For Love

by Sue Miller

  Now she turned the light on and looked over the clutter of her desk. She had to decide – it must have been this, she thought, that had waked her – how much of her work she would try to take with her. She sat down and flipped slowly through her notes, the odd multiple starts she’d made on an article she was doing.

  Lottie specialized in medical issues, explaining them simply in short essays usually published in the health or beauty columns of expensive women’s magazines. She’d done several books too. It was how she had met Jack. She was writing a book on cancer at the time.

  She had just recovered from it then – breast cancer: they’d removed the lump and given her radiation. The result was only a small, smooth dent in her right breast that her hand restlessly fluttered back to over and over in the first months after it was removed; and a roughened patch of skin that was supposed to return to normal slowly. Her own doctor was reassuring, said it was contained and small, with what he called ‘clean margins.’ He was certain they’d gotten it in ample time. But Lottie had been scared for months, scared in the way that wakes you at night dry-mouthed, scared in the way that had her calculating how she would arrange for Ryan’s growing up. And her method of coping with that had been to begin to read, to read everything she could about the choice she had made, then about the rationales for all the choices, then about the history of the rationales, then about the wackier, less researched, less respectable choices: coffee enemas, macrobiotic diets, reinjecting your own washed blood, crystals. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she’d decided to write the book – or she’d decided that she was, already, writing it.

  Jack was an oncologist, and he was willing to talk to her. A lot of doctors weren’t, she’d discovered over the years of research on this and that. They didn’t want their work popularized. They felt that it led to hypochondria, to people diagnosing themselves, medicating themselves, questioning the doctor’s wisdom.

  But Jack had seemed to like their conversations. They had met at first several times in his office, among his diplomas and the pictures of his family. Lottie remembered clearly the photograph of Evelyn on his desk, strong and young-looking in tennis whites. It wasn’t until after the first time they met for dinner that he explained what his life with Evelyn was like now – what she was like.

  From the start Jack had enjoyed playing with analogies that he thought would make the medical intricacies clear to Lottie. It was only very slowly that it dawned on both of them that all of this was an elaborate analogy, itself, for courtship. A courtship he felt he had no right to, in literal terms. But by the time they discovered it, it had done its work. In spite of the invalid wife, the children at home – Lottie’s son at her home – they were in love.

  Although love was not what Jack offered her, or chose to offer her. In fact, he scrupulously avoided offering it. ‘I need to believe,’ he said to Lottie, ‘– no, I do believe – that in some sense or another I still love my wife.’

  And Lottie, who thought of herself as big and tough and having been around the block a few dozen times, had said yes, that was all right, she could manage that. She was, after all, a grownup, with her own life. She had felt, actually, that this might be almost ideal for her, to have a lover who wouldn’t want to see her all the time, who couldn’t focus very much of his attention on her.

  The first time they made love, Jack was passionate and thorough. About ten minutes after they were finished, his beeper went off. He had rented a room for them in an expensive hotel near his office, and as he dressed, he told Lottie she should just drop the key off at the desk on her way out, it was all taken care of.

  ‘Including me,’ she said. ‘You thought of everything.’

  He’d smiled and bent over to kiss her, a tall, lanky man whom she’d been completely pleased to see naked earlier. Now he pulled a tie through his collar and slid his long arms into his jacket. ‘I’ll call you, about the middle of next week, okay?’ he said. ‘The weekend’s full of sports and lessons and kids for me.’

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said.

  After he left, she’d put on one of the hotel’s thick robes – it probably cost three times what she paid for the robe she had at home – and opened the curtains. Out to her left she could see the lake, gray and swollen-looking, and, far below her, shoppers streaming down Michigan Avenue amid the first pale blossoms of a chilly spring day. She stayed in the hotel room for several hours. She ate part of a jar of cashew nuts from the honor bar and drank a little bottle of white wine. She ran a bath full of scented gel and soaked in it. She applied her makeup carefully in front of a magnifying mirror and dried her hair with a fancy little dryer. She was alone and she felt perfectly happy.

  She felt happy shopping for Ryan and herself later that afternoon, and happy still cooking dinner and talking to him; and then sitting down at her desk around ten or so to begin her evening’s work. On her skin she could smell the scented gel from the hotel. She thought of Jack’s touch, of the graying hairs on his chest, of his sleepy, strong erection, his gentle fingers. And she was glad he wasn’t with her.

  Everything worked, beautifully, for about a year. She saw Jack for lunch once or twice a week, and they met to make love once every two weeks or so. Occasionally they had what he called ‘a date.’ Sometimes they drove to a seedy pool hall to the west of the Loop. He taught her to play cowboy pool, and they sat in the big scarred wooden booths and drank beer and dropped quarters in the jukebox. Three or four times he took her to a crowded dance hall in a Polish neighborhood, where every third number was a polka and they seemed to be the youngest people present. They listened to jazz in black bars on the fringes of the ghetto; once they actually went roller-skating. They never spoke of it, but Lottie assumed that one reason for the peculiarity of these evenings was that they weren’t likely, in these settings, to run into anyone who knew Jack, who’d known Evelyn. It didn’t bother her. They were things she would have liked to do with him anyway.

  She talked to friends about it sometimes, about how made-to-order for her busy life this relationship seemed. She finished the cancer book and began to work on a book she’d actually gotten a good advance for – the first real money she’d made writing: a book about fad diets and the medical realities and ramifications of them.

  And then Evelyn had another stroke. Jack called her at home and told her. He said he wasn’t sure how soon he could talk to her again. He was at the hospital, and it was touch and go. Evelyn’s parents were flying in and would be staying at the house for a while.

  Lottie was understanding, completely sympathetic. But for the week or so until Jack called again to say Evelyn would survive, she was appalled to find herself sometimes lost in a waking dream of Evelyn’s death, and of herself married to Jack, living with Ryan and Jack’s kids in the big house she’d driven by once or twice when she was in his neighborhood.

  They didn’t see each other for more than a month that time, and Lottie didn’t seem to be able to stop herself from thinking of Jack over and over. Of his angular body, his lined face. Of his hands with their knotted knuckles and joints. Of his odd-colored eyes. She was traveling a good deal, interviewing the originators of various diets, and often she couldn’t sleep in the strange cheap hotels she stayed in. She sat up late watching TV, listening to arguments or lovemaking on the other side of the Sheetrock walls, and thinking of him. In airports, in restaurants, driving over unfamiliar terrain in small rental cars, she would see his image in front of her. His hands, his hoarse voice. She remembered the moment he’d reached over and turned off the tape recorder she’d set on the table between them while she asked her carefully researched questions. Startled, she’d looked up from her notes and noticed his eyes for the first time. ‘This is something you can’t use in the book,’ he’d said. ‘I’d like very much to make love to you.’

  She remembered the slow mock-medical exam he’d performed on her once, in a hotel in Cleveland – his stylized professional distance, her increasing frantic arousal. He’d still ha
d all his clothes on when they made love that time, in a position he said was recommended by the AMA.

  One day, driving, picturing him, she was suddenly aware of tears streaming down her cheeks, into her open mouth.

  Finally they met for lunch and an afternoon at their hotel. Everything seemed the same. They sat in the bar. He had seltzer and she had wine, and they laughed and talked about what they’d been doing at work, about the children. She told him about Ryan’s dyeing his hair green, the running spots all over the bathroom walls. He told her that Megan had gotten her period, that he’d had to help her with it.

  ‘Same idea,’ she said.

  ‘Not even in the ballpark, madam.’ He shook his head. ‘In the great Olympics of parenting, it’s gold to your, maybe, lead.’

  They didn’t speak of Evelyn. When Lottie had asked about her on the telephone, he had said, ‘It’s very bad. She’ll live, but it’s very, very bad.’ They went upstairs and made love, twice. Lottie didn’t come, and when he was finished the second time, Jack moved down between her legs and lapped and stroked her gently until, with an act of fierce concentration, she managed a small, shuddering convulsion.

  Afterward they showered and dressed together, talking in a desultory way. Lottie was unbearably tense, but she tried to imitate Jack’s rhythm, his relaxed tenderness with her. He walked her to her car, leaned over the open window, and touched her cheek as he said goodbye.

  ‘Two weeks okay?’ he asked. ‘Life is still nutty for us.’

  She smiled. ‘It’s fine.’

  As soon as he turned and walked away, cutting into the crowd, she rolled her window up and was shaken by ragged sobs. She bent over, as though she were looking for something on the floor of the car, and kept her head down until she was calm again.

  In the next weeks, she called his home repeatedly, and hung up when one of the children or the housekeeper answered. It was during this period, too, that she began driving down his alley, looking up at the room that would later be her own study. She was so absentminded and irritable at home that Ryan asked her one night, ‘Is this that menopause thing you’re having?’

  She’d gotten control of herself after that, in front of Ryan and her friends anyway. She’d always been in control when she was with Jack. And slowly the most intense of the feelings seemed to pass. But still, several times a year up until Evelyn’s death, she would feel so shaken on leaving him, or so abruptly in need of him in the midst of something she was doing, that she’d drive to his office at the end of a day and double-park across the street just to watch him set out for home – a tall, skinny gray-haired man, his head bent down, his hands in his pockets, his topcoat open and swinging from side to side behind him in even the coldest weather. Or she would make the slow drive again, down the alley behind his house, her headlights off. As though she were some criminal, she thought. A housebreaker. A homewrecker.

  And the first time she was alone in the house after they were married – her house now too, just as she’d dreamed – she had gone through Jack’s things, looking for a sign, any sign, that he might have some parallel feelings about her. And found none, not a thing, unless you counted the reviews of her books he’d clipped and tucked inside the covers.

  Instead, to her dismay, she found a box full of photographs of Evelyn and letters they’d written to each other. She forced herself not to read the letters, though she couldn’t help taking in phrases, words: ‘so shaken, to my roots,’ ‘all my thoughts, my dreams, of you,’ ‘darling, darling Jack.’ She allowed herself the photographs. And then was sorry she had. Most of them were fairly standard snapshots: Evelyn with the children on a beach somewhere; Evelyn in the background at Christmas, wearing a bathrobe, at some big party, balancing a plate of food while she talked. But several stayed with her long after she’d closed the box and slid it back on Jack’s high shelf in the closet. One of Evelyn in a wide-brimmed black hat, sitting at a table covered with half-filled glasses somewhere clearly in Europe, laughing. She was big and dark and very beautiful. And one of her staring intensely into the camera, her eyes nearly out of focus with feeling, her hair in disarray, her shoulders and one large breast bare while she nursed what was clearly a newborn on the other.

  In the days and weeks following, whenever one of the images rose in Lottie’s mind and her world lurched sideways, she would chant internally, You deserve what you feel, you deserve what you feel.

  Now Lottie hunched over the table in her room, Idalba’s room, looking at her papers under the bright light. In the deep stillness of the sleeping house, the refrigerator began to whir, and Lottie stopped for a moment to identify the sound and then went on reading. She was writing a series of articles on emotions, and the distortion of medical terms used in discussing them popularly. She had started thinking she’d simply write an essay about the process of grief, wanting to understand Jack, what he was going through. She’d read a wealth of self-help books, some trashy, some serious, about the subject. But all of them infuriated her with what she saw as prescriptive, shallow accounts of the ‘healthy stages’ of the feelings involved. She had begun to seek examples of sick and healing extravagance in literature and biography. She discovered, for instance, that Flaubert, devastated by his mother’s death, had asked a maid to wear an old dress of hers; that he would burst into tears at the sight of her moving around the house. She wrote about this. She wrote about the nineteenth-century preoccupation with séances, she wrote about people wearing jewelry made from the bones, the hair of the dead. She described voodoo ceremonies in which people had intercourse with the dead, a culture in which they disinterred the dead annually for celebratory reunions. She talked about the comfort available in what was taboo, in what was extreme. She closed with a paragraph gently chiding the fear behind the particularly American need to normalize emotion by using medical language to describe it.

  None of this helped her with Jack, of course, with his private, understated sorrow. But it did bring a very nice fee from an elegant woman’s magazine that often published Lottie’s work. And another editor said yes, they would be interested in a series on various emotions. It was this series Lottie had begun to jot down ideas for now. Love and hate, to start with, she thought. Then fear. Anger. Jealousy.

  She was looking now at her notes on love. Bader, whom Idalba had forbidden entrance to her room, lay on the threshold with his paws crossed under his chin. Under the glare of her white lamp, her ideas seemed sketchy and inadequate. She had just begun to read the psychologizing literature and had been struck with the consistency of opinion on things. Romantic love was obsessive and childish and couldn’t last. Mature love was trusting, friendly, more relaxed. Part of the function of marriage, sociologically speaking, was to transform one into the other.

  Over the past weeks, Lottie had begun to feel that doing this reading and making these notes had reawakened in her all those feelings about Jack she thought she’d suppressed. She had started to cry one night recently after they’d made love – their sorrowful grownup love – wanting back the feelings they’d had before they lived together, before Evelyn died Megan had been at a sleepover, and Lottie took the opportunity to be as histrionic as she wished, weeping, accusing Jack of having withdrawn from her.

  That in itself repulsed him; he wasn’t used to this kind of thing, especially not from her. He had put on his bathrobe and left the room. She had washed her face and followed him to the kitchen, determined to stay calm, but also to make him hear what she had to say. She stood in the middle of the room, barefoot and only wearing one of his T-shirts, her face swollen, her hair snarled after sex, and started in again.

  He was standing at the sink holding a glass of water, and he looked over at her coldly. ‘I simply don’t know what you mean or want, Lottie,’ he said. ‘This’ – he swung the glass toward her – ‘seems adolescent to me. It’s like some holdover from your single life.’

  Lottie was stung, furious at the smugness in this. She felt a pure rage at him, who’d lived so safely,
utterly sealed off from emotion by his wife’s illness for years. It made her want to rub his nose in the disorder of her sexual life before him, of most people’s lives out there, as she thought of it.

  ‘How dare you lecture me?’ she shrilled. ‘You had to have your kind of marriage – sad, and full of patience and kindness. But don’t pretend you know what it has to be for other people. What it is.’

  He turned and looked at her. His voice was sharp. ‘I know it doesn’t have to be melodramatic. That’s not what marriage is about.’

  ‘This is our marriage,’ she said. ‘How would you know more than I do what it’s about, you asshole?’

  They looked at each other, both full of the wish to injure, to hurt. ‘Do you hear how you sound?’ he said. ‘How ugly you sound? If you were Megan, I’d send you to your room.’

  ‘How inconvenient for you that you can’t. That you have to listen to someone for once.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t have to listen to this … garbage.’

  He started from the room, and she grabbed his arm. Something gave, stitches popped audibly in his sleeve. They stopped. Lottie was aware of a pang of confused feeling having to do with his size – how much smaller she was than he, like a child – and with how badly she was behaving. She thought, suddenly, of her reading about love, and she was swept with a sense of the absurdity of their argument, even of their dilemma.

  They stood still, looking at each other for a moment. One of his eyelids was pulsing erratically with fatigue. She wanted to end this, somehow. She stepped back and said, in a little girl’s voice, ‘You’re not the boss of what love is.’

  If they hadn’t both raised children, if they hadn’t both been middle-aged, it might not have worked. But his face opened in relief, his shoulders dropped, and he laughed. Half an hour or so later, when they were side by side in bed in the dark, he spoke suddenly, intensely, as though they’d been in steady conversation all along: ‘We can get through this, Lottie. I know we can. It’s just time. Just give me some time.’