With the help of two Luckies, by the side of the road, she understood that the building with the awning was just an ordinary realtor’s office. Looking around, she saw ordinary asphalt, ordinary streetlights, a hillside covered prettily with coastal heather. She unwrapped a stick of Trident and got back in the car.
Palos Verdes was one of countless neighborhoods she’d had no reason to visit in her youth. The streets were empty of pedestrians, and the houses were blander, more homogenous, than the ones in West Los Angeles. In the dimming marine mist, the place seemed abandoned and melancholy. Reaching the street called Via Rivera, she found that she was ten minutes early.
Bradley’s house was less than grand, and it didn’t have the ocean view that she’d imagined; a burgundy Cadillac was in the driveway. She stopped her own car well short of it and took the gum from her mouth. Would her smoking repel him? Or would the smell of her Luckies take him back, as it took her, to the Murphy bed in Westlake?
His first letter, which had arrived a week after she’d written to him, contained sentences of inexhaustible interest—I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you, how often I’ve wondered where you were, how worried I was that something terrible had happened to you—and many smaller items of interest, such as the fact that he wasn’t married. He’d been divorced from Isabelle after their younger boy finished high school, and divorced a second time, more recently, from a woman I should have known better than to marry. Also of interest were the excellence of his health and certain suggestions of wealth. He was now in the vitamin business, not as a salesman but as the owner of a company, based in Torrance, that employed more than forty people. Although his report on his sons was not of interest, she’d studied the details and filed them in a mental drawer that also held the name of every member of First Reformed. She was a pastor’s wife, skilled at politely remembering, no longer scary, and she wanted Bradley to know it.
At one minute past twelve thirty, she rang his doorbell.
The man who answered was somewhat like Bradley but jowlier, sparser of hair, wider in the hips. He was wearing loose linen pants and an oversize sort of toreador blouse, pale blue and halfway unbuttoned. Also a frightful pair of sandals.
“My God,” he said. “It really is you.”
She had two related thoughts. One was that she’d somehow projected the height of her husband onto her memory of Bradley, who in fact had never been tall. The other was that Russ, besides being tall, was by far the better-looking man. The man in the doorway was blowsy and yellow-toenailed. If she’d daydreamed for a hundred years, she couldn’t have imagined him in sandals. This led to a third and very unexpected thought: she was doing him a favor by seeing him, not the other way around.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find me,” he said, beckoning her inside. “How was the freeway? It’s usually not bad at this time of day.”
He shut the door and made a move to hug her. She stepped sideways. The house was a split-level and smelled faintly of old person. The art and the furnishings were tamely Far Eastern.
“What a lovely house.”
“Yeah, I have the vitamin craze to thank for that. Come in, come in, I’ll show you around. I was thinking we could eat on the patio, but it’s a little too cool, don’t you think?”
“It was nice of you to make lunch.”
“God, Marion. Marion! I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I can’t either.”
“You look—you look like yourself. A little older, a little grayer, but—great.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
Broad in the beam, favoring an apparently sore hip, he led her down into the living room, from which a tall hedge and a flower garden were visible. The clamminess of her dress, a vestige of her terror, seemed sad to her now. On a wall lined with bookshelves, she noticed recent Mailer, recent Updike.
“I see you still read.”
“God, yes. More than ever. I’m still working, but the company kind of runs itself. A fair number of days, I don’t even go down to the office.”
“I don’t read the way I used to.”
“With a house full of kids, that’s not surprising.”
Her fourth thought was terrible: she’d killed the baby he’d fathered. Not once in three months had it occurred to her that she might have to mention this to him. She wondered if she should do it right away. Their entire history was coiled up tightly in her head. If she let it out, it might obliterate the reality of how he looked to her, the sad smell in his house. But was this a favor she felt like doing? It was confounding to recognize how much she had, compared to him. Not only many more years to live but full knowledge of their history. The story resided in her head, not his, and she felt a curious reluctance to share it, because she was its sole author. He’d merely been the reader.