Somebody Else's Music(13)

It was because of the way she felt about cars that Maris was staying with Belinda Hart, and it was because she was staying with Belinda Hart that she saw Betsy get out of the big green Mercedes parked at the curb in front of English Drugs. Obviously, Maris thought, Betsy didn’t realize that English now had a parking lot out in back. Maris heard a rustle in the apartment behind her. Belinda was coming out of the bathroom at the back of the kitchen. This apartment was worse than the one Maris had in New York. It had more square footage in absolute terms, but it was much more cramped, and its claustrophobic airlessness was not helped by Belinda’s mania for knickknacks. The walls were covered with fake needlework samplers, trumpeting inanities. He prayeth best who loveth best/All creatures great and small, one of them said in ornate script made of navy-blue thread to contrast with the faux-natural linen background. The verse was surrounded by kittens, puppies, and birds, frolicking in fields of tiny flowers. The tables were full of fake Limoges porcelain and knockoffs of Hummel figurines: white boxes trimmed in gold and scattered with painted purple violets; three-inch-tall goat girls wearing dirndls and carrying pails. The only thing that was missing was a statue of the Virgin in a grotto—but of course that would have to be missing, since Belinda was a Methodist.

“Look,” Maris said, pointing toward the window next to the only dining table in the place. Of course, Maris thought, her own apartment had no room for a table of any kind, but that didn’t really count, because it was in Manhattan.

Belinda went to the window and looked out. “Is that Betsy Wetsy?” She sounded startled. “She’s so incredibly thin.”

“She works out nine hours a week. We’ve even got a room full of exercise equipment in the office so that she can work out there when she doesn’t have time to do it in Connecticut. She hates gyms.”

“God, she was bad at gym in high school. Do you remember?” Belinda pressed her face closer to the glass. “Still,” she said.

“Still what?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought she’d look more like herself.”

“Meaning what?” Maris said.

Belinda backed away from the window and sat down in one of the other two chairs. Down on Grandview Avenue, there was no longer any sign of Betsy or the two boys. Belinda bit her lip.

“I’ve seen pictures of her, of course,” she said, “and I’ve seen her on television, but somehow I thought that when I saw her in person, she’d look more like herself. You know. Sort of lumpy and … whatever. Sort of gray.”

“She doesn’t look gray. She can manage to look pretty damned spectacular when she wants to make the effort, which she usually doesn’t.”

“Oh,” Belinda said. She tapped her fingers against the tabletop. The top was peeling along the edges, much the way Belinda’s nail polish was peeling along the sides of her nails.

“Well?” Maris said.

“Emma said the same thing. That she didn’t look like you’d think she would, when you saw her in person. Emma and George saw her somewhere, in England, I don’t remember. Emma didn’t even tell me about it until last week. I don’t understand people sometimes. The only thing is, well—”

“What?”

“Well,” Belinda went on, looking stubborn. “It might not work. This thing. I mean, if she’s like that, and not like we remember her, then it might not work. So maybe we shouldn’t try it. Because she’s different.”

Maris looked into her cup of coffee, the pale coffee she had made from freeze-dried stuff out of a jar that was all Belinda kept for coffee. She would have to find a way out to a decent grocery store to pick up some beans and a grinder. Made like this, the coffee tasted too much like gin, which wasn’t supposed to have a taste, but did. She was not surprised at Belinda’s wavering. She had expected something of the kind, from all of them, because they really had no idea what they were dealing with. They all thought they could go back to 1969 and behave as if nothing had ever happened.

“Listen,” she told Belinda. “She hasn’t really changed. Not the way you think. It’s all an act.”

“It can’t all be an act,” Belinda said seriously. “She really does look like that. She can’t be doing it with mirrors.”

“But she is doing it with mirrors,” Maris said. “That whole attitude, that thing she’s got of not giving a damn what anybody thinks, it’s all an act. She cares just as much now as she ever did. She cares so much, it makes her sick.”

“Well,” Belinda said dubiously, looking out the window at the Mercedes again. “Maybe she cares about people like Jimmy Card and, you know, those people she’s with on CNN. George Stephanopolous. Like that. That doesn’t mean she’s going to care about us.”