“That did cross my mind,” she said.
Buddy nodded, and drove slowly on, and made another turn. To her horror, Lily recognized the street. “There it is,” she said.
And Buddy stopped the car. Before them was a massive, furiously upward-rushing conflagration, a house, the house, the same one Lily and Tyler had decided to rent. It was completely engulfed. The roof had partially collapsed; the windows were all charred frames and licking fire. Tyler said, as if only now realizing it, “That’s—oh my God. That’s—” He didn’t finish.
For a long time, no one said anything. They watched the movement of the firefighters hurrying back and forth in the wild intermittent radiance and darkness, the arterial pulsing of the emergency lights, the bending, heavy streams of water from the fire hoses disappearing into the flames.
“Now that’s a freaking portent,” Nick murmured. “God is watching.”
“Somebody wasn’t watching,” Lily said, through her trembling.
“They’re not gonna save much of that,” said Buddy. He waited another moment, then pulled the car around and headed away. He glanced at Lily in the backseat. “I’m sorry about it, sweetie.”
“You’ll find something,” said Millicent, reaching back to pat Lily’s knee.
The next morning, over breakfast, Tyler and Nick spoke about fate, and how evident it was that Lily and Tyler were destined to remain right where they were. Though Lily understood that they were not serious, she felt the weight of the event anyway, and she let the idea of moving out of the Galatierre house rest for a time. Tyler went on as if it had never been a question; he was too busy at the dealership to think about much else.
He was gone most nights until late, and when he came home he seemed worried and tired, as she was worried and tired. She was finding the work at The Loft taxing, and she went over there less and less.
Tyler was overly solicitous of her. In every circumstance, he seemed less playful. And whenever they were with the rest of the family, it seemed to her that Nick was too playful, too ready to tease or make a joke or a sardonic remark. It made Lily vaguely restless and nervous, as if there were some matter of her knowledge of his marriage that had leaked to him, through Sheri, or through his study of Lily’s face. She had trouble looking him in the eyes; and he seemed to be watching her. His jokes about the play wore on her goodwill, and made her seek to avoid him, without being obvious about it. Often, she took to finding some pretext to leave a room when he entered it, and she tried never to be alone with him.
Tyler unwittingly helped her in this: he didn’t like to leave her alone, and would follow her through the house. She chided him about being too attentive, and he appeared injured by this, lowering his head like a boy who has been called out in school. So she found that she was, in turn, being more careful with him, as though both of them had become rather more delicate than either of them actually was. She attempted to be less watchful of his moods, to try giving him room for adjusting to everything.
It was during these weeks that she realized how strong her need for him was. One night, she had a nightmare that he was cold and distant, turning from her, and she woke in fright, gripping the blanket and trying to catch her breath. She lay close to him, luxuriating in the way he put his arms around her. He murmured something she couldn’t distinguish, and then went back to sleep. She lay wide awake, imagining herself in England, a hundred years ago, the old, habitual way of riding over the dark.
It seemed to her that she missed him more in the days, and that when he came home, his weariness got in the way. They had settled into a kind of mutual companionability that made her think of middle-aged couples, and when she told him this he stooped and put one hand at his back, hobbling across the room like a very old man. “Can I get you something to chew, there, Maw?”
“I’m serious,” she said. But she laughed.
On a Sunday morning in late September, he turned to her in bed and murmured her name, and they made love, making wordless concessions to the changes in her shape. She placed herself astride him, and moved so slowly that he reached up and held her face, gazing at her with an adoring expression, staring, quiet, almost still.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, Lily.”
She lifted herself, so that only the tip of him was inside her, and she moved from one side to the other, then settled, slowly, slowly, on the full length of him, pressing down, then lifting again, still slow. She repeated the motion, talking to him the while, telling him that she loved him, that she loved this with him. This. When he came, he kept repeating her name, holding her by her shoulders and saying it. She slammed herself against him in the last pulses of his coming, and kept doing it, until she came, too, and during it all he kept saying her name.
“Oh, God,” he said. “I love you, Lily. I love you so much.” There seemed something almost mournful about the way he said it.
She said, “Are you all right?”
“Oh,” he said. “Yes. Yes.”
They lay together without moving for a long time, and he grew soft, was sliding out of her. “Don’t go,” she said.
He put his arms around her and held on. “I do love you.”
She straightened, resting her hands on his shoulders. “You make it sound like there’s been some question about it.”
He blinked, reached up, and kissed her breast. “My upbringing, again,” he said. “Remember? Me and happiness?”
“Well, believe it, baby,” she murmured. “It’s right here on top of you.”
Then they were separate, and she could feel him pouring out of her.
He let his arms down, sighing, gazing up at her with a satiate impassiveness that now made her feel his difference from her. That was delicious, too. She lay over on her back, and saw the little imperfections in the ceiling.
Later, they went into town, to the square, and spent time looking in the shops that flanked the courthouse. In Square Books, they found a names book, bought it, and then strolled across to a small sidewalk café, where they ordered brunch, and looked through the book, trying to decide on a name for the baby. She suggested Mary if the baby was a girl, and he said, “Oh, God, no, I don’t like that one. Anything but that. I had a terrible neighbor lady named Mary. My father actually went out with her a few times.”
They found it odd that there were certain names, male and female, that both of them felt adamant about, and in each instance it was because they had known someone with that name, someone they hadn’t liked, or someone who seemed less than attractive. There were several that both of them disliked for these reasons. And there were some that they agreed on, but tepidly. Each liked a few that the other didn’t, and they could see how difficult it was going to be to choose. He liked Maxwell, if it was a boy. She was adamantly opposed to that. She liked Thomas; his fourth-grade teacher had been named Thomas, and he hated the idea. They talked and laughed and planned things, and Lily felt very happy.
She said so.
He shrugged, then reached over and moved a strand of her hair aside from her forehead. “I wonder if I’m made for happiness.”
The rest of the afternoon he seemed a little distracted, even faintly remote, and when she tried to bridge the distance, suggesting with a look that they could go to bed again, he made a joke about being less of a man than she needed, and changed the subject. That evening, they went out with the family to dinner, and when they got home, and had retired for the night, he kissed her and said, “What a glorious day this was.”
Yet as he drifted off to sleep, and lay over on his side, groaning softly with whatever he was dreaming, she had an unhappy sense that something had come between them. The shadows in the room seemed to take on life as lights were turned off in other windows of the house; the dark seemed to move, and the shadows crossed over her, like spirits, bearing the weight of trouble.
Was happiness so bound up with the knowledge that it was also ephemeral? And was it therefore always to be accompanied by the stubborn fear of its loss? Something wasn’t
right. And yet she believed that she had developed an unusual capacity to ruin her own good fortune with this anxiety, this expectation of something going wrong. It was Tyler who had said he didn’t trust happiness. She couldn’t find the answer to any of it, now, and so she berated herself for her morbid imagination, turning in the bed, sleepless and worried, she believed, over nothing.
SHE HAD EXPERIENCED few physical discomforts from the pregnancy once she was past the first trimester. Aside from a few small waves of nausea, she’d had no morning sickness. Her appetite was healthy; usually, and if she had no nightmares, she slept fairly well. She’d even managed to do a little more work on the play.
Often enough, she doubted it would ever be finished.
In the mornings, she looked at herself in the mirror, marveling at the roundness of her abdomen, and at the fact that she hadn’t been able to trace its incremental swelling, no matter how hard she tried. That was herself in the mirror, and as her body had changed she found it impossible to remember its shape as it was before. She marveled at the excitement and fright that she experienced, and it seemed odd that the world could go on as it always had, with its entertainments and sufferings and appointments, while this tremendous thing was happening inside her. She had been told that by September she should feel some movement, and when she didn’t, she worried about that. But her gynecologist assured her in his authoritative way that things were coming along quite normally. He turned out to be right, of course, though Lily worried anyway.
The movements, when they came, little flutters, delighted her, and made her feel involved more profoundly in life than she could find words for; it was like a great secret she possessed, separating her from the rest of the world. It was deeply defining, and calming, too, each time it happened to her. Yet at the same time, when she thought about its significance, it caused her to tremble, and to experience the nameless apprehension that comes to people facing something momentous and unknown.
2
YOU SAID ONCE that you had never been in love with anyone, and no one had ever been in love with you. But you moved with men, rough men, who it is difficult to imagine were gentlemen in all circumstances. What was it about you that gave you the power of setting boundaries they wouldn’t cross (while you were crossing boundaries no white man had ever ventured past)? It must have been more than Victorian dress and custom because those social boundaries were crossed routinely during that era. Your own father crossed them with your mother. In everything I’ve read, I’ve found only the smallest inklings of your true being—the things that made you what you were. Forward-looking, but always dressed in black; funereal, but thoroughly charming, witty, and unforgettably plucky. Plucky the way E. M. Forster meant it about Chekhov—that he was entering the world of the intelligent, the charming, and the plucky.
There were proprieties you paid rigid and absolute attention to, yet you were quite willing to deceive the British Museum authorities by maintaining that you were collecting fauna and looking for species—though you did bring an enormous number of things back with you—when what you were really after was a way into the African mind, into the world of fetish, and religious practices. You claimed not to have any kind of mind for writing, and yet you wrote some of the most beautiful descriptive passages ever rendered in English. Studying you and your contradictions, I ought to feel more comfortable with the contradictions in myself—the fact that I’m a silly little romantic fool when it comes to my husband. And then there’s the contradiction of my feelings for this family, with whom I would like to stay, in exactly the same proportion and force as I would like, also, to leave. I’ve come to love them so, with all their complications and kindnesses. As these weeks have passed, I’ve found that I have less of myself to give my husband, who is carrying some worry I can’t get him to express. Lately it’s hard to concentrate on much of anything. I’ve spoken to Doris several times, and it’s always about the stages of pregnancy, what she’s doing in the house, what Scott and Peggy are up to. We never seem able to say anything about how we feel. I can’t seem to express it to anyone.
I sense this eerie kinship with you, and maybe what I am experiencing most is a desire to be like you. To command my own demons as well as you clearly commanded yours. As it is, I find that in conjuring you as you might’ve been in your time, I’m constantly having to resist investing you with my own unresolved, and irresolvable, contradictions. I find it very hard to accept your belief that women should not have suffrage; that, doing what you did and going where you had to go and seeing everything you saw, you could still hold so fast to the assumptions of your time, assumptions that you yourself, with your life, exploded, or proved false. I admire your outspokenness, and am puzzled by the ways in which you still clung to the social norms. I think sometimes people took you seriously when you were joking, and others took you to be joking when you were serious. But you were determined and quite serious about the duties of a woman, and took the pains to fulfill them as you saw them, even after the journeys and the books, even after you were famous and Charley wasn’t and he belittled your accomplishments by insisting that you continue to serve him, like any paid housekeeper. You lived in a closed world, a repression I can only imagine, assumptions about you that in today’s light seem so cruelly designed to imprison you, and still you broke through to yourself; you went so far; you astonished everybody.
But I sense the facade of your chipper, amusing, discursive speech as a protective shell. And when I think of you, I feel stronger. I have such awful nightmares. I have gotten so big.
ONE MORNING Lily, suffering a bad headache, labored up the stairs for a glass of milk. She found Nick sitting in the kitchen, talking on the telephone. Earlier, she’d fallen asleep, and had a terrible nightmare, and the feeling of it was still reverberating inside her. She had thought there was no one else in the house, and seeing Nick, had emitted a small gasp of surprise. Nick hung up the phone and said, “Hey. I had to come get a box of forms Buddy forgot to take with him this morning. I’m heading into town. Want to come along?”
“Thanks, anyway,” she said. “I’m not feeling all that good.” She averted her eyes, and moved across his field of vision. She almost asked him to stop staring. She had determined to pour a glass of ice water and go back downstairs.
“I’m thinking I’d like to help somehow with this play you’re writing,” he said.
She shrugged, and gave him a little smile. “I’m not writing it, lately. And I don’t really feel much like teasing today, Nick.”
“I’m serious.” His own smile was almost sheepish.
She waited a moment. Evidently, he had no other comment to make. She had expected some sly remark, and when it wasn’t forthcoming, she felt a little at sea.
“You were down there all morning,” he said. “Writing.”
She nodded.
“Do you have to write preparatory stuff? Sketches, things like that to get ready?”
She realized that he was serious. She said, “Right now I’m writing letters. Back there. To her. To Mary Kingsley.”
“I don’t mean it as a joke—but that sounds a little batty.”
“Exactly. That’s exactly it. But they help me think about her. It’s like a journal, really—working notes, say. That sounds less batty, doesn’t it?”
After a pause, he said, “It’s still a little batty. But I think I know the feeling.”
She turned to the refrigerator, and opened it. She had to hold her lower back with one hand, it hurt so much. “Where’s Millicent?”
“Went into town for something. Rosa went with her. You all right?”
“A headache.” She poured the milk and stood there drinking it while he watched. The quality of the light was watery here; it made her think of depths, labyrinthine murk, the dark that the residue of the nightmare had left. She turned and tried to smile.
“I hate back pain,” he said.
“Right now,” she said, “I hate headaches.”
“You’re not very c
omfortable around me,” he broke forth abruptly. “Are you.” There was something tentative in his tone; he had let his gaze drop to the floor.
“Nick,” she said. “Stop being silly. You’re family.”
“Has Sheri told you anything about me?”
Lily shook her head, swallowing the milk. She felt everything Sheri had told her burning in her face.
“You’re sure.”
Putting the empty glass in the sink, she averted her eyes. “What would Sheri have told me?” The falsity of the response felt like a lash on her spirit.
“Well, I’ve had the feeling you’ve been a little jumpy around me from the first.”
“I didn’t know how to take you,” she said. “I didn’t grow up in a big family, Nick.”
He cleared his throat, and looked down at his hands. “All that teasing I’ve done—well. And that first night. I have to admit it. I was crocked. I was trying—I guess I was trying to make friends. I thought if I could make you guys laugh.”
She said, “You know how it is when everyone else has had something to drink and you haven’t? That’s how it is sometimes, with me. Even when nobody’s had a drop. I don’t know why. Or, I do, I guess. I just don’t know how to change it or make it go away.”
“Of course, I’d had a lot more than a drop, that night.”
She nodded, smiling. “I believe that was noticed.”
They were quiet for a time. Somewhere outside, crows sent up a racket.
“You haven’t really answered me about Sheri,” he said.
“Sheri didn’t say anything, Nick. Really.”
“She didn’t tell you about the dirty movie episode? I can see it in your face, Lily.”
She took a few seconds before answering. “That was so long ago.”
Hello to the Cannibals Page 28