—There are no stories or cocoa this late, my mother said instead of answering my question.
—But Daddy lets me when I’m scared. Daddy said—
—Your father is going to ruin you! she snapped.
I have long puzzled over that response. Somehow, because of how much warmer my father was on the whole, I think I metabolized it to mean that men can ruin you in wonderful ways, like lurid, bright white jawbreakers with beautiful rainbow specks.
17
I WOKE IN THE MORNING to two text messages. The first had come in the middle of the night, from Vic’s wife, very long and all in capital letters. She must have been drunk or on pills. I thought of her dead husband and especially of her boy, how it was exponentially easier to go on if you decided to go mad.
JOANNN. COME IN JOAN. WHERE ARE U? ARE U WITH A NEW HUSBAND? ARE YOU GOING TO TEAR ANOTHER FAMILY TO SHREDS? MY DAUGHTER HATES ME AND SHE HATES HER FATHER. SHE THINKS ITS MY FAULT THAT A WHORE WAS ABLE TO STEAL HER FATHER FROM ME. WHAT DO U THINK JOANNN? DO U AGREE? ARE U A WOMAN OF GOD? DO U PRAY TO A HIGHER POWER? WE USED TO GO TO CHURCH EVERY SUNDAY AND AFTER TO THE ROSE GARDEN AND HE PICKED ME ROSES AND WE PUT THEM IN A VASE AT HOME AND THEY LIVED UNTIL THE NEXT SUNDAY. I WAS ONE OF THE LUCKY GIRLS. HE WAS THE LOVE OF MY LIFE. I WONDER IF HE GOT U ROSES. I HAVE ALL THE BILLS HERE THE CREDIT CARD I WASNT SUPPOSD TO KNOW ABOUT. ALL THESE FANCY DINNERS! U ARE A LUCKY GIRL TO. HE NVR GOT ME CAVIAR.
I read it a few times. I’d begun to tremble, though I didn’t realize it until I saw the phone shaking in my hand.
The other message was from Alice.
Your day off right? Come by for a comped class at 10? Then ill take you to the farmers market on trancas for banana blossoms.
* * *
FIVE MINUTES BEFORE THE CLASS, I checked my face in my rearview mirror. Why do some straight women need to be beautiful in front of other women? If men were wiped from the planet, how long would that need linger? At what point would we just focus on becoming strong?
Inside the studio Alice was seated in lotus pose. Her hair was all the way down. She winked at me as I unrolled one of the rental mats near the window. She led us in sun salutations to Dylan’s “Mozambique.” I wondered whether any of these tight-faced women were thinking anything other than how beautiful Alice was. How stable yet dainty her wrists looked on the mat and how demure her rear was, high up in the air, in downward dog. There is so much power in the way we obsess. If we could only harness it. If we would only redirect it.
I watched Alice’s body move and willed my bones to lengthen like hers. When I shot my legs behind my hips into chaturanga, I felt as light as I had ever felt.
At the end Alice readjusted me in corpse pose. She smelled like pears. I was the first to get up and quietly roll up my mat. I didn’t look at her as I left the space. I waited outside on one of the benches. The front-desk girl came outside to ask me whether I had paid for the class, whether I would like to purchase a membership. I told her the class was comped. I felt like a wrinkled thief.
When Alice came outside, she regarded me with a queer smile on her face. I worried that maybe I’d acted needy in the studio. It was impossible for me to know the right way to be around a woman.
We drove too fast in the left lane of the Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down. We passed several empty garden centers, we passed the stone pillars of the Getty. That stretch of Malibu felt void of animals. The wind was too hot, the cars were too fast. Only crabs thrived.
Alice played music loud and didn’t always answer a question right away. A lot of her actions felt cruel to me. Eventually I stopped asking questions. I held my arm out the window and tried to exist as a needless thing. I felt around her much the way I’d felt around Big Sky—that I should be as seductive as possible but take up the least amount of space.
We pulled into the Trancas Country Market. It was a cluster of shops, a café, a bank, and a few boutiques. All the storefronts were made of wood planks. It felt more like Montana than it did the dry throat of Malibu. Alice parked between a bright yellow Karmann Ghia and a powder-blue BMW. There were G-wagons and Land Rovers and weathered Volvos and Porsches and Priuses. Every car in Los Angeles felt like it was the perfect car.
The farmers’ market took up a strip of roadway behind the shops. Individual white tents shaded twin rows of long tables. Some tables were full of flowers in vases, and others had tight clusters of young broccoli florets and healthy-looking artichokes. Some had shallow tubs of ice with plastic containers of taramosalata and whipped feta. There was a fishmonger and there was a meat man and there were gray-haired ladies selling soap.
Many of the patrons looked like us, women in yoga clothes with good hair. There was a woman a few years older than I was, with her daughter. I was always picking these women out of crowds—my age, give or take a few years, with a young girl. The child wore her blond hair in cornrows and had gangly legs. The mother pushed her own hair into a messy bun—something that beautiful women do on autopilot. My mother did things like that but not with her hair; more so with cutting onions, eating persimmon. This mother looked rested and scheduled. I watched her buy black garlic and let the hippie farmer keep the three dollars in change.
There was a group of young men in neon Ray-Bans wearing backpacks. They were hikers coming down from one of the nearby trails for a glass of aloe vera. They looked at us. Next to Alice, in similar clothes, I wondered if I became a part of their fantasy or if they pushed me out of the picture altogether. I would have preferred the latter. To be a part of the dream of Alice would have made me feel like the scrapings from a pan. By that point in my life I knew that my obsession with beauty had everything to do with my father. When you are young and you see your father choose something, the thing that he chooses will be the thing that you want to be. I’m thrilled you will not have this problem.
So far the two men who’d loved me were dead. Big Sky was alive and well, with his young son and his Southern belle wife, on the Upper West Side and in Montana. For some reason I always pictured them on their big decks eating peaches, sweet yellow wedges with vibrant red-orange skin.
I’d been in the apartment overlooking the park only once. His wife and son had been at the lodge in Montana. Back then they went sporadically, but I’d recently found out they had moved most of their life there.
He was flying to meet them at the lodge the following day. With Big Sky, my hatred of weekends intensified. Only people who live their lives very routinely, who have never known abject grief, can love Saturdays and Sundays. For me there was a rickety lonesomeness to them. It always seemed everybody had escaped somewhere I hadn’t been invited to. Blue pools and cocktails circulating on round trays. Or black lakes and tire swings. I bet that’s true for most mistresses. But it’s laughable to call myself a mistress, with either Vic or Big Sky, or with Tim, for that matter. I wish I had been something so quaint and definable as a mistress.
That Thursday night on Big Sky’s deck I looked out at the city beneath me. I was wearing a white dress with wooden buttons down the center. It was one of the most expensive dresses I owned, though it didn’t look it. He brought out two glasses of rosé and we peered over the stone balustrade. I felt the heat of being next to him. I wanted to make myself wider, I wanted to spread my legs as far out in either direction as they could go and take everything he could possibly shoot inside me. I asked him if he was excited to get to Montana and he said, Oh, yes, I can’t wait.