views from the mullioned windows revealed trees and shrubs of a dense, lush green.
She heard a loud banging at the back door, so ferocious and unexpected that she jumped. She returned to the kitchen, where she saw Mr. Ishiguro’s face pressed against the glass. She opened the door, awaiting an explanation. He was angry and his agitated English was gibberish to her. The more she shrugged and shook her head, the more infuriated he became. Finally he turned abruptly and motioned for her to follow. He set off down the path, walking so rapidly she had to trot to keep up with him. Turning a corner, she slipped and caught herself, but not before her foot skidded off the stepping stone and onto the countless parallel rake marks meant to quiet the mind. Nora laughed. She couldn’t help herself. It always struck her as funny when other people fell. There was something comical about the complete loss of dignity, the flailing attempt to recover one’s balance. Even animals suffered embarrassment when they slipped and fell. She’d seen cats and dogs stumble and then shoot a quick look around to see if anyone had noticed.
At the sound of her laughter, Mr. Ishiguro turned and lashed out at her, yelling and shaking a fist. She babbled an apology, trying to compose herself, but a part of her had disconnected again. Why should she put up with the incoherent ravings of a yard man, for god’s sake, whose only purpose was to maintain a stone gray landscape created to prevent the house from burning down. Laughter bubbled up once more and she faked a coughing fit to cover the sound. If he caught her laughing again, there was no telling what he would do.
Another ten feet along the path, Mr. Ishiguro stopped and pointed repeatedly, expressing his disapproval in a rapid series of what she took to be insults. On the ground there was a pile of animal feces. The compact deposit of excrement sat in the center of a composition of white pebbles he’d labored over the week before. It was coyote scat. She’d seen the pair for the past month, a big gray-and-yellow male with a smaller rust-colored female, picking their way along one of the trails, their bushy tails held down. They’d apparently established a den close by and regarded the neighborhood as one big cafeteria. The two coyotes were thin and wraithlike, and their posture suggested stealth and shame, though Nora thought they must be deeply satisfied with life. Coyotes weren’t fussy about what they ate. Squirrels, rabbits, carrion, insects, even fruit in a pinch. A number of neighborhood cats had vanished, most noticeably on nights when the howling and yipping of the pair suggested a hunting free-for-all. The male wasn’t above scaling the wall to drink from her reflecting pool, and Nora wished him well. Channing, on the other hand, had twice gone out with his handgun, shouting and waving his arms, threatening to shoot. The coyote, unimpressed, had loped across the patio, leaped the wall, and disappeared into the scrub. The female had been conspicuously absent for the past few weeks, and Nora suspected she had a litter of pups tucked away. Having watched Mr. Ishiguro obsess over the placement of every stone in the garden, she could see how a coyote taking an unceremonious dump on his path was the equivalent of an interspecies declaration of war.
“Get a hose and squirt it down,” she said when he paused for breath.
He couldn’t have understood a word of this, but something in her irrepressibly jocular tone set him off again, and she was treated to yet another tirade. She held up a hand. “Would you
Mr. Ishiguro wasn’t finished with his complaint, but before he launched in again, she cut him off. “HEY, you fuck! I wasn’t the one who crapped on your fucking rocks so get out of my face.”
To her astonishment, he laughed, repeating the expletive several times as though committing it to memory.
“Oh, forget it,” she said. She turned on her heel, went back into the house, and banged the door shut behind her. Within minutes her head was pounding. She hadn’t driven ninety miles to take abuse. She climbed the stairs and went into her bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet in search of Advil, which was sitting on the bottom shelf. She shook two into her palm and swallowed them with water. She studied herself in the mirror, marveling that recent revelations hadn’t altered her outward appearance. She looked the same as she always did. Her gaze shifted to the wall behind her and she turned with a fleeting sense of disbelief. Thelma had left a monstrous brassiere hanging over the towel warmer just outside Nora’s shower door. Good god, was Thelma staying here? She’d apparently hand-laundered the garment, which featured stiff, oversize lace cones sufficiently reinforced and buttressed to support the weight of two torpedoes. Nora was appalled at the casual appropriation of her space, though why she bothered to react at all was a question worth examining.
Carefully, she surveyed the room. There were signs of Thelma everywhere. If Nora had hoped for evidence, here it was. She looked down at the silver tray that rested on her countertop, feeling her lips purse as she picked up her hairbrush now threaded with Thelma’s dye-coarsened red hair. She opened one drawer after another. Thelma had helped herself to a little bit of everything. Cold creams, Q-tips, cotton balls, expensive colognes. Nora made a point of keeping track of what she used in this house and what she needed to replace. She could have recited, item by item, the exact status and placement of her toiletries.
She checked the cabinet under the sink. Thelma must not have expected anyone else to examine the contents of the wastebasket, where she’d tossed the paper wrapper and lollipop stick from a tampon she’d inserted. Cheery news, that. At least the sow wasn’t pregnant. The cleaning ladies came on Monday. Thelma must have intended to remove all traces of her stay by then.
Nora went straight to her walk-in closet and flung open the double doors. To the left, there was a climate- controlled closet-within-a-closet where she kept her cocktail dresses and her full-length gowns. The room was intended for fur coats, but since Nora owned none, she used the space for her wardrobe of designer creations, elegant classics by Jean Desses, John Cavanagh, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. She’d put together her collection by patiently scouring estate sales and vintage clothing stores. The dresses had been bargains when she bought them, picked over and ignored in favor of what was trendy at the time. Now the interest in early Christian Dior and Coco Chanel had created a secondary market where prices were through the roof. A few of the gowns were too large for her now-the size 6’s, 8’s, and 10’s she’d worn before the weight came off. She’d considered having them altered but felt that resizing would affect the integrity of the design.
She slid dress after dress aside, working her way down the line. When she found the white strapless Gucci, she removed it, still on its hanger, and inspected it carefully. Some of the beading had come loose, crystals and sequins missing, and there was now a tiny split in the seam where Thelma’s fat ass had stressed the threads until they popped. She held the fabric to her nose, picking up the lingering musk of Thelma’s perspiration. Of course, she’d been nervous. She’d co-opted Nora’s husband. She’d helped herself to Nora’s clothes, her jewelry, and anything else she fancied. Thelma was impersonating a woman of class, and she’d gone through a major bout of flop sweat because she knew what a fake she was. For the first time, Nora felt rage and she leveled it at Channing. How had he tolerated this trollop, this corpulent interloper, stepping into her shoes?
She returned the Gucci to the hanging rod. She could see now that Thelma had been trying on a number of her cocktail dresses, perhaps debating which of them to wear that night. Two she’d rejected, tossing them over the back of the velvet slipper chair. She must have realized she had no prayer of squeezing into the 4’s. Instead, she pulled out Nora’s three Hararis, one of which she hadn’t yet had occasion to wear. Nora could picture the scene. While Thelma pondered her choices, she’d hung them on the retractable caddy Nora used for clothes when they first came back from the dry cleaners. The Hararis were more forgiving than the more form-fitting of Nora’s clothes, diaphanous layers of silk, in pale smoky blues and coffee tones, overlaid with gray. Each ensemble consisted of multiple pieces: a body slip, a vest that flowed from the shoulder to an irregular hem below. The separates were interchangeable, meant to be worn in varied combinations. There was something sensuous about the way the fabric settled against the skin, transparent in places so that the body was both disguised and revealed. Maybe Thelma thought her sagging, cellulite-ridden arm flaps would look especially fetching in such a getup.
Nora removed six hangers from the rod and folded the dresses across her left arm. She removed another handful and laid them on top of the first. She carried them downstairs and out to the car, loading first the trunk and then the backseat. The gowns were surprisingly heavy, well constructed, many of them so densely embellished with crystals and beads that the weight of them was palpable. It took her six trips before she’d successfully stripped her closet of all her evening wear: full-length gowns, cocktail dresses, the entire collection of haute couture fashions in every shape and size. The provenance didn’t matter. Nora removed every garment that might have been at all suitable for the dinner dance that night.
It cheered her enormously to imagine the sequence of events. Thelma and Channing would leave the office early, maybe 5:00 instead of the usual 7:00 P.M. The drive home would take an hour or more at the height of the rush hour traffic, which would be particularly heavy along Pacific Coast Highway. By the time they arrived at the house, it would be 6:00 or 6:30, and all the nearby dress shops would be closed. Maybe they’d have a drink before getting dressed. Maybe they’d make love and then take a shower together. Eventually Thelma would turn her porcine attention to what she’d be wearing that night. Buoyed at the prospects, she’d fling open the double doors
