Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  The whole time she was talking to Iris, Iris stayed completely still. Charlotte had thought Iris would yell at her for being so reckless, but instead she was rigid, tears streaking her face.

  “That horrible monster,” Iris whispered. Her fingers were threaded together so tightly that Charlotte could see the whites of her knuckles.

  “It’s over now,” Charlotte said, though of course she knew it wasn’t.

  Iris got up and brought out cheese and bread, but Charlotte shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You have to eat,” Iris said, but she didn’t touch the food either.

  Charlotte stayed with Iris all that evening. They played a game of cards. They finally ate the cheese and bread, and then, when Iris yawned, Charlotte got up to leave.

  “You’ll be starting school soon,” Iris said. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  Charlotte had been thinking about it, too. There was so much she had to do. She needed to talk to Dr. Bronstein and get his recommendation. She’d have to find her zoology professor and see how much it would count for her grade. And even though she had saved money from her job, it wasn’t enough to pay for an apartment for a whole year. She’d have to move back into the dorm unless she could keep working, even part-time. Maybe Dr. Bronstein would let her. But could she keep her same apartment, or would she have to find a new one?

  “Are you giving up your sublet?” Iris asked, as if she had read Charlotte’s mind. “Do you want to go back to the dorms? Could you stay there during vacations and breaks?”

  “No one wants to be in the dorms except the seniors, who get singles. Maybe I can keep subletting.”

  Iris’s mouth curved. “I’d like to see you in your own apartment.”

  “I’m going to look.”

  “And I’d like to pay for it for you.”

  “You can’t do that,” Charlotte said. “And I have a little money from my job.”

  Iris shook her head. “Not enough for a nice place. A bigger place.”

  “A studio is fine.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “I won’t let you. You need your money.”

  “What I need is to help you. And you need to let me.”

  Charlotte blinked hard.

  Iris stood up. “I want you to invite Joe and me to dinner in your new place. I want you to fix it up and make it pretty and feel at home and know that it’s yours. You can live there all through school, and in the summer, and even when you graduate, if you choose.”

  Charlotte covered her mouth with her hands. She thought of not having to pull out the couch to sleep on every night, of actually having an extra room, with a door she could close. She would have a real kitchen, not just a tiny stove and fridge stuck in the corner. And it would be hers. Really hers. “Are you sure?” she asked. “It won’t be a hardship for you?”

  “It’ll be a hardship if you don’t let me help you.”

  “Then September fifteenth,” Charlotte said.

  Iris raised her brow. “What’s that?”

  “The day you and Joe will come to dinner at my new place.”

  Chapter 28

  By the time he got to Cleveland, Patrick was tired and hungry. Every woman he passed reminded him of Charlotte. The way a hand brushed hair out of her eye, the way she might smile, the corners of her lips turning up. He stopped at a diner to get a grilled cheese sandwich and had a beer, downing it in one gulp, and then ordered another. He drank until he was good and drunk. He was exhausted but he didn’t want to stop, because then he might think better of seeing Vera’s parents. Well, if all the doors in his life were closing, he might as well be the person to close this next one himself.

  The last time he had been to the house was right before he moved out of the apartment in Ann Arbor. He hadn’t had the courage to call them and say he was dropping out of school, so like the coward he was, he had written a note. Maybe it wasn’t the best note, but he didn’t know what else to say. All their lights were on. The grass was patchy and overgrown. The flowers Ellen had fussed over were wilting or dead. He had stopped the car. He had heard music coming from inside. He had idled the motor and was about to get out when he saw the curtain moving, a shadow behind it. Someone was there. He had driven away, the note on the seat beside him.

  Now he drove down the street and stopped at the familiar blue house. How many times had he come here with Vera, for a family dinner, everyone laughing and talking around the table? How many times had they all sat out in Vera’s childhood backyard?

  He swallowed. He got out of the car and walked up the walk. He couldn’t imagine her parents would want to talk to him. Well, he would say his piece and then leave. Sometimes just being heard was all you could do, the only kind of forgiveness you might get.

  He rang the bell, and then the door opened and there was Ellen, her hair golden and cut to her chin, a pale blue cashmere sweater wrapped around her. “Patrick,” she said. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Look at you.” He couldn’t tell whether she was glad to see him. “Come inside.”

  He didn’t know what he had expected, that the house would be rundown, or a mausoleum, but instead it smelled like cinnamon. Everything here was new to him, a floral couch and matching chairs, a deep rust-colored carpet over polished wood floors. She led him into the living room, and there was Tom, leaner now, his hair gray but longer and styled. “Patrick,” he said, and he held out his hand.

  “Come have a seat,” Ellen said, and then he noticed the photos on the mantel. Vera and her parents at the beach, their hair dark with water. Vera at six in a party dress, her hair in pigtails. And then he saw a photo of his wedding, Vera on his arm, and he had to stop himself from going over and touching it.

  “That was always one of my favorites,” Ellen said quietly.

  He stared at it. Vera had insisted on wearing a blue lace dress instead of white, and when his mother had asked her, baffled, “But how will we know the bride if you aren’t wearing white?” she had laughed. “If you don’t know, you don’t belong at my wedding.” He remembered that day. How beautiful she had been. How ridiculously happy they were.

  “It’s been a long time,” Tom said.

  Patrick swallowed. “I came to apologize.”

  “For what?” Tom said.

  “No, no, let me talk. I need to tell the truth. It was my fault.”

  “Patrick—”

  “She wasn’t feeling well. She asked me if I thought she should go to a doctor, and I said no.”

  Ellen slowly sat down on the couch and took Tom’s hand so he would sit with her. She threaded her fingers through his.

  “We had these bills. College and the rent, and they were all just building up and building up. We were trying to have a child . . .”

  Ellen shut her eyes and then opened them. “I didn’t know that,” she said slowly. “About the child. About the bills. We could have helped you with money. With anything. All you had to do was ask.”

  “I waited too long. For everything—”

  “Good God, Patrick,” Ellen said quietly. “She had a bad heart. It’s no one’s fault.”

  Patrick swallowed. “Yes, it is, and you were right to blame me.”

  Ellen and Tom exchanged glances. “You know,” she said slowly, “we blamed everyone. You. The mailman. The checkout girl at the market. Do you know how many friends we lost because of the way we were? I argued with my best friend because she hadn’t been able to come to the funeral. I shouted at our dentist because I knew there was a connection between teeth and the heart and I thought maybe he should have known something when he examined Vera. I picked fights. After a while, people didn’t call as much. They didn’t come by. And I blamed them for that, too. Tom and I—” She looked at Tom. “We nearly split up. One night, I got in the car and drove for two hours and stayed in a hotel. But I woke up in the middle of the night, missing my husband so much I came home, and when I did, he wasn’t here, and I thought everything was ruined.”

  “I was d
riving around looking for her,” Tom said.

  “It was just too hard to be around anyone,” Ellen said. “All that grief. All that rage. And the person it was hardest to be around was the one she had loved most. And that was you.”

  Patrick sat down, putting his head in his hands.

  “Tell us what you’re doing, how you’ve been,” Tom said quietly, and Patrick began to talk, telling them about leaving school, about the commune, the farm stand. Tom and Ellen didn’t move. At one point, when he mentioned how small his town was, Ellen put one hand on Tom’s arm.

  “You left school?” Ellen said.

  “I couldn’t handle it.”

  “But you’ll go back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ellen straightened, and for a moment he saw the old Ellen, the way she used to fuss over him and nag him.

  “Do you know how proud Vera was of you?” Tom said. “She’d come over here and talk about you, and her eyes would just shine. She’d be so upset to see you like this. To know you had given up everything you two had worked for to live on some crummy patch of land and work a shop—”

  “Hey,” Patrick said. “Hey, hey—”

  “She’d think she had failed.”

  “I’m the one who failed! I failed!”

  Ellen was quiet for a moment. “Tom and I went to therapy. We had help. There were days I wanted to die, and days I wanted to kill you, but every time I felt that way, I thought about what Vera would think if I did either of those things.” She looked at him with deep sadness. “You can’t kill your life, Patrick. Our daughter was a tragedy, but it pains me to see that you are, too, because you’re alive and acting like a dead man.”

  Patrick laughed, a short, snuffling sound.

  She reached over and took his hands, and he was shocked at how warm her fingers were, how when she let his hands go, he wanted her touch back again.

  “We mourn her every day,” she said. “But I’ve found that when I plant my flowers—you saw them, right?—or when I stand up in front of a class, I feel her, and maybe it’s just me being crazy, but I feel that she’s seeing what I’m doing.”

  They wanted to know whether he was staying in town, what hotel he was at, whether he would have dinner with them, but he felt overwhelmed. He needed to be by himself. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  Ellen handed him a piece of paper and a pen. “Not without giving us your address, you don’t,” she said. He scribbled it down and she looked at it. “This time we’re not going to let you vanish from our lives. That was our fault, too.”

  She hugged him, the way she used to, and then, to his surprise, Tom, who had always given him a hearty handshake, hugged him, too. “Let us know where you land,” Tom said.

  Patrick walked out of the house into the bright, clear day, and they came out after him and stood on the porch. “It was good to see you,” Tom said.

  He sat in the car, unable to move. He looked back, and Tom and Ellen had their arms around each other. They waved at him.

  HE DIDN’T WANT to go back to his hotel yet, so he drove around town, the same town where he and Vera had fallen in love. Everything was different now. There was a gourmet brownie store where KrickKrack Records used to be. Paolino’s, his favorite pizza place, was gone.

  Time was passing. People changed. And what was he doing? Why wasn’t he changing, too? He turned the wheel. He caught sight of his face in the rearview mirror, the wrinkles starting to web his eyes. He kept driving, past them, past the bar. The thirst was still there, but he wasn’t going to listen to it. He turned on the radio. He opened up all the windows in the car and let the air breeze in.

  BY THE TIME he got home, everything looked tired and familiar. The farm stand. His house. The isolation. He went inside and looked around and he knew he couldn’t do this anymore. He hadn’t realized how sadness was clinging to everything. Lucy had seen it, but he hadn’t been able to recognize it. Charlotte had seen it, too, and he had chased her away.

  He didn’t want to watch the years keep sweeping by. He didn’t want to find that he was forty and alone and still selling vegetables and fruits. He got up and went through the house, emptying out the bottles of wine he had. He knew that it wasn’t that easy, that he could wake up tomorrow and go to the nearest liquor store and replenish his stock, but right now it felt as if something new was starting, and maybe that was enough.

  He began to clean the house, putting away the photo albums of Vera, clearing out books he didn’t want, and the more he cleaned, the less he wanted to live there anymore. The more wrong it felt. He was going through a shelf when a picture of Lucy drifted out. He lifted it up. He had never taken a picture of her. Charlotte must have left it by accident. Or maybe Lucy did. She was sitting in the grass, smiling up at the camera, and the light was haloed around her hair. She was posed in a way that was meant to be seductive, her hip lifted, her chest pushed out. But to him she looked fourteen and innocent, as if she would jump up and go get a burger and fries with her friends and then dream about the huge, bountiful life that was unfolding in front of her.

  He studied the photo. He didn’t have a photo of Charlotte, but he didn’t need one. He would always see her eyes, her mouth, her hair, like a pour of ink. He’d always wonder whether she had been drawn to him just because Lucy had been there, because she was desperate for a connection to her sister.

  He rolled the photo of Lucy through his fingers, but it was Charlotte’s face he still saw, even after he put the picture back on the shelf. He found an old pad of Charlotte’s on the table, a list of all the things she had done that day, crossed out. Ice cream place. William’s school. He had laughed at Charlotte for her lists, but now he opened the pad to a brand-new page and picked up a pen and began to write out his own.

  Chapter 29

  By the last week of August, just when Charlotte despaired of finding anything, she stumbled on a great apartment, a small one-bedroom on South Street, with high ceilings and wood floors, and she could move in immediately. To her surprise, not only did she have Iris’s financial help, but she also had help from Dr. Bronstein, who wanted her to keep working for him weekends and had even given her a raise. She’d painted the bedroom a creamy blue and the kitchen a bright yellow, and she’d even bought some furniture. Sometimes she just stood in the middle of the room and thought, this is mine.

  Charlotte began eating better, because it seemed an affront to the apartment not to cook herself nice meals. She put her sister’s journal on a shelf so that every time she walked into the room she’d see it, but she would never read it again. She didn’t need to. She heard Lucy’s phone call to her in her head, every day, and the only way to stop it was to go out for a run and exhaust herself. Nights, she threw herself into her studies.

  IN SEPTEMBER SHE went back to school, taking the exams she had been supposed to take in the spring. Her zoology professor gave her credit for her work at the vet’s, and to her surprise, she passed all her exams.

  For a while she half expected to get a postcard from Patrick, a phone call. She was easy enough to find. But then it began to feel more and more as if the two of them had happened in another life, as if love could really be finite. What would he now say to her, really? What was left? Everything felt changed. She still saw leaflets protesting the war all over campus, but she also saw far fewer black armbands, and the activity at the strike center had petered out. Things were slowing down, and kids seemed more interested in school now. All that effort, and the war was still raging. The Manson Family was still on trial, though the Manson girls had been denied access, and the news kept flashing pictures of them holding vigil outside. They carved x’s into their foreheads, they shaved their heads bald. The trial, they told reporters, was “the second crucifixion of Christ.”

  Students gossiped about their summers; they talked about their courses and who they were sleeping with and who had the best dope. If anyone knew about Lucy, they didn’t mention anything to Charlotte. They might have read the papers
, formed their own ideas about the case and about her. It might make them think differently about Charlotte, but she couldn’t help that. Instead, when they saw her, they said, “Like your hair,” which Charlotte now wore in a single braid down her back.

  ON SEPTEMBER 15, Charlotte went to pick up Iris and Joe for dinner at her place. She was a little nervous, but she had scoured her apartment, waxing the kitchen floor, mopping the wood, polishing every surface. She wasn’t sure what to make, so she decided on spaghetti with a sauce she had made herself the night before, from real tomatoes, with basil and mushrooms. She could cook it quickly when they arrived, and she had already made the salad.

  As soon as Iris stepped into the apartment, she opened her arms wide, beaming. “Will you look at this wonderful place!” she said. Iris and Joe examined everything—the books on Charlotte’s shelves, the braided rug she had bought to give the place warmth, and the wood table set with red dishes.

  All through dinner, Joe kept one arm around Iris’s shoulder. Charlotte liked them together, their easy banter, the way they looked at each other. And Iris looked different, in a slim pair of dark tan pants and a cashmere cardigan. “Where are you getting all these great clothes?” Charlotte asked, and Iris blushed. “Joe and I walk down to the mall and shop,” she said. “He has an excellent eye.”

  When dinner was over, Charlotte cleared the dishes and led everyone to her couch. She noticed that Iris was walking more slowly, but before she could get to her, Joe gently took Iris’s arm and guided her. “Did we have our meal yet?” Iris asked, and then Charlotte saw the fear float across Iris’s face. “It’s okay,” Joe said. “We had a delicious meal.”

  He helped Iris sit down and then kissed her cheek. “My girl,” he said.

  Charlotte didn’t know what to make of it all. The way he took care of her. The way she looked at him. Charlotte had heard of late-in-life romances, people hurling themselves into love because it was their last chance, or because they wanted companionship, or maybe because they were just discovering that everything that had kept them from real love no longer mattered anymore, but this felt different. She sat opposite the two of them in a floral side chair she’d found at a vintage store, and a kind of heat seemed to radiate from them. They were both in their eighties and maybe they didn’t have so much time. Iris was forgetful, and it might get so much worse, but it might also stay the same. Joe’s memory could fray, too. And so what? None of that had happened yet. Wasn’t it better to have love for a little while than not at all?