“At all like that movie?”
“What movie?”
She couldn’t immediately come up with the name—black and white, psychosexual, she said—and I understood she meant The Servant, which we’d seen together in a college course on—what?—postwar decay of the British class system? London, early ’60s. An aristocratic man hires a butler with murky motives, whose hold on him grows and deepens. Hierarchies get subverted, desire twisted, roles reversed. Order is not restored—something was rotten with that order to begin with. What stuck with me was the visual tone: insinuating, dark, all of it suffused with a kind of humid malignancy.
“She doesn’t work for me,” I said. Obvious, stupid. Not just because it was a fact, but because it was a simple answer to a simple question Liz didn’t ask. The real question involved an interrogation into the very meaning of work—and control, power, deference, surrender. And I wanted to say there was none of that at play here. But there was. Of course there was. Stella choosing which clothes I should wear to my interview, performing a service, helping me, but at the same time determining what I would look like, how the world would see me. She was my Pygmalion. And I’d asked her to be. I’d placed myself in her skilled hands with their deep blue nails.
“Don’t get defensive,” said Liz. “I’m just curious. That’s all.”
“I think you’re turning all of this into something more fevered than it is.”
“I need someone to live vicariously through. It’s true. I’m asleep by ten every night now. So, what I’m saying is do it for me.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know. Use your imagination.”
I’d been with her up to this point, enjoying it on some level, pleased at being the subject of some intrigue. But when she said this, it stirred distaste—for how she’d reduced Stella to an object for her own, for our own, amusement. How I’d reduced her, as well.
“Okay, Madame de Merteuil.” I passed it off. We’d seen those movies too. The faithful eighteenth-century versions of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the late-twentieth-century retelling with Upper East Side adolescents, now a period piece itself. I’d written part of my undergraduate thesis on the book, in French—Liz was there for it, though there’s no way she’d remember the arguments I tried to advance about the letters of those manipulative libertines. I barely recall the terms I used, but I do remember I wanted to draw out connections between pedagogy and power, education and sex. And I knew that I was the Vicomte de Valmont in this scenario that Liz wanted to put us in: the seducer who gets seduced into caring. The one who drops his mask too soon.
“Where’s David in all this?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure I knew. Sometimes David and Stella were like those husbands in the Cassavetes movie. But I’d also been thinking of David and Stella—I realized as I told her—like people who meet and get to know each other in a support group they’re attending because they’ve each got a loved one with the same problem. By that logic, the loved one was me. But what was my problem?
Her laugh was a kind of answer, I suppose. She’d changed positions, now sitting in the wing chair, her legs pulled up, the arches of her feet on the piped edge of the seat cushion, toes pointed, her chin resting on her knees. Avid, assessing. Her glass on the floor, in need of refilling. I had only taken a few sips from mine.
“It’s just . . .” she said. “I get it. You get to be someone new when you’re seen by someone new. You know what I mean? Really seen. And I think that’s what you miss and what you want at a certain age, when most of your firsts are behind you.”
You want discovery, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.
“Are you and Felix, like, not in a good place?” I asked.
She reached for her glass, frowned at its emptiness, then shrugged.
“Oh, we’re fine. Really.”
I didn’t quite buy her breezy tone and my doubt must have registered on my face.
“We’re good.” She sighed. “But I can sort of feel a shift coming, in me.”
For some reason I thought of elephants, sensing seismic waves through their feet. A distress call, an underground rumbling otherwise undetectable.
I once saw a piece that Liz had choreographed, in which a woman in a leotard and a wrap skirt performs a series of volatile movements not to music, exactly, but to a tape track of repeated, truncated yells. As if the full, original yell was lost or suppressed and all that remained was this found, spooky fragment. A dance critic included Liz’s work in a round-up review, praising its evocation of “female rage” and speculating that its “somewhat obscure title”—Dishes—referred to “what is dished out” or perhaps to housework, or to “dishing” and the role of gossip in female subjectivity. I suppose it was all those things but I also knew where this dance came from, the source material it transformed. Liz and I had lived together in an apartment for a time after college and I came home to find her in the kitchen, in a fury, clacking together the porcelain plates that had been drying on the rack, almost throwing them on top of each other and then shoving the stack in the cupboard before slamming the door. Then she enacted similar violence on the cutlery drawer. She hadn’t heard me come in or call her name.
When I asked what had set her off she had said it was “nothing.” It was the “stupid fucking yapping dog downstairs” and the couple that played “loud as fuck” video games somewhere above us, a letter about her student loans, a passive-aggressive voice mail from her mother, a stubborn canker sore in her mouth. A whole litany of nothing that oppressed her only when it was compounded by something else, some lack of control she had over her life. But she wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me what that something else was. Instead, I suppose, she extracted it and made it into a dance. I never saw her seized like that again.
Before she could tell me more about this shift coming on, we were being called, from downstairs. David’s voice. Liz didn’t float down the staircase, that would have been too much, but she had a way of near-gliding, a lightness on her feet, a melody almost. She reached the bottom, not waiting for me, while I stopped on the landing, where the window looked out to the backyard. A rectangle of green, Stella in the far upper-right corner, Felix tossing something metal and weighted in her direction, David out of the frame. It took me a minute to interpret the image, to understand they were playing horseshoes. That’s what the iron stake in the ground toward the trees was for. I’d passed it before and vaguely wondered, but never enough to investigate. The horseshoes came from where? Under the porch, the athletics shed, a corner of forgotten things in the lodge? Liz entered the picture with what I can only describe as efficiency, getting to the point, and the point was this: she took no interest in the horseshoes, she took little interest in Felix just then, her interest was in Stella, whom she didn’t consider a rival, more like a gem whose facets had caught her eye, that she was selecting for closer inspection, for how it might look on her. She was establishing a line between herself and Stella that hadn’t been there before but could now intersect or connect to all of the other lines that had been drawn.
And here’s what I still didn’t know about Stella—how aware was she of what Liz was doing? When Liz offered Stella her arm and Stella linked hers through, smiling modestly, and they exited the frame, while Felix remained, gathering the horseshoes in a tidy pile, was she oblivious or was she playing into the role Liz had given her? And then, if she was playing into it, how much was she subverting that role through her performance? And then I wondered, what was it like to have Liz for a mother?
David was at the foot of the stairs. Emily? he said. Snapping me back. Could I help him, he asked. Sorry, yeah, of course, sorry, I said. I followed him, taking his instruction—what we should bring out, what to serve at the start—because I still wasn’t completely there.
But they’d made it look wonderful—David and Stella; Felix, too—inviting, easy. The wooden table, set with dishes and glassware, would fit us comfortably. We all assembled on the porch. The light at that time of
day, in that spot, flattered everyone, and the mood was one of abundance—of good company and a good meal to come, of generosity, gratitude. We toasted to it and I was glowing, pleased and proud that David and I could offer this.
We ate, talked, drank. Like a camera lens refocusing, the specifics of the conversation blurred, but the sound of engaged voices, voices I loved, grew more defined, along with the breeze rustling the trees, the sound of the cutlery against the plates. Liz no longer seemed so full of orchestration or calculation. She seemed to be in the same flow of talk that David and Felix and Stella were in.
I readjusted. The topic of the conversation returned front and center—they were talking about music. The venue in the city where Stella had worked. Felix had gone there a lot, years ago, in his twenties. And I worried this would turn toward self-satisfied nostalgia—but when Felix recalled an “incredible” show he once saw there, there was nothing smug or patronizing about it. Only a remaining vitality strong enough that Stella went a little rapt, as if she could hear the sound, could feel it, reverberating in that space. Not like a child or a student being taught, but a fellow practitioner, nodding in understanding, identifying with. “They don’t phone it in. My ears were ringing for days,” he said. Stella smiled.
And I shouldn’t have worried with Felix, who was genuine, though not unthinking, in his enthusiasms. He wore his intellect so lightly you could forget it was there, I felt, and I didn’t mean it in an arch or bitchy way. I meant it less as a reflection on Felix than on people around him, who almost had to be told, brought up to speed, and only then would they acknowledge his intelligence, the kind of sly subtlety that doesn’t announce itself, a depth of feeling that doesn’t dramatize itself. I’m sure Felix had agonized over things in his life, but he never led with that agony, never wrapped himself up in it like a coat for the world to see. All of us at the table seemed to recognize this about Felix, and value it.
I knew that Liz, especially, recognized Felix for who and what he was without having to be told. She loved that such an intelligence was there in Felix and she loved that it wasn’t the type to compete with hers. What was the shift she felt coming, the one she brought up earlier? Wouldn’t Felix shift with her? Or accommodate her shift in some way? But I glimpsed it for a second—Felix, always gathering the horseshoes until one day he stops. He doesn’t toss one at her back, nothing so violent. More than rage, there’s resignation—he just leaves them there for Liz to pick up for once in her life and he walks away. And this, I suppose, was the problem. Liz wanted to rage at him so he would rage at her, but he simply didn’t have that rage in him.
Still, I didn’t really know what their life was like and I didn’t want these thoughts. I wanted us to stay in the stream of good feeling. Of plenitude and ease in the last of the daylight. Where I could look at David and then meet his eyes and, in that moment, feel that nothing and no one was missing.
After second helpings we were full, but there was ice cream and sorbet for dessert and the pie-tart that Liz and Felix brought. I got up to serve it, feeling the wine in me, mixing with that glow from the start of the evening, dimmed a little bit now. I could have broken a dish, sent a few spoons clattering to the floor, dropped a carton of ice cream, and it wouldn’t have mattered much. It would have merely become part of the flow of that night. But there was something about the pie-tart, I felt I had to take special care with it. That something vague but irretrievable would be lost if I messed it up. As ably as I could, I set it down whole in front of Liz and asked her to do the honors.
When she cut into it, the filling that squelched out was such a deep, dark red it had to symbolize something, but what? All the obvious analogies were boring so I said nothing, but I was delighted when she gave the first piece to me, as if it were my birthday.
So I brought it up, the cusp I was on. I mentioned the job interview, which Stella dressed me for (thank you, Stella, I nodded) and David had been supportive of (thank you, David). Felix and Liz said something along the lines of oh, that’s great! And then I went into a little more detail, because at my age and with my experience a job interview shouldn’t have been a big deal, but I wanted them to know it was not nothing to me. Not just the prospect of a job, of being employed, but the interview itself—having the chance (because it felt like chance) to successfully participate in a world I was beginning to think was no longer mine, would never be mine again. Maybe I went too far with this, conversationally. Felix still thought it was all great, but Liz shifted in her seat. She placed her elbow on the table, her chin jutting into her palm, her face arranged in a kind of pouting skepticism and concern.
“What is it?” I said to her.
“Oh, it’s not . . . I don’t know.”
“What?”
“It sounds good, this opportunity. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t get your hopes up. You should! And they’d be lucky to hire you. But I just think maybe you should apply to some temp agencies in the meantime. Or do some gig economy thing. Or try to reactivate your old contacts and freelance?”
I couldn’t argue with the soundness of her suggestions, and I fully expected everyone to second, third, and fourth her, but her advice was loaded with a kind of judgment and superiority I wouldn’t have expected from her. Or rather: I’d completely expect it from her, I just wouldn’t have expected her to direct it toward me, to my face. The fact that I didn’t anticipate anybody sensing how wounded it left me made my heart beat faster when Stella spoke, when she said to Liz:
“Why, though? Why should she?”
“Well, Stella,” Liz said, elbow still on the table, chin still in hand, “money aside, it can’t be good in terms of mental health for Emily to be wandering around here all day alone.”
“But I’m not alone,” I said.
Liz didn’t reply, but I knew her well enough to see—she sat up straight, pulling back—that what I said had landed just as I’d wanted: she was baffled, jealous, a little put upon. And why not? Wouldn’t she have liked to live in this idyll, to pass her days like this, in a haze of desire and memory, and a kind of physicality that drew on that haze, that energized it? When Stella and I swam, when we played tennis, rode our bikes, pumped our legs, swung our arms, our bodies knew everything, they could do everything. Everything I asked my body to do, it did. Liz, of all people, a dancer, would have understood this. Would have wanted it for herself. Her body may finally have belonged only to her again, after pregnancy and breast-feeding, but even so, most of the time she had was not her own. She taught a few university classes at different schools and she took care of her children. If she danced, I thought, more spitefully than sadly, it was a cramped, unsatisfying shadow version of both the freedom and control she had once possessed.
I looked from Liz to Stella, who showed no satisfaction at having challenged Liz, only concern. Whether it was concern for me or concern that she’d overstepped, I couldn’t tell. But I wanted to let her know that she hadn’t overstepped, or if she had, I didn’t mind. I felt flush with shame at the way I’d let Liz talk about her earlier, the extent to which I’d gone along with it, and flush with gratitude—something more than gratitude—for Stella, for the way she cared.
Felix, who wasn’t drinking much this evening, since he planned to drive home, attempted to come to Liz’s rescue, to the whole table’s rescue—to get us back to the convivial place we were before. He tried his best. He was unemployed for seven months once, he said, and loved it. He got my situation, he did. But then—I could see him actively reassessing his situation—this was before they had kids, he said. Before he was solidly with Liz, even. Before he cared about health insurance. And what he stopped himself from saying was that it was before he had to be responsible to anyone other than himself. The implication wasn’t hard to decipher: I was selfish and irresponsible.
After a momentary but infinitely awkward silence, David spoke, as if from a dais, out to the waiting audience. “When we moved here, it was for a number of reasons, but part of what motivated us
was a creative impulse. And maybe that sounds self-indulgent, or privileged or whatever, but if you give yourself that kind of license, it’s hard to just shut it off. We’ll probably have to make some decisions soon, and maybe sell this place. But right now, if you wanted to get a temp job”—he looked at me—“that’s fine, but you don’t need to, we don’t need you to.” His “we” was exclusionary, incorporating Stella but shutting out Liz and Felix, who apparently did need me to get a temp job in order to justify their own choices to themselves.
“Stop. This is making me sad.” Liz lifted her gaze to mine. “You make us sound sad.”
I got up and walked over behind her, a little swoony from the wine. I poured what was left of the bottle into her glass, an offering, and standing by her chair, I kissed the crown of her head. “Don’t be sad.” She leaned back to meet my eyes, upside down, blinking, then smiling. A look I’d seen her give her children, a smile that spanned and compressed time, so that her own childhood wasn’t behind her and her children’s future ahead in a chronological, linear progression. It was all there at once, surging.
As I raised my head, I saw Stella pick up her glass and then put it down without drinking. She glanced at David, who was pouring water for Felix, she absently twisted the napkin in her lap, and then when she looked at me almost reluctantly, I thought just maybe I caught a flicker of jealousy.
The small white plates around the table, smeared with half-eaten pieces of pie, seemed to be keeping everyone there, in place, and if I removed them to the kitchen counter, I’d be removing a pin, releasing everyone, they’d go off in any direction they chose. Which didn’t sound like a bad idea. We could make it a game, now that it was dark. Hide and seek. We could set as boundaries the edge of the playing field and the lodge, to the north and south, the tennis court and the rec hall to the east and west, and within them run off into the night.
Everyone, it turned out, was up for it. They’d hide, I would seek. We set rules: twenty minutes and then you returned here if you hadn’t been found. Phones for flashlights.
The Summer Demands Page 8