White Oleander

19

BY APRIL, the desert had already sucked spring from the air like blotting paper. The Hollywood Hills rose unnaturally clear, as if we were looking at them through binoculars. The new leaves were wilting in the heat that left us sweating and dispirited in the house with the blinds down.

Claire brought out the jewelry she kept in the freezer and dumped it onto her bed, a pirate’s treasure, deliciously icy. Freezing strands of green jade beads with jeweled clasps, a pendant of amber enclosing a fossilized fern. I pressed it, cold, to my cheek. I draped an antique crystal bracelet down the part in my hair, let it lap on my forehead like a cool tongue.

“That was my great-aunt Priscilla’s,” Claire said. “She wore it to her presentation ball at the Waldorf-Astoria, just before the Great War.” She lay on her back in her underwear, her hair dark with sweat, a smoky topaz bracelet across her forehead intersected by an intricate gold chain that came to rest on the tip of her nose. She was painfully thin, with sharp hipbones and ribs stark as a carved wooden Christ. I could see her beauty mark above the line of her panties. “She was a field nurse at Ypres. A very brave woman.”

Every bracelet, every bead, had a story. I plucked an onyx ring from the pile between us on the bed, rectangular, its black slick surface pierced by a tiny diamond. I slipped it on, but it was tiny, only fit my smallest finger, above the knuckle. “Whose was this?” I held it out so she could see it without moving her head. “Great-grandmother Matilde. A quintessential Parisienne.” Its owner dead a hundred years, perhaps, but still she made me feel large and ill bred. I imagined jet-black hair, curls, a sharp tongue. Her black eyes would have caught my least awkwardness. She would have disapproved of me, my gawky arms and legs, I would have been too large for her little chairs and tiny gold-rimmed porcelain cups, a moose among antelope. I gave it to Claire, who slipped it right on.

The garnet choker, icy around my neck, was a wedding present from her mill-owning Manchester great-grandfather to his wife, Beatrice. The gold jaguar with emerald eyes I balanced on my knee was brought back from Brazil in the twenties by her father’s aunt Geraldine Woods, who danced with Isadora Duncan. I was wearing Claire’s family album. Maternal grandmothers and paternal great-aunts, women in emerald taffeta, velvet and garnets. Time, place, and personality locked into stone and silver filigree.

In comparison to this, my past was smoke, a story my mother once told me and later denied. No onyxes for me, no aquamarines memorializing the lives of my ancestors. I had only their eyes, their hands, the shape of a nose, a nostalgia for snowfall and carved wood.

Claire dripped a gold necklace over one closed eye socket, jade beads in the other. She spoke carefully, nothing slid off.

“They used to bury people like this. Mouths full of jewels and a gold coin over each eye. Fare for the ferryman.” She drizzled her coral necklace into the well of her navel, and her pearl double strand, between her breasts. After a minute, she picked up the pearls, opened her mouth and let the strand drop in, closed her lips over the shiny eggs. Her mother had given her the pearls when she married, though she didn’t want her to marry a Jew. When Claire told me, she expected me to be horrified, but I’d lived with Marvel Turlock, Amelia Ramos. Prejudice was hardly a surprise. The only thing I wondered was why would she give her pearls.

Claire lay still, pretending to be dead. A jeweled corpse in her pink lace lingerie, covered with a fine drizzle of sweat. I wasn’t sure I liked this new game. Through the French doors, in the foot of space showing under the blinds, I could see the garden, left wild this spring. Claire didn’t garden anymore, no pruning and weeding under her Chinese peaked hat. She didn’t stake the flowers, and now they bloomed ragged, the second-year glads tilting to one side, Mexican evening primroses annexing the unmowed lawn.

Ron was away again, twice in one month, this time in Andalusia taping a piece about Gypsies. Out combing the world for what was most bizarre, racking up frequent flier miles. If he wanted to see something weird and uncanny, he should have just walked into his own bedroom and seen his wife lying on the bed in her pink lace panties and bra, covered in jade and pearls, pretending she was dead. Underneath the bed, the voodoo box, magnets and clippers and pens, sealed Polaroid photographs, conjured him home.

Suddenly, she was gagging on the pearls. She sat up, retching. The jewels fell from her body. She pulled the strand of pearls from her mouth, catching it in her hand. She was so pale, her mouth seemed unnaturally red by comparison, and she had dark circles under her eyes. She slumped over the cluster of lustrous eggs, wet with spit, on the edge of the bed with her back to me, her spine threaded like jade.

She reached back for my hand, her nails dirty, tips small and sensitive as a child’s, the rings incongruous as gumball machine prizes. I took her hand. She brought my hand around to her face, pressing its back against her wet cheek. She was burning up. I rested my face on her shoulder, her back was like fire. “Ron’ll be back soon,” I tried to reassure her.

She nodded, head heavy on her slender neck, like one of her drooping tulips, the knobs of her spine like a diamondback’s rattle. “It’s so hot already. What will I do when summer comes?”

She was all skin and nerves, no substance, no weight. She was her own skin kite, stretched before dry violent winds.

“We should go to the beach,” I suggested.

She shook her head, fast, as if a fly had landed on her. “It’s not that.”

I was sitting on one of the jewels, it was digging into my hip. I freed one of my hands and reached under myself, pulled it out. It was an aquamarine, big as an almond in the shell. Aquamarines grew with emeralds, Claire told me. But emeralds were fragile and always broke into smaller pieces, while aquamarines were stronger, grew huge crystals without any trouble, so they weren’t worth as much. It was the emerald that didn’t break that was the really valuable thing.

I handed her the ice-blue stone, the color of my mother’s eyes. She put it on her forefinger, where it hung like a doorknob on a rope. She gazed into it. “This belonged to my mother. My father got it for her to celebrate an around-the-world cruise.” She took it off. “It was too big for her too.”

Next door, Mrs. Kromach’s parrot whistled the same three notes in an ascending scale, three and a half notes apart. An icecream truck rolled down the street, playing “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Claire lay down on her back so she could look at me, one hand behind her head. She was very beautiful, even now, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, wet at the hairline, her dark eyebrows arched and glossy, her small breasts curved in pink lace.

“If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” she asked.

I turned onto my stomach, sorted through the jewelry. I tried on a gold bangle. It wouldn’t fit over my hand. I thought of my suicides, the way I would run my death through my fingers like jet beads. “I wouldn’t.”

She laced an Indian silver necklace onto her flat stomach, strands of hairlike tubes making metal into a fluid like mercury. “Well, say you wanted to.”

“It’s against my religion.” Sweat trickled down between my breasts, pooled in my navel.

“What religion is that?”

“I’m a survivalist.”

She wouldn’t allow that. I wasn’t playing. It was against the rules. “Just say you did. Say you were very old and had a horrible incurable cancer.”

“I’d get lots of Demerol and wait it out.” I was not going to discuss suicide with Claire. It was on my mother’s list of antisocial acts. I wasn’t going to tell her the surest way, the bone cancer boy’s plan, injecting an air bubble into your vein and letting it move through your blood like a pearl. I was sure her aunt Priscilla used that once or twice on the battlefield when the morphine ran out. Then there was a load of cyanide at the back of the tongue, the way they did it to cats. It was very fast. When you committed suicide, you didn’t want something slow. Someone could walk in, someone could save you.

Claire clasped her hand to one knee, rocked a little, up and down her spine. “You know how I’d do it?”

She was pulling me down that road and I wasn’t going to go there. “Let’s go to the beach, okay? It’s so hot, it’s making us crazy.”

She didn’t even hear me. Her eyes looked dreamy, like somene in love. “I’d gas myself. That’s the way. They say it’s just like going to sleep.”

She reminded me of a woman lying down in snow. Just lying down for a little while, she was so tired. She’d been walking so long, she just wanted to rest, and it wasn’t as cold as she thought. She was so sleepy. It was the surrender she wanted. To stop fighting the storm and the enveloping night, to lie down in whiteness and sleep. I understood. I used to dream that I was skin-diving down a coral wall. Euphoria set in as the nitrogen built up in my bloodstream, and the only direction was down into darkness and forgetting.

I had to wake her up. Slap her face, march her around, feed her black coffee. I told her about the Japanese sailor adrift for four days when he killed himself. “They found him twenty minutes later. He was still warm.”

We heard the hum of someone running a lawn mower down the street. The sweetness of jasmine took the rest of the air. She sighed, filling out ribs sharp as the blades of the mower. “But how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?”

What answer could I give her? I’d been doing it for years. She was my life raft, my turtle. I lay down, put my head on her shoulder. She smelled of sweat and L’Air du Temps, but now dusty blue, as if her melancholy had stained the perfume. “Anything can happen,” I said.

She kissed me on the mouth. Her mouth tasted like iced coffee and cardamom, and I was overwhelmed by the taste, her hot skin and the smell of unwashed hair. I was confused, but not unwilling. I would have let her do anything to me.

She dropped back onto the pillow, her arm over her eyes. I raised up on one elbow. I didn’t know what to say. “I feel so unreal,” she said. She turned over, her back to me, her garnet heart pendant stuck to the back of her shoulder. Her dirty hair was heavy as a bunch of black grapes, and her waist and hip curved like a pale guitar. She picked up the strand of pearls and lowered it in a spiral on the bedspread, but when she moved it slid in toward her body, spoiling the design. She picked it up, tried again, like a girl picking petals off daisies, trying to get the right answer.

“If only I had a child,” she said.

I felt a twang on a rarely played string. I was well aware I was the instead-baby, a stand-in for what she really wanted. If she had a baby, she wouldn’t need me. But a baby was out of the question. She was so thin, she was starving herself. I’d caught her vomiting after we ate.

“I was pregnant once, at Yale. It never occurred to me that was the only baby I’d ever have.”

The whine of the lawn mower filled the silence. I would have liked to say something encouraging, but I couldn’t think of anything. I plucked the heart off her back. Her thinness belied her spoken desire. She’d lost so much weight she could wear my clothes now. She did when I was at school. I came home sometimes and certain outfits were warm, smelling of L’Air du Temps. I pictured her in my clothes, certain things she favored, a plaid skirt, a skinny top. Standing in the mirror, imagining she was sixteen, a junior in high school. She did a perfect imitation of me, the gawky teenager. Crossing her legs the way I did, twining them and tucking the foot behind the calf. Starting with a shrug before I talked, dismissing what I was about to say in advance. My uneasy smile, that flashed and disappeared in a second. She tried me on like my clothes. But it wasn’t me she wanted to be, it was just sixteen.

I watched the garden under the blinds, the long shadows cast by the cypress, the palm, across the textured green. If she were sixteen, what? She wouldn’t have made the mistakes she’s made? Maybe she would choose better? Maybe she wouldn’t have to choose at all. She could just stay sixteen. But she was trying on the wrong person’s clothes. I wasn’t anyone she’d want to be. She was too fragile to be me, it would crush her, like the pressure of a deep wall dive.

Mostly she lay here like this, thinking about Ron, when would he come home, was there another woman? Worrying about luck and evil influences, while wearing talismans of her family past, women who did something with their lives, made something of themselves, or at least got dressed every day, women who never kissed a sixteen-year-old foster daughter because they felt unreal, never let the weeds grow in their gardens because it was too hot to pull them.

I wanted to tell her not to entertain despair like this. Despair wasn’t a guest, you didn’t play its favorite music, find it a comfortable chair. Despair was the enemy. It frightened me for Claire to bare her needs so openly. If a person needed something badly, it was my experience that it would surely be taken away. I didn’t need to put mirrors on the roof to know that.

IT WAS A RELIEF when Ron came home. She got up, took a shower, cleaned the house. She made food, too much of it, and put on red lipstick. She took off Leonard Cohen and put on Teddy Wilson’s big band, sang along to “Basin Street Blues.” Ron made love with her at night, sometimes even in the afternoon. Neither of them made much noise, but I could hear the quiet laughter behind their closed door.

Early one morning, when Claire was still sleeping, I heard him on the phone in the living room. He was talking to a woman, I sensed it immediately when I came in, the way he smiled as he talked in his striped pajama bottoms—wrapping the phone cord around his smooth fingers. He laughed at something she said. “Flounder. Whatever. Cod.”

He started when he saw me in the doorway. The blood bleached out of his rosy cheeks, then returned, deeper. He ran his hand through his hair so that the paler strips sprang back under his touch. He talked a bit more, arrangements, flights, hotels, he scribbled on a scrap of paper in his open briefcase. I didn’t move. He hung up the phone.

He stood up, hiking his pajama bottoms. “We’re going to Reykjavik. Hot springs with documented healing powers.”

“Take Claire with you,” I said.

He threw the paper into his briefcase, shut it, locked it. “I’d be working all the time. You know Claire. She’d sit in the hotel and cook herself into some morbid fantasy. It’d be a nightmare.”

Reluctantly, I saw his point. Whether he stayed out of town as much as he could to screw around, or just to avoid dealing with Claire, or even on the off-chance he was what he claimed to be, just a tired husband trying to make a living, it would be a disaster to bring Claire along if he couldn’t spend time with her. She couldn’t just wander around by herself, see the sights. She’d sit in the hotel and wonder what he was doing, which woman it was. Torturing herself.

But it didn’t let him off the hook. He was her husband. He was responsible. I didn’t like the way he talked to that woman on the phone in Claire’s own house. I could imagine him with a woman in a dark restaurant, seducing her with that same smooth voice.

I leaned in the doorway, in case he decided to try to go back to bed and pretend nothing had happened. I wanted to make him understand that she needed him. His duty was here. “She told me how she would kill herself if she wanted to.”

That got his attention, made him stumble a bit in his smoothness, a man tripping over a crack in the sidewalk, an actor who’d forgotten his lines. He brushed back his hair, playing for time. “What did she say?”

“She said she’d gas herself.”

He sat down, closed his eyes, put his hands over them, the smooth fingertips meeting over his nose. Suddenly I felt sorry for him too. I only wanted to get his attention, make him realize he couldn’t simply fly off and pretend everything was normal around her. He couldn’t leave her all to me.

“Do you think she’s just talking?” he asked, fear in his hazel eyes.

He was asking me? He was the one with the answers. The man with the firm grip on reality, the one who told us when to get up and when to go to bed, what channel we were watching, what we thought about nuclear testing and welfare reform. He was the one who held the world securely in his smooth hands like a big basketball. I stared at him helplessly, horrified that he didn’t know whether or not Claire would kill herself. He was her husband. Who was I, some kid they’d taken in.

I couldn’t help but picture Claire lying on the bed, clad in her jewels, pearls welled in her mouth. What she had given up to be with Ron. The way she cried at night, arms pressed tight around her, bent almost double, like a person with stomach cramps. But no, she still waited for me to come from school, she wouldn’t want me to find her dead. “She misses you.”

“It’s almost summer hiatus,” Ron said. “We’ll go somewhere. Really get away, just the three of us. Camping in Yellowstone, something like that. What do you think?”

The three of us, riding horses, hiking, sitting around the campfire, memorizing the stars. No phone, no fax, no laptop computer. No parties, meetings, friends coming by with a script. Ron all to herself. That would be something to look forward to. She wouldn’t want to miss camping with Ron. “She’d like that,” I finally said. Though I thought I’d believe it when I saw it. He was a great reneger.

“I know it hasn’t been easy for you.” He put his hand on my shoulder. Smooth. There was heat in his hand, it warmed my whole shoulder. For a moment I wondered what it would feel like to make love to Ron. His bare chest so close I could stroke it, the gray hairs, the quarter-sized nipples. He smelled good, Monsieur Givenchy. His voice, not too deep, sandy and calming. But then I remembered, this was the man who was causing all the problems, who didn’t know how to love Claire. He was cheating on her, I could feel it in his body. He had the world, all Claire had was him. But I couldn’t help liking his hand on my shoulder, the look in his eyes. Trying not to react to his masculine presence, solidity in his blue pajama bottoms. She’s a young woman, he told Claire. It was just part of his act, the appreciation thing. I bet he did it with all the lonely spoonbenders. I stepped away, so his arm dropped. “You better come through,” I told him.