‘Oh, I’m real sorry,’ he told her.
He was tall and curly headed and he put her in mind almost straightaway of
Elliot Gould. ‘I guess I’m not much of a driver. Did I hurt you at all?’
‘I’ll live,’ she smiled.
She went on pushing her cart along
by the herb and spice shelves. She was giving a small dinner-party tomorrow –
not that she particularly felt like it. Paul had been away for a week in Las
Vegas, negotiating a new lighting contract with the Desert Hotel Group, and he
would be bringing back three of his clients so that they could inspect the full
range of his latest fixtures, out at his engineering works at Burbank.
She hated business dinners. The
clients were either short and fat and Jewish, or short and fat and Italian, or
short and fat and Japanese. They all drank too much and smoked too much and
tried to grab her behind. Afterwards, she always felt that she and her house
had been gang-banged. She had begged Paul to take his clients to restaurants
-’They’ll be so much more impressed with a restaurant’ -but Paul believed
implicity in the personal, family touch. When men were away from home on business,
he argued, they saw far too many restaurants. They wanted to feel comfortable
and relaxed. They wanted to feel they were
friends
rather than business clients.
So it was that two or three times a
month, Jennifer was expected to prepare a four-or five-course dinner of
boeufcarbonnade,
or glazed duck with
baby vegetables, or roast rack of lamb Provencale. She had Inez to help her, of
course, but even if she had run a kitchen staff of twenty, her feelings about
business dinners still wouldn’t have changed. It was the loud laughter, the
crass remarks, the blue jokes, and the sub-Rabelaisian table-manners. Whenever
she thought of business dinners, she thought of the president of Northern
Frate, and how he had crushed out his cigar in the Madeira sauce that he had
left on his plate.
Jennifer thought that she probably
deserved better. A better home, a better husband, a better life. When he wasn’t
making business-dinner demands on her, though, Paul was still amusing and
gentlemanly and she believed that he still loved her, as much as he could love
anybody. It was just the unrelenting sameness of every day that depressed her;
the sameness of housework, and then the sameness, once the housework was
finished, of wondering what on earth she could do to occupy her spare time. She
often tried to spin out a small embroidery project for days on end, unpicking
it unless it was absolutely perfect. She had plenty of friends, but they were
all caught up in the same predicament as she. Their children were all away at
school, their husbands were all away at work, and let’s face it, not every
woman could write
Scruples
or head up
Twentieth-Century Fox or play championship tennis.
She used to look out of the window
of the plane whenever she flew back from seeing her sister Nesta in San
Francisco, and try to count all of the bright turquoise swimming-pools that
studded the Valley, thinking to herself as she did so: by each of those pools
there stands a house, and in each of those houses there sits a woman, waiting
out the rest of her life in emptiness.
Jennifer stopped beside one of the
mirrored pillars and deliberately looked at herself.
Brunette, dark eyed, with excellent
bone structure, seeks amusement. Dresses tastefully, talks intelligently, makes
love with enthusiasm when required. Will not consider embroidery or business
catering. Prefers hunting rhinoceros, sailing uncharted oceans, dancing until
well past dawn, and running naked through breeze-blown fields of golden
poppies.
She focused her eyes. The young man
who had collided with her only a few minutes before was standing behind her,
watching her. She blushed suddenly, and turned around, hoping that she hadn’t
been making her usual faces.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was
thinking how attractive you were.’
‘What?’ she asked him, as if he were
mad. God, he probably was.
‘I have to cook this meal tonight,’
he told her, and he said it in such a way that she wasn’t at all sure what he
had said to start with. Her memory had been getting worse, as forty gradually
approached. Forty, like the exit gate from Disneyland. Once you were through,
there was no going back, and there was nobody there to stamp your hand.
‘It’s lamb,’ he added, distractedly.
She stared at him. ‘What is?’
‘This meal that I have to cook
tonight. My fiancée’s folks are coming over. I can’t afford to take them out to
a restaurant, so I thought I’d cook.’
‘And you were going to cook them
lamb?’
‘I have this recipe, look. I cut it
out of last Friday’s food section.’
He held out a well-folded cutting
from the
Times.
She took it, but she
couldn’t read it because she wasn’t wearing her glasses. She fumbled in her bag
and finally managed to find them. ‘Now then,’ she said, peering at the cutting.
‘What is this?’
She read it quickly. It was
lamb en croute,
boned leg of lamb smothered
in pate and herbs, wrapped in pastry, and then baked in the oven. She gave the
recipe back to him. ‘Do you cook much?’ she asked.
‘Only burgers.’
‘Don’t you think
lamb en croute
is rather ambitious for
somebody who only cooks burgers?’
‘I guess. But I thought that if I
followed the instructions carefully, and used frozen pastry instead of trying
to make my own... well, it would probably turn out okay.’
‘Well, I suppose so, with lots of
luck,’ smiled Jennifer. The young man amused her.
He was gentle and earnest and good
looking and he spoke to her as if he respected her advice as a person, not the
way that Paul did, as if she were lucky that he was wonderful enough to share
his priceless conversation with her.
The young man scratched the back of
his neck, thinking hard. ‘It’s just that this meal is real important, and if I
cook something dumb then what are her parents going to think of me?’
‘You don’t have to cook anything so
complicated,’ said Jennifer. ‘Most people really prefer plain food, anyway. I
give dozens of dinner-parties, and the most successful ones are always the
simplest ones. Ham, or tenderloin of pork, or-’
‘They’re Jewish,’ the young man
interrupted.
‘Well, in that case, you can always
do something simple with beef or fish.’
The young man looked down wistfully
at the recipe he held in his hand. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should
cook something real simple. Broiled ribs of beef or something.’
Jennifer watched him for a moment.
In the bottom of his shopping-cart, he had already collected liver-pate,
herbes de Provence,
and frozen
shortcrust pastry, as well as snow peas, baby carrots, and russet potatoes.
‘Let me make a suggestion,’ she
heard herself saying. ‘Why don’t you come back to my house this afternoon, and
I’ll prepare the
lamb en croute
for
you. You have to partly cook the lamb in any case, before you wrap it in the
pate and the herbs and the pastry. I’ll do all that, and decorate it for you,
and then all you have to do tonight is take it home and put it straight into
the oven.’
The young man stared at her. ‘You’d
do that?’
‘Why not? I don’t have anything else
to do this afternoon. It should be fun.’
‘Well, that’s terrific,’ the young
man said. ‘But you don’t even know me. I could be the Hollywood Hatchetman, or
somebody like that.’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Jennifer briskly,
pushing her shopping-cart ahead of her. ‘The Hollywood Hatchetman wanders
around Ralph’s, wondering how to cook
lamb
en croute
for his Jewish parents-in-law-to-be.’
The young man followed Jennifer
along the aisle. ‘Even Charles Manson used to shop,’ he said, breathlessly.
Jennifer stopped, and their carts
collided again. ‘You’re not a friend of Charles Manson, are you?’ she asked,
only half seriously.
The young man clapped his hand
against his chest in horror. ‘Me? No, of course not!’
‘Listen,’ said Jennifer, ‘we’d be
better off with just one shopping-cart. Otherwise there could be a serious
traffic accident before we’ve finished.’
It took them ten minutes to finish
their marketing, then the young man pushed the shopping-cart out to Jennifer’s
car, a metallic green Eldorado, six months old.
‘Where’s your car?’ asked Jennifer.
The young man flapped one hand
diffidently toward a scabrous Le Sabre, twelve years old, with collapsed
suspension. Jennifer smiled. ‘You want to leave it here and come back in mine?’
she asked.
‘No, that’s okay, I’ll follow you.
Not too close. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.’
Jennifer said, ‘I really ought to
know your name. And I guess you ought to know mine. I’m Jennifer Shepheard.’
They shook hands. ‘Bernard Muldoon,’
the young man told her. ‘I’m a business studies student at UC San Diego.
Training to be a captain of industry.’
‘Good to know you, Bernard.’
They drove out of Ralph’s on to
Hollywood Boulevard, heading west. Jennifer kept her eye on Bernard’s limping
car, making sure that she didn’t leave him behind as she turned up La Brea. She
didn’t live far away: just up the canyon on Paseo del Serra. But by the blue
smoke that was blowing out of the back of Bernard’s car, she thought she ought
to keep the pace sedate. In five minutes, however, they were parking on the
sharply sloping driveway outside Jennifer’s split-level ranch-style house, and
Bernard was helping Jennifer to carry the groceries around the back to the
kitchen.
Bernard glanced around as Jennifer
opened the door for him. ‘The neighbours won’t gossip, will they?’ he queried.
‘You’re not bent on giving them
anything to gossip about, are you?’ Jennifer smiled.
Bernard flushed red, from the neck
up. ‘Well, no, of course not. But I know what some of these suburban
neighbourhoods are like. They live entirely on gossip and Stouffer’s candies.’
‘You think I’m like that?’ asked
Jennifer, thinking of the afternoon last week when she had put her feet up and
read
Lace 2
and eaten a whole box of
violet creams. She didn’t binge like that very often; she wanted to keep her
figure as well as her mind.
But she swore now that she would
never let herself do it again.
The kitchen was tiled in
Thanksgiving Brown, with glazed pictures of golden poppies beside the sink (the
poppies through which she sometimes imagined herself dancing naked). There was
a cookie jar with a silly rabbit’s face on it, and an egg rack with ten brown
eggs in it, and a Currier & Ives calendar which Sammi her favourite niece
had given her, in a frustrated teenage attempt to teach her aunt some taste.
Jennifer unpacked the groceries on to the tiled central island, and told
Bernard where to put things away.
‘Would you like a glass of wine?’
she asked him. ‘There’s some Chablis in the icebox. Or else there’s a beer, if
you’d prefer it. The glasses are in that cupboard next to the scales. That’s
it. And could you pour one for me, please?’
They spent the whole afternoon in
the kitchen, preparing the
lamb en croute
and chatting about everything and nothing. Politics, art, television, how
good Raquel Welch looked for her age, what about contraception for under-age
girls, atomic energy, Greenpeace, the meaning of other people’s lives, the
meaning of their own lives. Jennifer could hardly believe it when she looked up
at the reproduction early-American wall clock and saw that it was well past
five. Bernard had kept her continuously interested, continuously amused.
If only –
but then
‘if only’
was as far as a married woman was allowed to think, as
far as Jennifer’s upbringing was concerned, anyway. Beyond ‘if only’ there was
excitement and pleasure; but there was insecurity and danger as well.
‘What time is your dinner?’ Jennifer
asked Bernard, as she glazed the pastry with egg. ‘You should put this in the
oven at least an hour beforehand, 220 degrees.’
Bernard stood with his hands tucked
into his back pants pockets and looked down at the lamb for a long while,
saying nothing. Jennifer stopped brushing it with egg, and asked him, ‘Is
anything wrong?’
‘Well. . .’he began.
‘Well what? Is there something wrong
with the lamb? You don’t like the way it looks?
Maybe those pastry flowers are too
fussy. It was supposed to have been cooked by a man, after all. We don’t want
your fiancée’s parents thinking there’s anything limp-wristed about you, do we?
You know what these Jewish people are like when it comes to carrying on the
good old family tree.’
‘Nothing like that,’ said Bernard.
‘The truth is, I have a confession to make.’
‘A confession?’ asked Jennifer. She
went over to the sink and washed her hands.
Then she untied her apron strings,
and said, ‘You don’t owe me anything, you know.
Not even the truth.’
‘The truth is,’ Bernard told her,
with great simplicity, ‘that I have no fiancée.’