by Sue Miller
But hadn’t she spoken – she’s stirring the primer now – as she would to anyone who chose such an inadequate word? Who used language so callously? ‘Aaah!’ she cries suddenly. ‘Murk!’
She climbs the ladder carefully, carrying her hook, her little bucket of primer, her brush. She hooks the handle of the can to a rung of the ladder.
She starts to paint the patches of wood trim Ryan has scraped bare. The primer is creamy and thick as she strokes it on. Its sweetly chemical smell combines with the odor of the sanded wood and the sound of the leaves shifting in the moving air to soothe her. Her mind begins to slide loosely over the events of the last day and a half. After a few minutes, she’s thinking of Jessica again. Picturing her. Jessica, as she imagines her in the ambulance, wrapped in white, the bloodstain widening under her head. Then Jessica as she looked that night when Lottie turned the light on – the blindly frowning face, the long, beautiful body.
Later she and Ryan had argued about it.
‘But in my bed?’ Lottie asked. She was sitting at the dining room table. She’d been trying to work.
‘Have you looked at my bed?’ Ryan asked. ‘It’s about a foot across.’
‘Still,’ Lottie said. ‘It is my bed. It bothers me. A lot.’
‘Should I have asked?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Or maybe we should have talked about it when we chose rooms. “Who do you think’s gonna get laid more this summer, me or you?” ’ Lottie flinched, and he lowered his strident voice. ‘Come on.’ He shifted his weight. He was standing in the doorway. ‘You just took the big bed, Mom. No discussion.’
‘Well, I’m the grownup.’
‘Mom, you’re not the grownup.’ She didn’t answer. ‘I could argue that I’m bigger,’ he said. ‘I could argue that I’m sexually active and you aren’t.’ He shrugged. ‘This summer anyway.’
Lottie fiddled with her papers. Then she said, ‘This isn’t the point, Ryan. You hardly know this girl, that’s the point. The night before, you were out with someone else.’
‘This is the point? Listen to yourself, Mom. Listen to what you’re saying’
She didn’t answer him.
‘Do you know how old I am?’ he asked more gently.
‘Of course I do,’ she said.
He lifted his hands as if there was nothing further to talk about. But she didn’t look at him, so he started again. ‘Let me ask you, Lottie: you’ve never slept with someone just to have some good old meaningless sex?’
She stirred uncomfortably. ‘What I’ve done or not done is none of your business.’
‘Why not?’
She looked over at him sharply. ‘Because I was discreet. Because I didn’t do it in front of you.’
‘Mom.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You were away for the weekend. And you didn’t bother to call me. To say, “Oh, gee whiz, Ryan, I’m coming home.” ’ His face was like a nine-or ten-year-old’s in his eagerness to make his point. She saw that yes, he was right. But wasn’t she right too?
She has finished the area within her reach. There’s just a little bare patch beyond it at the upper edge of the window frame, and then she can lower the ladder. She yanks the ladder away from the house, leaning slightly to the right, to walk it over a few feet at the top. Ryan has showed her this trick, this way of saving trips up and down when you want only a little more reach. Under her hands the ladder slides; and then goes on sliding. Lottie squawks, her body convulses, she jerks the ladder back violently, and it stops, it stops almost as soon as it started. She stands clinging to its side rails. The bucket swings wildly on its hook below her, the yard blurs to a green shadow down there. Not me! she thinks. She rests her head along the side rail. Her heart drums irregularly as she shoves the picture of herself, the fall, the damage, out of her mind. Not me. And with the cold metal on her cheek, she closes her eyes and suddenly sees Jessica stepping forward into the headlights, so young, so sure the car must stop for her, of course, for her.
Then slowly, carefully, her foot blindly caressing each rung before she shifts her weight lower, she climbs down the ladder to the squalor of her parents’ teeming, overgrown garden.
PART II
CHAPTER IV
It was late in May, almost two months before the accident that killed Jessica, when Cameron had called Lottie to ask if she could come and help with the house. He was apologetic about his request, and it might well have seemed to him that the timing was bad: Lottie had been married for only five months. As it happened, though, she was grateful, glad for the possibility of getting away. And Jack, who knew her by then very well, seemed to hear that in her voice. At any rate, his eyes never left her face as she told him she was going; he looked as though he was trying to read through her words.
They were still in the kitchen at his house – their house together now: Lottie had given up her apartment the previous December, a few weeks before the wedding. Megan, Jack’s daughter, and the only one of either of their children still at home, had gone to her room after dinner, in all likelihood to talk to some friend on the telephone about how stupid her stepmother was and what she had done or said tonight that proved it. Jack had cleared the table, and they were sitting over cups of decaffeinated coffee. ‘Well, of course,’ he said when she’d finished talking. ‘If Cameron needs you.’
She blew on her coffee. ‘It’s not so much even that. It’s just I feel I owe it to him. After all he’s done.’
‘Is that it?’ He was smiling slightly now. His eyes were a strange color, a light brown that was almost gold, and to Lottie they made his face, which was deeply lined, seem always youthful too. There was nothing about the way he looked, in fact, that wasn’t a source of deep satisfaction to her, and even in these difficult months since they’d gotten married, she often found herself watching him – even while he did something as ordinary as clearing the table or lowering the shades in their bedroom – with an intensity that seemed to startle him if he caught her eye.
She didn’t say anything now.
‘I know it’s been hard, Lottie.’
‘Nothing we didn’t expect,’ she said. She gestured vaguely upstairs to where Megan had shut herself in her room, away from them. They had been in family therapy, all three of them, for several months, and only the day before, Megan had announced that what really bothered her about Lottie was her habit of clearing her throat repeatedly in the morning. She’d imitated it, sounding like a motor trying to turn over: hrmm, hrmm, hrmm. That, Megan said, and the perfume she wore. ‘Gross,’ Megan had called it. Then her eyes had swiveled wildly toward her father: had she gone too far this time? ‘It’s just, you know, a bunch of small stuff like that, really.’ She raised her narrow shoulders. ‘No big deal at all. I don’t know why we all have to keep coming here,’ she said.
For once Lottie was in agreement with Megan. The family therapist had an office on Michigan Avenue, where they all met weekly. He kept the venetian blinds closed, presumably so they wouldn’t be distracted by the view out over the lake, and they sat in the artificial dusk and leveled this kind of charge at each other over and over. The therapist seemed unable to move any of them beyond these petty gripes. But it was just this kind of complaint that pained Lottie most, of course. And it seemed clear that Megan somehow knew this. How much more easily, Lottie felt, she could have confronted accusations about being a liar, or an adulteress. Why couldn’t the therapist force them to talk openly about that stuff? she wondered.
‘I don’t mean just Megan,’ Jack said. ‘I mean me.’
‘Ah!’ Lottie said.
‘Ah!’ he echoed. He looked sternly at her. ‘Don’t say “ah,” please.’ Lottie smiled. Jack was a doctor. ‘Say yes, Lottie,’ he said gently. ‘I know it’s true.’
And of course it was. Lottie looked at him. She thought of him as beautiful. Beautiful, and inaccessible to her. ‘Okay, yes,’ she said.
He twisted his head away as though she’d struck him. She swallowed some of her coffee and, over the rim of her cup, watched him
compose himself again. You said it first, she thought.
Jack’s wife had died almost a year before, after what is called ‘a long illness.’ In her case, a major and catastrophic stroke about ten years earlier, when the children were all young, followed by periodic smaller strokes. Lottie had been involved with Jack for six years before his wife died. The night of Evelyn’s final stroke, Megan had called Lottie’s apartment.
‘Is my father there?’ she asked. Lottie knew instantly who it was, though she’d never talked to Megan on the phone. She had waited a beat before she could answer. And then she made a terrible mistake. ‘I think you must have the wrong number,’ she said.
‘Look, just get my fucking father on the phone,’ the girl’s voice had said. ‘This is an emergency.’
Jack hadn’t called Lottie for more than a week after Evelyn’s death. He hadn’t been able to make love to her again for more than a month. They had waited seven more months to be married. The night of the wedding, Lottie woke up and heard him pulling on his clothes in the dark, then leaving their hotel room. She looked at the bright numbers on the digital clock. She watched them change through the long hours. Each digit made a nearly inaudible click as it shifted its shape, became a new number. He hadn’t come back until five-thirty.
And he’d continued to get up at night through the months of their marriage, often staying awake for two or three hours. At first Lottie would get up, too, and sit with him in the living room, sometimes with the lights on, sometimes in the dark. Always he smiled when he saw her, always he apologized. Once, early, he talked about it. He told Lottie he’d been so relieved when his wife died, for her as well as for himself, that he didn’t feel he mourned at all. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I feel as though her death has given me back some earlier version of her. The way she was then. And I feel so … tender for that person. I’m mourning that person now, I guess.’ He had looked at Lottie with pouched, tired eyes. ‘On your time.’
Finally Lottie had stopped getting up with him. Often she didn’t even wake now when he slid carefully out from under the covers, when he padded across the carpeted bedroom floor, the clicking of bones in his ankles the only sound he made.
He looked at her again across the kitchen table. His eyes seemed deeper momentarily, a darker color. ‘Poor Lottie,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Poor Jack,’ she countered.
He smiled. ‘In general, a sorry group.’
Lottie drank some more coffee and set her cup carefully in the saucer. The china was Jack’s – Jack’s and Evelyn’s – like almost everything else. It was elegant, formal, some Wedgwood pattern with intricate little dragons chasing each other round and round the rim. Nothing Lottie would have chosen. ‘I don’t know what I expected,’ she said.
‘But it wasn’t this?’
‘No.’ She looked at him. ‘It was this: I knew it’d be … hard. I knew you’d still be feeling terrible about Evelyn. But I didn’t expect it to feel the way it does to me. I thought I’d be different, honestly.’
They were quiet for a moment. Faintly they could hear music, what Megan called music anyway: the steady punch, punch, punch of rap. ‘You’ve been a trouper,’ he said.
Instantly her eyes filled with tears. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say a stupid thing like that. This isn’t something I’m enduring.’
He watched her as she grabbed a paper napkin and blew her nose.
‘When will you go?’ he asked after a minute.
‘Mid-June or so, I guess. Cam has to get the roomers out of the house, and that’ll be the hard part. They’ve been there forever. They’re entrenched. They’re working on theses. And Ryan wouldn’t be able to come till then anyway. I’m going to try to reach him in the morning to see if he’s interested. Cam says Mother’s estate can pay him, and I know he’d like the money. He loves money.’
‘Well. It’ll be nice for you to have some time alone together with him.’
‘Yes. In all honesty, I was dreading this summer here. The two of them in the same house.’ She gestured vaguely up at the distant pulses of Megan’s music.
But this wasn’t the truth. The truth was that Lottie hadn’t been able to imagine Ryan living here with them. Jack was used to a more public life with Megan and his other children. For years there’d been a housekeeper and a daytime nurse for Evelyn, and the shape of their life together seemed connected to that: they were all polite with one another. She would have called it distant if she couldn’t feel the affection too.
She and Ryan had always had a messier relationship, volatile and intimate. They fought loudly and often, and he sometimes swore at her; but he was also capable of a rough affection – wrestling holds that loosened to a kind of embrace, occasionally a visit to her bedroom after a date or an evening out, when he sat by her feet and earnestly and self-importantly explained his feelings about some girl, or a political event, or something he’d read, liberally sprinkling all his comments with profanity. How could any of that become part of her life in this house?
‘Megan likes Ryan,’ Jack said. ‘I thought she even had a crush on him during the wedding stuff.’
‘She hasn’t had to live with him yet.’ Lottie got up and took her empty cup to the sink. From here she could see across a wide patch of grass and low bushes to their neighbors’ house. The lights were off in their kitchen now, but all the upstairs windows blazed. Homework, Lottie thought.
‘You think it’ll be most of the summer, then?’ Jack asked behind her in a cautious tone.
She turned and looked at him. ‘No, no. But maybe a month, I’d guess. You can’t imagine the way she lived. Bottles, bottles everywhere. And lots of drops to drink. It’ll take a while to clean it up.’
He nodded. He knew all about Lottie’s mother, though he’d never met her. ‘Will you drive?’
‘Yes. I should think having a car would be convenient.’ She came back and sat at the table again. She’d left already in her mind; she was thinking ahead – to the house, the work. To Ryan. To her freedom.
‘If you could leave on a weekend, I could drive out with you and then fly back.’
The pinch of claustrophobia Lottie felt at this suggestion startled her and made her feel sad for both of them. It made her remember, too, how often they had sneaked off together while Evelyn, Jack’s wife, was still alive. Lottie would be working somewhere, interviewing someone, and Jack would join her for a night or, occasionally, a weekend. She could suddenly see one of their crummy hotel rooms, the bed, the orangey drawn curtains that didn’t quite close. She remembered the rush of erotic weakness in her spine at the thought that he would be there with her that night. The things they would do.
‘Oh, no, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I’ll stop halfway or so and have a motel night. I’ll be fine.’
Bader came in stiffly, his toenails clicking on the tile floor. He was Jack’s family dog, named by his sons so they could call him Master Bader, a joke they were sure their parents were too out of it to get. The dog was elderly now, grizzled from the bottom up, as though he’d been dunked partway in white paint. He had fallen in love with Lottie, perhaps because she was the one who was home with him all day; and now when he saw her, his mouth fell open in a foolish panting smile and his tail swung steadily back and forth in a low arc.
He came and put his muzzle in Lottie’s lap. She bent over him, grabbed his ears, and moved his head back and forth. ‘Ohhh, I’ll miss you, sweet old Bader. Bader. Old Bader.’
She patted him in silence for a minute, and when she looked over at Jack again, she saw he was watching her, as she’d known he would be, with a pensive, almost stricken look on his face. The thought had obviously occurred to both of them that the same time that she’d been able to say to the ancient dog the very thing she couldn’t say to Jack.
In the night, Lottie was the one who woke. Jack was on his back, breathing heavily next to her, his mouth fallen open as though something shocking had happened in his dreams. She sat up and slowly got out of bed. B
ader met her at the foot of the stairs – he no longer climbed them – and followed her to her study, off the kitchen. In Evelyn’s time and before Lottie married Jack, this had been the housekeeper’s room. Idalba’s. Megan had liked Idalba’s cooking. ‘Why can’t you get some of her recipes?’ she’d asked one night as she scraped most of her dinner into the disposal.
It was the one room in the house now where Lottie felt completely comfortable. She had painted it herself, a deep ocher color. ‘We can hire someone who’d finish it up for you in a day,’ Jack had said the second night she came to the table with paint in her hair. But she had wanted to make the room hers the same way she’d always laid claim to the spaces she’d lived in before she married him: by doing it all herself. She’d kept the pretty iron bed Idalba had slept in and had bought a big square table she painted white to put her word processor on. There were overflowing bookcases against two of the walls, and more books piled on the bed and the floor. Photographs and clippings were tacked on the walls in no apparent order.
From the windows of this room you looked out over the deep backyard to the alleyway. Lottie had driven slowly down that alley more than once when she was still Jack’s secret. His paramour, she thought. She had driven by and seen the light on late at night in Idalba’s room and thought it was Jack, in what must be his study. Alone in her car, she had thought of him as being as restless, as sleepless as she was, in his tragic house. She felt connected to him when she looked up at the glowing rectangle in the night.
Instead, though, it was Idalba, Jack told her when she finally confessed to him. Idalba, who drank thick black coffee through the evening and stayed up late every night reading cheap American romances in order to perfect her English. Lottie had made him laugh, she remembered now, playing out a balcony scene between a lovesick version of herself and a confused Idalba imagining one of her paperback fantasies had come to life.
