T. Boyle - San Miguel

They made their introductions on their way up the hill — they were the Graffys, Dick and Margot, and they were coming down from visiting her parents in Avila Beach when the windstorm drove them into the harbor — and all Elise could do was apologize for hurrying them up the road till they were out of breath and the small talk fell away to the rasp of indrawn breath and the scrape of pebbles kicking out from beneath the soles of their shoes. The low sun elongated their shadows. The creek below chanted over its stones. She couldn’t help thinking what a glorious day it was, or would have been, if only there were no pain and no danger and things could go on as they’d gone on before.

When they got to the house, they found Herbie still propped up in the chair and Marianne — hungry, bored, impatient — perched in his lap with a picture book she’d lost interest in. “These people have come to help,” she said, the words all coming in a rush as she bent to lift her daughter and hug her to her. No one was dressed. The room was a mess. She felt ashamed suddenly.

The man — and what was his name again? — stepped forward and bent over Herbie while the wife hung behind in the doorway. “Is it bad?” he asked. He was thin, a man of sticks — she could see his shoulder blades projecting like a wooden hanger from beneath the weave of his turtleneck sweater — and he wore his hair parted just to the left of center and slicked down so it clung to his skull. His clothes were expensive — the sweater, dark woolen slacks, deck shoes with tassels — and he had a stern probing look that for an instant made her imagine he might be a doctor, and wouldn’t that be something, a doctor delivered to them out of the storm like an angel of mercy? But he wasn’t a doctor. He was a banker, as it turned out, president and chief officer of the Ventura Savings and Loan, one of the few banks that had survived the financial carnage. But he was here. And he had a boat.

Herbie — and this really put a scare into her — wasn’t able to respond. He just lifted his eyes, his gaze gone distant, and nodded his head.

“It’s his wound,” she heard herself say. “From the war. Shrapnel, he says. It’s pressing on something — inside. There was blood.” She looked away. “In the toilet.”

“Can you move?” the man was saying. “Can you get down to the boat?”

“I can’t”—the words pinched in his throat—“leave her here.”

“We’ll take her with us — there’s plenty of room. It won’t be a problem. And I can help you get down there — and Margot too, we’ll both help. Don’t worry.”

Herbie was shaking his head. “The animals,” he said — or no, he was croaking, his voice splintered and reduced. “Somebody has to stay.”

In the end, it was decided that Margot would stay there with her while Dick ran Herbie to shore, and there were assurances all round that everything would be fine, doctors what they are today, and Dick would take him to his personal physician, best man on the west coast, fix him up in no time, just you see.

* * *

There was the first night, Margot a godsend — just her presence, her presence alone — and she couldn’t thank her enough. Elise made up the bed in Jimmie’s room for her and they sat before the fire and talked about the little things, trivial things, the weather, boats, fashions, life in Ventura and Los Angeles, the motion pictures, never letting a silence fall between them for fear that everything would begin to unravel if they had even a moment to think about what they were doing, strangers thrust together in an emergency, as if their ship had gone down and they were clinging to the wreckage. Margot spent a long time in the bathroom the next morning and when she came out she was wearing makeup, her eyebrows two perfect plucked arches outlined with pencil, her lips a vampish red, her hair blondly gleaming. She sat in the kitchen, looking embarrassed, and she would accept nothing but coffee. They both watched for the boat all through the day but the boat never came. Elise tried to be cheerful, offering to show her guest down to the beach or up to Harris Point for the views, but Margot said she wasn’t feeling very well — she hadn’t slept, it was the strange bed, it was always like that with her and she just couldn’t explain it. “Even on the boat—” she began, and then caught herself.

As the day wore on Elise began to feel a constraint between them, an overpoliteness that became awkward, as if they really didn’t know what to say to each other. It was clear that Margot was bored and anxious and was beginning to regret her rashness or altruism or whatever it was that had made her offer to stay on. Which only made Elise feel guilty and inadequate — and foolish too. What were a couple of horses and a flock of sheep that they couldn’t be left behind for a day or two? And the house — what must she have made of the house, with its crude furnishings, the guns on the wall, a stove from the last century? And the larger question her guest was too delicate to ask: How could she live like this? How could anyone?

The second night, when darkness sheeted down in increments over the water and it became apparent to them both that the Bon Temps wouldn’t be returning, Margot looked grim and accusatory. There was no gaiety, no pretense. Elise tried to make conversation: “You know, it really is wonderful to live out here, away from everything. You’d be surprised.” Margot just gave a her look. “Though it takes some getting used to, of course. I don’t know if I told you, but I grew up in New York, in Rye, with a house full of servants. I never washed a dish in my life.” She gave a laugh. “Barely knew how to cook.” There was no response to this. Margot fished a silver lighter from her purse, lit a cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke with a long withering sigh.

At dinner, she consented to take a plate of lamb and potatoes with canned wax beans and a cup of tea, but she excused herself immediately after — and didn’t offer to help clean up as she had the night before. Or to mind Marianne while Elise was washing the dishes. She hardly even glanced at her. Just went to her room and closed the door.

It was infuriating. But why should she care? Why should she stand there at the counter and try to make small talk with this woman, explain herself — or worse, apologize? Or be made to feel inferior in her own house while all that mattered was that Herbie was somewhere out there across the waves, at the doctor’s, in the hospital, suffering, needing her, and she was stuck here with a stranger whose smile kept tightening and tightening till it was like a screw worked into a plank of smooth knotless wood.

The morning crashed down on them in a sudden burst of rain that hammered at the roof and pocked the courtyard with puddles. She had to force herself from bed: there would be no boat today, no Herbie, no word even. She kept telling herself everything would be fine, it was just a scare, that was all, but she pictured him strapped down on an operating table, his eyes sunk back in his head, the surgeon there with his tools like instruments of torture, and it all became confused with images of the sheep they slaughtered for the table, the heavy bluish sacks of their intestines, the blood that pooled in the bucket till it was like oil, dark and viscous and without sheen. When Marianne, pulling herself up by the slats of her crib, said, “Daddy, Daddy,” she almost broke down. And when Margot, hunched by the fire with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, said, “I don’t care what the weather is, Dick’ll be here, I know it, he wouldn’t desert me,” she couldn’t think of a word in response.

* * *

Just after noon, while she sat in her chair reading to Marianne from a book of nursery rhymes, the Bon Temps, rocked by a heavy swell, pulled into the harbor. The rain had slackened but the wind had picked up so that it was hard to see anything out there even with the binoculars. It was Margot who spotted it. She’d been out on the porch for the better part of the morning, wrapped in an old coat of Herbie’s Elise had loaned her, her hair bound up in a kerchief and the binoculars pressed to her eyes, unfazed by the cold and the rain drooling from the eaves, willing the boat to appear. “They’re here,” she said, pushing through the door, her voice flat and annunciatory, as if to betray excitement would make it seem that there’d ever been a doubt in her mind.