For Love

by Sue Miller

  ‘Oh, I adore them,’ Jessica was saying. ‘I went to one of their concerts last year and we had great seats, so close that their sweat actually fell on me.’

  Elizabeth had set two more bottles of wine on the table before she sat down again. Lottie reached forward and poured herself another glass. Then she sat back a little and listened to the babble of the multiple conversations. In every silence she could hear the whirring saw of crickets, the distant horns on Mass Ave.

  ‘I never get to wear my purple dress,’ little Emily complained.

  ‘Darling, it’s much too fancy for tonight. Look at us all, eating with our bare hands, dripping blood and ketchup all over ourselves.’

  Big Emily launched herself. ‘When I was little we weren’t allowed to eat with our hands, even hamburgers …’

  ‘Why do you have that earring?’ Jeffrey asked. ‘Earrings are for weird guys.’

  Lottie turned quickly to Cameron.

  ‘I’m weird,’ he said, and shrugged. Then he smiled at Elizabeth, and Lottie had to turn away, his gaze was so intense. It seared her.

  It had grown dusky, and the candles’ yellow light had begun to cast upward shadows on their faces, Elizabeth looked tawny and beautiful. She was wearing a light, flowered sundress of some gauzy fabric. Her collarbones were deeply shadowed. Her long arms, cuffed again with the wide silver bracelets, were in constant motion. Now she bent toward her daughter to say something.

  Across from Lottie, Ryan was talking. ‘They say “bloody this” and “bloody that” all the time, and you forget they’re fucking swearing.’ Then he looked around the table, suddenly shamefaced. ‘Oops.’

  ‘But these are real deviled eggs, dear,’ Emily was saying as she held the plate out to Jeffrey. ‘Not mine.’

  ‘Nary a book in the house,’ Cameron was saying. ‘Well, hardly a book. God, what a way to grow up. That’s why it’s the perfect profession for me.’

  ‘But why can’t I stay up as late as the boys?’

  In the flickering light, everything was happening either too fast or too slow. When Elizabeth came around the table, pouring wine, Lottie put her hand over her glass.

  ‘It’s eeny, meeny, miney, mo’, catch a tiger by the toe, stupid. Isn’t it, Mom? Mom?’

  ‘We have our little volunteer uniforms, you know: blue-striped, middle-aged, genteel ladies of mercy.’

  ‘Oh, I never get to New York,’ Lottie heard herself say. ‘You do everything by phone and Fed Ex. You could live in Nebraska for all they care.’

  ‘I was, like, oh no, do I have to go through this again?’

  ‘Well, at home we have lots of pets, plus I get to go horseback riding once a week.’

  Little Emily began to cry, and Elizabeth leaned over and said to Jessica, ‘I’ll get her set and then you … ?’

  Next to Lottie, Jessica nodded, and her hair moved in a watery shimmer.

  The boys began to rise too. It was dark, and Lottie had been swatting mosquitoes for a while, she realized.

  At the kitchen door, Elizabeth stopped to call to her sons. ‘Plates to the kitchen before you go anywhere.’ The lights inside went on in successive windows as she trailed little Emily through the kitchen and then upstairs.

  Lottie stood too, and Cameron and Emily, and there was a friendly clattering of dishes as they stacked them. At the kitchen door with her heap of stuff, Lottie turned back. Ryan and Jessica were still sitting at the table in the candlelight. The au-pair girl was half lying across it, actually, seeming to reach toward him, resting her chin on her arm. This would be at least the second girl already this summer, Lottie thought. Maybe the third.

  Emily came outside, passed Lottie on her way back to the table. ‘Oh, bless you, dear,’ she said as she floated away.

  In the kitchen, Cameron was at the sink, scraping plates off into a garbage bag, then rinsing them.

  Lottie set her stack down and watched him for a moment. He moved neatly, rhythmically, and she thought of his years of careful bachelorhood, his tidy apartment. She said, ‘Boy, the pheromones are fierce tonight.’

  ‘Ah, Lottie the romantic,’ he said. He didn’t break his rhythm, but he was smiling, that quick, surprising smile that lit his somber face, that made you want to keep him happy.

  She laughed. ‘Well, as it happens, I am.’

  ‘Who, you?’ He looked at her, as though he hadn’t really noticed her before.

  ‘Did you think you had the patent?’ she asked. ‘Yeah, me.’

  ‘It never struck me that way.’

  Lottie lifted her shoulder and popped a radish into her mouth. ‘Nonetheless.’ The radish exploded noisily between her teeth. ‘What’s going on with you and Elizabeth?’ she asked after a moment.

  He looked over at her and squinted his eyes. He smiled again. ‘Pheromones,’ he said.

  ‘Ahhh!’ She went outside for more dishes, passing Emily once more. Emily had an empty wine bottle in each hand. She held them carefully, as if she were using them to balance herself.

  ‘Charlotte, dear,’ the older woman said.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I just wanted to thank you and Cameron, dear, for all you’ve been doing for Elizabeth. It’s so good for her to get out, to try to just put it aside for a while, till things come around, and I’m sure they will, these things happen, don’t you know, even in a very solid marriage, but you’ve been lovely, just lovely to her, and I’m very grateful.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything, really.’

  ‘No, no, no, no, my dear, you must let me say it, I’m old enough not to be contradicted, and I know it’s not that much to you, a few movies and dinner and the like, but she’s been so despondent, and it really has absolutely transformed her – so!’ She bobbed her head up and down, up and down, in a diminishing series of dips. The reflected light moved from plane to plane in her bifocals, and she smiled warmly and leaned too close to Lottie.

  ‘Well, it was nothing,’ Lottie said. How very interesting, she thought.

  ‘Poo,’ said Emily. She patted Lottie’s arm once, twice, and Lottie felt the cold touch of the bottle glass. Emily went inside.

  Lottie stood alone for a moment in the dark. The light from the kitchen cast her own shadow in front of her. Across the terrace, Ryan and Jessica still sat, blurry in the candlelight and her middle-aged vision. Behind her, she heard Emily start up with Cam, his tight, small voice giving monosyllabic replies to the steady, watery lapping of her conversation. It was like sitting in a warm bath, listening to her, Lottie thought. Across the dark lawn, the white shirts of Elizabeth’s boys moved like giant moths.

  She had the odd sense of having somehow disappeared. She could walk across the street now, back to her mother’s house, she could get in the car and drive off, and no one would miss her, no one would come for her. It was like the feeling she’d had once as a little girl when she hid under the front porch, behind the broken lattice, because her mother had yelled at her. She’d waited on the packed dirt through the long summer afternoon and into the evening – perhaps actually no longer than a few hours, but it had seemed endless to Lottie then – and no one came. Her mother called her once, at dinner, but then not again. Finally Lottie had crawled out and gone inside. And though it wasn’t until much later that she was able to articulate the resolve she took from this event, even at the time she somehow understood the feeling, the knowledge that there was no one out there for her. That her mothering would have to come from someplace in herself.

  The feeling she allowed herself now, though, as she started again across the terrace, was a sudden pulse of anger at Ryan and Jessica, sitting here together in the dusk, as though the world, the adults, had been invented to serve them, to arrange for them to meet, to score. As she came up closer, she heard Ryan saying, ‘I was really little, only about two or so, so I don’t even remember it when they were together.’

  Perfect, she thought. Tales of divorce. He was using the sorrow of his life, of her life, to seduce this girl.

  ‘Ry
an, my dear,’ she said.

  He turned. His face in the moving light was frightened, as boyish as Michael’s or Jeffrey’s.

  ‘Maybe you could be helping too.’ There was acid in her voice, and Ryan and Jessica both quickly unfolded and stood up. Looking almost sheepish, they began to gather the last glasses, the leftover silverware and napkins, from the table.

  A little while later, Lottie and Cam were sitting on the front steps of their mother’s house. It was dark, and Lottie could barely make out Cam’s face in the shadows. He’d asked her if she was going out to see their mother again, and she’d said she wasn’t sure.

  ‘It isn’t easy, I know.’

  There was something Lottie heard as condescending in this, and she answered quickly, ‘I don’t expect it to be easy, Cam.’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘But she doesn’t even know me.’

  He shifted on the step across from her.

  ‘And it’s not as if we were ever what you might call close.’

  ‘I wasn’t either.’

  The thought of how true this was, of how much more he had to forgive their mother for than she did, shamed Lottie, and she was silent.

  After a minute Cam asked her how the article was coming.

  Gratefully she answered, ‘I don’t know. I’m at an impasse.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe I should do hate next, instead of love. Or anger. I mean, I think I keep reading and reading because I really have no notion of what I think about it all. And every time I hear a popular song on the radio, just some sappy thing – especially some sappy thing – I change my mind.’

  ‘What have you been reading?’

  ‘That you gave me?’

  ‘Or whatever.’

  ‘Well, Romeo and Juliet for starters. Stendhal. Turgenev: “First Love” and then “Clara Milich.” But I’m sick of death. Everything I read has death in it. You love, your lover dies. Or you die. Or you think about her dying. I already wrote the article on grief. I thought I was done with that.’

  ‘Well, of course, they did die more frequently then. Mortality was much more … a familiar, I suppose you should say.’

  ‘I suppose, I suppose. And I suppose a lot of female deaths must have been in childbirth, or from childbirth. So love was, literally, I guess, more dangerous. All tangled up in the anticipation of grieving and sorrow. Maybe that’s part of what made it romantic.’

  The dark swirled a little around Lottie. She’d drunk too much. After a minute she said, ‘That “Clara Milich” is a strange story – do you remember it?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve even read it.’

  ‘The main character falls in love with a woman – Clara – after she’s died. After she’s killed herself on account of her unrequited love for him. Because – it seems, anyway, at least partially because – he’s in love with the idea of himself that she’s revealed. Of himself as someone worth dying for.’

  The living room light came on at Elizabeth’s house. Lottie saw Cam’s head lift in that direction. His voice, when he spoke seemed tense. ‘But that would be compelling, of course.’

  ‘I think it’s sick.’

  He turned to her in the dark, his face a light blur. ‘You can’t have it both ways, Charlotte. I thought you were arguing for sickness. For what we call sickness.’ He turned away. ‘In our sickness.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I am. It’s just … it all seems so drearily unhappy.’

  ‘Well, the happy ending isn’t popular in literature. It isn’t dramatic enough.’

  ‘Or maybe real enough,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Because how could you say, “They lived occasionally happily ever after”?’

  ‘There’s my cynical Charlotte.’ She could hear that he was grinning. ‘Romantic, my ass.’ He laughed.

  ‘Why do you keep laughing?’ she asked. She was pretending to be irritated, but she felt a quiver of the real thing too. ‘You’re altogether too happy.’

  ‘You can’t be too happy.’

  ‘That’s not what my reading is telling me.’

  ‘You’ve been reading too much, then.’

  ‘The pot calling the kettle black.’

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment. The trees rustled with a sudden, cool breeze. Rain was predicted in the night.

  Lottie said, ‘Mrs Harbour – big Emily – thinks they’re going to get back together, that this is just a temporary little blip in their happily married life.’

  ‘Emily is sweet, but she’s completely in the dark.’

  ‘Well, here we sit too.’

  Across the street, a door banged shut. Elizabeth emerged in the light under the porte cochere, quickly became just a shape in front of it, then disappeared into the black lawn. They both waited in silence for her to reappear. After a moment she did, stepping forward on to the sidewalk, crossing the street toward them. Her skirt billowed around her long legs.

  ‘Hi,’ Cameron called as she stepped on to the curb.

  Her hand slapped her chest. ‘God! You startled me.’

  ‘Char and I are stoop-sitting.’

  She hesitated a half second, then walked toward them. ‘May I join you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lottie said. When had this been arranged? she wondered.

  ‘We were talking about love,’ Cameron said.

  Elizabeth laughed her bright, nervous laugh.

  ‘And laughter,’ Lottie said.

  ‘Love, laughter, and the sorrow that comes after,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Isn’t that in some song?’

  ‘We were just voting on the sorrow-that-comes-after part.’ Lottie said.

  Elizabeth stopped, facing them. Her mouth made a dark O in her face. ‘You’re too quick for me, Char,’ she said. ‘I don’t get it.’

  Cam’s arm lifted toward Elizabeth. ‘Come sit,’ he said.

  As though he pulled her by a string, she stepped forward with the inward motion of his arm and sat down on the step below his. Her perfume floated up toward Lottie.

  ‘But I want you to cast your vote, Elizabeth,’ Lottie said. ‘Do you think sorrow follows love? That’s what we were debating.’

  ‘What an odd thing to be talking about.’

  ‘I’m writing about it. An article.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, what about it?’ Lottie could hear the nervy, persistent edge in her own voice; and she realized how cruel this question was. What was wrong with her tonight? No one spoke for a few seconds. ‘Well, it’s probably a dumb question,’ she said. Then: ‘All’s well at your house?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘For the moment,’ she said. ‘Emily’s asleep anyway. Little Emily. The boys pretty much take care of themselves. How’s your other project, Char? The house, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, coming along. Coming along.’

  ‘You’re so admirable, to do it yourself. If it were me, I’d just throw money at it.’

  There was a silence. Lottie waited for Cam to speak, and finally he did. His light voice was polite, moderate. ‘Well, of course, Charlotte could do that. But I couldn’t, and that’s the problem. I’m afraid I’m in a way responsible for keeping her in chains this summer.’

  Elizabeth had spun around to look up at him. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Cam, I didn’t mean …’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Lottie said, ‘I can’t afford it either. I mean, Jack can, but that’s Jack’s money.’ He had offered at one point, had said the estate could pay him back after the house was sold, if Lottie felt uncomfortable about taking the money.

  The estate couldn’t afford it either, Lottie pointed out. And for Jack to donate it, in light of Cameron’s financial situation, was awkward – impossible, as Lottie saw it. Jack had backed off, in the end. In part, Lottie knew, because he couldn’t tell how much of her argument was reasonable delicacy on her part about Cameron and his finances; and how much might be connected to her wish to escape him and his sorrow – the sorrow of their life together.

  ‘Besides,’ Lottie said to Elizabeth, ‘Ryan likes earning the d
ough, and he’s cheaper than anyone else we could hire. He and I together are a very cheap team.’

  After a moment Elizabeth said, ‘You seem to have a very nice relationship, you and Ryan.’

  ‘Do we? Well, we do sometimes.’ And then, because that sounded so tepid, she said, ‘It’s always lovely to be with him for a while. For about … five days. And then we discover why it wouldn’t work indefinitely.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t it?’ Elizabeth said. ‘That’s so hard for me to imagine. I feel in some way that my kids – at least one of them anyway – will always be there.’

  Lottie smiled. ‘All I can say is, you’ll see.’ They were all facing the street; they were quiet for a minute. Lottie thought she could feel resistance to this idea. From Elizabeth? From Cameron? It’s the way it’s supposed to be,’ she said. ‘They have to push away. They have to find you … wanting somehow.’

  Cameron said quietly, ‘I imagine it’s different for different people.’

  Lottie was about to answer, sharply, when a car turned on to the street at the top of the hill. They all looked up at it. It descended slowly, then turned into Elizabeth’s driveway. Her car, Lottie realized. It was Ryan. She could hear the pulse of the radio playing. Some reggae beat.

  ‘Hey, look at this,’ she said. ‘Speak of the devil.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Ryan’s taking Jessica out.’

  The car pulled under the porte cochere and parked, most of it hidden along the side of the house. They could see only its taillights, and Lottie noted that one was missing. She’d need to replace it.

  ‘God, this is like déjà vu,’ she said. ‘Like watching you guys start up in high school.’

  Elizabeth cleared her throat.

  Lottie looked over and saw that Cam’s hand was resting, a patch of light, on Elizabeth’s dark hair. Lottie felt brittle and worn, suddenly, teetering on the brink of some outburst. She slipped her sandals off and massaged her bare feet. It was just that she’d drunk too much, she told herself, like a mother to a cranky child. She leaned her cheek against her bare shoulder.