Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  Tyler was careful with Brina. He didn’t bring flowers or presents; he didn’t call or try to get in touch with Petey. He just kept coming over. At some point, he knew, she would have to take responsibility for his silent presence outside her door. It took a week and a half for her to let him in, and twenty minutes after that, Tyler was making love to her on the couch. He pushed up onto his elbows to look at her. She had her face turned away from him, and her eyes were shut. She seemed trusting, utterly at peace. Tyler’s heart welled with remorse and gratitude toward her and he began to weep softly. She turned to him, and he saw that her face was remote, cold, full of a hard anger. “Brina,” he said, frightened. He couldn’t believe she could make love with him without feeling love. He touched her face gently, as though he could change what he saw with a gesture.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she whispered furiously, and pulled him to her.

  Now Tyler began to woo Brina. She wouldn’t let him in until after nine or so, when Petey was asleep, because she thought that it would be hard for Petey to see him. But every night, Tyler arrived at nine and stayed until midnight or so, when Brina kicked him out. Mostly they made love, although once or twice Brina wouldn’t. Then Tyler talked. He talked about how much he loved her, how weak he was. About how his weakness didn’t affect his love for her, about how hard he’d tried to be faithful. He talked about how much he wanted her back. Brina seemed to listen; but she still wept or cursed him when they did make love. And she always turned away afterward and hunched over, facing the back of the couch and holding herself as if for comfort.

  Sometime in the second week of this strange courtship, Meredith called him at work. She sounded tense. There were some problems at the apartment. Could he stop by after work? She’d be home by five-thirty or so.

  Tyler couldn’t go to Brina’s until after nine anyway, so he told Meredith he’d stop by quickly around six.

  He drove over in the truck again. He was driving it home regularly now, so he’d be able to get over to Brina’s and back easily. Lying on the dashboard was a miniature boot from one of Petey’s superhero dolls. Tyler had found it in the glove compartment. He was planning to take it to Brina’s later. He’d even thought of a joke he might try on her when he got there, about being a prince looking for the woman who’d fit this shoe. He wasn’t sure he would, though, because Brina was several inches taller than he was and so far he’d only imagined two or three tough, sarcastic things she might say in response, having to do with her size.

  Meredith had Vivaldi on the radio when he came in. She was wearing jeans and a work shirt, but her makeup was fresh, Tyler could tell. He followed her to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and brought out some wine. He watched her lift two glasses down from the shelf. He could see the bumps of her nipples against the light blue shirt. She was thinner than Brina. He took the wine.

  She raised her glass. “Cheers,” she said, and smiled.

  He sipped and set the glass down on the butcher-block counter. He’d installed it three years before. He couldn’t help admiring it for a moment. He turned to her. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “No problem,” she said. She stepped closer to him. There was a little nick of lipstick on the corner of one of her front teeth. Tyler felt sorry for her.

  “I thought there was something wrong,” he said.

  “Only that I hadn’t heard from you,” she said, and looked at him. Tyler felt a shrinking inside. “I had a nice time that night.”

  “Me too,” Tyler said, not meeting her eyes. He drank some wine.

  “Well?” she said. She cocked her head and smiled flirtatiously at him.

  Tyler took a step or two backward. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know if you knew it or not the other night. I probably should have said something. But I’m married.”

  She stood very still, but she nodded her head. “I knew.”

  Then Tyler explained what had happened, how Brina had moved out. She stared at him while he told her, and he watched the determined cheerfulness bleed from her face, the bitter lines creep to the corners of her mouth. She was running her finger again and again around the top of her wineglass. Tyler was telling her how much he loved Brina. Suddenly she smiled at him, a forced, brilliant smile. He fell silent. After a moment she said, “So love her, for Christ’s sake.” Her upper lip trembled slightly, and a single tear snaked though her makeup. “God knows I wasn’t asking you to love me.”

  Tyler’s heart squeezed tight with pity. He closed his eyes and reached for her.

  When Brina called from her office, she sounded so crisp and efficient that Tyler for a moment thought it was Meredith again. But then she said, “I’m just calling, Tyler, to tell you where we’ll be now. Maryanne’s back, so we’re going to the Lloyds’ for a couple of weeks, while they’re gone. Do you have their address?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “I might somewhere, but why don’t I write it down, to be safe?”

  Brina dictated it to him in her secretarial voice. Tyler’s hands trembled as he wrote the numbers and letters. He read it back to her because he was so excited he wasn’t sure he’d heard it right. She had called him! She wanted him to know how to get to her. “Thanks, Brina,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The Lloyds had a king-size bed, as Tyler and Brina did at home. The first night Tyler visited Brina there, he slowly and carefully took off all her clothes, then removed his own, and they made love until four in the morning. Before Brina made him leave, he got her to promise to think about moving back home again.

  The second night, Tyler brought a bottle of wine and some grass over, but Brina met him at the door wearing an old sweatshirt and jeans. She’d pulled her hair back into a limp ponytail. She told him he couldn’t come in. Petey had some stomach bug and was up every half hour or so, vomiting. Tyler wanted to stay, wanted to help with Petey, but Brina was both distracted and absolute.

  Driving home, Tyler began to get angry at her rigidity, at the way she insisted that his life should be affected by her principles. He turned out of his way and drove past Meredith’s apartment. Her living room lights glowed yellow on the second floor.

  She answered the door with the chain on. She was wearing a striped robe and big green puffy slippers. Tyler held up the bottle of wine. “Party time,” he said.

  She smiled and shut the door. He heard the chain slide off and then she reopened it. She had kicked off the slippers. “I was wondering when you’d get around to coming over again,” she said.

  Tyler hadn’t meant to talk about Brina with her again, but after they made love he felt a resurgence of the anger that had brought him to her apartment in the first place. He told her what Brina had done, making it sound as though it had happened several days before. This time, instead of getting tearful or angry, Meredith took a professional tone. Brina, she offered, was projecting her own anger and fragility onto Petey and using him as a way of punishing Tyler. There were several possible reasons for this, psychodynamically speaking, and Meredith offered one or two.

  Tyler knew better than to listen to much of anything she had to say, but he liked speaking about Brina with someone else, liked hearing her name out loud. He felt excited and closer to Brina while he and Meredith were talking about her, and he asked questions to keep the conversation going. He supported her theories with intimate details Brina had told him about her first husband, her childhood. Meredith went to the kitchen to get a cigarette. He watched her walk away from him, small and boyish without any clothes on. “I’m sorry,” he said, when she was sitting next to him on the bed again. “I shouldn’t talk so much about this. About Brina.”

  “It’s all right. People need to talk about the things that are bothering them.”

  “But it can’t be very much fun for you.”

  “I don’t mind. It’s all right.”

  “It’s all right for a while. It shouldn’t be for very long, though.”

  Meredith looked at him as though he were making some sort of pr
omise. “I’ll let you know when it starts to bother me.”

  The next night the phone was ringing when he got back from Brina’s. He knew it was Meredith and almost didn’t answer it, but the thought of her sitting alone at the other end, listening to the phone ring in his empty apartment, swept him as suddenly and forcefully as a pang of self-pity, and he picked up the receiver.

  She was cheerful. She invited him over for a nightcap. Tyler tried to say no, but when she persisted, even began to offer to come to his house, he decided it might be the best thing to go over there briefly.

  Tyler saw Meredith five or six times in the next two weeks, sometimes at her apartment, sometimes at his, though they never made love in the bed he shared with Brina. There was something about her sexual greediness that excited him, that gave him an appetite for the tenderness and restraint he had to employ with Brina. And she was the only person he could really talk to about what had happened. He felt all right about it all because, as he told himself, he was always honest with Meredith, he never pretended to her that he didn’t want Brina back or wasn’t seeing her. In the end, he thought of himself as being faithful to both Meredith and Brina during this period, and he was only tempted once, by a girl he met in a bar on the way home from Brina’s one night. She told him she was a law student, and claimed she could also tell his fortune. She took his hand and leaned over it a long time. He could feel her breath warm on his palm. But then she said either the light was bad or he was in sad shape, because she couldn’t even find his life line, not to mention his love line and all that other stuff.

  Brina and Tyler were lying in the Lloyds’ big bed. The Lloyds were supposed to get back from their vacation in five days. Tyler and Brina had avoided talking about this, about where Brina and Petey might go next.

  Abruptly, Brina asked if he’d come to dinner the next night.

  “What time?” Tyler asked.

  “About six or so.” There was silence.

  Tyler felt his heart thudding as it sometimes did when he’d drunk five or six cups of coffee in one morning. “With Petey,” he said.

  “He misses you,” Brina said. “It just seems dumb, after a while, to keep punishing him because I’m mad at you.” Tyler didn’t let himself look at Brina, didn’t let himself hope. They were lying on their backs not touching, and he stared intently at the useless nipple-like fixture on the ceiling above him.

  “And I’m not so mad at you anymore, Tyler.” She sighed. “I guess I see that you can’t help yourself—that you’re just going to slip every now and then. And that it doesn’t mean much of anything to you and me. Or Petey. To who we are as a family, I mean.” She had turned on the bed, and Tyler could tell she was looking at him. “But if I think about it too long or hard, I can literally make myself throw up. And I never want to see it or know about it again. Ever.” Her voice was like a threat. Tyler nodded his head, and she relaxed again. The light from the candle on the bedside table flickered on the ceiling with the little rush of air from her movement. Tyler lay absolutely still, full of longing for her but afraid to touch her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was softer, almost as though she were talking just for herself. “I feel that it’s a terrible compromise. Terrible. One I never thought I could make. Or would even be asked to make. I thought of our bodies as being part of each other. It made me feel … injured, or damaged. And Petey too. I felt like you broke something that held us all together.” Her voice wavered and she was silent for a while. “But then I saw, I guess I saw, that other things really held us together. Or could. Because I do still love you, Tyler.” She had turned toward him again. He felt her breath on his shoulder. “What’s loving and generous in you. The stuff Petey misses. I miss it too. And it sort of seems fair to me that in the same way you have to struggle with your nature to stay with me, to stay true to me, that I should struggle with mine, with my … inflexibility, I guess, to be with you.”

  Tyler reached out and touched Brina’s hand. She responded quickly, passionately, and for the first time since she’d moved out she led them through their lovemaking.

  Afterward they talked about when she should move back. Tyler persuaded her that there was no reason to wait until the Lloyds returned. He’d come Saturday with the truck and they could throw everything in and bring her and Petey home. They talked a long time. Tyler fell into a light, then a deep, sleep. Brina didn’t wake him until five-thirty. For a moment, opening his eyes in the strange bed, with dawn just outside the windows, Tyler thought he’d stayed too long with some other woman and almost panicked. Then he focused on Brina’s half-tender face and his heart slowed down.

  Tyler left work early on Friday. He stopped at the five-and-ten and bought a Tonka truck and two new superhero dolls for Petey. Outside Brina’s, though, there suddenly seemed something cheap about apologizing to Petey with toys, and he left them in the truck.

  He rang the bell. He could hear Petey shout, “It’s him!” behind the door. It swung open, and Petey stood there grinning. He was larger than Tyler remembered. He threw himself up and into Tyler’s arms. His wiry arms and legs wrapped tightly around Tyler’s shoulders and hips. Petey had never embraced Tyler before—no child had—and Tyler was startled and momentarily almost revolted by the animal-like energy in his grip, the sense of his making some claim on Tyler’s affection. He realized abruptly how little he’d thought about Petey in the last month or so.

  He held Petey awkwardly and patted his narrow, hard back. After a minute, the boy uncoiled himself and dropped from Tyler’s body, still smiling up at him, but shyly now, as though he sensed the hesitation in Tyler.

  Tyler knew some gesture was required of him. He felt helpless. “My man!” he said, and held out his hands. Petey laughed, and they went through the elaborate hand-slapping routine Tyler had taught him. Then Petey started to tell him about a new game Brina had bought for him. He disappeared down the hall to get it.

  Tyler looked up and saw Brina standing in the kitchen doorway. He went to her and held her. There were tears in her eyes and she bowed her head, to rest it on Tyler’s shoulder for a minute. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispered.

  Petey reappeared, carrying a big flat cardboard box. He asked Brina if he and Tyler could play his game before supper. Brina turned back quickly to the sink so Petey could see only the blank side of her face. “Of course,” she said smoothly. Tyler had never realized she might consciously decide which side of her face to show to the world, and he felt a momentary shock, as if of recognition.

  The next day, Brina and Petey moved back in with Tyler. As Tyler carried the suitcases, the boxes of Petey’s toys up to the apartment, he felt the same sense of hope, the sense that everything could be different, that he’d felt the first time he’d done it. He even tried to carry Brina into the bedroom, but they gave up, laughing, as they had the first time.

  That night, while Brina was reading Petey a story, Tyler called Meredith. He’d been nervous all day about the possibility of her telephoning him and Brina’s answering, but they’d been out a lot doing errands, getting beer and groceries; and they’d had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, Petey’s favorite, to celebrate. Tyler planned to try to see Meredith sometime Monday, for lunch if he could, and tell her as gently as possible what had happened.

  She sounded glad to hear from him, although there was an edge to her voice. But when he asked her about getting together Monday, she was silent a moment. Then she said, “Monday? That seems suddenly pretty far away. I mean, I haven’t seen you for days.”

  “Well, things have been happening. We need to talk.”

  “Let’s talk right now. I can talk right now. Why don’t you come over?”

  “No, I think Monday’s best,” Tyler said.

  “Why?”

  “Well, see, I think what’s going to happen is that probably … well, it’s almost definite that Brina’s going to move back in.” Tyler wasn’t aware of lying to Meredith. He was conscious only of a need to spare
her feelings.

  “Oh, now wait a minute, Tyler. Wait a minute,” she said. He recognized her tone with relief. She wasn’t hurt. She was going to give him advice. “When did all this happen?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s sort of happening. I mean, we’ve been talking about it for a couple of days; that’s why I haven’t called. And I’m going over there tonight.”

  “So that’s it? That’s why you can’t see me?”

  “Right.”

  “Have you talked to anyone else about this, Tyler? I mean, to get a sense of perspective about what Brina’s doing here?”

  “No. Just Brina.”

  “Jesus!”

  “What?”

  She paused a moment, as though to think of the best way to break bad news. Then she said, “You are so … malleable, Tyler. Or gullible or something. I’ve never met anyone like you.” He didn’t answer. “Look,” she said after a moment. “Where are you now?”

  “Why?” Tyler asked, suddenly nervous.

  “Just, where are you? Are you home?”

  “Yes, but I’m leaving. In just a second. I’m due over there.”

  “She can wait a few more minutes,” Meredith said. “You just sit tight. I’m coming over.”

  “No!” he said sharply. Then, “No. I need to take off now.”

  “I’ll be there in five minutes, Tyler. You just wait.” She hung up.

  Tyler sat a few minutes by the telephone, trying to think of what to do. He heard Brina reading the story, her voice full of expression, and Petey’s bright laughter. He went to the door of Petey’s room. Brina was stretched out on Petey’s bed, the book propped up on her stomach. Petey leaned against her breast, rhythmically twirling a strand of his hair. Brina finished a sentence and looked up.

  “I’m just going to go out for a minute,” he said. He knew his voice sounded evasive.