by Sue Miller
And forgive me too, darling, for the choice I’ve had to make. Lawrence does want me back – me and the children. And I’m going to go. He is their father, he is my husband, and it’s our life. We’ll stay in Cambridge until after Jessica’s service, and then we’ll go back to Minnesota.
And I mustn’t see you again, darling. You mustn’t try to call or come over. You can understand, I’m sure, how hard it will be for all of us if you do, how upsetting to the children – to say nothing of me! And Lawrence mustn’t know about it. Not because it would change anything. I honestly don’t believe it would. But because it would needlessly cause him so much pain. You and I are in pain, darling – in my case, agony – but there’s no reason to put him through this too. And so, when you speak to the police, when you talk about it to anyone else, even Jessica’s parents, I must ask you not to mention our relationship this summer. It was beautiful, everything about it, but now it must be just ours to remember forever. There is simply no point served in making it public knowledge.
You must know how grateful I am to you for your silence so far. What torture it must have been – as it was for me! – to be silent last night through the questions, to sit across from Lawrence and me and talk to the police and say nothing of what was uppermost in your mind. That took a kind of generous courage I knew I could count on in you – that I did count on when they took you down for blood tests, etc. When you said, ‘family friend,’ I hope you could read in my face how moved, how touched I was that you weren’t going to [here several more words were crossed out] say anything more. I want my marriage back, Cameron. I thought it was over, done, but it isn’t; and I find I want it very much, for a whole variety of reasons. And I need you to be the loyal, true friend you’ve always been, and let me have it once more, by staying silent, by staying away.
It isn’t anything like what you and I have – have had – but it has been steady and good and full of devotion in the past, and I think it can be again. And that’s what the children – and I too! – need. Cam, you and I love each other in a passionate way, a nearly desperate way, that I’m not sure either of us could live with. And each of us needs to go back to living, darling, in spite of all the hunger we will always feel – I know I will – for what we have experienced together. I beg you to remain silent. I beg you not to ruin this for me. I wish I could come and comfort you. I wish our lives hadn’t taken the course they’ve taken. And I also know we must stay apart and we must keep our secret. I implore you. With all my love, Elizabeth.
Lottie sets the letter down and looks out the window. This is the back view, across to the elevated expressway. Traffic headed into the city is still thick, but Lottie isn’t seeing it. She’s thinking about Cam, Cam and Elizabeth this summer. She’s remembering the way his face looked when he watched her. She’s recalling her own feeling of hunger for what they seemed to have – and the anger it made her feel at Jack while she witnessed their falling in love. She looks again at the sheaf of papers. The writing gets bigger, sloppier, as Elizabeth works her way through, Lottie notes. Suddenly she is imagining the way the scene must have played out at Elizabeth’s last night: the wailing, grieved children bundled up the stairs with Elizabeth’s mother; Cameron, Elizabeth, and her husband in the living room with the cops. Mostly she can picture her brother’s white-faced silence, his stunned cooperativeness with the police, with Elizabeth. They would have asked, ‘Now, you were pulling in the drive, Mr Reed, right? Coming to call on … ?’
‘I’m a family friend,’ he says, and Elizabeth probably nods. Lottie imagines Elizabeth’s faceless husband looking from one of them to the other as the police move to their next questions: about the sequence of events, about what Cameron saw, what he noticed.
Lottie gets up, leaving the letter on the wooden trunk that serves as Cameron’s coffee table. She strides across the big open room into the bedroom again. She goes directly to the answering machine and pushes the message button. How quickly, she thinks, she’s gotten used to feeling she has a right to do this – to read his mail, to listen to his messages. She sits down on the bed.
The first voice is male, loud. ‘This is a message for Cameron Reed from the Cambridge Police Department. You left your wallet and keys with us, Mr Reed. Repeat: we have your wallet and keys. And we have just a question or two we’d still like to ask you. Please get back to us. This is Officer Scott, at a little after midnight.’ A fumbling noise. Then a click, and the buzz of the dial tone.
Another beep, then Elizabeth’s voice, husky and urgent. ‘Cam, it’s me. It’s … it’s around five. A.M. Pick up, darling. I’ll wait.’ A long pause. ‘Pick up, Cameron.’ Then, ‘Oh, God, where are you?’ After perhaps ten more seconds, she whispers, ‘Cameron: don’t call me. I’ll call you back, sweetheart.’
A buzz, and then Elizabeth again. ‘Cam, it’s sixish now. I don’t know what to do. I’ll keep trying, off and on, when I can. If you’re there now, darling, please pick up the phone.’ She waits. ‘I’m so worried about you. I’ll call again.’
The next message, Elizabeth too. ‘Cam, Char moved your car for me, and I’m coming over, darling. Don’t go anywhere, if you get this message. Stay right there. It’s about six forty-five or so. In the morning. I’ll be right over.’
Then Lottie’s own voice, sounding little-girl-like and slightly midwestern after Elizabeth. ‘Cam, it’s Lottie. I’m concerned about what happened at Elizabeth’s last night. Give me a call when you get back.’
Then a male voice again. ‘Mr Reed, this is the Cambridge Police. We have your wallet, which you left behind last night. We have your keys. And we have a few questions for you, of no real consequence. Paperwork. Please call when you get in. And ask for Officer Danehy.’
Another call from her, the one she’d made after she read about Jessica’s death in the paper.
Then several hangups, including one that she knows was her own. Finally a long, fuzzy silence.
Lottie turns the machine off. No news here, then. She gets up and drifts slowly back out into the open space. She crosses to the big wooden dining table. There’s a long bookcase on the wall behind it, and for the length of one whole shelf, Cameron has arranged pictures and memorabilia: drawings by friends, notes, bits of pottery, poems, wind-up toys, photographs, postcards. Cameron’s life, as he’s constructed it. The first night she arrived in town, they had dinner here, in front of these objects, and they talked about their lives, how they both felt they’d been mother and midwife to themselves. Lottie remembers that he spoke of Elizabeth that night, a remote Elizabeth, an Elizabeth who was, for him, still just a distant memory – neither of them knew then that she was already back in her mother’s house. He compared her role in his life to Derek’s in Lottie’s. ‘You use the tools that come your way, don’t you?’ he had asked. There were candles burning on the table between them, and his face seemed suffused with light. She was happy for him in this apartment, this self-constructed universe. ‘And they weren’t bad tools, as these things go. They were interesting people, they had a lot to teach us about the world. You got Ryan out of it, and what else I can only guess at. And from Elizabeth I got a certain sense of life as … I don’t know. I suppose a romantic thing, a rich thing, a complex thing. I’ll never think of her unkindly, as badly as it ended.’
‘Did it?’ Lottie asked.
He waved his hand over his coffee cup in a dismissive gesture. ‘You can’t imagine.’
Now Lottie looks around again at the elements Cam has chosen for himself. It astonishes her, actually, his life, his friends, his ease in a world so different from the one they grew up in. It’s a little like the life she lived with Derek, full of talk of books, of music and art. In her case – in Derek’s case – there was all the academic gossip too, another form of office politics. But it seems to Lottie that she and Cam have both reached for a life as different from the one they grew up in as they could. In fact, they’ve both tried to create in their own lives a world like that of the people who lived at the fancy e
nd of Farmington Street.
Lottie, of course, never stooped feeling like an impostor in it, like someone having to scramble too hard just to stay two steps behind. She knows this is part of the reason she’s chosen, finally, to write about medical issues – to work with doctors, whose intelligence is much more foreign to her but also by and large more concrete, less intimidating. But Cam, it seems, is at home in this life, this world.
There’s a photograph on his shelf of a dinner party in this room. Ten or twelve people are sitting around Cam’s table, their faces blurred and happy in the long exposure, the candles floating in their midst like so many small full moons. Abruptly she remembers the night she and Derek had Clive Leahy to dinner – a poet, a translator, and an old mentor of Derek’s. She’d worked so hard – they had candles too, candles and wine – and she made some Julia Child dish that took her nearly all day. She grimaces at the memory. At dinner she was struggling to keep up with the literary references, the talk about people whose names she should have recognized but didn’t. After one particularly ignorant question on her part, Clive smiled forgivingly at her and patted her hand. He had a sweet face, round and red and shiny in the candlelight – Santa Clausy, Lottie had felt.
‘Derek told me about this,’ he said.
‘About what?’ she asked. Derek was out of the room, changing the music.
‘How bright you were, but that there’d be these … lacunae with you.’
Lottie felt slapped: at Derek’s betrayal, at Clive’s apparent unconsciousness of his insult to her. The blood rose to her cheeks, she hoped not visibly. She managed to say, ‘Well, it was kind of him to forewarn you, wasn’t it?’ before Derek came back in, his finger held up in the air to silence them so they could listen to an aria he’d chosen for them. Callas, she remembered, La Traviata: how life was just a fleeting joy.
Lottie picks up a photograph of her parents from Cameron’s ledge. They are young in it, laughing at each other under a rose arbor somewhere. Her mother’s hair is brutally permed, but still she’s pretty: the dark, dark lipstick against her white skin, the short flared skirt, and chunky high heels tipping her forward in a potbellied, sensual way. Her father is in shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled back. His tie is straight and fiercely knotted at his neck. He has Cameron’s thick dark hair – though Cam, of course, has gone almost completely gray now.
Looking more closely, Lottie sees the shape of a house beyond the roses, the windows in a familiar pattern. She puts her finger on the photograph and traces the configuration. Then she sees: this is the house behind her mother’s. This is their own backyard! She traces the flower beds. A wooden rail stands behind them where now there’s the neighbor’s stockade fence to take away his view of their weedy decrepit lot. But the flowers! Who was the gardener? Her father, before he went to jail? Her mother, before she took to drink and television? Lottie looks hard at the blurred jumble of blossoms behind the laughing couple, above them, looks at her father’s face, a face she barely remembers. Can Cam remember them this way? she wonders. Can he remember this garden? How difficult it is for her to think of this labored-over beauty in connection with anyone from her childhood.
She sets the picture down and picks up the one next to it. It’s framed, of Cameron, perhaps ten years younger than he is now. He’s sitting in an Adirondack chair. He’s been reading, but he’s looking up, frowning, at the interruption just before the picture was snapped. He’s shirtless and deeply tanned. The wildly curling hair on his chest is still black and matlike. It must be the handsomest he’s ever been. Who was in his life then, to love him? To admire the beauty? To take this picture?
She slowly walks the length of the ledge, picking the pictures up, looking. A costume party, with someone dressed as a number-two pencil, someone else as a carrot. A trio of stoned-looking people on a couch, staring thickly at the camera. A pen-and-ink caricature of a professional-looking Cam with books falling out of his pockets, his pants legs. A framed poem in longhand about memory. A postcard of Dizzy Gillespie blowing his horn, his cheeks inflated and gleaming. Ryan’s eighth-grade graduation photo – his hair far too long, a hostile and fraudulent smile on his face. A shingle cottage in a light-flooded clearing in some New England woods. Cam and a long-haired woman, both on skis, both smiling, a blur of people moving in the snow behind them.
What had Elizabeth made of all this? Hadn’t she, in fact, mentioned the apartment once to Lottie? Yes: she said – Lottie remembers this abruptly – that it made her feel ‘ineffably bourgeois.’
Lottie steps across the room, aware of the smart slap, slap of her rubber sandals against her own heels in the silence. She has come to a decision. She picks up Elizabeth’s letter and shoves it into her purse. Whatever is driving him to wherever he now is – walking the streets, drinking in some bar, taking a train, a plane, to anywhere else – whatever that is will surely only be made worse by this letter. It does offer him the comfort of Jessica’s drunkenness, her own responsibility for part of what happened; but then it takes away everything else that might still be keeping him going. And Lottie wants him to keep going. To keep going long enough to show up anyway – to come home to his apartment or to her or even to Elizabeth.
On a pad of paper she finds on the kitchen counter, she writes him a note. She says she’s worried about him. That she has a letter to him from Elizabeth; she has several messages for him. She asks him to call her or to come over. She tears off the top sheet and sets it down on the floor in front of the door, where she found Elizabeth’s letter. She weights it with Cameron’s wallet and keys. Outside, she leaves Cameron’s door open and goes to the electric box at the head of the stairs. She reaches on top of it. The spare key slides under her fingers and pings! on the floor. She replaces it. Elizabeth must have used it this morning to drop off her letter; Cameron will have it whenever he comes home. Lottie goes back and shuts the door. She turns the knob, pushes against it to be sure it’s locked.
On the way down the stairs, she hears a man’s voice from behind the door on the second floor. She thinks it’s the same voice that called up to her earlier. He’s speaking loudly and steadily in an uninflected, litanic tone, as though he’s said this so many times before that by now he’s completely bored himself: ‘… so goddamned tired all the time when all you fuckin do is sleep around here … never even out of the fuckin bed till nine, ten o’clock and you fuckin complain about it from the moment you’re up …’ Lottie stops and listens for longer than she wants to. Something holds her. And she can still feel her heart pounding after she’s gotten out on the street – in fear? in anger? Some excitement that she can’t label. She sits in the car for several minutes, regulating her breathing, before she starts the engine.
She drives to Cameron’s bookstore. It will be open by now. It’s at the lower end of Newbury Street, near Mass Ave. There are plenty of parking spaces at this hour. The young woman at the counter, Maeve, recognizes her and greets her with great friendliness. Lottie met her one afternoon when she came in with Ryan. Cameron had introduced them around, shown them the store. Maeve has long hair, black for more than an inch at the roots, and from there on down, an almost Day-Glo orange. Each of her nails is painted with a different intricate design: lightning bolts, stars, crescent moons, crosses. Lottie remembers that she flirted openly with Ryan that afternoon, that she called Cam ‘the big C’ to his face. This had startled Lottie: she would never have been able to make fun of Cam; he seemed so grave, so intense, to her.
Today Maeve is wearing a dark dress straight from the forties, with little cap sleeves cuffed in white across her sturdy biceps. She shakes her head: she hasn’t seen or heard from Cameron. Her two-toned hair sways heavily.
She gets on the extension and calls upstairs to the used-book section. The guy up there says Cam called to say that he wasn’t coming in today.
Lottie feels a surge of relief, a nearly physical sensation. ‘When did he call? Did he say where he was?’
Maeve repeats the questions into th
e phone and listens, nodding, afterward. Then she covers the mouthpiece and speaks to Lottie. ‘John says he called first thing, right at ten, and that he didn’t. He didn’t say where he was. Just that he had some stuff to do and would be out—’ Her mouth and eyes round in Betty Boop surprise. ‘Wow! A couple of days.’ She listens to the telephone for a few seconds more and then covers the mouthpiece again. ‘But that he’d call in regularly to be sure everything was okay.’
‘Okay,’ Lottie says. She feels relieved at this; this sounds so reasonable. This sounds all right. He is somewhere, he plans to be somewhere.
‘Thanks, Johnny-boy,’ Maeve says into the telephone. She laughs at something he says, and hangs up.
‘I want to leave Cam a message,’ Lottie says. ‘If he calls?’
Maeve nods.
‘That he call me right away. Tell him it’s important. And maybe I’ll write him a note too, if I can leave it with you.’
Maeve’s face is serious, eager to help. ‘Is it your mom?’ she asks.
‘No. Not that anyway. But I’m a little worried about Cameron. He’s had a … shock. A bit of a shock. So if you see him, or he calls, I’d really like to be in touch with him. And try to find out where he is, if he calls.’
‘Will do.’ She’s reaching behind the counter, and now she produces a pad of paper and a pen and pushes them across to Lottie.
