Part 10 (1/2)

Catherine took a while to answer. She seemed deep in thought. ”I just know,” she finally said.

As I head toward home, I find myself studying the neighborhood, now that I'll be leaving it for good. Houses have changed color again since I last noticed, houses whose hues seemed so indelible when we first arrived that the neighborhood will always look fake to me. Most of our friends have split up and moved; different cities, different countries, strange, unlikely fates. Someone told me Katy Alistair's daughter is a stripper in Guam; Joel's childhood friend Bobby Zimmerman was found hanging from a light fixture in the Tenderloin. But these are only the most dramatic cases; most kids have simply gone off to college, their parents divorced, husbands married to younger women and starting second families. I see young, strange faces through the windows of houses I've been inside so many times, unfamiliar children hitting tennis b.a.l.l.s against garage doors. It galls me, how at home they seem. I have a lunatic urge sometimes to go up to one of those kids and say, ”Understand something, junior: you don't really live here. Not like we did.”

Two different families have lived in our house since we moved. The second, the Weisels, invited me to a dinner party several weeks ago. Against my better instincts, curiosity led me to accept. I wandered through the familiar rooms, remembering the paint samples and fabric swatches Ted and I had argued over-all gone, the curtains gone, the walls a different color, a vast Chinese urn where we used to put our Christmas tree. I could almost hear the scuttling of Joel's footed pajamas across the floor-those same boards! I searched the walls and corners for some trace of our lives, something left behind by mistake. But there was nothing. The house might never have existed before that night. As I ate my lemon mousse, I felt lightheaded, giddy, as if I myself had narrowly escaped the same oblivion. I drank another gla.s.s of wine. By midnight, I had to ask where to find the bathroom.

Catherine Black shot herself in the South of France two summers ago. People were shocked, of course, but less so than they might have been if she'd done it a few years before. She had gone, as they say, downhill, appearing more and more often alone, distracted, without the high spirits she was famous for. It was a.s.sumed that the men she saw were all married. I've tried lately to imagine the scene of her death: Was she staying in some man's villa? Aboard his yacht? Was it a fit of pa.s.sion, or did she simply look up one day at the palm leaves flapping against a blue sky and know that it was time?

Rover and I take a detour and stop before what used to be my house. I almost never do this, although my apartment is only a few blocks away. But in two days the moving trucks will come and take me to my new apartment on Russian Hill. After so many years in the same ten-block radius, I feel like I'm leaving the country.

It's finally dark. The foghorns honk and call, sounds as familiar to me as my own voice. The house is a strange gold color now, the ivy overtrimmed, without the chaotic appeal it had while we lived here. It must have been the vitamins my children used to toss into that ivy each morning as they left for school (after pretending to swallow them) that made it grow so wild. Once, during a hard rain, dozens of half-disintegrated pills washed onto the path.

Rover pants quietly beside me as I watch the lighted windows of our old living room. Beyond the open curtains someone moves, and I wait, half expecting to catch a glimpse of Ted tossing a log on the fire, of Joel running past with a tennis ball in his hand. Or myself, reading the evening paper, drinking tea. If I saw us, I suppose I would believe it for a minute, as if those memories were still real, my presence out here the illusion. But as Frank Weisel moves into the light to adjust the volume on his stereo, I feel unexpected relief. I'm weightless. There's nothing left here-I'll take it all when I go.

Like most things that happen well after they should, my divorce from Ted three years ago was unpleasant. In one of many confessions I could have lived without, he admitted to having been involved with Catherine Black off and on over the years.

”How many years?” I asked.

”I don't remember exactly.”

” 'Years' is not specific,” I said. ”I want a number: two? three? five?”

”Calm down,” Ted said. ”It was insignificant. You know Catherine, she was around. She made it easy.”

”When did it start?”

”I don't know when. It was some years, all right?”

” 'Some' means a lot.”

”It meant nothing, Charlotte,” Ted said, growing frantic. ”Zero. Nada. We were treading water, she knew that as well as I did.”

”Probably better,” I said.

Ted glanced at me, but seemed afraid to pursue the topic. I went on packing books into boxes; books from college, Book-of-the-Month Club books, so many I still hadn't read. I thought of that day when I'd ridden the chairlift with Catherine (six years before? seven?), and was appalled at what an idiot I might have been-how, that whole time, she might have been laughing at me. The thought haunted me for months after Ted had gone. But eventually I stopped wondering whether or not it had already started between them. How could it matter? What I felt on the chairlift with Catherine wasn't spite or cruelty, not even smug satisfaction. She'd been left outside my world, that was all. And from there she saw how quickly it would pa.s.s.

Back at my own apartment, I weave my way among packing boxes to the kitchen and pour myself a gla.s.s of Chardonnay. I call Jessica at her dormitory, and to my astonishment, she answers. ”Sweetheart. How are things?” I ask.

She sounds breathless. I hear music in the background. ”They're crazy,” she says. ”I've got way more than I can ever do.”

I see her, brown curls dangling in her eyes, thrilled by the dire earnestness of her life. She hollers ”Shut up!” at someone, and I hold the phone away.

”I'm sending you some clothes,” I tell her. ”That rose-colored suit, for instance. The suede?”

”You're giving that to me?” she asks, startled. ”But you've had it so long.”

”Exactly.” I wait a moment, then ask, ”So. What do you hear from your father?”

Jessica hesitates, for try as I might to make the question sound neutral, it is always tinged with my hope that she'll answer, ”Nothing. I've decided never to speak to him again.”

”He's visiting next weekend,” she says.

”With Beatrice and the baby?”

”I think so,” she says. ”But Mom? How're you doing?”

”Just fine,” I say.

”Had any dates?”

”Here and there.” I decide not to mention the one last month who revealed to me, as we sat kissing on my couch after too much wine, that he'd been a Roman centurion in his previous life. ”Actually, I'm going out tonight with Bud Templeton,” I say. ”Remember him?”

”Amy's father?” She sounds aghast.

”That's right. He and his second wife have split.”

”You're going out with Amy's father?”

”Should I have asked Amy's permission?”

Jessica laughs. ”No, it's just, I don't know. It seems weird, you and Mr. Templeton going out together.”

I find I am at a loss. There is a pause before I answer, ”Well, I think so, too, sweetheart. But that's what happens.” After a moment I add, ”I call him Bud, though.”

”Well, have fun,” she says, though I sense she feels the possibility is remote.

We hang up, and I go back to my closet to do another hour's work. I'm looking forward to tonight-I always liked Bud Templeton, though I've hardly seen him in years. I still think of him as the tall, wry neurologist I loved to chat with over plastic cups of wine at school plays. We would congratulate each other on our daughters' performances as orphans or lost boys, one eyebrow raised to show that, unlike some parents, we had this all in perspective. But perspective was what I lacked, it turns out, for my life had felt as permanent as childhood. I've even outgrown the clothes I wore as a young wife: summer suits, skirts below the knee, tall black boots-none of it fits; I've become a smaller version of myself, distilled from an earlier abundance I was not even aware of. I take unexpected pleasure now in packing these outfits away and stepping into a sleek, narrow dress I bought last week. I carry my wine to the window and wait, my face near the gla.s.s. The sky is clear and dark, the lights of the city trembling beneath it. As I watch them, I'm overwhelmed by a feeling I haven't had in years: a sweet, giddy sense that anything might happen to me.

Catherine Black. Sometimes I imagine she was everywhere for those years, quietly watching me live. Waiting-for what? I see us on that chairlift, our skis casting long gray shadows over hills like piles of sugar. Her skis were slightly pigeon-toed, I think. We're there, eyes fixed to the top of the hill, both counting the moments until we can reach it and ski away from one another.

PUERTO VALLARTA.

On their last day in Puerto Vallarta, the fathers rented horses. Ellen's father let her come along, though she was only eleven and hadn't ridden before. She stayed close to his side, staring at the tin shacks and rows of hobbled corn along the back streets. Her father drank wine from a pig-bladder pouch and gave her a sip when she asked. It was sour and hot. He bought her a sombrero embroidered with green and pink flowers and placed it carefully over her head. Gradually they drifted apart from the others.

Ellen was rarely alone with her father. She and her parents had joined two other families in Mexico, and for ten days they all had descended in large, whooping groups over local cafes and beaches. Her father told jokes and chose restaurants, whatever people wanted. He was Master of Ceremonies.

”Aren't we meeting Mom for lunch?” Ellen asked when she and her father reached a strip of pressed, pale dirt leading out of town.

He nodded. ”Want to turn around?”

”I don't want to ...” Ellen said tentatively, laughing.

”Neither do I,” her father said.

He set his watch back. It took an instant, a twirl of the tiny hands, and they were free. Ellen felt a thrill of mischief. She did not think of her mother, only of a hurdle she and her father had leapt together. As they rode on, she stared greedily at each dry bush and blotched, scampering pig.

”When I was eighteen,” her father said, ”I bought a motorcycle and rode around Europe for months.”