by Sue Miller
Lottie laughed. ‘Well, how lovely to hear you say so.’
They were walking down a derelict street, in the direction of the fancier part of the South End. Across the street from them, there was a towering hill of dirt behind a chain-link fence. A fat orange moon was rising from behind it in the still blue-domed sky. ‘This is a fine idea.’ Jack gestured. ‘Day and night simultaneously.’
As they walked along, Lottie began to sing ‘Night and Day.’ Her voice sounded little and breathless in the open air.
When she was finished, they walked in silence for a while. Lottie heard the rhythm of their steps together, hers a beat and a half to his one. Jack said, ‘It’s interesting to see you and your brother together.’
‘Really? How?’
‘Oh, just to see how you’re alike, how you’re different.’
‘How are we alike?’
He put his hands in his pants pockets. His elbows winged back. He looked at Lottie intently. ‘You’re both terribly willful. Strong.’
Lottie was silent a moment, adjusting to this. Finally she said, ‘And the difference?’
He smiled, and his eyes seemed to lighten. ‘You wear it better, darling.’
Lottie laughed, then sobered and sighed. ‘Well, I sure hope this works out for him.’
He looked at her sharply. ‘Oh, come on, Lottie.’
‘What?’
‘You’re talking about Elizabeth and Cameron?’
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘That’s not going to work out.’
‘Why shouldn’t it?’
‘Because. It’s an infatuation, on her part. She’s biding her time, that’s all. She’s not, finally, going to be interested in the kind of life they could have together. Believe me. I know her type.’
‘Her type!’ She was offended: on Elizabeth’s account, of all things. ‘What a thing to say, Jack.’ She thought of mentioning the scars, but didn’t.
‘Nonetheless,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I do.’
‘I won’t ask you how,’ Lottie said.
‘How what?’
‘What who?’
He laughed, and Lottie decided to laugh too, to drop it.
They came through Union Park, and Lottie pointed out the house she thought they’d used in filming The Bostonians. Their stride had slowed now. They stopped at a restaurant Cam had recommended. It had big plate-glass windows on three sides; it seemed to sit out on the street. They unfolded their napkins and watched the waiter pour water into their glasses. They perused the menu, ordered, had a bottle of wine brought over.
‘Not that we need it,’ Jack said, after the waiter had poured it.
‘I need it,’ Lottie said. ‘I want to get thoroughly wasted.’ She saw his face tighten, but decided to ignore it. Just then a black woman and a white woman walked by on the street, holding hands. The black woman had intricate beaded braids dangling around her face. She was wearing clumsy-looking black leather boots, and frayed shorts, and a T-shirt that said, ‘How Dare You Assume I’m Straight.’ The white woman was coming from an office job. She had on a pastel suit with a straight, short skirt over pale, nurse-colored stockings.
‘Check it out,’ Lottie said. ‘Talk about your mix of class and race.’
‘To say nothing of hairdressers,’ he said.
‘And sense of chic,’ she offered. She sipped some wine. ‘Well, sisterhood is powerful.’
After a moment he said, ‘You and Elizabeth seem unlikely friends.’
‘Well, we’re not, of course. Friends.’
‘What would you call it, then?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘We have spent a fair amount of time together. But that just happened somehow. Proximity, I guess.’ She watched him for a minute. Then she said, ‘How do you, in fact, know her type? Elizabeth’s, I mean.’
He looked out the window, then back at Lottie, frowning. ‘Evelyn, I suppose.’ He seemed reluctant.
‘Was Evelyn like her?’
‘In most ways, no, she wasn’t. She was steady and calm, almost reserved, I’d say, and Elizabeth is anything but. But they both have that patrician air, that smell of the upper class.’ He smiled. ‘That sense of themselves. It’s hard to shake, growing up that way. And Elizabeth oozes it.’
‘But it’s the first I’ve heard that Evelyn had it too.’
‘Oh yes. Oh, very much. A slightly different version. Lake Forest to Cambridge. And she struggled with it, to her credit. But it prescribed a great deal about our life together. Behavior and rituals. What kind of gift was appropriate, when. Who came to what kind of party. What kind of letter to write. And on and on. It drove me mad, sometimes.’
‘Really,’ she said. She couldn’t help feeling some pleasure in hearing this. It seemed the first chink in the armor of Evelyn’s perfection, a touch of realism in his grief-stricken idolization of what she’d been years earlier. ‘I’ve never heard you say any of this before. I’m surprised, I guess.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m probably more aware of it right now, since her parents were in town.’
‘Oh, they were in town?’ Lottie echoed.
‘Yes. To see Megan, really. And that part was fine. But it was tough in other ways. The fussiness about what she was wearing. How she ate. Knives and forks at the dinner table.’ He drank some wine and set the glass down, carefully twirling it. ‘They leave me alone, of course. They know better. But it’s as though they think someone needs to be in charge of Megan. To pass along the heritage, as it were.’
‘But … they didn’t stay with you, did they?’
‘Yes. Of course they did.’
‘In the house?’
‘Yes. That’s what we usually mean by “stay with,” isn’t it?’ He stared at her, frowning. ‘This isn’t some kind of problem, is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lottie said. It was a problem, of course, but she wasn’t quite sure why yet.
‘It seemed like a good time, Lottie. You were away …’
‘Well, but that’s my point. Or part of it, I guess.’
‘What? What is the point? I’d really like to know.’
‘Just that … I don’t know. That I didn’t even know they were there. In what is, putatively, my house too.’
‘But it’s no secret, Lottie. I’m telling you now.’
‘But you should have told me before.’
‘Why?’
She couldn’t answer.
‘You mean, I should have asked your permission?’
‘I suppose.’ Was this what she meant? She didn’t know. ‘Isn’t it my house too?’ she asked.
‘Lottie, look. If I’d gone away for a month or more, wouldn’t you feel comfortable having … I don’t know: your mother? or Cameron? someone like that stay?’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t think Cameron or my mother is in the position vis-à-vis you that your dead wife’s parents are to me. And I should point out, too, that your wife has loomed very large between us. In particular, lately. In particular, since she’s been dead.’
‘Lottie, you can’t, you can’t be jealous of poor Evelyn. Of my relationship to her parents.’
The waiter came with their appetizers. Jack had made Lottie feel ashamed, and she sat silently while the waiter set their plates down, while he refilled their glasses. The light outside the windows had fallen. In what had been a church across the street, apartment lights had come on, figures moved in the tall, narrow windows, doing domestic things. When the waiter left, Lottie changed the subject. She asked after two of Jack’s patients, ones he’d been particularly concerned about. Pedestrians strolled by, and Lottie commented on them all. She talked again about her work. And then, again, they discussed the children. All the safe topics. They finished the meal, the wine. They talked about films, about Dukakis, about Bush. They made a substantial bet on the outcome of the election. They ordered decaf. Lottie felt herself go into a kind of social overdrive, trying to avoid what seemed the chasm of all that lay unexpressed betwe
en them. She told him three jokes she’d heard, watched him laugh, and felt her heart would break.
They decided to take a cab back to the hotel. When they made love in the pinkish light, it seemed to Lottie that all of the routine of sorrow and obligation she’d been fighting so hard against had crept back in. She had to concentrate to try to come. She shut her eyes once, conjuring an image to release herself – but it was the dark passageway in Central Square that came to her, the rain, the dirty puddle. She was shocked; she opened her eyes quickly and stared at the patterns on the ceiling while Jack worked.
After breakfast, they packed and took a cab along the river and back into Cambridge. Standing in the street after Jack had paid the driver, Lottie pointed out the important sights of her childhood: Elizabeth’s house, the houses of other kids she’d told him about, the elegant salmon-pink house that had been the nursing home on the corner, on whose roof she’d had her first kiss. When they turned and started up the walk to her mother’s house, they could see the tilt of the ladder against its side. ‘It’s Ryan,’ Lottie said, and they angled across the crabgrass in his direction. As they turned the corner, they saw him above them.
‘Hey,’ Lottie said.
‘Hey too,’ he said. He grinned down at them. ‘Don’t stop me now. I’m going to finish this side today. Check it out.’
Lottie stopped backward into the privet that separated the houses and looked up. All the windows were scraped and primed. He’d gotten two of them painted.
‘Is this it?’ Jack said. ‘Are you done when you finish this?’
‘Nah. No way. I’ve been doing one side at a time, and I still have to do all the windows out back. Another couple of days, if it doesn’t rain. And it will rain.’
‘What’ll you do then?’
‘Help Lottie inside. Actually, that’s close to being done too, since we don’t have to mess with the kitchen or Richard’s room.’
‘Yep. Cameron will do that after Richard’s gone in September. Come in and see, Jack.’
They went in at the back door, leaving their bags in the narrow kitchen. Lottie led him through the house, showing him what they’d done, explaining what it had been like before. Upstairs, she held her finger to her lips as they passed Richard’s door. ‘The roomer,’ she whispered. ‘He’s in what was Cam’s old room.’
In her mother’s bedroom, Lottie twirled on the bare floor. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she asked. ‘You can’t imagine how junked up it was when I got here. And now …’ She held her arms out and curtsied slightly.
‘Now it’s empty,’ he said.
‘But I love this emptiness. Doesn’t it remind you of my bedroom? In my old apartment, I mean. Just bare wood and a bed.’
Jack was silent a moment before he answered, looking around. ‘Actually, it was full of things, Lottie. Only they were your kinds of things. Books. Papers. Your pictures. Once, if you recall, I had to remove the typewriter from the bed to get at you.’
‘Well.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ She sat down on the mattress.
He moved to the window and stood looking out. Lottie knew all he could really see were leaves, that he wouldn’t know the bits of color and shape that were Elizabeth’s house to her, Elizabeth’s yard and driveway. He turned to her. ‘I’ll say this again, Lottie, in case you didn’t hear the first time.’ His tone was businesslike. ‘Anything you want to do to make the house yours …’
‘Oh, Jack. How could I? It’s Megan’s house. It’s your house.’
‘And not yours?’ He was looking sharply at her. The light from the window fell sideways across his face. He looked old.
Lottie shrugged. ‘Not really.’ The silence scared her, and so she said, ‘Not yet.’
‘You feel more at home here, don’t you, than in my house?’
Lottie shrugged. ‘Well, of course; this was home, once. So it comes freighted with a kind of perverse nostalgia. Those glorious bad old days.’ She tried smiling at him.
They both turned as they heard a door open, as sliding footsteps moved down the hall away from them. The bathroom door closed, hard. Richard.
Jack crossed the room quickly and shut her mother’s door. He stood with his hand on the knob, looking down at Lottie on the bed. Then he said, ‘I hate the way we’ve been living together, Lottie.’
‘Jesus, Jack!’ She recoiled.
‘No, let me say this. I know that some of it is my fault, that I’ve been closed off. And I am trying. And I think it will get better if we both want it to. But looking at this’ – he gestured around the room – ‘at all the effort you’ve expended here: this makes me aware of your share in it too. All this,’ he said, and his mouth went hard. ‘There’s something about it that really pisses me off, when you’ve managed to leave your imprint on exactly two rooms in my house – our house. And one is Ryan’s, and one is a room you use by yourself.’
She breathed deeply several times before she answered. She didn’t look at him. She said, ‘I don’t know what you would have me do, Jack. I honestly don’t. And whatever I might want to do, it’s so clearly not the time.’ Now she met his gaze, the hard, light eyes. ‘You’re in love with Evelyn. More in love with her than when she was alive.’
He stared back at Lottie steadily.
‘Are you not?’ He gestured, a dismissive gesture that made Lottie angry. ‘And it’s her house. How could I – now – even take a picture she chose off the wall? What am I supposed to do – rip up all the wall-to-wall carpeting? And what’s more … I mean, what is my style, after all?’ She lifted her hand to offer the room. ‘Nothing! Or junk. That’s what I like, in fact.’ She shrugged. She was picturing her old apartment, furnished with oddments, with secondhand stuff she’d lovingly repainted. ‘I have terrible taste. Impoverished taste. I like old, beat-up crap. And I know it’s crap. But I like it. Am I supposed to get rid of all your very, very comfortable, very well-made, very good stuff, so I can go out and buy crap to replace it with?’ Only when she stopped could Lottie hear how shrill her voice had become.
Jack waited a moment, and then he spoke softly. ‘This feels very much like an accusation, Lottie. Against me. Against what I’ve made of my life.’
‘God!’ she cried. ‘No! That’s not it. That’s not it. But you will admit, won’t you, that we’ve lived differently? That my life has been … I don’t know. Whatever. Marginal, sloppy. Bohemian – economically anyway. And yours has been solidly middle class. Neither by choice, really. By accident. But that doesn’t make it easier now. I mean, I am the one whose life has suddenly changed. Utterly changed.’
‘What are you saying, Lottie?’ he asked. ‘Are you saying you’re sorry we married? You’re sorry you moved in?’
‘Oh, Jack. Those are two different questions.’
‘Answer them one at a time, then.’
Lottie looked at him. His face was closed, stern. ‘I’m not sorry we married,’ she said after a moment. ‘And in fact, I’m not sorry I moved in. In themselves, those were the right things to do. The only things to do. But I had a life before too, Jack,’ she pleaded. ‘I had a real life, as much as you did.’ His face didn’t change. ‘I don’t know. Somehow in all your … grieving over Evelyn, it’s as though I hadn’t lost anything.’ She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t, so she started again. ‘I’m not sorry. I’m not. But somehow there’s been this … I don’t know. Backlash, or something. And I feel it’s you, Jack. Who’s sorry. Apologetic. To Evelyn, really. Even to her parents. That you had them stay when I was away, for God’s sake – as though you were all pretending I didn’t exist!’ His mouth opened slightly, but he didn’t speak. ‘And I feel that way often, actually. As though I don’t exist anymore. So yes, it’s true, I guess, that in some odd way, I have felt more alive, more comfortable here this summer. Even though I’ve been in this weird kind of limbo, watching everyone else be sexy and in love.’
Jack snorted, and his head swung to the window.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Wh
at is it?’
‘Are you talking about Cameron and Elizabeth again?’ He looked back at her, a dangerous half smile lifting his face. He looked mean.
‘Yes. And even Ryan and his string of ponies, to a lesser degree.’
‘That strikes me as pathetic, Lottie.’
‘What?’
‘That in any sense you should see Cameron and Elizabeth as embodying something you’d like. It makes me very angry.’
Lottie picked up a pillow, swung it on to her lap, punched it. ‘And it makes me angry that you should so easily dismiss them. They are foolish. Of course they’re foolish. But they’re in love. That looks foolish, from the outside. I wish we looked so foolish, instead of so … fucking mature. I wish people said that about us, that we were ridiculous, that we were fools.’ Lottie was near tears, and it made her voice wobbly.
Jack’s voice, on the other hand, was too soft. Hoarse, and dangerously soft. ‘That’s like wishing we could lock ourselves in the hotel room, Lottie, and fuck ourselves blind. That’s what children want, Lottie – adolescents. But life doesn’t work that way. That’s a holiday. That’s a weekend. But that can’t last.’
‘There we go,’ Lottie said with bitter exultation. She was glad for his contempt, furious. And glad for the freedom it gave her. ‘You know what your trouble is? You’ve been on a beeper too long.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ There was so much ugliness in his voice that Lottie was suddenly scared. What were they doing? How could they end this?
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. She shook her head quickly. ‘You’ve been too dutiful. Too good and devoted. You haven’t locked yourself up enough. I mean, wasn’t that the power of what we used to have, really? In your life? We were the secret, dark, locked-up part of it.’
‘And you’d like to have that back?’
‘God, wouldn’t you? You loved that, Jack. You loved me then.’ She realized that her hands were gripping the pillow with enormous tension.
Jack was looking at her, and in a voice with no love at all in it, he said, ‘I love you now, Lottie.’
Down the hall, through the two closed doors, they could hear the toilet flush mightily. Richard hawked once, twice. The shower was turned on.