by Sue Miller
Edmund sat up. “I mean, think of it as if it were like 9/11. Think if you’d been about to ask someone for a divorce, and they upped and died then. The ambivalent reaction to such an event, the complicated one, is shocking to people. No one wants to hear it. It’s … repulsive. It’s unpatriotic.” His fingers nestled into his beard. “It’s small. It’s personal. It’s unworthy. Such a truth needs to be suppressed. He needs to be suppressed.” He banged his fist on the bar.
They both sat, not speaking for a moment. Rafe had some beer.
Edmund said, “Think what a crumb he must feel like.”
That was it, Rafe thought. That Gabriel was trying to figure out a way not to be a crumb, but still to be honest. He wanted somehow to be honorable. That’s what he was doing in that last scene with Anita, figuring that out. That’s what was slowly happening to him.
He was about to say something to Edmund about this, but when he looked over at him, Edmund had turned away to see how the Bruins were doing.
They’d been back together for about two years when the symptoms started. Of course at first they didn’t think of them that way. Just mishaps. She was dropping things, she began taking long naps, naps that left her limp and somehow more fatigued. Sometimes she had a funny garbling of her speech, so that she’d stop and take a deep breath. She’d say, “Allow me to rephrase that,” and repeat something with carefully precise enunciation of each syllable.
They thought mononucleosis, or Epstein-Barr, and she had a few tests, which revealed nothing. It seemed to go away for a while. Over the summer she was herself again. In early August they took a trip to Saratoga Springs. She bought an extravagant hat on the main drag, a hat that would have been worthy of the Queen Mother, as she said. They lost more than one hundred dollars at the track.
On the way home, they stopped to stay a few days with her mother in southwest Vermont, near Bennington College, where her father had taught.
Her mother, Grace, was a poet. A poet manqué, she called herself, because she hadn’t written for years. She said she’d stopped writing because she came to the abrupt realization that there already was an Edna St. Vincent Millay. She said to be a poet manqué was better by far than being a poet because it got you out of the house.
He’d seen pictures of her mother as a young woman. She’d been beautiful, in a Garboesque way—a little androgynous, a little too strong-featured for contemporary taste. Lauren had inherited some of that.
Now she was a wreck, really. Her hair had gone iron gray, cement gray—a bad color, the color of battleships. Her nose, which had been strong and beautiful, was beaky, the nostrils too large, hairs visible in them. She’d been a lifelong smoker, and it showed. Her skin seemed shadowed by nicotine, the long deep creases in her face and around her neck were slightly embrowned. She still smoked occasionally, luxuriating in it, but she made herself go out of her own house to do it now. The news about secondhand smoke had devastated her, and she was determined to do no more harm to her family and friends than she’d already done. She would come back inside smelling strongly of tobacco, chewing gum to make herself less odious.
It had taken Rafe a while to get used to her. He’d grown up in suburban Chicago—the aspiring suburbs, as he put it. Not Winnetka, not Oak Park. His parents were holding on tenaciously, but marginally, to a version of middle-class life that wouldn’t have included anyone like Grace. It was she who’d given the young Lauren the copy of The Joy of Sex that had been their cookbook in their sophomore year. “You should love your body,” she had said on the occasion of its presentation. “Love what it can bring you.”
She’d been a student of Lauren’s father at Bennington. It was a scandal. She got pregnant and he divorced his wife of almost thirty years and married her. Lauren’s half brothers were older than her mother. One of them, Frank, had died the summer before this visit, at seventy-six. The other, Pete, came over with his wife the night before they left.
“Hey, bro,” Lauren said. She was sitting in a chair with her back to the kitchen door, but she’d turned a little when she heard them come in.
Rafe watched as Pete bent over her from behind and kissed the top of her head. His hair was skimpy and white above her face, his skull shiny through it.
“And now”—she stood up, shoving her chair back—“I will embrace you.” She rocked him in her arms. “Oh, oh, sweetie Petie.”
Pete was still rumpled and blushing a little when he shook Rafe’s hand. “Why do you never look any older, Rafe?” he asked.
“It’s a part I’m playing,” he said to Pete. “I’m called on to be about thirty-two.”
“Well, you’re a damn fine actor.”
Lauren was hugging Pete’s wife now. Natalie. Small, with bright, improbably orange hair.
Grace was standing off to one side, waiting her turn at all this embracing. In the wings, he thought.
They went out on the porch and drank martinis, made by Pete, as always. The cat scratched at the screen door, and Natalie let him in. He twined himself around everyone’s legs, then settled by Gracie. They talked about Frank, Pete’s brother. He’d stayed mad at his father after he left his first wife. He wouldn’t enter the house until after the old man had died. “He missed out on a lot of fun,” Grace said.
Rafe had heard the stories. They all drank when Lauren was little, “like fish,” she said. “Exactly as though it was the medium they lived in.” When they were good and drunk, they played games, the games she might have played with other children if any had lived nearby. Sardines, kick the can, red rover. Later word games, board games, guessing games. Botticelli, charades. They wrote operettas and performed them. They danced. They sang. Lauren had once said that it was as though the confusion about the generations had addled them all, made them all about fifteen, max. “When I went to college, I was bereft,” she said. “I looked around and couldn’t figure out where the fun was. Thus, sex.” She made one of her dramatic gestures. “A party you could have with only one other person.”
Now, sitting on the screened porch, they were talking about the retirement community Pete and Nat were about to move to. Nat said, “Pete will be one of three men there. Three men, and I think about forty women. They’ll all be waiting for me to die so they can make their move.”
Grace went out on the stone steps to smoke a cigarette, followed by the cat. She held the door open for him. The breeze was such that the smoke blew back over all of them through the rusty old screens. “Come on and smoke back in here, Momma,” Lauren said. “You’re upwind out there, anyway.”
But Grace wouldn’t. She moved farther away. They could see her drifting around among the old apple trees. Pete offered to freshen up their martinis. “I couldn’t,” Lauren said, and her hand went over her glass just as Pete was about to pour. Rafe shook his head.
“There’s no sense in Nat and me pacing ourselves,” Pete said, filling their glasses. “We got to do everything in a hurry now. Time is closing in on us.”
“You’ll outlive us all, Pete,” Rafe said.
Pete snorted.
Grace came in, trailing the mingled odors of nicotine and Juicy Fruit. They should eat outside, she’d decided. It was too beautiful. So while she fixed their dinner, they all deconstructed the table Lauren had set inside earlier, traipsing back and forth, in and out, with dishes and glasses and silverware and napkins and candles, setting the wooden table on the stone terrace. An old apple tree stretched its gnarled branches above it. Lauren found two citronella candles and lighted them, so there was that to remember later, too—that lemony, camphory smell.
The sun set slowly and dramatically in the west as they ate. They sat in near silence for half an hour or so when they were finished, watching the clouds change color.
“Thanks for that, Gracie,” Pete said as they pushed their chairs back in the near dark and started to clear the table. “You sure have a way with a sunset.”
Rafe and Pete did the dishes. From the living room came the thin, touching music of
the scratchy 78s Grace still owned. Someone had stacked up the enormous old record player, and one by one, heavily, the records dropped and the needle moved across them. When Pete and Rafe came in from the kitchen, Grace was kneeling at the open cabinet doors, selecting new discs, and Lauren and Nat were dancing to Lil Hardin Armstrong.
When Lauren saw him, she let Nat go and came to him, lifting her arms. They did a two-step, and then jitterbugged to some swing tune by Duke Ellington. Pete and Nat were dancing too. “The Sheik of Araby” came on. They all tangoed. Then came Fred Astaire and Esther Rollins and Lee Weaver.
Pete and Nat were pooped. They had to go. “You danced us into the ground,” Nat said.
Gracie and Rafe danced a bit more, and then Rafe danced four or five songs with Lauren while Gracie went out to have a smoke. She came back after a bit and sat on the couch, watching them. They were both sweaty, panting and laughing. Finally the record player clicked off, and no one moved to put on any more. It was only about ten-thirty, early by the standards of yore, as Lauren pointed out.
They all sat and talked for a bit, quietly. Then Gracie said, “I have something I need to tell you.” She stopped and made a mischievous face. “And it’s not, you’ll be relieved to know, that I’m pregnant.” It was that she was giving the house up. She was going to join Pete and Nat at the retirement place. The house was already on the market—she would need the money for the entrance fee—but she’d asked them not to put a FOR SALE sign up by the driveway until after Lauren’s visit.
“I feel so awful about this,” she said. “I’d always planned to leave it to you, but it’s nothing but an albatross at this point. I haven’t kept it up worth shit.”
“Oh, Momma,” Lauren said. “Don’t, don’t feel bad. If this is what works for you, this is the right thing.”
“And you know we’re stuck in Boston,” Rafe said. “There’s really no way we could have taken it on, a second home.”
But Grace needed to be penitent about her failures awhile longer. They listened, they reassured her, the women hugged one another, and then they all said good night. Lauren started to put the records away, but Grace turned on the stairs and said, “Don’t. Don’t bother with that, darling. I like to do that in the morning. It’s like having the fun all over again.”
They went to bed, and Lauren wept a little. “My sweet old house,” she said. She smelled of Ivory soap, which was the only brand Gracie ever bought.
In the middle of the night, a complicated, several-stage thud waked him. It was pitch-black, and he couldn’t remember where he was for a moment. Then from somewhere below the bed—from the floor—came Lauren’s voice. “Did I wake you?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said. “What’s happening?”
She laughed. “I seem to have misplaced my knees, Rafe.”
That was the real beginning. In the morning, she couldn’t walk. He had to carry her downstairs, and after breakfast, he helped her to the car. She was dismissive, for Gracie’s sake. She’d pulled something dancing, she said. “You and Pete can apparently pretend to be seventeen with impunity, but not me.”
Each of them hugged Gracie for a moment. They promised to come back soon. Gracie in turn promised she would save everything in the house Lauren might conceivably want.
They drove back to Boston. They were mostly silent. He helped her into a rest stop on the Mass Pike and waited anxiously outside the women’s room.
When she emerged and spotted him, she laughed. “You look like a mole-ster, hovering there,” she said, using her own favored pronunciation of the word. But he’d seen her inching along the wall, and when he reached for her, she almost fell into his embrace. She leaned hard on him all the way back to the car.
After that there were more tests, and then late in the fall the terrible diagnosis. The doctor was kind and patient. He answered everything honestly and said three or four times how sorry he was.
“It is fatal, yes, invariably,” he said, in answer to Lauren’s question. “But there is variability in the length of time it takes. Look at Stephen Hawking.”
They didn’t speak going to the car, starting to drive home. It was a sunny day, a beautiful day. Irrelevant gold and red leaves blew across the street in front of them. She said abruptly, “Look at Stephen Hawking.”
“Swanee …,” he started.
“No. Shut up. Stephen Hawking is like a … disembodied brain,” she said. “Stephen Hawking has a mechanical voice. I am … I am my body. I can’t live without a body.” She was sobbing. “I don’t want to live without my body.”
He spotted a parking space. He pulled over and reached across the console and the stick shift to her.
He held her awkwardly, spoke to her: he loved her. It would be all right. He was with her. He was aware of the stick shift poking his side. He would stay with her. There was nothing that could happen to her—to them—that would make him love her less.
“And sex?” she whispered. “What about sex?” Her eye makeup was streaked down her face. Her mouth was twisted.
“As long as you want me to make love to you, I will want to make love to you.”
A lie. The first of many.
The little playwright was in the first row, watching him and Serena Diglio, who was playing Anita, go through their scene at the end of the second act.
“I have to do this alone,” Rafe said.
“You don’t, have to.”
“I want to do this alone,” Rafe said.
“Hold it,” Edmund said. They both looked over at him. “Does he? Does he want to? Is he telling the truth here?”
There was a silence. Then Rafe said, “So, less conviction?”
“Well, maybe he’s mostly trying to convince himself,” Edmund said. “Okay, sorry. Go ahead.”
“I want to do this alone,” Rafe said, more slowly.
“I don’t believe you,” Anita said.
“You should.”
“Just … answer me one question.”
Rafe turned away, impatient, as he and Edmund had agreed he would be.
“Gabriel? Just one.”
“All right.”
“Tell me honestly, when you heard, didn’t you feel any sense of …” She paused, shook her head. “Forget it.”
It seemed to Rafe that Serena was overdoing this a little, that she was too desperate, too pleading, too early on. But Edmund said nothing, so he said his line, and they moved on.
When he came to the self-pitying lines, “‘Oh, poor Gabriel. Poor man,’” his voice was thick with contempt for himself, and for her. Maybe he was overdoing it, he thought. But Edmund was still just watching.
She went on. She blew a line, and Edmund gave it to her. It’s not greed, what I feel.
“Oh, right,” she said. “That’s a funny one to forget.”
“Yup,” Edmund answered.
She took a breath, her face changed. She said the line.
He answered with his lines about wanting as the human condition, about feeling dead without it.
“But that’s what you said you felt with Elizabeth. Dead.” Her voice was shrill.
“Yes,” he said.
“And with me, you felt alive again.” She was begging him: You said so.
He hadn’t thought of it this way. He had heard her being more assertive. So he said his line more sorrowfully. “Yes. But it was … wanting. Wanting what I didn’t have.”
“Me!” she said. Now assertive.
He took a step back from her. He could see Edmund nod. “Ah, well,” he said. He had his distance again.
“Me,” she insisted.
And then he began his long, slowly developing explanation, something he wanted to be discovering as he went along, in just the way he and Edmund had talked about it—they’d agreed that he was actually feeling his way into his position as he spoke. When he got to his passionate declaration at the end, that he would enact whatever he was called up to be—the widower, the glad husband—at that point, they had agreed, he ha
d it; his feelings had caught up to what he was saying. He’d caught up to himself.
Then her cry, “But you said you loved me.”
Edmund stopped her. He didn’t like it. “You sound like a spoiled little girl, Serena.” He pitched his voice high and whining: “‘You said I could have some candy.’”
She was nodding, looking sheepish. “Yeah, I hear that. But I’m not sure how I should say it.”
Rafe sat down while Edmund and Serena talked about it. He looked over at the playwright, sitting in the second row of seats. Billy Gertz, her name was. Wilhelmina, she’d told him. Yes. That had been their exchange at the meet and greet.
“Billy,” he’d said. “Short for something, I bet.”
“Wilhelmina,” she’d said back, in a stern voice with a German accent, pronouncing the W as a V.
Now she was slouched deep in her seat, making notes. She had her glasses on. Her head barely rose over the back of the seat. She could have been a precocious fifth grader with a thick bowl haircut.
She looked up at him, and he met her eyes. She smiled, raised her hand for a moment, and then went on writing.
“Okay, Rafe,” Edmund said.
He stood up and took his place, and they went over their last lines together. He liked the way Serena said her last line, yelling at him. It sounded full of rage, but you could hear her sorrow, too. She overdid slamming the door, in fun. The set shook. Someone backstage protested: “Hey!”
“Sorry. Joke,” she called, coming back onstage.
They sat down and talked for a while with Edmund, who had suggestions for both of them. Gestures. Emphases. Praise, though, too. He knew how to balance these things, crafty old Ed.