For Love

by Sue Miller

  She dated Walter a few times. Then she had a long affair with another of them, a graduate student in biochemistry, Al. She virtually moved in with him. But it was Derek she ended up with, Derek Gardner. She moved in with him, and Al moved out. And then she married him and they began their itinerant life as graduate student and working wife, and then junior faculty member and working wife, and then assistant professor and working wife with baby. And then she was a young divorcée with a small child. This all happened before she was twenty-five.

  She’d ended up in Chicago, far from all thoughts of Elizabeth and Cameron and what had happened in their lives. Cameron wrote to her perhaps twice a year, sketchy, short letters, news of their mother, his jobs, his plans for the future; but she hadn’t seen him in two years, and they hadn’t really talked since before her marriage to Derek, when he called one day from the highway. She could hear voices, Muzak behind him, the binging of a cash register or maybe a pinball machine. He said he was in Ohio, he was driving to the West Coast, could he stop and stay with her overnight?

  She was glad to hear from him, mostly in the way a single mother living alone with a very young child is always glad for company, for stimulation. She put Ryan in his carriage and went out and blew her food money for a week on a jug of wine and some steaks, even a handful of chrome-yellow daffodils, an unspeakable luxury for her. Shortly before Cam was due to arrive, though, while Lottie was frantically picking up, her downstairs neighbor, who had a little girl six months younger than Ryan, knocked on her door. Nadine baby-sat for Ryan in the mornings while Lottie worked, so it was necessary to be gracious. Lottie asked her in, but said that her brother was about to arrive. Nadine said she’d only stay a minute, if she could just have some coffee. They were out, she was desperate.

  But while Lottie was dripping the cup through, she saw Nadine bend down and take off Chloe’s sweater. She realized this was to be the standard visit, in spite of Nadine’s promise. She was talking about Chloe’s cold now, about milk products and mucus. Lottie sighed and put on some water for a cup for herself too.

  Twenty minutes or so later, the bell rang. When Lottie answered the door, Cameron took her breath away, he was so changed. It was that era when everyone was allowed to change abruptly. Men grew beards, shed ties and jackets, and suddenly looked like different people, different kinds of people. Women wore costumes: beatnik, mod. Lottie herself was wearing a long flowered skirt. Her hair was parted in the middle and caught into a fat wispy braid, which rested on one shoulder. She had golden hoops in her ears. She looked like a gypsy girl.

  Cameron’s change wasn’t extreme, but it made him more attractive, arresting-looking. His hair lay across his shoulders, thick and black and straight, longer than Lottie had ever seen it. He was clean-shaven, but he wore jeans, his shirt was open at the neck, and she saw a dark cloud of curling hairs in the V below his collarbone. Unsmiling as ever, he seemed intense, dramatic. A Method actor, say. His embrace was quick and didn’t involve their bodies touching. He set his suitcase on the floor in the living room and looked around, taking in all that was seedy and worn, Lottie was sure: the bookcases made of milk boxes and boards, the mattresses on the floor, the toys scattered everywhere. Suddenly the very flowers, in their glass jar, looked shabby – looked fake.

  ‘And where’s my famous nephew?’ he asked when his eyes had made their careful circuit of her life.

  She brought him into the little kitchen where the children were banging pots and pans, where Nadine sat up straighter now over her coffee. She introduced him to Nadine, to Ryan, who swung his body shyly behind Lottie’s long skirt. Cameron said yes, he’d have a cup of coffee.

  Ryan was silenced, staring in admiration at his uncle, and Cameron turned his chair so he could watch the children. Nadine’s conversation grew livelier, more pointed, for Cameron’s benefit. Lottie tried to ask about the trip, the drive, but Nadine kept reclaiming the floor. ‘The doctor said there was nothing to be done, nothing. With that kind of fever, you just wait it out.’

  Lottie served Cameron his coffee and stood with her butt resting against the sink, watching the scene, wondering how to rescue them all.

  ‘Anyway,’ Nadine was saying now, ‘when I got back, I saw that Chloe’s spit-up was all over me, all the way down my back. No wonder they’d been staring. And I’d thought they might be admiring me. Foolish.’ Her eyes always flickered back to Cameron, who sat glum, sunk in stupefaction, Lottie imagined, to have arrived off the roar of the highway to this.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to stretch your legs, Cam? Take a walk?’ she offered when she could, and watched the gratitude lighten his face.

  He carried the stroller downstairs for her, while Nadine trailed them, telling Lottie where she should take Cam on the walk, as though Lottie were a stranger, too, to the neighborhood. She was still calling after them as they set off toward the schoolyard a couple of blocks down. It was late spring, cool. The bright-green shreds of leaves on the trees shook with the wind. Once they’d crossed the last street and stepped on to the patchy grass, Lottie braked the carriage and set Ryan free. He ran ahead of them up the slow rise, and stopped dead when the playground equipment came into his view. When she caught up to him, he pointed, awestruck. ‘It’s the swings!’ he said. ‘It’s the big kids’ swings!’ he told his uncle. Cameron smiled and reached for his uplifted hand.

  For a while they took turns pushing Ryan on the swing. Then Lottie spread a blanket on the grass, and she and Cam sat down. From a distance, she thought, they must have looked like a pretty, young quasi-hippie couple with child. Ryan meandered in a wide circle around them, bringing back treasures he found – a rock, a dandelion – and depositing them worshipfully in Cameron’s hand. Lottie’s eyes followed him, and every now and then, when he wandered too far or seemed to be putting something in his mouth, she’d get up and run to him; but within this punctuation she and Cameron were attentive to each other, busy accounting for their lives, for the years that had passed.

  Lottie was first. Her story was still new to her then, and she brought a fresh and venomous energy to it. Later she would learn to tell it differently, she would see how she’d used Derek to escape what was becoming of her life in Cambridge, to open certain doors, to be a new family from which she could launch herself less fearfully into the world. But what she described that day to Cameron was Derek’s never having time to take care of Ryan when she was both working and trying to go to school. His desire for an open marriage. Their competitive, joyless series of affairs with other people. She recalled for Cam a party a few months before Ryan was born, at which, coming downstairs from the bathroom, she met Derek on his way up with a woman she knew. She’d turned sideways to let them pass, and they’d both had to slide along against her big belly.

  Lottie was sitting very still on her mother’s back stoop now, remembering all this. Remembering herself pregnant, her unhappiness. Thinking with shame how often she’d used that detail – the twin touch of her belly – as the final brush stroke in the portrait she painted of Derek for anyone who’d listen in the years after her divorce.

  She noticed abruptly that Ryan’s music had changed inside the house. It was classical now. Lottie sipped her wine. As she thought about those long-ago days of her first marriage, it seemed just possible that it hadn’t really happened that way at the party. There’d been the stairs – oh yes! – and the pretty young woman. She could call up even her name, Barbara Doyle. But she seemed to remember now that the two of them had been ashamed or embarrassed to see her, that she’d turned away from them, coming down, that there hadn’t therefore been that doubled caress of her pregnant belly, the detail that made it all so much crueler.

  How much else might not have been true? It was so long ago. She remembered that she’d chronicled for Cam a few of her ugly fights with Derek, the days of not speaking. And after the divorce, the troubles getting child support, the infrequent visits. And Cameron had nodded and agreed: Derek was a bastard. He asked at least several of
the right questions.

  But once he began to talk, to tell his story, his voice seemed suddenly tuned differently; and Lottie realized he’d simply been enduring everything that came before. That for Cameron, hearing her story was like her having to listen to Nadine go on about Chloe’s achievements – her progress in toilet training, say. It was the first time it occurred to Lottie that the intricate shocks and pains of her life could be of no interest whatever to someone else.

  Cameron said he was going to marry Elizabeth.

  Lottie had felt yanked back to a country she’d forgotten the shape of, the climate of. ‘Our Elizabeth?’ she asked after a beat.

  ‘Elizabeth Harbour. My Elizabeth,’ he said.

  ‘But when did this happen? You guys haven’t been together in years.’ From twenty feet away, Ryan called to her, and she waved.

  ‘Oh, but we have. Off and on, off and on. We always come back to each other.’

  ‘This is since high school? This is, like, when she was in college too?’

  ‘Yes. It’s why I came back to Boston.’ Cameron had worked in publishing for a year in New York after college, then gone back to Boston and started working again at the bookstore he later bought a share in. ‘She always had a key to my apartment, all through college. She wanted to be free – like Derek, I suppose, with his open marriage stuff, only we weren’t married. I mean, I agreed with her. We both knew she was too young, that she needed time and space. And I wanted to give that to her. But just every now and then, I’d open the apartment door and she’d be there. Like a gift.’ His face was stamped with a commanding awe: Imagine this.

  And Lottie had imagined it then, Elizabeth with her long red hair, her big pale-pink mouth, waiting in the sunstruck apartment. Lottie had been in Cameron’s apartment a few times; it was in Cambridge, on Mount Auburn Street, near the post office, a brick building with lots of windows and a tiny weed-choked courtyard. She saw Elizabeth in a chair, a Modigliani figure, the sunlight glinting through the vine-covered window behind her. She saw Cameron in the open doorway with just this eager gratitude rising on his face.

  ‘Didn’t it ever interfere?’ she asked. ‘Other relationships and stuff? It must have.’

  ‘Oh yes. Lots of times. But those were the rules. Once, actually, I remember I came home with a woman I’d been involved with for a couple of months, and she was there – Elizabeth – asleep in my bed.’ He grinned quickly. ‘Goldilocks. She was wearing a shirt of mine. And that was it with that woman. I mean, I took her home and all, but she didn’t even speak to me on the way. That was it.’

  ‘It would be, wouldn’t it?’

  Ryan had staggered up to them and fallen into Lottie’s lap. Now he flung his head back against her breast, under her chin, and reached up idly to explore her face and hair with his hands while he watched Cameron talk. Lottie leaned forward and closed her lips over his fingers, sucked them gently for a moment. ‘And what about now?’ she asked finally. ‘I thought she was at Berkeley?’ How did Lottie know this? She just did, she couldn’t remember.

  ‘Well, I’ve flown out a few times. And of course, she comes home a couple of times a year to see her parents.’

  Lottie shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I never knew any of this.’

  ‘Why would you? I never said anything about it. And you and I haven’t exactly kept close watch over each other the past few years.’

  ‘True,’ Lottie said. She rested her head on Ryan’s. ‘And now you’re going to marry her. The famous happy ending.’ She felt a quick pang for her own failure. She held Ryan tight for a second.

  Cameron was looking away, off over the top of the ugly flat school building to the scudding clouds. ‘Well, Elizabeth doesn’t know it yet.’

  ‘Oh. You mean you’re … what? Like, proposing?’

  ‘I guess. Or more like carrying her off or something. She’s supposed to be marrying someone else.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ A phrase Derek had used when she said something that displeased or shocked him: ‘If you ever do that again, I’ll leave you.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Cameron was smiling now, grimly. With his strong profile, the longish dark hair, he looked like an American Indian. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But that’s not going to happen. It’s all a mistake.’

  ‘Well, but you’re not getting married, then.’ Ryan had stood up again, and now he lurched off after a big, dirty-looking pigeon, crying out in excitement.

  Cameron watched Ryan for a moment and then turned to her. The breeze lifted his hair suddenly. ‘Yes I am, Char.’ He spoke to her as though she were a very young child. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going out there to do.’

  Lottie felt a sense of dismay: this seemed so wrongheaded. ‘But … Well … It sounds like Elizabeth has other plans, Cam.’

  ‘Elizabeth just needs to see me. She needs to listen to me. I shouldn’t have let her stay out there this long. It was too long, apart. She just needs to be with me again.’

  ‘But … I mean, it really sounds like she’s moved on, in some way.’ Let her stay out there? she was thinking.

  ‘You don’t understand this, Char. I don’t think you and I should even be talking about this.’ His voice was chilly, suddenly.

  ‘Well, I do understand that you can’t force someone to love you again if they’ve stopped.’

  ‘She hasn’t stopped. That’s the point. And it’s not a matter of force. We just need to be together. We were meant to be together.’

  Lottie was wishing they had stayed home and drunk a lot of the wine she’d bought. She would have liked to dismiss all this as wine talking.

  ‘But, Cam,’ she said. ‘If she’s met someone new, someone she’s planning to marry …’

  He got up quickly. She had to shield her eyes to look up at him, a tall shadow in the bright, thin sunlight. ‘You don’t understand this, Char. You’ve always settled for things. You’ve given up, you’ve compromised, you’ve settled. For what you could get, for what came easy. And Elizabeth and I have lived a different way.’ He turned abruptly and walked off a little distance.

  Lottie was stung. Her eyelids felt suddenly swollen, and she looked out, unseeing, after Ryan. After a few minutes, Cameron came back and said more gently, ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but I don’t really want to talk about Elizabeth with you.’

  Lottie didn’t say anything. Silently she rose too. As they folded the flapping blanket, they walked toward each other once, twice, three times, without meeting each other’s eyes. Lottie pushed the blanket into the back of the carriage. Then she went to retrieve Ryan from his circular, futile pursuit of the bird. Later – often, later – she would think back to Cameron’s remarks about her that day, to his comparison of his life with hers, and feel outraged. But at the time – with Ryan so happy to be around a man, any man; with her own sense of her defeat as a lovable person so recent in her life – she had thought only that Cam might well be right. That real love might just be a universe she’d never been part of.

  The next morning he was gone, even before Ryan’s gay crowing woke her up. There was a note on the kitchen table. ‘I’m off. Thanks for dinner and the bed. I’ll write when things settle down. Kiss Ry for me.’

  And that was all she ever knew of it. The next time he wrote was on a Christmas card. He was in Boston again. There was no word of Elizabeth. Somehow later – maybe through her mother – Lottie knew of Elizabeth’s marriage, to a different man entirely, of several children. Nothing more until now. She’d assumed, she supposed, that Elizabeth had gone on to have the kind of life they’d all imagined for her when they were young together: accomplished, distinguished, full of glamour and excitement. Because everyone had understood, of course, that Elizabeth was special. Even when Lottie had hated her most, she had believed that. And it seemed, in some way, that now, long after she’d stopped thinking in these categories for anyone else, she still did for Elizabeth. Or how else could she explain the senseless pant of envy she’d felt, leaning into Elizabeth’s
car?

  Ryan was calling her now from inside, asking her something she couldn’t quite hear. She stared at her wineglass for a moment, then poured what little was left out on to the ground and went back in the house to see what he wanted.

  Elizabeth telephoned a few days later. They arranged to meet at the Harvest – the best thing to happen to Harvard Square for years, Elizabeth said: a bar for grownups. Lottie got there first. A sullen waitress with spiked black hair and a deadly-looking crescent of earrings dangling from one lobe led her to a table. It was outside, on a shadowed terrace at the bottom of a well of tall office buildings. When Elizabeth arrived, Lottie watched her cross the terrace in her sunglasses and high heels, watched the middle-aged men trail her with their eyes.

  Elizabeth kept her sunglasses on through the meal. Sparrows hopped at their feet eating crumbs, and in the office windows hidden by the tree arched above them, all the air conditioners hummed with a sound as steady as rain.

  Elizabeth talked freely – astonishingly so, Lottie thought – about the problems in her marriage, the details of her husband’s infidelity, of how she had found out about it. He had been unable or unwilling for the moment to give his lover up. But he’d wanted to hold on to his marriage too. ‘I told him forget it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I told him there was no way I was going to cooperate for a minute in wrecking the children’s lives, in letting him wreck my life. And then I left town. Let him see how it feels to live alone with his bimbo. Let him understand the damage he’s doing.’ Elizabeth’s dark mouth pulled down at the corners when she spoke of her husband, and Lottie could see now that behind her sunglasses, there was a fan of delicate lines, fine as paper cuts, around each eye.