“It’s a rental,” he says. “Silly. Get in.”
There are still patches of ice in the yard, whitening crescents at the edges of pools that ripple softly when the chilly breeze moves on them. The air stings her face and neck. As she gets into the car and sits down in it, she sees that Ronda has run out onto the walk, waving her book about the explorers. Lily looks at her friend and understands in the nerves that line her stomach that she will not want to see Ronda anymore. She accepts the book, holds it on her lap, and Ronda leans in and kisses her on the cheek. “See you Monday, right?”
“Right,” Lily says. Ronda walks back to the house and Lily sinks down in the seat so that her head is almost below the level of the window. When her father gets in, she glances back. The door of Ronda’s house is closed; they’re all inside.
“What’s wrong?” her father says.
She turns to him, and finds that she can’t speak.
“Hey,” he says. “What is it, sweetie? Don’t you feel right?”
“I’m okay,” she says.
After a time, he says: “Tell me what’s wrong.”
She waits a moment, holding on, something collapsing under her heart. Yet when she turns to speak to him, she hears a lie come, or a truth that makes up a lie: “I didn’t sleep well.” And she goes on, adding to it, “I had a nightmare.” Abruptly, it’s as if the whole experience of the previous night, beginning with the panic over the prospect of harm coming to her parents, is being called forth now, a threat. Life as she has always known it hangs in precarious balance: if it comes to trouble, it will be all her doing. She senses this without words, and recalls the feeling of luxuriating in Mr. Stapleton’s admiring gaze. “I had a nightmare that you were gone. You and Mother.”
He reaches over and touches her hand. She gazes at the black hairs on the backs of his fingers.
At the cast party on Sunday, Ronda and her parents are guests. Ronda explains that her grandfather is not feeling well, and Lily hears Ronda’s mother tell Doris that she fears he’s sinking into another depression. He’s had a couple of episodes, Ronda’s father says to Scott. Nothing serious. Just goes to sleep, you know. Lily goes into the storeroom off the main stage entrance. It has always been a favorite place: clothes from every period of the world’s history of wearing clothes are hung in rows, on steel racks, one after another; boxes in ranks and stacked like bricks in a wall, boxes filled with props, with fake telephones and bottles and pistols and knives with retractable blades; fake furniture lying about, decked with glass figurines and delicate china lamps, porcelain busts of fictional people and leather-bound books, ashtrays and doilies and dinnerware. On one side, a bed, with a comforter, as if it’s been made up for someone to sleep there. And, piled haphazardly behind the bed, war gear—helmets, breastplates, shields, swords, and, incongruous even in this incompatible array, a microphone hanging from wire hooked to the blade end of a propped spear. She stands here among these things, in this beloved room, this place where she has always felt safe—no, invincible—fortified by the memory of the fantastic and the magical, the truth in her deepest heart, that if the world gets bad, you simply imagine it otherwise, you take hold of it and shake its rust off and make it something bright again. Behind her comes the voice of her mother and Ronda, calling her name. “Lily,” Ronda says. “Where are you hiding?” And quite suddenly, standing here, Lily has the urge to begin breaking everything into pieces.
She experiences a strange non-feeling chill at her heart about the whole rest of the world.
But she turns and smiles at Ronda and says what she knows will be acceptable under the circumstances; she imagines her own soul to be an expanse of drifting sand under an empty sky.
Later, she paints this picture for herself, using acrylics, in her room in the afternoons after school. But it isn’t her soul, it’s the world. This is how she sees it, now.
During the next few months, she watches her mother sit at her dressing table, putting makeup on, heightening the color and shape of her lips, her eyebrows—a lovely woman, making herself look her best. Lily stops wanting to wear makeup, though she doesn’t show this to her parents. She keeps appearances, and soon the fright of Mr. Stapleton starts to fade a little. She begins reading whatever she can find about Mary Kingsley, and by Mary Kingsley. She makes a drawing of her, and then feels it isn’t good enough, and destroys it. She stops painting and drawing pictures altogether, and when her mother questions her about it, she says drawing simply no longer interests her. She keeps her journal, sometimes writing into the small hours of the night, and she goes with her father to his work. She soaks everything up, and people begin to decide that she’s an oversensitive child, quiet, perhaps even a bit secretive: a girl who has turned inward. Her mother worries about her.
“Where’s the Lily I used to know?” she says. “What’s wrong? Is it because I quit the company?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Lily tells her. “Can we please stop treating me like I’ve grown another head?”
“You’ve pushed Ronda away. Why is that? What is it between you two?”
“Nothing. She’s got new friends. I got tired of her talk. Didn’t you ever notice that all she ever does is talk?”
“That was you,” Doris says. “Darling, that was you.”
Summer comes, and another winter, and spring. She dreads the night coming, every day, and finds a way to hide this from everyone. Her father is in three other productions. Her mother is true to her word about the company, staying home, sometimes not even attending performances. Lily spends a lot of time at the theater; it engrosses her, and its flow and ruckus fill her mind, quell the turmoil in her mind, when she feels as if she might float out of her own body and dissolve on the air. Her father allows her to stay up late on summer nights, to be with him, to watch the rehearsals. It’s a blessing, knowing that she can put off lying in the dark, alone. She takes everything of the theater into herself, like a form of nourishment. She imagines a scene: a young woman all in black, posing for a photograph with others, on the veranda of a station house in Freetown, West Africa, circa 1895. She puts down the words that, in her private world, she can hear them speak; it’s as if she’s ghost-visited.
One night, she hears a tussle in the living room, and steps out of her room to see her father and mother grappling with each other in the entrance to the hall. Her mother’s head is turned to one side, where her father’s hand holds it, and he’s leaning into her, his face a blank, almost bland mask, the muscles of his arms flexed. Her face is white, her lips bloodless. Her eyes are closed, and then they open and look at her. “Oh, Christ,” she says. “Scott.”
He steps back. “What are you doing awake now?” he says.
Lily says, “I heard noise.”
“Go back to bed.”
They’re both breathing heavily, and her mother moves out of view, holding her hands to her face.
“It’s an argument,” her father says. “People argue. Go to bed.”
She goes back to her room, and lies down, quiet, hands on her chest, thinking, without the words to express it yet, that people are such strange mixtures of tenderness and violence, anger and laughter and grief, and all of it too frightening to bear. The night goes on, quiet, threatening and empty as the distances between the stars. Nothing so terrible happens. In the morning her parents are themselves again, full of kindness and merriment, glad of the very air.
As time goes on, her father seems less and less comfortable with anything as a subject for meaningful conversation with her. She knows that he thinks this new distance between them is probably natural for a man and his maturing young daughter. As best she can, she buries the memory of Mr. Stapleton.
She never tells anyone about him.
PART• 1
Romance
ONE
1
TOWARD THE END of her junior year of college, her parents separated, and that summer, the hottest summer anyone could remember, she heard them discuss their dissolvi
ng marriage individually, to different people, in distressingly composed, matter-of-fact voices. They might as well have been talking about refinancing a mortgage. With her, they were mutually reserved, polite, careful not to criticize each other. They spoke of reciprocal respect, of what was best for everyone; and it seemed that no rancor existed between them. Indeed, once it came to the final arrangements, they both appeared rather self-satisfied for having accomplished everything with a minimum of pathological scenes. Even the lawyers called it amicable.
In Lily Austin’s mind, there was nothing about splitting a household in two that could be called anything of the sort.
Her roommate, Sheri Galatierre, attempted to divert her, asking her along to parties and other social events. Lily mostly demurred. As it had been for years, now, she was troubled by the company of strangers, though she didn’t express it that way. She didn’t know, really, how to say what she wanted.
Sheri had a way of getting down into her sorrow with her that made her feel worse, though the other woman obviously meant to help. Dominic Martinez also tried to distract her, being goofy and chattering, clowning for her. He had come to the university that year, having transferred in from North Carolina. He’d walked up to her after one of the performances of the drama department, and said, “Ronda Seiver’s party.” It had startled Lily, and for a moment she hadn’t recognized him. “You got the book that had the lady explorer in it.”
“Dominic?” she said.
He bowed, exactly as he had that night at Ronda’s house.
They had become rather like brother and sister, since then. Dominic sometimes refused to indulge her. He would tell her to grow up and stop twisting her own knife in herself. Strangely, that helped some.
Yet in the hours when she was alone, nothing quite reached the place where she was hurting. The facts hurt; the knowledge of what had lately transpired between her parents caused a deep, unreachable, continual ache. She couldn’t shake the old, terrible, familiar sense of having been betrayed. And so while everyone around her spoke in terms of romance, and while it was in all the books and the plays she was reading—and last spring she had played the most romantic of parts, Rosalind, in As You Like It—Lily had decided that the whole thing was a lie and a cheat.
Her father, completely serious, and without a trace of irony, had an affair with someone he worked with. He spoke about falling in love. He used the phrase, telling Lily’s mother about it, confessing to her that it had been going on for more than a year, crying idiotically and begging her to forgive him. Lily’s mother, who had felt the weight of her own increasing estrangement from him, went into an almost surreptitious six-week-long depression, then gathered strength and called a lawyer. Everything was decided with an efficiency, a courtesy, that Lily deplored. It was as if her parents had decided to close a long-running play in which they had performed the lead roles.
This was in 1988. Bush and Dukakis were running for Reagan’s soon-to-be vacated office, and Lily, entering her last year of college, found that she couldn’t care less. In the fall, back at school, she went through the strangeness of writing to and communicating with her parents separately, and of having to speak to the young woman, a set designer, to whom her father was now married (a civil ceremony in Maryland, three days after the divorce was final, in late July). The strain worked on her in unexpected ways: she had experienced episodes of panic and sleeplessness. And when she could sleep at all she had nightmares—one, quite recently, about her fourteenth birthday. She was more upset about how it made her feel than she was about the nightmare itself; inexplicably, it was worse waking from it than being in it.
She had registered for double the normal hours, having lost a semester when she switched majors, and wanting to graduate on time. Her teachers liked her ability to lose herself in whatever role she tried, and others commented favorably on her performances. When she had played Rosalind, there was a certain pleasure in being recognized. But she was already discovering that she had no taste for being in front of people. There was something in herself that she defied by continuing to perform, though her sense of this was visceral, flying in the face of her own increasingly introverted feelings. Her discomfiture after the performances, her absence at most of the celebrations and cast parties and social gatherings, had become the subject of talk among the other members of the drama school. She went her own way; and people began to leave her alone. Even Dominic and Sheri kept a certain respectful distance at times.
The panic she managed mostly to keep at bay, though trying to decide what she might do after college, after all this relentless work, was cause for anxiety, too. The anxiety, whatever its source, plagued her. When one was suffering through this kind of distraction, it was nearly impossible to concentrate on memorizing large masses of text. It was difficult enough just getting through assigned reading.
On one of the last football weekends of her senior year—a crisp, breezy Saturday with the smell of burning leaves in the air and a pleasant coolness that seemed a kind of mingling of the fading summer and the coming winter—Sheri cajoled and begged her into accompanying her to the game. The Cavaliers won big, though since she didn’t know anything about football she couldn’t make much out of the confusion of sun-reflecting, bright-clad, helmeted bodies slamming into each other on the earth-churned grass. But she discovered that she liked the spectacle, and spent much of the game watching everyone else’s happy reactions, surprised by how pleasing that was. “What an amazing thing,” she said to Sheri, as the game ended. “That was fun.”
Sheri, whose speech was punctuated by what Lily thought of as a sort of aural italics, said, “You know, a couple of these boys might end up rich. Does Dominic like football?”
“We don’t talk about it, but maybe that’s me.”
“I don’t much like it, but I go.”
They strolled over to one of the post-game celebrations, at a small apartment in the center of the campus. People talked too loud, trying to be heard over each other, recounting the high points of the victory. Their enthusiasm made Lily conscious, by contrast, of her own lack of school spirit.
Sheri said, “That’s the first game you ever saw? You never even saw a game in high school?”
No.
She turned and, with a wave of her bony, hard-knuckled little hand, addressed the others in the room. “Everybody, this girl has never been to a damn football game. Today was the first game in her whole damn life. I mean, can yew imagine?”
Lily, feeling caught out, raised her eyes against the urge to look down.
And out of the group, a young man emerged, stepping forward to say that he could imagine it: he had never been to a football game, either, including today’s game; the truth was, he didn’t like the sport. Several people hooted good-naturedly at him, and a girl in an athletic-lettered sweater that hung on her like a robe put a paper party blower in his face and blew it.
He was built like someone who could play football—broad across the chest, with beautifully defined musculature in his arms and shoulders. Lily gazed into his hazel eyes and her embarrassment changed; she saw in them an incitement to stand with him, separate from these others, with their banners and their noisemakers and their letter jackets and sweaters.
Sheri started to say something, and Lily interrupted her, speaking only to him. “My name is Lily.”
He extended his hand. “Tyler.”
On an impulse, she stepped inside his offered handshake, stood on her toes, and kissed him full on the mouth. He seemed surprised, then kissed back. Everyone was watching them.
“Well,” Sheri said, “can yew believe this country? Happiness just walks up and says howdy.”
“Let’s go out on the balcony,” he said with a grin.
Lily took his hand, and there were whoops from the others. It was an exhibition; she felt the color rising to her face and neck, walking with him toward the sliding glass door leading out of the room. She told herself, as they stepped onto the balcony overlooking Rugby Drive,
that in the morning he would be elsewhere, and so would she.
He said, “We’ve got them all talking now.”
“I guess so.” She felt a little stab of embarrassment at the dullness of her answer, and she tried to smile at him, feeling the gesture as a kind of spasm in her face.
“Are you cold?”
She pulled her sweater up from her waist, where it had been tied, and put it on, accidentally striking him on the side of the face with her elbow.
He said, “Whoops.”
“Oh, God—did I hurt you?”
“I think I’ll make it,” he said, with a soft, good laugh. A murmurous baritone music was in it; it calmed her.
From where they stood, looking beyond the grass field, they could see cars waiting at a light, turn signals flashing. He gazed at her, and she was aware of the boniness of her body under her jeans. She had felt skinny and unattractive, yet just now, for a brief few seconds, it didn’t seem to matter.
As though something in her thought produced it, there came Sheri’s voice on the other side of the curtain: “‘Oh, Romeo, wherefore art thou?’ Thou silly son of a bitch.” The whole room laughed. And Tyler laughed, too, in a murmur, staring. Lily looked out at the stars beyond the rooftops across the way. The moment had turned again; she felt the nerves of her stomach. She wished to seem experienced, adventurous, even alluring, without being cheap—wished, in short, to be the kind of young woman she had so recently played: someone who could get away with taking the small step across a room full of strangers to kiss full on the mouth a man she had just met.
They were alone. She saw the lights from other parties in other buildings winking into the night. Behind them, the noise of the celebration went on, Sheri rattling about her plans for altering reality, her emphatic alto coming to them over music: something from Paul Simon’s African album with its wonderful close harmonies.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 4