After You've Gone (21 page)

In the harsh porch light, as they headed out and toward his car, it seemed to Roger that Julia's facial scars looked deeper, suddenly, more prominent. Perhaps she was trying some new makeup that didn't work very well? Or maybe, perversely, losing weight deepened scars?

After helping her into her side of his car, Roger was aware as he came around to the driver's seat that for some reason she had switched on a light. He got in, saw her staring at a scrap of paper, yellow. Her face was frozen in an expression he had never seen.

And then, turning fully toward him, she spoke very loudly and clearly. “You rotten bastard!” she said. “Goddam you!”

Before Roger could take in what she had said, she had slammed out of the car and rushed off. Out, away.

Picking up the yellow paper, he saw indeed just what it was: the receipt for his afternoon's motel, and he thought, How on earth? I would never have left it there.
Candida!
On purpose! Fucking bitch, goddam
her.

At that moment came the sound of Julia's old car, from across the street. Starting up, heading off.

No point even in trying to follow her. In Julia's mood, or for that matter in his own, they would only shout at each other, ruining everything. Besides, he was really tired.

The next day, Roger tried to call her down at Stanford, with no success. And that night at her house: no answer. He considered driving over there, up to Twin Peaks, but decided that she might well have gone to stay with friends.

Or if she was at home she was no more apt to answer the doorbell than the telephone.

Sending flowers did not seem quite the right gesture, somehow.

A few nights later, though, she did answer her phone. Indeed, in a very calm way she seemed to have been expecting his call. As well she might have been.

“You know, for quite a while I've had this idea that you were seeing someone else,” she told him. “No real reason, I just thought that. But I so much wanted it not to be true. I convinced myself that I was being crazy. Delusional jealousy, I really accused myself. I guess you could call it denial, because I really knew. Don't ask me how, we were just too close for me not to. And then there it was. Concretely.” Her voice,
though still fairly calm and controlled, then rose as she said, “Jesus, Roger, how could you? So sleazy—”

No way to deny his guilt, and so Roger improvised. “I guess I sort of knew you knew, and I thought maybe you didn't mind,” he lied. “You could have even been seeing someone yourself, some nice lefty physicist you met at meetings.”

“Oh
shit.
You did not think that. You know me.”

“Well, maybe I didn't really think it. Maybe I just hoped it.” Possibly honesty could win her back at last? “But couldn't I see you? Could we at least talk?”

“We are talking. And no, I don't want to see you.”

“But—”

“Please, Roger. I'm busy.” Her voice now high and tremulous.

“But I love you.” And never so much as now, he wanted to say, but it sounded silly. Not what she would have wanted to hear. And so he simply repeated, “I love you.”

“You love
you.
Roger, goodbye.”

Several times after that Roger called her, in the hours and days and weeks to come. But Julia always hung up, and Roger came to see that she meant it, she would have no more of him.

Unhappily, at just that time, that November, Candida was in Italy, touring with Edwin. And almost everyone else that Roger knew seemed similarly missing.

And, in the suddenly changing weather—an early, cold winter was generally predicted—all the girls with their visible legs and breasts seemed now to have taken cover. They were not around anymore, they may have migrated south to Mexico, like birds, or butterflies.

Thus, Roger thought even more obsessively than he might have, at the end of a love affair, of Julia. He felt as wounded
as a schoolboy, and in an adolescent way he was pained by songs that brought her back. The Beatles singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” such a wonderful, perfect stoned song that he and Julia had listened to, laughing and very stoned.

Or “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Except that he could not accurately, vividly remember Julia's smile. In fact, for an exceptionally visual person, he had considerable trouble seeing her at all. And when he did, instead of her smile or even her golden eyes he saw scars. Deep, irremediable scars.

Thin and cold, although the San Francisco day is balmy, Sheila Cullan stands naked in her narrow, book-lined bedroom, arms crossed over her chest, paralyzed with indecision—she does not know what to wear. And the question is not frivolous; for Sheila, who teaches Victorian literature at a local university, it has metaphysical implications. Her lover is in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital, and she is going to see him, her first visit (quite possibly first and last).

In a year of knowing Braxton, Sheila has never known what might please him, might make him laugh, might interest or infuriate him, and the effort of trying has worn her out, or nearly.

And now, gone certifiably mad (she assumes he is mad, since he is there, locked up), he will be even more unpredictable, probably. How could she know what to wear, to visit Brax?

A sweater and jeans, running shoes? That is what Sheila usually wears when she is at home alone; it is what she feels most comfortable, most herself in. For teaching she wears shirts and skirts, hose, pumps. And at night for Brax she has
been wearing whatever she thought he might like. (And she knows, Sheila has always known, the “incorrectness” as well as the total folly of her efforts.)

In terms of this hospital visit, what to wear to the ward, there is also the fact that most of the people in Psychiatric will be “lower income,” often meaning no income at all. (Sheila's information comes mostly from a social worker friend, Maxine. Maxine, who never liked Brax, has also said, with some malice, “Brax is not going to like it there.”) In any case, shy Sheila, who is hardly rich, does not want to appear conspicuously middle-class.

With long straight streaky brown hair, small and thin, Sheila looks younger than she is, almost thirty—and a lot younger than Brax, who is in his middle forties, still good-looking but overweight. Her youth and her thinness were always among her positive qualities for Brax, Sheila knows.

In his palmiest days, Brax was a high-flying real-estate operator in Marin; clothes were very important in his work, in his life. He always wanted Sheila really gussied up, as he liked to put it—in silks and her highest heels—when they went out to certain parties, openings, new restaurants.

But will this new Brax, someone quite sick, maybe really broken down—will this new person wish them both to be inconspicuous, in the ward? In that case, jeans and her old gray sweater would be just right.

How stupid, though, to stand there naked, deciding what to wear. How Brax would laugh, if he knew. How anyone would laugh, and think her a fool.

…

Once, and really by accident, Sheila managed to please Brax immensely with clothes. He was coming for dinner and, after cooking all afternoon, worrying more about whether he would like the chicken than what she would wear, Sheila at the last minute pulled out of her closet a long red dress, bought on sale the summer before (in her pre-Brax days Sheila bought clothes with more bravado). And he loved her in that dress. “Baby, you're gorgeous. Stick with red, it's your color.”

The dinner itself was less of a success, and Brax was less enthusiastic about all the subsequent red clothes that Sheila bought; still, there had been that moment of triumph, that unforgettable “Baby, you're gorgeous.”

Ironically, the psycho ward is only about five blocks from Sheila's apartment, ironic in that at last Brax is anchored somewhere near her. At least she knows where he is, which has not always been true; for the past month Brax has been defined as “missing.”

This is what happened.

He was scheduled to have fairly routine surgery, a hernia, at Marin General Hospital. Scheduled some months in advance because, one, his internist saw no urgency; and, two, the surgeon of choice was vacationing in New Zealand.

Braxton talked a great deal about his coming operation, in what seemed to Sheila an obsessive, even exaggerated way. He referred to the event as the Grand Opening, along with more bad jokes of that nature. He drank even more than he usually did, and he did more coke. (Sheila
thought
he was doing more coke, that not being something they shared; Sheila is squeamish,
drug-wise, partly because of an acid-trip brain-damaged older brother.)

This pre-operative period was a little tiresome, then, what with so many bad jokes, and so many drunken evenings.

At other times, though, Sheila berated herself for a lack of sympathy. She has never had surgery of any kind, and she too would find it frightening, she knew. Braxton was obviously “dealing with it” in his own available ways, which were not necessarily hers.

And then Brax vanished. First, he did not show up one night when he was to take her out to dinner, and it was not just an ordinary going-out plan: they were to cruise around the bay in some hotshot client's boat, and then a very late dinner in town. Braxton was often late, but on the other hand that boat arrangement involved other people and a specific time, 7:30, to meet at the pier.

Sheila knew better than to try to read, waiting for Brax. It was better to putter about, to involve herself in very small, marginally useful tasks. She sewed on a button, she polished two small coffee spoons and a pair of silver earrings. She washed off the shelf on which she kept salad oils, and then ate some yogurt, seated alone at her round wooden kitchen table. In her new summer black Go-Silk.

By nine she thought, Well, he's not coming—could he have gone ahead without me? Deciding that I would not especially get along with the big hot client? Well, he knew that in the first place, he's always known that. There'll be some drunken phone call at 3 a.m. to explain, Sheila thought, which is what had happened on the only other occasion of Brax not showing up.

But there was no 3 a.m. call from Braxton, nor calls at any other time. The next day, a Saturday, Sheila suffered a miserable combination of sleeplessness and anxiety. She went out for
several short walks, in the cool sweet early May air, but came home to no messages on her answering machine. At last, late in the afternoon, most reluctantly she called his office, although one of the things she was thinking was, This is useless, whatever's going on they'll cover for him.

However, one of the younger salesmen answered, a man whom Sheila had met and sort of liked (he was trying out real estate to help him write his novel; he would not last, Braxton had thought). “We haven't heard a thing,” this young man now told Sheila. “He stood those people up last night, which is not like Brax, and then he didn't show up today. No answer at his place. I was worried, I was going to call you. Could he have taken a powder, as they used to say?”

“I don't know, I guess he could have.”

He could indeed have run off to avoid the operation, was one of Sheila's thoughts. Or to avoid his work, which most of the time he hated. And very likely, in a way, to avoid her too. He could have just run off, period. Or he could have gotten really high and jumped off some bridge.

The weeks that followed were for Sheila a strange and mostly terrible time. Fortunately she was extremely busy just then with papers, finals, clearing up the sheer detritus of the academic year, but she still had a large amount of pure anxiety time, hours during which she experienced every variety of fear for Brax, for large florid handsome old Brax, whom, despite all indications that she should not do so, she truly loved.

She also experienced certain fears of Brax: a dread that he might at some dark hour arrive to lean on her doorbell, drunk and angry. He had done just that one night, early on in their connection (one of the times that she should have left him, for good).

There were even some hours during which she experienced a certain relief at his absence, relief from a connection that was violent and exciting and more than a little crazy. Brax was someone quite apart from what Sheila saw as her real life, from what she perceived as reality: her job and her students, books and friends. Brax was the demon lover from whom sooner or later, in one way or another, she knew she would have to part.

And then two days ago came the call from the hospital. “We have a Mr. Braxton Dunbar in the psychiatric ward. He would like to see you. Visiting hours on Sunday start at two.”

Sheila was vastly relieved, of course—and terrified.

And here it is, a bright June Sunday, and Sheila is still standing naked in her bedroom, torn with impossible conflict over the seemingly idle question (although with Braxton nothing was ever idle) of what to wear. And visiting hours will begin in thirty minutes.

Sheila's apartment consists of the upper floor of a narrow Victorian house in a block of very similar houses. A medium-good neighborhood on the outskirts of expensive Pacific Heights. The sidewalks on Sheila's block are in serious disrepair; sturdy trees with massive roots have cracked and broken through the concrete. Those trees provide the block with considerable charm, though; it was mainly for the trees that Sheila, from Oregon and used to trees, first rented this place. She has always meant to find out what kind of trees these particular ones are, but so far has not. She admires their tenacious strength, however; she is awed by those powerful roots. She especially
likes the trees' leafed-out summer look; just now they are all feathery, pale green.

Looking out at the trees, in the sunlight, Sheila experiences a small jolt of pleasure, perhaps even of strength. How very pretty they are! What a nice place to live, after all. And in that happier instant she sees clearly what she should wear to visit Brax, stupid not to have thought of it before. She will wear a new pink silk blouse, bought on sale out on Sacramento Street to cheer herself up, in that long time of hearing nothing from Brax. Of course she should wear it, the blouse is something he has not seen, no associations to any of their troubled history together. And a pricey blouse, even on sale; Brax, who is something of a clothes snob, will recognize its quality. And the blouse is becoming, she knows it is—the famous flattery of pink.