The Good Mother

by Sue Miller

  Molly had left a week and a half earlier to stay with Brian in Washington for a month; and Leo and I had been spending most of our nights in his loft, at first out of a sense of adventure and liberation, but then, I realized—for me anyway—it was just as much because I was fleeing the emptiness in my apartment. I didn’t like being there without Molly. Everything around me seemed to refer to her absence. And so we slept at Leo’s and made love for long hours every night, since we didn’t have to get up at any specific time. And often in the hot bright mornings, we’d picnic on muffins and coffee in bed, and then make love again amid the crumbs. Frequently I didn’t get into the lab until the early afternoon, and the rats scolded me for food and attention.

  We had come back to my apartment the night before, though, because we’d had a party in the studio, a send-off party to celebrate the opening of Leo’s show in New York two days hence. We’d all gotten drunk and danced, and someone had spilled beer on Leo’s mattress. At around two in the morning, we’d turned the lights out on the beer bottles, the half-empty plastic glasses and overflowing ashtrays, and walked through the still night to my place.

  We didn’t talk. We hadn’t made love, either. I’d been angry at Leo. The party was mostly his friends, mostly artists. As a group, they seemed to me less genuinely crazy than some musicians I knew; but certainly wilder, more flamboyant. I’d felt accountantlike, orderly, moving among the wild costumes, the exaggerated speech patterns; though I’d danced, and drunk maybe six or seven beers. Towards the end of the evening, there were people sprawled all over the mattress and floor, no one speaking lower than a shout, and the open window gasping for a breeze. I had been quiet for a while, sometimes getting more beer out of the refrigerator or changing a record, or listening to one of them. Leo was watching me from time to time, with that by-now familiar mix of impatience and affection in his face. Finally he reached over and picked up a whistle one of the women had worn around her neck because she was walking home alone. He blew it and there was silence.

  “And now we will have,” he swung his hand towards me, “a word from Anna.”

  Their faces turned to me, not that they really cared whether I talked or not, but because he did.

  I was silent for an eternal minute.

  “I think the word is asshole, Anna,” suggested Clarkie, a tall black woman who taught with Leo at the museum school. They laughed and turned away. I had laughed too, but I didn’t forgive him. Still, I didn’t want to fight—he was leaving for New York the next day—so when we got to my apartment I stayed in the bathroom until I thought he might have fallen into a drunken sleep. When I came to bed he reached for me, but I didn’t respond and he fell quickly back to sleep.

  Now I heard him padding around barefoot, coming towards the bedroom. I turned to the open doorway and watched him walk through it, carrying two cups of coffee. He was naked and his limp penis swung slightly from side to side as he walked. His skin had the luminous quality of eggshells. I felt the familiar dropping sensation in my body, the trigger for desire.

  “You’re awake,” he announced.

  I sat up and reached for my cup. He carefully handed it to me, then crossed to the window and raised the shade, squinting into the bright light.

  “It’s actually nippy out today,” he said. “Move over under there.” He came to the bed and got under the covers with me. His skin felt cool and dry.

  “Mmmm. You’re warm.” He sipped his coffee and set his cup on the wooden box which sat at his side of the bed. “God, just warm me up a little here.” He burrowed towards me under the covers. I took one quick swig of coffee, set my cup down and shifted my body towards him.

  His cold hands wedged between my legs. “Oh God, you’re so warm.” His hands nestled into my crotch. “Oh warm, warm, mmmmm.” We were silent. Our bodies made little adjustments to increase our comfort. His hands got busier between my legs, and I opened them wider to make it easier for him, and concentrated fiercely on what he was doing. As I started to come, he leaned back away from me to watch me thrash around. When I had relaxed he said, “It looked nice.”

  “It was.” I was still breathing unevenly. “But nice is not really the word.”

  “It looked . . . swell. It looked smashing. It looked . . .”

  “What we want is a word, a word which characterizes its way of being nice.”

  He touched my lips with fingers that smelled of me. “It looked fucking nice.”

  I swung my head on the pillow. “That’s just an adverb. A puny modifier.”

  He shook his head too. “It’s no adverb.” He moved onto me.

  “Fucking is not an adverb?” I asked.

  He grinned.

  It was past eleven when we got up. Then we had to rush because Leo had a friend, Peter Damigella, coming over at noon to help him load his paintings for the trip to New York. He had to pick up the Ryder truck before then. I drove behind him on the way back from the rental place in the Valiant, through the sunstruck and barren streets of East Cambridge, the thicket of tiny stores and bars in Inman Square, and then back up past the shopping center to his loft. When we pulled up to the side door, Peter was sitting in his car, a ’62 Volvo with replacement panels of various colors, listening to a tape of jazz, Coltrane I think it was.

  “God, it’s yellow,” he called out. “Fantastic. I’ve got color film.” And he insisted on posing us in front of the truck.

  Peter was a photographer. He let Leo share his darkroom to develop the photographs Leo often used as starting points for his paintings. Peter was wiry and dark, with a mop of curly black hair and a large Zapata mustache. He’d been at the party the night before with a new woman, a model named Maisie. He’d met her doing a brassiere ad. But, he confided in me, she had no breasts. “Little bitty titties, Anna,” he said. “Why would they want someone like that, someone with virtually concave breasts, to advertise bras?” I had told him, honestly, that I didn’t know; and he had gone on to ask the question of many other people at the party, until Maisie, furious, left. Only then did he seem to be able to enjoy himself.

  I still have the photograph he took of us that day. The temperature had risen quickly again once the sun came up, and Leo had taken off his shirt after we’d picked up the truck. I was wearing cutoffs and a red T-shirt. We lean against the hot yellow truck and laugh at the joke Peter is telling us. When I look at the picture now what I see is the slight tilt of our bodies away from each other and the inch-wide stripe of yellow that holds us apart. My eyes are shut, my mouth open. I could either be laughing or crying out in pain.

  It took us over an hour to load Leo’s truck. The gallery, a good one in SoHo, wanted to exhibit all his preliminary work too. Although in every case what Leo ended up with was a large painted canvas on stretchers, part of what was interesting about his work to those in the field were the exacting studies in various media which led up to the finished piece.

  His recent paintings consisted of images, figures, which he wanted to appear as existing at different depths on the canvas, as though you were looking at one through another. In some of the studies for these, he experimented with bringing various figures forward, or pushing them back, trying to see at which level the images should live. He often worked on sheets of clear plastic which he set at different depths in wooden frames with grooves built in the sides. But he also looked at the figures purely in terms of shapes, colors. For these flat studies he worked in tempera on plaster, which drank depth he said, or on gridded steel sheets. All these maquettes were heavy, awkward to carry.

  Peter and Leo shared a joint before they started. I had a drag or two and then didn’t like the way I began to feel. But they sat on the damp mattress and passed the joint back and forth and discussed, laughing, the various techniques they might use to get the plaster studies down the stairs. Peter told Leo about a mutual friend who’d constructed an entire puppet stage in his studio which he discovered was too large to go through the door. He’d had to knock down a part of one wall to get
it out. His landlord had sued him, and it cost him about half of an N.E.A. to have the wall rebuilt.

  “Our tax money,” Peter said. He kissed his fingertips. “Arrivederci.”

  “Not mine,” Leo said. He’d gotten up and had hoisted the first of the plaster studies onto a dolly he’d rented with the truck. He started to slide it across the floor. The wheels wailed.

  “Well, what I mean is tax money,” Peter said. He was still sitting on the mattress, watching Leo. When Leo stopped at the door, he got up and stood by the dolly, poked it with his foot.

  “Why do you pay taxes?” Leo asked. “I don’t suppose that’s occurred to you.”

  “Taxes,” Peter laughed. “We all pay taxes. You have to pay taxes. Otherwise there’s not enough money for the N.E.A.”

  Leo shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I’m a painter. I get the N.E.A.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Peter said. “That’s how Stoney rebuilt his studio.”

  They disappeared into the hall. I began to carry the canvases out to the top of the stairs. Peter and Leo were struggling on the stairs, laughing and swearing at each other. They’d left the door propped open at the bottom, and reflected light from the hot street filled the hallway, along with the jazz from the tape Peter had left playing. The next time I came out with a painting, they were at the bottom, panting in the little rectangle of light. The horn poured in from outside, as though it were the sound of sunshine; and when I passed with the canvas across the top of the stairs, Leo looked up at his work floating above him with amazement stamped on his face.

  When Peter left, Leo locked the truck and came back up the stairs. I was standing in the middle of the studio, near the littered table. I was still faintly stoned. As he crossed the room towards me, I saw us both as images from his paintings: just as sometimes when you’ve seen a powerful movie, you speak, move for a while in ways touched by the behavior of the characters whose lives you’ve witnessed. My memory of that moment is strong. The studio seemed barren, our bodies huge and separate. And in the time since then, my other memories of him have become more like that, like the series of images which echo through his work. I reorder them, angle them one way or another. They become fewer, sharper, as I draw them in my mind, working perhaps towards some final version.

  He was nervous. He embraced me quickly, then crossed to his bureau and pulled on a T-shirt. On the front it read SAL’S FRUITS AND VEGETABLES.

  “Do you have to go right away?” I asked. I wanted to make love again.

  “Jesus. I think so.” He jangled keys, coins, in his pocket. “I feel like that’s my life down there in the truck, I can barely stand here. I shouldn’t have smoked that stuff.”

  It was one of the moments when the dislocation between us seemed absolute, when I would have given a great deal not to feel so mired in my body, my needs; because I could understand so clearly his need to go, to act, to be off and away.

  “Did you get your bag?” I asked. I knew he hadn’t. It sat on the floor by the kitchen table.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Where is my fucking bag?” His eyes found it and he crossed to it. He picked it up and without looking at me again, he walked out of the room. I followed him out the door, locking it behind me with my key. I honestly think he might have forgotten me if I hadn’t trailed along after him, blinded by the sudden darkness of the hall, watching his black silhouette bounce ahead of me into the light at the bottom of the stairs.

  On the sidewalk he turned to me. Standing next to the yellow truck, he seemed to relax a little. He reached over and rubbed my neck. “God, I’m excited,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to come?”

  I shook my head. I’d decided not to for a number of reasons. The first was simply that I needed to catch up with the rats before I went to Washington the following weekend. Our indolent mornings had put me behind schedule. But also I wasn’t entirely comfortable in Leo’s world. And I knew if I went along it would be an effort for me to stay up “to meet and greet the New York freaks,” as Leo put it. And that part of his pleasure would be dissipated by his concern for me, about whether or not I was having a good time.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  I smiled at him.

  “A little anyway,” he said, grinning back. “When the pace slackens, you’ll be there, driving me mad.” He nodded. “True,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “here’s hoping the pace never slackens.”

  We stood, facing each other foolishly, smiling. Then he leaned forward and kissed me gently.

  I looked at him a long moment. This was the first time since we’d met that we were going to be apart. “Is that it?” I asked. “You’re going to leave me mooning around here alone for three days and that’s all I get for good-bye?”

  He dropped his bag and grabbed me, bent me backwards at the waist. Flailing, I felt his lips, his tongue all over my face and neck, in my mouth. Someone on Mass. Ave. whistled loudly.

  Then we stood panting, grinning at each other again. Moisture cooled like a private breeze over my face. “That was to grow on,” he said. He turned, walked to the truck’s door, unlocked it and swung his bag and himself up. The engine started, and the yellow monster eased slowly away from the curb. He beeped twice, froglike and thick as he rounded the corner out of sight.

  By the time I got to the lab, it was two in the afternoon. Even as I turned the key in the lock on the rat-room door, I could hear the animals beginning to stir. When I opened the door, their excitement made a buzzing, a fretful vibration in the air. I turned on the overhead lights, and the low flickering hum of fluorescence provided a steady accompaniment as I began to go through my routines. I fed the rats I wasn’t going to run, caressed them. The sound of the cages sliding in and out made the remaining rats more and more frantic. When I pulled their drawers forward, they’d be riding the front edge, their delicate paws on its lip, sniffing at me, turning their heads sharply from side to side to get me in focus. It may have been the faint aftereffect of the dope, but my senses were somehow dilated. I had an acute feeling of pity and tenderness for the rats that afternoon, their short days beginning with the opening of the drawer, their definition of life, I imagined, formed largely around whatever it was they perceived me to be. When they faltered in the maze, as several of them did, when they took seventy or eighty tries to make the requisite ten right-hand turns in a row, I felt none of the irritation and impatience I sometimes had towards them.

  Once in the long afternoon I stopped for a break, and wound my way through the corridors to the food machines in the basement. As I stood there eating bologna and cheese on Wonder Bread, sipping a diet Pepsi, four o’clock came and went, and the students, released from their classes, flooded past me like water around a rock, talking of parties, teachers, sexual attraction. The silence they left behind them astonished me. I walked slowly back to the lab, my sandals slapping loudly down the tiled corridors. Many of the doors were shut now, happy experimenters having gone home early for a long weekend.

  Under the fluorescent lights in the windowless room, I lost all sense of time. I ran four or five more rats in a haze of tenderness. I was startled when I stepped into the corridor to check the wall clock and discovered that it was nearly seven. I went back in and fed the few rats I hadn’t tested yet, petted them, then washed the animal smell off my hands. I took the charts of the rats I’d done up to Dr. Fisher’s office. He was away, spending the month on Martha’s Vineyard with his family. Before he’d left, he’d picked up in his office; and this evening as I entered it, I was startled again by its uncharacteristic tidiness. His desk was bare, his jackets and sweaters hung in a row on pegs on the wall. The papers on his spare table were stacked, squared off in orderly piles. Even the grains of Cremora and sugar that usually laced the table around the coffee machine had been wiped away.

  I felt utterly solitary, alone in a way I couldn’t remember feeling in a long time, perhaps not since before Molly was born. I sat in Dr. Fisher’s chair, loo
king for a kind of company, I suppose. Through the leaves of the sycamore I could see in the fading light outside the angle of a shoulder of someone walking by underneath, the rhythmic swing forward of his alternating feet. I turned to Dr. Fisher’s desk. Facing me on it was a photograph of a young woman, her hair and clothes in the style of the Fifties, her lips dark and shining around her smiling mouth. She was coming down the steps of some remote front porch. One foot was missing under the circle of her wide skirt. The other was pointed out, wearing a ballet slipper. Her head was slightly bent under the blow of the sunlight. I picked the picture up and stared at it. His wife. It touched me, the notion of his wanting to remember her like this, to think this kindly of her. I knew from Ursula that she’d spent the month just before this vacation drying out in a clinic. And Dr. Fisher himself had told me he was taking more time away from his work this summer than he ought to, but that it was very important to his family that he be around. My notions about the place I occupied in his fantasy life seemed suddenly shabby to me. I set the picture down. I got up from his desk, shoved the new data into a folder in my pile on the spare table and left the office.

  At home, too, my state of heightened awareness persisted, like the sense of deep pleasure in ordinary things you have after recovering from a fever. When I came into the front hall, the last slants of pinkish sunlight fell through the living room windows. I stood in the hall for a moment, then sat in the living room until the darkness had thickened outside, unwilling until then to leave the light’s last traces.

  I walked down the long dark hallway to the dining room without turning on the lights. There, the purplish light from the lamps above the train tracks pulled me towards the piano. The ivories gleamed cold and pure in the light. I sat down and played, from a part of my memory I couldn’t have consciously exercised, all of Mozart’s Sonata no. 7 in F major, a piece I’d had for a recital in my early teens. My fingers looked like someone else’s as they moved across the keys in the strange light.