by Sue Miller
He was tall, the boy approaching her, he had a predatory strut. He passed under one of the dim lights, and she saw him grinning.
She was almost up to him, and she braced herself for it: the comment, the ugliness, the claim to some part of what made her female.
But he stopped before she did. No smile; then a wider one, amused. He turned and called over to his friends. ‘Hey, man, she’s old!’ He started to walk back to them. ‘She’s fucking old, you assholes!’
CHAPTER VIII
It was the third week in July when Jack called. Lottie had already been gone longer than she’d told him she would. ‘You’re learning to get along without me, aren’t you?’ he asked in his hoarse voice. ‘I think I’d better come out there and remind you of what you’ve left behind,’ He told Lottie that Megan was going to a friend’s house in Michigan for the next weekend. He had arranged coverage and booked a round trip to Boston. ‘Will that work for you?’ he asked, and Lottie could hear all that was tentative in his tone.
Her own answering voice was shaky, but they arranged it quickly, getting to the point without much conversation, like the flurried undressing for hungry sex. Lottie would get a hotel; who needed Richard and Ryan listening in? Jack would come there by cab from the airport. The plane got in at eight. He ought to be with her by nine or so.
For the next days, Lottie was distracted, repetitively reviewing the history of her love for Jack, her life with him, as though she’d been asked to decide, in this short span of hours before he arrived, whether to stay with him or not. She felt a kind of heartsickness as she remembered the way they’d lived together in the days before she left: so careful with each other, so polite. ‘I can’t go back,’ she thought she might say to him. ‘You have to understand, I was dying.’ But how could she say such a thing to him, who knew what dying truly was?
That was part of the trouble, surely: how could she say such a thing to him? There were too many things she couldn’t say to him. She had no right.
Instead, then, she thought of the house itself, Jack’s house, as the problem. It was too thick, too heavy, an impossible burden their marriage had to carry. She imagined it again and again with a kind of dread: brick and enormous, set far back from the street on a neat lawn in a neighborhood near the university. The front terrace had a huge cement urn at each corner. Lottie had peered into one once. It was filled with gravel and a few ancient cigarette filters. The rooms were all large, gracious, the windows heavy, with leaded panes in the top halves. You could be in Lottie and Jack’s bedroom and not know whether anyone else was home, whether Megan and her friends were talking in the den or the living room. There was a den. A den, a living room, a study, a kitchen, a dining room, a maid’s room. That was just the first floor.
The streets around the house were solid with other silent, dignified homes, just like Jack’s. There wasn’t a café, a bar within walking distance. There wasn’t a laundromat – why would there be? – or a bookstore or a bulletin board. When Lottie left the house, she never walked. She got in the car and drove to Hyde Park. Often, actually, she drove to the North Side, where she’d lived with Ryan, and she cruised the crowded bungalows in her old neighborhood, stopped at places she’d gone to then.
This was unfair, she’d told herself. This was just a kind of homesickness for her old life that she was blaming Jack for. And she made herself number the reasons she’d come to love him. The fact that he could play the clarinet part to ‘Miss Brown to You.’ How once in making love, after she’d carefully lowered herself on to him, adjusting her hips a little this way and that, he’d said, ‘Prettily arranging her skirts.’ How his exuberant gray hair, which he combed down so tidily each morning, gradually rose and took on a life of its own over his long workday. Yes, of course, how he’d taken care of Evelyn.
But then she remembered, too, the time he’d come to join her at a hotel in Seattle when she was on the road doing publicity for the diet book. When he’d called that time, he didn’t ask if he could come, his voice was not hesitant. ‘I’m coming out,’ he’d said. ‘I’m going to lavish money and sex on you whether you like it or not.’
That was what she wanted, Lottie thought. That ease, that honesty. That need. She wondered if she could conjure it, if she could set them both free from the spell they seemed to be under. This weekend, this weekend, she swore, she’d make it happen, she’d make it be the way it was before between them.
The room at the hotel overlooked the Public Garden. Through the thick veil of leaves Lottie could see the drooping willow fronds over the rain-pocked water, and white glimpses of the tethered swan boats. The light by the bed was too bright, so she went downstairs to the lobby and bought a very expensive red silk scarf in the little shop there, which she thought she could drape over it. There was still more than an hour until the time Jack might be expected to arrive. Lottie stood in the shop and leafed through a magazine or two, and then she walked outside into the rain, across the street and down a winding path into the green of the garden. It was getting dark, the rain was light, and the air smelled of the sea. The living swans, as motionless as their giant wooden replicas, slept, floating close to the grassy banks, their heads tucked under their wings. Halfway around the pond, she passed a couple, laughing and jockeying for position under a small, collapsible umbrella. She realized abruptly how wet she was getting, and turned back. At the hotel, though, she didn’t feel ready to go up to the room. Instead she found the lounge and had a glass of wine, sitting by a window looking out into the rain. There was a young man in a tux at the grand piano in the center of the room, playing Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes. He had on black, high-cut gym shoes, Lottie noted. Outside, the streetlamps had come on.
Finally she went upstairs. She tried the scarf over the lamp. A bit bordello-like, but better. She turned the light off. She opened the narrow, moveable portions of the window and welcomed in the heavy air, the faint sibilance of the rain and wet things stirring in the slight breeze.
She called the airport. The plane was on the ground, just arriving. She was nervous, as she’d been with Jack in only the craziest times. She went into the fancy bathroom and brushed her teeth. She fussed with makeup, covering a blemish. Then she decided that the cover-up itself was too visible, washed her face, and started all over. By the time she heard his knock on the door, she had actually changed once into the nightgown he had given her, and then, when it occurred to her he might want to undress her, into street clothes again.
She was at the door within seconds. His embrace engulfed her – the length of him! – her throat clogged, and she couldn’t speak. She’d forgotten him, the way it felt to be held by him, his doctor smell, as she thought of it, the solid flat of his back under the fabric of his shirt, the long muscles of his thighs. It was at once familiar and completely strange, and it suddenly occurred to Lottie how little she knew him, that his touch could shake her this way.
Lottie pulled him over to the bed. ‘C’mere, c’mere.’ Her voice was rough and strained. They fell on the fancy coverlet, grappling, laughing.
‘But it’s lovely to see you,’ Jack said artificially formal. He pushed the dampened hair back from her face.
But Lottie didn’t want to be looked at, didn’t want to make jokes. She pulled his face to hers, mouthed his jawline, his cheek. Then his lips, her body convulsing against his. Her fingers clutched at his shirt buttons and worked them open, pushed frantically at his belt. He rolled away and reached down to undo his pants, to push them down, his hips arching up. Lottie hoisted her skirt to her waist, and he helped her with her panties. She was stroking him already, pressing against him, bucking rhythmically.
‘Shh, darling, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’
She felt him try to slow her with his weight, but that wasn’t what she wanted. With her teeth, her tongue, she stroked his chest, then his shoulder. Her mouth made senseless pleading noises, ‘Hnhh, hnhh.’ She lifted herself against him, her legs rose, opening herself – she
thought of this as a gripping, a reaching too – and then he was in her, she pumped violently, she bit down hard on his shoulder’s flesh and heard him gasp.
He pushed up, he arched away from her desperation and moved them now to the slower rhythm he chose. It was twilight in the room. He was a dark shadow humping over her, her own feet and legs like wings rising above his shoulders. The cars rushed past outside in long sighs. Jack cupped his hands under her buttocks and lifted her against him. His thumbs pushed her thighs down open, more open, and he shifted her to please them both, so easily that she forgot her greed, she forgot her body as the dense form she lived in daily – it was so light, so insubstantial that it was only feeling, a space, a beautiful dark room with the doors opening out on sun, air. ‘Darling,’ he cried, and then more urgently.
‘Oh, say Lottie,’ she whispered, and he did.
They lay heaped together for a while, panting, then side by side on their backs, watching the reflected light from outside slur across the ceiling. They began to talk, slowly. His voice floated over Lottie. ‘That was lovely.’
‘I was too hungry for you,’ she said.
‘You were pretty scary,’ he said. She didn’t answer. ‘We have lots of time, you know. All the time in the world.’
‘Mmm,’ she said.
His hand moved over between her legs and she opened to it. His fingers slid down her, then pulled up, cuplike, and spread the warmed syrup, rubbed it in cooling circles on her belly, in her coiling hair. His hand rested on her belly. Their talk idled along. He told her about the summer with Megan, about a visit from his oldest son, Charley. Lottie talked about Ryan, about the house and her pleasure in that work, about her inability to write. It was quiet for a few minutes. Lottie reached over and touched him. ‘I want to do everything.’
‘Baby steps first,’ he said. He rose above her again, unrolled her damp skirt, pulled it down. He eased her arms out of her blouse. He moved his hand over Lottie’s belly, down between her thighs again, where it was still slick and warm. Lottie opened her legs, and his fingers moved on to her, into the folds of her flesh with a light, wet sound. ‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Clickety, clickety.’
‘My fine hen.’ He’d already found the right slow rhythm.
Lottie laughed, mostly to herself, and held her knees open at her chest while he knelt back to watch his fingers on her.
Later they decided to get dressed again and go downstairs for a drink and maybe something to eat. ‘Let’s live in a hotel,’ Lottie said as they walked down the wide silent hallway to the elevator. ‘Forever and ever. The hell with our children. The hell with houses and jobs.’
He laughed, but when she looked up at him in the big mirror above the console opposite the bank of elevators, his face had already tightened, she saw he was unhappy. She had hurt him. Lottie felt a quick irritation. She glanced quickly back at herself, now blurred her eyes to take them in, Jack-and-Lottie, as a couple. She was startled by their appearance. So respectable. So oddly matched. Next to Jack she looked tiny and delicate, and it always surprised her to see this version of herself, diminished, made so feminine. Mutt and Jeff, she called them to Ryan once. ‘Who?’ he’d said.
Lottie asked to be seated by a window again in the dimmed, plush lounge. The rain was heavier now; it stroked the glass audibly. There was only the odd pedestrian, moving fast. The nuts in the little silver bowl the waiter brought were so good they decided not to have anything else to eat. They each had a glass of wine, then a cognac, and the waiter kept filling the bowl with nuts.
‘He disapproves of us,’ Lottie said. ‘Moochers, is what he thinks.’ She was conscious of flirting with Jack now, of trying to win him back.
‘I can live with it,’ Jack said.
‘I’m humiliated.’ Lottie shook her head and smiled across at him. ‘For both of us.’
But Jack was looking out at the steady rain. After a minute, he said, ‘So, Lottie mine, how soon do you think you’ll be done?’
Lottie knew he was saying she’d been gone long enough, he wanted her back. She made her voice light. ‘Murphy’s Law: The job expands to fill the time allotted to it.’
His light eyes had shifted to her. ‘I guess that should be my question, then. How much time have you allotted to it?’
Lottie lifted her shoulders. ‘You talk as though I’d chosen to go away. This is my summer job, remember?’
He watched her face. After a moment he said, ‘We miss you; that’s all I mean to say.’
Lottie laughed, and then stopped. ‘We?’ she asked. ‘Is that the royal we?’
‘Megan and I.’ Then he smiled. ‘Bader.’
‘Well, I’m sure Bader does anyway,’ she said.
He leaned forward. ‘Lottie, I miss you. I want you home.’
Lottie stirred uncomfortably. ‘I’m not finished here.’
He sat back again. He reached for his cognac but just held the bowl of the glass in his long fingers. Lottie shifted uncomfortably. ‘We’re not talking just about your mother’s house, are we?’ he said finally.
Lottie didn’t answer. For a while longer she didn’t want to talk about their marriage, or Evelyn, or anything difficult. There was a little decorated matchbox on the table, and she picked it up now and shook it, opened it. Inside, the matches were wooden, long and white. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘How fancy.’
‘Lottie …’ he began.
‘Shh, no,’ she said. ‘Please. Let’s not. Please, let’s be happy. Let’s play a game.’
He relaxed back in his chair, and she looked over at him. His face had fallen somehow; he looked defeated and sad.
Lottie had made her voice light again. She was explaining the rules as she laid the matches out on the table in expanding rows. They played a sample game. She won.
‘Marienbad. It’s an odd name for a game,’ he said as she was laying the matches out again.
‘It’s from the movie,’ Lottie said. He looked blank. ‘Don’t you remember that old movie? Last Year at Marienbad?’
‘I don’t think I do. Probably it came out one of the times Evelyn was ill.’
‘Oh no, it was long before that,’ she said irritably. Why did everything have to connect to Evelyn? ‘I think I saw it with Derek. Of course he loved it. Very mysterious. Maybe very pretentious too.’ She paused. ‘I should probably see it again now, actually. It was about love. I think it was about love, so maybe I could use it.’
‘What happened in it?’
‘Oh, it had no plot. Or no recognizable one. It was just a series of visual images, as I recall, repeated over and over, like memories being formed. One was – I think I’m not making this up – this woman in a sun-filled room, falling back on a bed, and then falling again. And then again. Elegant woman. Some French actress, Simone or Delphine or Monique Something-or-other. She had a boa.’
‘Is that the way memories get formed? By repeating images, you think?’ He seemed genuinely to want to know.
‘For me, yes. Pictures I call up. In life, of course, you can change them a bit. Or you do, I think. You see different things at different times, or you see them in different ways.’ She frowned. ‘They might have in this movie too, actually. Done it differently each time. It might not just have been exactly the same frames being repeated. I can’t remember. That would be more interesting, of course.’ His eyes were steady on her, but he seemed to be smiling, and this pleased Lottie. ‘I go first this time,’ she said, and she picked up two matches.
‘There’s a trick here,’ he said.
‘Of course. And I know it.’
‘And I don’t.’ He lifted up a whole row. ‘Would you like a boa, Lottie?’
She looked up at him quickly, grateful. Maybe everything would be all right. ‘If it’d make you remember me over and over, yes, I would.’ She picked up four matches from another row.
‘It might, as I think about the possibilities.’
Lottie laughed. ‘You’re a dirty, dirty man.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, an
d shrugged with stylized modesty.
She was about to win again. Abruptly she scooped all the matches from the table. She began to put them in the box.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Let’s stop,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of whupping you. It’s too easy.’
‘I’ll remind you later that you said that.’
‘What?’
‘That what’s too easy is tiring, boring.’
Lottie felt the pulse of irritation again – at his seriousness, at the return to the same theme. ‘That’s not what I said,’ she told him. ‘I make no such rule. You want some things to be easy. And even if it makes things boring, I wouldn’t aspire to difficulty on that account.’
He signaled the waiter for the check. Then he turned to her. ‘You never have to aspire to difficulty, darling. It arrives, uninvited. Then it stays for dinner.’ He was looking at Lottie with his light eyes. Suddenly he was smiling again, his broad easy grin. ‘Remember that stripper in the bar near the Loop, Lottie? She had a boa.’
‘I remember her, God knows. Not the boa, though.’
‘Now that’s funny. I remember the boa. Over and over.’
Lottie laughed.
The bed was made up when they returned, the coverlet removed, and the requisite chocolates wrapped in gold foil floated on the pressed pillowcases without making a dent. When Lottie came out of the bathroom, Jack was standing by the closet, taking off his clothes, hanging them up. She crossed the room to turn on the lamp with the scarf over it, then came back and switched off the overhead light. Just then Jack bent to pull his shorts off his long legs, his big feet. His body suddenly looked storklike and unwieldy to Lottie. How much work he had in life, living in such a body! The entire length of each articulated limb to worry about, those enormous hands and feet. She felt a rush of love for him, and remembered a passage from one of the books she’d read this summer: Edna Pontellier in The Awakening defending her love for Robert, defending it on the grounds that his hair was brown, that he had a little finger permanently bent from a baseball accident. Just so, she thought. She ran her hand down the long, shaped muscles of Jack’s buttocks. ‘Just so,’ she said aloud. He laughed.
