The Butterfly Plague

  The dog stood up and waded further into the water. On the rocks the seals cavorted and mewed. Ruth sighed again. She started walking.

  Keeping track of your past is pointless, she thought. All you ever do is forget it or get it mixed up or wish it had been different. Dogs were lucky. Dogs didn’t even know where they came from, who or what they were—or where they were going. She slid, beside the dog, into the water.

  9:30 a.m.

  A parade of bathers had begun below them on the beach.

  Ruth, covered now with olive oil and wearing a bandanna over her hair and dark-green glasses over her eyes, was stretched out partly in a deck chair and partly (her legs and feet) along the railings of the porch.

  Naomi, in a bright-red wrapper and a huge coolie’s hat, with socks pulled up to her knees, was seated in the shade of her parasol on the far side of a table which was laden with coffee cups, orange-juice tumblers, and newspapers. Miss Bonkers sat beyond the screen door inside the living room.

  “Does anyone know why he did it?” said Naomi.

  “No,” said Ruth.

  “Danced right down in front of the train. Heavens! Did you see it happen, dear?”

  “Of course not, Mother. I was in my compartment.”

  “Oh. Yes. But afterward. Did you see it then?”

  “You mean Bully?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” said Ruth. “I saw it.”

  She watched the parade. “It.” That’s all we are. While there, down there on the sand, all those vibrant bodies are glowing in the sun, “it” is lying in the gutter somewhere, or in a hospital bed, or, like Bully, in the cinders.

  “There seem to be more people,” she said, “than there used to be.” She looked at the bathers.

  “Yes,” Naomi drawled. She was still reading the paper.

  “Where in the name of God do they all come from?” Ruth asked testily.

  “Oh, from the city, dear—different places. They do that every weekend, now. And the weekends all drag on till Monday. There’s always a parade like that. Up and down the beach, up and down, showing each other what they’ve got and what they haven’t.” Naomi laughed. “They’ll do it for an hour or so, then stop—exhausted, I suppose—and then begin again. We’re in for it now till lunch, then they disappear somewhere and come back about four. This is only Monday, don’t forget. Midweek isn’t so bad.”

  “I was hoping it would still be private,” said Ruth.

  “Nothing is private any more,” said Naomi, giving her daughter a look of secret worry. “You must give up that idea. Times have changed.”

  Ruth ruminated. The people below weren’t really even attractive. Just fleshy and flashy. Lots of brown skin and bathing suits that were either too large or too small. And everyone chewed gum and yelled at each other and laughed far too much—dreary, mirthless laughter—and they threw things on the sand. American weekends, Ruth thought bitterly. It’s not like Germany.

  The sun buzzed.

  Naomi, not intending to (intending only to ponder her daughter’s mind and what might be wrong with it), drowsed beneath her parasol and hat. Miss Bonkers knitted and looked at her watch, thinking of Naomi’s shots. Ruth lapsed catatonically into a stare at the beach. Her mother was dying.

  A girl with red hair giggled and screeched on the sand below. Two men—they must have been in their forties or fifties—were pursuing her with blankets. The girl ran into the water and the two men stood, disconsolate and panting, on the shore. They made hopeless gestures at each other and then, clutching their blankets, strolled away arm in arm. The girl glowered after them.

  Now a man riding a horse came by. The horse was a palomino and so apparently was the man. They seemed to be all one color, and for a moment Ruth thought of Chiron and the centaurs, but there was nothing noble in this horseman’s bearing. He was slouched toward his horse’s neck. He rode the animal forward into the sea near the girl with the red hair and gave the horse and then himself a bath.

  A game of volleyball appeared next—without nets and without court. It moved all the way along the beach (the ball was bright yellow), and when it reached one end it moved noisily back to the other, trampling children and sunbathers indiscriminately in its way.

  A butterfly settled on the railing near Ruth’s feet. It was a vivid green and looked out of place. It came from Mexico, she decided. When she looked again it was gone. Sic transit gloria mundi. As usual.

  Then there he was.

  Ruth’s heart made a noise. Her veins became speedways.

  She stared down at him, knowing that all the sunglasses and bandannas in the world could not disguise her now or ever if the man had been able to follow her this far without once mistaking her destination. His mask, unmoved, looked up, and Ruth wished somehow that he would smile. He never did. In fact there was never any sign at all of emotion in his face. He just stared and drifted close by and stared again and was gone…Now he was wearing a bathing suit and Ruth could see for the first time the fully muscled body she had guessed was probably under all that tweed and twill and corduroy. The bathing suit was no less ghastly than anything else he ever wore, but at least his skin was a good color. He was one of those brown Germans who always had a tan. His blond head seemed to have shed a sprinkle of loose hairs over his arms and legs and stomach and glints of blondness shimmered all over him. Beautifully, Ruth thought. How beautiful you are, and awful. As though the two must go together.

  He stood loosely but with enough sense of poise not to stoop or bend or do anything that would appear ungainly. His muscles were long, not gathered into knots, and his stomach was broad and flat. His shoulders shone with some kind of oil.

  “Go away,” Ruth whispered. “Go away!” An enlarging group of multisexed admirers had gathered in his immediate vicinity, staring at him from all sides. Surely he was someone. So they gossiped and stared and speculated, waiting for him to move. But he paid no attention. He just stood there looking up at Ruth as much as to say, “I am here now.” And then, having made this mute announcement, he strode away, trailing admirers after him in such a long string they left Ruth’s end of the beach quite vacant except for the man and his horse, still quietly bathing in the sea. The girl with the red hair brought up the end of the blond man’s parade. She was laughing.

  2:55 p.m.

  In the early afternoon that day it seemed that everyone slept. The beach was exceptionally quiet; even the yellow dog lay under a porch and rested, eyes closed but with its ears pointed forward in the direction of the water. The sea was making ridiculously doglike lapping noises at the verge of the sand. Perhaps the dog found this amusing, for he did not entirely sleep and at intervals his tail wagged slowly back and forth, knocking, as it did, against a painted green watering can on its left wag and a Babe Ruth baseball bat on its right wag.

  This noise in turn filtered through slats, beams, and openwork metal grilling until its off-rhythms occurred just often enough to intrude into the nap of B.J. Trelford, who owned the dog, had mothered eight children, and was married to Noah Trelford, a sculptor who slept beside her right now with a child’s smile on his face and an everlasting erection battering for release against the buttons of his jeans.

  B.J. awoke fully, glancing around for the time, and smiled. Noah. Noah. She gave the erection a motherly pat and slipped off the bed, knowing that soon the children would start their afternoon interruptions.

  Noah did not wake up.

  3:00 p.m.

  B.J. went into the kitchen. The dog’s tail wigwagged below: green can…Babe Ruth, green can…Babe Ruth. B.J. walked to the water cooler, noticed that it was nearly empty, and drew herself a short drink. The kids in the other rooms, some on floors, some on beds, lay stretched like so many sentimental corpses for her mind’s eye to encompass. Three o’clock.

  She listened to the dog, got a dish towel, wiped her breasts free of perspiration, and folded them back inside their envelope of bra. She swished her hair from her forehead. Gosh, it was h
ot. She nibbled at the water. Noah would have to switch the jars as soon as he woke up. The kids would want orange juice and she would have to dilute it because she had only six oranges. Might as well squeeze them right now.

  She smelled smoke.

  Smoke was a villain. It could mean the canyons were on fire.

  B.J. allowed herself the normal moment of panic and adjusted patiently to the added adrenalin before she moved carefully (never wake anyone unless you absolutely have to) out through the door onto the porch.

  Once outside she could smell the smoke more strongly, but at first she could not see where it came from. She shaded her eyes from the sun and made a crablike march around the whole square-circle of her porch, ending where she had begun.

  There it was. North end of the beach, top of the bluff. A haze. Blue-gray. Not a grass fire (that would be yellow)—probably just some sap, burning paper.

  Over it, there was a flight of birds, circling higher and higher; curious, staying on the updraft, watching down. Not a paper fire. The smell was wrong. Disturbing. Cloth or something. Perhaps just something wet that didn’t want to burn. Rags, B.J. thought. A rag-burner. Junk.

  Back she went inside, passing through the bedroom, where Noah had his erection out now in his hand (sculptor’s thumb hard up against the tip—Treats it like a chisel, she thought, me his piece of marble) but still babysleeping, kid-smiling, no fooling around, just holding it tight like a handle, “like he’d fall off the bed if he let go…”

  B.J. threw a white sheet over him just in case the kids came in, saw him turn for her and find only bed and pillow, gave him a dazzling love smile, and left him. One thing at a time, she thought. The kids come first.

  3:10 p.m.

  Octavius Rivi walked from his garden into his mirrored dressing room, set down his glass of tequila, opened one of his cupboards, stared inside at the mirrors and began to dry his hair with a large blue towel.

  As the towel skimmered down around his head, and as his nose emerged from its fluff, he began to smell the fire. Danger. He stopped toweling and put on clothes.

  3:15 p.m.

  Miss Bonkers finished boiling her hypodermic equipment, set the needles in a pan of alcohol, wrapped the syringes in cotton and toweling, closed the little boxes, threw away bits of cardboard, dabbled her fingers, dried them, turned out the lights (the drapes were drawn against the heat), closed doors, sighed, and crossed the balcony. Going into her room, she said to herself, “Someone is barbecuing hot dogs at the far end.” She selected Gone With the Wind, opened it, and fell at once into a deep untroubled sleep.

  3:25 p.m.

  Ruth whispered out of the house onto the balcony and down the stairs.

  She noticed the smoke at once and thought, I’ll go and see what it is.

  The yellow dog joined her just under halfway up the beach. He growled for the password and, having given her a good wet sniff around the ankles, turned the growl into a wag of recognition. Ruth looked up at his house, but B.J. was inside squeezing oranges by then and Ruth concluded there was no one there and the dog might as well come with her.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and they set off.

  Passing the seal rock, Ruth looked out and for a moment thought she saw one of the seals swimming in toward the beach. It wasn’t. She marched on.

  Nearing Octavius’s fence, she could not resist a casual glance through the slats and noticed a woman in a green dress standing in a garden. She walked on by and came to a patch that led up the bluff to the salt-grass meadows and beyond that to a low hacienda-like bar that was called, for some reason, the Spanish Maine.

  The birds, seen earlier by B.J., made an ever-widening circle, higher and higher, and their numbers grew until there were twenty or thirty of them. Gulls.

  Some crows scuffled off the rocks at the top of the path just as Ruth came in sight and the dog gave them a loud, officious bark.

  “Shut up!” said Ruth. “Be quiet.”

  Her heart raced.

  Why was she afraid?

  No good reason. There were plenty of people within calling distance. She had a dog with her. It was broad daylight and she’d always been a good runner. The Spanish Maine was only five hundred yards away and she could even hear the sound of its juke box. Below her there was the roof of Octavius’s house, his fences and his visitor in the green dress, who was sitting on a bench.

  Ruth felt in her pocket. There were her cigarettes and her change purse. Her matches.

  “I’ll go to the Maine and buy a beer,” she decided. “No one can object to that.”

  She wondered vaguely if the blond man would be there sitting at the bar. Better to keep in contact, to let him see her; to know where he was. Better than not to know and to be afraid like this, walking through a perfectly ordinary meadow full of perfectly ordinary salt grass, hovered over by perfectly ordinary gulls and terns and crows.

  There was the fire.

  It was only embers now, giving off steamy smoke.

  Ruth approached it.

  A dune hollow had been cleared and the grass lay uprooted and trampled in a sort of flung-out circle of anger and haste. Ruth sensed that someone had done this in a state of panic. A state of violence.

  All around the hollow there were footprints, large and apparently male. They seemed to have been made by an extremely heavy person, because the impressions were deep and very clear. The fire, or what was left of it, was right in the center of the hollow and seemed to have consisted mostly of wastepaper and a few small pieces of wood.

  Ruth stirred the ashes with a stick. She removed her sunglasses in order to see better. There was nothing sinister in the fire at all.

  She looked up.

  Why the birds? Fire does not attract birds. It repels them.

  She looked down again.

  No sign of food. No crusts. No wrappers or peelings. There was, however, a small blue piece of material. Ruth fished it out. It sizzled. It was still damp. Instinctively she smelled it. Nothing. Just wet fire. And vaguely, a little perfume. Part of a woman’s dress? No. Too heavy.

  She put it in her pocket. Memento mori.

  The dog gave all the footprints a hefty once-over, lifted its leg on the ashes, and nosed off. He seemed to want to go back, not forward. So Ruth followed.

  At 7:30 that night she heard one of B. J.‘s children yelling and she went out onto the balcony, where she was witness to the discovery of a nude female corpse that had been washed up on shore. It was the body of the girl with the red hair, the one Ruth had seen that morning. “Oh,” she said. “God…”

  Ruth went inside and locked herself in her room. She took off her clothes and stood with her back hard up against the wall.

  “Not like that…” she whispered. “I don’t want to die like that…”

  Her gaze shifted—watching the window as she listened to the commotion on the beach. Not really knowing she was doing it, she began to “swim.” Her arms made motions—forcing her shoulders against the wall—one arm and then the other reaching up and out and in and up and out and in—the rhythm gaining in momentum—locking—as she whispered, over and over, “eins, zwei, drei. Eins, zwei, drei…”

  In the pocket of her beach pajamas, flung upon the bed, was a small garish piece of bathing suit: scorched. Ruth knew it had belonged to the red-headed girl, now dead on the beach. Its smell was everywhere. Her nostrils and the room were filled with it.

  The Chronicle of

  the Mysterious Lady

  Friday, September 2nd, 1938:

  Bel Air

  10:00 a.m.

  The Little Virgin was in bed.

  The bed was hung on all sides with curtains. Inside, a light shone down on the occupant, casting a warm and peachy glow over face and figure, sheets and pillowcases. The effect from outside the bed was one of many-coloured shadows; no features were visible: only the delicate profile.

  A maid came and went with various Implements of Beauty, while another busied herself with flowers, setting t
hem into bowls and Oriental vases.

  The Implements of Beauty, lying on little trays, were passed through the curtains, used or disregarded, and then passed back to the waiting lackey. The atmosphere was surgical and silent, while a certain aura of imminent rebuke permeated the air.

  Back and forth: back and forth: silvered trays, lacquered trays, inlaid trays, and trays with ormolu handles; small white towels fluttered in the breeze as back and forth through the netted portals loads of Kleenex were passed, loads of facial cream, bottles and syringes, loads of cotton; combs, curlers, brushes, and hair ribbons; hair tonics, hair nets, rats, falls, pins, buns; loads of jellies, jars, and Jergens; trays of pencils, rouge, lipstick, kohl, and mascara; toilet water, ice water, hot water, drinking water; mirrors, mirrors, mirrors; files, scissors, and emery boards; patience and paper bags.

  “That will be all,” said the voice. “Bring me my lace shawl, Maureen.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  It was done.

  “The visiting gentlemen,” said the voice, preoccupied in tone, “will start arriving at eleven.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Coffee, biscuits…and sherry. Nothing more.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you remember what I told you about the napkins?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “For God’s sake, nothing paper.”

  “No, ma’am. Never.”

  “Tell Fiona her flowers look sweet and she’s not to forget to set out the potpourri.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Now, I want that copy of Vogue someone brought in yesterday. And Vanity Fair. And the papers the minute they arrive.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Did you listen to Louella?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Well?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. Not a word.”

  “Very well, then.”

  Maureen wavered doorward, her stack of trays loaded onto a sort of tea wagon specially designed for madam’s boudoir. There was much to do before eleven.