by Sue Miller
The problem was that even then Sam didn’t feel he’d escaped them sufficiently—their world, their way of seeing things, their rules. It seemed to him he was still faking it, four years after leaving home.
The rules of his college world had seemed like those of another country when he first got there, so different were they from the rules at home. Even the clothes he had brought with him were wrong. Sam sold them at the local used-clothing store within a few weeks of arriving on campus, and with the money from that and some of what he’d earned working at the grain cooperative over the long, hot high school summers, he bought several versions of the uniform the prep school boys wore—Levi’s, not slacks; blue work shirts or Brooks Brothers button-downs; striped rep ties; two tweed jackets. This made him more comfortable in his body, but he was still so unsure of himself socially that he sometimes waited to hear other people’s opinions before he announced his own.
Susan was utterly at ease wherever they went in the world—the world of school or the wider world. Sam watched her, imitated her, learned from her. This was the way you spoke to a cabdriver, a waiter. This was how you talked to older people at a party, to faculty after class. These were the forks you used for salad and these for the main course. This was the present you took when you were staying for the weekend, this was what you took to a dinner party. Sam wanted to know this kind of thing. He asked her questions. He took her advice.
She was charmed by this, by his open curiosity, by his eagerness to fit in.
And fit in he did, to a life arranged for him by her and her family—benevolent guides, as he saw them then. Her parents paid for the wedding, of course—a pretty penny—and the honeymoon to St. Croix. They paid for the apartment Sam and Susan lived in while they were in graduate school. They paid for Susan’s library science degree. Sam had a fellowship to architecture school, so that wasn’t an issue, and both he and Susan worked part-time through the academic year and over the summers. But there were lavish gifts, and they joined her family on vacations and holidays, sometimes on the Vineyard, once to Italy, several times to Bermuda or the Bahamas. Sam felt that not to do this would have been to deny Susan their company, their indulgence of her, all the things they could do for her, so he went along. He enjoyed it. He was a boy, greedy and glad for what he was learning, what he was being given.
He would have said that he and Susan were happy. Happy enough. Sex was an issue. This she wasn’t able to teach him about, because she wasn’t terribly interested in it. Sam was unsure enough of himself to feel that this might be his fault, and perhaps it was. But she seemed to enjoy it. At any rate, she liked the talking, the touching, that led up to it and that followed, and she never turned away from him, not until she got sick. It wasn’t until much later, long after she’d died and he began to have other lovers, that he understood that she wasn’t able to have an orgasm. That he realized that when she said, after sex, “I think I came”—as she often did when he asked—this meant she never had.
Charley arrived, unplanned, three years after the wedding, and a year after that Jack; then Mark, when Jack was two. A few months later, Susan found the lump in her breast. They removed it, and she had radiation and chemotherapy. This took almost a year out of their lives, but afterward she seemed to be in the clear.
But three years later there was a recurrence, and after that she was never well again. When she died, the boys were eleven, ten, and eight. Sam was thirty-five. He had been managing the household pretty much singlehandedly for years, though they had pretended for as long as they could that Susan was in charge.
It was during this period, her dying and afterward, that Sam had to grow up. That he had to learn to behave like a grown-up, at any rate, though sometimes he felt as frightened as he assumed the boys were.
But he didn’t allow himself that. He couldn’t.
As he couldn’t allow himself his impatience with her, sometimes his anger. Anger that she insisted on the fiction that she could do it. That she rejected her parents’ offer of household help. That she seemed not to notice how much she was asking of him, of the children. There were moments, hours, days, even, when it seemed just too hard to keep her going, to handle the boys and their fear, their acting out, to get some kind of dinner on the table night after night so they could maintain the semblance of a normal life. But he did it. He always did it.
Still, sometimes, suspended in this role, growing into it—because he did get better and better at it—he had the sense of having mislaid his true self, his real self.
And then she died, and slowly his life changed again. He had two women between her and Claire, each an astonishment to him in her way, neither of them a woman he’d chosen, exactly. They more or less happened to him. Both, apparently, his type. Or maybe neither. It didn’t matter.
And then Claire. He had often thought that part of her appeal for him was that she didn’t need taking care of. She was completely independent, competent, used to solitude.
Was that a type?
——
A few years after the split with Claire, Sam was having lunch with a friend of his from architecture school, Paulus Norton. Paulus told Sam he was planning to spend the summer in Truro helping his son build a house the younger man had designed—architecture seemed to run in families, Sam had observed, except for his own. Paulus and Sam had worked together on small building projects in the summers during graduate school to make money, and he idly suggested Sam join him. A lark, he said.
Sam had been living alone in the big house in Brookline—the house he’d lived in with Susan, the house the boys had grown up in, the house he’d rearranged architecturally, several times. Even when he married Claire, even when he and the boys went to live in her big house in Cambridge, he hadn’t sold it. He’d held on to it, he rented it out, he wasn’t sure why—maybe because in some unconscious way he knew from the start that he and Claire wouldn’t last.
At first he’d been glad to come back to it, alone. He’d never lived alone before, marrying as young as he had. He’d reveled in his solitude for a while. But increasingly now he was aware of avoiding it. He lived mostly in the office; he ate out; he stopped and had a drink somewhere after that or went to a movie or a bookstore. When he was home, he was restless and lonely.
This had surprised him. He was disappointed in himself that he wasn’t more resourceful.
Paulus’s project was a chance to turn away from all that, his disappointment with himself included. He said yes. By late June the project he’d been working on had broken ground—an addition to a house in Lincoln—and he loaded up his car and drove out to the Cape.
They lived like teenagers, like animals—Sam and Paulus, Paulus’s son Chase, and a tall, silent friend of Chase’s named Lex. They slept in tents on the ground for the first weeks, until the framed house could be used as a kind of platform. They got up with the sun and worked until it set, sometimes stopping for a while in midafternoon for a swim. Once every ten days or so, Sam drove into the city, took a shower, put on civilian clothes, and went out to Lincoln to go over things with the builder there. The next morning he’d dress in his work clothes again—laundered now and smelling of soap instead of sweat. He’d stop by the hardware store or the lumberyard for whatever specialty items for Chase’s house they couldn’t get on the Cape, and then make the long drive back out and start to work again.
After Paulus and Lex left in the fall, Sam stayed on with Chase, the two of them working shorter days, doing cabinetry and trim work. They didn’t talk much. Chase seemed comfortable with that, and Sam tried to be. In the evenings, Chase would lie down with a book next to the woodstove they’d installed when the nights started to get cold. He was working his way through the Russians—he was on Pushkin at that point.
Sam wasn’t able to settle down. He was itchy. He’d go to a bar, or he’d call one of the women he’d met over the summer.
There were four in all, people he’d thoughtlessly, heedlessly slept with. Through the fall, he juggled t
hem, sometimes awkwardly. It helped that Chase didn’t have a phone at the house, that Sam never gave any of them his cell phone number. It meant he could reach them, but they couldn’t reach him.
They were every type, these women. Un-type-able. One was young, entrepreneurial, a wiry smart-ass blonde in her early thirties who’d borrowed the money to start her own small restaurant. Things quieted down for her once the tourist season was over, and she had lots of energy for Sam. Too much energy. Another was married to a fisherman. She ran the farm stand where he and Paulus bought fruit and vegetables and homemade bread in the summer. She was tough and touching, a little overweight, but very beautiful, Sam thought, in a sweetly sad, worn way. There was also the owner of a touristy bad-art gallery in Provincetown he’d met one rainy day in the summer trawling the streets with Paulus. She was tall and thin and stylishly dressed—she’d been a model. And there was a writer he’d met at a reading at the Fine Arts Work Center, a poet with long wildly curling hair that she used in sex, wrapping it around his cock, stroking his belly with it.
“I seem to be suffering from a bout of concupiscence,” he told Paulus on one of the nights he was in town. “I’m not sure what your kid is making of it all.”
“Don’t worry about Chase,” Paulus said. “He’s brilliant at not noticing things. And I’d like to say it’s about time.”
“But kind of typical of me, don’t you think, to be doing this stuff assbackward.” He was thinking of the wild group of young married couples that Paulus and his first wife had been part of, that Sam and Susan had been bemused observers of. In the midseventies these couples had a kind of ongoing drunken dinner party in which they slept with each other in various combinations, smashed up their marriages, and rearranged themselves—some several times over—as new couples, their hapless children shuttled back and forth as it suited their needs. Now they all seemed as settled and cozily domestic as Sam and Susan had been through those crazy years. “He has the morals of a billy goat,” Susan had once said of Paulus. Which is what she would have said of Sam now, too, he supposed.
He wondered but didn’t feel able to ask Paulus whether he’d felt then as Sam did now about all his women—that sleeping with one increased his appetite for the others, or maybe for women in general. During this period—which felt endless as he lived through it but was really only a month or so—he had the sense of a great tide of femaleness washing over him, carrying him away: flesh and smells, breasts, limbs, hair, openings. Occasionally, working in a room by himself, he would call up one of these women, or several of them, in their damp parts. Once he was aware that he’d moaned aloud. He wondered what Chase thought, hearing this animal sound from a grown man, a friend of his father’s. An omnivore indeed.
It ended messily, with two of them finding out about each other—the two who cared, as it turned out, the restaurant owner and the fisherman’s wife. And Sam, who had thought he was so conscientious, so careful—he wouldn’t hurt a soul—Sam more or less sneaked out of town in the night, with apologies to Chase for not quite finishing the bathroom cabinetry.
Billy wasn’t his type. At any rate, he wasn’t at all attracted to her, not at first. She was so small, there was something so still, so inert in her face, so guarded in her eyes. She was pretty, he acknowledged that to himself, but pretty in a quite particular, delicate way that had never interested him—the gamine, beginning to wear a bit at the edges. So as the part of the evening that included her started, he was thinking vaguely, if he was thinking at all, that he’d just get through it—take her home, if that was called for, say a polite good night. Easy. Manageable.
So he was surprised to feel his interest in her growing, especially once Leslie and Pierce left. And not just his interest, but his attentiveness to her, to what was sexual about her, which he hadn’t seen at first. When he lifted her ridiculously shapeless blanket of a coat and turned it this way and that, trying to help her on with it, he was intensely aware of her physically, the neat shining bowl of her hair cut sharply in against the white stalk of her neck, her tiny waist, the shapely triangle of her back, and the way the muscles moved under her fitted top as she strained her arms behind her to find her sleeves. Of course, by then he was piqued—unsettled anyway—by her sudden coolness to him and the way that had made him feel.
Like a boy on a first date. Like a jerk.
But maybe, he told himself afterward, she had behaved the way she did at the end of the evening because she was responding to the strangeness of the beginning of it as much as he was.
And it had been very strange for Sam, almost all of it.
He had been early to the theater. He was habitually early. He enjoyed the vague sense of moral superiority the first arrival has, and he liked to have some time alone before any social event to settle himself, to get ready for whatever was coming. He stood under the marquee, watching what had been a chilly mist when he arrived begin to gather into real rain, and looking around at this neighborhood, which had always intrigued him, starting back when it was one of the most beautiful slums in the city. Now it had been gentrified several times over—it was not just beautiful anymore, it was expensively beautiful.
Across the street a row of storefronts took up the ground floors of the old brick town houses and, above them, like so many lighted stage sets, the apartments, one to a floor, it seemed. There were characters visible in several of them.
Around him the theatergoers arrived and milled. Sam watched them, too—another of the pleasures of being early. A group of what seemed to be students was assembling in front of the doors, almost all of the men sporting the little goatee that had become so inexplicably popular now—a half dozen Lenins. They were calling to one another as they gathered, they were talking loudly in twos and threes. One of the young women, a beautiful redhead with very white skin, said to the man standing with her, “Yeah, seventy-two hours at the max. And even then, sometimes …”
Family visits, Sam thought. He’d put money on it. Staying with parents, having your parents stay with you. It made him think of his oldest son, Charley, and his wife, whom he visited once a year or so for a weekend—max—by what seemed like mutual consent. At least they never pressed him to stay longer, and he didn’t ask to, in spite of the fact that Charley lived the farthest away—San Francisco—and was the one child of Sam’s with little children of his own, Sam’s only grandkids.
It was suddenly quiet under the marquee when the group went inside. Sam saw an old couple coming up the sidewalk toward the theater in the deep shadow of their umbrella. They were both tall, the man bent a little over the white-haired woman. They walked slowly and cautiously. It was perhaps seven or eight seconds before he recognized them—a world of time. He felt shock when he did, and then the effort of trying to make the quick adjustment. He started to move in their direction just as they arrived under the marquee and Pierce swept the umbrella back and away to close it.
“Ah!” Sam said, stepping up to them. He felt confused by his mistake, by how changed Leslie was, but he held her face and kissed it, twice—remembering, at the moment he did it, that this was exactly the way he had held her the one time he truly kissed her, standing in a field in Vermont.
So that started it. A sense of discomfort that set things in motion, that was at work through the evening. Certainly he felt awkward talking to Leslie and Pierce for a little while after that, though Pierce, as usual, made everything easier with his energy, his loud voice.
Then there was the play, the way in which it stirred his shame about himself. It seemed to affect Leslie, too, nearly silencing her for a time. It must be hard for her, he thought during the first act. There must have been such a time for her, a time like the one in the play, when she was waiting without knowing whether Gus was alive or not.
And then after the play, just before Billy arrived at the restaurant, they were having their strange discussion about pornography, sparked by Pierce’s account of a show at the MFA that he’d gone to see that afternoon. It occurred to
Sam that Pierce might have introduced the subject to distract Leslie, to pull her back from wherever she’d gone in response to the play. But maybe not. You couldn’t always tell what Pierce was aware of, what he just stumbled into.
Pierce had said that his first porn experience was with photographs of his father’s that one of his older brothers had found and showed to him. “Beauties of the twenties or thirties,” he said, “with the great blurry, silvery lighting and the makeup of that day, comporting themselves in various ways I would have thought shameful. But no. They were all smiling pleasantly—happily, I’d venture to say—while they diddled themselves or looked back at the camera over their handsomely displayed buttocks. And ‘splayed’ is the operative part of that word. That was what dazzled me most. That it wasn’t shameful.” He frowned momentarily. “That was, I suppose, the real revelation involved for me.”
Sam had offered a movie he’d seen at college. “Pretty formulaic. The stud arrives at the door. A milkman, I think. Or a postman. Or an iceman.”
“The iceman cometh,” Pierce said.
“Well, exactly. The missus, without much to-do, lies down on the kitchen table, and, yep, the iceman cometh. Amply.”
And though Sam had seen such a movie, this wasn’t his first experience with porn. He couldn’t have spoken of that, wouldn’t have spoken of it in Leslie’s presence. That had happened at a state fair when he was about fourteen or fifteen. He’d told his parents he was going to play some games, and instead he’d gone directly to the girlie tent, holding out the entrance fee, not looking at the man taking his money—worried that he’d be turned away because of his age.
Inside, a group of twenty or thirty men were standing around, waiting, in much the same way they stood around when they were about to look at cattle or hogs, but without the pointed interest money brought to such things. When the woman came out, their faces, like his own, he supposed, went thick and stupid.