She turns her gaze to Scarlet. “I have a beautiful house, and I hate it. I’d rather live in a cabin beside a stream, if you want to know the truth. My ex-husband has managed to convince our daughters that our despising each other is entirely my fault. I spend my time, energy, and a good bit of my money on my own appearance, despite the fact that no man is ever going to look at me with anything approaching desire again. And so I channel all my surplus sexual energy into expensive food and art I don’t really care about and maintaining the fucking showplace of a house I created for Ted, always for Ted, who needed to entertain people from Georgetown, he said, who constantly had his sights set on better things—including a whole gaggle of willing and eager graduate students, all his little political theorists in training and on the make, each of whom he was screwing, one after another right there in his office, then coming home for a cocktail party on our back verandah—can you believe we called it our fucking verandah —oozing all his oily charm, talking up the president’s wife, glad-handing everyone in the room.
“God, he was good at it. It made me sick, and at the same time, I can’t explain this, it turned me on. Even in the midst of all that, even knowing what he was doing, practically right in front of me, I still ached for him; sometimes I think we had the best sex when I hated him the most. At least at the end.
“And so I kept it up—for years I kept it up. I hired the caterers and ordered the wine and decorated, and redecorated, and re-redecorated, until I thought I’d throw up if I looked at one more copy of House Beautiful or Architectural Digest.”
She pauses for a moment, looking out the window. “You know,” she says, her voice softer now, “years ago we had a neighbor—crazy old guy, a retired professor of something or other, scourge of the neighborhood, that kind of thing. He had all these hideous overgrown hydrangea and peony bushes—two of the uglier flowers known to man, you have to admit—that were taking over his yard, along with about two hundred species of weeds, ivy going crazy, growing into his window screens. Peeling paint, the whole business. He’d let the whole thing go to hell. Whole families of squirrels were nesting in his two chimneys, and he didn’t even care.
“And one day last year I just stood on the verandah and watched the squirrels climbing in and out of his chimneys, gathering their stash for the winter, whatever it is they do, and it dawned on me: I envied him, really envied him. I was dying to live like that, like my crazy neighbor, to let everything go, let it all just rot away around me.”
She pauses, taking a deep, audible breath. Then she says, more quietly, “That was what I said to Addie last night. I said, ‘Addie, I’m so tired. I’m so tired, and all I want to do is let it all rot. I want to live in the middle of the rot.’ ”
“What did she say?” Cora asks.
“Just what you’d expect. ‘Rot’s vital, Lou. It’s teeming with life, a good place to live. You should try it.’” She takes another breath, exhaling with a little laugh.
They’re quiet for a moment, and then Scarlet asks, “So why don’t you? Let it all go, I mean?”
Lou doesn’t look at Scarlet when she answers. “Because I won’t give him the satisfaction of watching that happen to me,” she says. “He’d use it to try one more time to get at my inheritance.”
Scarlet has heard bits and pieces of this, in recent years—details about Lou and Ted’s mean, protracted divorce, his contention that he needs access to a portion of Lou’s inheritance—which is a sizable one—so that it might be properly monitored and invested, for their daughters’ sakes.
“Well, you’ve already heard my idea about that,” Cora says, reaching for a shawl that’s hanging on a hook behind her and wrapping it around Lou, who’s begun to shiver, despite the warm sunlight that’s replaced the chill of the early morning. “Give it away. The girls are adults now, and you’ve already put aside enough for them. Put aside a bit more for yourself and give the rest away. Then you’d be finished with Ted once and for all.” She sits back down and folds her arms across her chest, looking at Lou with a half smile, as if she knows this is a safe suggestion, unlikely as Lou is to take it seriously.
Lou gazes out the window, nodding absently. Her face, in the now glaring light, looks older, and wistful.
“Unless . . .” Cora says, sighing as she turns back to face the table and her newspaper.
“Unless?” Lou turns to face her.
“Unless that really isn’t what you want. To be completely free of Ted, I mean.” She slides her glasses back onto her nose and turns a page. The silence between them now is full and heavy. They know each other, and they knew Addie, in a way she never could, Scarlet thinks. She finds this strangely comforting, which is a welcome change. For years it bothered her, the way she felt so left out of this part of Addie’s life.
Years ago, during the year she spent living in Cora’s house, Scarlet discovered a book Addie had sent to Cora: the diary and letters of the artist Käthe Kollwitz. She read the book obsessively, fascinated by these day-to-day observations and frustrations of a working artist and mother. Kollwitz herself became a bit of an obsession for Scarlet then, one that would last a number of years.
An artist and a mother. An artist who was, in fact, a champion of mothers, and of the poor. A graphic artist and sculptor with a social conscience, a woman who created realistic depictions of struggling workers and grieving mothers simply because, she said, she found them “beautiful.” More beautiful by far than the bourgeoisie. Not attempting, really, to be iconoclastic, to shock—though perhaps she did wish to disturb the viewers of her work. Devoted to her children, one of whom she lost in the First World War, and to her husband, despite times of despair over her work. She had found, Scarlet thought, the ideal artist-mother. Why couldn’t Addie be more like that?
Of course Addie was like that. Struggling to make something, in the midst of so much sadness. But it would take some time, and several more readings of Kollwitz’s diaries, for Scarlet to see this. And now she can also see that Addie herself wasn’t particularly interested in any parallels between herself and Kollwitz. She sent the diaries to Cora, another grieving mother, with the hope that they might comfort and inspire her.
In fact they did provide Cora with a kind of comfort, though she didn’t read the diaries carefully until two years after Addie sent her the book, when Karl died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of a heart attack. For the year that followed, Cora locked her door and threw pots and read, day and night—Kollwitz’s diaries, other books by and about artists. At the end of that year she emerged, ready, it seemed, to face the world again; in another year she would open her home as a quiet, simple bed-and-breakfast.
When Scarlet visited during those first years of Cora’s new business, she had to swallow her disappointment at sometimes sharing Cora’s marvelous breakfasts with paying guests, at strangers tossing Karl’s old boccie balls in the backyard. She missed Karl’s quiet presence, the salami and eggs he sometimes cooked on Sundays, his random piles of books and magazines scattered throughout the house. The way he told the same corny jokes the summer before she left for college that he’d told when she was thirteen. His gentle solicitousness with Cora.
Surely Cora missed all those things too, and more. What had she done to find her way out of her grief and loneliness that year after Karl’s death? “I read,” was all she told Scarlet. “I worked on my pots.”
Presumably she told Addie and Lou more. Or maybe she didn’t need to.
They know each other so well, these women, Scarlet thinks. Lou is crying again, quietly now.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it?” she says. “That I could still love him.”
“No, love, it’s not pathetic,” Cora says. Her tone is dry, factual, not particularly warm; she makes no effort to reach out to Lou.
“That day I stood and watched the squirrels, something had happened earlier,” Lou says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and simply holding it for a moment—absentmindedly, almost tenderly—before dropping it on
the table in front of her. “I was renting the apartment above the garage in the back—the one where Addie stayed, Scarlet, remember?” Scarlet nods, remembering those clean, nearly empty rooms all too well.
“I was renting it for next to nothing to a friend of Liz’s, a student. I’d gotten up early and gone out to the greenhouse to transplant some perennials I’d started, and when I reached the door I heard a sound, an unmistakable one, two people having sex, moaning, breathing hard, really going at it. It was this girl and her boyfriend, and they’d pulled a mattress down there, right there on the floor of the greenhouse, below the geraniums and hibiscus I had wintering in there.
“And who could blame them? It was a wonderful spot, warm and steamy, and of course it smelled heavenly. I’d done it there myself a time or two.” Here she pauses for a moment, stopping at a sharp look from Cora.
“What?” Scarlet says, confused. “Now all of a sudden I’m the young innocent again? You have to protect me from something?”
No one says anything for a while, and Scarlet feels, for some reason, suddenly hot and uncomfortable. They’ve sidled up to something forbidden, and she knows it; she has a feeling she knows more too, somehow. More than she wants to know.
They’re silent like this, tense and silent for a long while. Scarlet clears her throat, ready to excuse herself, when Lou speaks again, her voice even quieter now, deep and hoarse.
“No, listen. What I remembered that day was actually something lovely, something from so long ago . . . I stood there at the greenhouse door and watched for a while; I couldn’t tear myself away. What I saw between those two was so different from my own clumsy, ridiculous escapades in there.”
She and Cora exchange a quick glance, and she goes on, “I knew the difference because I remembered feeling like that. Feeling real passion, I mean. And what I remembered was being in Greece with Ted, when we were still so young. It was right after he dropped out of medical school, and we’d had a huge fight and gone off to screw other people and then come back together, all contrite, the way we always did in those days. And we decided to go to Europe for a while, get away, think about what Ted might do next to avoid the draft. That’s how young we were. God, Cora, remember those days?”
Cora nods, watching Lou closely.
“Anyway, we headed pretty quickly for Greece, and we hopped all over the islands. But what I remember was an afternoon on Santorini, one of those gorgeous black-sand beaches, that volcanic sand. We were both naked, everyone there was naked, and we dove in for a swim, and when we walked out of the water we just looked at each other, and I swear to you, I have never again felt what I felt at that moment, before or since. He felt it too.”
She closes her eyes. “The deepest yearning I’ve ever felt. Something to do with that sand, and that light and wind and blue-green water. Maybe with thinking he could be sent off to fight in a stupid, meaningless war. I don’t know, I don’t have a word for it. Passion doesn’t mean anything anymore, that doesn’t do it somehow, but I’d have to say that’s what it was. The real thing. Real passion, pure and simple. He grabbed my hand and we ran, I mean ran, for the nearest hidden spot we could find, a patch of sand between some rocks at the base of the cliff behind us. No towel or blanket with us, nothing, we wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. And we dove onto that sand, and we just tore at each other. . . .”
Scarlet glances at Cora, whose eyes are closed behind her reading glasses. Again she feels uncomfortably warm, sweat trickling down her side. She is trying to understand what’s happening in the room.
Lou opens her eyes for a moment, then rubs them, laughing bitterly. “Oh, my God,” she says. “I sound like some kind of goddamn Harlequin romance. I’m sorry.”
“No, you don’t,” Scarlet says. Because for once, she thinks, Lou doesn’t sound like a cheap romance novel. For once she is simply telling the truth. “Go on,” she says. “What happened next?” What she’d like to ask Lou is “How did you go from that moment on the beach to the bitterness you’ve been soaking in for years?” She has her own reasons for wanting to know.
Lou laughs again. “Well,” she says, “we eventually fell asleep, and when we woke up it was completely dark, and we had no idea where our clothes were. We finally found them, and then we had dinner at a little restaurant near the hotel we were staying in. And it was so strange—we were almost shy with each other then. We’d been having sex for several years by then, but it was clear to both of us that something was different about that afternoon, something had changed. I think it scared us both.
“The next morning we got up early and went to see an exhibit of these ancient cave drawings nearby. And there was one I’ll never forget, of two birds, flying, gliding through the air, and one of them seemed to be reaching for the other one, like a lover.
“‘Look, it’s Addie and Tom,’ Ted said. I laughed, but then I just stared at it for the longest time. All of a sudden I felt like I understood, for the first time, what it was between the two of them. I guess I’d always thought she’d just had a crush, the kind I was always having, and of course he was flattered and attracted to this beautiful young girl—who wouldn’t have been? But something about what had happened to us on the beach the day before, and then seeing these beautiful, yearning birds . . . There it was again, I thought: passion. It seemed like I’d just never grasped it before.
“There were cards for sale in a little shop there, reproductions of the paintings, and I bought one with a picture of the two gliding birds and sent it to Addie. I think I wrote something about how Ted said they reminded him of Addie and Tom. For some reason I felt embarrassed to tell her the truth, to tell her I felt like I’d seen something about her for the first time. And I think I felt afraid too. Afraid to tell anyone about what I was feeling, for Ted.
“I felt so in love with him that morning it scared me,” she says, then covers her eyes with one hand. “Nothing has ever come close to that since.”
She lowers her hand to her mouth, and her eyes look almost frightened. Scarlet tries to think of something to say—it seems like Lou needs comforting now, though Scarlet isn’t sure why, and she certainly can’t imagine what to say to offer her comfort—when Lou lowers her hand and speaks again.
“I got pregnant that day. I didn’t even realize it for something like six weeks, and then when I did, two days later I had a miscarriage.”
“Lou . . .” Cora says, her voice a whisper, and then she covers her mouth with her hand.
Lou looks at Cora and gives a sharp little laugh. “Can you believe that? Here you and Addie were, back here starting your families and setting up households, and there I was on the other side of the world, acting like some naive sixteen-year-old or something, deciding to overlook the fact that, obviously, I didn’t have my diaphragm with me that afternoon. And then drinking and smoking dope and screwing around like I always did, acting like nothing was different because it never would have occurred to me that it was.”
She shakes her head, then blows her nose and smiles ruefully. “Ted was sweet about it. ‘It’s better this way, Lou,’ he said to me. But I saw something in his eyes—I could tell he was shaken by the whole thing. And I know he blamed me.”
She dabs her tissue at the corner of an eye. “To this day I wonder if things might have been different. If I’d realized it, I mean. And if we’d had the baby we made that day.”
Cora stands now, then kneels next to Lou and takes her hands in her own. She starts to say something, then stops, changing her mind.
Lou looks at her and says, “You know I went on to have an abortion another time after that, right? Indeed I did. That was Ted’s idea. He said he needed to finish his course work first.” She draws a deep, halting breath, then turns to Scarlet.
“I’m sorry, Scarlet,” she says. “What a thing to talk about the morning after Addie’s death. I can’t explain where that came from. I haven’t thought about that for years.” She turns to look out the window, and Cora goes back to her chair across the tab
le from Scarlet. No one says anything for a while.
“Addie taped that card to the big mirror in the hall outside our bedrooms,” Scarlet finally says. “I can still picture it. As far as I know it’s still there.”
“Ted even knew what kind of birds they were,” Lou says. “Of course I’ve forgotten.”
“They were barn swallows,” Tom says suddenly, from somewhere behind Scarlet. Instinctively all three women sit up in their chairs, like guilty schoolgirls.
“Hirundo rustica. Rusty red throat, white spots on a split tail. Though the flight doesn’t look right; barn swallows don’t tend to glide like that. And yes, it’s still up on the mirror.” He pulls a chair up next to Scarlet’s, and smiles gratefully as Cora hands him the muffins and a cup of coffee. He looks tired and, Scarlet thinks as she watches him, suddenly much older.
“I’ll go make some more,” Cora says, rising with the carafe in hand. She is visibly relieved to see him. “Any sign of your plovers, Tom?” she asks before she goes. She’s become an increasingly avid bird-watcher herself in recent years.
“Not this morning, no,” he answers, as Lou continues to stare out the window.
Scarlet needs to pee, but something has made her reluctant to leave the room. She feels afraid, somehow, to leave Lou and her father alone together. Part of her is desperate to know what they might say to each other. Another part of her can’t bear the thought.
“So have you all solved the dilemma of what we’re going to do next?” Tom asks.
If she were alone with her father, Scarlet thinks, she would laugh out loud at the question. “No, no,” she would say; “first we had to talk about Lou and her problems. As usual. Yes, Addie’s dead, and yes, we have to deal with a few things, just little things, like whether to honor her last request or just do the sensible thing and have her cremated. Nothing too pressing. Of course Lou’s sad and desperate love life would come first.”
In Hovering Flight Page 12