“Zee’s my best friend. But chatty. You can tell that about her. She holds the neighborhood in her hand.”
“I know she’s in charge.”
“Yes, in charge. That’s Zee. In charge of us all, even our children, and I wanted to tell you how much I like Maggie and glad I am that she and Maeve are getting to be good friends and they are, you know. I even think they lie upstairs on Maeve’s bed and study Will’s copy of The Joy of Sex.”
She laughed, an awkward, artificial laugh, on the edge of crying.
“Sex and joy,” she said. “The concept is lost on me.”
Lucy’s legs were beginning to shake and she twisted them around each other, pressed her knees together, her arms wrapped tight around her chest.
“I thought you should know from me and not from Zee because she doesn’t have girls. You know all she ever wanted was a girl—and you and I do have girls and our girls are so close. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
“It is lovely.”
Lucy got up, opened the fridge to pour herself a glass of milk.
“I have been diagnosed with breast cancer,” Lane said, “and that’s why I’ve left graduate school and why I’m at home but you mustn’t tell Maggie because Will and I are not telling our children. You understand?”
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy said, her face burning, too easily upset by personal information. “I am so very sorry.”
“Never mind. I’ll either die or not,” she said. “Don’t tell the children. That’s our philosophy. Will’s and mine.”
“Of course.”
“You don’t tell your children everything, do you?” Lane asked. “Zee insists she does but I don’t believe her for a second.”
“I suppose I don’t.”
“I didn’t think you’d be that kind of mother. How could you—too much has happened to you they couldn’t possibly understand.” She started to stand and then leaned back against the chair. “I’m reading Fear of Flying. Have you read it?”
“I don’t read very much fiction,” Lucy said.
“But you write.”
“I think in pictures,” Lucy said.
“Interesting,” Lane said. “Well, everyone seems to be reading Fear of Flying so I thought I should.”
She got up then, slowly, pressing her temples, the color drained from her face, and for a moment Lucy was afraid she was going to throw up, the way she leaned forward towards the floor, this almost-stranger, about to be sick on Lucy’s new linoleum.
“Are you all right?”
“I’ve such a headache,” Lane said. “I have them and they come over me like lava.”
Lucy followed her to the door but at the door Lane stopped. She leaned against the wall as if for support and Lucy could tell she wanted more from her, some connection or revelation, and she was just about to say something vaguely insincere like Thank you for stopping by when Lane took her by the wrist.
“If Maeve knew I had breast cancer, it would kill her,” she said with surprising force. “I can tell you disapprove.”
“But I don’t,” Lucy said, quickly. “I don’t at all. I don’t tell my children everything either.” She took a breath. “I couldn’t.”
Lane gathered her robe around her, wrapping the skirt across her legs.
“I should confess that I lied to you,” she said, taking on a child’s voice, a little lisp over the s’s. “Will actually isn’t impotent at all. I don’t know why I said that. I really don’t. But of course there’s a reason. Always a reason, I’m told in my psychology classes. Will’s concerned I’m losing it, whatever that means.” She started down the steps. “Still raining, isn’t it?” She turned and gave a little wave. “Thank you for the coffee. I imagine you made the blueberry muffins yourself.”
Lucy watched her make her way down the front steps in the warm rain, holding the railing, moving slowly as if it might hurt to walk, and when she had crossed the street without looking back, walked up her front steps, Lucy went into the house.
Exhausted, she sank into the new couch in the living room and watched the rain pelting on the roofs of the houses.
Reuben would most likely not be at the office since it was a Saturday, but she called him anyway. She wanted to tell him about Lane Sewall, who was certainly losing it, breast cancer aside.
Lane is not telling her children. Is that lying or shielding them from the truth? Or were those the same thing? She would ask him.
AUGUST’S HOUSE WAS smaller than hers and well-kept, the kitchen spotless, not even the residual smell of food. Maybe he didn’t cook for himself. Only for Lucy. She had never seen him cook from the window in her kitchen or the one in her bedroom where she occasionally watched him. Maybe he had a cleaning lady who kept a key and did not even know that he was critically injured in the hospital. No one in the neighborhood was privy to August’s personal life, and so no one would know whether or not he had a housekeeper unless they had seen her go in the front door.
She went to the study first, which was on the second floor, assuming that was the most likely place to find the manuscript, and it was tidy as if no one had worked there for months, as if it were a study out of a decorator’s magazine arranged to be photographed. Stacks of books were on his desk, a picture of August as a child with a couple who must have been his parents, the mother holding a small boy, probably Gabriel. A small Buddha in stone, legs crossed. A Buddha? A single candlestick with a terra-cotta candle, the room painted pale green, deepening the terra-cotta. Maybe August was in love with colors too. There were dead tulips in a celadon vase on the desk, faded red and drooping.
She searched the drawers, the closet in which manuscripts and books were stored, some paintings, photographs in frames, one of which must have been his wife. Anna. His sheepskins, also framed from Kenyon College in Ohio, his Ph.D. from Yale. Boxes marked Childhood: India 1933–1948; Marriage: 1960–1971. Anna Russ: 1936–1971.
She took the box marked Marriage off the shelf and opened it. Through the window in the study overlooking the backyard, she could see Mrs. Greene kneeling in her garden, in a yellow slicker clearing out the winter as Lucy imagined she might be. Any moment now, she would stand up, glance at August’s house, and perhaps with her sharp nose for change might even guess that someone was there.
The box was full of loose photographs. There were many of a tall, slender, fair-haired woman, not pretty but pleasing, eyes set wide. Conventional. Lucy assumed the photograph was Anna.
There were two rooms upstairs, August’s bedroom and the study. The bed was made, the spread pulled tight, nothing on the tops of dressers or tables, not even photographs. The room was painted mustard yellow, an oil painting over the bed which showed a farmhouse with a blue door, half obscured in high grasses, and a single sheep in the foreground.
It was as if he planned to vacate the morning of his fall and didn’t wish for anyone to find a mess.
There was another bedroom used for storage with four large steamer trunks and boxes and boxes of books marked books to sell. Paintings lined up against the wall. Downstairs in the dining room lay open books. File cards were in a case on the table, a book about seventies architecture opened and marked with notes in the margin in nearly invisible pencil, a typewriter with paper on which he was typing. In the middle of writing that morning, he must have decided to clean the gutters and gone to the side of the house facing Lucy where he kept his extension ladder and lifted it so it reached just under the eaves. Or maybe he was thinking about Lucy, about coffee and a hot muffin and what he would read to her from his manuscript after the gutters were cleared.
Nothing in the dining room either. Just the work he was doing; no sign of the manuscript.
SHE CHECKED THE time. An hour and thirty-two minutes since she’d entered the back door. Any moment now, Josie would bring Felix home so she had to hurry, out the back, checking first to see if Mrs. Greene was still working in her garden, which she was not. A quick dash across the yard into her own backyard and up the steps, thr
ough her door just as the phone stopped ringing.
“Lucy,” the answering machine had recorded, “If you get this, call me at the office ASAP.”
Thirteen
NO ONE WAS in the booths of Café Stella at four in the afternoon on the last Monday of April—only the waitress, Brigitte, sitting at the bar smoking Salem menthols, her back to Lucy and Reuben, who sat across from one another in the last and darkest booth next to the stage where that night the Blue Horns were doing a Joni Mitchell concert.
Lucy’s hands were closed in Reuben’s larger ones, his leg under the table between her legs.
They were quiet, Lucy at a loss for words.
That morning at the International Inn on Scott Circle, Room 603—international chosen because the hotel would be full of strangers, they had been together on the clock. Two hours until Felix got out of preschool, Maggie’s teacher’s conference at one-thirty, then Maggie to Maeve’s after school and Felix with a babysitter Lucy had gotten at American University.
Four to six to talk about important things at Café Stella, and then Reuben would take the seven-thirty shuttle back to New York.
He had come to Washington at the last minute to have lunch with John Dean, the White House counsel who had agreed to cooperate with the Watergate investigators without resigning his post at the White House. Betraying the president to save his own skin, Reuben had said when he called Lucy on Saturday morning to say Yes, yes, yes! He was finally coming to Washington first thing Monday morning.
Someday, perhaps even soon, John Dean would have a book to write about his role in Watergate, which was why Reuben had been sent to Washington.
There were things she needed to say to Reuben but Lucy was afraid to talk.
HE LOOKED OLDER and thinner. Naked, his hipbones had protruded like pointed trowels in the flesh of her stomach that morning. His hair was fading, not gray exactly but the way she supposed dark red hair turned gray by paling to a kind of soft pink, and he seemed somehow frail and girlish to her.
“Two months is a very long time,” she said.
“Pneumonia was terrible for us but it’s over and we’ll work on a better plan to be together.”
“It’s only . . .” She stopped.
“So tell me . . .” He leaned over and kissed her lips.
“I’m afraid to tell you the truth,” she said.
“Is it anything I don’t already know?” he asked. “That we haven’t already talked about.”
“We have talked about everything,” she said. “Again and again the same things but never with answers to the questions.”
In the dim light of Stella’s Café, his eyes were dark green, not hazel, the pupils dilated, darting in spite of his effort to hold his attention on her.
Brigitte had gotten up from the bar and ambled over to their booth.
“Something to drink?”
“We’re still fine,” Reuben said with some irritation.
“Order something or I have to ask you to leave.” She shrugged. “Policy.”
“No one’s here so we’re not exactly keeping people from ordering,” Reuben said.
“We’re not a bus stop.”
“Then two hot chocolates with whipped cream.”
“No hot chocolate on the chalkboard menu, right? Only coffee, tea, soft drinks, and alcohol,” she said, and went through the swinging doors to the kitchen, coming back with beers.
“I’ll leave you alone now.”
Reuben released Lucy’s hands and lit a cigarette.
“So tell me the questions to which we haven’t found answers.”
Sometimes she hated the way he spoke to her, lifting his brows, a pained expression in his eyes suggesting she took all the patience he could muster.
“We haven’t found the answers to how we will deal with our children now that they’re older and we’re living three hundred miles apart.”
“Week by week, month by month, the way we have always dealt with these children unless there is a crisis.”
“There is a crisis,” Lucy said.
“Okay,” he said quietly, and she could feel him cooling to the conversation, even as his hand lay heavily on her arm. “What crisis?”
Nothing would come of this. She knew that. Reuben would say he was doing the best he could to “fix” the situation and Lucy would retreat to her promises of self-reliance and independence and personal integrity made before she understood what it meant to raise two children alone. And that would be followed by the small argument about Felix—Maggie, yes, Reuben would say. I thought when Maggie was born that we would be together for good, and then Nell came and it was impossible. I couldn’t leave. Not then.
But Felix had been Lucy’s choice. Somehow that decision had become the end of the story, Reuben’s trump card, his winning hand.
“I have told you about Zee, who lives across the street,” Lucy began.
“A lot.”
“Well Maggie is sort of in love with her and maybe that’s natural because she’s eleven and Zee is seductive.”
“Do you mean sexually?”
“No, but she’s very taken with Maggie. She swoops her up and makes off with her.”
Lucy slipped her legs under her, her arms tight across her chest.
“Maggie is turning into a liar,” she said.
Reuben rubbed his hands together, his elbows on the table, his body forward so he could speak quietly.
“Lucy.” He left her name in the air.
“I want to be exact, Reuben. I don’t want anything to go wrong in this talk.”
“You have always been leery of women,” he said. “This Zee is no surprise.”
The room was damp and chilly but Lucy was perspiring, beads of sweat gathered on her forehead. She pressed her hand against a pulse beating in her temple.
It was an old conversation she’d had with Reuben many times.
“I’m leery of people, Reuben. Not women.”
“I don’t know this woman who is after Maggie but I think you have to be careful when it comes to—”
“I am careful,” Lucy said, getting up, heading across the café to the restroom to wash the flush from her face, the perspiration from her forehead.
In the mirror over the sink she looked at herself. Her skin was blotched, red, and puffy under her eyes. She sat down on the toilet and held her face in her hands. Maybe she would stay there until the bar filled and Reuben left for his flight to New York.
She wondered did she love him or was this stew of emotions that felt like love really fear that he would leave?
There are no happy endings, he had told her once. The end is the end.
Was this the end? she wondered. Had he had enough of the arguments between them, Lucy’s longing and what he called his responsibilities. Was this life they’d woven together unraveling and she had failed to notice, the way she often failed to notice the reality of things, and had time run out, leaving her no chance to rewind back to the place where this day began.
“Lucy.” Reuben banged on the door to the ladies’ room. “Are you okay?”
She checked the splotches on her face, ran her fingers through her hair, unlocked the door, and stepped into the smell of beer and cigarettes.
“Let’s get out of here.” He took her hand, his finger rubbing softly on her palm.
He drew her into a courtyard along the street, leaned up against a building pulling her towards him, his hand on her back, his tongue wandering softly in her mouth.
“Remember that piece of land I told you about in Nova Scotia?”
“I thought it was Maine.”
“Then Maine,” he said, taking her hand walking south. “I wanted to build something for us on the tip of that point.”
They came to the bottom of Georgetown on M Street at Wisconsin Avenue.
It was near six by the clock on the National Bank building and Reuben checked his watch.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Can you keep a secret about today?”
“About business?” she said. “No, I don’t want to talk about business.” She dropped his hand. “Actually I don’t want to talk.”
She wanted to walk along Wisconsin Avenue pretending nothing at all, swinging arms and kissing.
The day was quickly fading to a wet dusk, the streetlights flickered on, and ahead on Wisconsin Avenue, a taxi was turning towards the curb to pick up Reuben.
“Before you leave . . .” She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to say.
“I love you, Lucy Painter,” he said, tilting her face towards him. “You are the love of my life.”
He scrambled into the taxi, leaned forward to direct the driver, and as the cab pulled away from the curb, he blew her a kiss.
She could see him in the shadow of the cab’s backseat and he was waving.
WHEN GABRIEL RUSS rang the doorbell, Maggie was sitting in the kitchen watching the clock. Her mother was somewhere, not at home yet and late. The babysitter had taken Felix to the library and Maggie had burned the chocolate chip cookies and burned her own tongue tasting them.
Gabriel walked straight into the front hall carrying a paper bag.
“Hello, Maggie, but I call you Margaret,” he said. “I have a present for your mother from my brother.”
He handed the bag from Leed’s Market to Maggie.
“Last week on Thursday when I saw him, my brother, Augustus, at the hospital eating oatmeal for breakfast and a banana, he told me to get this present from the top of his desk in the study and to bring it to him at the hospital. And today, he gave it back to me and asked me to bring it over to Lucy Painter because that was exactly what he was planning to do on the morning that he and the ladder fell into the street. So here it is,” Gabriel said. “Happy Birthday.”
“Do you know what it is?” Maggie asked.
“It’s a present and presents are surprises so how would I know what it is since it’s a surprise.”
“Well, thank you,” Maggie said, taking the Leed’s Market bag.
“Thank you, Margaret. I call you Margaret because Maggie is a nickname and I have a disagreement with nicknames and that is why I am called Gabriel which is my real name instead of Gaby which would be my nickname if I liked nicknames. That’s all for now,” he said, and waved heading down the steps.
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