by Sue Miller
Lottie let her breath out in a rush. ‘I don’t know. Maybe these things will be better when Megan goes off,’ she said. She had meant this in a conciliatory way, but she saw instantly that she’d made a mistake.
‘Why do you say that?’ His voice was sharp.
‘Oh, just that she’s sort of emblematic. I don’t mean Megan herself, really. Though God knows I wish she liked me a little. And there have been times I’d gladly have dunked her in cold water.’ He didn’t smile. ‘But Megan, Ryan, whoever. All the detritus of our previous lives.’
‘We are the detritus of our previous lives, Lottie. By now we are. I would love you less, in fact, if you hadn’t been Derek’s wife or Ryan’s mother. Because it made you who you are.’ He was speaking to her slowly and carefully, as though she were either very young or very thick.
‘Oh, I know. I know. I know all that.’
He walked back over to the window and stood, his back to her, looking out. He said, ‘And if it comes to it, Megan has tried harder than you have, I’d argue, to make things work.’
‘Oh, Jack! Now that pisses me off.’
He turned. ‘It’s true, Lottie.’
‘What complete bullshit!’
‘Didn’t she embrace you when you left?’
‘One embrace. One stiff, awkward embrace. Is that supposed to make up … ? Okay, yes, she did, I’ll grant you. Why? She reported to you on it?’
‘We’d talked about it ahead of time. That’s what I mean. She’s been consciously struggling with herself, with her feelings, her behavior, in a way that’s very touching to me.’
‘So you suggested that Megan embraces me.’
‘In a sense. She had said how disconnected she felt from you, how she wasn’t sure she could ever come to care for you. And I made an analogy with Evelyn after the stroke. That I felt, really, nearly frightened of her in that condition, and that it wasn’t until I forced myself to touch her again, to hold her, that I had a sense of love, or the possibility of love, for who she had become.’
‘I see,’ Lottie said. She was horrified.
‘What is it? You’re upset by that.’
‘I sure am.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Jack. Surely you can see that there’s something frightening, and deeply offensive too, I think, about your comparing me to Evelyn.’
‘I didn’t – I hardly compared you to Evelyn, Lottie. You’re distorting what I said.’
‘I know what you said. You said you made an analogy. I know that. Between me and an invalid, really. A vegetative person. A partly dead person.’
‘Lottie.’ His voice was dangerous. ‘You’re looking for problems here. You’re inventing them.’
‘No I’m not. I’m absolutely not. Because you’d prefer me that way, I think. That’s what I feel, Jack. I think it’s no accident that that analogy sprang to mind. Because your behavior, your way of dealing with me in your life since we got married, has been connected to that. I don’t know. Maybe you feel guilty that I’m whole, I’m well. Because everything that’s most passionate, most alive, most insistent, in me – most in love with you – is to be pushed away.’ She stopped, but he didn’t answer. She lowered her voice. ‘I’m in love with you, Jack, in some funky, low-rent way that embarrasses you. That you’ve forgotten how to feel, nearly. Or you think you don’t deserve. Or something. I don’t get it.’
Richard had begun a tuneless, muffled humming in the shower, like a sorrowful bagpipe playing in the distance.
Jack’s face had whitened. He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure how we got here, darling. From furniture or home decoration or whatever to … this. I’m sorry we did, though. I’m truly sorry.’
He strode past her, he opened the door and left the room. Lottie heard him going down the stairs, going back through the house. A moment later, his voice sounded outside, muffled through the walls. His voice and Ryan’s alternated in short sentences. False. Upbeat. Saying goodbye. Then he came back into the house. She heard his footsteps, she heard him pause at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Lottie,’ he called up.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I think I’ll head out to the airport now.’ His voice was mild and polite. Public. This was the way they spoke to each other at his house, in front of Megan. ‘It’s only a little early. There’s no need for you to drive me. I’ll call a cab.’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ she called back. She blew her nose. ‘Of course I’ll drive you.’
She came down the stairs. Jack stood by his bag, watching her descent. ‘I really can manage,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t need to bother.’
‘Of course I’ll drive you, Jack. We had an argument, but I’ll drive you to the airport, for God’s sake.’
He shrugged and picked up his bag. Lottie walked ahead of him out to the car. At the curb, as Jack put his bag into the back seat, she shouted back to the house. ‘Ryan!’
His voice floated to them. ‘Yeah?’
‘I’ll be back in an hour or so. I’m taking Jack to his plane.’
‘Got it.’
They drove in silence through the leafy streets of Cambridge and then slowly began to move east, into the land of triple-deckers, of bodegas and storefront churches. They descended past the courthouse and crossed the river. Lottie could hear her own nervous pulse in the silence that hung over them. She was terrified that they’d leave it like this, terrified about what this might mean.
‘You’ll be an hour and a half or so early,’ she finally said.
‘I’ll read the paper,’ he said coldly.
‘Will you?’ she asked, and felt a return of her anger. Was he trying to insult her, to suggest how easily he could dismiss all this?
He didn’t answer. They drove past the Boston Garden, and Lottie thought about another universe, in which she would have pointed it out to him. He was a basketball fan. His oldest, Charley, had played it well in high school and college.
As they emerged from the tunnel, she said, ‘We both have a lot to think about.’
He stared straight ahead. ‘I’m much too angry to think now.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Me too.’
After a few minutes she said, ‘You’re not used to people making you angry.’
‘I don’t hold this kind of … discussion in as high a regard as you do. I don’t see what’s gained.’
Lottie shrugged. ‘Depends on what you do with it.’
He let her listen to his silence for a moment. Then he said quietly, ‘Don’t be so fucking smug, Lottie.’
She was stung; Jack never swore, and that alone had shocked her. But then she recognized that she had sounded smug, that she didn’t know how to talk to him, what to say, what she felt.
When she pulled over at the departure curb, she reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘Jack. I’m just as confused as you. I’m not being smug, I promise you.’
‘I’ll call you in a few days,’ he said.
‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek.
He held her arm, hard, looking at her, and Lottie waited for him to say something. If he spoke to her now, if he asked her to come home, she felt she would break apart, she would yield. But he seemed to change his mind. He let go and got out of the car. And when he opened the back door to get his bag, he didn’t look at her or speak to her. She watched him stride across the crowded sidewalk and in through the revolving door. He turned and looked at her once from behind the darkened glass windows, and then he stepped back, and his pale face was lost in the reflections on its surface.
She had just come out on to Storrow Drive when she realized she couldn’t go back to the house, to Ryan’s cheerful noise, to the long afternoon in front of her. She drove into the Back Bay and parked on Arlington Street. She walked into the Public Garden again, amid the mix of Sunday strollers – the tourists with camcorders, the handsome, well-dressed couples pushing those expensive fold-up strollers, the punk kids, the odd homeless person. The high white clo
uds moved quickly across the sky. She sat on a bench near the water. There was a child under two with her mother, feeding the ducks with mixed terror and delight.
A wedding party entered through the iron gates, from the Ritz-Carlton, Lottie assumed. They crossed on to the grass and gathered in front of one of the arching willows. They were all small, with dark hair. Japanese, she saw. Their uniformity to her eye gave them a nearly emblematic quality; they reminded her of the little bride and groom statues on the top of a wedding cake. The larger, Caucasian photographer, wearing a brownish ordinary suit, lurched clumsily among them, directing them this way and that. They grouped themselves in response to him in various ways, various versions of perfection.
Lottie thought suddenly of a quote from Twain; not a quote she’d read for this new essay on love; but for the one about grief. He was talking about marriage and death. He called marriage the supreme ‘felicity’ – the word had struck Lottie – and also the supreme tragedy. The deeper the love, he said, the surer the tragedy and the more painful when it came. Felicitations, she thought, looking at the doll-like couple; and get ready.
She thought of her own imperfect wedding, at City Hall – Megan’s resentful tears, their loud, embarrassed trio of sons, only Charley really able to help them, to smooth things for them a little: he’d brought rice and streamers, he had champagne waiting in the car. There had been tears in Jack’s eyes, too, as he’d watched her echoing his vows, and it had occurred to her, even then – even before she’d read the Twain – that perhaps Jack was seeing her through the scrim of his experience with Evelyn, that this ceremony marked for him, in some way, the beginning of her dying, her going away from him.
Suddenly all the tiny perfect figures – the fairy women in lilac gowns and wide-brimmed hats, the stiff small men in tuxedos – moved away from the wedding couple, and the photographer took three, four, five shots of them alone.
Now somehow a signal was given and it was finished. Everyone loosened and milled together; and then slowly, led by the beautiful bride and groom, they walked across the grass again to the ornate iron gates and out of the garden, across the street.
PART III
CHAPTER IX
In the confusing aftermath of a tragedy, of any terrible event, we sometimes try to make sense of it by finding a way to blame ourselves. It seems to Lottie in the afternoon after Jessica has died that Ryan is feeling something like this – responsible, and miserable on that account. After he’s come back from the hardware store and they’re working mostly silently together at the back of the house, she remembers abruptly a time when he was three or four and she was grocery shopping with him. Someone had spilled coffee beans in a corner of the store, and he kept wanting to return to that spot, to look at the mess. Finally he had asked her in a hushed voice, ‘Did I do that?’ She had felt such a sweep of compassion, such an aching familiarity with this sense of oneself, that she knelt and held him tight for a moment before she could tell him, ‘No, of course you didn’t.’
It’s only more slowly as the long afternoon wears on that she realizes she is doing it too. That she is calling up again and again those few moments when her actions might have had something to do with what happened. She remembers her anger when she told Elizabeth she ought to call Cam, that he still lived nearby. Perhaps that was what had set it all in motion. Or perhaps if she’d left when she was supposed to, she thinks, some element in the equation that added up to Jessica’s death would have been different, and the girl would still be alive.
When she catches herself, she makes herself stop. It’s absurd. She knows this.
But she does keep calling Cam through the afternoon. He’s never home or at the store, but she talks to Maeve twice more. The second time, he’s called there again, and Lottie feels the same sweep of lightness, of relief, she felt earlier at this news: he is safe, he is all right.
It’s only a few minutes after this call that Elizabeth comes over to ask Lottie to drop by her house later in the evening; and this may be why Lottie so readily says yes.
It would help them out, Elizabeth says. She’s breathless, apologetic, and confusing in her attempts to explain everything. If Lottie hadn’t read her letter to Cameron, she might not even be able to understand what Elizabeth is saying. But what she gathers, after Elizabeth has explained Lawrence’s call from the airport, his sudden arrival in the afternoon the day before, is that Elizabeth has used her, Lottie, as a kind of cover for Cameron’s appearance last night.
‘Lawrence said, “What was he doing here anyway?” – you know, late in the evening, long after the accident. And I said that one or the other of you popped over all the time, that we’d done lots of stuff together this summer.’
She’s standing with Lottie in the front hall. Ryan is still outside. ‘So it would just give me some credibility if you’d come over tonight and have some coffee and dessert or whatever.’ Elizabeth is dressed up again, Lottie notes. She’s wearing slacks and a vibrant purple silk shirt. She has beaded sandals on her feet. ‘Plus, of course, it’ll just distract us.’ She runs her hand over her head, down her hair. ‘It’s been a ghastly day, Char. I’ve been so worried about Cam. I managed to get over there once, but of course there was no sign of him. And poor Jessica’s parents came by this afternoon. The children, of course, are frantic. Basket cases. And in the midst of all this, I’m trying to hold on to some sense of reunion with Lawrence.’ He’s leaving the next day, Elizabeth tells Lottie. He needs to get back. Elizabeth will stay on until after the service for Jessica, and then she’ll fly home.
‘You understand, don’t you, Char?’ Her voice is nearly pleading. ‘I wrote Cameron a letter and tried to explain it to him, but what I couldn’t say, of course, was that as soon as I heard Lawrence’s voice on the phone, it was over. It was decided. After all this happiness this summer …’ Tears fill her eyes. ‘I just feel so fucking … shallow, I guess.’
Lottie doesn’t say anything.
‘What was it?’ Elizabeth whispers. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean to hurt him.’
‘Maybe you needed a little ego food,’ Lottie says. Her voice is drier than she intended.
‘No,’ Elizabeth answers firmly. She shakes her head. ‘I think I do love Cameron in some way. And maybe if he were more, sort of, settled … I mean, if I’d felt he could have, somehow, taken us on. Maybe. But the way he lives, Lottie.’ She holds her hands out. ‘I mean, he’s almost fifty, and I don’t even think he has life insurance. Realistically, I guess I must have known all along there was just no way he could have had the children and me. I mean, what would I have done? Taught freshman comp somewhere?’
‘A lot of people do. And even more horrible things. Hell, I worked as a secretary once.’
Elizabeth’s head tilts. ‘Don’t be hard on me, Char.’
‘I’m not being hard, Elizabeth. It’s the truth. Besides, I feel for Cam. How could I not? I know it’s been stressful for you. But Cam’s the one I feel for.’ Lottie shrugs. ‘You can understand that.’
Elizabeth says she does. She’s sorry. ‘But can you come over?’ she asks, after a long silence. ‘There’s just this one more night to get through, with Mother hovering; and the children, and Lawrence just … perplexed, I think. And I think if you came it would answer some questions he’s got, first of all, and then simply help us get through a few hours. Please.’
And so Lottie says yes, in part because she has the hours to get through too. She fixes dinner for herself and Ryan, and they both eat, ravenously. Then he goes out, and Lottie showers and changes and crosses the street to Elizabeth’s house.
And now she’s walking home – she’s being walked home – by Elizabeth’s husband. Lawrence. She stumbles on a dent in the lawn, her ankle bends, and he reaches over in the dark and cups her elbow with his hand.
‘I’m all right now,’ she says. ‘Really.’ His hand on her flesh is warm, moist; and he doesn’t let go. ‘You really don’t need to be doing this anyway. It’s not New York, or
something. I go out all the time by myself at night. Here, and in Chicago. I run after dark.’
They step off the curb, into the wide, black street. There’s no light on at Lottie’s house. Ryan has gone out with a friend from college who lives in Boston. He said he would be late. Lottie is aware of Lawrence’s physical presence, like a heat that travels in the dark beside her.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I was hoping, actually, you’d offer me a drink.’ Lawrence has a quiet voice, an insinuating voice, Lottie would have said. But what is it insinuating? She can’t tell. She looks over at him again, but his face is turned away and obscured in the shadows.
‘I’m not really sure what we’ve got in the house,’ she says.
‘Really? From what Elizabeth said, I would have guessed you inherited a sizable liquor cabinet.’
Lottie laughs. ‘Now that wasn’t nice of Elizabeth, was it?’ she says. ‘And it’s not true. A bottle at a time was Mother’s motto. Waste not, want not. The New England virtues.’
‘Still, how ’bout it?’ he asks. There’s something urgent in his voice. ‘I’d settle for a beer.’
They’re standing now at the bottom of the porch stairs. Lottie suddenly has no wish to go into the dark house alone. ‘Well, we’ll see what we can dig out,’ she says, and he follows her up the stairs.
In the kitchen, she leans over the refrigerator door, the Ryan pose.
‘Okay, there are two beers, Anchor Steam. And part of a bottle of white wine. A California Chardonnay. But a cheap one, about four bucks a bottle, so you know what that means. And’ – she turns to the counter – ‘some red, though it may be vinegar by now. And I think …’ She opens the freezer door. ‘Yes. Some vodka. But no tonic or anything.’
Lawrence is standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘I’ll have vodka. Neat.’
Lottie pours him some in one of the little jelly jars, and pours some white wine for herself. ‘Why don’t you go on into the living room? Such as it is,’ she says. ‘I have one call I need to make.’