by Sue Miller
After a few minutes, the car backed out. ‘And they’re off,’ Lottie said. She could see Jessica in the passenger seat. ‘You should warn her,’ she said to Elizabeth. ‘He’s a bit of a rake and a rambling boy.’
‘Oh, I don’t worry about her,’ Elizabeth said. ‘She gets about three calls a day from different men herself.’
‘And do you tell her what time she has to be in, Elizabeth?’ Lottie asked. ‘Are you in loco parentis?’
‘I hardly dare,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I’ve been staying out so late myself. And you? With Ryan?’
‘Oh no,’ Lottie said. ‘No. That part of the mom act is over too.’
‘Do they believe in love, you think? Does Ryan?’ Cam asked after a moment. Elizabeth was leaning back against his opened legs.
‘I suspect so,’ Lottie said. ‘He takes himself tremendously seriously, and that’s the bottom line, isn’t it? That high seriousness that we weren’t allowed.’
‘What do you mean, we weren’t allowed?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Well, I mean, really, do you think? Didn’t you feel, the moment you felt anything, that it was inauthentic? I mean, weren’t we the first real post-Freudians? The first ones to live with that understanding of life? It was impossible to take yourself seriously. Every single thing was a dynamic. We knew everything was neurosis. And love in particular was made suspect forever, don’t you think? Trivialized.’ Lottie was warming to it. ‘See, in the nineteenth century, people could feel their emotions without second-guessing themselves all the time. They didn’t have to realize that there was something ridiculously predictable and culture-bound – mundane – about even the most grand of them. Now no one can even write about love anymore.’ She saw Cam’s hand move in protest, and said, ‘It’s true! Where are the twentieth-century love stories? They’re not allowed.’
‘I don’t think your … post-Freudian feeling is as universal as you claim it is, Charlotte,’ Cam said dryly. ‘And after all, weren’t you the one who called yourself a romantic earlier?’
‘Well, maybe I did,’ Lottie said. ‘But surely I know better. After all, we can’t believe in romantic love anymore, can we?’ She was asking permission. She was asking them what they were up to.
‘But we do,’ he said firmly. Then he laughed. ‘We suspend our disbelief and we do.’
‘But that’s hanging by the proverbial thread, isn’t it?’ she asked.
Cam turned his blank face to her. ‘But as Cheever said, it’s hanging by a thread in the moonlight.’
Elizabeth spoke suddenly: ‘As Woody Allen says, we need the eggs.’
Cameron laughed again. He bent over Elizabeth for a moment.
Encouraged, Elizabeth continued. ‘And don’t you think we all believe – in our hearts anyway – that our emotions are enormously serious? Just the way they do?’ Her arm swung toward where the car had disappeared.
Lottie felt exhausted. ‘Oh, who knows?’ she said. ‘Maybe they don’t take themselves so seriously anyway. I mean, do you know what they call it? Having sex? Among other things they call it, I presume.’
‘What?’
‘“Doing the nasty.” Isn’t that strange? Here they treat it as though it had all the moral weight of … aerobics. But they label it as though it were powerfully evil. So maybe they don’t believe in love, after all.’ No one spoke. ‘I’ll ask him, tomorrow,’ Lottie said. ‘And get back to you.’
‘Well,’ Cameron said, after a long silence. ‘I guess I’d better be hitting the road.’
‘Oh, okay,’ said Elizabeth casually. And then she stood up along with him. ‘Well, maybe I’ll join you for a while.’
Someone could have pointed out that this made no sense, but no one did. It was awkward as they left, but they accomplished it, calling good night to Lottie in hushed voices as they walked toward the Volvo, which was parked farther up the street, at the foot of Elizabeth’s driveway. The doors slammed, the engine went on, then the headlights. Lottie heard Elizabeth’s piercing laugh just before they drove off.
She sat by herself for a while after they’d left. Had this summer been invented to teach her something? Was there some purpose to her solitary witness to all this romance? This love, if love it was. She thought of what Cameron had said about hanging by a thread in the moonlight; of what Elizabeth had said about eggs. Two utterly different notions, she thought suddenly. She should have said so. Those are two very different ideas. One is concerned with perilous beauty, and the other is about lying to yourself.
She thought again of Ryan, driving off with Jessica. Then of his reeling the girl in with his story, his sad story, in which she, his mother, was just the backdrop, a minor character.
Perhaps, after all, that was what was making her angry – being relegated to a supporting role. Didn’t she have a story too? A story in which Ryan’s role was significant but definitely minor?
The difference was, Lottie thought, that she was old enough to understand the nature of the story: that everyone had one, but that it was thrust upon you, as often as not. That what counted was what happened after that, the combining of the aftermath with the original story. Your mother is an alcoholic. Yes: and then? Your mother is an alcoholic, and you live at home and take care of her as she sinks into early dementia. Your mother is an alcoholic, and so are you. Your mother is an alcoholic, and you leave home and reinvent your life. Your mother is an alcoholic, and you never, ever let yourself touch a drop.
Jack’s story was Evelyn, of course. But then there was what he’d made of his life, of his family’s life, while he somehow kept Evelyn at the center of it. It was a good story, an interesting aftermath, and it had helped her fall in love with him.
Of course, when they met, Jack also had the knowledge she was seeking. That was powerful, Lottie thought. Sexy. That certainly helped it get going, that same thing that allowed middle-aged professors to hit on nubile young students with such ease – women who a few years later, when they’d become investment bankers or lawyers, would wonder at their choices. At the clunky brown shoes, the hair artfully arranged over the bald spot, the food spilled down the lapel.
With Jack, though, after the knowledge, the power, other things unfolded. His story, and what he made of it. And if Lottie were honest about it, she was the one, anyway, with the liabilities: the closetful of secondhand clothing, the inevitable run in her panty hose. And, of course, the dented breast, a mild lateral scoliosis, terrible teeth, a tendency to spill when eating. Their first dinner out, when the waiter cleared her place and then fastidiously swept the crumbs from the tablecloth in front of her, there was a silence as they’d taken it in – the smears, the bright dabs of color. They didn’t know each other well yet. When the waiter had left, Jack leaned forward and looked more closely. ‘It’s really worthy of de Kooning, Lottie.’ Lottie smiled at the memory and went inside.
She wandered through the rooms, flicking the light switches. In the kitchen, she turned on the radio. The Red Sox were losing. She changed the station – jazz – and went into the living room, sat down in her mother’s chair. She liked the way this felt. This was better. Light fell in from the dining room, pooled on the floor. Lottie turned away from it and looked out the window at the dark street, the odd porch light up and down the block a melancholy beacon. She could hear the music, dim and tinny on the cheap radio, but it wasn’t where she was. She was at a remove, she thought. ‘At a remove,’ she murmured.
What about Cam’s story? Was there a narrative to his life? She had no idea, she realized. There was the one he’d seemed to make – the clutter of books, friends, the beautiful apartment in the derelict neighborhood, the store. But she didn’t really know how he fit in. There was something disjunctive, not clear, about it all. About him. His history with Elizabeth, for instance. He’d said to Lottie that it made him what he was. But what was that? How did that go with the bookish Cam? Or with the Cam who stayed and took care of their mother? And who was the Cam who had passed through Chicago those years ago so full o
f romantic will?
Could there be such a thing as romantic will?
She remembered the visit they’d made together a few weeks earlier to their mother, how oddly uncomfortable she was watching his patience, his attentiveness to the old woman. She had thought then that it was because she felt he shouldn’t have forgiven her for being the kind of mother she’d been. She’d tried to get him to concede that, in fact, in the car on the way back that day. But now it occurred to her that she’d felt even then that there was something false in his devotion, something that had to do with his need to see himself as a certain kind of person, when his truest feelings – she would have sworn this – were quite different.
She heard footsteps on the front porch – Richard Lester! – and she froze, every muscle tensed. The front door creaked open, then shut, very carefully. Richard appeared, moving slowly across the hallway. As he passed in front of the lighted dining room doorway, he turned to where he thought she was, in the kitchen, where the music rattled. Lottie was holding her breath, absolutely motionless, watching him, his exaggerated high steps. When he made it to the foot of the stairs, she heard him gasp in excitement and scamper up, careless now of his noise.
In her mother’s chair, invisible Lottie sat, still frozen. And then she was aware of how rigidly she was holding herself. She inhaled, slowly. Exhaled for a long count. She forced herself to relax, she let her muscles drop, her head loll back. Her legs bent open at the knees, her arms slid down and rested, curled fingers turned up, on her thighs.
She closed her eyes. How absurd they were, she and Richard: the two celibates of the tale, hiding from each other in terror. She imagined describing this night to Jack, making a foolish story of it. ‘A non-bedroom farce,’ she’d call it. She imagined Jack’s lined but youthful face, the intense light eyes, the curve of his mouth. The palsied waltz of the wallflowers, she’d say.
Then someone was shaking her shoulder. She was cold, it had started to rain, she could hear the hard pelting drops outside. It was Ryan.
‘Jesus, Mom,’ he said. His voice was tightened in judgment and disgust. ‘What’re you doing down here?’
CHAPTER VII
As the alternately rainy and muggy days of the summer wore on, as the time when the accident that would change their lives drew nearer, Elizabeth began to hang around Lottie’s house for a little while almost every day. She’d arrive sometime after breakfast – Lottie would hear her on the porch, her light, quick step – and then she’d knock at the open front door, call, and come in as far as the empty hall.
The first time she came, she seemed almost shy, hesitant; and Lottie contributed to the awkwardness since she couldn’t figure out why Elizabeth was there, standing with her hands on her hips, surveying the work Ryan and Lottie were doing as though she were the contractor in charge of the project. She’d left her paintbrush lying across the open can too, and the image of it, its bristles hardening slowly in the damp air, kept recurring in her mind’s eye as she slouched against the doorjamb, talking uncomfortably to Elizabeth for about ten minutes. Finally Elizabeth left.
The next day, when Elizabeth showed up again, Lottie thought to offer her coffee. They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. Elizabeth leaned forward and set her elbows down, and suddenly she looked so completely settled – relaxed – that Lottie realized that this was the point, that she simply wanted to talk.
And so it started. Sometime usually around ten or ten-thirty, Lottie would hear Elizabeth’s voice echoing in the open hallway, the question mark in the ‘hello,’ and she’d come from whatever she was doing to make a fresh batch of coffee and sit in the grim little kitchen with her for a while.
Her subject was Cameron, Cameron and herself, and virtually nothing else. She’d repeat various things he’d said to her, she’d describe how he looked when he said them. At first Lottie could scarcely believe how bored she was. She barely needed to listen, really. She knew the basic themes so well. She remembered behaving just this way when she’d been so intently focused on Jack. Her closest friend then, a magazine editor Lottie had met through her work, had heard the same kind of details. ‘Mmm,’ Lottie would say to Elizabeth – as her friend had said to her – and pour herself another cup of coffee. ‘No kidding,’ Lottie would offer, and unbelievably, that was enough to keep Elizabeth going. Once she actually made a note to herself while Elizabeth spoke, a note she thought might be useful for the article she was still working on: Exhibitionism, she wrote on a folded paper napkin. The early stage of love which requires an audience. Elizabeth’s eyes had followed Lottie’s hand as she uncapped the pen, as the spidery vertical script bloomed on the napkin; but she never stopped talking. Lottie’s behavior clearly didn’t exist on the same plane of consciousness with her preoccupation with Cameron, with her need to speak of him. She watched Lottie sit up straighter and push the napkin into a pocket of her jeans without her attention ever appearing to waver from her own train of thought.
Slowly, though, over the course of ten days or so, Lottie was drawn in. She found she actually began to look forward to Elizabeth’s arrival. She realized that at least part of the reason this could happen was the curious blankness of her own life in Cambridge and the way in which what was going on between Elizabeth and Cameron seemed a comment on it. But some of it, too, was the glacial but inevitable course of the drama, the steady slow flow of information shifting just slightly over the days. It made Lottie remember the period just after she had separated from Derek, before she finally gave her television away, when she had religiously followed the soaps. She was working mornings then, and she’d pick up Ryan from the baby-sitter after lunch and put him down for a nap almost as soon as they got home. Then she’d lie down herself in front of their tiny, blurry TV, and watch the self-destructing love affairs, the bitter rivalries, the medical and legal entanglements, as they played themselves out incrementally.
Now, against her will, her better judgment, she felt the same eager fascination for Elizabeth’s slow-moving narrative, her tedious piling up of mundane and yet – to Lottie – compelling detail. And as though she sensed Lottie’s appetite, Elizabeth began to elaborate her stories, began to reveal more and more intimate aspects of her falling in love again with Cam – though she never gave it that name. ‘Our little romance,’ she called it. ‘Our recycled affair.’
And so Lottie came to know that Cam had wept the first few times they made love again. She knew when Elizabeth gave Cam the key to her mother’s house so that he could sneak in and up to her room after everyone had gone to bed. (After that Lottie had to will herself not to watch for the Volvo at night, had to keep herself away from the front windows.) Elizabeth told Lottie about the rainy night when they’d turned into a dark passageway between buildings in Central Square and made love against a wall there, how she’d just stepped out of her panties when they left, how she’d looked back as they reached the sidewalk and seen them lying there, a flag of white in a black puddle.
Lottie knew that Cameron’s body hadn’t changed much, she knew that he had what Elizabeth called ‘a lovely fat penis.’ She thought she had probably flinched when Elizabeth told her that, so startled was she that this could be something Elizabeth would want someone else to know. It occurred to her to wonder when this kind of discussion had become possible among women. Had the women’s movement done it? She thought about it and recalled herself in one of the three groups she’d belonged to over those years, talking explicitly – yet never, she was certain, without a sense of at least overcoming a kind of embarrassment – of Derek, of what he had liked to do in bed; and then, she remembered, of new lovers too. Yes, of penis size, of varying styles of pumping, foolish things said, postcoital behavior. And this was exactly the kind of thing it seemed Elizabeth needed to tell Lottie, again and again.
And gradually Lottie dropped her guard too, at least partway. She began to tell Elizabeth about her life. Never about the situation with Jack, never about her fears in that regard. And she was always vague
about Evelyn’s death. But she revealed at least some of the particulars of their courtship. She told Elizabeth, for example, about the first night she’d spent with him, when someone had taken the opportunity to leisurely tear her apartment up, taking only two things in the end – an electric can opener she’d gotten as a gift when she married Derek, and her very beat-up stereo. Jack had bought her a new stereo to prove this wasn’t God’s judgment on them, and its sound reproduction was so good she’d had to throw away most of her records. ‘They went ga-thunk, ga-thunk,’ she told Elizabeth. ‘Or they’d get to a certainly gluey part and just scrape over it to the end. We used to weight the old player arm with a nickel to push it right into those gummy grooves, but we knew we couldn’t do that with this machine; it wasn’t somehow ours in the same sense.’
She told Elizabeth about therapy with Megan, about how Megan had said she didn’t need another mother, the last thing she needed was another mother. ‘So I said to her, “What can I be to you, then?” And she truly didn’t know what to answer. I think she hadn’t thought that far ahead, that I would have to be something to her. She hadn’t reckoned on it, poor thing.’
She told Elizabeth about having cancer.
Elizabeth’s braceleted hand clutched her own throat. ‘Cancer! Oh God, I’d be so terrified. And you must think about it all the time, ever after.’
‘Oh no,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s been years now. And even at the time – I mean, you just deny like crazy. It’s an argument for the usefulness of denial, actually. I’ve never admired an unhealthy psychological phenomenon more.’
‘But never to know. When it might recur!’
‘Oh, that’s not true,’ she said. Elizabeth was a wonderful audience, really. Lottie was almost regretful she couldn’t tell her about Jack and Evelyn. ‘You get into these statistical pools. I’m in a great one now, having survived for seven years. In fact, I’d bet money I’m in a better pool than you. But see, you probably don’t even know your pool.’ Elizabeth shook her head. ‘And I do, so there you have it.’
