by Sue Miller
Somewhat less frequently than once a week I’d go in and have a cup of coffee with Dr. Fisher, as he’d asked me to. “Check in every now and then,” he’d said. “You’ll probably need the human contact, and I’d like to hear how you’re doing.”
Usually we talked about everything but the rats. He had a long narrow office with windows at one end, which I sat facing. A sycamore tree grew outside, its spiny pendants the only life left on it by late November. Unless the overhead lights were on, which they rarely were (they hummed—Dr. Fisher said he felt nagged by the noise), I couldn’t see Dr. Fisher’s face well while we talked. But in his gentle mournful voice he’d probe my life, ask about Molly, my playing, how my holidays had gone, whether I’d seen Ursula lately. And I was attracted to his voice. It was like a caress. When I thought of him, I didn’t think of how he looked, I realized. I thought of his dim office, the sycamore tree, his sad eager questions. He was married, I found out. He had three children, two in college. Ursula told me that his wife was an alcoholic, that she was notorious for disappearing noisily with other men at departmental gatherings.
Once he said to me, “You young women are so competent, it’s hard to see what you need men for at all.” I had a revelation, then, of how I must appear to him, and it shocked me. Young? Competent? I would have used neither of those words to describe myself, but when he said them, I saw how they could be true, and they became part of who I felt I was. But even more important was the sense they gave me that I occupied some space in Dr. Fisher’s mind, that he thought about me when I wasn’t there. I discovered that he’d read a short story in The New Yorker that I’d mentioned to him, that he’d gone to hear a pianist I’d praised. He’d saved a bad review of her performance, too, clipped it out of the Globe and gave it to me. Had I seen it? What did I think?
To feel you have life in someone else’s imagination is to feel a kind of intimacy with them. I grew to rely on my sense of connection with him that fall and winter. His voice always rose with pleasure when I’d open his door. “Oh, Anna, it’s you,” he would say, and he’d hurry to clear the coats and books off the extra chair. “Come in, please, just a minute here. I was hoping I’d see you soon.” I knew it was the truth, and I knew Dr. Fisher cared for me in some vague and dreamy way that would never require any action on his part, any response on mine.
And I would have settled for my life as it was at that stage: sitting in his darkening office talking our inconsequential talk, making music, running the rats, listening to my students, looking at Molly, hearing her stories of life at the center, touching myself in my room in the morning. It all seemed tentative and unimpassioned; but I was tired of passion, of certitude, I thought, not realizing I’d never really felt either. I told myself I could go on like this forever. And I believed I could, I would, until I met Leo and my world ripped apart.
CHAPTER FIVE
I READ SOMEWHERE that the blind who once were sighted see again in their dreams, and are grateful for the fleeting return of the faces of those they love. I can remember waking from dreams as a child, happy dreams in which I had things I wanted—sometimes forbidden foods or money. Occasionally I would be playing the piano, making impossibly beautiful music. For a moment at the return of consciousness I would believe so powerfully in the dream that I could still feel the sticky coins in my hand, I could still hear the accomplished music, taste the warm rush of saliva that filled my mouth. The sense of loss on awakening those mornings was wrenching, the grief at coming back to my impoverished, hungry self. But what I feel when I dream of Leo, even sometimes just when I experience his waking memory, is compounded in the way I imagine the grief of the waking blind is compounded. They must mourn not just the things which are gone, the faces they won’t see again outside those moments of sleeping grace, but also the lost capacity itself to see. The memory, the moment of sight behind closed lids, is a memory too of the disease, the tragedy which took sight away; the beloved face is also a talisman of that disorder, the panic of that loss.
There are certain parts of Cambridge, certain remembered images, a few photographs that I’ve kept that evoke that doubled sense of loss for me. Not just the loss of Leo, but the loss of the part of myself that believed he was possible for me, a part of myself that feels as elemental in its absence as taste or touch or sight.
In the last several years, Leo’s work has become well-known. Not long ago I was in a bookstore in Harvard Square and I saw his face on the cover of an art magazine, staring out from the cluttered rack with characteristic intensity. I left the store and had walked several blocks, weaving through the crowded sidewalks, before I was fully conscious again of where I was.
When I was married to Brian, I often had the sense of having been absorbed by my role or by him. Sometimes I felt that I’d absorbed him. Either way, we both seemed diminished by having come together.
The year before we agreed to divorce, we went to visit friends at their summer house in Vermont. It was late May, still midspring, really, in that northern world. On the drive up we’d seen snow heaped in granular piles in the woods. The floors of Louise and Mark’s house grew dusty over the weekend from the mud our boots brought in; it crumbled everywhere as it dried out.
We sat with our friends on a blanket in the pale sunlight in front of their house. Inside the cool house, Molly napped in winter pajamas. Louise poured red wine into our glasses. Our lips were stained. We were talking about the difference between city dreams and country dreams. Louise said that before the snow had all melted she dreamed the tiger lilies were blossoming orange and yellow underneath it.
I told a city dream. Our buzzer rang, and the voice on the intercom said it was Brian. But when I opened the apartment door to let him in, a man I didn’t know in an army jacket with a shiny knife smiled at me and moved forward.
Brian told an elaborate dream. He was walking home through a strange neighborhood. He turned down a dark side street. A man was walking ahead of him. As he drew abreast of the man, who was wearing a loud sports shirt and baggy pants, he asked if Brian had something for him. Brian said no and tried to pass the man, but he speeded up and walked with Brian. He said he knew Brian had something for him, something he would sell him. Brian said, no, he didn’t have anything, not even any money he could give him. “C’mon, you asshole, you know you got some,” the man said. He pushed Brian Brian started to shake his head no, and suddenly the man had a razor in his hand. He reached out quickly to slash at Brian’s face. Brian woke up.
I sat watching a struggling insect that had fallen into my wine. I felt anger and pity for Brian. He had forgotten that it was one of my Chicago dreams. I had told it to him years before, when I first knew him. In bed that night, he and I lay far apart, our bodies curved away from each other, two crescent moons, each in a separate universe. We could hear Louise and Mark making love, her greedy cries of “Yes! yes!” thickened and muted through the walls. I lay still, breathing evenly so Brian would think I was asleep, and wondered when this had happened to us, when we’d stopped noticing or valuing the separateness of the other.
With Leo that didn’t happen, couldn’t happen, though there were times when I yearned for the unconsciousness, the self-forgetfulness that would have made it possible. From the start, we fought and then made love, both with a passionate intensity that I had thought as lost to me as the possibility of making great music. I felt I’d been traveling all my life to meet him, to be released by him. It was what Babe had promised me, what my Gray grandparents had promised, what music had promised me: another version of myself, another model for being. Once, in a rage, I swept the dining room table clear after a dinner party we’d had together, a party where he’d been rude to two of my friends—and then stood feeling utterly free amid the shards of expensive china that had been wedding presents from Cass and Orrie, Weezie and Hal. It was like the sensation I had the first time I played a Schubert sonata.
Anything seemed possible. After another argument, when we’d been lovers for about tw
o months, Leo picked me up from an evening making music with friends. Still calling good night to Cecile, I opened the car door. The dim interior light showed me his long body, his limbs absolutely shocking in their unexpected white nakedness.
“What are you doing?” I cried out, and slammed the door.
“Christ, Anna, I thought you’d be pleased,” he said, leaning across the seat to look up at me through the passenger window. “It’s supposed to be an apology.” And then I was pleased. I opened the door again quickly and slid over to him to end the argument.
About a month or so into our affair, at that happy stage when we kept retracing our steps, telling each other, and so discovering—or perhaps inventing—its history, Leo would try to rewrite our beginning. “You saw me,” he’d say. “Instantly you knew. The physique. The heavy-lidded, penetrating eyes. The incredible sense of style. You fell in love. You fell madly in love.”
But the truth was, as I told him, that I had barely looked at him.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” a voice behind me said. I turned around, holding a T-shirt of Molly’s. It was bright red, and it said on the front, “My Mom and Dad went to BARBADOS on vacation and all I got out of it was this lousy T-shirt.” Brian and Brenda had brought it back from their honeymoon for her. Whenever she wore it, whenever I even looked at it, I felt a bruised sense of generosity about letting Brenda share my title. Mom. “My new mom,” Molly sometimes called her, and I would feel a smart of jealousy I couldn’t allow myself to examine.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. But they’d been sitting in there so long, and it was the only dryer.” A man sitting on a washer near me, holding a paperback copy of The Hite Report, watched us with a bored, blank face.
“Yeah, but they’re still wet,” he said.
“Damp,” I agreed.
“Fuck,” he said.
I picked up a pillowcase and shook it with a loud snap. “They’d been in there the whole time mine were in the wash,” I said. “I’m sorry. All the other dryers were going, and I’m in kind of a rush.” This last wasn’t true. It was one of my long weekends alone—Brian was staying with Molly and I was in a friend’s apartment—and I’d come to the laundromat to have something to do.
He fingered his damp clothes. A student’s, I had thought when I’d put them in one of the laundromat’s bright plastic baskets. Paint-splattered jeans, grayish underwear, work shirts, frayed socks with holes. I was surprised that he was older, perhaps my age; but beyond that, I didn’t think about how he looked.
In the corner of my eye, he shook his head. “I get so tired of this jazz, croyez-moi. Even at the laundromat it’s dog eat dog.”
A light tug of guilt compounded my irritation. “Look,” I said too loudly. “I’m sorry. I said that. And there are”—I looked behind me—“three empty dryers now. Maybe you can stop licking your wounds long enough to stuff your wet clothes into one.”
He looked at me for a moment. “Damp,” he said.
“Fine,” I said, and turned back to my heap of clean clothes.
I didn’t think of him again until about a month later when I was back in the laundromat. It was Saturday. Another Saturday alone, except that I was staying at Ursula’s for the weekend. She and I had become friends since I’d started working at B.U. We were planning on having dinner together that evening, but I thought I should get out of her way for a while, and had sought refuge in doing the wash. Besides, I liked the laundromat—the way it smelled, the rhythmic slosh of the machines, the ticking of buttons, zippers, in the dryers, the odd camaraderie among those placed in life by circumstances which meant they had to wash their dirty linen in public.
Peculiarly for a Saturday afternoon, the place was nearly deserted. The long row of gleaming yellow washers sat silent, lids up, open-mouthed. Only my laundry hummed and clicked in two dryers. At the back of the long room, a girl stood folding her wash at a table provided for the purpose, and reading the notices which decorated the wall above it. I looked forward even to my turn at the notices, the ads for empowerment workshops, used furniture, lost dogs. I’d advertised on the same board in the fall when I was trying to get new students. Until my wash was dry, though, I was stretched out on the long bench which spanned the plate-glass storefront, reading and watching passers-by. The door stood open—it was one of the first warm days of spring—and every now and then the same rangy black dog would come in and check the wastebaskets and changing personnel.
A man walked by the window. He was tall, lean, wearing a jeans jacket. As he passed, he looked in and our eyes met. I remember feeling quickly a little pulse of sexual attraction, and then a sense of pride that such a thing was possible for me. Coming alive, I thought. I bent over my book.
A minute later, he said hello. I looked up, then back at the woman folding clothes, then back at him again. I smiled frostily and nodded; then turned to my book.
“You don’t remember me,” he said.
It seemed a tired line, straight out of Little Anthony and the Imperials, but at least he wasn’t opening with a discussion of some one of my body parts and what he might like to do with it, which had also happened to me at the laundromat.
“No,” I answered.
“We had an argument in this very spot. Or that spot anyway.” He pointed back to the folding table. “A couple of weeks or so ago. You told me to stuff it.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I do remember.” I looked at him again. He shifted his weight and put his hands in his pants pockets. He had a long narrow face with very white, smooth skin. His eyes were dark, looked nearly black. But it was a strange angle, looking up at him. I felt I couldn’t really tell what he looked like, that he had some advantage over me.
“Are you a student?” he asked. He gestured toward the book with an elbow, swinging his body slightly.
“No,” I said. “I’m just reading.”
“Oh,” he said. He shifted his weight again. “Look, can I sit down? Do you mind?”
I thought about it. I’d been asked the question perhaps four or five times in that solitary year, and I’d always answered yes, that I did mind. Ever my mother’s daughter, I was still in some reflexive way frightened of talking to strangers; and also just unready for the slightly sexualized banter necessary to bring off such an encounter. But my own minimal history with this man gave me a sense of safety with him; and I found him attractive, but in a way I can perhaps characterize as vulnerable enough to make me feel almost comfortable.
“I guess not,” I said. I swung my legs to the floor to make room for him.
He sat, and turned to me. “I’m Leo Cutter,” he said. He held out his hand.
“Anna Dunlap.” I extended my hand, and we shook firmly.
“Anna Dunlap, Anna Dunlap, Anna Dunlap,” he said, as though to imprint it on his memory.
We sat side by side in a silence that was just beginning to seem awkward when he said abruptly, “Look, I’m an asshole.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to know you then,” I said.
Leo laughed, lifting his head slightly in an odd gesture, like a bird drinking water. “No,” he said, and his face sobered. “No, I’m apologizing.”
“What for?”
“For being a jerk, whenever it was. I’d had a . . . God!” He shook his head. “A horrible day. I just wanted some dry underwear to take home and comfort myself with. And instead I got stuck with this sodden cold mass.” He shook his head again. “But I’m sorry. I am.” He looked at me and grinned. “I should have been more civil.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
He looked at me a moment. His eyes were dark brown, I saw, not black. He had dark hair, almost the same color as his eyes, that curled slightly over the collar of his jacket. “No,” he said. “I should have been nicer. Even then I was attracted to you.”
Dammit, I thought. Here it comes, as inevitable as a dog at a hydrant. I stood up and walked to my dryers to see if they were still spinning. “Are you picking me up?” I asked loudly a
cross the space between us.
The woman folding clothes at the back looked up.
He shrugged. “I’m trying anyway.”
I leaned back against the washing machines and watched my clothes whirl around. He got up and walked towards me. “You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
He stood near me, his eyebrows raised, a half-smile playing on his mouth. He was taller than I was, and he bent slightly towards me. I had a sense of his making some kind of claim on me. I folded my arms across my belly. “Yes, you can,” I said, not looking at him.
He turned and looked out the window. The dog came and stood in the doorway briefly, and he and Leo seemed to exchange a long look before he left. “I see,” Leo said, turning back to me. “You wanted the lawn party with the formal introduction.”
I think I smiled slightly. Certainly I shrugged, feeling foolish. “It’s just that it’s so predictable.”
After a minute, a minute of just standing next to me, he said, “No, it’s more predictable, it would have been, for me not to try. Just to walk on and fantasize for a few minutes. That happens much more often, I bet. So either way, you can’t escape predictability.”
One of the machines slowed. The dancing clothes flopped to limp stillness. I shut the lid of the washer behind me to give me a folding surface, and crossed to the dryer. I opened the door, leaned into the warm, bleach-smelling air, and gathered the hot clothes. He had to step back to let me set the clothes down. Self-consciously, I began folding.
He cleared his throat. I looked at him again, then back to the clothes. “Look,” he said. “I know I might be being an asshole again. The more familiar version.” Even though he wasn’t so close to me now, I was intensely aware of him physically. The warm pocket of air around us seemed generated as much by his bending towards me as by the heap of towels and sheets in front of me. “But here goes. I’m going up the street to Christopher’s for a beer. You know it?” I nodded. “I’d like it if you’d join me.” I kept folding clothes, though I could feel a blush rising to my face. He stepped a little closer to me. “So, if you feel like it when you’re done here, that’s where I’ll be, O.K.?”