by Sue Miller
By now Lottie had all but stopped working, though she would have had sufficient solitude in Cambridge and enough time to do whatever she liked. She might have accomplished a great deal. Indeed, she had planned to. She had started to. In the first few days after she’d sold the dining room table and chairs to the cigars-moking dealer from Widespread Depression – the store specialized in furniture of that era – she’d moved a small drop-leaf table from the hall into the dining room, opened it up, and set out all her books, her notes. And at first she had lost herself, that’s how she thought of it, in reading, in making more notes. Even after Ryan arrived, she had most evenings to herself since he was so often out. Occasionally she worked on the house project, but more of the time she sat in the dining room at her makeshift desk, her legs hooked around the legs of a chair, her eyes moving slowly down the pages of print under the bright gooseneck lamp left behind by one of the tenants who’d moved out.
She’d already read the popular literature. That had been the easy part, the boring part – the books on love addicts, self-destructive love, men who can’t love, women who can’t stop. Earlier, in Chicago, she’d read some Freud, some legitimate psychology, some sociology. Now she’d begun the random circling through fiction, biography, letters, poetry, that was almost always part of what she loosely termed research. This was the aspect of her work Lottie usually loved best. She thought of it as her true education; the BA she’d finally gotten from Roosevelt was simply too hard-won, too much an issue of scraping together whatever it took – time, books, pages written, money – either to have left her enough energy to absorb much of what she was learning or to have been pleasurable, except as an unlikely achievement. No, this slow meandering-with-something-in-mind that had started after she began to specialize in medical issues, this had taught her more than all those years of earnest scholarship wedged between Ryan’s feedings and baths, between PTA meetings and Little League games, between her job and the occasional bit of social life. Sometimes she felt a nearly erotic pleasure in the simple, physical piling up of the books to be gone through, a kind of thrill as she sat down at a desk or table strewn with them or with pages of notes, or articles clipped from the paper or Xeroxed in the law library or the medical library.
She’d done stories on jogging, on birth control, on pregnancy. On anorexia, on the changing images of perfection in women’s body types. On the politics of midwifery. On breast implants. On the spurious medical labeling of beauty products. On women and mental disease. When she was in the middle of an article, the apartment would be littered with splayed books – texts, poetry, novels – and with Xeroxes, with scraps of paper, notes she’d gotten up to make to herself in the middle of the night.
When Ryan had asked her once how she could stand it, she’d been honestly surprised. She’d looked around and seen it, momentarily, as he did: a terrible mess, a problem. She’d made an effort to keep it more contained after that. She’d actually bought herself a worktable and tried not to let her books and papers stray too far from it. But the truth was that she loved it, she loved the mess, she loved the sheer mass of paper and words and ideas.
Quite a few of the books stacked at her mother’s house were on loan from Cameron. That first night she was in town, when they’d had dinner together in his apartment, she’d explained her idea to him. ‘I’m working on the article about love now. What I want, I think, is somehow to defend excess. To find examples of emotion that would be termed aberrant and talk about their importance.’ She didn’t mention Jack, or the conflict between them. ‘Who should I read? Who do you recommend?’
‘Well, run like hell from Flaubert this time,’ he said. She’d told him about Flaubert’s extravagant grief.
‘Yeah. I guess old Emma gets her comeuppance for romantic thinking, doesn’t she?’
‘Emma’s the least of it. The only romance he allows is with Art.’ He’d gotten up from the table and turned on the spots that shone on the bookshelves. Blinking in the brighter light, they’d both moved in front of them. Lottie watched Cameron’s hands slide lovingly, quickly over the spines of the books, as though he were reading the titles through his fingertips. He’d pulled out five or six volumes for her. Romeo and Juliet. Stendhal. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. John Donne. A collection of short stories by Turgenev. C. S. Lewis.
Some of them she’d read before. Some she read for the first time at the table in the dining room or curled up in her mother’s bed. But the more she read, the more it all seemed part of the argument in her head. Everything stalled her, threw her back into her own confused life, just as watching Cameron and Elizabeth falling in love did, just as hearing a schmaltzy song on the radio could. ‘Memory,’ for instance. Or even – God help her! – Barry Manilow.
It was as though Lottie had forgotten how she used to spend her days. She made herself recall it, she instructed herself about her habits. But as she thought about it, she realized that it had been a while since she’d worked well. She saw that even during the months at Jack’s house she’d been off her stride.
What’s more, she didn’t know now how to recapture her sense of focus, of energy, about this article. She had thought it would write itself, really, so eager was she to expose the folly of current prescriptions about love. Oh yes! her heart had sung when she read of crazy Turgenev, attaching himself permanently to the household of his beloved Pauline: the third wheel of all time, with a speaking tube connecting his apartment to the music and conversations in her study below. Heaven! she thought when she discovered Aristophanes’ theory about man as originally a four-legged, four-armed, two-headed creature, divided and set to search forever for his missing half.
But nothing came of all this. She just went around in circles.
One night – this was about ten days before the accident – she was reading Donne’s love poetry. Just a few of them before she dropped off to sleep, she told herself. She was propped up in bed, and the circle of light fell on the worn white sheets and across the yellowed pages of the old book. A musty smell rose from it as Lottie turned the pages, a smell that weighted the words with physical meaning for her. ‘For, not in nothing, nor in things/Extreme, and scattering bright,’ she read, ‘can love inhere.’
She thought of Jack, of course. In what did her love for him inhere? She rolled back on the bed. His goodness, it seemed to her. And then she laughed out loud. Excellent, Lottie. Hardly extreme, hardly scattering bright. ‘Come on,’ she said. And she made herself remember his unavailability at the time she met him, reminded herself that that was then the sine qua non for any of her relationships. And of course, she had rather liked certain hotels he took her to. Now she was getting extreme. His rangy body and big hands, she thought. His voice. His fidelity, as she saw it – Megan surely wouldn’t – to Evelyn through all those years.
And then suddenly Lottie was remembering a conversation she’d had with him one night in her old apartment, several years before they were married, when Evelyn was still alive. He was talking about Evelyn; he told Lottie that what he’d missed most immediately about her after her first stroke was the way she did her hair. ‘She has beautiful hair,’ he’d said. ‘Heavy and dark and full, and she used to wear it in what I think you call a French braid. Do you know what I mean?’
Lottie said yes, she knew what that was. She had asked about Evelyn. Though Jack was almost never willing to speak of her, tonight he had started, and Lottie felt she had to be very still, very blank, in order not to make him stop. The room was dark: maybe this was some of it – what allowed him to drift into memory. And Ryan was away at a friend’s house for the night. It felt to Lottie as though she and Jack were alone on an island in her bed; she had invited Evelyn to join them, and for once he had allowed it.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘she braided it and then coiled it at the back and pinned it somehow, very elaborately. Every day. Only, of course, after the stroke she couldn’t. And she looked so … unadorned, so ordinary without it, that I felt grieved, sometimes, just looking
at her. I actually fired the first nurse because she didn’t know how to do it – how to braid Evelyn’s hair that way.’ He laughed, hoarsely. His head was resting uncomfortably on Lottie’s stomach, but she didn’t move. Outside her windows, she heard a car pass in a muffled, distant rumble over the snowy street. The flakes had been falling thick and lush for four or five hours. She hadn’t pulled the curtains when they came to bed, and both of them were turned to watch the whited air.
‘The agency really let me have it,’ he said. ‘They were nurses, not hairdressers, and so on. And of course that was right.’ A puff of wind hurried the snow sideways, and then it seemed to halt, momentarily suspended in air, before it began to float down again. ‘I knew that.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I called a hairdresser after that, to come to the house, and he tried it a couple of times, but it never looked the same. So for a while she wore it just in a braid down her back, something the nurse could easily do. And then, later, I had them cut it.’ His head moved just slightly from side to side on Lottie’s belly. ‘I can’t tell you the feeling of loss. I actually wept. I wept over her hairdo, of all things. What a betrayal of her. Of who she was. Because she wore it like that to get it out of the way, so she wouldn’t have to bother with it through the day.’
Lottie had lain there, breathing evenly and quietly, and added the French braid to what little she really knew of who Evelyn was: she’d been a good cook, a good tennis player, a slapdash housekeeper. She hadn’t been able to quit smoking, and Jack felt guilty about that – that he hadn’t somehow forced the issue. He thought it had probably contributed to her stroke. ‘I don’t know that you would have liked her,’ he had said once to Lottie. ‘She was, I suppose, an old-fashioned sort of woman. Just enough older than you to have believed that marriage and a family were it, were enough.’
What was left, Lottie wondered now, that Jack had loved, when these things – extreme and scattering bright – weren’t part of Evelyn anymore? She lay in her mother’s bed, in her mother’s house, and she would have liked to ask him this. ‘When Evelyn was strapped in her wheelchair all day, when she signaled her pleasure – in food or your arrival home – with an animal cry, what then did you love in her?’
And then Lottie thought of a lover she’d had – the only serious, long-lasting love in all those years between Derek and Jack. He was a funny man, a wry man, and Lottie had been incredibly fond of him, though they never lived together. Sometimes she had let herself imagine that one day they might. Maybe after Ryan was a little older, easier for someone else to be around.
The second winter they were involved, there was a terrible snowstorm in the Midwest. The roads out in the suburbs where Avery lived weren’t cleared for several days, and he was stuck. In addition, Lottie’s telephone was out of service. To talk to Avery, she had to walk down to the deli a few blocks from her apartment and use the pay phone. She had to stand in line behind other people whose phones were also not working, who were all trying to conduct the urgent business of life armed with a pocketful of dimes. While you waited, leaned against the wall with take-out coffee, you could hear arguments, business arrangements, tears, vows of love, drug deals. When Lottie’s turn came, she’d dial Avery’s number and feel that they had nothing worth that much effort or passion to say to each other. And somehow because of that it occurred to her that he was a foolish man, more than anything.
And nearly as abruptly as that, her love for him began to diminish. All the things that had charmed her, interested her, simply lost their magic and were absorbed into his foolishness, as she saw it. When he asked her what was wrong – and he did, of course – Lottie didn’t know how to respond. I don’t like to look at you anymore? I’m not interested in you anymore? Impossible. Slowly they separated, though understandably he made one or two quite ugly scenes before it was finished. In what had that love inhered, that it could be over so abruptly?
Maybe what Lottie was feeling now, with Jack, was the end of her love for him in that same way. She remembered her relief in the anonymous solitude of the Holiday Inn in Pennsylvania. Even now, restless and miserable as she was in her mother’s house, wasn’t there a kind of pleasure in reclaiming herself? Perhaps her substituting fantasy for who Jack really was constituted a kind of infidelity to him, a way of escaping his love. Maybe she’d never truly been in love with Jack. Maybe she’d never truly been in love at all. Maybe part of what had made her angry when she found Ryan and Jessica in her bed the weekend after the cookout was that Ryan was behaving just as she so often had. ‘Haven’t you ever wanted just some good old meaningless sex?’ he’d asked her. Yes. Oh yes indeed, she surely had. And for years, that’s all she’d had, even when at the time she’d thought of it as full of meaning.
Perhaps this was what she was suited to, was all she was suited to. Perhaps her mean growing up had unfitted her, finally, for deep feeling, for the kind of love that could last years, as Cameron’s and Elizabeth’s had; or through hard times, as Jack’s love for Evelyn had; or through the kind of distance she felt between herself and Jack now.
Lottie hiked herself up again in bed; she turned over to rest on her elbow, bent over the book. She flipped through the pages. ‘Love is a growing, or full constant light,’ she read. ‘And his first minute, after noon, is night.’
As soon as she felt her throat tighten at this, she made herself get up. She put on clothes – a loose long T-shirt, a short skirt, her heeled sandals. She picked up her purse and went outside. The street was deserted. She got into her car, and for some minutes she sat there clutching the steering wheel like a child pretending to drive. She couldn’t think where to go, what to do, but she was outraged at herself for feeding her own melodramatic instincts in this way: John Donne as the I Ching of love! It wouldn’t do!
When she started the car, the radio came on too, at tremendous volume, a station of Ryan’s. She slammed the Off button. In the silence left behind, her wounded heart was jumping wildly. Slowly she drove to Garden Street, then headed roughly for the Square; and then, just because there was a parking place opposite the Common, she parked. She got out, locked the car, and walked through the open gateway into Radcliffe Yard, into the wet-smelling dark. Here and there a pretty, inadequate lantern twinkled.
She came out on Brattle Street and headed into the sound of music, of several different bands, actually, playing at the same time. As she got closer in she could see the groups of pedestrians stopped in clusters here and there – in open doorways, in the well in front of a clothing store just below street level, on the brick-paved traffic island. Stopped to listen, to watch the odd magician or juggler, to drop a quarter or a dollar into an opened guitar or violin case.
She stood at the back of a group listening to some Andean music, the mournful sprightly pipes over the rhythm of the drums and the guitar. The closed, grave faces of the Indians commanded respect, and Lottie, like the rest of the group, stayed until they’d finished their set. She left a dollar, though it was beneath any of them to take notice of this; they had turned to each other in a circle and were tuning their instruments.
Lottie went into one of the bookstores. The lights were bright in the store, and people sat cross-legged on the floor in the narrow aisles to read whole chapters for free. You had to be careful not to kick them, to trip. At first Lottie was just browsing in paperback fiction. But then she thought of Tolstoy, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata.’ She’d never read it, but she knew what it was, and it occurred to her it would be the perfect antidote to all her moony love reading. A little bitter pill. A brittle little trill. She went to the T’s and found it in a collection of Tolstoy’s short fiction. On the cover of the book was a photograph of the homely man himself in his middle age, scowling sternly back at Lottie as though he hadn’t had, too, the occasional foray into meaningless sex. Then, on an impulse, she pulled out Anna Karenina too. Maybe she’d reread it.
She carried both books to the cash register. When she’d paid, when they’d been put in a plastic bag, Lottie walked out,
happy again. She ambled slowly back through the couples with ice cream cones, through the straggling groups of summer school students who made it necessary for people to step off the curb, to hug the storefronts. The bag swung against her leg, the books slapped her rhythmically as she walked along in the cheerful carnival atmosphere.
Past Appian Way the street was abruptly darker, quieter. Lottie turned back into Radcliffe Yard, feeling the air shift, welcoming the sense of dampness, of dark. She first heard, then saw, a group of young men two thirds of the way across the black grass, clustered around an old, tentacled fruit tree. Their voices were loud and flat. There was a laugh, then someone said, ‘The fuck you say …’ Bad boys, Lottie thought. And then reassured herself: Ryan might be in such a group. She kept walking, but without thinking of it, she made her step brisker and more businesslike. She could hear the slapping, tarty scuff of her sandals on the sidewalk.
And then they noticed it, she could feel them noticing with a kind of doglike attentiveness. There was a pause, and one of them called, ‘Hey, baby, over here’; and they laughed again.
Just keep walking, Lottie thought. She clutched the bag and her purse against her chest.
Now one of them angled out from under the tree, across the grass toward her. Unless she turned, she would encounter him.
She wouldn’t turn. This was just their idea of a joke. Scaring her, talking a little dirty maybe: just fun, for them. She concentrated on keeping her stride even, but she stepped to the right side of the walk, toward where she would turn off quickly when she got to the little side path that led to Garden Street.
