Читать книгу The Days of Summer - Jill Barnett, Jill Barnett - Страница 13
ОглавлениеDuring the years she lived with Julia, Kathryn Peyton had lost herself. Her mother-in-law hadn’t been old when Jimmy died, only fifty-five to Kathryn’s twenty-three, but she was frail, her bones the first thing anyone noticed about her and much of what gave her the hard look that went along with her controlling nature. With Laurel in the house, Julia’s mind stayed sharp, but her body hadn’t. Those bones shrank into nothingness over twelve years, and even Julia, with her sheer determination to control everything, couldn’t stop her own death.
Those same twelve years had shrunk Kathryn into a nonentity. She was Laurel’s mother, Julia’s daughter-in-law, a reclusive artist known only through the pieces sold. No Kathryn. Her life had been dissected into two precise pieces—before Jimmy died and after Jimmy died. Everything before was only a dream, everything afterward alien territory.
It wasn’t until recently that she had faced her own existence with clearer eyes, and saw what it had been—one distraction after another. Laurel needed her. Julia needed her. Her work—a place to hide from what she was really feeling. Then one day she was living in her dead mother-in-law’s home with no one to tell her what to do or how to live. She didn’t fit anymore and felt swallowed by the emptiness of her own existence. Until Evie called with a plan. She was getting married and moving to Chicago, so Kathryn should buy the house on Catalina Island. The timing was perfect. Nothing was keeping her in Seattle. “After all, Kay,” Evie said, “you’re almost thirty-six years old.”
So Kathryn bought the house and moved to Santa Catalina, a small Channel Island off the coast of Southern California, where everything was different. From the island village of Avalon, the moon looked as if it rose right out of the sea, and the palm trees stood so tall, like hands waving hello in the sea breezes. It was lazy here; things began only with an arrival from the mainland—a regatta, a steamship, or a seaplane. This was the land of glass-bottomed boats, of coves named after jewels, of starfish and abalone shells, a place where people preferred to drive golf carts instead of cars.
Esther Williams had leapt off an island cliff on horseback once, creating a small but dramatic piece of cinematic and island history. The movie studios had shipped a herd of buffalo over to film a Western, and left them to become part of the place, like the wild boars and herds of goats and other seemingly mythic animals. So, given all the elements, Catalina became the magic isle, a place that rose out of the fog, an emerald in a sea of sapphires, a place where the fish could really fly.
Here the rain didn’t come down in sheets of water so thick they blocked out life going on around you. Island sunshine made things appear clearer. You could see all the sharp edges and soft curves of life. Here, when you looked into a mirror, you saw what you had become, not what you had been.
Hiding in excuses wasn’t so easy in the clear air and sunshine, or inside a small house filled with rooms as colorful as her sister’s personality. So perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising when Kathryn shared a pitcher of margaritas and a platter of nachos earlier that evening with a man named Stephen Randall, whom she’d met at a Chamber of Commerce meeting the week before. She had sat down alone in the bar of the local Mexican restaurant and felt reckless for even showing up. She knew how to hide; she didn’t know how to date.
Just drinks, he told her when he’d come into her shop one afternoon. But tonight he came into the bar with his arms full of yellow daffodils, so drinks moved on to appetizers, and he left hours later with her home telephone number. Funny that she didn’t regret giving it to him, even now, as she set an overflowing vase on a glass table in her bedroom. His flowers were the same sunshine-warm shade as the walls. Happy colors, Evie called the paint she’d used inside the house. Daffodils were happy, like snapdragons, and pansies, and lost women who moved to small islands in the blue Pacific.
Wilmington Pier, Los Angeles Harbor
Laurel Peyton stood on the corner as the local bus pulled away from the wharf and headed back toward downtown LA. A slight breeze lifted her hat, so she pressed it down, picked up a large, rusty brown suede purse, and rushed toward the boat as she did almost every Friday, when she routinely made the two-hour boat trip home.
The SS Catalina was a three-hundred-foot white steamer, a ship really, but everyone called it a boat. As always, the Catalina was docked in the last slip, where nothing but an expanse of blue-gray water stood between her huge hull and the Channel Island she serviced. On most days, you could see the island from almost anywhere along the Southern California coast. Against the western horizon, Santa Catalina Island looked like an enormous sleeping camel, sometimes shrouded in marine mist and sometimes sitting there so clearly you could almost make out the saw-toothed outline of the trees along its ridges.
Laurel joined the long line waiting to board. The late afternoon sun was hot and shone at eye level. The sun was more intense in California, especially at the very end of land and on days like today, when no cool wind blew in off the ocean. People shifted in line and muttered impatiently, removing jackets and sweaters. Kids whined or ran about. Their mothers ignored them, fanning themselves with island pamphlets and folded-up guide maps.
Although she hadn’t lived in California a year yet, Laurel could spot the tourists with the innate eye of a native. Men in dark shirts wore straw hats with black hatbands and socks with their sandals. Women in floral print dresses carried white patent-leather purses and wore nylons. California women were true to the golden land and wore only their tanned skin, polished with a bit of baby oil.
Laurel glanced left at the sound of a deep male voice coming from a bank of pay phones. The young man leaned casually against the wall, his back to her. He was tall, with light brown hair and the lanky build of a movie idol. He wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt the color of fresh lemons, his skin looking darkly tanned against that light clothing. On his feet were sandals—no socks.
The line shifted with an almost unanimous sigh of relief as two crew members came down the gangplank and unlocked its chain. He glanced over his shoulder and she forgot to breathe. Paul Newman and Ryan O’Neal rolled into one. He was too old for her, really—in his mid-twenties—but when he walked past her, he winked.
She counted slowly to ten before she turned around, and had lost him while pretending to be so casual. The boarding line was backed up to beyond the turnstiles, four or five people wide. The Gray Line tourist buses in the parking lots still unloaded passengers, but he was tall enough to stand out in any crowd, so she systematically scanned the dock from right to left.
“Excuse me, missy.” A man tapped her on the shoulder. “You’re holding up the line.”
A gaping distance stood between her and the gangplank. “I’m sorry.” She rushed forward, her face red, struggling to sling her bag up her arm.
A familiar crewman greeted her at the gangplank. “Going home again?”
“Sure am. Looks like you have a full boat.”
“Spring break starts today. The next couple of weekends will be pretty wild. College kids. High school kids. Heard last year was almost as wild on the island as Palm Springs. This might be the last calm crossing for a while.”
Her frozen smile hid the truth: she had no idea what spring break on Catalina Island was like. She and her mother had lived there only since summer, after they had moved away from everyone and everything they’d ever known. Halfway up the gangplank she looked back over the crowd, searching, but the line was now just heads and hats and people milling together like spilled marbles. Once on board, she searched for that handsome face and yellow shirt, but soon gave up and went to find a seat.
An hour and a half later the seat felt hard as a rock. The sun glowed low on a vibrant pink horizon, a golden ball magically balancing itself on top of the blue sea. Passengers shifted to the bow, where the colors of the sunset looked like fire, which meant no lines in the snack bar. Inside, she stared at the black menu board with its crooked white letters. She glanced back and Paul O’Neal himself stood three people back. He smiled. She smiled back.
“What can I get for you?” The worker behind the snack counter waited impatiently, a plastic smile on his face.
She glanced quickly at the board and blurted out the first thing: “A white wine.” There was complete silence for an instant, the kind where you wish the floor would swallow you up.
“Can I see your ID, please?”
She dug through her bag pretending she had an ID. “It’s here somewhere. I’m certain of it.” She moved her face so close she could smell the old sticks of Juicy Fruit gum in the bottom. “Give me a second.” Her cheeks felt hot. She shoved her wallet into a dark corner at the bottom and looked up. “I’m sorry. My wallet isn’t here.”
“I can’t serve you any liquor without an ID.” Why did his voice sound like he was hollering on the ship’s loudspeaker? “Can I get you something else?”
She glanced at the board, then at her bag. “No wallet,” she lied, then walked away without looking back. She straight-armed one of the swinging doors, and the air hit her flushed face.
At the back of the boat, the seats were sheltered from the wind and spray. She sat down on a bench where she could lean her head back against the side of the ship and hide. Seagulls drafted alongside the boat and the mainland was a distant outline of dusky hillsides, where pinpoints of light began to sporadically wink back at her. It was still light out when the ship’s overhead lamp flickered on. The light was bright and white, so she opened her bag and pulled out her book, then reread the last page she’d read on the bus.
Someone came around the corner and stopped—a yellow shirt. She pulled the book so close she couldn’t read a word. The change jingled in his pocket as he sat down next to her.
How do I pretend I’m not the moron who was just carded?
He set down a plastic glass between them and sipped a beer.
Was she supposed to reach for it? If it wasn’t for her … well, she would just die … again. She shifted and looked down at the lonely glass.
“Are you going to let the ice melt in that wine?”
She lowered the book. “What?”
He handed her the plastic glass. “This is for you.”
“Oh. Thank you.” My God, but he was good-looking, and watching her with eyes the color of blue ice. “It’s good. Thanks.”
“That’s heavy reading you’ve got there. Is it for an economics class?”
“No.”
He laughed. “What kind of girl reads Wealth of Nations for fun?”
She closed the book and looked at the front jacket, then at him. “It’s a shame really. I had nothing else to read. I left all my Barbie comic books at home.”
“With your wallet?” he shot back.
“Yes.” She had to laugh, too. “With my wallet.”
“Okay,” he said. “I deserved that Barbie comment. I didn’t say that right at all, did I?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“And here I was trying to impress you.”
“You were? Why? Do I need impressing?”
He watched her for a long few seconds. “Maybe I was wrong again.”
“Maybe buying me a drink was impression enough. That was very sweet of you.”
“You looked thirsty.”
“Did I?” She laughed softly. “I thought I looked embarrassed.”
“That, too.” He sipped his beer and glanced out at the water.
She stared down at the drink in her hands and felt every awkward second of silence. “So what do you like to read?”
“After what I just said, I’m surprised you aren’t asking me if I can read.”
“Actually, I was thinking your reading material might be the kind that has staples in the centerfold.”
He burst out laughing. “I deserved that.”
“You probably did.”
“You’ve got a great sense of humor.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I don’t think I’m going to answer that. I’ll just get into more trouble.” He stood up. “I’d like another beer before they close. Do you want another drink?”
“No, thanks.”
She was smiling, probably a goofy smile that told the entire world what she was thinking. He was coming back. She sipped her drink at the railing, watching the island and the glimmering lights of Avalon, home after her mother moved them there when Laurel graduated high school. Moving was tough when she’d lived in a place where her friends had been her friends since they’d all played in a sandbox together. In a new town, Laurel was suddenly the outsider. All those lights before her and not a friend among them.
“We’re almost there.” He walked toward her, a dripping beer bottle in his hand.
“That didn’t take long.”
“No line.”
She felt different when he looked at her—like he was doing now—as if she weren’t a friendless, lonely thing. She longed to say something clever and memorable.
“Okay.” He braced his arms on the railing next to her, his beer in his hands. “Time to come clean. You didn’t leave your wallet at home.”
“No.”
“So, I’m guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” There was a softness around his eyes and mouth, no judgment or censure.
“You could say that.”
“How minor?”
Laurel contemplated lying. In the right clothes, she looked at least twenty, but wanting to be older didn’t make you older. She faced him. “I’m seventeen.”
He choked on his beer. “Seventeen? You’re kidding.”
“No. I’ll be eighteen soon.”
He watched her, probably half hoping she would suddenly age five years, then swore under his breath. His gaze dropped to the drink in her hand. Without a word he took it and tossed it in the water.
She drew back from the rail and crossed her arms in front of her, equally silent, her body brittle, her knees locked.
He looked surprised at what he’d done, but not apologetic.
“You paid for the drink,” she said. “You can do what you want with it.”
He lifted his hand toward her cheek, almost approachable again, almost apologetic, and standing close enough for her to smell his aftershave. “You’re in high school?”
“No, I’m in college.”
“At seventeen?” Clearly he thought she was lying.
“I skipped the third grade. I graduated high school just after I turned seventeen.” She could almost read the word “jailbait” in his expression.
The loudspeaker crackled on. “Attention, please, we are now arriving at the Avalon dock, Catalina Island. Make certain you have all your personal belongings. All passengers will disembark on the starboard side of the ship. For safety, please securely hold the hands of all young children as you leave.” The loudspeaker cut off.
She gave him a direct look. “Do you want to hold my hand securely as we disembark?”
He didn’t laugh.
“I guess my age killed your sense of humor.”
For just a moment she thought he wanted to say something kind to her, but a group of young kids scattered away from the nearby railing and jumped up and down, shouting, “We’re here! We’re here!”
“We’re here,” she said over their noisy little bouncing heads. The kids ran around them in rambunctious circles. She broke eye contact, and when she looked up again he was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry.” He walked away and never once looked back.
She stood there, empty, embarrassed, ashamed, and upset. Maybe because of him. Maybe because of her. Listlessly, she picked up her thick book with its conservative literary jacket and dark, unaffected type. The things you could hide … She slipped off the paper jacket. Hot pink lettering glared back at her from the real cover—The Adventurers, by Harold Robbins. She dropped the other jacket into a nearby trash can, tucked the book under an arm, and made her way toward the gangplank.
Behind the hills the sunset glowed pink, and a noisy hum came from the crowds. Pole lights lit the dock and shone down on the boarding ramp. Only a few hundred feet down the dock was Crescent Street and the heart of town. Local boys sold newspapers and, for fifty cents, offered to cart suitcases in red wagons to side-street hotels and cozy island inns. The crowd split around girls in white shorts and sandals who handed out flyers with discount coupons for abalone burgers, lobsters, and pitchers of draft beer at two for one.
But nowhere in that crowd below her did Laurel see a tall, handsome man in a lemon yellow shirt. He had disappeared as if he had never existed. And for her, he didn’t exist. Not really, because she didn’t even know his name.
Victor checked the clock on his desk, stood—his foot on a floor button that buzzed his secretary—and effectively brought the magazine interview to an end. The interviewer’s questions had just gone in a direction he disliked. “I have another appointment.”
“But I have more questions, Mr. Banning … Victor. It’s only five thirty. You know this is our cover story.”
Victor laughed at him. “I wouldn’t be talking to you if this weren’t your cover story.”
The door to his office swung open and his secretary recited, “The car’s waiting, Mr. Banning. You’re running late.”
The journalist still sat there, a tape recorder on the arm of the chair and a shiny Italian pen in hand. He wore a clipped beard and his dark curly hair in a ponytail, which fell halfway down the back of a five-hundred-dollar suit.
Victor came from behind his desk. “I see I’ve reduced you to silence, which is best. We don’t speak the same language, son.” He left the young man juggling his pad and recorder, stammering for him to wait, and headed down the hall toward his private elevator.
The article would label him a corporate villain. At his center he was a hardscrabble oilman born in a boom-or-bust era, and the polar opposite of a journalist out to cauterize enterprise and whose radical point of view smacked of being all too trendy. An ill-fitting sobriety emanated from men like him, a languidness in the face of the real and vital things that changed the world around them.
That reporter’s Berkeleyesque scorn was detectable even when cloaked by a professional voice. With high degrees from expensive schools, his kind persuaded courts to stop the building of freeways, put hundreds of people out of work, boondoggled, and stopped progress to save a damned frog. Victor could have respected them if they were actually doing it for the frog, but men like him were faux avant-garde—the ultimate luxury for those who already had everything.
Victor and men of his ilk made things better for everyone: gas stations with car washes and streets fitted with drains so they wouldn’t flood; tax dollars that fed the public schools and highways, and opportunity for golden equity in land and homes with values that rose monthly.
Later, at home, he took an overly long shower—an attempt to wash off the grit of an interview that implied what he had accomplished in his life was all wrong. His annoyance was difficult to shake off. The seeds of it stayed with him even as he traveled north along the 405, Harlan at the wheel of his Bentley.
In the distance, covered in a green veil of haze, were the rolling hills connecting San Pedro to Palos Verdes. Victor could remember those hills when they were just purple wildflowers, waist-high mustard, and a crumbling Spanish hacienda with its scattering of guest ranches, land deeded before California was ever a state. Now streets with expensive homes cut along those hillsides, looking as pronounced as veins on the arm of a growing economy.
It was change. It was good. So he told himself he didn’t mind articles written about men like him—a generation hungry for success and power, winners who carried with them accomplishment and the pride of building something out of nothing, instead of making a brouhaha out of nothing in order to sell magazines.
Lately he’d been the topic of too many articles, and the human interest ones made him clam up faster than today. Perhaps he was annoyed now because he’d had a touchy interview for Look six weeks ago. Newspapers and magazines sent women reporters for human interest stories, armed with his family history and seeking an angle that was lonely, silly, and romantic—something his life was anything but.
Victor had been married twice and in love only once. He’d worked most of his life, hardest when he had a wife and young son. Anna died with no warning, and he couldn’t remember crying for her, a woman forbidden to him whom he’d married after a long chase.
His son was a stranger, barely three when he buried Anna. Victor remembered thinking he had nothing in common with Rudy other than bone and blood and the same last name. His son cried every time Victor came home—took one look at him and ran away, disappearing for hours in some nook of the monstrous Pasadena house that belonged to his wife’s family.
The day Victor found his son cowering in Anna’s closet symbolized their dismal relationship: the father who had been locked in a closet and his son who sought refuge in one. It was a long time before Rudy could sit in the same room with him, longer still before he accepted that Victor was the man who fathered him.
Victor had spent his childhood fighting for acceptance. Not even for his son would he fight for acceptance again. Soon he recognized in his own son’s expression his father’s look of failure. He and Rudy were doomed from the start. The Banning curse had skipped a generation, and nothing Rudy ever did changed Victor’s opinion that he was a weak young man, destined for nothing. The only thing his son ever had the strength to do was walk away from Victor and stay away.
The second wife also walked away from Victor, and he never regretted that. She was a convenience—she’d done the chasing. The women and marriages, even the affairs were long gone, and he was left now with his only progeny, Cale and Jud.
The radio phone between the car’s seats rang, his attorney calling with news. “Jameson’s kid agreed to sell the painting.”
Victor didn’t move. “How much?”
“Half a million.”
“Cut the deal,” Victor told him in a voice more even than he actually felt. To finally win was almost a physical thing, live and sweeping through him like some kind of drug. “Any word on the other pieces?”
“That Seattle gallery claims they’ve lost track of the client.”
“Then we need to find the client.”
“No one will release the name, Victor. It’s been thirteen goddamn years and I can’t even buy that name out of those people.”
“Raise the offer another quarter of a million,” he added. “And the commission another ten percent. That ought to prod somebody to locate who bought those paintings.”
After making arrangements for delivery, he hung up and rested his head against the back of the seat while Harlan turned the car into the Loyola parking lot. In an instant so real he would never be able to explain it, Victor caught a whiff of Arpège and sat forward sharply. On the seat across from him were the images of his son and daughter-in-law, an echo of another time and clearer than any memory should be; they held hands. Rachel was pregnant and Rudy didn’t look like a failure.
“The game’s already started.” Harlan opened the back door.
The images across from Victor evaporated in the overhead glare of parking lot lights, but what they represented stayed with him and made him pensive and touchy. Once inside the gym, they took seats in the middle of the crowded bleachers. By 9 P.M., Loyola was losing, so Victor sent Harlan to get the car and stood hidden in the shadows of the bleachers.
He watched Cale trot down the basketball court, weaving in and out of the other players with long-legged agility and a sure-footedness that helped him score three points. With that single basket, the energy in the gymnasium changed. The crowd noise grew louder; they were on their feet. The university band began to play with the crowd clapping and singing, “Down on the corner … Out in the street.”
Rudy had played basketball, too, but was never good enough and spent his games mostly on the bench. Victor could have missed every game and it wouldn’t have mattered.
But this game changed in under five minutes. Dorsey cut quickly, stole the ball, dashed past his opponent, his grin as big as the sections on the basketball. Then he became all business and shot the ball in the opposite direction, right to Cale, who let the ball fly. It arced through the air, then hit the rim with a deep thud, bounced, and went straight up in the air.
Nothing moved in that gymnasium but the ball. It came down on the rim, swirled around and around. On the edge of defeat or victory, players jumped up, arms reaching for the ball. The ball fell into the net and the white numbers on the scoreboard flipped: 89–87 Loyola.
Pom-poms flew into the air and the university cheerleaders tumbled across the wooden floor. The crowd cheered and stomped their feet so loudly you could barely hear the time buzzer. Players and coaches swarmed all over one another, and a teammate ripped Cale’s jersey in two and ran around him, holding the torn piece with his number, twenty-three, high in the air. They shouted, “Banning! Banning! Banning!”
Victor didn’t know he was smiling. He felt something he couldn’t ever remember feeling for Rudy. Maybe a hundred feet stood between Cale and him. They hadn’t spoken since Christmas. He placed one foot in front of the other, closing the distance.
“Cale!” An attractive young blond girl raced down from the bleachers and across the court, her ponytail flying, her long tanned legs running straight toward the knot of Loyola players. She wore a Mount Saint Mary’s sweater and flip skirt, and flung her arms around Cale, who caught her and spun her around, laughing as she kissed his cheeks.
Victor stopped, unable to move forward. Another girl he can throw his future away on. Cale hadn’t learned a thing from last year, from any years. Victor turned away in disgust and walked out of the gym without looking back. He wasn’t there when Cale set his roommate’s girlfriend down and tugged affectionately on her ponytail. And when Cale slung a towel around his sweaty neck and looked around the gym for the one person in his life to whom winning was everything, Victor was already on his way home.
