abruptness and left it at that:
There’s no use my staying any longer. Iris is a riddle, and your son won’t budge
. She dropped the envelope into a mail slot; they had begun to call her flight. The overseas stamp was big and showy. It would be postmarked Paris, as it must be. To take the letter with her, to send it from another city, was perilous.
She had exchanged her ticket for an earlier date — but also for a different destination. Marvin was not to know this; it was a recklessness. A whim. Or not a whim; it drove her. A handful of days remained before she was obliged to breathe the fetid airlessness of her classroom — Laura impatient, chafing, waiting to be freed from those hulking students with their long sideburns and beginning mustaches, how they must be hooting at Madame Defarge and her knitting, caterwauling in staccato falsettos
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done
, swiping their necks, and how was Laura handling it? — Mrs. Bienenfeld, show us how it works, the guillotine, come on, show us, show us on Charlie! Poor Laura, was she pullingit off, staring down that mob of overgrown boys cavorting in their seats?
Paris had been hurtful; they had treated her badly. Their rebuffs and mystifications. But Bea knew now what Iris knew; they knew it together. A secret no more — Bea was carrying it with her. She had the power to divulge it or not to divulge it: either way, it was power.
The windows were black, the shades pulled down. Many of the passengers were asleep, their faces turned childlike under the dim cabin lights. The body of the plane vibrated like a tuning fork, obedient to the pulsing of the great engine quartet. In a matter of hours they would be escaping the night, outrunning it to cross into the ruddy seam of late afternoon. The shades would snap open, a dawdling finger of sun would wake the sleepers, and far beneath, as the plane’s belly lowered, a famous ocean would rise toward them — not the homebound Atlantic, at whose lip lay New York. They were landing in California.
20
I T WAS ANOTHER country. Deep summer ruled autumn. Women strolled in the streets half dressed, in halters and shorts, with pearl-painted toenails peering from high-heeled sandals. The smell of frying things flooded out of eateries and greased the air. Streams of cars on ribbons of highways: Los Angeles haphazard and fragmented, as if an entire city had been dropped from the sky to be broken into shards and scatterings, the pieces flung miles apart. She had expected mountains, blue cones merging into a gray horizon. Instead, only these shards of towns with their Old World names and their New World obstreperousness.
The Suite Eyre Spa: an English manor set in an English garden. California! — where everything was a replica of somewhere else. The parking lot was hidden behind a stand of palm trees; abutting it a long lawn fenced by rose-mobbed trellises, its grass so shockingly green that it looked newly painted. Pools of flower beds wound artlessly through, as if a wild growth of peonies and zinnias had sprouted of themselves. Oak benches were dispersed among them, and these too pretended to have aged naturally in their soil. And beyond, the manor with its six white Georgian pillars and broad shadowy porch lined with cushioned wicker lounge chairs and urns over-flowing with bougainvillea. But no one walked in the grounds or loitered on the benches or waited on the porch. A sanatorium in the hush of a communal indoor doze; or a flock of rich men’s wives under a spell.
She passed a reception desk — no one was there, though a half-full coffee cup rested on its blotter — and then moved on through a corridor of doors, some shut, many open. Women sleeping. Medicated into torpor, self-lulled into immobility. The toxin of despair. Impulse may have brought her here; yet impulse was the frail carapace of what felt long calculated. Or if not calculated, then stored and readied. Her motive was
There’s no use my staying any longer. Iris is a riddle, and your son won’t budge
. She dropped the envelope into a mail slot; they had begun to call her flight. The overseas stamp was big and showy. It would be postmarked Paris, as it must be. To take the letter with her, to send it from another city, was perilous.
She had exchanged her ticket for an earlier date — but also for a different destination. Marvin was not to know this; it was a recklessness. A whim. Or not a whim; it drove her. A handful of days remained before she was obliged to breathe the fetid airlessness of her classroom — Laura impatient, chafing, waiting to be freed from those hulking students with their long sideburns and beginning mustaches, how they must be hooting at Madame Defarge and her knitting, caterwauling in staccato falsettos
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done
, swiping their necks, and how was Laura handling it? — Mrs. Bienenfeld, show us how it works, the guillotine, come on, show us, show us on Charlie! Poor Laura, was she pullingit off, staring down that mob of overgrown boys cavorting in their seats?
Paris had been hurtful; they had treated her badly. Their rebuffs and mystifications. But Bea knew now what Iris knew; they knew it together. A secret no more — Bea was carrying it with her. She had the power to divulge it or not to divulge it: either way, it was power.
The windows were black, the shades pulled down. Many of the passengers were asleep, their faces turned childlike under the dim cabin lights. The body of the plane vibrated like a tuning fork, obedient to the pulsing of the great engine quartet. In a matter of hours they would be escaping the night, outrunning it to cross into the ruddy seam of late afternoon. The shades would snap open, a dawdling finger of sun would wake the sleepers, and far beneath, as the plane’s belly lowered, a famous ocean would rise toward them — not the homebound Atlantic, at whose lip lay New York. They were landing in California.
20
I T WAS ANOTHER country. Deep summer ruled autumn. Women strolled in the streets half dressed, in halters and shorts, with pearl-painted toenails peering from high-heeled sandals. The smell of frying things flooded out of eateries and greased the air. Streams of cars on ribbons of highways: Los Angeles haphazard and fragmented, as if an entire city had been dropped from the sky to be broken into shards and scatterings, the pieces flung miles apart. She had expected mountains, blue cones merging into a gray horizon. Instead, only these shards of towns with their Old World names and their New World obstreperousness.
The Suite Eyre Spa: an English manor set in an English garden. California! — where everything was a replica of somewhere else. The parking lot was hidden behind a stand of palm trees; abutting it a long lawn fenced by rose-mobbed trellises, its grass so shockingly green that it looked newly painted. Pools of flower beds wound artlessly through, as if a wild growth of peonies and zinnias had sprouted of themselves. Oak benches were dispersed among them, and these too pretended to have aged naturally in their soil. And beyond, the manor with its six white Georgian pillars and broad shadowy porch lined with cushioned wicker lounge chairs and urns over-flowing with bougainvillea. But no one walked in the grounds or loitered on the benches or waited on the porch. A sanatorium in the hush of a communal indoor doze; or a flock of rich men’s wives under a spell.
She passed a reception desk — no one was there, though a half-full coffee cup rested on its blotter — and then moved on through a corridor of doors, some shut, many open. Women sleeping. Medicated into torpor, self-lulled into immobility. The toxin of despair. Impulse may have brought her here; yet impulse was the frail carapace of what felt long calculated. Or if not calculated, then stored and readied. Her motive was
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