by Alison Lurie
“Uh—yeah.” You’re so beautiful, he thought.
“For me, writing is a sensual act. Well, you must know. It’s like that for most artists, isn’t it?” Delia turned slightly away, glancing out of the window as if she saw a procession of artists passing.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” he agreed, swerving around toward her, his mind blurred by a surge of pain and the impulse toward another sort of sensual act.
“I’m sure I am,” Delia said, stepping away as if she had intuited what he was planning. Her voice had strengthened and lost its murmuring, confiding tone.
“I—you—” Alan uttered inarticulately, putting one hand on the pain in his back.
Delia did not reply. She felt about on the carpet for her shoes, slipped her feet into them, and moved toward her desk.
“You know, I think I’d like to work now,” she said.
“Okay. I’ll let you.” Alan heard a hurt, resentful overtone in his voice. A few moments ago he had felt closer to Delia than to anyone in the world; now she was speaking to him like a polite stranger. Or an impolite one. “Well, so long,” he added, attempting an equal unconcern.
“Mm.” Delia sat down at her desk, drawing a sheet of pale-green paper toward her and picking up a pen. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she added casually, glancing up. “I heard from Jacky Herbert yesterday. He really likes your paintings.”
“He likes them?” Alan felt suddenly out of breath
“Mm,” she said after a pause. “He wants to meet you.” Again she turned away,
“He wants to meet me when?”
This time Delia did not even seem to hear. Alan stood for a moment staring at her bare flushed arms and her thick sheaf of hair. As he took a step toward the door, one of the slices of dust-filled sunlight that escaped from between the heavy velvet curtains slashed and suddenly blinded him. Stumbling with suddenly renewed pain, he left the room.
NINE
In a campus coffee shop known as the Red Bear, Jane and Henry Hull were having lunch. It was heavily cloudy outside the window, and damp yellow leaves splattered the lawns, but Jane’s spirits were not cloudy or damp. More and more she looked forward to these lunches, which occurred more and more often. They no longer made her uneasy, since all this time Henry had never made the move she had guiltily desired and dreaded. Clearly she was safe with him: all he wanted was a friend, a friend who also had an invalid spouse.
Mainly they spoke of ordinary subjects—local and national news events, films they had seen, their own histories. Jane now knew that Henry had at one time or another been a waiter, an advertising executive, a counselor of troubled adolescent boys, a taxi driver, and a high school teacher. At present he was a freelance editor. “What that means is, somebody who knows something but can’t write, puts together a book,” he had explained. “It’s on weather forecasting, or city planning, or Colonial history, or whatever. The information is all there, and there are readers who want it—but the prose is clumsy and the organization is confused. So they send the manuscript to me. And the worse it is, the longer it takes, the more they pay.”
As a result of his profession, Henry knew a lot about some unusual subjects. “When I take on a project I sometimes think, Oh, this won’t be very interesting, but I always get hooked. Did you know, for instance, that you can tell whether the moon is waxing or waning by whether its horns point east or west?”
“I did, actually,” Jane had admitted. “You need to know that if you have a garden, because you have to plant aboveground crops when the moon is waxing, and root crops when it’s waning.”
“You really believe that?” Henry said, smiling.
“I don’t know; but I planted my carrots at the wrong time this year, because of Alan’s operation, and they’re not very good—pale and kind of tasteless. That’s why I didn’t bring you any.” Jane had continued giving Henry her excess vegetables, and he in return (in spite of her protests that the vegetables were free) insisted on paying for their lunches.
She had learned that Henry had two grown children by an earlier marriage, both successful yuppies. “I love them, and they love me, but they’re more serious and grown-up than I am by now. Their attitude is, what crazy thing is Dad going to do next? The trouble is, I don’t usually know the answer myself.” Jane, in turn, had confided that she and Alan hadn’t really wanted children.
“Really?” Henry said.
“Well, no. That’s not exactly so,” she amended. “We wanted them, but we didn’t want to adopt. Alan didn’t think he could ever feel the same about a child that wasn’t his.”
“Ah.” Henry gave her a steady look. “And could you?”
“I—” Jane swallowed. “I thought maybe I could,” she admitted. “But it’s not right to have children that one parent won’t ever love.”
“I suppose not,” Henry said slowly. “You know what’s so remarkable about you?” he added. “You always try to say what’s true, not what will make you look good or please the person you’re speaking to.”
Yes, maybe, she had thought. But that’s partly because you’re the person I’m speaking to.
For Jane, the most important subject of their conversation was what Henry had proposed that day by the lake: the problems of being a caregiver. Theoretically she could have spoken of this to her women friends, and in the past she had tried to do so. But their first question was always, “How is Alan doing?” Often it did not occur to them to ask how she was doing. After all, she was perfectly healthy. Only her mother had ever suggested that Jane’s role might not be an easy one. “Yes, it can be hard,” she had told Jane. “You just have to do your duty the best you can.” It was her mother’s standard solution to the problems of life, but one that had begun to work less and less well for Jane.
Even with Henry she had resisted the topic at first. “Really, I shouldn’t complain,” she had said. “It seems so disloyal.”
“Of course you should complain,” Henry had replied. “Besides, if you don’t, I can’t either.”
“Well.” She smiled.
“Do you think I’m disloyal?”
“No. Not really.” In Jane’s opinion, it was quite reasonable to complain about Delia Delaney, a deeply self-centered person whose headaches were, if not wholly fraudulent, certainly manipulative. But Henry never said anything negative about Alan, and she had therefore resolved to refrain from criticizing his wife, though sometimes she almost slipped.
“We both need to let off steam,” Henry said. “It’s better and safer this way. If we don’t, it’s going to explode and burn someone.”
“I guess you’re right,” Jane said. She imagined a cloud of scalding hot steam bursting from his mouth and engulfing Delia. How she would scream, she thought.
“Absolutely.”
Jane had not protested again, though sometimes she would take an awkward step back after revealing the latest problem: today, Alan’s sluggishness about doing the exercises that had been prescribed for his back. “He keeps putting them off, and then when he finally starts he groans so, you can hear it all over the house. He wants me to come running and tell him that he must stop if it’s hurting so much, and bring him a glass of grapefruit juice and his icepacks.”
“It’s like that with Delia too. Misery loves company. I used to think that meant that miserable people love to be with other miserable people. That could be true too, sometimes. But lately I think it mostly means that they need for us to be there and see them suffer, and be miserable too.”
“Well, yes. Sometimes it seems that way,” Jane admitted. “Like last Sunday I was going to have lunch with a friend. I’d told Alan about it the day before, but when I said I was leaving he acted as if I hadn’t. ‘Oh, do you really have to?’ he said. I felt terrible, because I knew he had had a bad night and was in awful pain. And of course I didn’t have to go. I just wanted to.”
“And did you go?”
“Yes, eventually, but I maybe shouldn’t have.” Jane sighed.
“If you�
�d stayed, would Alan have felt better?”
“Maybe. At least I could have made him lunch. Well, I did make him lunch, and left it in the fridge, but it’s not the same.”
“Uh-huh. They want us there when they want us there. And then when they don’t, they don’t.”
“Alan always wants me there,” Jane said. “But then he’s in pain all the time, not just now and then.”
“At least you always know what to expect,” Henry said. “I can never tell from one day to the next whether Delia will get a sick headache and everything will have to be canceled. She’ll be dressing to go out to dinner, and suddenly she’ll collapse and throw up, and I have to get on the phone to make excuses, and then go mop up the bathroom.”
“I thought she could tell when a headache was coming on,” Jane said.
“Not always.” Henry looked at her. “You think maybe her migraines aren’t real, but you’re wrong.”
“I didn’t say that—”
“But you thought it, I can tell. And it’s not true. When one hits, Delia’s in agony. She wouldn’t ever choose to lie for twenty-four hours in a dark room; she loves life too much.”
“Mm,” Jane said, ashamed but only partly convinced. The headaches may be real, she thought, but Delia uses them. Did that mean that Alan too used his pain? That he deliberately—But at that disloyal thought she felt a pang of acid guilt like heartburn.
“Her life hasn’t been easy,” Henry told her. “Bad things happened to her when she was a kid. Her parents were both drunks, and she saw things no kid should see.”
“Um,” Jane said, remembering Delia’s story “A Woman Made of Fire,” one of her most famous works. The language of this tale was so poetic and allusive that it had been hard for Jane to figure out what happened. But it seemed to be about a beautiful princess who is vaguely but horribly attacked in the forest at dusk by a man or monster with a burning torch. As a result she is both damaged and metamorphosed, burnt and transfigured. Afterward she goes to live alone in a tower by the sea. Her hair grows very long, and many men come to court her. They stand on the shore and call up to her, they sing and play musical instruments and recite poetry. She looks out of the window, but never lets down her long burnt-gold hair to them.
According to Lily Unger, this tale was supposed to be based on a traumatic event in Delia’s early adolescence, and the burning torch was really a flashlight. “When she was fifteen, sixteen, Delia was kind of a freak,” Lily had explained to Jane. “The other kids thought she acted superior, put on airs. She wore strange clothes, and she used to go out and walk in the woods after supper, talking to herself. So one evening some boys followed her into the woods, four or five of them.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” Jane said now.
“She was damaged,” Henry said. “It was a long time ago, but nothing can make it up to her.”
“But you try,” Jane suggested.
“Yeah. Sometimes.” Henry shrugged.
“It’s different for Alan,” she said. “His life has been pretty easy. Until he got ill, I mean. And it could be so much worse—I mean, he doesn’t have a fatal disease or anything like that.”
“Neither does Delia. But in a way that makes it harder. I remember when my father was terminally ill. Of course he was miserable, and my mother was totally wiped out. But they both knew that one day, maybe quite soon, it would all be over. For us, it could go on the rest of our lives.”
“Yes,” Jane admitted. “I’m afraid of that sometimes.”
Henry stirred his tea slowly. “I figure there’s no point in looking too far into the future. What we have to do is enjoy the world as much as we can right now. It doesn’t do anyone any good for us to give up things and be miserable.”
“I don’t know.” Jane laughed unhappily. “I mean, I’ve thought sometimes maybe it does. If Alan sees me enjoying myself he might feel worse because of the contrast.”
“Maybe,” Henry said. “But I don’t think it works that way. At least not with Delia. She wants me to be strong and well and happy, otherwise I might not be able to take care of her, or I might not want to. She doesn’t want me to get worn down or fed up. That’s odd. Why isn’t it ‘worn up’ and ‘fed down’?”
“I have no idea.” Jane laughed. “You sound like Bill Laird. He’s always looking sideways at words, turning them around in his mind.”
“I used to do a lot of that,” Henry said. He sat back and pushed his empty plate away. “You get in the habit.”
“Oh yes?” Jane looked at him, admiring his thick eyebrows, high color, and thoughtful meditative expression. “You mean when you were in advertising.”
“Yeah, and when I was a poet.”
“You were a poet? I never knew that.”
“I don’t admit to it very often. But I was. It was a long time ago, but I even won an award for it, and I published two books. They were mostly white space, though, because I was a minimalist.”
“Really? So why did you stop?”
“I didn’t exactly stop. My poems got shorter and shorter, and then they just sort of disappeared, and it was all white space.” He smiled and ran one hand around the collar of his denim shirt, as if it had suddenly become too tight.
“I’m sorry,” Jane told him. “But maybe you’ll start again sometime.”
“That’s what Delia always used to say. She got quite angry with me when I wouldn’t even try.”
“But that’s not fair,” Jane exclaimed in spite of her previous resolve. “It’s not the sort of thing you can just decide to do.”
“Depends on how you look at it.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t you like me better if I were a poet?”
“No, why should I?” She laughed.
“Delia would.” His face darkened; he looked away from her, out of the window, which was beginning to blur with rain.
“Well, I like you just fine the way you are,” Jane said, feeling a rush of distaste for Henry’s wife. At least Alan never wants me to be something else, something I can’t be, she thought.
Henry turned back; he looked at her, then slowly smiled. “And I like you just fine the way you are,” he said, less casually.
Jane caught her breath; for a moment the whole room blurred like the rain-washed quadrangle outside. Something is happening, she thought. Alarmed, she tried to block it.
“I’m afraid Delia has the same sort of idea about Alan,” she said rapidly. “She’s convinced him he’s an artist; and now she’s convinced some friend of hers who owns a gallery in New York to show his pictures of ruins.”
“Yeah, she told me about that.”
“Of course Alan was very excited when he heard the news. Over the moon, he said himself. He didn’t say anything about his back for nearly a whole day. But I’m worried about the whole thing.”
“Worried?” Henry raised his eyebrows.
“You know, what people will think.”
“What’s that?” He smiled, but Jane did not.
“They’ll think Alan’s making fun of death and destruction.”
“Really? Do you think he is?”
“No, of course not. Alan would never do that. Anyhow he made most of those drawings long before September 11. But most people won’t know that. They’ll think it’s a joke about the World Trade Center, and they’ll get angry.”
“Is anyone angry at him now?”
“No,” Jane admitted. “But not many people have seen his drawings.” I’m angry, she realized. Not at the drawings, but at Delia, for charming and bullying her way into Alan’s life, making him jump over the moon like the stupid cow in the nursery rhyme, making him forget his pain, when I’ve been trying to do the same thing for a year and a half without success. It was so wrong, so unfair—It also was something she couldn’t complain to Henry about.
“I’d better get back to work,” she said instead.
“Okay.” He stood up. “Hey, it’s really raining,” he added as he pushed open the door. “Never mind, I have a big umbrella
. Here, take my arm.”
Splashing though puddles, Jane and Henry made their way across campus toward the Center, where his car was parked. But though her feet were soon wet, the rest of Jane remained surprisingly dry. This struck her as odd; then she realized that because Henry was shorter than Alan by several inches, his big black umbrella shielded her better. Also he held his arm closer to his side, so that Jane’s hand was pressed against his rough tan duffle coat. A shiver ran up her arm toward her shoulder, and farther, and she had to remind herself forcibly that she was suffering from prolonged sexual frustration, and that Henry was just a friend who was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hopkins County.
“I’d like to come in for a moment,” he said when they reached the Center.
“Yes, of course.” Jane held open the heavy door while he shook out his umbrella. “How’s everything?” she asked Susie.
“Very quiet. Nobody’s here but Charlie and Selma.”
“Yes, I know.” Neither Alan nor Delia had come in that day—Delia almost never did on Fridays—and the fifth Fellow, a dignified Yale sociologist in his fifties called Davi Gakar, was on his way to a wedding on Long Island with his family.
“Oh, look at that rain.” Susie opened a pink-flowered umbrella. “I’ll be back in an hour. Oh, I forgot, Selma wanted me to remind you that she’s screening all Delia’s calls. Says she’s Delia’s watchdog.”
“Yes, I know,” Jane repeated without enthusiasm. Somehow, over the past few weeks, Delia had got everyone at the Center working for her. Selma took her phone messages, Susie typed her manuscripts and letters, Charlie brought her coffee at the weekly lunch, and Davi Gakar passed on his New York Times every day. “I expect she’ll get tired of it after a while.”
“Actually I don’t think she will,” Henry said as the front door closed behind Susie.
“No, maybe not.” Jane recalled the look of doglike devotion that Selma sometimes directed toward Delia. At least Alan isn’t working for her, Jane thought.
“Delia understands the use of obligations,” Henry said, following Jane into the office and sitting on the edge of her desk. “She knows how to bind people to her with them. When you do something for Delia she’s wonderfully grateful. She makes you feel that she couldn’t survive without your help, and that you have a big part in her fame and success. But that’s not what I wanted to say.” He leaned toward Jane and put one hand on her arm. “I w-wanted to say—to tell you—” He stumbled over the words.