by Lydia Millet
She heard herself sigh softly. Lately she’d been sighing a lot. It was a medical syndrome, among other things. She’d looked it up.
“It has to go over the desk, like the other. For now, maybe—I don’t want to press my luck, but do you think possibly—that gin and tonic you mentioned . . . ?”
“Oh wow, of course,” said Lora. “Pregnancy brain. Sorry. I’ll be right back.”
Once she was installed, she’d have her own wet bar. She depended on the cocktail hour, felt actual tenderness on its approach—every day, a grateful expectation. When it came to alcohol, you couldn’t afford to be at someone else’s mercy.
With Lora gone she could soak in the mood of the place. It was three rooms plus a bathroom, not too small, and many windows—the rear ones, off the kitchen and bedroom, had a view of the tennis club over the fence. The beige of its buildings in the background; in the foreground a red expanse of clay court.
“They’re playing foosball,” said Lora. She came in holding the tumbler. “Paul and Jeremy.”
Last time she checked, the boy still hadn’t been speaking to Lora. His policy had been straightforward when it came to his stepmother: silence. She was only eight years his senior. He spoke to her mostly in monosyllables. Barely spoke to his father either. His mother was deeply depressed, so it was scarcely a surprising resentment, but all in all, Lora—who’d been ignorant of Paul’s first marriage when he first picked her up at a nightclub, due to outright lies on his part, and then had gotten knocked up—accepted it with good grace.
“So when are you thinking you’ll move in?” asked Lora.
“I’m not in a hurry,” she told her. She took a sip of her drink and let it sit on her tongue.
“Paul’s going to feel so much better once you’re here with the au pair. I repainted the east suite for her. Like, robin’s-egg blue? I’ll show you later.”
“It’s good of you.”
“I love that she’ll help you out but also double as a nanny! So great! Right?”
“So great.”
The Swedish au pair would be changing diapers at the bookends of life, from Huggies to Depends. No, stop, too harsh, she wasn’t there yet—so far, at least, incontinence wasn’t her lot. Still. The au pair was a nursing student and six feet tall, Lora said, with big hands; she’d be nice enough but likely condescending as she managed the helpless, both newborn and ancient.
Paul wanted her to move soon. He claimed he was afraid of a hip breaking when she was alone in her house, no one nearby to notice or help . . . though something had rung false when he said that, come to think of it. Since when was he afraid of her poor health? He noticed even her hospital stays in passing, at best. Maybe he was just embarrassed by the prospect of her keeling over, being found like an upside-down beetle, limbs helplessly pedaling. He set great store by appearances, her son. He’d been embarrassed by the sight of human weakness since he was a teenager. And she was a poster child for weakness now, any idiot could see it. But maybe she underestimated him: maybe she was the one who should feel ashamed of casting aspersions on the nobility of her child’s feelings—a bad habit of hers, taking cheap shots. Privately, even. There was nothing funny about that eighties medical device commercial, for instance, just common stupidity. The sterile humor of mockery.
Easy mockery: it clung to the mind like a spider.
He wanted her to move, but to move she would have to destroy her home.
“You just relax,” said Lora. “I’ll send one of the guys to get you when dinner’s ready. We’ll eat on the deck. OK?”
After Lora had gone back to the kitchen she sat on the patio in front of the guesthouse sipping her drink. Could have used another jigger, but it was nice enough. The sunset’s pink bands were partly hidden by the trees that rose around the edges of the property, tall trees like oak and eucalyptus. She liked the trees, but she would miss having a wider view of the sky.
When Jeremy came to get her, walking his slouching walk, his lowrider jeans a mere hair’s breadth from exposure of his genitals, he wore his default sullen expression. But he grinned when she held out her glass to him. Only the watery dregs. He was well below drinking age so he appreciated even the smallest gestures toward inebriation. She made it her business, when not in view of either of his parents, to parcel out booze to him. Gin was better than marijuana, after all, when it came to conversation.
“Thanks, Gram,” he said, and slugged it back. “You rule.”
He set the empty glass on the rim of a planter and bent down to help her up. He was a perceptive kid, despite the crude acting out. She saw the bad behavior as a tithe, not to a church but to his pubescent demographic. He’d grow out of it. Meanwhile he knew just the right angle, just the right speed at which to help raise her to her feet, and the pressure of his hands was solid and comfortable, unlike his father’s. Paul always had a more important place to be and didn’t pay much attention; usually he jerked her out of her chair so abruptly it made her bones rattle.
Sure, her grandson liked her mostly because she slipped him liquor, but she could hardly blame him for that.
Ahead she saw the deck table with places set for dinner—those massively oversized goblets. They were so trendy now you could barely buy anything else to drink your red from. Some pompous ass had told the foodies their wine was only acceptable when served in fishbowls with narrow sticks on the bottom; well, they got their comeuppance when they had to tip the things almost vertical to eke out the last sip. She’d once seen a hedge-fund manager, some obnoxious colleague of Paul’s, break the upper rim of a giant goblet on his nose in the middle of a buffoonish anecdote about a “slutty girl.” Served him right. She’d chortled loudly and perhaps a shade too long for good manners; Paul had covered his embarrassment by implying she was senile.
She could have made a retort, but a mother spared her son, when it was in her power to do so. It had been her choice.
In the low wind of twilight paper napkins were fluttering, pinned down by cutlery. Cloth napkins would never occur to Lora. She might have seen some white ones in a restaurant once.
The sun was throwing shadows against the wall of the house. She leaned on Jemmy, whose arm was thin but strong. Yesterday he’d been bouncing in a swing, chubby and angelic. Now tall and pimpled and rangy, with the ass-crack-revealing jeans and an addiction to pot and masturbation.
But he was a good boy.
She hoped the new baby was a girl, though, had to admit she hoped she’d have a granddaughter this time around. In the long run, less heartbreak. Because boys, and later men, regardless of their best intentions often seemed to yearn for something they just never succeeded in defining. You pitied them for it, your heart went out to them, but still there was a chronic gap between what they should be and what they were capable of being.
Into that gap civilization fell.
Not that Lora was much different, in terms of her net effect. The footprint of Lora on the earth. A hostess at the nightclub now. Made less there than the au pair would cost. They didn’t work just for room and board these days. Frankly, she suspected Paul didn’t trust Lora by herself with a baby. She was warm, so nice you felt guilty, and full of just about nothing. For her it wasn’t that history had faded but that it had never existed to begin with.
To a child the world began anew every day. All life was the life of the self, the life of now, and stories flitted around the margins like butterflies.
But at least, unlike Paul, Lora did no harm.
Could that be said for her? In old age and weakness, was all forgiven? Did it need to be?
What had she done with her whole life? She’d studied them. The ones who took her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Her baby sister. The ones who took so many. And after all it was the United States they’d wanted to imitate: these easy-living, these complacent and iniquitous United States. Hitler admired, with deepest faith, the way the New World conquerors had so effectively wreaked genocide upon the Indians. Established the supremacy
of whites. That recent study—what had it said? She kept up, even if she wasn’t a contender anymore. There might have been about 80 million of them. Not 8 million, as early twentieth-century scholars used to guess. As many as 80 million, it was now estimated by the archaeologists, the demographers who worked on historic population densities. Cabeza de Vaca, Lewis and Clark, their stories of the Indians they met so frequently, the size of the country. That meant the genocide in the Americas had taken maybe 10 million, at the low end—60 million at the high.
The greatest genocide of all had happened here. War and foreign disease, spread purposefully, often. Enslavement had failed, with the Indians. They’d rather die than work the fields. Mostly they’d been nomads, of course. They didn’t care for the white man’s land-work. So Africans had to be imported, for the purpose of enslavement, because the Indians didn’t make good slaves. Hell, they didn’t make even mediocre ones. The red man was no slave at all. They had refused to farm and been summarily erased, and other unfortunates had been brought in. Under the whip, the black man agreed to work the fields. For a time.
But who spoke of the Indians? Where was it mentioned?
In academic journals, that was where. Indian news. A handful of native activists. No one listened to them. There was a founding myth, and their petty quibbles existed only at the margins.
And what had she done? She’d studied the art and design of the imitators. The second or even third generation. The weak-minded copiers of race domination, with their brilliant banners and their engineers of empire. She’d scrutinized their accoutrements. Following in their path with a microscope and a sad flutter of little-read articles. This was the song she offered up to the fallen?
She’d held it as an article of faith that distance gave you insight. But distance gave you distance.
She would have laughed at herself, if she had it in her.
Something faltered, a pang shot up her leg from the knee. Flicker of agony. She clutched Jemmy’s arm harder.
“Gram! You OK?”
“I think—”
There it was again, a long stab up to the joint of the hip. To the bursa, that sack in the joint, full of fluid. She’d had shots in that sack, steroid shots when she was younger, a giddy girl in her late sixties. They never helped. Her whole leg was folding. She had the feeling she was hollow: what bones she had were made of glass. But terribly, the glass was sharp on each end, split into shards like a paintbrush whose bristles were pins. And those pins were embedded in the nerve-wracked flesh.
Jemmy spun and was standing in front of her, clasping her around the waist. Bearing her full weight, must be. She sagged but didn’t hit the flagstones. A high, panicky voice came to her ears.
“Aleska? Aleska!”
Vaguely she remembered asking Lora to call her “Professor Korczak,” though. But could she have? Possibly? Or was that a dream? She hoped so. She couldn’t have been so rude. She was rigorous, but rude only when provoked. Not to the innocent; it hadn’t been her upbringing. The true people of the book were seldom impolite.
The young woman was running toward her. Worried! Poor dear. Not so fast, she wanted to say. You’ll hurt the embryo. Wasn’t that what they called it?
“Gram, can you hear me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
She was unsure. Her bones were rubber or they were spiky. They couldn’t hold.
The weakness receded as suddenly as it had come on.
“I’m OK. Thanks, Jemmy. Thanks, dear. Please—just give me a moment.”
“Steady there, Gram.”
“It was just my—was my body.”
“You’re OK, Gram.”
Still a bit confused. A form of aphasia, possibly. Where you say the wrong thing. But she felt firmer and steadier every second. She was solid. She was herself. For a little while yet.
“I am OK. Yes. I’m quite all right now. My apologies.”
“Aleska, are you—what was that? You want to sit down? Rest?”
The girl’s pretty, concerned face was suspended beside them. Jemmy still held her up. He was the solid one; he was the mainstay. She thought of his mother, an intelligent woman, if depressive. Worlds apart, the first wife and the second: a woman and then a girl. Paul knew the difference—even he knew. But for his purposes he didn’t give a shit.
It made her sad. She’d wanted to raise a finer man.
“I’ll make it to the table,” she told them. Paul was coming out the back door finally.
“She stumbled,” Lora called to him. “But it was almost like she was having an attack or something.”
“I’m all right now,” she repeated faintly.
She felt like an ancient bride, advancing along the garden path on Jeremy’s arm toward the wedding feast. He’d give her away. But to whom? She was already given. She had given. She’d given all she had. And it was surely not enough.
Not by a long shot.
In so many traditions, heaven was in the sky. It made sense—up there where personhood dissolved, dominion of light and ether.
Go on, just leave the earth. Your work here is done. Insufficient. But over with.
But how much she loved this place.
If only she could find someone to live in her home exactly as it was, not with its insides stripped away but with everything still in position, soft and careful, its every corner well-disposed to company. If someone could exist there, on through time, and quietly appreciate the place the way she had—if they could know the small, unsayable beauties of that cherishment. In all their singular detail. If she could hand that down inside her house.
I may have failed, but I knew one precious thing: I knew what was beautiful.
So take my home, here, take the way I lived, nestled within these rolling hills. Take my view of the sky, and on a clear day the ocean.
You too will thank this life. Flooded with gratefulness. Bow your head.
THE MEN
You could almost call them a squad—sometimes as many as seven, when they all pitched in. They were reliable for plumbing, basic carpentry, minor electrical fixes, and digging holes. They liked to dig holes. They liked it a lot. Twice she’d ordered a bunch of seedlings for the backyard just to keep them busy.
The men’ll take care of it, she’d say to herself, if she had a lot on her to-do list, and sooner or later the men would file in. Their blunt-fingered hands were capable of surprising dexterity.
They were smaller than midgets but larger than cats—about the size of dachshunds, if the doxies were walking on their hind legs. They’d smile sometimes. But not often. They played their cards close to the vest. The men weren’t much for talking.
She wasn’t sure where they went on their own time, though once she’d found them hunkered down around the TV staring slack-jawed at a game. And she’d walked past them grilling steaks one afternoon. They were using the old indoor/outdoor George Foreman, on its stand in the driveway. She hadn’t seen it since Dan left. She didn’t mind.
“Hey, those look good,” she said.
One of them shrugged.
She always got the feeling they preferred her to move along. No chitchat, please. Almost a precondition of their service. It was all right. Honestly, what did she have in common with them? The answer was nothing. The men didn’t do small talk. Mostly they disappeared after a set of tasks was done and reappeared for the next.
They were small, but not elfin. When she tried to think of them as helper elves—like the ones in fairy tales, say, who cut leather and stitched it into handmade shoes during the night to help a humble cobbler—it made her laugh. They were dachshund-sized, sure, but very solid. They were burly, and walked with a swagger. They didn’t dance nimbly or wear pointy caps.
When Dan left she’d gotten depressed. She’d been blindsided, after all. No warning; he just didn’t come home from work one day. At first she thought he’d been mugged. Was lying somewhere in an alley, possibly bleeding out. She was so worried she called the cops. They wouldn’t do anything, so
she called his office. She got stonewalled—no information forthcoming. On the third day she drove over there herself and found a temp who walked her back to his cubby. Empty, the bulletin board just a bunch of colored pushpins and a ragged old New Yorker cartoon, one of those ones that made no fucking sense. Wasn’t funny at all, that was a given, but also had no apparent meaning. Zero. Those cartoons, she’d always thought, were tests of something, and she failed the test. Who passed? She’d like to know. They put them in the magazine to enrage you. Smart people talking in code. Trying to bury you with their smartness. Like an autistic kid reeling off difficult calculations.
Had he actually liked it? Had he gotten it?
No way. There was nothing to get.
A gulf widened between them. She stared at the cartoon.
But maybe he’d just put it there for inspiration, for when he needed to be pissed off. Get a quick shot of adrenaline. For business purposes. Maybe the New Yorker cartoon was like a red flag to a bull.
Finally she asked someone, an older man she thought she recognized, although his name escaped her. All he said was, That guy? He quit. His assistant, Stacey, also quit. She had big bosoms. Very big. That was what the man said. “Big bosoms. Very big.” Neither one of them gave any notice, he went on. We saw them drinking champagne at 11 a.m., then they were outta here.
When she got home she flipped out. She opened his file cabinet and found it almost completely empty. His birth certificate was gone, his Social Security card and tax files. In the bottom, a crumpled receipt for an oil change. That was it.
He wasn’t using their joint credit card, she saw online; he’d always kept one of his own.