You Are the Love of My Life

by Susan Richards Shreve

Which was true. She was not able to go to Vermont with him. Not strong enough, not sufficiently detached.

  “Are you going to show me up?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, opening the back door. “I’m going because I have to go.”

  “But you went already in January. I thought that was your trip this year.”

  “Apparently not,” he said, finishing his coffee and heading out the back door.

  “Call,” she said.

  “I’ll call when I get there.”

  From the kitchen window, Zee watched him put the car in gear and back out of the driveway and down Witchita to the entrance to Witchita Hills, then left to the Chevy Chase Circle and out Connecticut Avenue to 495 Baltimore and north to Vermont. Maybe ten hours.

  Six or seven hours on Route 95 past Wilmington and New York to Hartford and then straight up Route 81, the length of Vermont to Cavendish. Six o’clock at night, he’d be in Cavendish checking into the Goosedown Lodge, where they had stayed the other times they had driven to Vermont together.

  “Forty-five minutes,” she said to the twins, slouched side by side in front of the television, Luke’s leg slung over Daniel’s. “And at nine-thirty baseball practice at the field and then we’ll go bowling with Josie and Rufus and then you have Eric’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.”

  Upstairs, she changed the sheets. She wanted to sleep alone on clean sheets.

  Maybe she’d cut her hair, short like Twiggy, a boy’s cut close to her head.

  She lay down on her back on the unmade bed and crossed her legs at the ankles, lying very still looking at the ceiling, her eyes half closed.

  Gabriel was on his way downstairs from the third floor.

  “Goodbye,” he called in the singsong voice he favored. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. I’m off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”

  She shut her bedroom door.

  He was on the second set of stairs going down to the first floor.

  Above the splash and rumble of the washing machine, she could barely hear Gabriel talking to the twins.

  Should she remind him to be careful about Onion getting out the front door? Or should she simply lie there and wait to see what happened? So what if Onion did escape. He’d climb a tree or wander across the avenue on his fuzzy white paws. He could be hit by a car if he happened to walk out on Witchita Avenue at the wrong moment. Stupid cat. And then what? Would such a possibility be worth getting up and dressed to prevent from happening? And would it matter deeply to her if Onion died? Or did she already have responsibility for too many lives and one white-pawed alley cat, almost fifteen years old, who peed on the laundry with increasing frequency, did not make sufficient difference in the scope of things.

  A thought floated through her mind. Onion had witnessed her whole life since she’d been a junior in college in Ann Arbor when Zee found her outside the coffee shop, things that no one else knew except Adam and the cat, her sweet old cat had no point of view about Zee, unless it was affection or gratitude.

  Eight-thirty by the clock on Adam’s side of the bed.

  She had never in memory, even as a child in rural Michigan where time moved unchanging through the day like cloud cover, been so still that her body sank into the mattress. She almost slept. The cool air through the open window washed across her face and arms. Something else was seeping into consciousness. In her groin the rumbling of sickness or was it desire.

  SATURDAY MORNING, A whole long day, hours and hours of it in front of her. Maggie needed a plan.

  She had been up early, disappointed at the dreary rain pelting her windows. Checking her closet, she dressed in pants even though she was in the process of transforming her appearance after Zee’s and Zee never wore pants. She wore skirts and little tight tops but Maggie didn’t have so many skirts, not the right ones at least. She took a black top with long sleeves and a deep V from the shelf in her mother’s closet, a little blush on her cheeks from her mother’s top bureau drawer.

  This morning her plan had been to ride her bike down Witchita to the other side of Connecticut Avenue where Vivienne lived on Ohio Lane. Maeve Sewall was going to come along with her father’s copy of The Joy of Sex, which they planned to study in detail sequestered under a large weeping willow tree in Vivienne’s backyard. And if it was warm enough, they’d swim in Vivienne’s pool.

  But today it was going to rain and rain, a long, slow steady rain, Maggie thought, watching Adam Mallory with a duffel bag get into his car and back out of the driveway.

  Crazy Gabriel had come out of the Mallorys’ house with an umbrella and was standing on the front porch looking one way and then the other as if he imagined the Mallorys’ yard was not a yard at all but a busy street. He opened the umbrella, walked down the steps, a little dance move like a skittish squirrel, walking almost on his toes, and turned left towards Connecticut Avenue.

  Lane Sewall glided across her front porch in a splashy red robe. She picked up the newspaper, Maeve in pajamas behind her.

  Maggie was watching the neighborhood from her bedroom window—Victoria hurrying up the street with a yoga mat, her frizzy hair secured in a ballet dancer’s bun, the Sewalls’ beagle barking madly at a squirrel in the maple in the front yard. She wondered what Zee was doing. Adam off on a trip, only the twins downstairs watching cartoons.

  And then she saw Onion meandering across the street, his tail, clipped at the end so it curled, straight up. Crossing to the south side of Witchita, he disappeared into the yard of the house next door to August belonging to Mrs. Greene.

  Maggie hopped up, slipped on her yellow rain slicker, and ran out the front door barefoot.

  “Be back in a second,” she called to her mother, and headed past August’s house to Mrs. Greene’s where Onion was sitting on the top step of the porch biting at something between the pads of his paw.

  “Onion!” she said, gathering the old compliant cat in her arms and heading to the Mallorys’.

  “Upstairs!” Daniel said when Maggie asked where their mother was.

  “Onion got out,” she said, but neither of the boys sitting on the couch with mangy Blue lying across their laps showed an interest in Onion so Maggie walked up the steps with the cat under her arm, knocked on Zee’s bedroom door, and walked in.

  Zee was lying on an unmade bed, her head on a pillow, in a short nightgown, her arms above her, her hair a pillowcase of blond, and just the stillness of her was quite beautiful and stirring.

  “Onion crossed the street,” Maggie said. “I found him on Mrs. Greene’s porch.”

  “Gabriel probably let him out when he left,” Zee said. “Poor Onion.”

  “Crazy Gabriel just headed towards Connecticut Avenue with his umbrella swinging back and forth over his head in the rain so he’s sopping wet.”

  They both laughed and Maggie put her knee on the bed as if she might sit down or might not, might stay or leave. She had never seen Zee Mallory in a nightgown, in bed, and she seemed fragile and small.

  “Adam’s gone to Vermont for the weekend, in all this rain,” Zee said. “So it’s just me and the boys.”

  “I’ve made plans to go to Vivienne’s house with Maeve and maybe swim and now we can’t,” Maggie said, balancing against the edge of the mattress.

  “Sometimes I love the rain. It reminds me of Michigan where I grew up, day after day, gray, gray, gray,” Zee said, patting the side of the bed for Maggie to sit down beside her. “You could put Onion out in the hall and close my door so he doesn’t pee on my rug and lie down with me on this sleepy morning if you don’t mind a bed with no sheets.”

  Maggie hesitated, mentally anticipating her movements as if by lying next to Zee or not, or choosing to sit on the end of the bed with her knees drawn up under her chin or even to leave, say breakfast is ready at home and I haven’t eaten, would be a commitment.

  The moment felt strangely reckless.

  “I’ve been meaning to give you some of my necklaces.” Zee was sitting now, stretching
, her back against the headboard. “I have so many necklaces from my mother’s shop in Michigan and you have a lovely neck.”

  A lovely neck.

  Maggie had never thought about her neck before. No one had even remarked on her looks that she could remember. Only Uncle Reuben, who told her she had an Italian kind of beauty except for the curly red hair which was pure Irish. But never anything about her neck.

  She sat down on the end of the bed, a high bed so her feet dangled and didn’t touch the floor.

  “Do you like silver or gold?”

  “Maybe silver,” Maggie said.

  “They’re not real silver, I should tell you, and certainly not real gold,” Zee said. “But they jangle and that’s the point.”

  “I love jangle,” Maggie said, climbing onto the bed next to Zee, her back pressed against the soft quilted headboard, their bodies touching. Zee’s hands, folded lightly on her stomach, were trembling.

  “I can’t stay long,” Maggie said, noticing Zee’s shaky hands, nervous about it.

  WHAT LUCY HAD in mind for Saturday morning, after Maggie went to Vivienne’s house and Felix to play at the Lerners’, was to search August’s house for the manuscript. She had watched him from her bedroom window working on the dining room table or in his study on the second floor. When he came over in the mornings, he brought the book in a manila file marked book in red magic marker, held together with a rubber band. It should be easy to find.

  Her plan was to go into the house through the back door which he kept unlocked so the people on Witchita Avenue wouldn’t see her, only Mrs. Greene who lived next door to August. She was a woman likely to be clearing out her garden for spring planting even on a rainy day. The kind of woman who made everything from scratch, bread and soups and gardens from seeds. She even changed the oil in her old Chevrolet and once, according to Zee, she had changed a tire lying on her back half under the car.

  She keeps to herself, Zee had said, but she’s vigilant and probably knows a lot more about us than we think.

  Lucy didn’t ask how long Mrs. Greene had lived in the neighborhood, but that was on her mind. It was possible that she could have been living in the same house when Samuel Baldwin died. Not that anyone in the neighborhood had known Lucy’s father then because the house was rental property but certainly the newspaper stories would have made note of the place.

  Copies of the newspaper stories were likely in August’s research files. Lucy had never read them. Somehow in the flurry and shock of the week he died, her mother had managed to shield her from the news and then she and her mother had left for Santa Fe and more or less permanently erased her childhood so Lucy had only the story her mother had constructed when she took on the name Painter and her own scattered memories, pure in detail and precise but disconnected from a narrative.

  For days, she had not been able to sleep at night, at all, she’d told Reuben, slipping out of bed not to wake Felix, curled next to her. She’d go up to her studio and lie on the floor under the skylight, the moon illuminating her Vermillion drawings drying on the clothesline between the rafters, flapping eerily in the light breeze through the cracked open window.

  A soft resolve and she’d put a pillow between her legs, imagining Reuben beside her, his hand lightly on her belly, his warm breath on her neck.

  Later, she lay on the floor, her knees up, a light sleepiness coming over her. She was alone with her work and Reuben had vanished. Comforting to be alone, she thought, surrounded by her work as if without it, she was invisible even to herself.

  Vermillion, poor Vermillion in the act of becoming, so far from finished, and Fervid P. Drainpipe and Belly and all the others. Her inventions, not separate from her like a child is separate, like Maggie or Felix, but herself in fact. Proof of her existence.

  It was possible that August had been brain-damaged in the fall and would forget things, even the book he’d been in the process of writing.

  Possible also that he’d tell the nurses or one of the doctors about Samuel Baldwin. Or Zee would make her way into his room in the hospital when he regained consciousness and ask him question after question and August would say what came into his mind about the man whose suicide in Lucy Painter’s house had been national news. He might even tell Zee Mallory the truth of why Samuel Baldwin had chosen such a way to die.

  Ne dis jamais de notre honte, Lucy’s mother had warned her, as if the telling of what had happened to her father was always on the tip of Lucy’s tongue. As if the truth were some catastrophe waiting in the wings and only Reuben, to whom she had told the real story, had loved her enough to understand.

  Lucy checked the time. 8:45. Felix would go to the Lerners’ at nine and soon Maggie would be back from delivering Onion to the Mallorys and ready to go with Maeve to Vivienne’s house. She was washing the breakfast dishes, thinking that if she made enough money when she sold Vermillion, she’d get a dishwasher and because the water in the spigot was running she didn’t hear Lane Sewall come onto the porch, open the front door without knocking, and wander into the kitchen.

  “Maeve’s mama is here,” Felix announced from under the table where he was picking the old chewing gum off the underside, probably stuck there by students long ago at RISD.

  “Yuck.” Lucy turned around, wiping her wet hands on the painting smock she was wearing. “You’ll get some sort of awful sickness, Felix. Wash your hands.”

  “That is disgusting, Felix,” Lane said, still in her red robe splashed with white chrysanthemums, tied at the waist, barefoot, her hair falling loose of its high bun. “I can practically see the germs walking over the chewing gum in their military uniforms.”

  “You can?”

  “Hundreds of them with hairy heads and big lips,” she said as Felix scrambled out from under the table and hurried over to the sink, pulling up a chair to wash his hands.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” Lane said, “but it’s so gray out this morning, I couldn’t bear to stay in the house.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table, folding her robe at the split, her long legs crossed at the knee, settling in as if a plan to meet at Lucy’s this morning had been prearranged.

  “Coffee?” Lucy asked, leaning against the sink hoping her irritation wasn’t evident.

  “Coffee would be good. You’ll tell me if I’m interrupting.”

  “You’re not,” Lucy said, and then because her voice in her own ear sounded unconvincing, she added, “I’m free all day.”

  “Good. I hate Saturdays when Will is at the lab.”

  The lab where Will Sewall was a research psychiatrist with a particular interest in schizophrenia was at the National Institute of Mental Health, and since the Watergate scandal, he had been serving as a special consultant on the president’s team of physicians worried about Nixon, who had a history of erratic behavior, and his mental stability.

  “Most Saturdays he’s at the lab,” she said, retying the sash of her robe tight around her waist, which was the wide waist of a thin, leggy woman without hips. She shrugged and then from nowhere, she seemed to pluck words out of the thickness of the day, the heavy weight of thunder clouds bearing down on their morning.

  “He’s impotent.”

  Lucy caught her breath. She didn’t even know Lane Sewall but nothing in her bearing suggested confession.

  “I fell in love with him because he plays the cello.”

  “I didn’t know he played the cello,” Lucy said, getting up for cream and sugar, pouring herself a cup of coffee although she had already had too much but her plans for this morning had changed course with Lane’s arrival.

  “I love the cello,” she said. “It’s my favorite instrument, although I know so little about music and play nothing myself, but I listen, I listen to everything, especially when I’m working.”

  Which was not true. She listened to children’s stories on tape for Felix.

  “Sometime come over and he’ll play and you’ll think he’s falling in love with you but he isn’t.”
She shrugged. “That’s Will.”

  Rufus came to pick up Felix to play at his house and then Maggie crashed through the hall, calling to Lucy that she was late, late, late because she’d been at Zee’s and saved Onion from being smashed by a car and now she had to hurry to meet Maeve in front of her house to go to Vivienne’s.

  “Okay?”

  Lane requested more coffee. No cream this time.

  “Is Maggie’s father married?”

  She had a way of speaking, slow and a little slurred, as if she had been drinking, which she had not.

  “Your children’s father,” Lane said, something in her voice that Lucy couldn’t identify thinned to a silk thread of sound. “Never mind,” she went on, waving her hands as if to swat away what she had just said, rearranging her legs so the one crossed over the knee swung back and forth, hitting the table leg with a thump. “It’s not my business anyway but I’m impressed at your confidence. Just you and your children as if you’d decided in favor of immaculate conception and miraculously it has worked.”

  “Well . . .” Lucy got up to get blueberries from the fridge.

  “That was meant to be a compliment, you know.”

  The gray light of the morning articulated the shape of Lane’s face, her soft features, pretty but not beautiful, her cheeks flushed and damp.

  “I have muffins,” Lucy said, setting muffins and butter and jam on the table.

  “Muffins,” Lane said. “Lovely.”

  She leaned towards Lucy, her elbows on the table, her chin supported by her fists. “I actually came over for a reason beyond company on this depressing day,” she began. “I suppose I wanted to tell you myself before it became a matter of neighborhood conversation, as things do in Witchita Hills, even though I love it here better than anyplace I’ve ever lived and Zee is my closest friend. Are you getting to know her?”

  She took a muffin, breaking it into small pieces, brushing the pieces across the butter, dipping them in jam, and eating so slowly Lucy thought she would jump out of her skin.

  “I’m getting to know her a little,” Lucy said nervously.