I have my eye on those three window tables and am planning to ask in my most winning way if, possibly, we can sit there, when the hostess tells us to, “Follow me,” and, surprise, it
is
a window table she leads us to. Before we sit, I stop at the window to stare down and marvel at the direct drop, straight along the side of the building into a boiling ocean. Our table is the best one in the house; someone, Mrs. La Salle I guess, has tipped management a lot. Mrs. La Salle, with her on-target elegance, projects
rich
. Most of the Manor ladies project
comfortable—once
.
The hostess smiles her struck-dumb hostess smile; she has a lot of wiry curls scooped to one side and held up by airplane glue. “My dear,” my father tells her, “you look like an houri.” She blinks twice; I’ll bet that’s a new one. Now she’ll have to go home and look up
houri
on the internet.
Houris are beautiful virgins of the Koranic Paradise. I want to get Daddy away from these Egyptian associations, so I change the subject by spreading out his leather-bound menu and handing it to him, “Look, purple writing.” And this works. “Of course, my dear,” he says, “purple; in all the best hotels it’s always purple. I have forgotten the name of this hotel but that’s all right. . . . The purple writing,” he tells Mrs. Dexter, “is known as a hectograph process.”
“An’ damn messy it was, too,” Mrs. Dexter agrees.
So my father lectures about hectograph, and Mrs. Dexter and Mrs. Cohen reminisce about getting hectograph all over your hands. And Daddy turns the crinkly pages of his menu, and although he looks kind of lost, we’re getting into the spirit of things. Mrs. Cohen says, reading the purple French, “
Homard
, that’s lobster,
n’est-ce pas
? Oh, my, lobster would be so wonderful, let’s all have lobster.”
And Mrs. La Salle goes, “And a wine, white, very dry, two bottles,” and Mrs. Dexter asks if two bottles will be enough, and everyone thinks that’s hilariously funny.
So I decide, okay; he’s forgotten about e-mails, this is going to be a happy outing after all.
Of course, the ladies need to talk Manor gossip. “Mr. Rice is leaving,” Mrs. La Salle says, and, “No, I beg your pardon; he isn’t,” Mrs. Cohen says, and finally they’re down to some conversation about Mona, where I marvel again that nobody takes her murder seriously. Mona has become a historical figure, as if she had died a hundred years ago. “She had a false cupboard full of addictive substances,” Mrs. Cohen announces. Apparently that’s safe to say since nobody jumps or looks scared. I guess no one here is an addict.
Mrs. Dexter talks a little about her childhood in these parts. “A beautiful place? I suppose so. Children don’t think about beautiful. Children think about each other. About their families. About whom they hate.”
Mrs. Cohen giggles. “Louise, you’re being bad.”
My father has been edgy ever since we came in; now he’s doing it again. He stares at the window and then back into the dining room. “Perhaps there was something over there?” he gestures into the receding set of white alcoves.
Yes, I think. Maybe in a different time, a different country.
The alcoves look like the abandoned tomb of the merchant Intep. Intep’s was the tomb next to our coffin-text one; it had recesses like these and that same heavy, hangs-over-you feeling. The tomb was empty; it had been stripped of treasure two thousand years ago. But very faintly on the walls you could see where the painter had inscribed part of the
Declaration of Innocence
: “I have not caused pain. I have not made to weep.” You didn’t usually put thoughts like that on your tomb wall; usually you had pictures of your happy life in the world, drinking wine, hunting birds on the Nile. “Poor chap must have had a guilty conscience,” Daddy had said as he deciphered the hieroglyphs.
The ladies are now on the subject of Mona’s childhood, which they’re guessing was unhappy.
My father is watching the window. “Is there,” he asks, “a beach down there?”
Several voices tell him, “Sure,” and “I guess.”
“If someone could have stopped something and didn’t and they have regret for it afterwards . . .” he begins.
These ladies are really sweet. That proposition must seem to come out of nowhere, but they can still be comforting about it. Mrs. Cohen pats his hand, “We just can’t tell, can we?” Mrs. Dexter says, “Everyone always wonders.”
He says, “What I’m thinking is, the
Declaration of Innocence
.”
I think,
Oh, God, the Declaration of Innocence
. And, of course, the guilty conscience. I try to send
stop
and
quit
mental messages at him. Don’t rehash it. Please. What could you have done? If you were up on the bluff and it was happening down on the beach?
Our time waiting for lobster is occupied eating dabs of food on gold-rimmed plates. My father continues staring at the window, a wide arced expanse of glass that begins at waist height and stretches two tables across. “Let’s open it,” he tells the waiter.
“Oh, I can’t, sir. Here’s your wine sorbet, sir.”
“It doesn’t open?”
This waiter, in his tux and black pants, looks generically continental, but when he talks he’s more Central Valley. “Well only to wash it, sir, swivels out, kinda, hard to manage, practically takes an engineering degree.” He hands Daddy a dish of tan-colored ice, “Here’s to cleanse the palate, sir.”
“Amazing,” says my father.
I start playing with the gold-rimmed dishes and then with the silver candleholder, and discover that I can see the whole restaurant in the shiny candleholder surface. The room in the candleholder appears long and wobbly, stretched in the middle and disappearing at the edges, with white tables and a low, rounded Moorish ceiling. That skinny place in the middle is an attenuated front door.
“I don’t care about her unhappy childhood,” Mrs. La Salle is saying, “she was a
bitch
.” She pronounces the word precisely, as if it’s one she appreciates.
Daddy is still dividing his time between the room, which he doesn’t like, and the view, which he wants to watch. I move to see it, but with the window starting at waist height the view is mostly sky; just a line of horizon, and then the sweep of heaven where the sun is squat and fat and getting lower.
Mrs. La Salle is saying that there’s a reason for the split between Mona’s visible smarmy personality and her underlying evil scheming one; people with an ego split have a recognizable psychic illness, and Mrs. Cohen says, “Oh, tell me, Daphne, you’re so informed,” and I return to my candleholder where there is somebody in a blue dress gesticulating and crossing the room, and now someone with red hair, coming from the opposite direction, wobbling because the reflective surface is bumpy. And now arrives the hostess, undulating away, recognizable because of her scrambled hairdo. And finally . . . I stop here. I call a halt. I simply won’t start the game of recognizing old friends in this mirror. But, yes, there is a man now, waiting over by the door, who looks familiar. How silly to think you can identify someone reflected in a candleholder, but just the same I do recognize him.
“The sun is getting ready to depart; I need to speak to her,” says my father. He’s right about the sun; I can feel over my left shoulder that the sky is growing very deeply crimson.
Now there’s a chorus of gasps from my table mates; the lobsters have arrived, paraded home by a matched pair of busboys. “How totally gorgeous,” Mrs. Cohen exhales and, “Well, I do love all the nonsense.” That’s Mrs. Dexter.
I leave my candleholder. I am firm with myself. Quit being silly; quit pretending you’re the Lady of Shallot or some damn stupid thing. How often lately do you get to eat lobster?
There’s a several-minute hiatus while napkins are arranged and silverware jostles. Mrs. Cohen says, “You know, I never could do this when I was a child. Because of the dietary laws,” and Mrs. La Salle tells her that those Old Testament rules are admirable, entirely sensible.
I am fussing with lobster claws. Pretty soon I have broached the small claw and eaten the meat out of it. And that, I decide, makes it okay for me to sneak a sideways peek into my magic mirror.
The person I think I know is crossing the restaurant. Over my shoulder the sky has gotten a deeper red.
Now the figure is circling in my mirror, and the walk is definitely familiar. There he goes, led by the hostess, into a cubicle at the edge of my view. I don’t think he sees me. If he did he’d be here in a minute; there’s nothing subtle about him.
Him
of course being Rob, in case you hadn’t guessed. And it
is
Rob; he goes into a cubicle, and there’s someone with him. You don’t come to a place like this alone.
If I want to put an end to this childish mirror-watching, all I have to do is get up and speak to him. That’ll be a perfectly straightforward, ordinary encounter. “Hi, Rob.” “Well,
hi
, Carly.” “Hey,
you
.” “Well, hey, yourself.” Anticlimax times ten.
He’s here with a date, and I am here with my father and three old ladies.
I won’t let Robbie feel sorry for me. I’ll wait before I speak to him. Maybe I’ll never speak.
The ladies have moved from discussing Mona to debating eternity and God. People talk like that over wine and lobster. Mrs. La Salle says, “No, Louise, it’s not that there aren’t atheists in foxholes . . .” and Mrs. Dexter says, “If I were in a foxhole, I’d show you an atheist, all right.”
My father isn’t eating his lobster; his eyes are glued on the window where the sun, enormous now, is spreading itself, ready to flatten, which is what it does just before it sets. The setting of the sun in the Egyptian religion equals the descent of Re, sent underground for his dangerous journey. “Don’t stare right at it, Father.”
He’s rapt, not moving a muscle. I don’t like this much. “Daddy?”
It does something to your retina, I’ve read about that; fries it. Maybe I should tap him on the shoulder.
“Why, dear.” He smiles his chairman’s smile but keeps on looking past my shoulder as if I’m not there.
I sit back and examine my hands, my napkin, my fingernails, and a spot on the knee of my good black pants. Mrs. Dexter is saying, “What makes it interesting, we’re the only species with the foresight of death.”
Mrs. La Salle talks about Heraclitus and something about the sweet and the bittersweet. Mrs. Dexter moves the walker an inch, for emphasis maybe, she says, “Daphne, now, you must listen . . .”
I can feel with the side of my face that Robbie is just a couple of dozen feet away. Maybe I should simply turn and smile, straightforward, nothing to it.
“But death is a going over,” Mrs. Cohen is saying, “a translation, a passing into the next stage of life . . .”
From some place near me, maybe right beside me, yes, from my father; he’s the one that’s doing it—there’s a scream, a skull-splitting shriek, a gargling, ferocious noise wrenched from stomach, lungs, throat, gut, to make you grab for your chest, put your hands over your ears. Voices say, “My God,” “Where is it?” “What?” and “Who?” A glass clangs, sets of plates crash, a metal stand collapses. And Edward Day, screaming, is on the window ledge. He has somehow, without fuss or muss, in an instant, got the magic window open and is trying to climb out of it into the setting sun.
This window opens onto nothing at all. Below it is one hundred and fifty feet of building side, cliff side, rocks, then ocean.
Carla, for God’s sake, for
God
’s sake, get up, don’t just sit there.
He has one knee up on the white cement casement sill; his head is out, his body bent, he has kicked over his wineglass, pushed his lobster plate onto the floor. What is he saying? Words. I can understand them; “Tell her . . . I’m supposed to . . . help.”
And I’m beside him now, which has happened in one motion without my thinking. I’m on one side, and somebody else is on the other side. I can feel that other person though I don’t really look, only with the side of my vision; there’s a dark jacket and an arm, and my father is half out the window, knee flexed, body bent, rock him the wrong way and the whole man goes end over end into the view.
“Careful, careful.”
“There, darling, there.”
“I did not help,” he is saying.
It’s only the setting sun, a brilliant red streak across the black of the blackened mind. Life, strength, force, reason, and all those things you’ve lost. “Watch it. Slow . . .”
“Careful . . . he’s a lot stronger than he looks.”
“Without scaring . . . try it without scaring him.”
“Watch out, don’t tip that way. Back . . .”
My God, for a minute there I thought he was going through, tipping and teetering, old fragile kneecap on rough white sill, old man balanced insecurely like a toy.
Oh, Jesus.
The sun is almost gone now, and there’s nothing left except a purple glow and that green streak they talk about. Then careful and slow, let’s get him back down without catching his arm. He’s coming willingly, maybe he’s a little scared, looking down into that vastness and the sea blue and hard and the rocks brown and hard.
We pull him in slowly, his shoulders still partly out the window and one shoe catching on something. We push the table back. There, now. Sit down. Gently, gently. It’s all right, dear, really it is.
Rob says, “Dr. Day? It’s Robbie. Hey, now, it’s me, Dr. Day. Robbie Ackroyd.”
Out in Justine’s parking lot a small crowd of subdued people has collected. First of all the Manor ladies, then Justine’s hostess dabbing at her makeup with a restaurant napkin, then Rob and his girlfriend and Henry the cabdriver, his bearded face screwed into a question, and finally Daddy and me, with my father the most subdued of us all. Cabdriver Henry is patting him on the shoulder, saying, “Heard about the mess in there, good thing you had me wait, not the right place for you people, I coulda told ya.” Daddy is shaking his head. He looks puzzled. The hostess says to me, “You’re sure now?” and I say, “We’ll just take the cab home.”