remember ever having envied their wealth. It was their freedom I envied, that arrogant freedom. Art and Geoff Tees were two of them, often seen at the wheel of their convertible MGAs (bottle green for Art, red for Geoff), the radio spitting out wild rock music. You could see them driving full speed on the 132, cigarette at their lips, beer bottle in their hands — they were barely sixteen for God’s sake! — accompanied by their girlfriends from Montreal who came to spend their summers in Métis Beach — it was said that they slept with them, in the same bed! The sort of behaviour you’d only see among the English. Among our Protestant neighbours. Where apparently they spoke freely of condoms and tampons, while in the French Village, we didn’t even know such things existed.
Their existence was an itch we’d have to scratch our whole lives until it bled. Unless we left.
The last time we saw each other was in December of 1986. Gail knew I was passing through New York. Her husband had an accountant’s meeting in Union City, New Jersey, on the other side of the Hudson, and she’d come with him. She’d phoned me in L.A. I was surprised and thought it might be my friend John Kinnear in Métis Beach who’d given her my number, and perhaps John had even told her I’d be in New York that week. I can’t remember, but I’d been surprised, very surprised. “Romain, it would be nice, no? For lunch?” And I hesitated before answering. We had left each other on bad terms years before, and I still felt she’d stolen something from me. I had the feeling I’d been betrayed by her, that I’d been unable to help her — to save her. “Lunch?” I thought for a moment, yes, no … perhaps my friend Moïse might join us? It might be more pleasant. “Moïse?” Surprise in her voice, perhaps disappointment. “Yes, of course. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. It would be great.” And so we made plans for Zack’s, a deli on the Lower East Side. Moïse had gotten there a good half-hour late, covered in snow, breathless as if he’d run across Manhattan. We laughed, Moïse and I, but not Gail, she barely smiled. She was wearing a dress from another time, her eternal shawl draped across her shoulders as if in a perpetual state of hypothermia, throwing disgusted glances at the salamis that hung from the ceiling like stalactites. She sighed with irritation at the impassioned conversation Moïse and I began about the scandal of the hour, Irangate, which had sullied Reagan’s presidency. To distract herself, she began tearing the labels off our bottles of Beck’s.
“Are you okay, Gail? Everything’s good on your end?” She had little to tell us. Her home in Baie-D’Urfé, the animal rights organizations she was volunteering with. When it came time to order, she dug her heels in, “No vegetarian dishes?” In the end she had a tomato salad, barely ripe, their hearts still white, and mineral water. She pecked at her food, a hand gripping the shawl around her small breasts, throwing haughty looks at our plates full of pastrami.
“You keep going like this, boys, and you’ll be dead at fifty.”
What had I felt? Pity. Pity and a little anger. I was wondering why she’d come to see me. What was the point? After a taxi dropped all three of us at Rockefeller Center, we began walking towards the New York Times building where Moïse worked. A fine but abundant snow was falling over the city, its chaos now muted like a mountain in winter. Moïse was playing the fool, catching snowflakes on his tongue, and Gail walked ahead of us, head down, splitting the crowd like a ship racing for port after months of hard sailing. I escorted her to her hotel near Broadway. What could we say to each other? Between us, there was the weight of the separation for which she was ultimately responsible. She had behaved reprehensibly, egotistically. And we both feared our words would wake the monsters of our shared past. The events of summer 1962 had shattered our lives, marking us for the rest of our days, though it had affected Gail even more than me, I would come to discover.
She said, shame-faced, absorbed by the tip of her boot drawing strange shapes on the snowy sidewalk, “Well, see you next time.”
“See you next time.…”
I remember the small furtive pecks we gave each other on our frozen cheeks, then her hand buried in a large mitten pushing the woollen hat she wore down over her sad eyes. Forty-two years old, lost in a man’s coat, successive layers of shawls and scarfs, she looked like one of those students in Washington Square who found their clothes in an Army surplus store on Canal Street.
After that I wouldn’t see her again. It had been my choice, my decision. Turn the page for good.
4
“You’re not saying anything?” Ann asked in the Pathfinder.
In front of us, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was paralyzed by a long line of stopped vehicles, their brake lights diluted in the fog.
“We can’t know about Gail,” I said. “It might be another of her tantrums.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, more surprised than indignant. “A tantrum? You don’t call people to your death bed for a tantrum. How can you say such a thing?”
She turned the radio on, cycling through the stations. Traffic reports, the same as usual; streets were clogged throughout the city. Then a couple of ads shouting at us. Exasperated, she lowered the volume and continued, “What you just said about Gail is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”
Yes and no. Gail wasn’t easy to live with. She always thought of herself first and expected everyone to yield to her suddenly changing moods. A woman of fifty-one now, perhaps she’d softened with time. I turned to Ann, “You’re right. But things were complicated with Gail. Not like they are with you, honey.”
And that was true. With Ann, there never were any real fights. We had a bond that our married friends admired, a fulfilling sex life — just like they talked about on the covers of women’s magazines. Of Gail, only a memory of something unsound, a thin crack in a windshield, a misunderstanding, long-winded shouting matches to get her to come to bed with me, one of those women whom despair and anger light like a match, distress a constant in her eyes. I always came away from her unnerved.
Ann measured her smile, not wanting it to be triumphant. I knew her, she wasn’t jealous or the type to delight in easy flattery, not like they are with you, honey. At least she wouldn’t show it.
Ann. Lord, her beauty had cast a spell on me seven years earlier, when we first met at the art gallery on Rodeo Drive, where I worked to help pay the bills. Her mother, a regular customer of the Kyser Gallery, had introduced us. “My daughter studies film at UCLA. I thought you might give her a few tips.”
“Tips? You know, I might not be the best one for.…”
“Come now! Don’t be modest! Sure, there’s your talent, but there’s also that nice mug of yours, young man.…” Followed by a hearty wink. Meanwhile, behind her back, her daughter rolled her eyes.
Laureen Heller was a small skinny woman, moved by the morbid fear of gaining any weight at all, her face worn smooth by too many facelifts. Her taste in art was exuberant — charged, gaudy, garish, like the décor in her large Tudor home in Brentwood. She was a great customer and Ted Kyser, the owner, couldn’t afford to lose her. She bought two or three paintings a year, sometimes more, a welcome relief in the summer of 1988, when business was particularly slow because of the seemingly endless writer’s strike.
While her mother scampered about the gallery, Ann spoke into my ear, “Can I take you out for a drink?” Stunned by her advance, I burst out laughing, charmed by this young woman, so sure of herself. We ended the night a bit past sober in an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. I was enchanted by her eyes in the flickering candlelight, her jokes and funny faces, her brown braids, thick and heavy like hemp rope.
Seven years
