“The sixteenth.”
“Hmm. Yeah, I could maybe be back by then. I don’t want to promise. I’ll write, though, so you’ll know where I am. And I’ll bring you back something nice if I miss it.”
“Right,” I said reflexively, but nothing seemed right. I kept telling myself as we put the groceries away that I had known Ralph was going to take this trip. I had known. I had known. I married him anyway.
When we were done, and while Ralph attached the lens to his new camera, I took Mariko’s book from my bedside table and held it for a moment. Ralph was right about what I had to let go of. If I didn’t, I would never learn to be truly happy again. Mariko’s memory was too precious to me to throw away, but I could put her book out of sight. I could hide it from view and maybe even forget for a while that I had it. I slipped the book inside my empty suitcase, replaced it in the hall closet, and closed the door.
Then Ralph and I went outside to the patio, where the children were playing. Ralph took photographs of them, over and over, as they laughed and shrieked and tossed flower petals into the air.
At dusk, Martha called them in to supper and we went back inside the casita.
“You don’t mind if I eat out with some old friends from high school tonight, do you?” Ralph asked while he was putting his camera away.
“What?” I said, even though I had clearly heard him. It just surprised me.
“I’m going to meet some old friends from high school for dinner tonight.”
“I . . . I don’t mind coming with you.”
“You’d be bored out of your mind.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He went into the bedroom, took off his shirt, and pulled on a heather gray turtleneck. He brushed his hair back into place and grabbed a leather jacket out of the closet. “Can you give Hugh back his keys? I’m getting a lift from one of the guys. I’m getting picked up out front in five minutes.”
He plopped the car keys in my hand.
“When . . . when exactly did you make all these plans?” I said.
“All these plans?” Ralph echoed, and laughed. “It’s just supper with some old friends. I talked to them this morning. On the phone. When you were in the house having breakfast.”
Ralph reached for his billfold on the dresser and shoved it in his back pocket.
“Enjoy the peace and quiet in here, but leave a light on in the living room so I don’t trip over the sofa or anything, okay?” he said.
“Sure,” I replied, like an automaton.
“Night.” He opened the door and was gone.
I don’t know how long I stood there after he left. I was just aware that the room was suddenly dark. And I was alone in it.
Hugh’s keys were still in my hand.
I stepped out of the dark casita and walked toward the main house. I didn’t want to spend the evening in solitude.
I was a Dove now, and Doves don’t do well on their own.
Inside the house, Pamela and Teddy were happy to see me and I sat with them while they finished their dinner. They asked me to come upstairs with them after they ate and I played with them until Frances said it was bedtime. Irene was nowhere in sight. She’d apparently left earlier in the day and told her mother to put the children to bed whenever she pleased.
I read stories to the children, heard their prayers, and, because they asked me to, kissed their foreheads as I tucked them into their beds. Hugh came in to say good night to them, as did Frances.
When the light was out and the door was shut, the three of us went back down the stairs. Frances said Martha had laid out dinner and that I should go to the casita to fetch Ralph.
“Oh. He’s not there. He’s having dinner with high school friends,” I said.
We were nearly to the dining room, but not quite. Frances stopped and turned to me. “He’s what?”
“Having dinner out with some old friends.”
“Without you?”
The way she asked made what Ralph had done sound so reprehensible. I didn’t want Frances or Hugh to know Ralph hadn’t wanted me to come with him. They would think poorly of both of us. “Oh. I . . . I was tired. I told him to go along without me.”
Frances stared at me a moment and then proceeded into the dining room, where our plates waited with silver-domed cloches atop them to keep the food warm.
Hugh kept his gaze on me long after we’d sat down to eat. Frances hadn’t given my reason for not going with Ralph another thought because she believed me when I said I hadn’t wanted to go. Hugh, though, with his unfathomable blue eyes, was not like his mother. I could see in his relentless gaze that he knew I’d lied. That I had wanted to go. And Ralph had not invited me.
Many hours later, my husband fell onto our bed, fully clothed and smelling of tobacco, alcohol, and women’s perfume. I looked at the clock on my bedside table. It was a little after three o’clock in the morning.
“Was it fun?” I murmured to him in the dark.
“Damn. I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, his words a slur.
“It’s all right. Was it?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Where’d you go? What did you do?”
Ralph hesitated a second. “Do you really want to hear what I did?” His question was another wobbly mixture of consonants and vowels, and yet still I could hear the caution in his voice, the warning that I did not want to hear what he’d been up to.
“No.”
“Night.”
He was snoring lightly in seconds. The return of sleep took longer for me.
31
Ralph left for his great adventure, as he called it, nine days after we’d arrived in Los Angeles. The week leading up to his departure, he swam daily in the frigid water of the pool—to reacclimate himself to colder climates, he said—played with his niece and nephew, and packed and repacked his duffel bag so that he could fit as much as possible in it while still keeping it lightweight. He didn’t tell his family what his plans were because, so he told me, they wouldn’t understand. Even if he explained it to them like he’d explained it to me, they would not understand, so he was going to wait until the very last minute to announce his departure.
He and I spent a lot of time in the big house that week, eating our meals with the family and playing board games and drinking—as Irene would say—the good wine. Irene floated in and out of the house, sometimes with Pamela and Teddy in tow, sometimes not. One afternoon, Irene left the children with me because Frances was gone, Martha was busy with the laundry, and Irene needed to be somewhere without them—and because I’d told her I didn’t mind watching them for her.
“Divorce is messy,” she’d said, after she’d thanked me and as she sailed out the front door. I did not want to know what she meant. Divorce was still a word I could not bring myself to speak aloud or even think about.
Frances, like Irene, would arise late in the morning, but unlike Irene, she always came down the stairs beautifully dressed and coiffed. She always had somewhere to go—a garden club meeting or bridge or mahjong or lunch at the country club or visiting the several charities that she liked to support. Dinner was always at eight, and always after the children had gone to bed. Even on the lone Saturday, our third day there, and after Ralph and I had taken the children to the seashore to look for shells, when it would’ve been just as easy to let them stay up and eat with us, they were in bed when the adults sat down to dinner.
That weekend, Hugh spent a lot of time in his father’s study, which apparently was his now, reading and listening to the radio and smoking a pipe, and occasionally being interrupted by Pamela’s and Teddy’s running about the house, looking for adults who would play with them. He also watched Ralph and me, sometimes unconsciously perhaps, but other times deliberately. He didn’t observe us in an antagonistic way but rather with obvious curiosity, as though he were trying to figure something out. I tried to steer clear of him and his inquisitive gaze.
There was plenty of time for me to write my parents and Max that week and tell them all about the house and the family and the cottage by the pool.
The night before Ralph was to leave, he sat me down at the little kitchen table in the casita. In his hands were a reading book and two smaller bankbooks. He opened the first of the smaller bankbooks and I could see that it was full of blank checks. There were also six twenty-dollar bills, which he pushed toward me.
“There’s plenty of money in the bank if you need anything,” he said, and he turned the checkbook to show me that he had a balance of well over five thousand dollars. I gasped at the number.