by Sue Miller
I didn’t say anything, but I could feel my head nod, nearly involuntarily. He walked to the door and turned back. “O.K.?” he said again.
I looked at him. “O.K.,” I said. My heart was thudding heavily in my chest. Then he was gone.
Slowly I folded the laundry, the unraveling towels, all of Molly’s superhero underwear, the overalls, my jeans, the stretched-out bras and mismatched socks. The girl at the back of the laundromat pulled a sweater on and trudged out, carrying her laundry in a big straw basket. A young couple came in, then a mother and a small fussy child. As my heart decelerated, I pushed the sorted piles of folded clothes into my laundry bag, stuffing the box of Tide, the jug of bleach into the top. Then I carried the bag out to the Valiant, got in the car myself, and drove slowly back to Ursula’s.
Two weeks after that, as I was leafing through the paper one evening, I saw that there was to be an exhibit of Leo Cutter’s recent works at a gallery on Newbury Street. With a rush of contempt for myself, I realized that this changed everything in my mind. It was the lawn party, the set of credentials. It meant he wasn’t just some guy at the laundromat. He was a Professional. He had a Career. He was safe, appropriate.
Now, even though I knew it was shabby, I began to hope for another chance with him, another encounter. When I passed the laundromat, I’d slow down and stare into its depths. When I was trapped in it myself, I’d sit in the window and stare out. Twice I took Molly to Christopher’s for supper. I never saw Leo.
Then one Friday night late in April, Molly woke me in the middle of the night with a fever. In the morning it was still high. Two circles of fiery red sat on her cheeks, small glowing coals fed by the inner fire which made her body hot to touch, which made her tremble with cold, even under a quilt. I called the doctor and arranged to bring her in.
He looked for signs of strep, for a rash, anything he could treat: but there was nothing. I remembered that the teachers at day care had put up a sign about a viral flu making the rounds. He said that was probably it, that he’d seen quite a few other kids with just these symptoms. On the way home, I parked illegally just outside a little neighborhood grocery store, so I could see her through the glass front while I shopped. She sat silent and stunned in her car seat the whole time, her mouth a little open as if in surprise. I got ginger ale, chicken soup, a kind of arrowroot cracker she liked, and baby aspirin. I had to carry her upstairs, and her limpness, the intense dry heat of her body frightened me. She fell asleep almost as soon as I set her in her bed. I woke her long enough to get some aspirin and water into her. Then I called Dr. Fisher to let him know that someone else would have to feed the rats that day.
It was a long, still day. The weather was warm—that gentle humid touch of Boston spring air—and on our trip to the doctor’s the streets had been crowded with joggers, lovers, groups of teenagers talking and punching each other. But in the apartment I could hear only an occasional voice floating up from the street, mostly adult, but every now and then the bright high cries of children playing together. Otherwise there were just the trains ratcheting by and the uncomfortable heaviness of Molly’s breathing, which seemed to fill every room of the apartment.
I woke her from time to time to repeat my efforts to get her to drink liquids. Shortly before dinner she had a period of feeling a little better, and I read to her for a while and brought her some soup. But at the end of the aspirin-induced respite, her fever went up again and she fell heavily once more to sleep.
I planned to set the alarm at four-hour intervals to try to keep her comfortable through the night, but when I woke at two o’clock, I knew I was getting it too. I had the heavy sense of impending discomfort, though no fever yet. I took aspirin and didn’t set the alarm again. By Sunday morning, my fever was 102°, and my sole impulse, like Molly’s, was to sleep. I called Dr. Fisher again, and then went back to bed.
For two more days we lived like that. I’d wake occasionally and shuffle down the hall to feel her, to make sure she was breathing, to wake her and make her drink, make her chew the sweet orange pellets, eat a baby cracker, pee. Then I’d do the same things for myself and go back to bed. Dr. Fisher called twice, Ursula once, to see how I was, if I needed anything; and the phone was so loud in our world of breathing, sleeping silence, that it made my heart pound erratically. We got better simultaneously, and on the third day, both began to walk around, to want to eat. But it wasn’t until I took her back to day care on Tuesday and went into work myself that I realized how frightened I’d been by our isolation.
I was in Dr. Fisher’s office, talking about how much time I’d lost with the rats—they’d been nervous that morning after three days with no one handling them. I told him a little about the course of the disease, about how silent the apartment was, about how sometimes when I woke up I couldn’t hear Molly breathe and would panic about whether she might have died—how long had I been asleep? had she been without water? aspirin? and then suddenly I burst into tears.
Dr. Fisher rose from behind his desk and hurried around to me. Once at my side, though, he didn’t know what to do, and so stood awkwardly patting my shoulder. “You should have called me, Anna,” he said again and again. And I realized then, feeling his tentative touch, his flurry of confused words, turning away from him as I yearned more than I ever had to turn to him, that I wanted someone I could have called; that I didn’t want to be as solitary as I was, as I’d grown used to being.
That evening, on the way to pick Molly up at day care, I bought a bottle of expensive white wine to go with dinner. Half way through it, after I’d tucked Molly into bed, I called Leo Cutter.
He picked up the telephone after the third ring and said, “Just a minute, hold on.” The phone clunked down and for three or four minutes I listened to loud music, jazz, while Leo and someone else, a man, I was glad to hear, shouted to each other over what sounded like an enormous distance.
Then the music was abruptly turned off. There was a pause. Leo said, “I’m sorry. Hello?”
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Anna Dunlap.”
“Anna Dunlap,” he answered. “Give me a second, I’ll get it.”
“I met you at the laundromat.”
There was a tiny silence. “Oh, Anna Dunlap,” he said. “Yeah.” In his voice I heard a smile. “Well, it’s a pleasure to hear from you.”
“I’d like to try meeting you at Christopher’s again, one night this weekend,” I said. I had decided that the best approach was to be straightforward. “If that’s possible.”
There was a silence.
“I mean, I’ll understand if you’d rather not.”
“No,” he said. “I’d sure rather. I’m just, I’m really sort of surprised. And ah . . . Saturday’s no good for me. Will Friday work? Friday night?”
In terror I agreed. Molly and I were picking Brian up at the airport at six-thirty, so I arranged to meet Leo at eight.
During the intervening days I thought as obsessively as I had in high school about what I would wear, what we would say, whether I would sleep with him if he wanted to. (“Do it,” Ursula said. “You haven’t been laid in five months and you’re worrying about whether he’ll think you’re a nice girl? Do it,” she said. “Validate your I.U.D.”)
Before I picked Molly up at day care on Friday, I went home, bathed, shaved my legs and changed my clothes. I’d decided on jeans, in order not to seem as though I’d deliberated a long time over what to wear; but I’d bought a new sweater to go with them, and silver hoops for my ears. I fixed a snack for Molly to keep her happy on the way to the airport, packed a weekend bag to take to Ursula’s—she was out of town, visiting an old lover in Philadelphia—and left the apartment. It felt like the beginning of a voyage.
At the airport, carrying Molly back to the car, Brian looked over at me. “You’re looking wonderful,” he said.
“Thanks,” I answered. I felt so tense sexually, so aware of myself, that I was surprised that everyone in the crowded terminal wasn’t staring
at me.
“Doing something special?” he asked after a minute, and I realized he was still looking at me.
I smiled. “I have a date,” I said. “I haven’t had many, you know.”
He looked away, and we walked along together, as we had so often when we were a family. Then he bent to Molly who sat along his arm, jouncing with every step. “Doesn’t Mommy look pretty?” he asked her.
Molly looked at me critically for a moment. I stared back at her flat, unreadable eyes. Then she turned to Brian. “She’s not pretty,” she said emphatically. “She’s Mom.” I laughed and touched her arm.
I had dropped the bag off at Ursula’s on the way to the airport, so I got out of the car at Porter Square. As I bent into the passenger window to kiss Molly good-bye, Brian leaned across from the driver’s seat. “I meant it, you know,” he said. “You look great.” His face, tilted and thrust forward at the odd angle to see me, looked strained and unfamiliar.
The noise in Christopher’s was deafening, a combination of the jukebox and the effects of Friday’s prolonged happy hour. I found Leo at a table in the bar, a beer in front of him. He saw me from across the room and waved. As I approached him, I was intensely aware of my body, a kind of sexualized awkwardness in it that I hadn’t felt since my breasts were new and I didn’t know how to carry them thoughtlessly in front of me.
I don’t remember much that we talked about, just that he was animated and curious. I was tense, but relaxed a little once I had a beer, then two and three. He asked me a lot of questions with an energy and enthusiasm that both frightened and charmed me, and I heard my own voice getting louder, my speech speeding up in response to him. Several times I stammered uncontrollably at the beginning of a word, as though my body itself were trying to slow me down, to insist on its own pace. I had trouble chewing and swallowing. When the waitress removed our plates, two-thirds of the meal was still left on mine, though Leo, intent on what I was saying, didn’t notice. We had another couple of beers each and then went outside and got into his truck, a Toyota. He drove us to a dim bar in Central Square. There were four or five beer bottles lying on the floor of the truck’s cab. They rolled around during the ride and clunked together musically when we turned corners or changed speeds.
The bar was full of blacks, and thick with cigarette smoke. The band was black too, and they were mostly doing the blues, along with a few hits from the Fifties. There was a space in front of the bandstand where the singer stood. From time to time a few couples would get up and dance, edging him into a dark corner.
Leo wanted me to dance. I leaned forward and shouted in his ear that I couldn’t. He turned to me, and our lips brushed. We sat grinning stupidly at our accomplishment for a moment.
I was by now quite drunk. We had a few more beers while we listened to the music. We didn’t talk—it was impossible, the band was playing so loudly—and I’m not sure how long we actually stayed at the bar, though it was long enough so that my clothes still smelled of nicotine the next morning. When we went outside, it was raining, a cold drizzle. The light from the neon in the bar window and the marquee of the Store 24 next door were reflected in pocked puddles. We ran the block and a half to the truck.
Our breathlessness was loud in the truck. It smelled of cigarettes and beer and the freshness of rain. I told Leo I was staying nearby, at a friend’s,
“Oh, no,” he said. “I thought you’d come to my place. I’m going to teach you to dance.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Can’t what?”
“Dance,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said, and started the engine. I looked over at him. His damp hair curled tightly around his head. Raindrops sat on his white skin like sweat. He smiled at me as we swung out of the parking space, and suddenly I had the same sense that I’d felt with a few other powerful people in my life—that their energy, their passion could transform me. In my drunken state, I think I focused only on the dancing, but the exhilaration I felt, the sense of possibility, had to do with everything else Leo was and I was not.
We droye up Mass. Ave. past Porter Square again, past the parking lot, past the laundromat. The streets were deserted except for an occasional solitary figure walking fast, hunched against the rain. It felt late, one or two o’clock. In Dunkin Donuts, five or six customers sat on the stools, some turned to look out at the steady downpour.
Leo turned onto a dead side street just past the Newtowne Grille and parked. We got out of the truck and I followed him to the back entrance of the big commercial building which faced out on Mass. Ave. I thought I remembered an insurance office, a karate studio the storefronts.
The hallway we stepped into was dim. There was a broken mailbox on the wall, and then the stairs began. He preceded me up them. His jeans were baggy over his narrow hips. “This is my studio,” he said above me. “But I live here too. It’s all illegal, but half the artists in this town do the same thing, and all the landlords know. They don’t give a fuck.” As we mounted the stairs, we drew close to a single, perhaps 60-watt bulb hanging over the second-floor landing. In its light I could see that the walls were a peculiar ochre color, perhaps painted, but more likely just the ochre of age, of finger marks, of years of absorbed smells and dust. Leo turned back to me, walking sideways and gesturing around him, a tour guide. “You know, I can’t afford the rent on two places at once, and as long as I’m not conspicuous, he really doesn’t care.” He turned left on the landing, unlocked three locks on a scratched, stained door, and swung it inward. “Voilà,” he said. He reached in and flicked a light switch. I stepped into an enormous white space—white walls, white floor. It smelled of paint and turpentine, like our apartment, but more strongly. The light illuminated only what seemed to be the living area of the room, so the other corners were in cavernous twilight, but I could see huge canvases leaned against the walls, and a long, littered worktable stretched across the middle of the room. The ceiling was studded with the black rectangles of big skylights.
Leo was moving quickly around his living quarters, singing in falsetto, “I can’t dance, don’t ask me, I can’t dance . . .” He pushed a quilt-covered mattress on the floor out of the way. There was an orange crate next to it, a gooseneck lamp sitting on top. He turned the lamp on and squatted in front of the crate, flipping through the records which it housed. I looked around. A toilet, refrigerator, and sink stood against the wall. On a small wooden table next to them were a hot plate and an array of cups, tins, utensils. There was no bath, but hung on the wall next to the sink was an enormous galvanized tin washtub. I went over and touched it. “Do you bathe in this?” I asked. He looked up, stopped singing. “Yep,” he said. He turned back to his task, pulled out a record. “As infrequently as I can get away with, cause it’s a big hassle. I try to bum baths at friends’ when I can.”
He put the record on and suddenly the room was full of Chuck Berry’s guitar. Leo turned the volume up. I began to feel the same exhilarated excitement this music had waked in me as an adolescent. Inaudibly in the racket, I began to laugh.
Leo turned off the overhead spots. He swiveled the gooseneck lamp so it shone on the wall. He pulled me into its light and pointed out our shadows on the white wall. Our heads were immense near the ceiling. The shadows tapered to little human-sized legs. He leaned forward and shouted in my ear, his breath warm on my neck, “Now, all you’ve got to do is just move your shadow, see?” His shadow danced. “Like this, see?” I moved a little. “Good, Good for you!”
The music was deafening. We were both drunk, though I drunker, I think, than Leo. We jumped up and down for a while. We made pictures with our fingers. Leo didn’t look at me, only at the wall and his own body. I watched him singing, absorbed in the music and the flickering shapes. After a while, his shirt was stained with sweat, and sweat beaded on the white skin of his face. Between songs he froze, his eyes shut, and waited for the guitar to start again. I began to move, to move like him. I stopped looking at myself or Leo and only w
atched the wall, the monstrous others. He made his shadow merge with mine, and I copied him. The hydrocephalic figures came together, separated, sneaked up on each other, devoured each other. I had never felt so free of myself. Apart, together. Two, then one.
Then, as our shadows touched, Leo was touching me. He pulled me gently to the floor, to the mattress. Underneath us through the floor, I could feel the vibrations of the bass line of the music. We rolled over each other drunkenly, feeling each other’s bodies. He rose on his hands above me, looking down at me. I didn’t want him to, didn’t want him to see me. I shut my eyes and pulled him down to me. We made love quickly and awkwardly, with half of our clothes still on.
I woke with the beginning grayness in the skylights, a terrible headache pounding at me. I needed to pee. I got up and quickly pulled my clothes on. Leo lay on his side of the mattress, uncovered. His hands rested, curled slightly near his face, like a child’s, like Molly’s. His bare hipbone carved the air, his penis falling limp down the dark hair pocketed in its curve. His jeans were still attached to one leg. His socks didn’t match. I was glad that I was the one who had awakened first, who was seeing him like this, and not the other way around.
In spite of the pressure in my bladder, I decided not to use Leo’s toilet. I didn’t want to wake him, and I especially didn’t want his first waking vision to be of me hunkered over his toilet.
The gooseneck lamp was still throwing its white light against the wall. I turned it off, jumping at the sharp click it made. Leo didn’t stir. I shut the apartment door quietly behind me and lightheadedly walked back down the ochre hallway, the stairs with their worn rubber treading.
Outside the sky seemed light, nearing dawn. I started walking. The sidewalks were still dark with last night’s rain, puddled with still pools. As I passed my street, I looked down it. The big frame houses loomed silent, as ugly as ever; but the linden trees beginning to green looked frilled, hopeful in the pale dawn. I thought of Molly heavy in sleep; of Brian on the couch; and kept walking.