It Will Come to Me (18 page)

I
t was Daphne Porter's house, of course. Ruth had been here twice before, once for a meeting of a book club out of which she immediately dropped and once for an impromptu craft fair where she bought a pair of earrings that never hung straight and a jar of apple butter because it seemed rude to leave empty-handed. And during the years when she still attended such events, she'd run into Daphne and her husband, Sidney, at concerts and art-show openings and readings.

Now she was here for the Monday morning meeting of the dean's mission statement group. She was ten minutes early, so she parked and sat in the car. This was a part of town she liked, with narrow streets and mature trees and casually maintained yards. She felt more at home here than in her own neighborhood, where standards of upkeep were so high she feared one day she'd find a
signed petition in her mailbox. Through a bay window she could see Daphne moving about in the dining room, setting the table.

Daphne—here she was now, gliding out onto the porch carrying an old-fashioned galvanized aluminum watering can—was a few years older than Ruth. She was also taller. She wore her long gray hair in a chignon, like Ruth, but more loosely and more becomingly, and she dressed like Ruth too, but somehow more convincingly. Not that she was imitating Ruth: it was quite the other way around. The effect that Daphne achieved effortlessly was exactly the one that Ruth repeatedly shot for and nearly always missed.

She watched as Daphne strode from pot to pot, watering her collection of thriving plants with an unself-conscious, unhurried grace, even now when people were due to arrive at her house at any moment. In the same situation Ruth would be dashing around distractedly, replacing the TV-guide supplement from the
Spangler Advocate
and the dog-eared collection of thrillers Ben had left on the coffee table with a display of recent issues of
Salmagundi
and
The New York Review of Books
and tossing stained throw pillows into the hall closet, all the while marking in her mind how much this behavior was at variance with her carefully cultivated sense of herself as a person who rose above appearances. And by the time guests arrived this cognitive dissonance would be buzzing and clanging so loudly inside her head that her social timing would be thrown off and things would go rapidly from bad to worse, especially if it was late enough in the day for alcohol to be served.

Daphne had never been a friend; she was too much all of a piece for Ruth to feel any real kinship with her. But neither was
she a nemesis like Barbara Bachman or any number of others. Ruth liked and admired her for her simple warmth and authentic tranquillity. Of course she also envied her, for many things—for just about everything, in fact, except for Sidney, a pipe-smoking Spenser scholar with a reputation for grabbiness in elevators. She envied Daphne her beauty, which grew more austere and wintry with the years. She envied her her house, which was a commodious, slightly worn wooden cape set far back from the street. She envied all its comfortably bohemian furnishings. She envied the semi-wild garden where Daphne grew herbs and vegetables and heirloom roses. She envied her her three grown daughters, all willowy like their mother, all devoted to her and to one another, all quietly successful in their various careers. Two of them had already produced five grandchildren. (No doubt the count had gone up since last she'd seen Daphne: she'd have to brace herself for hearing that this morning, and prepare to deliver congratulations.)

But what she envied Daphne most was the way she seemed to fully inhabit her own life. Ruth knew what it was to do that for short periods of time. A shift in the light, a change in the angle from which she surveyed her surroundings and suddenly she'd find herself on the inside, for the moment at least. But what would it be like, she asked herself as she watched Daphne shake out an area rug over the porch railing, to live there all the time? Unimaginable, especially for Ruth, who had never been inside for long and had lately taken up more or less permanent residence outside, like a feral cat.

But now Daphne had caught sight of her and was headed down the porch steps in her direction. Ruth rolled down the
car window. “Ruth,” said Daphne, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “What are you doing watching me from the car? Please come in the house and have some coffee. I made a pineapple upside-down cake.”

“It wasn't quite time,” said Ruth. “I didn't want to get in the way.”

“I'd have given you a job to do,” said Daphne, ushering her through the door and seating her at the table, which was covered with a blue-and-white batik tablecloth and set with an attractively eclectic array of Daphne's hand-thrown plates and mugs. In the center was a great crackled-enamel vase erupting with zinnias and marigolds from the garden.

“Can I do anything now?” Ruth asked.

“Nothing. It's too late. You missed your chance,” said Daphne, disappearing into the kitchen and reappearing with the cake, which she set on the table in front of Ruth. “Oh my,” said Ruth. “My mother used to make upside-down cakes, but this is like a Byzantine mosaic.” And it was.

As Daphne filled her mug with coffee, Ruth looked around. High ceilings, wide shining floorboards, Oriental rugs, books behind glass. She'd always taken Daphne's house as a standing rebuke to her own, the more so because like hers, the furnishings and atmosphere harked back to graduate-school days. But while Ruth and Ben's house was aboriginal, with its chipped saucers and lumpy futons, Sidney and Daphne's was a lovingly cared-for historical preserve. Usually the contrast caused her active pain, but today she found herself happy to be here. For once in her life, admiration had trumped envy. Her eye was pleased wherever it wandered and the temperature was tolerable enough this morning
for the air-conditioning to be turned off and the windows opened. Surely that too had something to do with this sensation of well-being and expansiveness.

“Who all is coming to this?” she asked as Daphne headed back into the kitchen. “I only got the word about it last Friday.” But apparently Daphne hadn't heard her, because she called out, “How's Isaac?” over her shoulder as she disappeared through the door.

As Daphne rustled in the kitchen, Ruth considered her options. Could she pretend she hadn't heard? Daphne would only repeat the question. Mutter something evasive? Somehow she didn't want to do that, not this morning. The backward and sideways moves both seemed blocked. Why not go forward?

“He's not good,” she called back.

“Not good?” said Daphne, returning to sit down kitty-corner to Ruth with her own mug of coffee.

Ruth hesitated. Another decision point. Why not ask? Daphne was the right person, neither friend nor enemy, and she knew everyone.

“Daphne,” she said, “tell me something. Do you know Eusebio Martinez?”

“No,” said Daphne. “I don't think I do. Who is he?”

“He's Isaac's therapist. We're supposed to talk to him this afternoon.” Daphne looked faintly puzzled, ready to hear more.

“When was the last time you saw Isaac?” Ruth asked. “When was the last time we talked about him?”

“Oh I think five, six years ago? He was just finishing high school?”

“He never finished. He never went to college. He's homeless. We haven't seen him in two years.”

A moment of shocked silence. “Oh,” said Daphne. “I'm so sorry. You must have been beside yourself.”

Beside myself, thought Ruth. That's it exactly. I've been beside myself. “To tell you the truth I don't think about it that much,” she said. “I put it in a box. Ben does too, even more than me. But Isaac keeps on with this Martinez. We're going to his office this afternoon. He says Isaac's going to be there.”

“Well that's good isn't it?” Daphne's voice broke into a warble on the word “good.”

“He was supposed to be there once before and he wasn't. We're not getting our hopes up. Actually we think he may be part of the problem. This therapist might, I mean. He just called us up out of the blue when Isaac left home. He seems to have taken over. Everything has to go through him, even the money we send Isaac every month.”

“The
money?”
said Daphne, rising to her feet and padding into the kitchen and returning with paper and a pencil. “I wonder who might know this man. Would you mind if I asked around?”

“Please,” said Ruth. “Please do.”

“What's the name again?”

“Eusebio,” said Ruth. “E U S E B I O. Eusebio Martinez.”

A stiff rap at the front door startled them both. Ruth turned to see that a small-headed elongated shadow was swaying behind the leaded glass. It was Tony Del Angelo, the playwright. Of course!

W
hen Ben reached the office at ten thirty he found it once again locked and dark, but when he opened the door and turned on the light he saw that Hayley had been here, probably
on Friday after he'd gone to the reception. She had transformed her workstation into fairyland. Fairy posters had been tacked to every wall. There was a fairy with a fishing rod perched on the tip of a crescent moon, angling for smiling stars. There was a gathering of fairies lounging and preening on the branches of a decayed tree. There was a gothic fairy in a dark cape riding on the back of a wolf. There was an infantine fairy conversing with a frog on a lily pad and a redheaded fairy executing a semipornographic squat on the lid of a jack-o’-lantern. This last one reminded him uncomfortably of Ricia Spottiswoode.

A collection of ceramic fairy figurines was displayed on a mirrored tray on the desk. Others were lined up along the shelf where Dolores once kept her radio and her paperbacks and her box of Almond Roca. The standard Lola computer screensaver—the university logo superimposed over a soft-focus avenue of live oaks—had been replaced by a blowup of Tinker Bell trailing magic dust. There was a company of plastic fairies with sequined bodices and tiny gauze skirts suspended from the ceiling on strands of thread, all twirling in the breeze from the air conditioner. There was a fairy coffee mug holding pencils fitted with fairy erasers.

What there wasn't, Ben determined after a quick inspection of the desk and its environs, was the pile of work Dolores had left for Hayley It wasn't on the fairy-occupied shelf or on the computer stand. It wasn't in any of the desk drawers. Ah, here it was, along with Friday's mail, on top of the cabinet by the window where Dolores kept computer paper and toner. The mail consisted of the usual publishers’ brochures and conference announcements and a postcard from Bruce and Sissy Federman in Majorca, showing an assortment of tapas displayed on a red tablecloth. “Off the beaten track in Cala Figuera,” Federman had scrawled diagonally. The
pile of work appeared untouched, still bound by a stout rubber band and tagged with a yellow sticky marked “Urgent.” Nothing looked too pressing. But no, here was a thick interoffice packet from the dean. Opening it, he found a stack of impenetrable SCAC material, tabulations and graphs printed in pink or green or yellow (one of his rules of thumb was that anything in color could safely be ignored), copies of letters to the dean from various state officials, congratulating her on Lola's high levels of compliance with the program directives—the kind of stuff he'd been tossing into the recycling box for a year now. But the cover letter, he saw from a quick perusal, was important. The dean was giving the faculty notice that the SCAC inspectors were expected on campus some day next week. (That meant
this
week, he realized.) They'd be talking to faculty in the halls, interviewing students, dropping in unannounced on classes. He found a sticky, a highly visible pink one, wrote out “Please Alert Faculty, Very Important” and left the letter on Hayley's desk, right in the center of the blotter where she couldn't fail to notice it.

He retreated to the door of his office, turned, and took in the fairy display once again. Call Dolores. That was the thing to do. Ask if there was any way to fire an employee. He couldn't remember a precedent, but there had to be one. He thought of Mitten-Kurz and how he'd like to walk over to her office right now and knock over some of her plants. Yes. And then he'd take that forty-pound sack of fertilizer she kept propped up in the corner and upend it over her desk.

But here was Hayley now, arriving for work at—what was it?—ten thirty-three. He'd made up his mind to confront her about her lateness, but one look at her silenced him. She was flushed, unwell. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. She had
the look of someone who'd spent a sleepless night, the look of someone so distraught she hardly knew where she was. He saw that this was not the moment to say anything about lateness or to demand she take down the fairy display or to chide her for the work she'd left undone. “Are you … ?” he began, but she had turned her back to him and was closing the door. She did this deliberately and theatrically, using both hands and throwing her back into it, as if simultaneously closing this particular door and pantomiming the closing of an imaginary door. Turning back to face him she said, “May I have a word with you?” in a dangerously flat monotone.

“Of course,” said Ben.

“A
private
word?” said Hayley. “In your
office?”

“Certainly.” Ben led the way. There was nobody else around, so any word she had with him would be private by definition, but never mind; there was no reason not to oblige. He ushered her into the office, sat down behind his desk, gestured at a chair. Hayley shook her head. She stood in front of the desk, head lowered, hands twisting. “A problem?” he asked. “Something I can help you with?”

Hayley's lower lip was quivering. Tears were leaking from her eyes. “Everything all right?” Ben asked stupidly, standing up to push the Kleenex box in her direction. She examined it blankly, as if it were a brick or a loaf of bread, then seemed to recognize it. She took a tissue, wadded it tightly in her fist. “She is the snippiest, rudest …” She was weeping openly now. Tears were actually popping from the corners of her eyes. Projectile weeping; Isaac used to do that. “She has no regard,” she wailed. “She has no respect.”

Her daughter? Who was this? “Who is this?” Ben asked.

“Rhoda…”
She exhaled the word in a voiceless whisper.