Sleeping Beauty

chapter 13

I found Elizabeth in the big front room.

“How did you get along with Mother?” she said.

“All right. She answered my questions.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of asking questions?”

There was a slight edge on her voice. I wondered if she was self-conscious about telling me so much about her life.

“I’m tired now,” I said. “But I’d rather ask questions than have to answer them.”

She looked at me with bright interest, as if I’d revealed a weakness in myself. “I’ll remember that. Now, what about tomorrow?”

I told her what the plans were.

“Jack won’t want you to go along. You know that.”

“Jack may have to put up with me,” I said. “Right now, I’d like to have a look at the guesthouse where Laurel was staying.” She looked at the watch on her wrist. “It’s nearly two o’clock.”

“I know that. It’s the only time I have.”

She turned on an outside light and led me out through a sliding door onto a breezeway which deserved its name. A cold wind laden with the scent of oil poured over us from the sea. Several miles offshore, the platform that marked the source of the oil blazed like a Christmas tree.

The guesthouse was a new-looking flat-roofed building which projected on pilings over part of the beach. The tide had gone out, and at the foot of the beach I could see the surf breaking white and sliding back into darkness. It looked as if the oil hadn’t reached shore yet.

Elizabeth turned on the lights as we went in. The interior of the guesthouse was divided into living and sleeping quarters. The bed was unmade; the twisted sheets looked like something that a prisoner had escaped from. Some dresses and a coat hung in the closet above a single empty pair of shoes. There was a sweater and some stockings and panty hose in the chest of drawers. Neither here nor in the bathroom could I find any drugs, legitimate or illegitimate.

The only personal thing I found was a letter folded into a book of stories entitled Permanent Errors. The letter was typed on Save-More stationery and signed “Tom.” I stood under the light and read it through while Elizabeth watched me.

I handed the letter to Elizabeth. She read it through. There were tears in her eyes when she had finished. She wiped at them ineffectively with her fingers, and turned away.

“What’s the matter?”

“I feel so sorry for them.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of Tom.”

“As a husband for Laurel, I don’t. He’s so simple, and Laurel is so complex.”

“That combination can make a match.”

“I know it can. But in this case it hasn’t been working. He thinks he can bring her back, and close the gap between them, by moving to another house, or getting a job somewhere else.”

“He’s a willing man,” I said, “more willing than I realized. If I had been half as willing, I could have held on to my own wife.”

She gave me a direct bright look which went strangely with her tears. It passed through me like a laser beam assaying an unidentified object. My heart accelerated a little, and I wondered if her tears had been for herself as well as for Tom.

She turned the letter over. “There’s something written on the back. It’s Laurel’s handwriting.”

She read aloud:

Elizabeth’s voice broke. Her eyes were wet again.

“I haven’t cried for years,” she said. “What’s the matter with me?”

“You’re turning out to be human, after all.”

She shook her head in short quick arcs like a child. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“It’s better than crying.”

“Not always. Not if you’ve got something to cry about.”

She turned her back on me and went to the window. Touched by emotion, her back was beautiful. The narrow waist blossomed out into strong hips, which narrowed down again into a fine pair of legs.

Beyond her on the water, the lights of the platform blazed cold.

“It looks like a burning ship.” She sounded like a child recognizing something for the first time. Later she said in a colder, adult voice, “It’s a recurring theme. Other people burn their bridges behind them. We do things on a grander scale in our family. We burn ships and spill oil. It’s the all-American way.”

She was losing the feeling stirred in her by Tom’s letter and Laurel’s unsent answer, dissipating it in irony. I moved up close behind her, not close enough to touch.

“You’re taking this oil spill very hard.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Laurel did, too.”

“I know that.” But it wasn’t Laurel she wanted to talk about. “It’s really made me take a look at my life. I was brought up to think in terms of gain. Not just financial gain – we didn’t need that – but gaining points, the way you do in tennis. Make good grades in school, have more friends than anyone, marry the most eligible man, and so on. But it really doesn’t work out too well if your gain has to be someone else’s loss. Or if the rules of the game turn out to be different from what you thought.”

“I don’t quite follow that.”

“I mean you might think you’re gaining, and be a loser. I am, and I knew it long ago, but I didn’t have the courage to act on the knowledge. I’d given up a boy I met in New York who probably would have married me if I’d waited. But there were no points to be gained there – we were merely in love with each other. I married Ben because there was a war on – he was Captain War himself, going to be Commander-in-Chief Pacific someday. Also because my father wanted me to. He was in the oil business, after all, and at that time he was supplying oil to the Navy. It was what they used to call a dynastic marriage, based on mutual gain. But I was the one who lost.”

“What did you lose?”

“My life. I stayed with Ben and let it slip away from me. I should have left him in the first year of our marriage. But I was ashamed to admit that I was a loser. I was afraid that my father would turn against me. Now my father has turned around and done what I should have done.”

“What happened in the first year of your marriage? Do you mean the loss of your husband’s ship?”

“It was part of it, but the crucial thing happened before that. I lost Ben, or knew I’d lost him, before he lost his ship. I never had him, really. He had a mistress at the same time that he was courting me, and he didn’t even break with her when he married me. I suppose she was a pretty little thing from the masculine point of view, but I was appalled by her. She couldn’t even speak grammatical English.”

“You knew her?”

“I met her once. She came to see me in our new house in Bel-Air. Ben was at sea, and I was living there by myself. She came to the door one day, with her little boy, and told me she needed money – just like that. When I asked her who she was, she explained to me that she was Ben’s girl. She was so matter-of-fact about it I couldn’t be angry with her – at least not with the little boy there. I gave her some money and she drove away in her old beat-up car.

“It was afterwards that I had the bad reaction. I couldn’t bear to live in the house any more. I wanted to burn it down. One night, I took a can of gasoline into Ben’s study. I intended to sprinkle it on the floor and furniture and on his books, and then set fire to it. At the last minute, I changed my mind.

“But I decided I couldn’t go on living there. I went home to live with my parents and lent the house to Jack and Marian. Jack had just graduated from Communications School in the East, and he was waiting on the West Coast to join Ben’s ship. Everything happened so quickly in those days. The ship came into Long Beach Harbor in a few weeks, stayed for a night or two, and then went out again, with both my husband and my brother aboard. And then the ship caught fire off Okinawa, and that was the end of Ben’s career in the Navy. It was hardly more than a month between the time I carried the gasoline can into his study and the time his ship caught fire. I used to make a connection between the two things.”

“You mean you imagined that you set fire to the ship?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But something like that. From the time that woman came to see me, with her little boy, I think I must have been a little out of touch. For all I knew, he was Ben’s illegitimate son, though she said he wasn’t.”

She was gazing at the lighted platform as if its cold blaze on the contaminated sea might be a symbol of her life and its meaning.

She moved back against me. Then she stood very still as if she had frightened herself. I put my hands on her.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered urgently.

“Why not? It’s better than burning ships and spilling oil. Or setting fire to houses.”