For Love

by Sue Miller

  While she peeled her clothes off, he lay back on the bed in the pinkish light. ‘Ah.’ His penis rested sideways, heavy-looking, slightly stiffened, across his thigh. He gestured at the lamp. ‘This is as good as a boa, almost.’

  Lottie crawled on to the bed, bent over him on her hands and knees, took him into her mouth. After she was finished, and had lain back too, he rose up and slowly, sleepily, returned the favor. She watched him for a few moments down what seemed the long slope of her body: the shock of gray hair, the kind, worn face moving between her legs as though he wanted to nuzzle his way inside her. And then she dropped her head back and drifted away, everything eased inside her. She could feel herself flailing around, bucking, moving sideways across the bed. When they stopped, she was wedged into a corner by the headboard, her head nearly at the bed’s edge. ‘My pink, pink Lottie,’ he said after a while, and she felt his breath on her, and shuddered once more.

  ‘Oh, this is heaven, Jack. I could go on doing this forever.’

  ‘Mmm. We’ll have to get a few other men in, dear.’

  ‘Let’s. Let’s just stay here forever, having meaningless sex.’

  He laughed and moved up beside her. ‘I love a woman who says “Let’s,” ’ he said. But she thought she heard in his tone the pinch of disapproval again. He lay still next to her, not touching her. Lottie rolled to her side and turned off the light. Later she heard Jack in the bathroom, then over by the windows, closing the curtains. He came back to bed and pulled the covers over Lottie, he lay down next to her again. She listened to his breathing thicken, finally the long slow pulls of sleep. She was glad for his peacefulness; but now she was wide awake.

  ‘Meaningless sex,’ she had said. Why had she said that? It was not what she meant at all.

  She was restless; she could have cried out or begun to sing, she felt so wild. Her hand slid down between her legs. She began a slow circling motion. She held her thighs wider apart, pressed her fingers in a smaller, tighter circle. All her muscles were tensed, her heels dug into the mattress. In the dark she bared her teeth, she gasped, she shuddered once, twice, then stopped.

  When she lay quiet again, there was silence in the room. Jack’s breathing had stilled to its waking rhythm. Her blood slapped in her ears. She listened, as she knew he was listening, to her own breathing come slowly under control. I won’t say anything, she thought. There’s no need to say anything about it. And then she fell asleep.

  ‘There he is,’ Jack said, and banged the table with his hand as he stood up. Lottie had seen him too, her own son, but hadn’t for a second recognized him in this place, a handsome blond man in an unfamiliar linen jacket and pressed slacks. She hadn’t even known he had such a costume. She watched them as Jack reached Ryan across the restaurant, their greeting half handshake, half embrace. She watched them as they weaved back to her table, their faces moving animatedly at each other. Jack was the taller by several inches, but Ryan was larger, more solid. Who were they, to her? These two enormous men. It seemed impossible her life could be so connected to them, so defined by them. She felt almost dizzy with dislocation as they came to claim her.

  Over lunch, Ryan talked about himself in response to Jack’s questions, and Lottie learned more about what he’d done in England and what he hoped to do than she had in all the weeks they’d been working together. She leaned back in her chair and looked at them. She thought of Jack’s sons, Charley and Matthew, and his friendly ease with them too. How good he was! How much she loved him. What was wrong with her that she held her heart so bitterly away from him?

  Later in the afternoon, as she and Jack walked slowly to Cameron’s apartment, they talked about Ryan, about how differently Lottie felt about him when Jack was around. ‘I like it,’ Lottie said. ‘I like the distance from him. I think of it as the way he’ll be with me someday. I like how polite and grown up he is.’ She sighed. ‘Why isn’t he like that when he’s alone with me now?’

  ‘I suppose he’s busy creating that same distance in other ways now.’

  ‘I’ll say. His eyes, sometimes. If looks could kill.’

  They walked down Dartmouth Street, past the skateboarders banging around in front of the Public Library, past the jazzy new Amtrak Station. ‘I like Boston,’ Jack said. ‘I didn’t think I did. It used to be such a dour, prissy town.’

  ‘I like it too,’ Lottie said. ‘But it isn’t as though I know it any better than you do. I never came over here when I was growing up. I really knew nothing about it. It was like living in the provinces, then, to live in Cambridge.’

  ‘Ah, poor Lottie,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not complaining, I promise you. Now that I’ve grown up and seen Duluth, I know better than to complain of my childhood in Cambridge ever again.’

  Cameron had set out a tray on the trunk in front of the couch, with cheese and fat black olives, big wineglasses and bread. There was a blue bowl full of lemons next to all this, just for beauty, Lottie supposed. He opened a bottle as soon as they’d all greeted one another, and they clunked the heavy wineglasses together and congratulated themselves on this occasion. Cameron and Jack hadn’t met before. Cameron was saying now that he was glad Jack had come out, as much on his account as Lottie’s. ‘Though Char certainly deserves a break. Have you seen everything she and Ryan have done?’

  ‘No; we haven’t gone over yet.’

  ‘Actually, you’d need the Before and After for full effect. It wasn’t until after it was cleared out that I realized how horribly Mother lived.’

  They talked about the house, about the legal process, now almost complete, of having their mother declared incompetent. Cameron and Lottie talked about Richard Lester, about other roomers they remembered over the years. Cam told a story about one of them who’d lived in the house for six years before their mother discovered he was a cross-dresser. ‘Not full time, you know. And not extreme. Apparently there are subtle gradations. He was, I guess you’d say, a tasteful transvestite. But one night Mother looked up’ – here he imitated her blurry lifting of the head – ‘and sees this … dame! This floozy she doesn’t know, heading up the stairs. “Excuse me!” ’ he said, imitating her high-pitched, indignant tone. ‘ “Oh, Mrs Reed, it’s only me, it’s Stan,” the poor guy says. The upshot was that I got a call the next day, and had to go over and throw Stan out. That was it.’ He shook his head. ‘I hated to do it to him; he paid his rent regularly and he was very quiet, very neat. But she was adamant. Wouldn’t have such a thing in her house, et cetera, et cetera.’ His face was animate with a kind of anger or disgust that surprised Lottie. Then he looked directly at Jack and smiled, wryly. ‘This happened four or five years ago. If it was today, he would have sued for his civil rights and stayed forever.’

  Jack laughed.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Lottie said. ‘I thought Mother was more open-minded than that. Or maybe that she didn’t have that much mind left, or something.’

  ‘Oh no. She was definitely offended. You’d be surprised at the number of things that offended Mother. Still do. It seems to be a response that outlasts cerebration.’

  ‘Uselessly,’ Lottie said.

  They had relaxed by now, they had nearly finished the first glasses of wine, and there were bread crumbs sprinkled over all their laps, olive pits sitting on the plate. Jack had started to talk about his parents, who’d died within months of each other a few years before; when someone knocked on the door. Lottie looked at Cameron’s face as he stood up to go and answer it, and knew instantly it was Elizabeth. When he opened the door, she stepped toward him, kissed him lightly. There was a murmured exchange, and his hand rose to her face. Then she came into the room, her wide blue skirt swirling around her. Just like Loretta Young, Lottie thought unkindly, as Jack rose.

  ‘And this is Jack!’ Elizabeth said eagerly, her hand extended. ‘I’ve heard so much about you!’

  This was not true; Lottie had deliberately told her hardly anything; but Jack smiled warmly and let her hold his hand in bot
h of hers as they shook. Lottie looked up at them. Jack and Elizabeth were both tall, leggy, and they looked good together, much better than Cam and Elizabeth did; or than he and Lottie had in the mirror last night. Lottie had a friend who used how people looked together as a gauge of their potential for success as a couple. She and Jack would flunk, Lottie thought now. She should give him to Elizabeth.

  ‘I knew Charlotte would try to keep you to herself,’ Elizabeth was saying. ‘So when I heard you were coming to Cameron’s for a drink, I wheedled an invitation.’

  Cameron was fetching another glass from the cupboard above the kitchen counter. ‘It was beautifully done,’ he said. ‘I thought for a while she badly needed to be with me.’ He came back across the room, holding out the glass, just as Elizabeth dropped into the butterfly chair. ‘You want wine,’ he said to her.

  ‘Of course!’ she cried. ‘Tons of wine! No, gallons!’ She laughed. ‘I need to catch up with all of you!’ She was wound even tighter than usual, Lottie saw.

  Jack had sat down on the couch again, and Lottie leaned toward him a little. He spread his hand on her thigh, as though he felt her need for assurance. He was asking Elizabeth how long she’d been in Boston, and she began to tell him an abbreviated version of the story she’d told Lottie at the beginning of the summer, the story Jack had already heard from Lottie. While Elizabeth was speaking, Lottie looked at Jack’s hand on her leg, at the long flat fingers. She remembered once looking down at them spread across her own abdomen and asking him idly whether he thought he might have Marfan syndrome. He’d snorted. ‘That’s about as likely a diagnosis,’ he’d said, moving his finger up to the whited dent in her breast, ‘as my concluding that this is the result of a broken heart.’

  Lottie’s hand rose involuntarily to her breast now, and then quickly down.

  Cameron’s eyes moved from Elizabeth’s face to Jack’s and Lottie’s as Elizabeth talked, assessing their response to her. She’s mine, she’s mine, they said: what do you think?

  They started to talk about the Democratic convention, held the week before, and Cam was being expert about Dukakis, his unlikeliness, his chances or lack thereof. The sun had moved directly opposite Lottie now, and she had to squint to look at Elizabeth and Cameron, so she didn’t, for the most part. It made the conversation feel distant and unreal to her, as though she’d taken a powerful drug. ‘I don’t know,’ Cam said. ‘Neil Diamond supplying the emotion. It seems a new low to me.’

  Elizabeth began to reminisce about the politics of the sixties. She’d worked in the McCarthy campaign. ‘Remember? Get clean for Gene? I bought these little cotton blouses with Peter Pan collars. I eschewed eye makeup. This, in context – well, in my life generally – was a macrosacrifice. I had a circle pin.’ She clasped her hands to her bosom. ‘Oh, I behaved so beautifully! And all for naught, of course. But it just felt – well, you remember it, Cam – so cosmically important. And every march! Remember the one in Washington? Cam and I went together,’ she explained to Lottie and Jack. ‘What a time!’ She shook her head, dazzled by her memories.

  Lottie remembered the spring of ’68 too, hearing that King had been shot, that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, while Ryan careened and fluttered his way around inside her. She’d felt she’d made a terrible mistake, that she shouldn’t be bringing a child into such a world.

  ‘I’m just enough older than you to see it differently,’ Jack said. ‘I think it was a terrible and divisive time. I had friends who literally lost their children for years. Other friends who, it seems to me, compromised everything not to lose them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Elizabeth asked. She’d sat forward in her chair, and she was watching Jack’s face. Lottie turned to him too. The bright sun was in his eyes as well, and he was squinting, seeming to look far into his past. He talked about parties in Hyde Park and Kenwood, parties where adult children, stoned, offered critiques of their parents’ lives, the lives of their parents’ friends, while the parents themselves nodded, passionately agreed. ‘It was delusional, finally,’ Jack said. ‘I think those who crossed over thought they could make themselves young again. They paid a high price later. But those who resisted, who argued with their kids, paid a high price too.’ He shook his head.

  ‘What was the price?’ Cam asked.

  Jack’s shoulders rose. ‘They lost their children. Quite simply.’

  ‘No, I mean the price for those who – how did you put it? – “went along”?’

  ‘I think I said “crossed over.” And that varied. Sometimes they were just foolish for a while. Sometimes the foolishness became a permanent condition: I still see some of them around, unable to let themselves become … well, elderly, which is what they are at this point, really. Sometimes they lost their marriages – good, stable marriages – for some brief fling with what they saw, I suppose, as youth and passion.’

  ‘Why brief?’ Cam’s voice had a still, dangerous quality.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Yes. Why isn’t it possible to conceive of someone really starting over, really discovering something that changes him, that makes a whole new universe of experience possible? Why should that be beyond imagining, just because you’re a certain age?’

  ‘I’m not arguing it is.’

  ‘You seem to be.’

  ‘I’m not. I’m sorry if I sounded that way. I just meant …’ Jack looked at Lottie. She was watching him and Cameron. ‘Look, it was a wholesale promise that way, the sixties. I think individual change is possible, can be permanent. But any … movement that promises we can all find happiness, any way – love, drugs, whatever – is just wrong. People become what they are over time. There’s a kind of cumulative meaning to a life – don’t you think? – that isn’t so easy to sweep aside.’ He turned to Lottie again. ‘It’s like what Lottie is working on, this impulse to prescribe emotion, emotional health. People don’t live that way. And if they try to, they lose something, something central, I’d say. And the sixties, during that whole Vietnam era, that’s what people were trying to do.’

  Whatever it was that had piqued Cam seemed to have been resolved. He had relaxed back in his chair. And Elizabeth, as though she’d sensed the tension too, began to chatter again – about the war this time, about friends who resisted, friends who fabricated medical deferments, a few friends who went. ‘God, the endless moral arguments. Was it moral just to evade? Did you have to take a stand? Were you sacrificing enough if you gave up everything to go to Canada?’ She shook her head. Her smooth hair swayed. ‘I actually ended a friendship because the man cheated his way out,’ she said. ‘Got a doctor to say he’d been a heavy drug user and was therefore, I don’t know, psychologically unreliable, or something. When I think of my own sense of superiority – I, with this much’ – she held her forefinger and thumb pressed together in front of her face – ‘to lose, of course.’

  Jack cleared his throat. ‘Yes, my first wife and I had those discussions. She was passionately antiwar.’ Lottie knew this about Evelyn. ‘She couldn’t forgive me for my lack of involvement. Which was a matter of degree, really, because I did agree with her, on one level. But I came from a different life, a small-town life. I had a younger brother who went, who emerged from that same life and went, and what I was uncomfortable with was the venom that seemed to be directed toward those who bought in, as he did. We had some pretty lively discussions at home.’ He grinned. ‘She could be pretty high-toned, morally, herself.’

  Elizabeth laughed her high, excited laugh. They were all silent a few seconds in its wake, thinking, Lottie suspected, thoughts as disparate and self-involved as thoughts could be.

  The Elizabeth slumped back and heaved a thorough sigh. And here came hers: ‘God, to say – so easily – “my first wife.” Will I ever reach such a stage?’

  Lottie felt Jack’s fingers tighten momentarily. The equivalent of a flinch. She cleared her throat.

  But Cameron was leaning forward and touching Elizabeth’s knee. He said, in a too intense voice, �
�Yes, you will.’

  Lottie felt she was drowning; she didn’t know why she hadn’t been able to talk, but she didn’t want to listen anymore, either. She tapped Jack’s wristwatch through the cuff of his shirt, their signal, and then she stood up, dusting bread crumbs off her pants. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said. ‘And then we’re going to have to go to dinner, Jack.’

  She stepped across the painted floor, her footsteps sounding thunderously loud to her. Once inside the bathroom, she could hear them begin to talk again, then she could hear other footsteps. They were up, walking around, beginning to say goodbye. The casement window in the bathroom was open. When she sat on the toilet, she could see out, over the brick buildings to the Prudential Tower and some other high-rises. She wished she could just step out the window and materialize outside on the street. ‘Step out the window and turn left,’ as Fats Waller said. She didn’t want to have to pass back through Cameron’s living room, to make the chitchat necessary to get them out. She surprised herself in the mirror, she looked so composed. She felt frazzled and adolescent.

  When she went back out into the big room, though, she saw that Jack had done most of the work. The three others stood by the opened door to the hall, and when Jack heard her, he looked over and held up her purse, to show her they were ready to go.

  As they came outside, Lottie took his arm. ‘God,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

  ‘Yeah, what was it with you?’ he asked. ‘Why were you so silent?’

  Lottie shrugged. After a minute she said, ‘I don’t know. I think I felt threatened by her with you around. I felt suddenly exactly as I had around her as a girl.’

  ‘Ridiculous Lottie,’ he said. ‘She’s a nice enough woman. But also a particular version of a pain in the ass, darling.’