Olivia remembered the way she had asked him questions when she was growing up. “When you take a motorcycle off a mountain, how come you don’t get killed?”
“I leave it as fast as possible,” he had said, and grinned at her.
This time he didn’t leave it.
Because he was a stuntman the story was of more than passing interest, and was in the newspapers. The police investigated the accident and ruled it a suicide. The rain was heavy enough to wash away any skid marks, so no one ever really knew. He had not left a note. But motorcycles had been his specialty and he was too good to go off a mountain by mistake; and if he had, he would have jumped away. Grady always believed it was suicide. Taylor insisted it was an accident. The family told his mother it was an accident so she could live with it as best she could.
Earlene decided Grady had to be sent away to an all-boys’ boarding school so he wouldn’t grow up in a house of women. It was her opinion, one that was common at the time, that putting the teenage boy into a cloistered male world would keep him from becoming gay. Julia agreed, and paid for it. Then Earlene took in a roommate—a woman friend of hers who liked to drink as much as she did—to keep her company, and gave her Grady’s room. From then on when Grady came home for holidays, he had to sleep on the living room couch.
Taylor was devastated at the separation from her brother right after her father’s death, and it was then she began to compose her face into a little mask. She was relieved, in a way, that Grady would escape the abuse at home, at least for a time, and that she didn’t have to watch it anymore, but now she was in that house all alone. At first they wrote to each other, in a kind of code they had invented. Grady was apparently very happy away at school. But Earlene was jealous because her son wrote to his sister far more often than he deigned to write to his mother, and after Earlene went on one of her rampages looking for the letters Taylor had gotten from Grady, Taylor destroyed them to keep her secrets. Then Earlene stopped giving Taylor the pocket money with which she had bought envelopes and stamps, and told her she should spend her spare time doing her homework instead. Taylor got all A’s, had friends, became obedient and quiet, and no one but Grady ever knew what she was thinking again.
As soon as Grady graduated from the fancy boarding school he became a stuntman like his father. It was easier for him to break in than it had been for Stan, because Stan had paved the way. Taylor went to a college for the deaf and then became a yoga teacher. Ever since her father’s “accident” she had stopped doing anything daring. The day after she graduated from college she married Tim, an artisan who made beautiful furniture, whom she had met at a party in senior year. Tim could sign because his parents were deaf, although he himself could hear perfectly.
Earlene moved to San Diego with a different woman friend. For some strange reason, after Earlene moved away, Taylor and Tim bought a house in Topanga Canyon right near where she and Grady had so many painful childhood memories, and Grady bought one there, too.
For a long time afterward, whenever Olivia got together with her cousin Jenny they talked about Stan’s death and tried to figure it out. No one else liked to mention it. What was done was done. When Jenny named her firstborn Sam, Olivia asked her if the S was for Stan, to keep his memory in the traditional Jewish way, even though Stan had left his religion and had probably committed suicide. Jenny seemed surprised. She said no, she just liked the name.
He was, after all, just a cousin. It was up to his kids to keep up the tradition; but Grady hadn’t married and Taylor had chosen to be childless.
It would be twenty years now since Stan went off Mulholland Drive, but sometimes Olivia still woke up thinking about it.
3
S
PRING HAD MADE
its brief appearance and then disappeared, the way it always did in New York, and now summer was going. Olivia wondered why every year time seemed to go a little faster. Her friends had remarked on it, too. They said it was because time did that when you got older, and then they laughed nervously because they really didn’t want to believe it. She had gotten a postcard from Melissa, who was on vacation in Europe with her husband Bill and the kids, and she had heard from Aunt Myra that Jenny and Paul had taken a weekend house somewhere in Massachusetts on a lake, with their five children, and that Jenny said it was just like camp. She didn’t hear from any of the other relatives, but she didn’t expect to, nor did they expect to hear from her. Everyone was so busy.
Olivia liked summer weekends in New York with Roger. Everybody who could cleared out and it was easy to get into restaurants and movies. The stores had sales. The family was expected to do their clothes shopping at Julia’s, at the employee discount, because it was good public relations for the employees to see the owners there, and Julia’s had all the best designer collections, but Olivia liked the little boutiques where she could find the crazy clothes she preferred. Of course the family knew it.
This summer, as usual, it was too hot in New York, and the polluted city air was almost unbreathable, but she and Roger had good air-conditioning. Their four-story town tyhouse was an oasis. They had divided their back garden with a picket fence so half was a dog run, carefully kept clean by their assistants—eager young students—and the other half was for the two of them and Wozzle and Buster. There were trees and flowers out there, and vines grew against the brick wall. There was a gas grill on the flagstones, and a table and chairs under a large umbrella. Years ago they had discussed buying a summer place in the country, but all their money was tied up in the house and the clinic, and besides involving traveling and the purchase of a car, and then garage space, a weekend house seemed too much work, and it still did.
Roger had just had his forty-ninth birthday. It was hard to believe that he was only another year away from the dreaded Big Five-O. He had insisted on nothing more festive for his birthday than dinner in a restaurant for the two of them, and when she mentioned that next year she should give him a party, he had said he didn’t want to talk about it. They had recently been invited to a fiftieth birthday party given for one of his friends by the man’s wife. It was a big, expensive affair.
“Women always give fiftieth birthday parties for their husbands,” Olivia said. “But men never give them for their wives. Why do you suppose not?”
“Because women don’t want to admit it in public,” Roger said.
“
You
don’t want to admit it in public. I would.”
“Wait till you get there and then we’ll see if you say that,” he said, and smiled.
He had started going to the gym four times a week, spending an hour on the Stairmaster and then doing weights. He complained that he was fat.
“You look fine,” she said. What she really meant was that she was used to him. “I can’t stand anorexic men who talk all the time about cholesterol and Pritikin diets. I couldn’t stand it if you looked like an anatomy chart and your eyes bulged out.”
“What you’re saying is you like me fat.”
“You’re not fat.”
Even with all his disciplined exercise he didn’t look much different, and she couldn’t figure that out, but of course she would never mention it.
They had planned to take ten days off in October and go to Paris. She had already reserved a room in the charming little Hotel Lenox on the Left Bank, where they had been several times before, and had arranged with a doctor to take over their patients and even let Wozzle and Buster live in his house. In Paris they would do the same things they did in New York: walk, eat, see movies, but it would be in a different place—foreign, exciting—and she was looking forward to it.
In early September, when kids were back from wherever their parents had sent them for the summer and before they had to go back to school, her cousin Kenny was having his son Jason’s bar mitzvah in Santa Barbara. Kenny had reserved rooms for the weekend for the entire family at the luxurious Four Seasons Biltmore, which was supposed to be like a resort. As usual, Roger was trying to get out of the whole thing.
“Look, sweetheart,” he said, “there’s no way I can go to California for a weekend. Two long plane trips, and all that money—you know I won’t go steerage—and the hotel. And we’re going to take time off in October.”
“But Kenny specifically wanted you to come,” Olivia said, feeling the disappointment rise up because she already knew he would have it his way. “He put your name on the envelope and the RSVP card. He knows you don’t go anywhere—he could have written ‘and guest.’ ”
“Who would you have as a guest?” he asked, teasing.
“Wozzle. She’ll go anywhere.”
“Because she’s got no sense. Besides, someone has to stay here.”
“We’ll get someone. Other doctors take vacations.”
“I don’t call that a vacation. You go. You’ll get to catch up with your cousins. I’ll be fine.”
Of course he would be fine, she thought. If he went with her he’d be tired and grouchy, even though to them he would be as charming as he always was. She could understand how he felt about this particular effort, but it was so obvious that Roger didn’t have sentiment for any of the important rites of passage in family life that by now it embarrassed her. Everyone else’s husband was so good, and her boyfriend—lover? companion?—was so different. Pretty soon the family would stop inviting him to anything.
She hadn’t seen Jason since he was four years old, when Kenny and Gloria had still been married and they had taken a trip to New York. She doubted if she would even recognize him. But that wasn’t the point. You couldn’t let whole lives go by without even trying to look in on them once in a while. They were her blood. She wanted to be there, no matter how much trouble it was, if only for Kenny, and for curiosity.
* * *
Kenny was in his first year of medical school when he brought Gloria Weinstein to Mandelay. Olivia already knew he was having an affair with Gloria because he had told her.
“How is it?” she had asked, because Kenny was so shy he’d never even had a real girlfriend before, or at least none she knew about.
“She’s not very good,” Kenny said. “But neither am I.”
He was a young man with a depth of naiveté that was almost childlike, despite having been brought up with money and privilege. Gloria was a plump Bronx blonde with no money, loud and bossy and full of energy, and of course the family didn’t approve of her, but Olivia did. She was a secretary with no particular career ambitions, which in that family was fine, but what they didn’t like was that she was so open about their sexual relationship, going into Kenny’s room and shutting the door and staying there all night, in case they hadn’t already gotten the picture from their afternoon “naps”; and this made them afraid she was going to control his life. When he married Gloria his parents changed their wills, putting everything in trust, already planning for what they considered the inevitable divorce.
Actually, Kenny and Gloria seemed to be very happy together. She worked while he went to medical school, and when he decided to move to California and make his practice there she was completely agreeable even though it meant she would have to leave behind all her friends. Kenny had only one close friend, a man he’d known since first grade—Gloria was his best friend, his playmate, his confidante. His parents died quite quickly, one after the other, of heart attacks, and then Gloria became his entire world.
Despite what had been the family’s distrust, Gloria settled into the life of the wife of a successful heart surgeon, pillar of the community, patron of the arts, with good grace and a dash of wit. They built a beautiful house overlooking the ocean, with a lot of glass. Gloria became active on various benefit committees. She never complained about Kenny’s long hours. She brought the new friends she had made into his life, so that nobody ever noticed anymore how shy he actually was. Twice a year they would take a wonderful vacation; to Europe or South America or Africa or the Middle East; to rain forests or pyramids or historic ruins. They both became good amateur photographers, and the blown-up color photos of what they had seen decorated the walls of their modern house. After a number of years they had a son, Jason, and immediately began taking him along on their trips, even though the family fretted that he was going to catch something. Now big photographs of the three of them began to decorate the modern walls, covering them, until there was nothing left but the bright images of past adventures and the blue limitless ocean beyond.
Then one year, when Jason was six, the three of them went on a trek up the Himalayas. Kenny was still thin then, in good shape, and he and Gloria enjoyed physical activity on their vacations. But when they were ready to start down Gloria said to Kenny, “You go on home with Jason. I’m going to stay here and visit my guru.” Apparently she was into Eastern religions at the time, and apparently there was a guru somewhere up there, or maybe not. So Kenny went down the Himalayas with Jason, and Gloria ran off with the Sherpa.
After the “incident” happened no one in the family gossiped about it, as if something like that would go away and be forgotten if it was not mentioned. Gloria and Kenny got divorced, he kept custody of their son, and Gloria married the Sherpa, Tenzing, and moved with him to India, where she embraced his family with much more fervor than she ever had her own. She and Tenzing opened a travel agency and took tourists on treks, where she met several celebrities. On school vacations Jason went to India to stay with her, and since he had been to many exotic places already and was still quite young, he considered this perfectly normal.
As for Kenny, he took it hard. He devoted himself to raising Jason, and although he was considered a prime catch and dated a variety of women, he did not show the slightest interest in remarrying. He gained weight, even though there was a history of heart disease in his family. He did not know what to do about all those photographs of happier days, and finally just left them where they were—Gloria, after all, was still Jason’s mother.
When Olivia first heard the story she thought it was bizarre and something only Gloria would do, but then when she thought about it she began to see it more clearly, even though perhaps only Gloria would do it in exactly that way.
Once she dared to ask Kenny about it. “Why did Gloria run off with Tenzing? What did she want in her life? Was it adventure?”
“Something like that,” Kenny mumbled, his eyes darting away, and he looked so embarrassed Olivia knew it was true, and that he still took it personally.
* * *
It was over an hour to Kennedy Airport, five and a half hours on the plane, and two hours driving to Santa Barbara in a rented car, but by the time Olivia got to the hotel, because of the time difference it was still daytime, the sun shining brightly. The hotel was an old Spanish-style stucco building surrounded by gardens and palm trees, with the beach and ocean across the street. She unpacked her party clothes and started feeling a little better. Her room was pretty: done in French country-style, with pale colors, nice fabrics and a view of the pool. She thought of collapsing on the king-sized bed for a nap, but the activity below distracted her, so she put on her bathing suit and went to find her cousins at the pool.
Jenny and Melissa waved to her from under an umbrella and she joined them. “Hi, hi, hi,” they all said, and kissed.
A pool boy gave her a towel and brought her the iced tea she had ordered. In the near distance were the happy screams of children and the sound of splashing. The sky was deep blue, there was a cool breeze, she had a drink and a book and a lounge to lie on; Roger didn’t know what he was missing.
Max and Sam and Abe and Jake, little boys with the names of old men, were playing water polo, their bodies sleek as seals.
“Where are the girls?”
“With their fathers on the beach,” Melissa said. “Did Roger come?”
“No.” Neither of them seemed surprised or at all condemnatory. Olivia realized it was she they were glad to see, although of course they would have been happy to see Roger, too. She would call him later from the room to say good night before they went out to dinner.
“Isn’t this great?” Jenny said. Olivia noticed that Jenny and Melissa both looked excellent in their swimsuits, even after having all those children. She hoped she looked as good to them.
“It’s wonderful.”
“What we should do,” Jenny said, “is get together like this as a family without having to wait for events like funerals and bar mitzvahs.”
“Right.”
“At a place like this,” Melissa said. “Bill and I were saying that we would like to come here for a vacation sometime. We’ve reserved a tennis court for tomorrow afternoon after the service.”
“We should have a cousins club,” Jenny said. “We could get everybody together here, or a nice resort hotel more conveniently located; say, once or twice a year.”
“I would do it,” Olivia said.
“Like Mandelay,” Melissa said. She and Jenny looked at each other and sighed.
“Don’t you
miss
Mandelay?” Jenny said to both of them.
“Yes,” Olivia said, but she was lying. She had never felt the same way about Mandelay as the other cousins did. They had played happily with their invited friends in that country paradise, but her mother had driven away every friend she ever had, wanting to keep Olivia for herself.
“Nick went to see it this summer,” Melissa said. “He drove right up and told them we used to live there, and asked them if he could look around. They were nice about it.”
“What did it look like?”
“The same, except they remodeled the kitchen.”
“That dark kitchen in the basement,” Jenny said. “I liked it. The food . . . Do you remember the wonderful food?”
Olivia did, and the almost ritualistic nature of the elaborate meals, but she also remembered spending her summers dreaming about the enticing, forbidden world outside, where she could have the freedom of her own house, her own life. She supposed she had married as soon as she could not only because it was expected but also to have a buffer against her mother’s excessive love and fear.