Inventing the Abbotts

by Sue Miller

  They sat in silence. Then Rob said, “I do care, O. I can’t do it your way, but I do care.”

  “I know,” she said. And then, because she was very drunk, she said again, “That’s what I mean.”

  Oley had thought she wouldn’t hear from Rob again after their first night together. She had gotten used to this in New Haven, though it was something she’d been unprepared for when she first arrived—that men could sleep with you and then simply never call you, never try to see you again. She had had one lover all through college, actually someone she’d known a little in high school too, so her experience was limited. And such a thing would have been in some sense impossible in the town where she’d grown up, if only because she would have known the man, or at least who he was, before she slept with him, and would have continued to see him at least occasionally afterward. In New Haven, men could just disappear, and did; although she would occasionally glimpse someone she’d slept with going into a bookstore or crossing a street. A few times she’d waved or said hello, but she realized by their lack of response that she wasn’t supposed to do that. She wasn’t supposed to exist anymore; she was just a place they’d been, a town they’d passed through and chosen not to visit again.

  After the painful shock of the first few times, that was all right with Oley. It gave her a kind of freedom she hadn’t imagined possible, and she discovered a side to herself sexually that was different and wilder than any of the parts of herself that lived responsibly day by day in New Haven.

  Besides, she had come to understand that the men who would call her back were people she thought of as thick, dull; people who saw only the good, steady side of herself. The men she liked, the men who let her imagine herself as other than the way she was, were not men who wanted to spend much time with quiet young Head Start teachers.

  And so, when Rob called back, she was surprised and even a little disturbed. There was a part of her that didn’t want to have to cope with him as a real possibility, as a real disappointment. But she told him she’d meet him for a drink Friday evening to look at the proofs of the pictures he’d taken; and when she saw them, she saw suddenly who she could be, how she could be, with him. Off and on during the difficult year he’d lived with her, Oley would look at the pictures he’d taken of her before he knew who she was, in order to remind herself of what she could be to someone else.

  Rob left Oley alone in the hotel for two days. A reporter they’d met who was covering the revolutionary movement for a British paper had told him that the rebels were planning to take over the train from Cuzco to Machu Picchu. Rob thought he should fly in right away and get his pictures. He didn’t think it was a good idea for Oley to come along. It was as he stood peeling bills from a roll of money he carried with him that Oley understood how completely dependent on him she’d let herself become in this world. She was actually frightened to be alone.

  The first day she didn’t deviate from the routines they had set up together. Wherever she went, she smiled and nodded at the people who spoke to her. Laboriously she counted out money when she made a purchase, and occasionally she murmured the Spanish Rob had taught her for “I don’t understand” when someone seemed to expect her to respond. Otherwise she was silent and alone all day. In the evening she ate in the hotel dining room and went to bed early, without stopping in the bar.

  But the next morning the sun was shining for the first time since Oley had arrived in Peru, and after breakfast she went to the desk in the hotel lobby and asked the clerk about transportation to the ruins.

  “Ah, the Professor!” the clerk said, and made a quick phone call. Then she explained to Oley that there was a local expert on the ruins who would take her on a guided tour for free, a kind of promotional deal he offered. He would come for her in his car later in the afternoon.

  He showed up at about three-thirty. Oley was surprised at his appearance. He looked like a Latin crooner, a slicked-back Andy Williams. He wore pale clothes and a golfer’s sweater, buttoned casually at the waist. His mustache was thin, his hair a preposterously brilliant black, and he spoke careful, formal English. He smiled at Oley and revealed elaborate structures of gold where most of his teeth should have been.

  When Oley went outside with him, she discovered that his car was an ornately finned American model from the fifties, badly repainted a bilious green. There were several other passengers in it, other distinguished visitors to Peru, the Professor told Oley. The car had been fitted with a broken plastic cap on its roof, which now read TAX. Oley hesitated a moment, then inquired whether she could not pay the Professor something for the privilege of taking the tour with him. The Professor assured her that it was his privilege, he was pleased to do it gratis, in order to let people know about his shop, a shop specializing in reproductions of the ruins’ artifacts.

  As Oley got in, the Professor introduced the other tourists. The Indian man behind the wheel revved the car noisily, and they sped away from the tourist hotel, leaving a trail of rubber and exhaust to delight the shoeshine boys gathered on the plaza.

  The car had no shocks at all, and on every bump and curve, Oley and the other passengers were thrown and swung from side to side in the back seat. The Professor sat in front with a massive Dutch woman, who had, like him, a small mustache. He rested his arm along the back of the seat, and with his face turned to his group, he made conversation in his stilted English about the ruins, about their countries of origin, about Peru.

  Oley, glad to have an opportunity to speak English at last, grew expansive. She chatted with the massive Dutch woman and her shy female companion, and with the skinny and uncommunicative German student who completed their group.

  It took about fifteen minutes to get to the ruins. They loomed ugly and unpromising in the flat terrain, so many dirt piles. Up close, more of what they might once have been was visible, and there were groups of archaeology students working to restore them; but Oley was disappointed. She was in the process of deciding that she preferred the living, slightly decrepit town to the parched desolation of the ruins, when they came to the sections where intact samples of the relief work remained in the sand. Abruptly her disappointment vanished. The artwork here was both stylized and sexual, and Oley found herself moved by it. But the Professor’s explanations of the meaning of the figures irritated her. He kept talking about things like the symbolic fusion of the spirit and the will as he stood in front of the intertwined tongues and bodies. The Dutch woman, her friend and the German student stood, listened, nodded. But Oley began to lag behind the group. The Professor frowned at her, calling out from time to time that she was missing the discussion of the detail. Momentarily she would rejoin them; but then she would again find his monologue maddening, and drop back. She felt as though she were a naughty American child among adults.

  On their way back to town, the driver pulled off the highway into what looked like an abandoned gas station. It was the Professor’s gallery. The group of gringos clambered obediently out of the car, which rose several inches with each one’s departure. The shop was sweltering. It was full of black-and-white prints, scrolls and little clay sculptures. The Professor swung into a sales pitch. He had a way of unrolling the prints that reminded Oley of the shoeshine boys, their elaborate display with their cloths.

  The Dutch woman seemed interested. After looking at what seemed to Oley an endless number of samples, she bought two prints. Oley had moved nearer to the door, waiting for the transactions to be over. The reproductions in the shop were stark, precise, Egyptian. They had none of the sensuality of the actual reliefs, and they seemed expensive to Oley. And even though there were a few less expensive, less unattractive pieces of sculpture, Oley didn’t want anything. The moment the Professor had gone into his pitch, she felt angry at him for trapping her here, for his false generosity. She was determined to buy nothing.

  The German student liked one of the prints, but said that the price was too high. Oley moved into the doorway to try to catch a breeze as she watched the Pro
fessor at work. He came down a bit; the student, more animated than he’d been all day, pushed for an even lower price. Slowly they narrowed in on the range they could agree on, and the purchase was made. Then the little group was left standing in the shop, waiting for a signal from the Professor that they could leave, that his driver would take them back. But it became clear that he, in turn, was waiting for Oley to buy something. Everyone else had paid the price for the tour. It was her turn. The group looked expectantly at her.

  The Professor walked over closer to her and picked up one of the clay figures. “You have, perhaps, found something you would like, Miss Erickson?” he asked.

  “No. Nothing,” Oley answered. She could hear the defiance in her own voice.

  The Professor paused for only a moment. “Ah, well, then,” he said. “Perhaps I can point out to you some things which you may not have noticed.” He gestured to where the scrolls lay rolled up like tubes of wallpaper on the shelf.

  There was another moment of silence. Then Oley, still standing in the doorway, said, “I’m not going to buy anything, Professor. I’m sorry, I misunderstood your meaning, and really thought the tour was free.” Oley thought she could feel the group recoil from her slightly in the shop. “Besides,” she said, “I really can’t afford it.”

  She turned and walked outside, let herself into the car. The driver, leaning against the auto in the hot sun, looked confused. Slowly the little group of tourists meandered out too. Last came the Professor, looking seedy and defeated. Oley felt sorry for him, actually. The driver took his silent lurching load back to town.

  When Oley got back to the tourist hotel, she went up to her room. She ran herself a deep tub and lay in it for a long while, occasionally twisting the old-fashioned nickel-plated knob with her toes to let more hot water in. Her breasts floated above the water. The nipples tightened in the cool air. Oley dipped a washcloth into the steaming tub and laid it across her chest.

  She lay in the tub until the sky outside turned purple; then black. When she got out, her fingers and toes were wrinkled into what she and her mother had called “raisin skin” when she was small. She noticed, on the windowsill, a little red stain the maid had missed when she cleaned, the hardened juice of the strawberries.

  She dressed and went to the bar. She sat at one of the wooden tables by herself and ordered a Pisco sour. The table was next to the louvered windows which opened out onto the plaza. Through the slats she could see, in the glare of the fluorescent streetlamps, the shoeshine boys, their workday over, huddled in a tiny group around one bench. She watched them.

  From time to time during the evening, one of the other guests with whom she was familiar—the fat wife of the Chilean, the British reporter—came and talked to Oley for a while. But for the most part she sat alone. The bartender brought over a fresh drink or bowl of peanuts as soon as she’d finished the one before. Slowly the boys on the plaza drifted away. When the last two lay down on one of the benches, Oley got up. She bumped into a chair on her way to the bar, and its legs scraped noisily on the bare floor.

  She asked the bartender how much everything was. He looked at her, his eyes blazing with devotion, and shook his head. “Please,” she said in Spanish, “how much?” Again he shook his head. Oley felt her eyes fill with tears. “You are very generous,” she said in English. “Too generous.” He smiled shyly, partly, Oley saw, because he was missing several teeth. “Thank you,” he said in slow English. She reached over and touched the immaculate sleeve of his white coat. “No,” she said. “Thank you. Gracias. Thank you.” She patted his arm gently; then turned and carefully walked out of the bar.

  Rob came back early the next morning. Oley was still in bed, a little hung over. Rob was excited. He had met a man on the plane from Cuzco who wanted to buy American dollars and would meet him on the plaza in half an hour. Oley got out of bed and dressed slowly. Rob paced the room impatiently, leaned out the casement window into the kitchen noise. Oley knew it wasn’t just the illegal exchange rate that excited him, but the idea of the black market, of doing something illicit. She was familiar with this impulse of his. He’d once, for the same reason, bought a gun from a black guy they’d met at a bar in New Haven. He didn’t want it for anything. He had kept it for months in the bureau drawer in her apartment.

  He and Oley had made a special trip to Block Island by ferry in order to get rid of it, finally. They hadn’t even stayed overnight. They just took the ferry over, dropping the gun in the water on the way, and returned that evening.

  As they stepped out of the hotel lobby, Oley looked over toward the plaza. The sky was white again today, with high clouds. The flat gray stones in the plaza still gleamed darkly from their daily early-morning washing. The shoeshine boys, six or seven of them today, stood near the fountain at the plaza’s center, talking and gesturing. Two of the cement benches that studded the radiating pathways of the plaza were occupied, one by an itinerant secretary, the typewriter on his knees clattering faintly in the morning air as the old man next to him dictated, the other by a man in a sports jacket and sunglasses, holding a briefcase on his lap.

  “Is that the guy?” Olympia asked.

  “The very one,” Rob said. He patted his shirt pocket. Before they’d left their room, he’d put eight hundred-dollar bills into it, folded in half. Oley had protested that it seemed too much, but he’d said they would need it in Arequipa, the next city on their itinerary.

  The shoeshine boys spotted Rob and approached, waving and calling out. Even though Rob barely nodded to them, they followed him and Oley over to the man. But when Rob and Oley sat down and began talking, they fell back slightly. A few of them set their kits down and sat on them at a little distance, watching the trio on the bench.

  The man chatted politely with Oley and Rob for a while, at first about how they liked traveling in Peru. Their enthusiasm seemed to amuse him. He was slim and good-looking. His face was slightly pockmarked. He began to talk about himself. He seemed anxious to explain himself to Oley in particular. He spoke fluent English, with only a slight accent. He’d gone to school in America, UCLA, he told Oley, and majored in engineering. He wanted to leave Peru, where his opportunities were so limited, to move to the United States; but the government wouldn’t let him take Peruvian money out of the country. “They would strip me of my birthright, as it were,” he said. “My parents are not wealthy, but they have worked hard all of their lives for me, for their only son. But the government would have me leave the country a pauper. You, a rich North American, must understand that I cannot go to the United States a pauper.”

  “I’m not rich,” said Oley.

  “Of course you are,” said the man politely.

  “No.” Oley shook her head. “Really. I’m a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers aren’t rich.”

  “Schoolteachers in America are rich,” the man announced in his gentle, apologetic voice. “They own houses, cars, land.”

  Oley thought of her tiny apartment on the fringe of the ghetto in New Haven. She felt, suddenly, a pang of homesickness for its bare familiarity. She wanted to describe it to the man, but she knew there was no point.

  “And here I find you traveling in my country,” he persisted gently. “Such travel is expensive, is it not?”

  Rob was watching Oley with interest. Oley saw that he expected her to say that the money was his, to separate herself from him, repudiate him, as she’d done in one way or another, she realized, all week. She felt suddenly as though she should apologize to him.

  “Yes, you’re right,” she said to the man. Her voice was soft and regretful, as though she were acknowledging something shameful about herself. “It is terribly expensive.”

  She felt Rob’s eyes on her.

  “Well, then,” the man said. “You understand my circumstance entirely, then. Americans don’t like poor foreigners, so that I must be certain, before I leave, to amass enough money to fit easily and smoothly into your world.”

  He turned to Rob and they proceed
ed to the details of their exchange. Oley watched them. Rob’s face was animated, lively, full of the energy that had always attracted her, that she had always wanted to have herself, but didn’t. He and the man laughed about something. Oley looked over at the shoeshine boys. She felt like them, shut out, an onlooker.

  The man opened the briefcase on his knees. He left the lid up to shield the interior from view, but the shoeshine boys had caught a glimpse of its contents. They seemed in unison, audibly, to draw their breath in. They approached slightly nearer and made a silent semicircle around the three adults on the bench. In the briefcase, neatly banded, were stacks of Peruvian currency, perhaps more than most of the shoeshine boys would earn in a lifetime. They watched with rapt attention, whispering a little among themselves, as Rob and the man exchanged dollars for soles. Oley noted that when she and Rob got up and walked away, the shoeshine boys for the first time didn’t follow or call to them. Unmolested, she and Rob walked back into the cool, dim lobby of the tourist hotel.

  When they got up to their room, Rob began pulling the money from his pockets and throwing it on the bed. “We’re rich, Oley! Rich! Rich!” he cried. Oley sat in the chair and watched him. When he’d emptied his pockets and turned to her, grinning, she said softly, “I’ve got to go home, Rob.” He looked at her for a moment, the smile fading, and then he sat down on the bed without pushing the money out of the way.

  “Oley,” he said. He shook his head. “Olympia. How come I knew you were going to say that?”

  In late August, Oley found a manila envelope leaning against the door to her apartment. It was postmarked New York and stamped PHOTOGRAPH, DO NOT BEND. Because it was very hot outside and she’d been at a faculty meeting all day, she went around the apartment throwing open the windows and then she fixed herself a glass of iced tea before she opened it. Inside was a blowup of the picture Rob had taken of her in the tourist hotel in Trujillo. Oley felt in the corners of the envelope for a written message, but there was none. Just the picture. She looked at it carefully.