For Love

by Sue Miller

  Now, oddly, tears for that service she hadn’t gone to, for the lost opportunity to know more, perhaps, of who Evelyn might have been, come to her eyes. She fumbles in her purse for a Kleenex and finds an old one, wadded and shredding, which she unfolds a corner of to blow her nose.

  Ryan grips her arm momentarily in sympathy, assuming, Lottie supposes, that she’s weeping for Jessica. Let him, she thinks. Soon enough he’ll learn that you can mourn for any loss at any funeral; that there comes to be a general sense of sorrow and loss in life which can be released by the ceremony even of someone you didn’t know.

  To her surprise, though, Lottie can’t stop crying – she weeps through the rest of the service, like any of the young women in white around her – and it occurs to her just as they’re hearing the benediction that she’s also weeping for herself, for what she finally lost when Evelyn died.

  At the time, she had wept for Jack, for them all, but felt for herself only a kind of hungry happiness. For her, it was over at last. Evelyn’s long dying, yes, but also her own standing always outside, looking in. What she’s feeling now, though, as the minister speaks of corruptible bodies being changed, is her own sense of loss; is how much she loved having Evelyn there, how much she loved the yearning that resulted. She had accused Jack of needing Evelyn, but it seems to her that what she understands at this moment is that she needed Evelyn too, that she misses the potency that Evelyn’s existence, her life, gave to her own love for Jack, and his for her. ‘Wouldn’t you love to have it back?’ Lottie had asked him, talking about their secret, dark love together. And now Evelyn’s death has beckoned them both into the light. What Lottie has a confused sense of as she weeps is what she needs to leave behind a part of her own life, a part that loves the dark, that always chooses what’s temporary, what’s thrillingly marginal – the hotel, the car, the secret meeting – and try instead to try to build something permanent out of the quotidian, out of daily life. Out of everything that’s most fragile and mortal and corruptible.

  On the way out, she feels a touch on her shoulder. Elizabeth. There’s no one she’d less like to talk to, but Elizabeth stays close behind her as they slowly shuffle toward the doors, flung open now on the church steps and the sunlit town green beyond.

  On the steps, Elizabeth embraces Lottie abruptly, she thanks her for what she’s done. Lottie raises a dismissive hand, shakes her head, but Elizabeth insists. Then she tells Lottie they’re leaving, as soon as they get back from the reception in the parish hall. ‘Everyone’s packed and ready, so we can just put stuff in the car and take off. Mother will return it to the leasing company for us, and that will be that. What I did on my summer vacation.’ She smiles, wryly.

  Little Emily presses against her, whining, and buries her face in her mother’s side. Elizabeth encircles her with one hand, puts the other hand out and grips Lottie’s arm. ‘So this is goodbye, Charlotte. But I hope, maybe …’ She looks hard at Lottie, perhaps noticing now that she’s been crying. ‘Well, Chicago and Minneapolis aren’t so far apart. That’s what I’ll count on,’ she says firmly, cheerfully.

  Lottie turns away to where Ryan is waiting for her at the bottom of the steps. Then forces heself to look back. ‘That’s not going to happen, Elizabeth,’ she says quietly. ‘The Chicago–Minneapolis thing. I hope everything works out for you, but I don’t want to hear about it either way, all right?’

  Elizabeth stares and raises her hand, but before she can say anything, Lottie turns away into the crowd moving raggedly down the steps.

  She lets Ryan drive back. She sits on her side of the car, watching the pretty New England scenery float by. Through the woods, she can see the regular rhythm of tract housing. Then the trees open out on to an office park. She’s thinking of Jack. Of Evelyn. She rouses herself: this is selfish, she thinks. She looks over at Ryan, at his sober face. The sore-looking patches from shaving make him look young to Lottie. Young, and more vulnerable than he usually does.

  ‘Well, what do you think you learned?’ she asks him abruptly. ‘Anything?’

  He shrugs. ‘No. Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Mostly that a lot of other people cared a lot more about her than I did. It made me think, though.’

  ‘About what?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, it’s pretty egocentric, I guess, but really about what anyone could say about me.’ He looks over at Lottie. ‘If I died.’ He grins ruefully. ‘Not much,’ he says.

  ‘Well. Honey, come on. You’re just starting to be who you are.’

  He’s looking back at the road, still smiling slightly. Then he says, ‘I guess I’m just having a kind of pre-life crisis, then.’

  Lottie laughs, delighted.

  ‘What about you?’ he asks after a while.

  ‘What? What about me?’

  ‘You were crying. You seemed affected.’

  ‘I wept for general mortality,’ she says. ‘No. Well, yes and no. I was being egocentric too, really. I wept for myself. The bell was tolling for me.’

  ‘Really? Do you think about that? About dying?’ He looks over. ‘I mean, I know you did when you were sick. But. Well, I just wonder.’

  ‘I haven’t so much, I guess. I did then, a lot, of course. Cold-sweat thoughts, sometimes. And I worried terribly about you, about how you’d do. But since then I’ve led the kind of life where you don’t have to, much.’

  ‘And what kind of life might that be?’

  ‘Well, unattached, primarily, I guess.’

  ‘But you’re attached now.’

  Lottie is speechless for a beat or two. Then she says, ‘I seem to be, yes.’

  ‘You are,’ he announces firmly; and she wonders what he’s noticed, what he’s guessed at. He smiles at her. ‘So maybe you’re in a pre-life crisis too.’

  ‘Ah, pre-life, pre-death.’ She makes her voice tough. ‘It’s all the same kettle of fish. Ball of wax.’

  ‘Tub of chicken,’ he offers.

  She laughs and looks out the window again.

  ‘This reminds me,’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, I was just thinking of this course I took, this biochemistry course? Freshman year, it was required. And there was this section called Sex and Death. The point being that where you have parthenogenesis, you know, before you have sex, animals don’t ever die. They just go on splitting forever. They’re immortal. But once you get two different sexes coming together to make a third creature – to make life – there’s also death.’

  ‘Well, there you have it.’

  ‘I suppose.’ They’re coming to the parkway now, slowing down for the light. ‘Still,’ he says as he downshifts, ‘there are always accidents. Deaths in both worlds that have no connection to that issue. I mean, paramecia must get squashed sometimes, or devoured, or what have you. And then in our universe too. I mean, Jessica – her death wasn’t connected to sex at all.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Lottie says.

  They begin to move through the network of streets toward her mother’s neighborhood. The air feels dry, Lottie realizes. Dry and hot. ‘Are you going to work at all today?’ she asks him.

  ‘I haven’t decided. I have so little to do, it’s like I could finish in a couple of hours anytime. Maybe I’ll call the weather guy and see if it’s supposed to rain again soon.’ They stop at a light. Suddenly he turns to Lottie, grinning. ‘Remember when you used to telephone the weather guy, Mom? And play that game?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lottie says. She’s grateful to him for calling it up. She would dial the service while Ryan watched, and then repeat the odd detail – ‘Sixty degrees tomorrow, yes, partly sunny’ – and laugh, more and more hysterically at each additional element. She would begin by faking the laughter, of course, but Ryan would inevitably start really laughing, and then she would laugh genuinely too; until by the end of the forecast, they’d be in tears over the final repeated details. After she hung up, he’d say, ‘Do it again, Mom,’ and that in itself would set them both off once more.

  Ryan parks the car aim
ed in the wrong direction on their side of the street. As they come up the walk, they are arguing about whether this is a ticketable offense. Suddenly Lottie sees that the door is open. She stops. They left it locked, of course, when they went to the service. As she mounts the front steps, her heart is pounding. She steps into the empty hallway and freezes, looking around, ready for anything. But then Cameron calls from the kitchen. ‘Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh, Cam, it’s you,’ she says, and feels, for just a few seconds, relief. But as soon as he comes out from the dining room doorway, she sees that this is bad, this is trouble. He looks disheveled, frantic. He’s moving too fast; Lottie can see perhaps a little too much white in his eye. His hair is uncombed, he looks ill.

  He smiles at Lottie and Ryan, a tethered, false rictus that terrifies her. ‘All dressed up. Where ya been?’ he says in his small, pressured voice.

  Before Lottie can think of a lie to tell, Ryan says, ‘Jessica Laver’s funeral.’

  He turns his harsh smile on Ryan. ‘There must have been a fair crowd, no?’ Ryan starts to answer, but he rides on: ‘Seems like everyone I know and love was there. If you’d asked me, I’d have gone with you.’

  Again Ryan begins to speak; he’s saying Cameron’s name. This time Lottie interrupts. ‘It didn’t occur to us. Ryan had his own reasons for going – he knew Jessica. And I wanted to be with him. It had no connection to you, Cam.’

  They stand in a little circle in the empty front hall. Outside the open door, the huge sycamore stirs, sighs in the wind. Cam is staring at Lottie, then his eyes flick to Ryan, then to the living room windows, then back to Lottie. ‘Well, you look very nice, both of you. Very nice,’ he says finally. He seems to mean this.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lottie says.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ryan echoes.

  ‘It’s over?’ he asks. Before they can answer, he walks quickly to the living room windows and stands staring out.

  ‘The service? Yes,’ Lottie says.

  She follows him into the room, willing herself to move slowly. His nerviness seems volatile and dangerous, and Lottie is aware of wanting to pull against it. ‘Elizabeth was going on to the what-d’you-call-it. The reception, whatever. We didn’t.’

  ‘She’s alone?’

  ‘Elizabeth and the family, I should have said.’ She watches him from the side, his strong, harsh profile, his quickly shifting eyes. ‘Why don’t we sit down?’ she says. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  He laughs, a mirthless bark, but when Lottie sits in one of the chairs facing the windows, he sits too. He looks at Lottie now; he’s smiling again. ‘I called her this morning and got Emily,’ he says. ‘I talked to Emily. Emily and I had a little chat. She said Elizabeth’s leaving. After the service. Elizabeth’s leaving town.’

  ‘Ah!’ Lottie says. She’s frightened suddenly.

  ‘And what I’m wondering, Charlotte, is if you knew that, that Elizabeth was leaving.’ Lottie doesn’t respond. ‘And if you knew that, why you wouldn’t have told me. Why you would have led me to believe something distinctly other than that.’

  In her peripheral vision, Lottie can see Ryan shift his weight slightly. He’s still standing in the hall, watching her and Cameron.

  ‘I did know it,’ Lottie says softly.

  ‘What?’ Cameron’s voice is sharp.

  ‘I said I knew it. And I thought that she had a right to go. Unmolested, as it were.’

  ‘Charlotte.’ He shakes his head. He smiles sadly at Lottie. ‘That was wrong of you. That makes me very angry.’

  ‘What part was wrong?’ she asks.

  ‘It was all wrong,’ he says. He has leaned forward, and the smile is gone. ‘To lie to me. To think it’s right that she should go. To think that what I am about is … molesting Elizabeth. Wrong. All wrong.’

  ‘Well, I disagree with you, then. Obviously. I did what I thought was right.’

  ‘Right for who?’

  ‘Right. More abstract than that.’

  ‘There is no abstract right, Charlotte.’ He shakes his head again.

  There’s the sound of a car door slamming somewhere outside, and he turns quickly in his chair, half rises. His head moves, small tugs left and right. He looks feral. He stills finally and sits back down. There’s a long silence.

  Lottie says, ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  He looks at her. ‘No. Thank you.’

  Lottie gets up. Elizabeth won’t be here for another fifteen minutes at the soonest. ‘Well, I would,’ she says. ‘Ryan? You?’

  ‘Umm. Sure,’ he says, and starts to move toward the kitchen.

  ‘No, no,’ Lottie says. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She goes back out to the kitchen and puts some water on to boil. She gets out the paper filter, the grounds. She makes herself move slowly, calmly, through this ritual. She can hear the stillness in the living room, though once Cam speaks and Ryan answers, something about the service. Someone is up once too, walking around, but Lottie forces herself to stay in the kitchen, to watch the brown drops fill the glass pot.

  When she comes out, she is carrying two mugs. She hands one to Ryan, who’s sitting now on the arm of one of the old chairs. She sits down again in her chair. Cam is watching her steadily. She looks back, keeping her gaze level. ‘Are you sure?’ she asks. ‘That you don’t want any?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ he says.

  ‘What’s your plan?’ Lottie says at last. Absurdly, she has tried to make her voice conversational, and he hears that. He smiles. As if in response to this, Ryan shifts his weight.

  Cameron looks over at him. ‘Your mother’s funny, Ryan.’

  ‘Unh huh,’ Ryan says. ‘I know. I like Mom.’

  ‘At the moment,’ Cameron says, ‘I do not.’ His face falls, then – in a way that shocks Lottie – it grows flaccid, his eyelids seem to thicken, lines pull, as though he’s stepped into a more powerful gravitational field. She sees that he’s exhausted, near the end of something. She wonders how much he’s slept since Jessica died; whether he’s slept at all.

  ‘What is your plan, Cameron?’ she asks again.

  ‘Oh, Charlotte, come on.’

  ‘No, I’m curious.’

  He stares over at her coldly. ‘I’m here. I’m waiting. Clearly I’m going to try to stop her. Is that a plan?’

  He’s waiting for an answer, so she lifts her shoulders.

  ‘If it is, that’s my plan. To hold on to what I love. Wouldn’t it be your plan?’

  ‘I might execute it differently.’

  ‘I think you might.’ His voice is heavy with something ugly.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Charlotte. When have you ever tried to hold on to something you love? When have you ever worked at love? You think love is something that happens to you – a feeling.’

  ‘And what do you think it is?’

  ‘What you choose. What you do. How you live.’

  ‘Grace versus works,’ Ryan says.

  ‘Thank you, Ryan,’ Cameron says. He shuts his eyes. ‘Grace versus works. It’ll do.’

  Lottie meets Ryan’s eyes across the room and feels a welling of gratitude. He understands, then. He knows they have to keep Cameron distracted. Distracted and talking. And then she realizes what her plan is. She realizes that she’s decided against her brother here too. That she will try to guarantee Elizabeth’s departure. That what she is choosing, what she is doing, are in the service of everything she’s been struggling against in her own life since she and Jack married.

  ‘I don’t think “versus” is correct,’ she says.

  His eyes snap open. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s grace versus works.’

  ‘Oh, Char. The philosopher of love. No doubt you’ve solved it all this summer with your research.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it.’

  ‘Fine.’ He turns slowly in his chair to watch a couple of kids walk past, their sharp voices carrying back long after they’ve passed the window. Th
ey’re talking about money, it seems.

  ‘You need them both, surely,’ Lottie says. He looks almost confused as he stares at her. ‘I mean, you can’t work at it if there’s not a sense of – occasionally anyhow – of grace. In love, after all, there are two. Two people. If you’re working at it alone, you’re working on the other person.’

  ‘And that’s what you think I’m doing?’

  ‘Elizabeth wants to go, Cameron. She wants to work on her marriage. You can’t make her love you through works. Love-works. Whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘I don’t need to make Elizabeth love me. She does love me.’

  ‘Yes, of course she does. But she loves Lawrence too, and that’s where she wants to turn her energy.’

  ‘But that’s because he’s been working on her. She’s a very vulnerable person. Very easily swayed. I understand Elizabeth. I understand how important all those conventional aspects of life – all the status things – are to her. They always have been. But they’re not what she wants, really. And now maybe it’s my turn. To work on heir again. To remind her of what she really wants.’

  They sit in silence for a minute. Cameron’s fingers are dancing nervously on the arm of his chair. Lottie looks at Ryan, who’s sunk farther down in his chair.

  She says, ‘You know, I’d be furious if someone said that of me.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Said that they knew what I really wanted. Implied that they understood me better than I understood myself.’ Abruptly she remembers that this is what Larry has said about Elizabeth too, and she stops too quickly, her mouth a little open.

  Cameron looks at her. ‘Because you understand yourself so very well, no doubt.’

  Ryan stirs a little at his tone, and Lottie glances quickly at her son, then back at Cam. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I have a letter for you. From Elizabeth. Maybe it would be good for you to read it.’ Lottie starts to get up, but he raises his hand.