Bed & Breakfast Page 5

  There’d been that Christmas right after they’d been transferred when she’d been six weeks pregnant with Evie and having the worst morning sickness she’d ever experienced. The base housing was cramped and shoddy; she hadn’t known a soul. It had been the first time they hadn’t had a real pine tree, and when they’d bought the boxed plastic tree at the PX, she’d almost started to cry. She now knew enough to understand that she’d been going through hormonal changes and suffering depression, though at the time she’d just said she was homesick and had the blues. Oh, she had been miserable. Yet it had turned out to be one of the happiest Christmases she’d ever had.

  That Christmas Eve, after she’d put Cam and Lila to bed, she and Bear had put out the presents, danced to Armed Forces Radio in their pajamas, and made love on the fold-out sofa that served as their bed. Afterward, as they’d whispered and laughed, she drinking the milk and eating the cookies the girls had put out for Santa, Bear having another toddy, she’d looked up to see Lila, standing in the doorway, her face puffy from sleep, staring wide-eyed at the presents. She’d got up to put her back to bed, but Bear had opened his arms wide and said, “Yep, Lila baby, Santa’s already come.” And when Lila asked, “When? When did he come?” Bear had dropped his voice to a suggestive whisper, kissed Josie’s hand, and said, “About fifteen minutes ago. So”—he’d pulled on his pajama bottoms and gotten out of the bed—“wake up your sister and let’s have Christmas right now.” And despite Josie’s protestations, Lila had run to get Cam.

  Then it had been happy confusion—shrieks of delight, ribbons and boxes and—she would never forget this—when all the presents had been opened and Bear had gone in to take a shower and Lila had been squatting on the floor changing the diaper on her new Betsy Wetsy doll, Cam, who couldn’t have been more than five, had sidled up to her and whispered, “I know it’s not Santa. I know it’s just you and Daddy.” She’d started to remonstrate, but Cam had given her that precociously grave look and said, “It’s okay, Mama. I won’t tell Lila. She’s only a child and I don’t want to spoil her fun,” and Josie had pulled Cam to her and laughed so hard she’d started to wet her pants.

  She got up from the couch, walked through the dining room and kitchen and opened the back door. The hair on her arms stood up as the chilly air and the earthy smell of the garden hit her. Her girls had never lived in this house, yet she opened her mouth as though to call them, as she’d called them from countless back doors, on countless evenings when the light had faded and the weather had turned cold, “Camilla! Lila! Evie! Stop playing and come on in. Come home. Now!” She stood for another full minute, blank and dazed. Then she shuddered, turned, closed the door, and walked to the kitchen telephone. She would call her girls, call them now, tell them that life was short, that time was running out. No, she couldn’t say that. She would just tell hem that they must come home for Christmas dinner. And they couldn’t refuse her. Not this time. This time she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.

  Three

  CAM NEVER CRIED. Absolutely. Never. Did not cry, she told herself as she ripped the plastic cover from a roll of paper towels, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose.

  She hadn’t cried on Sunday when Sam, her lover of three years, had told her that he was moving back to Atlanta, and she hadn’t cried on Tuesday when her boss, Elaine, had told her that the grant money hadn’t come through, so there would be cutbacks, maybe even layoffs, at Athena Press. But she was crying now. Not just crying but blubbering, howling, moaning. And why? Because she’d dropped a bag of groceries.

  It was already dark and beginning to sleet as she’d come out of the office. Standing in the building’s lobby, peering through the glass doors at the crowd swollen with Christmas shoppers, she’d wondered why she’d been dumb enough to believe the weather report (“cold but sunny, with temperatures in the mid-twenties”) and to wear her best hat and coat and her red suede boots. But she knew the answer to that: if you were on the wrong side of forty, worked in an all-female office, and had just lost your lover, you knew that if you didn’t make a conscious effort to groom yourself you could turn into a bag lady faster than Cinderella’s coach had turned into a pumpkin.

  She took a small mirror from her makeup bag and moved it from side to side, looking at her face. “Faded” was the word that came to mind. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes dull, her mouth seemed to lack definition, except for those tiny lines of disappointment that pulled it down on either side. She had never thought of herself as pretty (only her mother, and men who were on the make, had described her as pretty) but “interesting” and “sexy” (especially sexy) had been used to describe her, even in the recent past. But it was winter, she reminded herself as she put on lipstick, and everyone looked pasty in winter, and the lobby had fluorescent lights and everyone looked sick in fluorescent lights, and she hadn’t been sleeping well, and—she rolled down the lipstick and clicked the mirror shut—and sooner or later, you faded like an old Polaroid. And you never realized how vain you were until it started to happen.

  “You know, Cam, you really don’t need makeup.” Her assistant, Maria Giacomini, came up next to her, dropping her backpack to the floor so she could button up her overcoat. “Makeup is so retro, and you look great without it. If you don’t mind my saying.” Cam did mind, but smiled and said, “That’s one girl’s opinion.” Maria rolled her eyes at being called a girl and stared out the glass doors. “Oh, shit,” she said, “will you look at that sleet! The sky god is pissing on us again.” Cam nodded. Maria, or Young Maria, as she thought of her (because lately anyone under thirty-five seemed young), had the apple cheeks, liquid eyes, and finely etched brows of a Renaissance madonna, a natural beauty she seemed determined to obscure by wearing a spiky crew cut and baggy clothes. When answering the office phones, Maria was as polite as her grandmother would have been when serving biscotti and espresso to the priest, but as soon as she dropped her office persona, she sounded like a sergeant in a Marine barracks. “And will you look at the fuckin’ traffic,” Maria went on. “It’s those goddamn suburban consumers. Why don’t they stay home and shop in their malls? Screw Christmas anyway.”

  Though Cam wouldn’t have put it that way (constant profanity, like a fondness for computers or the ability to program a VCR, seemed to be a generational difference), she was inclined to agree. What did Christmas mean except clogged traffic, short tempers, Muzak carols in elevators, tacky decorations, and office parties where people got drunk and tried to lay their co-workers? At least she’d be spared the office party, since four of the ten women on staff at Athena Press were Jewish, one was a converted Buddhist, and the other two, “women of color,” as her boss, Elaine, would say (the term always made Cam uncomfortable because it sounded dangerously close to her grandmother, Mawmaw, talking about “coloreds”), had shucked their Baptist heritage and were planning instead to celebrate the newly created African-American feast Kwanzaa.

  “And I have to go shopping,” Maria groaned, “ ’cause if I turn up at my brother’s house without presents for his brats, my mother will fry my ass. You finished shopping yet?”

  “I generally just order from catalogues,” Cam told her. She was past the rebellion of ignoring Christmas altogether, so she thumbed through museum catalogues, then ordered over the phone. This year she’d sent her family books: Victorian Gardens to her mother, Mary Cassatt to Lila, Fashion Through the Ages to Evie. She’d only ventured into the stores to buy a fancy frying pan for her best friend, Reba, and cashmere sweater for her lover, Sam. She still hadn’t decided if she’d send Sam’s sweater on to Atlanta or return it to Brooks Brothers after the holidays.

  “Wish I’d had the sense to order from catalogues,” Maria said. “Now I’ll be stuck in the kids’ department at Macy’s, spending money I don’t have. Shit! I just hope I don’t see a bunch of kids lined up for some wino playing Santa Claus. Ever considered the significance of little girls sitting on the lap of an old guy in red underwear and begging him for presents?” Cam laug
hed, but a quick look confirmed that Maria was deadly serious, twenty-two-year-old graduates of Rutgers’s Department of Women’s Studies not being known for their frivolity. “Well, here goes Dick Tracy,” Maria said, raking her hand through her crew cut, pulling her thirties-style man’s hat low over her ears, and shoving open the door.

  Cam braced herself against the freezing blast, watched Maria shoulder her way into the crowd, then headed in the direction of the bus stop, her head turned to the side to avoid the needles of sleet and one shoulder pulled down by a bookbag heavy with manuscripts. Lordy, she thought, I must look like Quasimodo. And why am I lugging these manuscripts home when there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Athena Press can publish them? She wished she could write a letter telling the truth: “Dear Author, Word may not yet have reached Lincoln, Nebraska, but small presses are in a bad way. By the time you receive this, I may be out of a job.” But she would read the manuscripts, write a critique, and, if either of them was any good, add some words of encouragement. She knew how much it took to write a book, even a mediocre book. Especially a mediocre book. And as her father, Bear, had always said, you didn’t desert the field because the battle wasn’t going your way.

  When the bus finally arrived, the crowd squeezed onto it like meat forced into a sausage casing, and she was pushed to the back, poked by elbows, crushed by shopping bags, boxes, and umbrellas. Some fifty blocks later, sweating and dizzy from the diaper smell of wet wool, she pulled the cord for her stop. The bus rolled on. In a throwback to an earlier self she called, “Oh, sir? Sir?” in a sweet Southern voice, but when she was ignored she switched to a louder, “Hey, mister, I want out!” The teenager in the Malcolm X cap who exited in front of her let the door slam in her face. She shoved it open and stepped into a bank of slush. Now her red suede boots were really gone.

  The sleet had been replaced by an icy, cutting wind. Shifting her bookbag to her other shoulder, she turned the corner of Broadway and moved toward Amsterdam, past the Japanese take-out, the Korean grocery, the newsstand, the baby furniture store she knew must be a numbers front (why else would so many men hang out in a baby furniture store?), and Blockbuster Video. She slowed down as she passed “Discount Air Fares,” wondering when she’d joined the ranks of people who complained about winter and gawked at sunny travel posters. Walking by Ray’s Pizza, she caught a whiff of hot pepperoni and her mouth watered, even though she’d met her friend, Reba, for lunch at a Cajun restaurant where they’d eaten large bowls of gumbo and a disgusting amount of cornbread.

  She and Reba had been buddies since they’d met at a temp agency when they were college students. In the intervening decades they’d been roommates (briefly), loaned one another money, supported one another through changes in hair color and careers, nursed one another through viruses, hangovers, minor surgery, broken hearts, and family deaths.

  There had been a line of customers waiting to be seated but Reba had already found a table, unbundled herself, and put the menus aside. “It gripes me to pay twelve dollars for okra gumbo and cornbread when I know the ingredients only cost a dollar ninety-five,” she said by way of greeting.

  “But the value of the chefs expertise is incalculable. Isn’t that what you always tell the customers of your catering business?” Cam teased.

  “Yeah, that’s what I tell them. Because I’m afraid they’ll realize the ingredients only cost a dollar ninety-five. Sit. Sit. I took the liberty of ordering because I know what you like and I know you have to get back to the office.” Leaning across the table, she took one of Cam’s hands. “You don’t look too good,” she said with an honesty so concerned and open-faced it was impossible to take offense. “So. Tell me again about Sam.”

  Cam said, “There’s nothing to tell,” and when Reba rolled her eyes in an aw-come-on expression, amended it to, “I’ve already told you everything.”

  “But, Cam, it’s not like he’s leaving you. I mean, he’s been offered this big promotion back in Atlanta. What’s he gonna do? Turn it down?”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t expect him to do that. After all, his kids live there.”

  “Exactly. And he didn’t say he wanted to break it off with you, did he?”

  “Of course not. Men never have the guts to tell you when they want to break it off. They just start playing around with other women, or turning up late, or going into a noncommunicative funk that forces you to break up with them. That way they don’t have to accept any emotional responsibility.”

  “But Sam didn’t do any of those things, did he? We’re not talking about the generic male here. We’re talking about Sam. Sam’s not like that.”

  “You know him better than I do?” Cam challenged, lining up the utensils.

  “Yeah. Maybe I see him better than you do. Love being blind and all.”

  “Do I seem visually impaired?” Cam asked, shaking out her napkin as though it had bugs on it.

  “Oh, no. You’re a regular Cassandra. You always see the worst first.” Reba shook her head. “I just can’t believe you and Sam are breaking up. You’re in love with one another. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. As plain as the nose on my face,” she added with characteristic self-deprecation.

  “Reba, you’ve seen too many of those old Disney movies where cute little animals mate for life.”

  “But you and Sam . . .” Reba almost squawked in frustration, digging in her hand into her Brillo-thick hair, then lowering her voice and staring at Cam as though she were a defense attorney making her final summation. “Let me put it this way: one Sunday morning last year when Cheryl and I were on the outs, I came over to your apartment. I was in a bad state and I had your keys so I just let myself in the front door of the building and came up the stairs, and I was standing at your door getting ready to ring when I heard the two of you. I couldn’t exactly hear the words, but I could pick up the tone of it, you know. You were both talking and laughing and I remember just standing there, eavesdropping, feeling a little jealous, thinking ‘This is it. They’ve really got it.’ I mean, Sam’s a mensch. He looks straight-arrow, but he’s got this private, quirky side. Plus, he’s got great legs.”

  “You mean, if you weren’t gay, you’d be in love with him?”

  Reba shrugged. “Of all the guys you’ve been with, Sam’s the best. I just don’t believe Sam would bullshit you.” She interrupted herself long enough to say thanks as the waitress set down the bowls, then charged on. “How many guys have I seen you break up with?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Cam shook some hot sauce into her gumbo and said, with sarcastic wistfulness, “There was Fred.”

  “Ah, Frederick the Weasel—a classic youthful misjudgment.”

  “Agreed. And Richard.”

  “The Prince of Darkness. What a phony. I’ll never forget what a creep he was.”

  “And Jeffrey.”

  “I saw through him from the beginning.”

  “And—”

  “I remember! I remember them all.” Reba shook her head, tasted, considered, and swallowed the gumbo, “A little heavy on the bay leaf, otherwise fine,” she pronounced, then said, “Cam, I know you. Whenever things get shaky—or sometimes if they just seem too calm—you always want to get your licks in. You always want to be the one who says good-bye first, because you have this deep, unresolved fear of being abandoned.”

  “You’re right,” Cam agreed, wiping the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “There is a tad too much bay leaf.”

  “You’re giving me indigestion,” Reba accused, throwing up her hands, then, after a few moments of silently tucking into the gumbo, “Tell me again what happened.”

  Cam put down her spoon and stared out the restaurant window to a street crammed with Christmas shoppers. “I knew the promotion was a possibility. Sam told me about that when it first came up, maybe two months ago.”

  “So. He wasn’t hiding anything. He wasn’t looking for an excuse to break it off. He said he wanted to stay together, right?”
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br />   “Sure. Sure. He said we could keep it going. I could fly down, he could fly up.” She hadn’t bothered to ask how often, hadn’t bothered to point out that long-distance love affairs usually collapsed under the weight of massive phone bills, delayed flights, hasty sex, and the constant rip and tear of separation. Hadn’t bothered to say that she couldn’t bear the loneliness and the suspicions that would inevitably, if unjustifiably, creep in when she called and he wasn’t there.

  “But after all this time! I mean, you could at least have tried to work something out.”

  “Reba, believe me, the notion that separation increases love is a myth.” And the pain of a clean break was preferable to the agony of watching something vital wither and die.

  “But he loves you. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  “Sure. Oh, sure. He loves me the way . . .”

  “He once told me he could never have survived being here without you.”

  “... the way any long-married man loves the woman who sleeps with him while he’s going through a divorce. But now the divorce is final and he has his freedom . . .”

  “He was getting the divorce even before he met you!”

  “Sure. But I think, and I think he thinks, that it’s time for him to move on, to another place and to another, probably younger, woman.”

  “So you just said ‘Curtain’ and took a bow, and that was that?” Reba demanded.

  Cam shrugged and took up her spoon. She couldn’t bear to admit—even to Reba—that when Sam had told her he was leaving she’d made that shamefully bitchy, self-pitying remark: “I guess I’m just like my mama. I run a bed-and-breakfast too. Only difference is I provide sex, and I don’t get paid for it.” That had made him so angry, she’d thought he might hit her. After she’d regained control and apologized, she’d said she’d wanted to make a clean break and she’d walked him to the door and said good-bye as though he were going around the corner for a carton of milk. Then she’d collapsed on the couch, feeling as though a hole had been punched in her heart. “Trust me, Reba. He sounded relieved when I asked him not to call me.”