Bed & Breakfast Page 6

  “Well, what else could he do? Beg? He’d never do that. He’s got as much pride as you have.”

  “Now you’re giving me indigestion. Do you mind if we talk about something else?”

  “Like what? The weather?” Reba scraped the bottom of her bowl and offered the last square of cornbread to Cam. “Remember that first New Year’s Day party you and Sam gave? Cornbread makes me think about Sam.”

  Cam accepted the cornbread and took a bite, feeling stuffed but somehow unsatisfied. “Reba, when you’ve lived with someone for three years ...” Not that she and Sam had actually lived together. Because of his long hours at the pharmaceutical research lab, he’d kept his own apartment in New Jersey, but their relationship had an undeniable, and for her, surprisingly pleasant domestic streak from the very beginning. Except for those weekends when he flew back to Atlanta to see his children and talk with lawyers about his divorce, it was his habit to drive into the city on Friday evenings and stay for the weekend. They’d make love, then go out to dinner, or go out to dinner, then make love, depending on which appetite was stronger. On Saturday mornings they’d drop off the laundry, go for long walks, and shop, usually for food. In the evenings they’d see a movie, meet friends, or go to a concert. But Sundays they’d spend alone, sleeping late, eating the goodies they’d bought from Zabar’s or Citarella’s the previous day, reading the paper, lolling in their robes, chatting and making love until it was time for Sam to go. “When you’ve lived with someone for three years,” she repeated, “everything makes you think about them.”

  If she and Sam were still together, she thought as she passed the bodega with “Feliz Navidad” spangles over the door and a creche nestled in the window amid boxes of green bananas, Pampers, and Tide, she’d have a refrigerator full of gourmet leftovers. As it was, she’d have to stop by Food City, where she’d been a customer for eight years but had never once heard “You’re welcome” in response to her “Thank you,” or she’d go into a salad bar where lonely-looking people shuffled around the layout of rabbit food as though they were filing past a coffin. If Sam hadn’t left her she wouldn’t be looking and feeling like Quasimodo. At least she wouldn’t have to face the holidays alone. Reba was going to be in town too because Cheryl, Reba’s partner in their catering business, and “significant other,” was going home to visit her family in Raleigh. “I wonder how I can continue to love someone who’s so gutless she can’t bear to crawl out of the closet at age forty-five,” Reba had lamented at lunch. “But since you and I are both gonna be grass widows, we can spend some time together. We’ll go watch the skaters at Rockefeller Center, or listen to the choir at Riverside Church, or maybe just rent It’s a Wonderful Life and get drunk.” I’ll get through it, Cam thought, trying to believe it.

  A warm soapy smell belched from the open door of the Mekong Delta Laundry and she stepped inside to ask Mai if they’d found the sheet they’d lost last week. Mai shook her head and said, “Sorry. Never find. Never lose before.” This was true. Though the place was tiny, crowded, and seemingly chaotic—laundry dumped in great mounds, churning in machines, tumbling in dryers, sitting wet in plastic baskets, lying in heaps on the Formica table where Mai’s sister and cousin shook and smoothed and folded it—they’d never lost so much as a sock of hers. “Sorry,” Mai apologized again. “I keep looking. You go way for Chissmas? Go see folks?” Cam shook her head, wondering if the sheet had gotten mixed up with Sam’s things, in which case she’d never see it again. And it wasn’t just any old sheet. It was part of a set. The most expensive sheets she’d ever owned: pale blue, 100 percent Egyptian cotton, purchased at Bloomingdale’s White Sale two years ago when she and Sam were celebrating their first anniversary as lovers. That sheet was special. That sheet had seen some action.

  She told Mai she’d check back later in the week and walked out, almost colliding with a couple carrying a Christmas tree as she turned toward Central Park. Suddenly she knew she didn’t have the energy to face the lines at Food City. She’d just have to duck into the deli on the corner, then she’d go home, lock the door, take a long bath in that herbal oil Reba had given her, put on her flannel nightgown, button it to the neck, make cocoa or a toddy. If she was lucky, there’d be a nature show on TV, and she’d turn down the sound and sit on the couch with her feet, in Sam’s socks, tucked under her, and read manuscripts, glancing up occasionally to be comforted by the sight of a polar bear training her cubs or a middle-aged anthropologist, who still looked good in shorts, talking to a gorilla. “When there’s no one to baby you, you have to baby yourself, otherwise you’ll go under,” Reba had lectured today at lunch. “And ain’t that the truth,” Cam muttered, as she slogged toward the red neon deli sign.

  When she came out, the homeless woman she’d nicknamed Maria Callas was standing next to the entrance, jiggling a Styrofoam cup and singing “Joy to the World” in a cracked soprano. The woman’s eyes seemed sightless as marbles and the light from the neon sign made her face and hands the color of veal. “You need gloves,” Cam told her as she fished in her purse for change. “Gloves,” she repeated, dropping fifty cents into the cup and waving her gloves in front of the woman’s face. The woman stopped singing and nodded in passionate agreement, then her eyes changed back into marbles and she started to sing the carol from the beginning, in frantic double-time, trying to find her way back to the place where she’d left off. “What the hell,” Cam said impatiently. She looked at her gloves—one of many pairs of eight-dollar Weber’s discount specials she bought in multiple sets because she was always losing them—and tucked them into the pockets of the woman’s army coat. As she walked off the woman began to sing, again from the beginning, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come, Let earth receive her king, Let every heart ...”

  “Prepare Him room . . .” Cam joined in, then stopped and muttered, “Get a grip!,” not sure if she was talking to the woman or to herself.

  God, how she hated the sweetness and light, the false promise of Christmas carols! And hated this one in particular because it reminded her of when her father, Bear, was dying, and she’d left her mother, Evie, Lila, and Lila’s husband, Orrie, slumped in orange plastic bucket chairs outside the intensive care ward, saying she was going out for coffee when she was really going out for a cigarette and a drink. A group of carolers had been standing in front of the Christmas tree in the hospital lobby warbling about joy and redemption and she’d hated their inexhaustible cheerfulness and their blind faith because she’d known that she was going to have to make the decision and tell the doctors to pull the plug and she didn’t think she was up to it. But neither of her sisters, nor her brother-in-law, who usually claimed the male prerogative, would be capable of that decision. And certainly Josie couldn’t: the guilt would be too great for her. She, Cam, would have to talk them around. They’d waffle and be tearful but in their heart of hearts they’d all be relieved.

  After nervously driving Orrie’s new BMW around a small town she no longer knew, she’d finally found a hole-in-the-wall bar and taken a stool next to an old black guy, so ramrod straight and enormously polite that she’d known he must’ve been in the military. With Elvis and Aretha blaring in the background, they’d made small talk about what he called “The Big W,” and she’d thought about something Bear had told her when she’d been old enough to imagine what he’d had to do to become a hero: it was all right to be scared. Only stupid people weren’t scared. Courage meant facing down the fear, and if you couldn’t do that—she could see his face breaking into that wide, challenging grin—you just went ahead and acted brave. It amounted to the same thing. Bear had never said what she’d known—that he’d wanted a son—but from the time she’d been about six or seven, whenever he’d left home, he’d always told her that she was second in command. She wished she’d been able to do something to make him proud of her, but at least she wouldn’t fail him in this. She was the only one who really loved him, so there seemed to be a tragic rightness that she would be the one to decide
to end his life.

  Dodging a taxi and crossing the street, she remembered her first winter in the city, when she’d seen whirling snowflakes from the window of a Fifth Avenue bus and become so excited that she’d gotten off and walked all the way to the ratty apartment she’d shared with two other girls in the Village. She’d sung as she walked, nodding at strangers, getting smiles in return, and a good-looking young man, coming out of a florist’s shop, had pulled a yellow rose from his bouquet and presented it to her, saying, “Merry Christmas, beautiful.” Well, she thought, as she trudged the last block to her apartment, both she and New York had changed. If a man approached her on the street these days he’d probably be asking for a handout.

  “Damn your lazy ass, Rodriguez,” she muttered as she got close to her apartment building and saw that the super hadn’t put salt on the pavement. “No Christmas tip for you.” Approaching the entrance, juggling bookbag, purse, and groceries, digging into her coat pocket for her keys, her feet went out from under her as though she were on roller skates, and the bag of groceries went flying. She was down on all fours. Tampax, Woolite, a roll of paper towels, a pack of Marlboros, a carton of cranberry juice, and the roast beef on rye that was to have been her supper scattered in the slush. Letting out a jet of curses that would have done Maria proud, she wiped off each item and dropped it back into the grocery bag, readjusted her bookbag, reached for her purse, and started to get up. Then the bottom fell out of the grocery bag. Suddenly, it was too much and she crumpled to her knees. Her head sank until it almost touched the pavement, and she heard herself cry, “Help me. Somebody please help me.” She tried to get up but couldn’t seem to move. There was nobody to help her and she knew it. She sobbed like some refugee who’d been left by the side of the road. Twisting her head to the side, she saw the man who lived upstairs rounding the corner. Frantic, she stuffed the scattered items into her bookbag, shoved the roll of paper towels under her arm, staggered to her feet, and thrust the key into the lock, praying it wouldn’t stick. Letting the front door slam behind her, she ran up the stairs.

  Her apartment was dark except for the glow of the street lamp shining through the windows. The only sounds she could hear were the hiss of the radiator and her own sobs. Moving to the counter that separated the kitchenette from the living room, she tore at the roll of paper towels, wiped her face, and blew her nose. She took a deep breath, dug in the bookbag for the Marlboros, felt for the box of wooden matches above the stove, lit one, inhaled, coughed, and took another drag. She had just cracked up. Cracked up on the street. Because she’d dropped a bag of groceries. Sweet Jesus! She was in worse shape than she’d thought. It was one thing when you felt it coming—that Edvard Munch The Scream panic—quite another when it mugged you from behind. When that happened they came and shot you full of tranquilizers and carted you off to the loony bin.

  She yanked open the refrigerator door and reached into the freezer for the bottle of wine, splashed some into a cup that was sitting on the counter, took a slug. Mixed with what must’ve been the dregs of that morning’s coffee, it tasted so foul that she swung toward the sink and spat it out. The sobs bubbled up again. She was hopeless. Lost. She didn’t even know how to wash out a cup! But she knew she wasn’t crying because she’d dropped a bag of groceries or neglected to wash out a coffee cup. She was crying because she, who’d believed she was going to have it all, had ended up with nothing.

  She’d come to New York at eighteen, giddy with the triumph of having escaped her crazy family and the life of a small Southern town. She’d won a scholarship to Columbia and she’d already published a short story. All she had to do was experience life and write The Great American Novel. When she did that she’d fulfill not only her own dream but her father’s, because she knew that’s what Bear would have done if he hadn’t been boxed in by her mother’s stifling domesticity.

  She’d understood that writing would be something of a challenge—no doubt she’d have to suffer some and she’d probably be pretty jaded by the time she was famous, but that was a price she was willing to pay because it was her Destiny, capital D, to write. In her imagination she was already Carson McCullers (but with a lot of male lovers), Eudora Welty (only prettier), Flannery O’Connor with good health, Truman Capote without the lisp. Mostly she was like Truman Capote because the story she’d been lucky enough to publish was closest to his early work—a childhood reminiscence, dripping eccentric Southern charm, about an aged relative. Her grandmother, Mawmaw, had been the model for the central character but she’d taken pains to disguise her (making her a hardscrabble-poor, snuff-dipping, maiden aunt, whereas in real life, Mawmaw was unrelentingly middle class, had borne five children, and would have put her head in an oven before she’d taken snuff). But in those days, tell-all exposes and “sharing” confessions on talk shows had still been considered to be in bad taste. She’d believed (really, still believed) that if you criticized, let alone trashed, your relatives in public, no amount of fame or money could ever make up for your shame. “I just invent these stories,” she’d told the reporter who wrote the Local-Girl-Goes-to-the-Big-City piece for the paper the week before she left for New York. At the time she’d envisioned triumphal, though rare, visits back home. She’d drive into town in a convertible, wearing some wild expensive outfit the locals had seen only in Vogue, and all the girls who’d said she was loose and the boys who’d said she was crazy would look at her in cow-eyed admiration. Even her mother would be proud. Not that she’d really cared about that.

  Almost as soon as she’d arrived in the city she’d known it was all too much for her. Her fellow students were generally better educated and much more polished. Her professors managed to convince her that trying to write without syntax, style, and being able to define intent was as hopeless as trying to breathe without lungs. (She would never forget that awful moment in her Freshman Comp class when Dr. Ehrlich—who’d later put the make on her—had asked her to describe stream of consciousness and she thought he was talking about an actual stream.) She’d felt like an explorer who’d stumbled upon a dangerous tribe whose language and customs she couldn’t understand. They’d all read Faulkner as well as Camus, but in their minds Southern still equaled dumb. The Vietnam War was raging and everyone she met believed that men in uniform were at best a joke, at worst an abomination. She’d engaged, to the point of tears, in arguments, but when facts had brought her around to thinking that the war was wrong she’d felt as bereft as a devout Christian who could no longer believe in God. The only things she’d written that year were love poems to a handicapped, narcissistic, anti-war veteran with whom she was having an affair.

  By the middle of her junior year she’d let her grades slide and had lost her scholarship. Not that she’d cared. Being a college student didn’t seem to have much to do with the real life of teach-ins and demonstrations. She hadn’t had the courage to tell her parents, so she’d gotten a part-time job to pay for tuition and had found herself in a making-ends-meet scramble of work and school. Writing had fallen by the wayside. What stories did she have to tell? What could she possibly understand, let alone express? When she’d look at the drift of papers on her desk, all she could hear was her mother’s voice saying, “Camilla, clean up your room.” She couldn’t clean up her room, let alone her life.

  Of course, she wasn’t unique in thinking, at eighteen, that she had a clear path to the top of the mountain and, at thirty, finding herself in the flatlands without a map. Betsy, who’d thought she’d be a filmmaker, had ended up in advertising; Shelley, who’d come to New York to be an opera singer, had returned to Santa Fe, where she’d become a fund-raiser for the local symphony; and Reba, who wanted to be a sculptor, found her way into the catering business where the only thing she sculpted was the frosting on expensive cakes.

  But, Cam reminded herself, no matter how tough things had gotten, no matter how close to the brink she had come, she’d never given in entirely because she could always hear those voices in her head: Mawmaw
telling her, “Don’t let anyone but the Lord catch you crying,” or Bear commanding her to hold the line, never to give in no matter how the fight was going; or even Josie saying, “Now, Camilla, is this any way for a lady to act?” She could hear those voices even now, as she gave her watery nose a final swipe, took another deep breath, and went back to the front door to turn the locks and flip on the lights.

  Pouring wine into a clean glass, she noticed that her knuckles were grazed, and heard Reba’s voice saying, “You’ve got to baby yourself,” but she didn’t have to look in the bathroom cabinet to know that she’d find a twenty-five-dollar bottle of Rejuve face cream, but no Band-Aids or peroxide. Still, she was safe in her burrow now, and if she ignored the clutter of last Sunday’s Times, books that overflowed shelves, discarded clothes, trash waiting to be taken out, flowers that had wilted because Rodriguez insisted on keeping the temperature close to that of his native San Juan, it didn’t look half bad.

  The living room cum kitchenette had twelve-foot-high ceilings with good original molding which gave an illusion of space. One wall was exposed brick, with a beautiful (though nonfunctioning) turn-of-the-century fireplace with a large antique mirror (a flea-market find) over it. The walls were painted in a dove-gray semigloss (it had taken two coats to cover the cracks just as Sam, who’d helped paint it on that miserably hot day last summer had predicted). And if you focused on the large abstract painting (a gift from an old artist boyfriend who’d hit the big time), the antique map of the South Carolina barrier islands she’d bought with her first raise at Athena Press, the framed covers of books she’d edited and was proud of, the Kiva-Bhokara carpet in deep reds and blues (inherited from her friend, Wally, who’d died of AIDS two years ago), or the sleek chrome-and-glass coffee table Betsy and Josh had left behind when they’d moved to Connecticut and gone country, it looked like the dwelling of someone who had good taste if limited means. At least that was the way it would look to her New York friends, some of whom lived in conditions that were only slightly better than those in Eastern Europe.