"What did he say, though?"
"He didn't say much of anything."
"Do you think he's shy?" Crystal asked. "A lot of actors are shy."
"Rats are shy, too," Annie said.
"I just don't care for rats," Betty said, and the party broke up.
Annie watched them trail away, her mother to bed; Mr. Shpuntov escorted to his room by the attentive Cousin Lou; Rosalyn off to make sure all the windows were locked against the
local coyote; Roberts, shooting her a quick but piercing look of concern, to make his long-legged way down the street; and Crystal to bounce toward the golf cart. Only Amber was left, lingering by the door.
"Pssst!" Amber said, waving Annie over, looking furtively around as she did so, then repeating the comic-book sound: "Pssst!"
Amused, Annie walked the three steps to her side.
"Yes?"
"We have to talk," Amber whispered.
"We do?"
"Tomorrow. Ten a.m. Fifth hole. Come alone."
"But what . . . ?"
"Tomorrow," Amber hissed, then squeezed Annie's arm with sober urgency and was out the door.
Miranda's breathing rose and fell with an easy regularity that belied the crumpled figure arranged across the bed in a tangle of legs and arms and sheets, an arabesque of despair. Alas, this was a world in which a kind and generous and fiery woman could not love in peace. It seemed neither fair nor natural. Then again, when had Miranda ever chosen to love in peace? Miranda found peace banal.
Annie allowed herself to imagine a peaceful love. Two people in a bed. Lovemaking had taken place, of course, wonderful love-making. But that was a while ago. That morning, perhaps. Now it was night. Two people, their heads propped up on pillows. They each read a book. Now and again, one would glance at the other and smile, reach out, perhaps, lay a hand on the other's hand.
Perhaps that was banal. But how luxurious, then, was banality! thought Annie, who had spent so many nights alone in her bed with just the book. To love enough and be loved enough, to love and be loved in such quantities, such abundance that you could squander whole nights in simple companionship--that was a richness she could hardly fathom.
The man in the bed next to her in her imagination was Frederick Barrow, of course. He turned to her with that almost amused blaze of desire, as if he had surprised himself with his own need and intensity, and he took hold of her arms, pinning her to the bed, as he had done in the dark in New York, the smoke detector blinking overhead.
Women in love, Annie thought as she climbed into bed. She gave a rueful smile, thought how little she liked D. H. Lawrence, wondered what Frederick thought of him and if she would ever have an opportunity to ask him. An owl hooted outside the window. Another owl answered it. Annie realized she had never heard an owl in real life before. Was this real life, though? Sometimes her life struck her as a mistake, not in a big, violent way, but as a simple error, as if she had thought she was supposed to bear left at an intersection when she should have taken a sharp left, and had drifted slowly, gradually, into the wrong town, the wrong state, the wrong country; as if she returned to a book she was reading after staring out the window at the rain, but someone had turned the page. The owl hooted again, one owl. It was a beautiful nighttime sound, and she fell asleep.
In the morning, Cousin Lou wanted to take them all out for pancakes. Annie could not imagine how she would escape and be able to keep her secret assignation with Amber until Miranda refused to get out of bed.
"Should I stay and keep an eye on her?" Annie asked her mother. "I think maybe I should."
"Poor bunny," Betty said, kissing Miranda before she left with the others.
If Miranda looked like a bunny, it was the road-kill variety, Annie thought. Overnight her lithe frame seemed to have become merely angular, skeletal. Her cheekbones appeared to have sharpened, to jut coarsely from a gaunt face, while her eyes, her remarkable eyes, sagged with apathy where they once had curved, enigmatic, playful.
"Oh, just please go away," Miranda said to her.
"I'll take a little walk?"
Miranda gave a barely perceptible shrug.
Annie was no golfer and had to Google the country club and study a diagram of the golf course in order to figure out where the fifth hole was and how to reach it from Lou and Rosalyn's house. It was uncharacteristically hot for December. She walked along in the crisp winter sun, the desert outline distinct, legible against the hard blue sky, and wondered what Amber could want.
She did not have long to wait to find out. At the crest of a little green golf hill, as prominent as a general on his magnificent stallion, Amber sat in the yellow golf cart surveying her domain.