It was later that afternoon.
“My New York agent called today to tell me about an offer.” Mike was ladling Hungarian goulash onto a plate for Helen. He had been cooking it all afternoon, teaching her how. The table was set, candles were lit, the fading lilies threw their shadows upon the wall.
“What was it for?”
“A novel. I haven’t written one in years. Seems an editor at Random House found an old one of mine somewhere and wanted to see if he could stir me up to write another.”
“For a lot of money?”
“A hundred thousand maybe.” He handed her the plate and she smiled, then she giggled.
“That’s a lot of money.”
“I would do it if I knew a thing to write about. It’s such a tedious undertaking. If I took it on, would you mind?”
“No, of course not. I don’t care what you do if you keep on loving me. And if you cook.” She giggled again. “I cooked so many meals for so many years. Now I am forgetting how. How long have I been here, Mike?”
“It will be two years soon. It doesn’t seem like it, does it?”
“No. It would make up for not letting them make that movie out of Anna’s stories. It’s almost the same amount of money, isn’t it?”
“I might do it. If I can think of a story.”
“I think you should. How would they pay you?”
“Fifty for signing. Sight unseen. Not bad, huh?”
“Lynley called me again. He didn’t apologize for hanging up and I didn’t say anything about it. But it was better, I think.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to tell me he ate dinner with Daniel and Olivia and Niall last night. Olivia is home and she and Daniel are going to New Orleans to see the baby. Daniel’s pouting because Jessie won’t bring the baby there but I guess he’s giving up now. Anyway, Olivia is going back to Tahlequah to spend the summer with her folks. My family! When I’m there I take it for granted, the things they do, the nutty things they do, and their tempers and their red hair. Now, when they call me up, I think it’s some sort of soap opera. I used to help do it.” She looked down. “Only I’m a lead character now, I guess. Even if I stopped getting pregnant every day.”
“They have a lot of energy.”
“They never sit still. There are only two or three people in the whole family who ever sit still. I can sit still. I am very proud of that. At least I don’t get up and pace around the room.”
“You pace, in your head.”
“I do, don’t I?”
“Yes you do. Best to keep you busy. We could get over to the university in time to see a movie if you liked. There’s a Chinese film I’ve been waiting to see. The Yellow Earth. Everyone says it’s spectacular.”
“Maybe it would give you an idea for a novel.”
“It might. You can’t tell where such things will come from.”
The auditorium was packed. Helen and Mike found seats in the back and settled down. All around them students were climbing over each other and stacking books on the floor and handing each other cookies and bars of candy. Finally, the lights went out and the film came on. A movie about pre-Communist China, about deprivation and courage, about arranged marriages and dangerous love, about a world as tight and old and destructive as the ones in which Helen and Mike had been raised. The panoramic views of the yellow hills of central China dazzled the eye, then the camera turned to the huts of the Chinese peasants, with their shining black hair and their shining eyes, their desolation and dark culture and religion-ridden lives. Helen’s hand found Mike’s. She held on to him for dear life. Her body had been sold like that, into marriage and endless childbirth, into the death of possibility. She looked around her in the darkened auditorium. The spoiled young women of the 1990s were all around her, in their messy clothes, with their backpacks and their dissatisfactions. I was having my third child by the time I was that age, Helen thought. DeDe, Kenny, Lynley. They hate me now. They think I’m insane. I guess I am insane. I ran away from my responsibilities. Nothing will save me now and I don’t care. Great lovers lie in hell. I’ll lie in hell with him. I’m never going back, not for a moment. They can do anything they want to. They can steal everything I have. They can do anything, if only my children didn’t hate me. I don’t want them to hate me. I wish they’d come and visit.
“Are you okay?” Mike whispered into her ear. He pulled her arm closer to his. She was going down. He could feel it across a room, when the enormity of what they had done dawned on her. “You want to leave?”
“No. I’m fine. Shhhhh, they’ll get mad if you talk in here.” She lay her head upon his arm. The movie continued. The lovers were caught and then destroyed. The landscapes claimed their victims. The lights came on. The students gathered up their backpacks and their books and toggle coats. They began to file out of the auditorium. Helen and Mike filed out after them. They walked out into the cool night air and began to walk in the direction of the apartment. When they were out of sight of the students, Helen took his hand and held it as they walked.
“It was a beautiful movie,” she said. “I can’t believe they have cameras that can make the mountains seem like they are in the room. Even on that little screen.”
“The youth group of the Chinese Communist Cinema Production Company made the film. It was beautiful, wasn’t it? Disturbing.”
“It was like that in Charlotte. Just like that.”
“It was like that in Dublin. It is like that in most of the world.”
“Will things ever change?”
“If the young have their way. My students are a pretty canny lot. They see through most of the cant, but they have bought another load that’s almost worse. Most of them live off their parents until they’re thirty years old. It never ceases to amaze me. Still . . .”
“Still what?”
“They’re just striving to find a way to live like all people do. Trying to figure it out and find some safety and a place to love.”
“Do they find it?”
“Not many of them.” They had come to their apartment building and went inside and went up to their apartment and Helen made hot chocolate and got out vanilla wafers and they ate and drank and then went into the bedroom. “I love you,” Helen said. “It’s the first time in my life I have even begun to know who I am. Some days I know. I look around and all the Helens I used to be seem like counterfeits and I can’t believe I inhabited them. On other days it’s this Helen who seems a dream.”
“Come here to me. Get closer. It’s only tonight, Helen. We don’t have to live in any other moment. Only this one, you and I together.” He began to move his hand up and down her soft back, past the roll of fat around her waist and the soft hips and the loins that had given birth five times and still were beautiful and tender. He took off her gown and her underpants and turned off the light and began to move his lips across the skin of her stomach. She was so responsive. He had never touched a woman who was so responsive. He could make her come in thirty seconds and he gloried in it and he did it.
In Charlotte, Helen’s brothers were discussing children.
“The hostage factor,” Niall was saying to Daniel. “Giving hostages to fortune.”
“I’ve never really understood that,” Daniel answered. “Explain that to me.”
“Well, as far as I can tell from observation, it’s this. You can bear misfortune or bad luck or even death. You either fix it or you bear it, but when it is your children, or in my case, my brothers and sisters, it isn’t that easy. When they suffer, you can’t fix it and you can’t bear it, and you are doomed to watch it.”
“Niall, you know what’s wrong with you?”
“What’s that, baby brother?”
“You say doomed too much. It’s from reading those goddamn musty books when you could be watching television.”
“You’re probably right. No one on television is doomed. Doom is not a word they understand, or even death, really, unless it’s caused by murder
.”
“Let’s get a brandy and go sit on the porch for a while.”
“Why not? If you insist, I might. E. A. Robinson.”
“And quit quoting poets, while you’re at it. Use your own words when you want to make a point.”
“‘The bird is on the wing,’ the poet said, and the poet was right. That’s also called getting the last word. Pour the brandy, since we’re doomed to drink.” They took the brandies and went out onto the porch to watch the constellations in the cool night air.
Chapter 21
TAHLEQUAH, Oklahoma. Olivia’s classes began at ten. On the third day she got out of bed early and tiptoed around trying not to wake Bobby. “I went to The Shak for breakfast,” she wrote in a note.
Meet me by the statue of Sequoyah at twelve-fifteen and don’t worry about anything. You’ll get a job and you’ll be great in school. There are free tutors in everything. Go meet them. It creates jobs to use them. It keeps graduate students off the streets. Love, Olivia.
P.S. Remember I have to go to Tulsa tomorrow afternoon to see that shrink. You don’t have to go unless you want to. I act funny when I’ve been talking to shrinks. You might not want to be around me right after I talk to one. Doctor Carlyn used to tell me jokes, these stupid jokes I can’t stop thinking about. About cows, for God’s sake.
It was eight-thirty when Olivia got to The Shak. There was a new car parked by the front door. A red MG with Arkansas license plates and two straw hats piled in the backseat. The fender of the car was plastered with bumper stickers. Every politically correct stance of the last five years was represented.
I bet it’s someone from Fayetteville, Olivia decided. Someone coming to write about the Cherokees. This is the time of year when they start showing up.
She opened the door to The Shak. It was very crowded. Every table was full. Olivia spotted her new anthropology professor sitting at a table by the window. A tall blond woman with rimless half-glasses holding a small stick between her fingers and reading a stack of papers as she ate. Ms. Georgia Jones, M.D., Ph.D. “Ignore this stick,” she had told the class the first day. “I’m trying to quit smoking. I think the feel of the cylinder is part of the obsession.”
The woman spotted Olivia and smiled and waved. “That’s a nice car,” Olivia said. “Is that your car? That MG?”
“It’s my boyfriend’s car. I traded with him. I wouldn’t put a bumper sticker on a car for all the tea in China. Sit down. I’m almost finished. Go on. I’d like some company.” Georgia gestured toward the empty chair. Olivia sat down in it. “I was told everyone in town came here,” Georgia continued. “Well, I’m glad to see you. I’ve been afraid there won’t be enough students for the class if anyone else backs out. So let me buy you breakfast. I don’t want anybody else dropping the class.” She laughed as though that were the funniest thing in the world. “What else are you taking?”
“Navajo. I’m trying to learn the language this summer. But I want to take your class too. I won’t drop it.”
“It’s going to be a crip. Anthropology. What a joke. The whole discipline’s a joke. Everything’s a joke except literature, music, painting, and pure science. Mathematics. I’m a medical doctor, did you know that? I quit two years ago and decided to teach for a while. I taught last year in Fayetteville and now I’m teaching here.” She stuck her legs out into the aisle between the tables. She was wearing long silk slacks. On her feet were brown leather sandals. Everything she was wearing looked rich. “Actually, as soon as I got to Fayetteville, I fell in love. Wouldn’t you know it. So I’m here to rethink that.”
“What’s wrong? What happened to it?”
“The war in the Persian Gulf. My love affair is a casualty of the war. Actually, it wasn’t perfect before that. Now it’s really a mess.”
“He had to go?”
“No. He led the protest. The war’s over and he’s still protesting. He’s a nuclear physicist, if that makes it any clearer. He was working on a superconductor, happy as a clam, making a new tool for mankind. Then he went crazy when they started the war. He’s this gorgeous guy. He’s unbelievably beautiful. I’m a fool for beauty. He’s got this dazzling smile, gorgeous nose. Fabulous in bed—at least at first. I thought I had it made. We were spending every night together. Then that war. Next thing I knew he started dragging in every night at two or three, too tired to fuck me. Fuck the war, I told him finally. Let them have the war. Let the nukes proliferate. What difference does it make if you can’t even find time to make love to me. That helped for about a month. Then the war ran out and he started in on the environment with the same group that had been protesting the war. So I came over here. Let him miss me. Let him see if his little politically correct half-educated friends can keep him warm. It looks like a waitress would come and at least take your order, doesn’t it?”
“That’s okay. I guess you just have to love him like he is, or break up with him. This psychiatrist I went to in Carolina said wanting to change someone is just trying to control them. If you can’t like them like they are, you might as well quit. How old is he? Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis.”
“I thought of that. He’s forty-nine. I’m forty-seven. I’ve already been through mine. Unless you could call what I’m doing now the last wave of it. Until I go back to Memphis and, as we say, resume practice. I guess I can’t talk. But I didn’t get out on the streets every night. With my face painted white. I didn’t carry a cross everywhere I went or wear black armbands. He’s a tenured professor of physics, for God’s sake. It’s too much.”
“So are you broken up?” Olivia was leaned halfway across the table. She had completely forgotten she was talking to her professor, much less someone she had never spoken to before. Georgia’s every word was so intense she swept Olivia into her obsession.
“No, we’re still supposed to be in love. I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m an emotional coward. I can’t stand to be in love. It drives me crazy to be happy. It drives me crazy to love this man.”
“I guess I better order breakfast,” Olivia said. “What time is it? Your class starts at ten.”
“It’s nine-fifteen. Listen, I’m in here every day. Eight-thirty. Come find me. I have to have some structure in my life, so this is it. I’m going to eat breakfast at the same place every day. In the first place I don’t like to cook and in the second place I have to have some structure in my life, so this is it. I’ll eat breakfast at the same place at the same time every day. The rest of the time I’m free.”
“To do what?”
“I’m not sure yet. Stay away from Fayetteville, I guess. Try not to barter the self for the relationship, as we say.”
“To do what?”
“The central problem of romantic love. To maintain autonomy while getting bonding energy. It may not be possible. If it was easy I wouldn’t have had to go a hundred miles away for the summer. Actually, I’m going to see him Friday.” Georgia was gathering her papers, getting up. A waitress appeared to take Olivia’s order. “I’ll see you in class,” Georgia said. “I need to get on over to my office and put some of this stuff away. Don’t hurry. Eat breakfast first.”
“I read the assignment,” Olivia said. “It was really interesting.”
“Yeah, Dyson’s hot. Next I want to give you some of Robert Coles’s studies of children. That’s the bitch about this subject. There isn’t a decent text. I have to xerox everything I need. Well, see you in a while.” Georgia was gone, weaving her way to the door, smiling back at Olivia over a stack of books and papers. Why do I need to see a shrink? Olivia wondered. When I have this woman for a teacher.
The waitress appeared with Olivia’s muffins. “I heard you and Bobby made up,” the waitress said. “I sure am glad. Everybody’s glad.”
“Where’d you hear that? Well, I forgot. The Tahlequah grapevine. Yeah, we made up. I’m glad you’re glad. Bobby and I are too.”
“I heard you got a ring.”
“Yeah, I did. You want to see it?”<
br />
“Sure. Where is it?”
“In my purse. I don’t wear it all the time.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what it means, I guess. Anyway, here it is.” Olivia took the velvet box from her purse and removed the ring and put it on her finger and held it out to be admired. The waitress, whose name was Castell Carter, marveled at it. Then the other two waitresses, whose names were Jayne Anne and Emily, also came over to admire it. Food service stopped at The Shak. Jayne Anne had been a cheerleader with Olivia and Castell had been on her soccer team. “I always knew you and Bobby were meant for each other,” Castell said. “We all thought it was a shame when you left him.”
“She had to go,” Emily said. “She went to meet her dad.”
Chapter 22
HE has been captured by his anima,” Tom said, putting down the phone. “She reminds him of his grandmother. His grandmother, Sherrill. Can you beat that?”
“In what way?” Sherrill was ironing a red silk cowboy shirt to wear that night to a benefit at the grade school. A neighbor kid was being taken into the National Honor Society and she and Tom had promised to come to the ceremony. Sherrill was never without a child to love, sometimes two or three. Tom could never figure out where she got them. Suddenly a new boy or girl would appear, taking riding lessons, washing windows, borrowing books, being dropped off for the weekend while their parents went away.
“He said when she walked away she looked like his grandmother dancing. His grandmother was a German settler who remembered how to waltz.”
“Then he isn’t full-blooded Cherokee.”
“Almost no one is anymore, I think.” Tom poured a cup of coffee, added sugar and cream, sat down at the table to watch his wife. He should be worrying about Bobby Tree’s anima, when Sherrill looked enough like his mother to be her twin. “What do you see in me?” Sherrill was always protesting. “I’m nothing special. You’re a famous writer and all I do is ride horses and cook and you act like you’re lucky to have me. I think there’s something fishy about that.” And she would wiggle around beneath his hands and curl her legs around his and plant little childlike kisses on his ear. “The Fisher King,” Tom always replied. “I was wounded in the thigh until I met you. In the heart and hand and thigh.”
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