“Phan lived in L.A., they met here. Parsifal didn’t have to go to Vietnam,” Sabine said.
“Because of his ulcers,” his mother said. “There was no way they could send that boy, the kind of ulcers he had.”
Sabine looked at her. That was one thing they both knew.
“It was awful nice of Guy to buy that poor boy a funeral plot.” She took one of the yellow roses off Parsifal’s grave and gave it to Phan in charity.
“Phan bought the plots,” Sabine said. She knew it would be better to just let it go, let everything go, but she couldn’t think of Phan being dismissed. It was mostly his money they would all be living on from now on. “He bought one for me, too. The one you’re standing on.”
Bertie looked down at her feet and took a quick step to the side, but Mrs. Fetters held her ground, green grass cushioning the bottoms of her sensible shoes. “That was real nice of him,” she said. “Guy always could make friends.”
They stayed a little longer, none of them talking. They were all worn out from the sadness and the smell of the flowers. The beautiful day had hurt them. Parsifal was wrong, Los Angeles was no place to be buried. It was five o’clock when they left, and the January sun was just making its way down.
“It was an aneurism, right?” Mrs. Fetters said, as if she were not at all sure that was right. “That’s what the lawyer told me.”
“An aneurism,” Sabine said, glad she had remembered to take the brain scan off the refrigerator. The car hummed at the front gate of Forest Lawn. “I’ll take you to your hotel,” she said, but she didn’t know where they were staying, which way she should go. “Unless you want to see the house, but we could do that some other time.”
“The house,” Bertie and her mother said together with a fresh burst of energy.
“It’s nice of you to ask us,” Mrs. Fetters said.
Sabine could only nod. It was nice of her.
Phan had bought the house on Oriole seven years ago, when he first came down from the Silicon Valley. By then the traffic was thick with people trying ]to move away from Los Angeles, and houses that had been bought and sold for hysterical amounts of money only a few years before now waited on the market like pregnant dogs at the pound. The agent was delighted by his call. She had six properties lined up to show him the first day, with plans to show him six more every day of the month, but Phan bought the first one. He refused to see the rest. The house on Oriole was built in the twenties as a contractor’s gift to his wife, in a neighborhood where every street was named for a bird, Wren and Bunting and Thrush. Phan had always wanted a Spanish-style house. To him, they looked like California. The creamy stucco swirled like frosting, the red tile roof, the high archways between the rooms, the fireplace big enough for two people to sit in, the careless way in which the house seemed to amble on forever. It reminded him of one of the administration buildings at Cal Tech. “Six bedrooms, a study, guesthouse, mature fruit trees,” the agent said, ticking off the points with her fingers; “a pool.” Phan went through the glass doors in the back. The water sparkled, hot blue diamonds. Perhaps he would learn to swim.
“You live here by yourself?” Bertie said, tilting back her head in the driveway to try and take it all in.
“I do now,” Sabine said.
Bertie stopped and maybe for the first time she looked at Sabine directly. She wrapped her arms around her waist. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what made me say that.”
“It’s a big house,” Sabine said, punching in the code for the alarm. The girl who did the yard had filled the planters with white winter pansies.
In the front hall their voices echoed. The Fetters began by complimenting the things that were closest, the curve of the staircase, the little table in the entry hall, the yellow-throated orchids on the table. “I have not seen anything like this in my life,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Nothing close.”
They went through the house as though they were half starved. They could barely restrain themselves from opening closets. “Is that a guest bath?” Bertie said, pointing to a closed door, and then, “Mama, would you look at this mirror in the bathroom.” They picked, up the fancy soaps shaped like seashells and sniffed them. They went through the guest rooms, the study, Sabine’s studio. They commented on her interesting work, the perfection of such small trees. They petted the rabbit, who barely woke up, his flop ears stretched in either direction like an airplane. They followed the runner down the hall to her bedroom before Sabine could think about whether or not she wanted them there. But it was in the bedroom that Mrs. Fetters found the thing she had been looking for, the thing she had come to her son’s house hoping to find.
“Oh,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, holding a picture from Parsifal and Sabine’s wedding. “Look at him,” she whispered. “Look how good he turned out.”
Bertie came and sat beside her mother. “He looks just like Kitty,” she said. “It’s like Kitty with short hair and a suit.”
“They always were just alike when they were children. People who didn’t know us used to always ask were they twins.” Mrs. Fetters touched her finger to the tiny image of his face. “Look at this one,” she said, picking up another frame—Parsifal and Sabine in costume for the show. Sabine felt embarrassed; in the picture she looked naked but covered in diamonds.
“You sure do take a good picture,” Mrs. Fetters said to her. “Are these people your parents?” Another frame.
Sabine nodded.
“I could see it. Are they still living?”
“About five miles from here,” Sabine said.
“And do you see them?” Mrs. Fetters asked. A real question, as if there were a chance Sabine had left her family as well, only five miles away.
“I see them all the time,” Sabine said.
“Oh, that’s good,” she said, smiling sadly. “That’s good. I know you must make them so proud. Who’s this?”
Parsifal and Phan at the beach, red cheeked, laughing, arms around necks. “That’s Phan.”
“The man at the cemetery.”
“That’s right.”
“And this is Phan.” A black-and-white picture of Phan working. It was bigger than all the other pictures. It was a beautiful picture. Sabine had taken it, a birthday present for Parsifal in a silver frame. Phan was writing on a tablet, his hair had fallen forward. The tablet was covered in numbers and symbols, hieroglyphics that only he would understand. “And this is Phan’s family,” Mrs. Fetters said, pointing to the portrait from Vietnam. Sabine confirmed this and waited for the next question, some inevitable question about why a friend’s family was on her bedside table. But the Fetters were quiet, too busy feeding on photographs to ask.
“If there are more pictures of Guy, I sure would love to see them sometime.” Mrs. Fetters got up from the bed.
“Plenty.”
The three of them left the bedroom. The tour was over.
“It’s perfect,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Every last thing. How long have you lived here?”
“Just over a year,” Sabine said, speaking for herself.
“You put a house like this together in a year?”
“Parsifal lived here for five years before me,” she said, again, peering over the edge into the mire of complications. “It’s his house. He was the one with the taste.”
“So how long were you two married?” his mother asked. “I should have asked you that before. I don’t even know how long you were married.”
“A little less than a year,” Sabine said, stretching out her six months. “It was after I moved in.”
Mrs. Fetters and her daughter looked at Sabine suspiciously, as if suddenly she was not who they thought she was.
“We worked together, we were together for twenty-two years. We’d just never seen the point in getting married before. I’m afraid I’m not very old-fashioned that way.” She did not wish to lie or explain. It was, after all, her life. Her private life. “I haven’t even offered you anything to drink. Let me get
you something. A soda, a glass of wine?”
“So why did you end up getting married? What changed your mind after all those years?”
Sabine put her hand on the banister. These people didn’t know Parsifal. They did not know his name. If there were questions to be asked, she should be the one doing the asking. They were probably wondering why the money was all hers, why she had the house, an interloper married less than a year. “We were all getting older,” she said. She heard her own voice and it sounded clipped, nearly stern.
Mrs. Fetters nodded. “Older,” she said. “I for one am getting older.” They all at once understood that the family reunion was over. Everyone had seen more than they had planned to see, no one had gotten what they wanted. “Bertie, I think it’s time we headed back to the hotel and got rested up.”
“You’re welcome to stay,” Sabine said, following some code of social interaction her mother had drilled into her from birth. She could not help herself.
“I’m tired,” Mrs. Fetters said. “It’s bad enough that I have to ask you to drive us to the hotel.”
Another trip in the car seemed a small price to pay for getting her privacy back. Sabine already had her keys in her hand.
“I told the travel agent I was willing to pay more for something safe,” Mrs. Fetters said when Sabine pulled up in front of the downtown Sheraton Grand. “For what this place costs I think I ought to have a guard standing outside my door. Do you think this is safe?”
“You’ll be fine here,” Sabine said. “I can come in, make sure you’re checked in okay.”
Mrs. Fetters held up her hands. “I wouldn’t think of it. You’ve done too much as it is. I know it was hard on you, going out to the cemetery. I’m afraid I was just thinking of myself.”
“I wanted to go,” Sabine said.
For a minute they all just sat there. Finally it was Bertie who opened her door. “Well, good night, then,” Bertie said.
“If you need anything...”
“We’re fine.” Mrs. Fetters looked at her, everyone unsure of how to part. Finally she patted Sabine on the wrist, a gesture of a distant aunt, a favorite teacher. They got out of the car and waved. Sabine waited until they were safely inside before punching the gas. The BMW could exit parking lots at record speed.
Parsifal’s family, his mother and sister, and Sabine had not invited them to sleep in one of the guest rooms. She had not offered them the enormous amount of food that was waiting in the refrigerator. Would it have been too much to be a little bit nicer? She gunned the engine and cut deftly into the left lane. Let them catch her. Let them try and take her in. She pushed the button down on the power window and let the wind mat her hair. Nights like this, the freeway was an amusement-park ride, a thrilling test of nerves and skill. Sometimes it was all she could do not to close her eyes. She would have to assume that Parsifal wouldn’t disapprove of her leaving his family in a hotel, after all, he had been polite enough to leave them a small inheritance but not warm enough to tell them where he lived. There was a reason he stayed away. Even if it wasn’t exactly evident, she trusted his judgment completely now. There was something wrong. Something that did not concern her or include her. It was dark and Sabine took the Coldwater Canyon exit over to Mulholland Drive. This was when she felt the most inside the city, when it was all broken down into patterns of lights.
There would have been something to gain by having them around. There were questions, giant gaping holes she would have loved to fill in, but when had the moment presented itself in which she could have said, and why, Mrs. Fetters, did you not speak to your son for all those years? Why the sudden interest now? Those were confidences, things that had to be earned. It took intimacy and that took time, and while she had seemingly limitless amounts of the latter, she had no stomach for the former. People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.
At home she pulled out the trays of food and fixed herself a plate. She made a salad for Rabbit and put it on the floor, tapping her foot until she heard his gentle thump down the hall. What, exactly, was it worth without Parsifal to tell it to? How she wanted to find him at the breakfast table, waiting. She would spin it out, the airport, Johnny Carson. He would never believe his mother had a tape of Johnny Carson. In her mind she told him about the trip to the cemetery, how Bertie had stood back while his mother chatted up the grave marker. She told him about how they went through the house as if he were there but hiding, just out of earshot. For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.
“I don’t want to wind up some old woman who talks to her rabbit,” she said to Rabbit, who was chewing so furiously he didn’t even bother to lift his head.
That night, while she sat in her studio carving a hill out of Styrofoam, trying to get the sweep to be gentle, she thought about them. She thought of Bertie’s pale hands, the tiny diamond, and wondered who had put it there. Had Bertie thought about this brother she could not remember? Would it have made a difference in her life if he had been there? Mrs. Fetters didn’t seem like a bad mother, the way she spoke to him at the grave site. She was direct. She was clearly proud of him, even in his death. And what could they know about Los Angeles? Would they go home tomorrow? Would they go back to Forest Lawn? Would they be wandering around the city, in and out of neighborhoods they shouldn’t go to, trying to put together something they couldn’t possibly find? Sabine was feeling guilty that she hadn’t tried harder, asked more; and it was in the distraction of guilt that she slid the knife she used to cut the Styrofoam through the thin skin at the top of her wrist and into the base of her palm. It took a tug to pull it free. She started to say something, to call out, but then didn’t. She closed her other hand around it and sat for a minute, watching while the blood pulsed out between her locked fingers. Then she went into the bathroom.
It was deep, no doubt about it, and it stung like the knife was still in there and very hot when she held her hand under the water, but all her fingers moved properly. The sink turned red. It looked like the kind of cut that would need stitches, but she would rather have bled to death sitting on the side of the tub than take herself to Cedars Sinai. Using her teeth, she tore open five packages of gauze pads and piled them onto her wrist and the bottom of her hand, then she taped them in place. Phan and Parsifal stocked a spectacular selection of first-aid paraphernalia. She could see the blood seeping around the edges and she raised her hand above her head. That’s when she heard the phone ring.
It was nearly eleven o’clock. It would be Mrs. Fetters, though Sabine hadn’t expected her to call. She sat on the floor, hand raised as if she had some urgent question.
“Sabine?” There was noise in the background, music and talking, a party. Sabine. “It’s Dot Fetters.”
Dot. She hadn’t thought of that variation. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’m sorry to be calling so late. I’m waking you up.”
“Not at all.”
“Well, Bertie’s asleep and I just couldn’t, you know, so I came down to the bar. They have a nice bar here.”
Sabine was glad she had called. She felt the blood running in a thin stream from her upturned palm down her arm.
“So I was wondering,” she said, “and this is stupid because it’s the middle of the night and everything and I know you don’t exactly live next door, but I was wondering if you’d be interested in coming over for a drink.”
Sabine thought that Dot Fetters had already had a drink or two, but who wouldn’t? How would such a call be possible otherwise? “A drink.”
“It was just a thought—too late really, I know, but I felt bad about the way things went today. I was hoping to have the chance to talk to you, and—I don’t know. You have to bear with me, this is all hard.”
“I know,”
Sabine said, her voice small in the room. It was very hard. And though she could not imagine going out to drink with Dot Fetters she could imagine even less being alone.
“All right,” she said.
“Really? You could come?”
“Sure. It will take me a minute, but I’ll be there.”
Sabine changed her shirt, which now had a bloodstain under the arm, and wrapped her hand up tightly with an Ace bandage until it looked like some sort of club with long, cold fingers wiggling out of the end. She didn’t know why she was going back, when only a few hours before she’d been so glad to be away, but this was new territory. There was no reason she should be expected to understand. She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.
The bar at the downtown Sheraton Grand was alive and well, late on a Saturday night. The lights were turned low and the televisions played without volume. A man in the corner picked at a piano but did not sing. Cocktail waitresses in blue suits and white blouses threaded through the tables, most of them were Sabine’s age or older, their heels mercifully low. When Dot Fetters saw her, she waved from a bar stool, and then, as if that had been insufficient, got up, went to Sabine, and hugged her. They had met, had parted, and had come together again, which by some code meant there could be physical contact.
“I want to buy you a drink,” she said, raising her voice a bit over the din of clinking glasses. “You tell me what you want.”
“Scotch,” Sabine said, naming Parsifal’s drink instead of her own.
Mrs. Fetters leaned over and spoke to the bartender, who laughed at whatever it was that Sabine couldn’t hear and nodded his head.
“This is all so much to take in,” Mrs. Fetters said. “Bertie was whipped, went right to sleep. You can do that when you’re young, but I knew I was going to be up all night.”
A man with dark eyes and expensively capped teeth brushed against Sabine, smiled, and asked for forgiveness. She ignored him and took up her drink.
“I didn’t even ask you how long you were planning to stay,” Sabine said.