there, without actually quite looking at her, and he kept thinking, Could you at least go over and sit on the bed? (But Alice had, quite deliberately, placed her in the chair, saying it was the most comfortable place to sit.) Liza knew how he was feeling, and was trying not to let it faze her. If there had been another room to go into, she would have gone into it, but there wasn't. She was feeling peaceful-relatively peaceful, anyway-sitting there in the sun, with the baby's hand gently kneading the skin just above her breast. Veronica, fresh from her nap, drank but looked around curiously, aware of being in a new place. She had fine dark curls that weren't even quite curls yet, more like half curls; they always seemed optimistic to Liza, and, combined with Veronica's grave demeanor, they could make her want to cry.

Alice was saying that her parents had not approved of her going to New York at the age of nineteen to become an actress, but they had kissed her and given her money and put her on the train, ”with all the love in the world,” she said. ”They didn't understand, so they couldn't quite give me their blessing; but they trusted me and wanted me to be happy, and I was.”

She'd gotten married a few months later, she said, to a very young actor. ”Because we wanted so much to go to bed together. We'd both been taught, you see, that one didn't have s.e.x outside marriage, and we both believed it. And what's really funny is that we both believed everyone else believed it too.” She laughed. ”So: the belief didn't last long, and neither did the marriage.”

Then she'd had a few years of being what she called ”a sort of hot young actress.”

She got up and pulled an alb.u.m from the bookshelf and sat with it open on her lap. There she was in an eighteenth-century French farce, with a laced bodice and a curly white wig; there in some modern drama smoldering in a dark c.o.c.ktail dress and smoking; there looking plaintive (”Sonya in Uncle Vanya,” she said); there in some sort of showgirl costume, with fishnet stockings and a bunch of bananas on her head.

Liza put Veronica, who had finished eating, down on the floor and leaned over to look at the pictures. She saw that Alice had been very beautiful: a kind of frank, at-ease, lush beauty that was at once erotic and friendly. Even as Sonya, where they must have tried to deglamorize her, she shone. Liza reached her hand toward the Chekhov photo, and Alice said, ”Well, that was a mistake. Not for me to do it-it was fascinating-but for them to cast me. I was the hot name for a little while, so they were casting me in everything, and I was lucky to get all that attention. But the truth was, I just wasn't that good an actress.”

Charlie was writing some things down, Liza saw, but not as much as she would have liked him to. He was humoring Alice a little bit-maybe not quite humoring her, nothing quite so condescending, but he was letting her talk about things he didn't need to know about so that she'd be relaxed by the time they got to the important stuff. Liza was disappointed in him, and a bit miffed on Alice's behalf: this was good stuff.

But Alice seemed to notice at the same time how few notes Charlie was taking, and she laughed. ”Oh, my G.o.d, here I am going on and on, and we haven't even started talking about Denis. Fire away.”

Denis. Liza saw Charlie jump a little, hearing the name-the name in the books, in the newspaper clippings, in the obsessive history-of-car-racing websites, the name on the timeline chart of The Four that Charlie had inked out on poster board on the living room floor a couple of years ago and which had hung on the wall over his desk ever since, the name that Charlie p.r.o.nounced so seriously as a history name, a biography name-tossed carelessly into the conversation. She knew why the name, spoken casually by Alice who had been his wife, had this kind of effect on Charlie. Denis Carlisle had been killed at the age of twenty-six, in a race outside Barcelona. His car had skidded off the road and flipped into a tree, and his helmet had shattered.

It was the kind of death that both was and was not supposed to happen-shocking, tragic, pointless-but wasn't that part of what racing was for? Or any dangerous sport. Death was always the thing that could happen; it needed to happen sometimes, or the risk would not be real.

Yes: Denis, Liza wanted to say to Charlie. Not some mythic figure. Her husband. Just listen.

Alice had gotten up again, and was kneeling on the bed, taking down some framed black-and-white photographs from a group that hung on the wall. She came back and handed them to Charlie. One was a close-up of a man's face: tanned, handsome, squinting into the sun, windblown light hair, intelligence, humor, grace-a set of blessings that couldn't help but seem doomed; it was impossible to look and not romanticize him, even for Liza, who badly wanted not to, she just wanted to let him be a regular guy caught on film in an ordinary moment.

The other two photographs went together. A group of men around a table in a nightclub. Sitting on the knee of the most beautiful of the men was a woman in a dress that was tight in the bodice and then extravagant in the skirt, billowing over the man's legs and trailing onto the floor. The other people at the table were smiling, but the man and woman were roaring, their heads thrown back, their eyes closed and mouths wide open, their beautiful throats exposed. The next photograph had been taken a moment later: they'd stopped laughing and were leaning toward each other, looking at each other. The look right before you kiss the one person whose existence strikes you as both necessary and miraculous.

Liza, who knew something of this feeling, who had struggled with it for years (sometimes it was better, sometimes almost unbearable-this was something separate, it had nothing to do with Charlie or with her marriage, though she knew she had married Charlie partly as an attempt to solve the problem), took the photograph from Charlie and looked at it for a while.

”That was at El Morocco,” Alice said, ”the winter we got married.”

”I have to ask this,” Charlie said, ”even though I know it's an incredibly dumb question, but: Do you remember what was so funny?”

The biographer was fine, Alice thought. A mail-order biographer. Send me one biographer, you wrote on the form, and this was what you'd get. A perfectly nice, serious, competent young man.

But the wife was more interesting. So young! (But maybe not that young-older than she'd been when she'd married Fred, and Denis, too, for that matter. It was just that they looked younger nowadays. We looked so old, with the hair and the clothes and the heels and the makeup. But that's what we wanted, to look old. Sophisticated. The desirable word, the high compliment.) She admired Liza's long, straight black hair, her calm face. It was unusual, Alice thought, this combination of self-containment and warmth. Liza didn't say much: How was it, then, that Alice felt so certain of her goodwill?

They were taking a break from the interview; the two of them were getting the lunch, while Charlie fleshed out his notes and kept an eye on Veronica, who sat on the floor playing with some empty Tupperware containers Alice had put down in front of her.

”I hoped I was pregnant,” Alice said, ”right after Denis died, but it was probably good that I wasn't.”

Liza, at the stove stirring the soup, looked at her.

”Well, because I wasn't really a responsible person for a number of years after that. A lot of years. I was drinking quite a bit. And flying here and there for acting jobs, trying to have a career. And living in one city, then another.” Alice smiled. ”I was a mess.”

It was strange, she thought, getting down a platter for the cold meats and cheeses, that she could narrate all this, her life, and not feel any of it.

Her AA sponsor was fond of saying, ”My life is an open book.” Alice, who liked the candor of AA (not all the hokey slogans, though), wondered if that was it. Standing up in front of meetings, talking to various friends over decades, telling things to writers (one showed up to interview her every couple of years, although most of the projects never seemed to get finished): the more you talked about your life, the less real it seemed. Maybe she'd told her story so many times that it had become just that: a story. What do I know about my life that no one else knows? she thought.

If she closed her eyes and tried to conjure up Denis's face, what she saw was the photographs. The man squinting in the sun, the man sitting in the car, the man laughing back at her from the deck of the boat they'd lived on in Monte Carlo harbor. What had his bare back looked like, his thighs, the palms of his hands? What had his face looked like in bed, what things had he said to her, how had his voice sounded when he said them?

It wasn't that she didn't have the information, the adjectives she needed to answer her own questions, up to a point. Strong. Warm. Tender. Helpless and elated. It was that the words were all she knew. The words both preserved and eradicated the past; at some point they had replaced it.

Liza held the baby in her lap during lunch, feeding her soup with an old demita.s.se spoon that Alice had run down to borrow from Marjorie's silver chest. Charlie kept asking questions and taking notes, not eating much. Alice was liking him better-he certainly knew a lot about Denis. More, in fact, about Denis's career than she knew herself.

”Oh, yes,” he said, ”that was Bavaria, 1961.”

”Was it?” Alice said.

They had covered everything. Now the three of them were waiting, sitting at the table with the afternoon sun making a drama of the dirty lunch dishes, to talk about Denis's death.

”I know this must be a painful subject,” Charlie began.

”No, it's all right,” Alice said gently. She felt sorry for him. ”Remember, it's over forty years ago.”

”You weren't with him there, were you?”

She shook her head. ”I'd gone to Paris, to visit friends.”