“We’ve been here four years,” Rachel said. She showed for the first time a trace of cautious animation. “A sort of cousin of William’s had it before us, and it was in rather a bad state. We’ve done quite a lot, though you can’t see it. We’re doing things slowly, as we can afford to.” There was timid pride in her voice.
“We’ve decided to do the most important things first,” William said, his tone dry and sardonic. He drew on his cigar, tilting his chin up at them. “We thought we’d do the garden, for example, before the roof. We thought we’d put in a really good shrubbery before we decorated the drawing room.”
His wife’s hand lay without moving on his shoulder; William took no notice of it at all. Emily, watching, found herself suddenly afraid to watch, afraid that he would reach up and brush the hand away as though it were a fly, his gesture heedless, dismissive.
William stirred his coffee with the tiny spoon, then set the spoon down neatly in the emerald-green saucer. He leaned back with his cigar into the cushions. He did not brush his wife’s hand off, he ignored it altogether, as though it did not exist.
There was a long moment of silence. Emily, frozen, could say nothing. She felt as though the air in the room had turned to ice.
“Well, that sounds like a sensible plan,” said Richard, nodding agreeably. He turned to Rachel. “Now, a shrubbery sounds very important. But we don’t have so many of them in America. Would you be very kind and explain to me exactly what a shrubbery is?”
Emily, watching her own good-hearted Richard try to shield Rachel from her husband, felt a wave of gratitude. She was reminded now of Richard’s compassion, the real tenderness of his heart. The last of her anger was gone, and she was sorry.
Now she longed for the evening to be over, for the moment when she and Richard would go upstairs. When they reached the end of the long, grim hallway, as they entered their cold, flowery room, she would turn to Richard as he closed the door. She would not let him take even a step inside the room before she reached him, before she wrapped her whole self around his body, reminding him that he liked her, liked her company, her presence, her skin.
Unpleasant, she thought, repentant, ashamed. She had been, and she was sorry. She was sorry she had been unpleasant, she was sorry she had been argumentative. She was sorry to have hoarded, so malevolently, the things Richard had said. She had been wrong about William, and arrogant about it, and she was sorry for that. But mostly she was sorry she had brought them here. She was sorry they had witnessed what they had—the undisciplined child, the separate bedrooms, the deadly chill.
Here was the risk, and she was sorry to have seen it, terrified.
Asking for Love
“Goodnight, Melissa,” I called up. I waited, but heard nothing back from my daughter. I tried again: “Melissa, I’m leaving now.” I was standing in the front hall of my parents’ summer house in Maine. I was at the bottom of the wide staircase, listening, and Melissa was up on the second floor and did not answer.
Melissa had arrived that morning from a friend’s in Boston. I had come up ten days earlier from Philadelphia, where we live. We were alone in the big shingle house that week, since my parents had gone cruising in their sailboat. Melissa’s room is at the back of the house, over the kitchen, in what was once the servants’ wing. I knew she had the door shut and her Walkman earphones on: she was sealed off from the outside world, and in one of her own. Tacked up on the old soft pinewood walls were her posters of rock groups: images of chaos, explosive, acid-colored. Melissa would be in her faded jeans, torn at both knees, and sitting cross-legged on the sagging iron bed. I could see her, face curtained by the long fall of her soft hair, her eyes rapt and unfocused as she nodded to herself, marking time. She was deep inside a web of syncopated rhythms, staccato sentences, and mocking phrases.
Last year I could have gone upstairs, opened her door, and walked right in. I could have stood beside her and smoothed her hair, and she would have raised her calm blue-eyed gaze to me and smiled. But now things are different, and when I heard no answer, I turned away from the silent stairwell.
John was standing behind me in the hall. Behind him hung an old gilt-framed mirror, its silvery surface flecked with dark spots. With the mirror I could see both his front and his back, both his long, earnest face and the place at the back of his head where his scalp is meekly becoming evident. He is forty-eight years old, tall and slightly stoop-shouldered. He is what he will be, and I like knowing this.
John was wearing a dark green sweater, tweed jacket, khaki pants, and blue boat sneakers. These are clothes worn by all the men I know, including my father, and though I haven’t known John my whole life, he looks as though I have. I know things about him just from the way he looks: I know who he is, and I know I can trust him. This is a comfort, and right now I am eager for comfort. I have just become single, after twenty years of being married. This was my doing, and it was necessary, but it has been terrible in ways I never imagined, and much larger, as though I’d stamped my foot and started an avalanche. So I am grateful for John’s calm presence.
John was listening too for Melissa’s response. He raised his eyebrows politely. “Well?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Let’s just go.”
“Are you sure?” John asked. “You don’t want to just run up and tell her we’re leaving? We’re in no hurry.”
John was thinking of his own daughter, Julia, who is nine, and lives with him. There is a live-in baby-sitter, Hannah, but even so, John would never leave for the evening without saying good night. John compares my behavior with his own, and he believes that I am irresponsible, a lax and heedless mother. I can’t tell him I am not; you can’t tell someone who you are. John will discover for himself what sort of mother I am.
“Melissa’s all the way up in her room,” I said, “with the door shut and the music on. She’s seventeen years old, and she knows we’re going out. Let’s go.”
Still John didn’t move. “But then when will I meet her?” he asked plaintively. “I’ve primped.”
“Primped?” I said, smiling. Only John would use this word.
John nodded solemnly. He smoothed a lock of hair back severely, in a parody of fussiness. At once it fell back over his forehead.
“You primped for Melissa? I thought that was for me. Thanks a lot.” I pushed open the screen door. “Come on, we’re out of here.”
John and I have been seeing each other for eight months, which is long enough for him to have met my daughter. Melissa’s been away at boarding school, but there were times they could have met. At first I put it off because I wasn’t sure John and I would go on seeing each other; later I put it off because I was sure we would. I pictured it going badly: Melissa sullen, John stiff, the air dense with hostility. Later, I was afraid, alone with me, each of them would be self-righteous and critical, each claiming my alliance against the other.
I think John thinks adolescents are like wild animals, leopards or water buffaloes, unpredictable, vividly dangerous. And Melissa doesn’t want to see her mother with anyone except her father. She doesn’t want to see me perfumed and earringed, ready to go out. She doesn’t want a strange man in her living room, smiling at her winningly. She doesn’t want to hear his footsteps, later, on the stairs. She doesn’t want me to be single; she wants me to be a mother.
But now Melissa is here for the summer, and John is here for July. He has rented a house for himself, Julia, and Hannah. He and Melissa will have to meet soon now, but I was relieved to put it off, even for one more day.
Leaving the heavy silence of the house, John and I went down the long staircase that slants across the stone foundation. The house is on a hill, and on the downhill side the rusticated masonry rises as high as a whole story. The rough stone wall is entirely different from the wood-shingled house above it, as though the big, airy, summery rooms were supported by a dungeon.
As we descended, the darkening house loomed over us—the deep porches, the gabled windows, the b
road, shingled roofs. Below us was the pallid circle of the driveway, and beyond it the pine-crowded bluffs that dropped steeply to the shore. Chill air rose up off the channel in tingling, invisible clouds. It was nearly eight o’clock, and the evening was deepening rapidly around us like a dark snowfall, the darkness settling in corners like drifts.
John’s car was a shadow, its silhouette revealed only by reflections, faint gleams along its rounded edges. As we opened the doors, the car filled with light, and we climbed into a radiant private space. Closing the doors with solid thumps we shut out the night, its chill, its dark, its distances. John and I were now shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh within a glowing cave. Outside sounds were gone, and inside ones—breathing, the rustle of clothes—were suddenly loud. I heard the gentle rasp of tweed as John stretched out his arm to the key. The glow fell over us like a tent, like a blessing. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“Hello, John,” I said. I was nearly whispering, but my voice sounded huge.
John turned at my touch and I heard him draw in his breath. He is always surprised by affection, and humbly grateful for it. This saddens me: I think humility should play no part in love. I think love should be inexhaustible, like air, that we should give and take it freely, without thought, without having to ask. I think John deserves love in vast quantities, but he has spent his life among cold and parsimonious women. He doesn’t know what he deserves, and he doesn’t believe me when I tell him.
As he turned to me now, his face lit up.
“Hello, Sarah,” he said. My name in his voice sounded wonderful, those ordinary syllables honored.
“It’s nice to see you,” I said, and I stroked his rough brown shoulder.
“It’s always nice to see you, Sarah,” John said.
John can’t use the word “love.” He is like someone standing on the edge of a high diving board and looking down. He is wavering, riven, churning with terror and longing, unable to risk that vertiginous step into the singing air. He’ll do it, I know, he’ll choose passion and jump. He’ll give himself up to that swift, ecstatic freefall, to the wild explosion of foam, the jubilant embrace of deep water. I know this, so I don’t care how long he takes. He’ll find the moment, and he’ll take the leap.
John’s long face looked fervent and noble, and his eyes shone behind his polished glasses. John actually is noble, honorable. It is one of the things about John that I love; another is the way he kisses.
I closed my eyes, breathing in his cool, dark, salty smell as he put his mouth on mine, and it happened again. This is something that never fails to surprise me—this sudden melting, turning-to-gold sensation. Before I married Michael I thought all sex was good sex, I thought good sex was a given. Now I’ve learned that it’s not a given but a gift. Now I know that a man you believe you love can turn your body to lead. He can slow your blood and chill your flesh and make you ache for solitude. So when John kisses me, I let everything go, and give myself up to this remarkable thing. I close my eyes, and sometimes there are tears in them, I am so grateful. Now I know that what I feel is rare, rare, and I am so glad that John and I have found each other.
The overhead light went suddenly off. John and I were left again in the larger darkness of the night, and we pulled decorously apart: we were saving the rest for later. We smiled at each other, and John smoothed the hair off my face. He reached out again to the ignition, and this time we set off.
The driveway hugs the side of the house, and we drove along the kitchen wing, where Melissa’s room was, through a grove of vast old pines. Here it was suddenly pitch-dark, as though we had passed into another time zone: among those shadows it was deepest night. The artificial glare of the headlights caught the undersides of everything, and the grove looked suddenly unkempt, threatening: the rough bark, the trashy litter of dead boughs and pine cones lying on the rust-brown floor of needles. It looked like a grim Germanic forest, the lair of some malevolent operatic creature. I was glad of John’s comforting profile, the gleam of his glasses in the dashboard’s dim glow.
The one street in the village was empty, except for a few cars in front of the new restaurant. There are now boutiques in this lobstermen’s village, and the old apothecary shop sells cashmere sweaters and tortoise-shell picture frames. But nothing has been built here in seventy years. The street is still lined with two-story houses, clapboard and shingle, and its silhouette is still a low, nineteenth-century stitchwork of gables, pitched roofs, and brick chimneys.
Inside, the new restaurant was fresh and cheerful, with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, cream-colored walls, and cream-colored wooden chairs. Local views by local artists hung on the walls: sunset on Great Cranberry Island, fog in the pines on Cadillac Mountain. Everything seemed innocent and unpretentious, and in that sturdy comfortable chair, surrounded by images of places I had known all my life, I felt happy and safe. I was proud that I could offer all this to John, and glad that he was here. He had chosen to enter my world, in a serious and public way. We speak through signs as much as words, and though John can not use the word “love,” I knew that by coming here for the summer he had stepped openly to my side.
Our waitress turned out to be an old summer friend of Melissa’s. This year Lainie was suddenly tall, her features subtly altered. She was now a young woman, and beautiful, with a long, fragile face and starry dark eyes.
“Lainie!” I said. “How nice to see you.”
“Hello, Mrs. Talbot,” Lainie said, smiling back. She filled our water glasses from the heavy pitcher, and I watched her narrow tanned wrists flex, the tendons suddenly visible, then vanishing. I felt touched: they are so innocently strong, these young women. They are so benign that we forget their strength.
“How’s Melissa?” Lainie asked.
“Great. She just got here. She’d love to see you,” I said, then wondered if she would: I’m no longer sure of what Melissa wants. To make up for my own uncertainty I added, “You look wonderful, Lainie,” which was true.
“Thank you,” Lainie said. Her smile was diffident but unsurprised, and I was glad that she’d heard this from others.
This transformation from girl into young woman is a miracle, like a flower revealing itself. I was glad it had happened to Lainie, glad it was being celebrated. I thought of Melissa, who was still struggling to free herself from the finespun cocoon of childhood.
When Lainie left, John asked, “Is she the same age as Melissa?” I nodded, and John looked down at his menu.
“Why do you ask?” I said, wary. “What are you thinking?”
John only shook his head, without looking up.
“They aren’t so different, Lainie and Melissa,” I said, defensive. “I don’t know how you imagine Melissa.”
“I only know what you tell me about her,” John said.
“And?” I said.
“You don’t tell me the wonderful things about her,” said John. “You tell me about the things that make you unhappy. That she came home for Thanksgiving and didn’t speak to you for four days.”
I was unprepared for this. Hearing John say it easily, out loud, was like a blow: the memory was terrible.
When Melissa arrived home, I had been waiting all day for her. That autumn was my first alone, and it had been hard. The air around me had been infected by misery, and I was looking forward to Melissa’s warmth, her affection, to dispel it.
The hall in our townhouse goes straight through from the front door to the kitchen, where I was waiting. I heard Melissa’s key in the lock, and I was at the door when it swung open. The late-afternoon chill swept in, and noises from the street. Melissa staggered in, dragging her blue-and-green duffel bag, her knapsack over her shoulder. My arms were open: I couldn’t wait to hold her, my warm, sweet daughter.
“You’re here!” I said joyfully.
Melissa was hunched over, sliding the duffel bag in through the door. She didn’t answer. Her head was down, and there was no place for me to put my arms around her.
&nbs
p; “Here,” I said, reaching for the duffel, “let me help.”
“No,” Melissa said, her head still down. “I’m okay.”
She slid the bag past me with her foot. She didn’t look up or touch me. When I closed the door behind her she kept right on going, her head turned away, as though I weren’t there. She slid the duffel along the floor to the bottom of the stairs. There she hefted it and started up, without a word.
“Hey, Liss!” I said. My voice was loud and cheerful, as though she had just forgotten, as though this was an oversight. “Hello!”
Melissa answered with her back to me. “Hello,” she said, her voice without tone. She was at the landing and didn’t turn.
I could see she needed time to herself, so I didn’t answer, or follow her up. That evening I made her favorite dinner, homemade pasta and sausages. When Melissa came downstairs I was in the kitchen. The table was set for two, and at her place I’d put her mail and some packages—little things, funny striped tights, paperbacks, a pretty barrette.
Melissa appeared in the doorway, and I smiled at her.
“Hi, sweetie,” I said. “Bangers and pasta, you’re just in time.”
But Melissa’s coat was buttoned up to her chin, and her face was cold stone. “I’m having dinner with Dad,” she said. She didn’t come in. She didn’t look at the table, at the packages by her plate. “I’m leaving now,” she said. When she opened the door, she let in a great blast of cold air, and after she had gone I felt it in the kitchen, chilling my legs, my hands, my face.
Melissa blames me for the divorce. She believes that I have voluntarily destroyed her world. It’s true that the divorce was my idea, but it didn’t feel to me as though I had much choice about it, really, or any choice at all. Michael, of course, encourages Melissa to blame me. I know what he tells her.
Michael and I disagree: I think that only he and I should be witness to our failure. I think that only we should occupy the smooth and ghastly chamber we’ve created, the doorless cell that still rings with rage, disappointments, accusations. Michael feels that “in a spirit of fairness” he should tell Melissa his side of things. I don’t call this fairness: his side of things is accusatory, informed by rage and hatred. I can’t prevent this, but I won’t contribute to it. I won’t tell Melissa my side of it, I won’t criticize her father to her, I won’t ask her to hate him. I’m waiting for her to realize for herself that there might be another version of this story, that the person Michael describes is not the person Melissa knows. When this happens, Melissa and I will be friends again, and I hope it will happen soon.
Asking for Love Page 11