by Sue Miller
He sat down. “No.”
“I don’t know how to thank you for coming over.” Her voice was almost her normal speaking voice, but rustier, softer with sleep.
“You don’t have to, Lainey.” He reached out, touched the dark mass of her hair, thicker than Nina’s. The white circle of her face turned toward him on the pillow.
“Are you sleepy?” she asked, and he felt the sudden weight of the evening, a yearning just to lie down next to her.
“I am,” he said. “You know, I was actually on my way to bed myself when Sarah called.”
“Sarah called?”
“Yes.”
“For some reason, I just assumed it was Nina. She usually takes charge.” She had turned on her side toward him.
David’s foot was touching a pillow. He bent down and picked it up. He propped it against the footboard and then stretched out, his feet toward Lainey’s head. “She did take charge,” he said. “But she was guarding you. She told Sarah to call.”
“Guarding me? Oh, good Lord, what a horrible thought.” She flopped onto her back. “Oh,” she moaned. “Ick, ick. I can’t stand it, David.”
He didn’t answer.
After a while, she asked, “Do you have a cigarette?”
He patted his jacket. “Yes.”
She wiggled up to a sitting position in bed. Their hands reached for each other. He took hers, put a cigarette in her palm, then lifted another to his own mouth and found his matches.
They sat back, the bright glow of their cigarettes marking their locations, head of bed, foot of bed. A matched pair, he thought. She moved suddenly sideways, then back, and he felt a little weight by his outstretched leg.
“Ashtray in the middle,” she said.
He reached forward and found it with his fingers, dropped the match into it. They sat for a while, smoking in silence. David was intensely aware of her, of the flare of orange when she inhaled, of her movements on the bed. Abruptly they both started to speak at once, then stopped.
Lainey laughed, a scratchy intake. “You go,” she said.
“No, you.”
“No, really,” she said. “I’ll remember, and go after you.”
He drew on the cigarette and leaned back. “I miss the girls. Or I’ve missed the girls. I’ve not thought about them enough.” He wanted to explain about the pad between Sarah’s legs, about how beautiful Nina had grown, but a kind of shame that any of this should have been a revelation to him prevented him. “Seeing them tonight makes me sad. That’s all.” He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. “What’s yours?”
She didn’t answer for a moment. She stirred, and the bed moved under him. “Oh, mine is foolish,” she said.
“Come on. You promised.”
“I feel bad, especially after yours.” She reached forward toward the ashtray. “I was going to tease you about being home alone, in bed early, on a Saturday night.”
“Ah.”
“It seems mean now, and I didn’t intend it that way.”
“Well. I have slowed down.”
Her voice was suddenly sarcastic. “I’ve ground to a halt, myself.”
“Lainey.” He didn’t want her to veer off into bitterness. He wanted to sit here, peacefully, out of time, for a little longer.
When she spoke again, her voice was gentle, musing. “But it is true, when I think of it, that the girls give me something that’s nearly the same.” Her cigarette glowed brightly, then died. “I don’t mean it’s the same, really. Or anything like sex. But I do. I touch them a lot. They touch me, and it is. It’s very physical. It’s pleasure.” They sat in silence. Somewhere in the dark, the house shifted, creaked. “It’s hard when they won’t, then,” she said. “When they outgrow it. Like Nina.” The tiny circle brightened again. And then he felt the motion of her arm, reaching for the ashtray. “I’m not sure what I’ll do when they’re gone.” Her voice was soft, hollowed.
“Maybe you’ll have sex,” he said. “To get what the girls used to give you.”
“I’ll be—what?—around ninety-two by then?”
“You’re as old as you feel.”
“Maybe ninety-three.”
He laughed and sat up, felt for the ashtray to put his cigarette out.
She had sat up too. She leaned toward him. She was waiting for him to be finished with the ashtray. Her hair fell forward; he could smell it, he could feel it moving the air close to his face.
While she was putting her cigarette carefully out, he lifted his hand to her head, he slid his fingers under her thick hair to the bare skin of her neck, her jaw. There was a little clicking noise in her throat.
Her head came forward and rested on his shoulder. Her hands gripped his forearms. He bent toward her, kissed her neck, moved his hand down over her heavy breasts, the familiar paths of her flesh. He felt an old, deep desire.
“No,” she whispered.
For a moment he ignored her, but then he felt that her body had frozen, and he dropped his hands.
“Lainey?” he asked.
“I can’t, David.”
“Is it a bad time?” he asked. Their old password.
She laughed. The spell was broken, and she leaned back among the pillows. “A bad time. No. Just that I can’t.” After a moment she was, he thought, weeping.
“I’ve managed …” she began; and was unable to go on. He sat tensed at his end of the bed. He felt disqualified to comfort her. Then her voice came again, thicker, but willed to calm. Harder too. He was glad he couldn’t see her face. “You can’t know what it was like for me after you left. I was terror-stricken. I felt that …” He could hear her gulp. After another moment she said, “I’ve gotten to a safe place now. And it’s where I want to stay. I don’t want to want you. Or to miss you. And I’m not interested in being someone you want momentarily. Or even occasionally. If you were ready to come back it would be different.” Her voice was flat, with no question or hope in it. She wasn’t asking him for anything. Then, much more gently: “Maybe you’re just confused about the girls too. All that nice touching.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know about any of it.” He had swung his feet down. He was sitting now on the edge of the bed, staring at the dark.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t even know that, Lainey. What I mean. What I feel. I’m sorry. I was … I was relieved to go, to be away. I had felt for years that it was a kind of death, our life together. That I was dead. That I’d watched you die. And that all my relations, with you, with the children, were false. A kind of … nattering designed to keep me away from my own misery.”
“And were you more alive out there?” Her voice was tender, full of pity. “With other women?”
“More out there.” He turned to where she was. “Yes. I was. I have been. For a while I was. But I wouldn’t have gone unless you had wanted me to go.”
Her voice was suddenly colder, louder: “That was hardly a whim, if you recall.” He reached out to where it was coming from; he was saying “Shh, shh” while she spoke. His fingers grazed her cheek, her lips. She paused, then spoke in a softer tone again. “It more or less had the quality of a forced hand, wouldn’t you say?”
After a long wait, he said softly, “We could go back and back, Lainey. ‘You made me do this.’ ‘You made me do that.’ ‘If you hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t have done that,’ ad infinitum. It’s like trying to find a prime mover.”
She didn’t answer, and after a moment he said, “If Randall had been all right.” There was silence. He went on. “If the pill had been invented ten years earlier. If I hadn’t slept with anyone else.” She stirred. “A thousand ifs,” he whispered. “A thousand mean, desperate things we each did. And I am … sorry. For my share.” He could hear that her breathing was uneven. “I hope you can believe that.” He waited a minute, then spoke again. “But tonight I wanted you. Maybe because of all that, all we’ve done to each other. Because, in some way, it’s all been done. And we’ve f
orgiven each other so much. Because we’ve passed through it.”
She leaned forward and reached for his arm. Her hand struck him gently, then opened and held him.
He turned to her and touched her legs under the covers. “Because I know you so well, and you know me. Because I miss the girls.”
After a long moment she whispered, “I can’t, David.”
“I understand,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry if I hurt you by asking.”
She sat back again. He could see her head moving slowly back and forth on the pillows. Then she stopped. Finally she said, “It probably is a bad time anyway. I mean, I barely remember from one month to the next. But it would be our luck. Can you imagine?”
“All too well.”
She laughed. She said, “I’m so tired.”
“Me too,” he said.
“Don’t sleep on the couch,” she said. He thought for a moment, then, that she’d open the covers to him as she had to Sarah. “Mack’s bed is so much more comfortable.”
He was surprised at the sorrowful pinch of rejection he felt. But he made his voice jaunty as he stood up. “Mack’s bed it is, then.”
But in Mack’s doorway he stood, unready for sleep. Across the third-floor landing, he could hear Nina move and sigh. He stepped into the room and shut the door, waiting until then to turn the light on, so it wouldn’t disturb her slumber.
This room was the mirror image of Nina’s, with its sloping walls, its window seats. But Lainey had papered it differently. Boy’s paper, tiny antique automobiles, although Mack had never had even a passing interest in cars. That hadn’t been the point, though. The point, David thought, had been that Lainey had done it herself, showing him once more how competent she was. Demonstrating to him how well she could manage everything. Trying to refute his marriage-long argument that for all their sakes, Randall should be sent away. He remembered the smell of wheat paste in the house, he remembered her leading him up the stairs to show him her latest accomplishment. He hadn’t responded the way she wanted him to, he recalled; there was a fight. She’d cried, the children had retreated to their rooms. The house was suddenly a study in closed doors.
Now he thought of how many of their positions they’d taken in response to the other’s. For him to say that Randall’s care was burdensome meant she papered Mack’s room, put new linoleum down in the bathroom, picked the scraggly clumps of grapes from the slanting arbor in the backyard and made jam. And then, hot, tired, drunk, she would slap the children, weep, accuse him of retreating into his work, never helping, not caring.
The year they found out about Randall, she’d been so full of household achievements, so lost as to seem crazy in her desire for these useless accomplishments. Always worn, frantically moving on to another project at the children’s expense. The psychiatrist had used the word autistogenic to David, and it was all too easy to believe it.
And then they’d had Nina.
He had been terrified after Nina’s birth. She was a quiet, placid baby, and her docility, her gentle, passive nature, had frightened him. He half believed she would develop as Randall had. He could feel the fear stiffen his arms as he held her. He was afraid of hurting her, of damaging her. He tried to have as little to do with her as he could; but he watched her more anxiously than he had any of the others. And before that was even resolved, before Nina had sat or said a word, Lainey was, unbelievably, pregnant again. This time he had known better than to talk about abortion, than even to bring it up with her. But his very silence made her worse. It became the goad, the driving force, the impulsion—to chair the PTA, to write letters to the editors, to knit matching shapeless sweaters for all the children, to paper the walls of their rooms.
He remembered now. When they had stood here, in this room, he had said, “Well, if wallpaper could cure this family, we’d certainly all be in great shape.” This was the edge he always played close to in his humor; he had thought she might laugh.
But she had spent too much time on this, she had hoped for too much from it, to let it become part of one of his jokes. Her face whitened, her mouth turned bitter. She had begun the familiar litany of complaint against him—for his coldness, for his remove from her, from the family. It had escalated quickly. She had shut herself into their room, crying. He had left the house. Then returned and apologized. Perhaps they were still at the stage then when they might have made love. He couldn’t remember.
It made him tired, and sorry for them both, to recall it. He sat down in Mack’s desk chair. On the wall in front of him was a poster for a movie called Reefer Madness, with a photograph of a demented-looking young man showing the effects of marijuana. Next to it was a series of sketches by Mack—cartoons really—of musicians playing, or singing. Negroes, they seemed to be. There was a portrait that David recognized as Al, done in one long slow black line, a separate squiggle above the forehead for his looping pompadour. David looked at the objects on Mack’s desk, neatly arranged and dusted by Retta in his absence. Sports awards. A mug full of pens. There were several jars of ink, a stamp pad, and in a little saucer were spilled some pennies and several keys. David thought he recognized one as the key to his own apartment that he’d given to Mack, hoping they could somehow be closer. It hadn’t worked, though Mack had always been civil—too civil—to him. But he held all his anger and resentment in, and it came out eventually in cutting asides. He remembered Mack’s saying to him after he’d been accepted at Harvard, “Well, now I’m out. Free and clear, just like you.”
David had been so shocked that he hadn’t been able to answer.
Mack had smiled then and said, “I wonder how they’ll manage. Women and idiots.”
David forgot what he’d said in response. Probably something wise, remote—“headshrinky,” as Mack called it—about Mack’s anger. But it didn’t matter in any case. Mack had intended to wound him, he saw that he’d succeeded, and he’d moved on, he was talking about whether he’d try out for a sport, about which one he was likely to make the team in.
Now David got up, restless, and pushed away from Mack’s desk. He went to the front window, which looked out over the square. From this steep angle, it looked small and unreal, stagelike. The streetlight on Harper was burned out, and all the contrasts were muted, the shadows longer and muzzier than they should be. Abruptly David saw, superimposed on all this, his own bright image reflected in the window. All those subtle shifts in the real world disappeared to black behind it. He stood, solitary, filled with a sudden burning self-hatred for the tall, trim man in the glass. He crossed quickly to the light switch, then lay down on the mattress pad and felt, nearly instantly, the deep dizzying pull of his fatigue.
He slept, he wasn’t sure for how long. He was dimly aware of one, then another, train roaring past.
And then suddenly he was awake, listening hard to a quieter noise in the house.
He got up quickly, staggering slightly in the dark. He hurried down the stairs, down the hall to Randall’s door. His head bent to touch it, he listened. There was only silence. He waited for what felt like several minutes, but the noise didn’t repeat itself. Slowly he could feel his body relaxing. Now he went to Lainey’s doorway and listened to her even breathing. Then to Sarah’s room, silent also behind her closed door.
Standing there, he imagined Lainey doing this night after night, making this round among the closed and opened doors, listening for the children’s rhythmic breathing, their dreaming, while he slept alone in his apartment, the bedroom door flung wide to the silence beyond.
But this was dishonest. It was just as likely that he hadn’t been alone, that he’d been with one of the women he’d slept with over the past several years. He stood still in the dark hallway and they emerged up at him, faces, bodies, aspects of sex. There were several whose names he’d forgotten, he realized. Six or seven, in three years. That wasn’t so many, perhaps. And as he’d told Lainey, it had pretty much stopped.
But it wasn’t their numbers anyway, or the fact that som
e of them had been young—nearly as young as Liddie in one case—that disturbed him. What had pained him, shamed him, was the adolescent hunger he had felt through it all for its melodrama, its mindless excitement.
Liddie’s doorway yawned blackly open at the end of the hall. He made his way slowly to it, touching the wall. He went in and sat on the bed. He was thinking about the woman who’d been her age, the last woman he’d been involved with. Charlotte. He hadn’t even liked her much, but he’d felt nearly out of control with an almost self-willed passion for her, for her life. She was a graduate student, a self-proclaimed radical, a “liberated woman,” which seemed to mean that she slept with a lot of people. He had smoked dope with her, he had eaten peyote. He had danced wildly and without selfconsciousness. He had fucked her in ways he’d never even wanted to fuck anyone. And while he was living through all of it, he felt utterly free, in a mean, desperate way. He felt it was the only reality—or at least the only life he could learn anything from.
And then he’d have the children over, or take them out somewhere, and realize that everything else he was going through was negated by their irrefutable claims, by the immediacy of their daily concerns: Mary’s humiliation over her braces. Mack’s near expulsion from school for insulting a teacher. Nina’s struggle with Lainey about a curfew.
Finally those claims had caused a series of arguments with Charlotte, and the last one had just about ended it. He’d had to cancel an evening with her because of one of the kids; she’d said she was tired of the way his children took up their time, took his energy. He yelled back. She called him a fucking asshole.
There was a long silence. Then he’d said, “If you could see your face when you say things like that, how hard, how ugly it looks.” He knew he was trying to hurt her, but it was true too. Her face, in its eager meanness, was ten years older.
“You like it well enough when we’re fucking,” she said. Then her face changed and she cried out frantically, “Fuck me. Fuck me. Fuck my cunt.” They were exactly the excited tones she used when he was in her; her face was suddenly stamped with that same ecstasy.