by Sue Miller
I had to fire Eric. He said he understood. We stood glumly opposite each other in one of the exam rooms, the moat of the gleaming stainless-steel table separating us, and talked about it, about my life, my responsibilities, about Daniel. About Eric’s life, about what he would do next.
I told Beattie I’d had to fire Eric because he’d been repeatedly late for the morning opening.
“Is that so?” she said at the time. And then, some days later, “You did the right thing, letting Eric go.”
“Thanks,” I said, not looking at her.
“Yes, he was too forward for my taste.” I could feel her eyes sharp upon me, hoping for a confidence, a confession—some dirt. But I kept my own counsel. Mine and Eric’s and Daniel’s.
This was it. My history. I assumed Daniel’s was something like it, though he hadn’t ever spoken to me of his attraction to anyone. But perhaps he’d had to say to someone what I said to Davis in Hawaii as he leaned in the doorway to my hotel room: that I’d always assumed about myself that I’d be faithful in marriage.
“Ah!” he’d said then, sounding approving and deflated at once.
I had assumed that. I assumed it still. But it seemed to me now that there might be circumstances so compelling, so out of the ordinary run of the possible, that the old rules, the old feelings, would no longer apply.
The truth was I didn’t know what I would do if I had the choice, and that, too, made me feel distant from Daniel, from my daughter, from what was normally a joyous period of preparation.
Cass and Nora arrived on Christmas Eve, from opposite directions and in time for all of us to go to the ten o’clock service together. Daniel was already at church, so we piled into my car. Nora and Cass were being civil to each other, having a gingerly discussion in the back seat about a band Nora had heard recently in New York, the Little Piggies.
The night was wonderfully clear, and when we got out of the car at church, Sadie and I leaned back dizzily in the frigid air and tried to identify the few constellations we knew in the glowing sky. Cass and Nora danced around us, calling out invented names to hurry us along.
“Why, it’s the Little Piggies themselves!”
“Look! Look! The Jolly Green Giant!”
“And there’s Pater Familias!”
“Check it out! The Lederhosen! Over here!”
“The Alma Mater!”
“Come on, you guys! Let’s go!”
Inside, the church smelled of wool, of candles, of the pine boughs that decorated the altar, and of something vaguely like cinnamon. The service was short, just scriptures and carols and a quick homily from Daniel. The children’s choir did a descant in their piercing clear voices on the last hymn, and it brought unexpected tears to my eyes.
At home we had hot cider with rum and opened one stocking gift each, the beginning of our prolonged ritual. There were lumpy purple mittens for Sadie from Beattie (“She made them herself,” I said). A new fishing lure for Daniel, bath oil for me, a tiny moonstone earring—or nose ring, or eyebrow ring—for Cass. A pair of tortoise-shell combs for Nora’s heavy hair, from Sadie.
Daniel was especially energetic and happy. He kept putting extra logs on the fire, stirring it. He sang to himself as he got us all more cider and cookies. It was the end of a long, demanding season for him, and he had three days with not a lot to do before the Sunday service. I went to bed early, but he said he wanted to sit up awhile with the girls. As I passed through the hall on my way back from the bathroom, I could hear them in the living room, a burst of laughter and then Nora’s voice: “If you strained for a compliment—and I had to, believe me—you might have called it cinema vérité. But it was really just plain home movies.”
“Down-home movies, it sounds like,” Daniel said, and then I heard his loose, light laugh and I shut the door.
When I woke in the morning and turned to his side of the bed, the bedclothes lay rumpled and empty. Daniel was gone, the house was silent around me. I had an odd moment of fear, and then I realized he’d gotten up early and gone to church alone. He often did this on Christmas Day, beginning it in solitary prayer before he came home to our loud and secular festivities. I imagined him there now, sitting with his eyes intently closed in a pew in the chilly nave, the gentle morning light falling on his solitary figure, on the white-painted pews, the gray floors. How sad it was, really, I thought, lying there, that not one of us shared his belief, that he was so alone in this central aspect of his life. Did we even have beliefs? I wondered. I believed in animals, I supposed—their purity, their goodness. Cass believed in music, in cigarettes and coffee and wine and men. Nora believed in getting up early and starting each day carefully dressed, carefully made up. And Sadie? Maybe Sadie still believed in us.
By the time I heard Daniel’s car crunching over the frozen snow in the yard, I was up and dressed, I’d fed the dogs and let them out, I’d made coffee and started the stuffing for the goose. Daniel burst in at the door, and I heard him stomping, sniffling, hanging up his coat and shedding his boots in the back hall. When he came into the steamy kitchen, his cheeks were flushed, his hair was raked up oddly from his hat; he looked like a badly cared for child. His face lifted when he spotted me. He cried out, “Merry Christmas, my darling, my dearest, my sweet,” and crossed to embrace me. His face was cold, bristly. His nose was wet.
“Oh, Daniel,” I said. I kissed him lightly.
“Why pull away? Why, when I adore you so?”
“Do you?” I asked, embarrassed. I reached out and flattened his hair.
“An alternative, just a suggestion,” he said. He raised his finger, as though about to conduct an orchestra. “ ‘And I adore you, my dearest husband.’ ”
“Well, of course, I do,” I said. “Come and sit, and I’ll pour you some coffee.”
We sat down opposite each other at the table. Sunlight had just begun to flicker through the kitchen windows, shifting with the motion of the pine trees behind the house as it edged above them.
“Oh!” I remembered, setting my cup down. “I had a weird dream.”
“Visions of sugar plums.”
“No.” I smiled. “No.” And then I thought better of telling him. “Actually, I can hardly remember it.”
But I did. It was a dream that was familiar to me, though it took various forms. Usually I was still married to my first husband, or Daniel in some way was Ted. This time it had been in a strange, messy house, unrecognizable, and Ted/Daniel kept starting to make love to me, sliding his hand deep into my pants, touching me. I’d woken in the night feeling aroused, bigamous.
“I like it when I can’t quite remember dreams,” Daniel said. “When I feel my brain has its own private life that I don’t necessarily have access to.”
“But if you worked at it, you could reach them. Freud says so.”
“Does he?” Daniel said. “Well, the hell with Freud, I say. I say let the secret life be the secret life.”
I laughed and raised my coffee cup. “Hear, hear.”
He reached over to pat my leg. “There, there,” he said.
Then we both got up, he to shave, I to finish the stuffing and to prepare our big family breakfast. As I sailed the folded white cloth into the air and it bellied out over the table, it caught the first sure shafts of sunlight falling into the room and sank dazzlingly down, like the descent of a blessing, I thought, and I willed myself to record it, to remember.
Early that afternoon, after we’d unwrapped the presents and put the dinner in the oven to cook, Daniel took me ice-skating. We hadn’t gone in several years, but they’d just flooded the town green and the ice was new and smooth.
I was not a good skater. Daniel was, and he glided around and around the edge of the ice, a slim, boyish figure at this distance, bent low, stroking steadily, easily crossing one foot over the other as he swept round the curves. I pushed my slow way up and back, stopping every few trips to rest my sagging ankles and tensed legs by sitting on the wooden bench at the edge of the ice. F
rom here I could see the front of the Congregational church, and behind it, modestly peeping around its corner, our house, in its regularity like a picture of old New England. Smoke puffed from the chimney; we’d left the sleepy, sated girls still in their bathrobes by the fire.
At last Daniel skated up to me, with a flourish of sprayed ice. “Shall we?” he said, and opened his arms to receive me. I slid forward, and he took my hand in one of his and put his arm around my waist. We pushed off, and after a few faltering steps, I got his rhythm. I began to lean with him, now this way, now that. Daniel powered us, his legs pumping hard, his arm around me transferring his strength to me, giving my strokes length and reach. We rode across the smooth, gleaming ice under the bare maple branches, up toward the church with its long pointing steeple, back toward the houses facing it, their doors hung with festive wreaths, Christmas lights twinkling in a few windows. The wind we generated stung my nose and cheeks, but I was exhilarated. Up and back we went, leaning steeply into the curve at each end.
I felt young and strong, I felt I could have gone on like this forever, with just the sound of the rushing air and the skate blades slicing the ice; so that when Daniel let go of my hand and dropped back away from me to skate off again, I wasn’t ready for my own sudden heaviness, the stumplike thickness of my limbs. I stopped dead in the middle of the gunmetal pond. Daniel danced by me, running, leaping, now that he was free of my dragging weight. He was showing off, spinning as he passed, landing on one skate, bending balletically.
I felt lumpen, old, and stiff. I turned around and around in the center of the pond, watching him circle me, full of a childish rage at him but also wanting to call him back, to stop him. To ask, somehow, for his help.
CHAPTER
11
“Can you have a drink?” Eli asked. “Are you driving back this afternoon?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. What I’d told Daniel was that I was meeting Lauren Howe, a friend from Maine, and might spend the night if it got too late. “I may stay over. In any case, yes. A drink.”
He raised his hand, a peremptory gesture, I saw. Authoritative. A gesture that assumed. It excited me, this small thing, the way in adolescence seeing a boy’s big hands on the steering wheel of a car had excited me. Something about their power, their control over my situation, over my life. Something foolish, even willfully foolish. The waiter came and took our order.
We were sitting by the tinted window in the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Boston. On the crowded sidewalk outside the plate glass, pedestrians hurried past, huddled against the cold. The Public Garden loomed dark and mysteriously beautiful across the street. There had been skaters on the frozen duck pond when I got out of the car, and tinny waltz music floating thinly in the darkening air.
“I’m glad you called,” he said.
“I am too.” Though I had felt almost frightened by the sight of him in the doorway, his face questioning the waiter and then opening in what seemed like pleasure as he saw me across the dimly lighted room. “I’d been meaning to for a while,” I said, “but life’s been chaotic. As I predicted.”
“A nice chaos, though, as I imagine it.”
“It was. It was fun. But it was a relief when everyone left.” Sadie had gone back to school just three days earlier, after a long holiday break.
“I’m sure.”
The drinks came and we wordlessly raised our glasses to each other. In the corner, the group of men in dark suits suddenly laughed, loudly. My bourbon tasted smoky and thick.
Eli had begun to talk, speaking of the pleasure of being in the lab again—he’d come from there to meet me—of getting things set up. He said he had stayed late in town twice the week before, he talked about the seductive quality of the solitude, about how he’d always loved the lab at night. He shook his head. “Finally there’s nothing like work, is there?” he said.
I was thinking of him as a young man. The worker bee, we’d nicknamed him. I smiled. “I can’t imagine a life without it,” I said. “Retirement. Doesn’t that seem improbable?”
He agreed. “Impossible, in fact,” he said. He spoke of a restless irritability that had overtaken him at some point late in the fall, like something physical, “like a nervous disorder. In spite of the fact that I was doing a kind of work, dashing around lecturing and attending conferences. It’s not the same, though.”
I sympathized. I talked about the way I felt walking into the clinic. About the sense I sometimes had of being lifted out of ordinary life, of leaving it behind. “Of course, it’s different in my work,” I said. “There is no solitude. I mean, I have the animals, with their own personalities and lives. Their own life stories, really.”
He smiled. “I suppose,” he said. “Sure. Arthur had one, after all. For me, though . . .” He paused, looked out the window a moment. “For me, work has been my life story, I think.” He was speaking more slowly than usual and without that lightness in tone which normally undercut the possibility of seriousness in whatever he was saying. “Or perhaps a kind of substitute for a life story. I think of myself as a scientist first, before I’m a man, really. That’s why I think . . . Well, when I spoke to you about Jean, about our separateness, that’s why that’s so important to me. Because it frees me for what’s most central.” He looked sharply at me. “I’ve tried to make my life count, and I think I have. I think, honestly, that the world is a better place because of the work I’ve done. And that’s everything to me.”
I smiled. Why? Because this was grandiose, but also, I think, high-minded. I wasn’t used to such shameless high-mindedness. Daniel avoided it, I suppose because high-mindedness combined with piety is such a deadly combination.
He saw the smile. “You think I’m being immodest,” he accused. “I’m not, I assure you. Crossing this blood-brain barrier is pivotal, absolutely pivotal, to curing all kinds of diseases.” He lifted his hands and began to count them off, finger by finger. “Cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, even spinal cord injuries. All of them will have treatments eventually—soon. Some do already. But no way of getting them across the natural blockade in the brain.” And he began carefully to explain to me the applications of his work, its importance in various of these treatments. It made me think of the night when he’d explained his research to me on Lyman Street and of my sense then of seeing a different Eli. The Eli he’d become, I thought, watching him now. The Eli he’d grown into.
He was talking about the impenetrability of the capillaries in the brain, their lack of porousness, what he called the “tight junctions” between cells. He talked about some other approaches for getting drugs across: temporarily shrinking the cells lining the capillaries so the drugs could, for a short period of time, pass through. Or surgically implanting them. “But the most efficient way, the way that will help the maximum number of people—and will have application with the maximum number of drags—is what we’re trying to do with nerve growth factor. Essentially it’s like smuggling it across,” he said. “You get a molecule that’s allowed to cross, one with its own transport system, and you ask it to be your mule.” He grinned. “To carry along the molecule you want to get in there.”
It seemed of great importance to him that I understand all this, and so I took care to be sure I did. The exchange was, for me, exciting, in part intellectually, but in part also because I sensed he might be wooing me with this. At one point he actually took his pen out and drew on a napkin the way the transport proteins ferried substances across from the bloodstream to the brain cells waiting outside the capillaries. The black ink trembled and blotted on the soft paper.
I was aware of the beginning of a kind of physical restlessness in myself, an eagerness that was not yet fully sexual but could be, I could tell. I was titillated by Eli’s seriousness, by his clarity about his work, by the work itself, truly. What else? By his reference again to the separateness in his marriage. Even by the way he spoke my name as he explained things.
So it seemed somehow an interruption in everythin
g when he suddenly sat back, looking intently at me, and said, “Do you mind if we talk about Dana?”
But then I realized that of course this was part of our intimacy too. Of course we would. When I first thought about seeing him again—when Jean brought Arthur to me—that was exactly what I’d assumed we’d speak of sooner or later: Dana, the past, who we were then.
“No,” I said. “No, I’d like that.” This will slow us down, I thought. Yes, let’s slow down. Nothing has to happen. Nothing. “It’s wonderful to think of having someone to talk about her with, actually. After all this time.”
He looked out the window for a long moment. And then at me, with an expression on his face I couldn’t read. He said, “Did you know she and I had been lovers?”
“Yes. Dana told me that.”
“Did she?” He seemed, momentarily, surprised. “Well, she told everyone everything, didn’t she?” He shook his head, fondly. “She was the second woman I’d slept with, in my meager sexual life of the time. I was terribly in love with her.”
“That I didn’t know.”
“No one did. Including Dana, strangely enough.”
“So you just—what? Sat on it? Kept it secret?”
“No. No, I tried to tell her. I did tell her. That’s the ‘strangely enough’ part. Because in some sense she didn’t hear me. She wouldn’t hear me. She . . . Well, she was a very powerful person in some ways, you know. What she wanted was for us to be friends. Just plain old friends. That’s how she thought of us. So”—he made a face—“that’s what we were.” His hands were cradling the squat glass his drink had come in, sliding it a few inches back and forth across the tabletop. “It was she who brought me into the house; did you know that?”
I shook my head.
“Yes.” He nodded. “And at first, foolishly, I thought it was another kind of invitation.” He smiled, his self-mocking smile.