For Love

by Sue Miller

  He holds up one of his hands so Lottie can see the palm. ‘Okay, okay.’ After a minute he asks conversationally, ‘How old’s your son?’

  ‘He’s twenty.’

  ‘You look young to have a son that old.’

  ‘Well, thanks. I was twenty-three when I had him. Not so young actually.’

  ‘You married young, though.’

  ‘I suppose so. I was twenty. Is that young?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘How long?’

  ‘How long what?’

  ‘How long were you married?’

  ‘Oh, only a few years. We split up a couple of months after Ryan was born.’

  ‘So you were single awhile.’

  ‘I was single for almost twenty years.’ Lottie has said this in a loud voice that surprises her.

  ‘You seem single now.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’

  ‘No, you give off single vibes.’

  ‘Are you coming on to me now?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He laughs, a bitter sound. ‘Maybe I’m just pissed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because everyone’s being so mysterious about what’s been going on here.’ He moves his feet in the patch of light. ‘So maybe I’m just needling you, Lottie. Maybe coming on a little, but just trying to get to you, basically. You can ignore me. Not – you should know – that I don’t find you attractive. I’ve always liked your type.’

  ‘I suppose I should say thanks.’

  ‘I would understand if you didn’t.’

  ‘I suppose I should ask you what you think my type is.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘What the hell,’ she says, trying to make her voice light. ‘I can take it.’

  He’s smiling at her, as though they’ve agreed to something. ‘You’re one of those small, high-energy women,’ he says. ‘Narrow body, wide hips, loves to screw.’

  Lottie is shocked, though she shouldn’t be. ‘That’s a type?’ she asks finally.

  ‘You tell me,’ he says. ‘You were single all those years, you must know yourself pretty well. Am I right?’

  Lottie is smiling back at him now. She shakes her head. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘this feels to me like one of the more cynical interludes I’ve participated in.’

  ‘I’ll go, anytime you tell me to.’

  ‘That’s what I mean: I haven’t told you to.’ She lifts her hands, gestures. ‘This beautiful young woman is dead, my brother is out there somewhere, somehow suffering with it. And you and I are sitting here, toying idly – maybe toying theoretically is more like it – with various quasi-sexual ideas.’

  ‘Why do you suppose we’re doing that?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly. Well, you, I’d guess, because you’re pissed, as you say, about what you don’t understand. But maybe you’re angry too, just that you’ve come back.’ He is smiling again. ‘She left you. You chased her. On the great seesaw of love, she’s up now, and you’re down.’

  He nods. ‘All right. I’ll say all right to that. But how do you explain yourself? Why are you playing the game with me?’

  Lottie sighs. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m riding my own seesaw. With my husband, I mean. The stuff I’m not going to talk about. Plus … well, wouldn’t it be a kind of revenge on Elizabeth, to fool around with you?’

  ‘Revenge for what?’

  ‘For having had an easier life. For any number of small moments of pain. Insults. For living across the street from this house in that house.’

  ‘You don’t need revenge on Elizabeth for that.’

  ‘Oh, I know. Water over the dam, under the bridge. Spilled milk, and so on.’

  ‘Plus she’s already in agony over your success.’

  Lottie realizes abruptly that she has known this about Elizabeth.

  ‘You are aware, of course, that that’s the biggest fuck-you you’ve got going?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nods. ‘Yes, I am aware of that. As a matter of fact, it’s given me some real pleasure this summer, I admit it. And I do feel that, some quiver of that, every time I see my name in print. Succeeding is an angry thing to do. For some people. For me. For you too, I suspect. I suspect, in fact, that that’s one of the few ways you and I do understand one another.’

  They sit looking at each other for a long moment. Then he stands up abruptly, steps across the stripe of lighted air, bends over Lottie, and kisses her. Lottie lifts her face to him, she kisses him back, but she does not stand up, she does not move her hands, which are enlaced around the jelly jar full of wine. His tongue comes into her mouth.

  Which of them decides it first, that it won’t happen? It would be hard to say. If she had responded. If he were more insistent, if he’d touched her body. If Elizabeth weren’t waiting across the street. If Richard Lester or Ryan couldn’t come through the door at any minute. By the time he lifts his face from Lottie’s, though, they both know it won’t. But they smile at each other in a kind of complicity even about this.

  He steps back across the room, picks up his glass of vodka from the arm of his chair, and gulps it. Then he holds the glass out to Lottie. She stands up and takes it. It seems the final part of some exchange. ‘I should be getting back, I guess,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you should,’ she answers.

  But at the door to the dining room – to the light – he pauses and gestures at the messy table, the books, the papers. ‘You working on some new story?’

  ‘An article; yes,’ she says.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s about love, actually.’

  ‘You’re reading books to learn about love?’

  ‘Well, that plus extensive man-in-the-street interviews, of course.’

  He leans against the doorjamb. ‘Ask me. I’ll be your man in the street.’

  ‘Umm. Okay. Love. Sir: A: Do you think it’s yearning, love? Or fulfillment? B: Is it knowing someone, or not knowing them? C: Is it having someone, or not having them? Then we come to the subquestions. Can you know someone? Can you, as it were, have someone?’

  He is shaking his head. The gleaming, polished hair stays perfectly in place. ‘These are not useful questions.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they don’t get at the real issue, and the real issue is, do you want love at the center of your life? And I think women want it to be at the center and men don’t. That’s all.’ He holds his small, pretty hands out.

  Peculiarly, Lottie is disappointed. Did she think he was going to reveal something to her, then? She did, in fact, she realizes. She thought he might have brought her news. She feels a jolt of contempt for herself; and then for him. ‘But weren’t you, in fact, putting it at the center when you held on to your girlfriend?’ she asks. ‘When you forced Elizabeth’s hand?’

  ‘Not at all. I told Elizabeth it wasn’t going to last forever, that it was just a kind of craziness. I never forced her hand. I never said I loved the woman. I didn’t love her, as a matter of fact. And if Elizabeth had been able to believe me, she’d never have gone through – she’d never have put the children through – what they’ve gone through this summer.’ He sounds angry for the first time, and Lottie feels strangely as though she’s scored some sort of victory over him.

  ‘But she sure would have gone through something else, wouldn’t she?’ she needles. ‘Sitting at home, waiting for it to be over. Maybe, in fact, she speeded that up by leaving. Do you think?’

  His lips purse in a dismissive expression.

  ‘I mean,’ she says, ‘let me put this situation to you: How easy would you be about being just a part of Elizabeth’s life, if another part of her life happened to be someone who was fucking her into oblivion daily?’

  ‘It means something different.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘It means something different to a woman. For the very reason, specifically because, women put love at the center of their lives, it means something different when they have an affair.’ He belie
ves this, Lottie sees.

  ‘Lame,’ she says. ‘I’m not even going to hammer you over the head with the overwhelming number of examples that can be offered of men who absolutely put love, want love, at the center of their lives. I’m just going to say that your argument is circular. And lame.’ She turns and steps into the darker part of the hallway, toward the front door. ‘Pathetic. Retrograde.’ She opens the door, and he comes and stands opposite her in its frame.

  He is grinning. ‘You didn’t buy it, I take it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even bid on it,’ Lottie says.

  He bends close to her; his breath warms her face. ‘Well, thanks for the information, Lottie,’ he whispers.

  ‘What information?’

  ‘Exactly,’ he says.

  His hand slides across the back of her neck, inside the fabric of her dress. He pulls her forward and kisses her again, roughly this time, maybe because it has been decided nothing more will happen, maybe because she’s been snotty to him. Then he’s gone, the slip, slip of his fancy shoes crossing the porch, going down the stairs and across the street. The night air makes Lottie’s hair tremble; she catches her breath. He’s disappeared on to Elizabeth’s lawn when she shuts the door.

  She goes back into the kitchen and looks at the clock that is part of the rounded back panel of the stove. It makes a constant, effortful, grinding noise, which Lottie has come to think of this summer as the very sound of time passing. Only ten o’clock. She planned to run after the evening at Elizabeth’s, but now she’s had the wine, she’d better not.

  She feels a wave of self-disgust. She blames it immediately on drinking when she hadn’t intended to, on not running for two nights in a row. And then she laughs out loud. ‘And how ’bout almost balling Larry?’ she says. ‘How ’bout almost doing the nasty, honey bun?’

  Lottie rubs her neck and frowns. What was it? What could it have been that brought her so close? Maybe some wish to seal the end of her love for Jack? Because it would surely have done that, wouldn’t it?

  Or maybe it was just the sense of familiarity with Larry. He’s like a half-dozen guys she’s slept with – for no good reason, except that she wanted them at the moment. She thinks again on the tough way he held his cigarette, of the way he seemed pleased to announce that his father beat him. She liked all that. Cheap taste, she thinks. White trash.

  White trash. She remembers that this was what Al called her, Al, the roommate of Derek’s, whom she’d slept with first, who seemed to understand how Lottie felt about herself before she did. White trash: he made a joke of it. Of everything. Of sex.

  Al. He was a biochemist. He’d disappear for two or three days at a stretch, running experiments that had to be continuously monitored, and then Lottie would answer the knock on her door at two in the morning, or four in the afternoon, and he would be standing there grinning, his fly unzipped, his penis hanging out.

  He called his penis Al too. ‘Al would like to go swimming,’ he’d say, nudging her with it. He embarrassed her. She felt he was irreverent. She wanted love and sex to be elegant, and Al was not elegant. She misunderstood him too. She thought his long absences, his seemingly cavalier attitude, meant he didn’t care for her.

  When Derek asked her out during one of Al’s experiments, she was glad to go. Derek was a poet; he had long, carefully combed blond hair. He wore Brooks Brothers shirts in pale colors that reminded silly Lottie of Gatsby. By the time Al reappeared, it was over. He walked in on her and Derek, actually, embracing in the kitchen. ‘Well, all my friends!’ he said. ‘What’s for dinner?’ Was that the response of an elegant person? Lottie thought not, at the time.

  Years later, long after Lottie was divorced, he’d looked her up when he was at a conference at the University of Chicago. He was married by then, to another biochemist, and they were both teaching at Cal Tech. He had a good life, a nice life, he told Lottie. He showed her a photograph of his kids, taken by a jewel-blue pool in a sunlit California backyard. They squinted into the bright light. There were palm trees behind them.

  Later in the evening, drunk, they mildly kissed for a while. Al got teary about the past. He said he’d loved her then. He asked her why, how it could have happened that she’d chosen Derek.

  Lottie was teary too. For what? For her youth, over before she felt it? For all the wrong choices she’d made? For her tiny poolless apartment across from the el in this gray and frigid city? ‘Oh, Al,’ she cried. ‘I had such a cold heart, you wouldn’t believe it.’

  In his kindness, Al had protested. ‘You only think it was cold, Lottie,’ he said, and they both had a good cry and swore they’d stay in touch and so forth, which they didn’t do, of course.

  And ain’t this your cold little Lottie revisited? Lottie thinks now.

  ‘I should lock the door,’ she says aloud. And she goes back into the dark front hall and flips the little knob on the lock to the right. Closing the barn door. She thinks about Larry again. Elizabeth’s husband. His kiss. Why had she let him in? She licks her lips. Her mouth still tastes faintly of cigarette. She goes into Ryan’s bathroom, puts a half inch of toothpaste on his worn, frazzled-looking toothbrush, and scrubs her teeth. The new filling on her tooth twinges, just slightly, and after Lottie spits out the toothpaste, she bites down hard on it, to feel it again.

  She comes back into the dining room and stands in the doorway, surveying the mess she has sometimes thought of as welcoming. I should do a little work, she thinks. Dutifully she sits down.

  Then suddenly she stands up again. She goes upstairs and puts on her running shoes, then comes back down, gets her keys, and goes outside.

  Though she is walking, she slowly traces the pattern of right and left turns she usually makes when she runs. The streets are emptied, and she walks on the smooth asphalt instead of the brick sidewalks, so she won’t have to think about where she’s putting her feet, the bumps and sudden gaps in the brick. It’s ten-thirty by now, and there aren’t many lights on downstairs in the big wooden houses. Lottie usually runs earlier, midevening, when kids are still playing in the streets on certain blocks, when people are on their porches or in their yards, and lights are just coming on in the living rooms, the kitchens, you can catch quick glimpses of all the variations of family life. Tonight everything seems desolate to her.

  A light rain is beginning to patter in the leaves above her, and Lottie feels a drop or two. She stops in front of a lighted window on Hilliard Street, one of those many-paned windows that reach from the floor to within a few feet of the ceiling. A couple sit on a couch with their backs to Lottie, their heads and shoulders rising above the curved frame of the couch. Each head is bent forward – they are apparently reading – each lost in whatever universe his book holds. They sit about three feet apart on the couch, infinitely companionable, it seems to Lottie, but separate. How does this happen? How do you get that? she wonders.

  She hears footsteps approaching in the distance, voices, and she makes herself move on. She passes a young couple, the girl talking that idiotic young talk: ‘I was like, duh, you know. I mean, I was like, so out of it, then. When I think of it now, I’m like, wow, was I ever so young?’

  Yes, my dear, you were. You, like, are.

  At the corner, Lottie stops. She’s been headed for the river, but the rain is falling harder now. She turns and walks back up Hilliard on the other side of the street. At the window she pauses again. The woman’s head is lifted now; she is turned to look at the man. She sits, impassively staring at him, and Lottie stands outside, staring at her, getting drenched. She’s aware of this, suddenly, the absurdity of it, and she starts to walk again, quickly this time, in the direction of her mother’s house. She’s like some creature from outer space, she thinks. Some Martian, reading her books, staring in through windows, trying to figure out what it means to be human. What is this thing, called love? She jogs a little, humming, then slows again to a fast walk.

  And after all, how can you tell, how can you know? Maybe what looks like
peace in the living room is anything but. She stares at him with love, Lottie had thought. But why not hate? Or a sort of shocked indifference: you look up from a book that’s full of feeling and importance to you and encounter a face, a self-contained and alien face, reading its book. Maybe you think, Who is this person whom I live alongside of? For whom I feel this sudden nothing? A couple lives together happily for twenty-five years, and then the man runs off with a woman exactly the age his wife was when she married him. They live together unhappily for twenty-five years, and when she dies, he’s besotted with grief. ‘Besotted,’ Lottie says aloud.

  Lottie remembers that one of her closest friends, the editor who’d endured her obsessions about Jack, told her she’d been married for seven years to a man who wanted to live close to the earth, who rejected civilization, filthy lucre. She said that for all that time she bought into it, absolutely. They built their own house, on difficult rocky land miles from anywhere. They had no electricity, no running water. They used a wood-burning stove for heat and to cook on. Diane had kept goats for milk. She made cheese, she put up quantities of vegetables and fruits each harvest season. She sewed all their clothes.

  And one day she walked the four miles down to the highway and hitched a ride to Denver, and it was over. She said if anyone had asked her the day before whether she would ever think of leaving, she would have told the person he was out of his mind.

  The lights are off downstairs at Elizabeth’s house, but her bedroom windows are glowing through the old, parchment-colored shades. Lottie thinks of that marriage, the way Elizabeth described it in her letter to Cameron: steady, full of devotion. Can that be true? And if it is, does it matter that Larry has affairs? Does it matter that Lottie has almost slept with him the day after he’s returned for Elizabeth?

  Who can know about anyone else’s marriage, really? Maybe Jack and Evelyn weren’t so happy, even when she was whole. Maybe when he played the clarinet, it drove her wild, she went through the house, slamming doors; and he pretended not to notice. Played louder, in fact. Maybe every now and then he wished she’d get a job, get a life. Maybe he came home sometimes and saw the carefully-addressed invitations to the carefully-orchestrated dinner parties stacked on the little burled maple table in the front hall, waiting to be mailed; and wished he’d married a different kind of person.