by Sue Miller
He didn’t respond. He was tired of this, he realized—this thing they did: constructing a review of each social occasion immediately after it, always pointed, always critical. It seemed abruptly a kind of folie à deux to him.
She was smiling now. She wanted things to be okay. “The point, my love, was you and me.”
She waited. He could see without looking over at her that she was watching him, wanting to have charmed him back into her orbit. He felt sorry for her, suddenly. He felt sorry for both of them. He said, “You don’t have to try so hard all the time, Claire.”
“For us to have fun?”
“Right.” They were coming across the bridge over the Connecticut River into Hanover. The river was black below them. “And actually, I don’t mind the occasional dull evening.”
She faced forward, her profile beautiful and exacting. “There’s the difference between you and me. I do. I mind it very much.”
After a moment, he said, “But actually—again—I didn’t find it dull.”
“Hn. Another difference then.”
They barely spoke as they got ready for bed at the inn, as she pulled on a black, sliplike nightgown he hadn’t seen before. One she’d bought, perhaps, for this very night—a night in a hotel with no children around. It might have been an invitation, but if so, it was one she no longer wanted to make. This was clear by the way she was facing away from him as she put it on, the way she slid quickly under the covers and turned away from him in bed.
But it was an invitation he would have had trouble responding to, anyway. Because lying there next to her, breathing in the scent of her perfume, of her flesh, listening to the occasional braying of a group of Dartmouth students passing by the hotel, he was thinking back over the evening and seeing it as a series of images of Leslie. Leslie, as she turned to invite them into the living room, her arm extended. Leslie, as she leaned over the table to set a plate in front of him. Leslie, as she looked across the table at him, her soft mouth open a little, her eyes melting in the candlelight.
What was willed? What just happened? He didn’t know. He couldn’t tell if these experiences made something in him shift, or if he used them to shift things. Things changed, though. After this point, it seemed to him that an agreement had been somehow reached between him and Claire that they would turn away from each other into their own separate lives.
Oh, they were courteous to each other. They continued to have a full life together—the children, the evenings listening to music, the dinner parties, their active socializing, which he’d loved at first; he and Susan had been so limited for so long by her illness. But Sam felt more and more that there was no room for him to be who he really was with Claire. And he felt he’d lost a sense of who she was underneath that bright, poised exterior. Perhaps because of this, they no longer turned to each other after these evenings, or even during them, for confirmation of the other’s pleasure—or the other’s critical response. There wasn’t the folie à deux that Sam had felt suddenly constricted by, but there was no longer the sense of their twoness, either.
Well, there was always a way for Sam to work longer hours on his projects, and that’s what he did now. But strangely, he focused his energy on the house in Vermont. He recognized the perversity of this; he knew by now that he and Claire would probably divorce—how could they go on the way they were? But he told himself that the house was a gift he wanted to give her, a way to honor his first feelings for her and the hope with which he’d entered the relationship.
An apology of sorts, then. Also—he realized this—a kind of justification of himself, a way to try to make himself feel better about whatever part he’d played in the way things seemed to be heading. Detailing the elaborate trim on the vaulted ceiling in the living room, he had a sad sense of virtue. Drawing the built-in cabinets in the bedroom, he imagined Claire alone, finding pleasure in their design. As he worked, he made himself remember how he had felt about her when he was getting to know her—the headiness, the elation of their first months together.
But it was like a distant, fond memory. Like the way he thought of the girl he’d been in love with in high school, that irrelevant—the pleasure he took in her largely a matter, he sometimes thought now, of the kind of underclothing girls wore then: The long tease of the difficult hooks on the back of her white, nurselike brassieres. The rustling crinolines, the garters and stockings. The band of silky, fat flesh between her cotton underpants and the smooth stocking tops. Of course, there was Candy herself, but when he remembered her minky little face, her way of laughing through her nose, he felt only a kind of amazement at the entirely other version of himself the memory suggested—though oddly it also felt continuous with who he was now.
So with Claire, with the distance he felt from the person he must have been, loving her—a person who was, nonetheless, recognizably still the man sitting at this table, doing these drawings, fussing over these details, thinking of his love for her as something past, long gone.
And as he made one trip after another up to the site to make sure that things were being done exactly as he’d wanted them for her, he understood that all this care and attention were also a way to see Leslie, to be with her more.
These things were confused in his mind, then. It wasn’t until much later that he teased it all apart, that he saw how much of his focus on Leslie had to do with the slow, painful ending of his marriage to Claire and with everything that wasn’t working between them in those months. In the meantime, though, it felt like love, like an impossible version of love.
He had kissed Leslie, once. It was in late August of the following summer. He’d come up for the weekend with a rental van to load the few things of his he was taking from the house before it went on the market. He asked her to meet him there.
She was waiting with a picnic lunch when he arrived. They spread it out on a blanket on the porch and sat there, eating, talking, looking down at the valley below and the mountains beyond it, made blue by distance. He told her about the ending of things with Claire, the decision they made together that—as Claire put it—they’d run out of energy for each other. He told her how, having made this decision, they were somehow able to be kinder, more generous, to each other again.
“I’m glad for that,” Leslie had said. “It must make all this”—she gestured vaguely, the house, the moving van—“easier.”
When they’d finished eating, he helped her pack up the paper plates and napkins, the tin cups. She suggested a walk. She knew a field near here where there was a good blackberry patch. They left the rucksack on the porch and started down the old logging road that ran through the woods behind the house.
It was early fall. Wild asters grew at the side of the road, an airy, delicate blue or white. Here and there a maple flared hot red, almost fuchsia. Leslie was walking ahead of him. She was wearing blue jeans and an old white linen blouse, the collar fraying slightly. Her brown hair fell just over it. When she looked down at the ground to watch where she was going, the hair slid apart into two wings on either side of her neck, exposing the vulnerable knobs of her spine as they disappeared into her shirt—the white curve of that private flesh. He had the impulse to step forward, to stop her, to put his lips there.
Suddenly she was speaking. She said she sometimes wished she had the courage to tell Pierce, This isn’t good enough. She lifted her shoulders then, her hands rose slightly, too. “But I don’t, so that’s that.” He couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded full of regret.
They walked on in silence, both of them watching their feet on the rocky, pitted dirt track. He was thinking about what she’d said, about what it might mean about her and Pierce. He was excited by this glimpse into their lives together, by the sense of possibility for himself he saw in it.
Just then they started to pass an overgrown field to their right, a field studded with maple saplings and small pines. This was it, she said. The blackberry patch. “Let’s see if the bears have gotten all of them.”
They hadn’t. Sam and Leslie moved around in the pale sunlight, picking the blackberries, eating them. The thorny canes caught at their clothes, scratched their hands. She was laughing about a bear that had come up on the porch of a friend, right outside the window where they had a bird feeder. As her friend and her husband watched, as their dog barked insanely and hurled himself over and over at the glass, the bear had leisurely, almost prettily, eaten every last seed. She imitated its dainty motion.
Sam had been standing close behind her while she talked. Now he reached for her and turned her to him. He kissed her. She stood still for it, waiting for him to be done, though her mouth—warm, sweet tasting—responded to him.
When she stepped away from him, she was shaking her head. Tears glinted at the lower rims of her eyes. “I can’t, Sam,” she said. “I don’t, have the courage. Pierce and I … Pierce and I, rely on each other.”
There were so many things he could have said then. He could have said, Do you think that’s a good enough reason for staying together? He could have said, But I love you.
He didn’t, though. He didn’t because he mistrusted himself, because he didn’t want to turn so quickly from Claire to her. He didn’t because she seemed so sorrowful. Because he wanted to be sure he wasn’t just desperate, or afraid of being alone.
He didn’t because he knew he was desperate and afraid of being alone.
He said, “I know.” They stood a moment more, looking at each other, and then not looking at each other in the sun-struck field. She turned away first, and they started back. He remembered her mouth, stained with berry juice, and her earnest dark eyes meeting his.
He thought that was the end of it for him. That he saw how things were for her, that he accepted it. But it wasn’t over. There was still a day, months later, after the divorce was final, when he suddenly decided he should … what? Claim her? Ask her to run away with him? He wasn’t sure.
It was the day after a disastrous visit from Charley, his oldest son. He’d told Sam he was going to get married, and Sam, worried about how young he was, about how young his girlfriend, Emma, was, wasn’t enthusiastic enough, fast enough. Charley had still been clearly angry when Sam dropped him off at the Back Bay train station and watched him disappear through the doorway under the neon arch.
As he turned the corner at the intersection a block away, he noticed a parking spot in front of a Starbucks there. On a whim, he pulled into it. He went inside and ordered a cappuccino. He sat in the window, looking out, drinking his fancy coffee. He wasn’t sure what he would do next.
The week before, Claire had called to say she was taking an endowed chair at the University of Chicago and would be moving in January. Sitting behind the plate glass, finished with his cappuccino, Sam had a sense of being suspended. Even the weather seemed vague and indeterminate. It was gray and misty, about to rain, but much warmer than it had been. People walked past in no rush. It seemed to Sam that he’d failed at everything he’d turned his hand to—his children, his marriage. It seemed that nothing had happened to him, nothing had happened in his life, for years. His sons, his ex-wife, they’d moved on; they were making choices and changing things for themselves, while he’d done nothing.
Behind him, there was the sudden shriek of the steamer frothing someone’s milk. Outside, the rain began. In the midst of this, aware of all this, thinking too of his office, how empty it would be when he went there, remembering Leslie bent over the long bracts of the blackberry bushes in the fall sunlight, he knew abruptly what he wanted to do. What he would do.
He finished his coffee, he carried the paper cup and stirrer to the trash barrel and threw them away. He buttoned his raincoat and opened the door to the soft noise of the rain.
The car windows began to fog up as soon as he shed his coat. He turned the engine on, and the defroster. The rain drummed now, the fan whirred.
He drove east on Stuart Street and then turned south, heading to where he could pick up 93, the highway that left the city going north.
It was after dark when he got to Leslie’s village. It had been a hard trip—rain so heavy he’d had to park at the edge of the road once, and a skidding accident he’d stopped to offer his help at. He’d sat with the young woman whose car was smashed up until help arrived.
His headlong mood had been tempered, altered then, in ways he wasn’t sure of, and when he pulled over to the side of the road across the sloping front lawn from Leslie’s house, he had already begun to doubt himself, to feel a sense of disconnection from the impulses that had brought him here.
He looked up at the lighted windows. Pierce and Leslie were in the front rooms of the house, Pierce in the living room, in the chair he always sat in, the one by the fireplace. He was looking down, perhaps reading. Leslie was moving around in the kitchen, clearly in the process of making dinner. He could follow her in motion and guess what she was doing at each step. When she disappeared through the doorway at the back of the room, she was in the dining room, perhaps setting the table. As she stood in profile facing the wall, leaning forward slightly, she was at the sink or the stove.
From the dark of his car, this is what he saw—the two of them, stage left and stage right, in their life together. And as he watched them, he was increasingly sure that he didn’t belong here. He realized he wasn’t going to do what he had planned to do. He wasn’t going to enter, stage right, and try to change her life or his.
But he stayed for a while, he made himself look. Why? Later he thought it was so that he would remember it, exactly the way it was, and not delude himself again.
Leslie was busy in the kitchen for a few minutes, her back to the window, to Sam. Then she came toward the front of the house and stood in what Sam knew was the open doorway between the kitchen and the living room, maybe to say something to Pierce.
Yes, now he raised his head from whatever he was reading, he raised his head in the orangey light of the old lamp and answered her. He smiled.
She laughed in response and then went back to the kitchen, bent again over her work.
It was so ordinary, so unremarkable, but for Sam it had the potency of a Vermeer. Something changed in him as he watched. He had a sense in himself, in his response, of mildness, of generosity, as though in some way he were responsible for what he was seeing—Leslie, at peace in her own old, frumpy house, with Pierce, whom she’d chosen, whom she’d chosen over and over. As though he were blessing it, its very ordinariness, by witnessing it. Or if not he, then something, some force in the universe that allots us just this much pain and no more. This much disruption. This much violent change.
He reached down and turned the key in the ignition.
He stayed at the Hanover Inn that night, too—it seemed to be the place where he went to experience the end of things. This time, though, he was strangely exhilarated. He felt a clean, absolute relief at acknowledging to himself that it was over. Or maybe that it had never been real.
——
A woman once said to Sam, “Well, I guess I must not be your type.” Her tone was chilly. This was during a brief period a year or two after the divorce from Claire when he was going out with people he met through a couple of dating services. He’d driven this woman home after an uncomfortable dinner, and he’d just turned down her invitation to come in. She was right, she wasn’t his type—though he didn’t say that at the time. It seemed as though that might be dangerous, she was so pissed off. He didn’t remember exactly what he did say—some polite denial. It didn’t matter anyway. They both knew that they wouldn’t be seeing each other again.
But it had made him consider the question of what his type, actually, might be. Did he even have a type? He couldn’t answer the question. He seemed to be an omnivore when it came to women, except when he wasn’t. They came in every shape and size and temperament, one unlikely type after another. His first wife had been preceded by a big, blond college girl, a hard-drinking premed who played lacrosse and could beat him arm wrestling. Then along came Sus
an, tall and quiet and pretty in her unstartling way.
There was a moment at their wedding when he did see her as a type suddenly. He couldn’t avoid it. She had lined up for a photograph with her sisters, the bridesmaids. There they were, a row of women not only all wearing the same pink dress—all but Susan, in white—but displaying the same genes. They were all the same height or close to it, they were all slender, brown-haired, brown-eyed, with even features. The noses might have been slightly too long, maybe the chins were a little sharp, but all were pretty enough in a high-WASP way. Which is what they were—that type. And that was part of the attraction for Sam.
He and Susan had met when they were seniors in college. They married the month after they graduated, under a flower-laden bower in the enormous, sloping backyard of her parents’ second home on Martha’s Vineyard. A large open tent—a kind of pavilion—was set up in one corner of this yard, with a smooth dance floor that workmen had laid down in sections over the thick grass the afternoon before. A band played music such as neither of them had ever danced to, music no one would consciously have chosen. Wedding-band music.
Sam was intensely aware of his parents through the whole three-day affair. They’d driven out from Illinois, from the small farming town where he’d grown up. He knew they must be uncomfortable. He’d spot them occasionally, always together, smiling politely, looking strained, usually engaged in conversation with someone—his mother, anyway—and he felt unable to help them.
But every time he looked at them, he also felt a stab of anger. He knew exactly how they would talk about the whole thing when they got back home, how they would alter the experience in their reporting of it to manage the sense of dislocation or discomfort they’d felt living through it. Everything would become laughable in its pretentiousness—though they wouldn’t use the word. They would make jokes instead: “Sam sure caught himself a fancy one.” “I never seen so many people put away so much pricey liquor.” “It must have cost a pretty penny.” And the eyebrows raised to signal all the things they weren’t saying.
