by Sue Miller
He was wrong in this assumption. Some were beautiful, some were not. Some were liberated, some were not. But most of them had no desire to sleep with him, a lowly sophomore. They were interested in the older actors, in the directors, in their teachers.
Lauren was his lab partner in biology, and she was interested in sleeping with him. Very interested. For a few weeks in their sophomore year they had frantic sex together through long late afternoons in his dorm room, the noise of his roommates’ lives on the other side of the door the background to their marathons. She was then still a little chunky, she wore glasses that she ceremonially removed before their exertions began.
They tried everything they could think of. She was the first person who ever gave him a blow job, who ever licked his balls, put her finger up his ass, let him do the same to her. She showed him how to flatten and widen his tongue to give her more pleasure, she corrected the way his mouth pulled at her nipples. Finally he had found her almost mannish, as he thought of it, in her willingness to experiment, her seemingly coldhearted enthusiasm to try the next forbidden thing. He tired of her. He tired of it. It was as though she were working from a text, he told her later when he met her again, when he fell in love with her.
Oh, she had been, she assured him. It was the way she’d done everything then. By the book.
Their second meeting happened twelve years after their first, when their real lives had begun. Though sometimes he thought now that perhaps they hadn’t yet begun, even at that point. Perhaps the present was the real part, the true test, and all the rest of it mere preparation.
Either way, they were both happy in their work then, single, in their early thirties, still living in Berkeley, which is where they’d met the first time around, where they’d gone to college. She came to a benefit for the repertory company he was with, after a performance of their ongoing play, Bosoms and Neglect. Rafe was Scooper, and he was still in costume and makeup, as were the other two players, so that they could easily be recognized by patrons who might want to schmooze with them, whose asses they had been instructed to kiss as enthusiastically as possible.
At first he’d taken her for one of these patrons. She looked expensive. She was tall and slender. Her brown hair had been streaked silvery blond. She wore dangly silver earrings and a big silver cuff on one wrist. Her heels were very high, her legs miles long and nicely shaped. She had on a black sleeveless dress, and her bare shoulders were like sheeny knobs jutting out of it. He wouldn’t mind kissing her ass, he thought.
He proceeded to start to do so, repeating the things they’d been told to say to the patrons, the questions they’d been instructed to ask: how lovely of her to come, the theater so appreciated her support, had she been to other performances?
She stood smiling at him for a long moment, and then she said, “You don’t have the foggiest who I am, do you?”
Uh-oh, he thought. Someone really important. “I’m sorry, I don’t.” He gestured, shook his head. “I’m kind of the village idiot at these affairs. Please help me out here.”
“Lauren Willetts.” She tilted her head slightly. Her hair swung over and kissed her shoulder. Her eyes were steady on him.
He was looking right at her and he didn’t remember.
“Lauren Willetts,” she said slowly.
Nothing.
She opened her purse, fished in it, took out some thick glasses, and put them on. “Lauren,” she said again.
“That Lauren?” he said. My God. Ugly duckling to swan of swans.
She took the glasses off. “Have there been so many other Laurens?” She was smiling.
He looked her up and down. He could feel himself starting to get hard, remembering. He laughed. “None quite like that one.”
“Though you ran away from her, as I recollect it.” She raised her finger, scolding.
“Well, she was scary.”
“Was that it?”
“And a little … heartless, I guess.”
“But you were, too, of course.”
“Yes. Well. I guess I expected that I had the patent on heartlessness then.”
“I was infringing, as it were.”
As quickly as that, he was tired of banter. “Listen, are you here with someone?”
She laughed again. “A friend.”
“So I couldn’t take you home.”
She shook her head. “You could call me, though.”
And again she fished in her bag. She brought out a little embroidered envelope and extracted a business card from it.
LAUREN MARGOLIN, it said. TECHNICAL CONSULTING.
He looked up at her. “Margolin.”
“Yes.”
“You’re married.”
She shook her head. “Not anymore, I’m not.” She walked away. He watched the rolling motion of her buttocks, the alternating wink of her long muscled calves below the black dress.
Someone touched his elbow and he turned, smiling. But distracted. And he was distracted until he saw her again, and then he was distracted until they had sex again, which happened almost immediately. And then he fell in love with her.
In the early days of this second time around, they talked a lot about their other, younger selves, and how the strangeness of their affair then had made this one inevitable. How, the minute each of them had realized who the other was, they wanted to redo what they’d done, but differently. Once more, with feeling. “Or maybe a couple of times more,” she said.
Many, many times more, it turned out.
It was both like and then unlike the way he remembered it. She was as strong and as wild as ever. Rafe had never had such an athletic, experimental lover. But this time it seemed they were driven by something deeper within both of them, something that perhaps had to do with the wish to revise old vulnerabilities. To make up for what seemed wrong-hearted or emotionally truncated in the first experience.
But there was something about the first experience that compelled them, too—its very limitations, its sad desperation. Rafe sometimes felt swept by a tender sorrow after they’d made love, sorrow for something they might have had then, when they were so hungry and needy, but hadn’t. Something that gave even their most ordinary couplings now a sense of depth, an inexplicable element, a pentimento.
After they’d been living together for about a year, she got a job doing tech stuff for an NGO based in Boston, so they moved to Cambridge. Rafe had to more or less begin his career again, but his connections in Berkeley had connections in Boston, and eventually he landed in the repertory company he preferred in town. They lived marginally, though every now and then Lauren got an independent consulting job that made them suddenly very flush. Then they’d take a vacation in the Caribbean, or rent a house in Vermont for the summer, or stay in a good hotel in New York for a week and see plays and hear great music. Once she bought him a Joseph Abboud suit. Once she bought herself a Jennifer Bartlett print.
They got married. Time passed. They moved a few times as apartments in Cambridge got more expensive, inching their way east and south, closer to MIT, to the river. Their old ardor became intermittent. She accused him of being withdrawn. They fought occasionally about his acting, the way in which he lost himself in it. She said that sometimes she hated seeing him in a play. “It makes me mad, how alive you are onstage when you have so little energy for me.” She had an affair that she told him about.
He had one.
They resolved not to tell each other about their affairs, which, after all, had nothing to do with their marriage, with who they were together.
But he couldn’t stand living with her and not knowing who she might be thinking of in those moments when her face went blank—what she might be imagining then. He left.
He moved to New York, to see if he had what it took. That was the way he put it, to her and to others. Later he was sorry for this, because he had to acknowledge that when the question was framed that way, the answer had to be no.
He got some walk-ons, occasionally a small sp
eaking role, but he was a little too old for most leads, too good-looking in a sort of has-been way for most character parts, too unknown, too unconnected. And maybe, just maybe, he didn’t have what it took.
Then there was his life, the way he had to live in New York—though for the first eight months or so, it was fine. He was essentially house-sitting then, paying a token amount each month to stay in the rent-controlled, gracious apartment of friends who were in Rome on a fellowship for a year. The women he had over were impressed. Even when he told them the truth of his situation, he implied that he would be looking for the same kind of place once his stay on West Eleventh Street was over.
But it was all downhill after that. He was in one roommate situation after another for a while, and then he found a strange flat on 112th Street with a dark, speckled linoleum floor, worn through in places. It had a tiny bedroom off the even tinier kitchen. The plastic shower stall had been installed sloppily—it tilted—and water collected at its front lip. You had to slosh it back manually toward the drain when you were through showering, something Rafe didn’t always bother doing. There were mice. He thought of the apartment as temporary—but what would change in his life to allow him to move? He didn’t let himself consider this for very long. But because he thought of the place this way, he did nothing to fix it up. He bought only the furniture he had to. He was mostly dating younger women during this time, because they were the only ones who were tolerant of his situation: middle-aged actor, no dough, serious aspirations. But even they found the apartment unattractive and depressing.
And then he fell in love, with a woman almost his age. A painter. The friend of old friends. She was a Southerner, and this was new and exotic to him. She was big, his height or even taller. Her hips were as wide as her vowels, her flesh everywhere soft and abundant. She had family money and a small apartment she kept in the Village where she stayed for a couple of months at a time. She drank a lot, she told dirty jokes, she was smart and gregarious. She needed to be among people. After his work was over, he would meet her at a party somewhere, drink fast to catch up to her, and they’d go back to her place and fuck until one or the other of them essentially passed out.
She was generous with friends and with him. She paid for everything. She bought him gifts. She took him on trips—Key West, New Orleans.
And then one day out of the blue she asked him quietly, innocently, “Lookee here, why don’t you invent something for us to do?” They were in bed. It was Monday morning. The theater was dark today.
“Because. Because, I suppose, you are the mother of invention.”
She frowned, uncharmed. “No, really. Why don’t you … plan a trip for us. Buy us a ticket to Paris France for four days.” Fowah dayze, she said.
“I would, Edie. If I could afford it. Either the days or the dough.”
She rolled onto her side, facing him, her elbow bent, her head resting on her palm. Her big breasts lay one on top of the other. He reached for them, but she brushed his hand away. “You’re really an odd duck, aren’t you?” she said, her voice not friendly. “Most men your age in the arts have either made it, or they’ve found another line of work so they can have a little money.”
He didn’t say anything.
“How have you managed to slide along the way you have all these years?”
“I don’t think about it much.” This was not true. “And then, when I was married, my wife made considerably more than I did, so we got along fine.” He felt embarrassed, so his voice sounded stiff and fussy.
She got up out of bed and pulled her bathrobe on. It was a deep ruby satin kimono with a large dragon embroidered on the back. “Well,” she said. “Yuck.”
And that was that. It was over, quite abruptly. No answering his calls, no calls from her, no more parties, and no explanation at all. He was on his own. It was up to him to figure out the reasons it had ended. He could think of quite a few. Still, it seemed unfair to him. Rude, really.
But wounded as he was, he didn’t have long to dwell on it, because at exactly this time, Lauren started to write to him. What she said was that she had collapsed into a dark depression, she was in intensive therapy. She wanted him back. It had all been her fault. She’d been wrong, she said, to have started the affairs. She had been angry at him but unable to say that. Far from being irrelevant then, her lovers had had everything to do with their marriage. And his having lovers right back had made her more angry, and she’d had more, and on it went until a while after he left, when she realized what she’d done and how angry she’d been all along. How terrified of expressing that she was, how low she had fallen since then.
Now she was slowly working on being more honest—with herself and, she hoped, with him. Would he let her try again?
At first he said no. It felt to him as though it would be a capitulation, an admission of failure in the wider world, of defeat in love, of being old and used up.
But she was persistent, nearly intoxicated, he would have said—he did say it to her later—with her sense of self-discovery, with what she felt was her increased ability to love, to love him. She called and wanted to talk. She kept him on the phone for hours. The letters she wrote him ran to five or six pages.
Well, timing is everything. He came back. To Boston, to Lauren—though he returned in a kind of defeat, though he was still half in love with Edie. But Lauren was so happy that she barely noticed his melancholy, his absence. And slowly he came out of it. Their love-making was new and fresh and sweet, and she wept afterward. She wept to think of what she’d done to their marriage. She wept because she was so happy he’d come back. She wept because he was wearing boxer shorts, which he’d never done before, and she assumed they were the preference of another woman. (She was right: Edie had bought him a dozen pairs and made him throw away his graying jockeys.)
The warmth of her joy over his return, of her grief over what she’d done, was a balm to him. Slowly he recovered from his sense of failure, his pain at Edie’s abrupt turning away from him. Lauren loved him. He had never been so devotedly loved. How could he not enjoy it? How could he not subside into it?
“Who ever gets three chances to love?” she asked him one night. “We have all the luck.”
They were happy again. Once, a while after they’d gotten back together, a good friend asked, in a joking way, “How did this happen anyway?” and Lauren said, only a little in jest, and not without pride, “Oh, I abased myself. Repeatedly.”
——
“Is it a good part, my sweet?”
“It’s the lead. It’s a biggie.” He was putting on her makeup for her. Friends were coming over.
“But good?”
“Very good. Very complicated guy. Not entirely nice. Look up.” She did, and he ran the eyeliner on her lower lids. “I’m onstage the entire time. It begins with me and it ends with me.”
“As I do.”
He looked sharply down at her. She was smiling at him, her newly goofy smile, slightly out of her control now.
“You know,” Edmund said. They were alone in the theater, sitting at a table in the middle of what would be the set, going over his lines with infinite and tedious thoroughness, Edmund’s specialty. “It might well be that he’s doing as much recollecting of Elizabeth here as he is arguing about how we should think about terrorism.”
“So the emphasis should be on the memory of her, of that time in Paris.” This was a question, as he said it.
“I’m just saying,” Edmund answered, “that they might have been having a kind of a nice vacation there together.”
Rafe reread the lines, going a little slower over the memory of Elizabeth, as though he were suddenly, surprisingly, seeing her as he spoke, calling her up.
“Unh-huh,” Edmund said, nodding and nodding and twining his fingers in his beard. And then, just to confound things, “Of course, he’s also trying very hard not to think of her situation right now—the train, the bombing, et alia. Trying to stay in that theoretical world where h
e’s so comfortable. So maybe the idea is that as he’s making this argument, the John Kerry argument, this memory more or less”—his hand circled in the air in front of him—“catches him unawares, so to speak.”
Rafe read the speech again, thrusting quickly through the lines about John Kerry’s perspective, in full argument mode. Then he paused for a moment, looking down. “I mean, I remember the time when Elizabeth and I were in Paris for four months, that sabbatical year.” Now he spoke more softly. “We traveled everywhere together by subway—by Metro.” He looked up, off in the distance for a second, then back at Edmund. “And it didn’t matter that there’d been a bombing in the subway only a few months before. One lived one’s life, one hoped to have warning, but it was simply there, a possibility.”
“Yup, yup, yup, yup,” Edmund said. “That’s the way. See, this sets up a kind of pattern that helps with the ending, the way he takes her back. You know, that all along he’s had this … awareness, of her, of what he had in loving her.”
Rafe was marking the script, flipping back to the earlier speech, making notes.
“Okay, let’s do it again,” Edmund said.
Afterward, they went out for a drink. They were sitting at the noisy bar in funky old DeLuxe, each with a beer. Edmund tipped his head, bent closer to Rafe, and said, “He’s kind of a funny guy, your Gabriel, isn’t he?” On the television, behind him, the Bruins, dark blobs on white, looped smoothly over the ice.
“How so?” Rafe asked. I’ll bite.
“Well, he plays it pretty close to the vest, don’t you think?”
“You think?”
“Do you?” Edmund’s pale eyes behind his glasses were steady on him.
Rafe swiveled on his seat for a moment. “Well, I was thinking he doesn’t really know what he feels, actually. He knows he doesn’t feel what he’s supposed to feel, but he’s not sure what he does feel, don’t you think?”
“Hunh.” Edmund sat for a long moment, staring down at his beer. He looked up. “Well, I think if it hadn’t happened this way, if it had ended some other way—maybe even if she’d had, say, a heart attack, he might have been able to be glad.” He frowned, he pursed his lips. “No, I don’t mean that,” he corrected himself. “Not glad. But certainly … relieved, to be out of it somehow without inflicting pain. People do feel that sometimes,” he said gravely to Rafe. “It ain’t nice, but it’s so.” He had another swallow of beer. “But this, this is … national. It’s like 9/11. It’s political. It has its claims, doesn’t it? In that there is only one politically correct response to this. Humanly correct. And that just isn’t where his heart is.”
