Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

Ella was on the terrace; he could hear her through the open glass doors chatting in her considered way with Alec. Her stubbornness in the matter of the capsule had, in the last week, provoked Larry to extreme tactics. He had offered her money (twenty dollars). He had threatened to spank her (though they both knew he wouldn’t). He had spied on her through the keyhole of the bathroom, and even followed her into the garden, trailing her from tree to tree, stalking her as she gathered daisies and buttercups, crouched to turn a beetle with a twig, sang to herself. Did she know he was there? Or was this conspicuous innocence unfeigned, so that he was persecuting an entirely blameless child? What if one of the capsules had rolled off the shelf while he was in the toilet on the plane? Would he have noticed? Could he trust himself any more not to make such a mistake? What confidence could he have in his own judgment?

Alec had had his little chat with her. Apparently she had heard him out without giving the least hint she knew what he was talking about. And then Hoffmann had phoned, back from Detroit, telling Larry he would have to bill him for the call, and speaking to Ella while she stood in the kitchen holding the receiver with both hands, wide-eyed, nodding, saying yes, no, yes, I will, OK, uh-huh, OK. It had done no good. She was like a child in an Edward Gorey cartoon, a little thing in a taffeta party dress wandering about the house with a pistol in her hand.

‘Alec!’

Alec leaned into the kitchen.

‘This’ll be ready in twenty minutes, max. We should start getting Mum down.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t move.

‘You want to do it? Or you want to stir this and I’ll go up?’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Alec. But he came over to the stove and took the wooden fork from Larry’s hand.

‘Don’t let it dry up,’ said Larry. ‘And lets put some candles out. Make an evening of it.’

‘Good idea,’ said Alec, without the least enthusiasm.

‘And as for you,’ said Larry, as Ella appeared in the doorway, regarding him shrewdly with her head cocked to one side, ‘as for you…’ But he had no idea what to say next.

In Alice’s room, Kirsty Valentine, only daughter, only child of Errol and Nancy Freeman (formerly ‘Friebergs’) of La Finca, Lemon Cove, California, sat on a stool at the end of the bed holding her mother-in-law’s feet in her hands, palping the soles with her thumbs in the way she had been shown in a class on reflexology at the day centre in San Francisco. Alice leaned against a bank of pillows, already dressed for her evening downstairs. Earlier in the afternoon, Toni Cuskic had come by with her wallet of scissors, her clips and dryer, her poodle, and had brushed out the snags from Alice’s hair, plaiting it, at Alice’s request, into a neat silver rope.

Her hair, and the blusher she had rubbed into the absolute white of her cheeks, put Kirsty in mind of a Bette Davis film she had watched recently, part of a gay icon series on AMC. Yet somehow the fashion suited Alice, suited the newly blatant nature of her stare, the startling bluntness of her questions – ‘Why don’t you have another child?’ ‘Do you still love him?’ ‘Are you faithful to each other?’

This, perhaps, was ‘disinhibition’, a term Kirsty had picked up scanning the cancer literature in Barnes and Noble: the tumours, weevil-like, eating away at the furniture of adult judgment; an irresistible, irreversible decline that ended in full-blown dementia, when the mind was of no more use than a fancy mirror in an unlit room. Nicer then, infinitely more consoling, to imagine there was something rather Zenlike in Alice’s new directness, that her manner derived not from the perishing of the intellect, but from her impatience with the conventional. If people had to die – and Kirsty was enough of an American not to accept the absolute inevitability of it – she wanted them to go full of a profound and liberating knowledge of things. When else should you be wise, if not at the end? But several times in the last twenty-four hours she had witnessed the shadow of vacancy or panic fall over the blue of Alice’s eyes, and in her heart she knew that here was a woman being shut up inside herself. That she bore it at all seemed nothing less than heroic.

But how should her questions be answered? It wasn’t just the problem of balancing tact with honesty, the etiquette of talking with someone so terribly sick, it was her own painful uncertainty as to what the answers really were. Did she still love Larry? She supposed that she did, but her ‘Yes, of course’ had about it the ghost of a qualification, as though she had said ‘probably’, or ‘most of the time’, or ‘not like I used to’. The difficulty was being able to see him clearly, to have, as she had had in the past, a single clear idea of him. These days he seemed to shimmer, being at the same time the man she had strolled with on Muir beach in the weeks before the wedding, the pair of them lit up, laughing because they were getting away with it, this remarkable trick of happiness, and some stranger who shambled in and out of the rooms of the house in shorts and sweatshirt (his favourite had ‘Barney’s Beanery’ printed over the heart), tumbler in one fist, cigarette in the other. He reminded her sometimes – still a big man, still solidly built – of a boxer who, the night before the fight, has unaccountably lost his nerve and begun to unravel. What was his problem? What had so bent him out of shape? His father? The drink? Losing his job? Was it something organic? Something in the air? Lead insult? How was she supposed to tell?

As for having another child, to Alice she said, ‘I’m not sure this is really a great time.’ But the reality was simpler and sadder: how could they have a child when for months they had slept with a wall between them? (Two walls: the bedrooms were separated by the passageway.) And what of the child they already had? Hoffmann had rung the evening before she was due to fly with some talk of another episode, though, oddly, he had seemed more concerned about Larry, who, according to the professor, was ‘struggling to articulate the appropriate responses’. What exactly he had meant by this she was unsure, she preferred not to ask, but the phrase looped through her head during the flight over until it acquired some ominous quasi-mystical significance that had threatened to bring on a migraine. Worst of all, it seemed to support her own most private misgivings, the unpalatable fact that she was less and less comfortable leaving Ella alone with Larry. She had seen the way he crossed roads, jaywalking through the traffic, not yet trying to stare it down, not raging at it, but playing with the danger. And he laughed at the television – news items, sad movies – in a way that spooked her. When Natasha Khan, her friend over in Sunset, asked if Larry had a gun in the house (Natasha’s ex kept an assault rifle in the games room) she had immediately gone home and turned out all the drawers in the guest bedroom, uncovering a small stash of pornography and sports magazines, a quart of bourbon, a flight schedule (SF to Vancouver) and, most miserably, a pair of her own panties, not even clean, which he must have fished out of the laundry basket in the shower room. But no gun. And then at Heathrow, Ella on Larry’s shoulders holding up a sheet of paper saying ‘HELLO MOMMY’, they had looked fine together, just fine, and she had felt ashamed of herself. Whatever Larry was, whatever he was becoming, there was a reserve of sweet water in him it was mean of her to doubt. It was Hoffmann perhaps, Hoffmann she should give up trusting.

From the landing Larry called: ‘Decent in there?’

‘We’re decent!’ sang Kirsty.

He came in, flushed in a way she immediately and wearily recognized.