The Dissident Page 15

  “We have fresh-squeezed juice,” she told Emily.

  Emily went to the sink and washed her hands. She stooped and wiped her knees, where Spock had lavished his affection.

  “So of course we do have plain oranges,” Cece conceded. “If that’s all you want?”

  “That would be perfect.” Emily smiled, and Cece suddenly remembered the girl’s mother: Felice Alderman, an angular woman with a beach club tan who organized the Christmas Wassail Party, a traditional fund-raising event for parents. Last year there had been a debate as to the appropriateness of a wassail party at a nonsectarian school. (St. Anselm’s had discarded its religious affiliation after World War II, although it was not until the late 1970s that the school had admitted its first Jewish students.) Emily’s mother was of the opinion that abolishing the wassail party was “politically correct nonsense.” In fact what she had said was, “Mr. Alderman can’t stand this politically correct nonsense.”

  “I just remembered that I know your parents,” Cece said. “Felice and Tad—is that right?”

  Emily rolled her eyes. “Of course you know Mom. She’s always fucking around that school—pardon my French.”

  The girls looked at each other and cracked up.

  “We would always say that in France,” Olivia said, through giggles: “Pardon my French.”

  Emily recovered her composure first. “Sorry, Mrs. Travers. I adore Mom. But she really needs to find something to do with herself.”

  Olivia shot her mother a nervous look. But of course Emily didn’t know that Cece was about to start fucking around St. Anselm’s on a regular basis herself.

  “I’m going to go out and feed Fionnula,” Cece said. “Would you mind giving Freud some lettuce, when you get a chance?”

  “Freud?” Emily said.

  Cece was sorry she’d mentioned it, although you couldn’t censor everything. At least once in every conversation you were going to be embarrassing to your children: it was inevitable.

  “Freud is a rabbit,” Olivia muttered. “My dad is a shrink. The rabbit is supposed to be my brother’s responsibility, but Max never has to do anything.”

  “Your brother is still asleep,” Cece said. “It would be nice for you to do it this once.”

  “My brother is grounded,” Olivia told Emily, evidently relieved to be off the subject of pets.

  “For what?”

  Olivia glanced at her mother. “Going to a party.”

  Cece could see that her daughter would have liked to tell the whole story to her friend, and probably would, once Cece was out of earshot. She wouldn’t have minded so much if Olivia had needed comfort—if it was her sorrow for her brother, or even a desire for sympathy, that had made her want to confide in Emily. But it was not. It was because the story of the gun was sensational. Olivia had something she knew her friend would find interesting, and she wanted to impress Emily at her brother’s expense.

  “Which party? Dave Bemish’s?”

  “You wouldn’t know,” Olivia said. “I think it was in Echo Park.”

  “Your brother goes to parties in Echo Park?”

  “No,” Cece couldn’t help interjecting. “This was a one-time thing, and he was certainly not supposed to be there.”

  “His girlfriend is from there,” Olivia explained. Cece was surprised to hear an edge of pride in her daughter’s voice.

  “Wow,” said Emily. “Ça c’est vraiment le barrio.”

  Cece would’ve liked to have heard the rest of the conversation, in all of its dazzling multiculturalism, but she was afraid that if she stayed, she might commit some truly unpardonable offense—such as asking the girls what they knew about Hispanic gangs, unlicensed handguns, and the possibility of a white kid from Beverly Hills with a history of depression getting mixed up in one.

  Instead she gathered Fionnula’s vegetables (remains that Lupe collected during the week, and left in a bowl in the fridge) and put them in her gardening basket. She put on her clogs and canvas gloves, which were useful for handling the bush baby, and took her shears from the shelf outside the back door, in case the roses needed attention.

  “I’ll see you girls later,” Cece said. She kept her voice cheerful, to conceal a sudden onset of emotion. “Help yourselves to everything.”

  25.

  THE ROSE GARDEN ENCOMPASSED THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF THE backyard. It was secluded on three sides by the ailing eugenia, connected to the lawn by a short set of stone steps. Cece hadn’t been particularly fond of roses when they bought the house, and had clipped them from a sense of duty: the garden was already mature, and it would’ve been crazy to let it go. Soon, however, she found herself spending more time pruning the existing plants, and even putting in new varieties, until the rose garden became her special province. (They had always had Chinese tea roses, and in her last order she’d thrown in a Tipsy Imperial Concubine, on a whim.) From the top of the steps she could see the pool house: two of the blinds were raised, which meant that Phil was probably awake, lying in bed. She thought about knocking and telling him there was coffee, but Phil wasn’t very sociable in the mornings; she guessed he would prefer to stay clear of the house until the girls were gone.

  The bush baby must have hidden herself among the ferns, because the rabbit hutch appeared empty. Gordon had built the hutch years ago, from plywood and chicken wire, and Cece had planted the ferns, so that there would be places for the bunnies to play and hide. It was an enormous space for one animal; if only Freud weren’t so aggressive, she could have put Fionnula in there with him. Instead she had (somewhat guiltily) moved the rabbit to a smaller cage in her already overcrowded study, reserving the leafy paradise of the hutch for the bush baby.

  “Fionnula,” she called, kneeling outside the cage. “Here, sweetie—are you hungry?”

  “Good morning.”

  Cece started: the dissident was standing right behind her.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  Mr. Yuan’s hair was pulled back in its customary ponytail, and he was wearing khaki pants and a white button-down shirt. She had noticed that Mr. Yuan usually wore Western clothes around the house; it was only when he went out for his walks or to the library that he changed into his Chinese costume.

  “She doesn’t seem to want to come out this morning,” Cece said. “I’m just going to leave this for her.”

  “Allow me.” Mr. Yuan put down his empty mug, and knelt beside Cece. The mug, from a seminar Gordon had attended last year at Stanford, said “Shrink Rap” in red letters across the side. She wondered if the dissident got the joke.

  “I think I should do it,” Cece said, “since I have the gloves. Phil warned me she might scratch.”

  “You take good care of your pets,” Yuan Zhao said.

  “Gordon and I are both fond of animals,” she said. “It’s one of the things we have in common.”

  “Is Dr. Travers at home?”

  Gordon had been taking Mr. Yuan to the library in the mornings, where he was doing research for his project, and picking him up on his way home from UCLA. Although the university had much better collections, Mr. Yuan had insisted that he preferred the public library. Gordon had a theory that the freedom of information represented by a first-class American research university was initially intimidating to someone who had lived under communism for so long. Personally Cece thought that anyone would’ve preferred the public library, with its big windows and low shelves for children, its friendly volunteer librarians and new turquoise-and-gold-tiled dome, which looked like a Disney version of The Thousand and One Nights. By contrast, UCLA’s grim study carrels and intimidating stacks—did anyone really understand the Dewey decimal system?—were much less appealing.

  “I’m so sorry,” Cece said. “Gordon isn’t back from tennis yet.”

  “Never mind,” said Mr. Yuan. “I can walk.”

  “Oh no,” said Cece. “It’s too far. I would drive
you myself—it’s only that I don’t want to leave Max alone.” She glanced toward the lawn. The girls had finished their meager breakfast, and were heading for the pool. “It isn’t that I don’t trust him,” she told Mr. Yuan. “But it’s tempting for him to go out now that he’s grounded. And sometimes I wonder if Gordon even notices—” She stopped, embarrassed. She knew she shouldn’t be complaining about her husband to their guest, but there was something about Mr. Yuan that made Cece want to confide in him. Maybe it was only that he had to listen harder, in order to understand what she was saying.

  “What do Chinese parents do, to punish their children?”

  “Sometimes they tell them to stay at home to study,” Mr. Yuan said. “Of course if a child knows that he’s making his parents unhappy, he’ll feel guilty, and want to stay at home in any case.”

  “That’s the difference,” Cece said. “Our children are taught that they have to make their parents unhappy, that it’s part of growing up.”

  The dissident took a step down, so that they were standing on the same level. Mr. Yuan was only an inch or two taller than she was; although he was too slight to be conventionally handsome, at least in an American way, there was something pleasing about the symmetry of his features. His presence was comforting. It seemed possible that people who were leading particularly honest, clearheaded lives would radiate peace: a kind of human feng shui.

  “You know what—Phil can keep an eye on him. It’s not asking much, is it? I’ll go talk to him. You stay right there. Can I get you anything else for breakfast? A muffin?”

  “I’ve had my tea,” the dissident said. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  Cece hurried down the steps, reflecting that the blueberry muffins were going to waste. She put her gardening tools by the back door, and was about to go around to the pool house, when she saw Phil in the kitchen. He was standing by the French doors, drinking coffee. He turned around as if she’d startled him, and then smiled broadly.

  “This is great coffee,” he said.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I almost came to see whether you were awake—”

  “You did?”

  “But the girls—are they still out there?”

  “I think so.” Phil moved away from the window.

  “I’m going to drive Mr. Yuan to the library. I wonder if you could just keep an eye on Max?”

  “Isn’t he a little old for that?”

  “He’s still grounded,” Cece said. “I just want to make sure he doesn’t go out.”

  “Is Gordo—”

  “Here? No, he’s at tennis. He’ll be home soon, but I can’t count on him. For discipline,” Cece added quickly. “He grounds him, and then he buys him presents. Have you noticed that? A Bose stereo to replace the one Max—sold, and now this video camera.”

  “He sold his stereo?”

  When the officer from the MPU had asked where Max had gotten the money to buy the Beretta Cougar handgun, they had had to tell him about the missing stereo. The officer had smiled faintly, noting it down. Clearly, to those policemen, the fact that she and Gordon had money made their near-tragedy into something more like a farce.

  Cece didn’t feel like explaining any of that to Phil. “Before the accident,” she said.

  “He’s not grounded because of that?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “No. It was for going to a party the other night. Jasmine’s cousin’s party. Jasmine is his girlfriend.”

  “I remember you mentioned her.”

  “She’s very sweet,” Cece continued. “But the cousin is an adult. There’s a mother and some sort of stepfather at home—he sounds like bad news—and of course there’s no supervision. I understand about the freeway project: it’s wonderful for kids like Jasmine. But to expose Max to this kind of lifestyle” (her voice broke, she couldn’t help it) “when he’s already at risk? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Phil left the window and came around to Cece. He put his hands on her shoulders, and bent his head almost to her level. “I’ll watch him,” he said softly. “Trust me.”

  “Oh, look at me,” Cece said. “It’s not even noon.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “You can’t cry before noon. It’s…” Cece wiped her eyes.

  Phil squeezed her shoulders; for a second all of Cece’s worries seemed to be concentrated in the small area that Phil was authoritatively soothing. “I didn’t know that rule,” he said.

  “You’re barely awake before noon.”

  “That’s because there’s a high risk of crying,” Phil said. “Especially if you go outside. Before noon is when you’re most likely to see effective people scurrying around. It can be very depressing.”

  “I know what you mean,” Cece said.

  “Sit down,” said Phil casually, as if the two of them sitting in her kitchen while he gave her a backrub was a normal, everyday thing. “But you are one of the effective people.”

  “You must be getting me confused with someone else.”

  “Impossible,” said Phil lightly. The feeling of Phil’s hands on her shoulders was amazing. It allowed her to postpone thinking about anything else. “You’re one of the most effective people I know. This morning you’ve made these muffins, which are delicious, done some gardening—”

  “I was only feeding Fionnula. She didn’t come out, though—I hope she isn’t sick.”

  “And taken care of a menagerie,” Phil continued. “A burden, I might add, that’s been thrust on you by your inconsiderate relatives—”

  “I love Fionnula!” Cece said. “She’s not a burden. And anyway, that’s different from doing important things.”

  “What’s more important than taking care of your family?” Phil said.

  Cece felt the warm rush of having your deepest beliefs confirmed by others. “That’s what I think,” she said. “But everyone—” She heard the door at the top of the outside stairs open. Mr. Yuan was coming down.

  Cece stepped away. “Thank you—that relieves a lot of tension. Did you know that in China massage is a part of the traditional medicine, as opposed to just a luxury? Blind people are trained to do it, from an early age.”

  “Why blind people?”

  “Maybe because—” but she stopped. Was this a conversation she could have with Phil if Gordon had been in the room? Maybe that was a good barometer. “I’m afraid Mr. Yuan is waiting,” she said. “I’ll just tell the girls I’m going.”

  She could feel Phil watching her as she struggled with the stiff latch on the old French doors, and as she made her way across the lawn. The idea that he could still be attracted to her was unreasonable. He’d come back to L.A. to resolve the dilemma of a woman who was desperate to be with him—a woman seven years younger than Cece. So it was important that she not slip into some kind of old pattern with him, of familiarities. What was familiar wasn’t necessarily good: that was something Cece had learned from Gordon. “Chemistry is pathology,” Gordon sometimes said, only half jokingly. He meant that if people were attracted to each other right away, it was probably because each fit into an emotional pattern familiar to the other. She often wondered how Gordon thought about the two of them, when he said things like that.

  The girls were lying on deck chairs on the opposite side of the pool. They had discarded their pajamas (such as they were) on the deck. The sun was so bright that at first Cece thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. She shaded them with her hand, until there could be no mistake—Olivia was lying on her stomach and Emily was on her back, but neither girl was wearing the top half of her bathing suit.

  “I think he’s kind of cute,” Emily was saying.

  “You’re a nympho!” Olivia twisted her head around when she heard Cece approaching, and then quickly put her face back down in the cushion. “Hi Mom,” she muttered.

  “Of course it’s gross to you,” Emily said. “Hi Mrs. Travers. This is a great pool.”

  Emily’s breasts, medium-sized, with the ela
sticity of only the very young, were oiled and brown, without any evidence of tan lines. Cece suppressed the urge to turn her back (the same impulse as her daughter’s?) and talk to the girls that way. She felt that Emily could see her discomfort, and was enjoying it. She noticed that the pool-house door was slightly ajar. Obviously, Phil had walked right by them.

  There were several things Cece wanted to say, but somehow none of those came out. “What is gross?”

  “What?” said Emily, although Cece had been talking to her daughter.

  “You said that something was ‘gross.’”

  “Oh.” Emily pushed a pair of white plastic sunglasses back on her head. She was wearing a very small, black bikini bottom, for which she had obviously been professionally waxed. “Olivia thinks it’s gross that I said her uncle was cute.”

  “Did you two speak with Phil?”

  “Is that his name?” Emily asked. “He didn’t introduce himself. He sure had a lot of questions, though.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “He asked us whether we’d had breakfast yet,” Emily said. “Then he asked what we normally had for breakfast in Paris. How we got around. Did we go to discos? Did we have boyfriends? What kind of classes did we take—did we like The History and Culture of Francophone Africa, or did we think it was”—she looked at Olivia—“what?”

  “A politically correct nod to the postcolonial perspective,” Olivia told the cushion.

  An involuntary shiver started between her legs, and ran through Cece’s body. It was unmistakably sexual, and it was looking at Emily’s body that had done it—looking, not as herself, but as Phil.

  “Does your brother live here now?” Emily asked politely.

  “My husband’s brother,” Cece said. “No, he’s just passing through.”

  “Really?” Olivia said.

  How could the child she remembered—a toddler, eating Cheerios from a plastic baggie—have transformed herself into the tanned, athletic body on the chair? Why hadn’t there been any warning? For many years, Olivia had been the same little person; only the wrapping had changed. Then all of a sudden the inside was different—or if not different, then impenetrable to Cece, so that all kinds of things could be going on in there, and she would have no idea.