For Love

by Sue Miller

  ‘I don’t need to read it.’

  ‘Come on, I’m just going to go up and get it. I think you should.’ She stands.

  ‘I’m not going to, Charlotte.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because. Because I know what is says. And it’s not news. And it’s not interesting. And it’s not relevant.’

  ‘Cameron, it’s what Elizabeth wants to say to you. What could be more relevant than that?’

  He shakes his head, looks sideways down the street out the window again.

  ‘I think you should read it, Cam.’

  ‘Why?’ He looks sharply back at her. ‘Have you? Have you read it, Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes. I have.’

  ‘How perfectly extraordinary,’ he says. He turns to Ryan, as though to ask him to comment.

  Over his shoulder Lottie sees Elizabeth’s big rental station wagon pull up the driveway. It stops with the tail just visible, sticking out under the porte cochere around the side of the house. Lottie begins to talk loudly. ‘All right, yes. I read it. I was worried about you, for God’s sake.’ What she is thinking is: Don’t slam the doors. Don’t, for Chrissakes, slam the doors. ‘A young woman had died – do you remember that? – and I was assuming you might be upset.’ Lottie strides across the room, turns, strides back as she talks, like any bad actor trying to invent stage business, trying to call attention to herself. ‘I came to your apartment, and you weren’t there. I had no idea where you were! What you might be doing. I was very worried. I was worried you might have killed yourself, Cam!’

  He grimaces.

  ‘And then I was worried that if the letter was in any way a rejection, a rebuff, that it might make you worse. Might make everything worse.’ Lottie is standing directly in front of him now. She points at him. ‘You would have done excactly the same thing, Cameron. Exactly. Or I hope you would. You would have tried to protect me. Or a friend. Or whoever. You would have read the letter. You would have taken it with you just the way I did.’

  She lets a silence fall. No sound from outside. Just the trees, a very distant honking. Surely Elizabeth has made it into the house by now, Elizabeth and the children.

  ‘Because it might have caused me to despair? Because what was in the letter might have caused me to despair, Charlotte?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. She sits down again, on the edge of her chair, and tries to keep her eyes intent on his.

  ‘But you’d like me to read it now. Why is that?’

  ‘Because. You’re being ridiculous. Arrogant. As though she had no will or choice in the matter. As though your will, your choice, were all that mattered.’

  ‘My will and hers are one.’

  ‘They are not one. I know that.’

  ‘By reading my mail.’

  ‘By talking to her. By listening to her, which is more than you’ve done.’

  ‘You can’t tell me she talked to you about me.’

  There is such contempt in his voice that Lottie feels stung. After a few seconds she says, ‘That is what I’m telling you. She talked to me many times.’

  He smiles, slightly. ‘I can promise you, Charlotte, that she didn’t tell you anything that really mattered. That you know nothing, you understand nothing, about what really went on between us.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be very surprised, very surprised, at what I know.’ Lottie’s voice is shaking, but she couldn’t have said whether this is something that has happened to her or something she’s willed to keep his attention.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he says.

  ‘You should.’

  He lifts a dismissive hand and starts to turn his head, to look out the window again.

  Quickly Lottie says, ‘She told me about a time you made love in an alleyway. Or a passageway, I guess, really.’ He looks back at her, his mouth slightly opened. ‘In Central Square,’ she says. ‘It was raining. You were standing up.’ His face is so drained, suddenly, that she feels a horrible pity for him; but she goes on. ‘She told me you cried when you first made love again.’

  Lottie keeps her eyes on his face, but in the corner of her vision she can see one, then another, figure moving around the back of the car. Then they’re gone.

  ‘But why would she? Why would she talk to you?’ His voice is whispery and cracked. He isn’t quite looking at Lottie.

  ‘Because. I don’t know. Because it made the whole thing more romantic to do so, maybe. It jacked it up. And that’s what she wanted, I think. She wanted romance, something to take her mind off the fact that her husband was leaving her. Seemed to be leaving her. Something to make her feel alive.’ Lottie lifts her shoulders. ‘She was bored. She told me that too. And lots of other things. Things about that time you went out to San Francisco, for example. Which is not so very different from this, really, is it?’

  He stares at Lottie.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is different.’ His voice sounds hollow.

  ‘How is it different? You went out there with the same argument, as I recollect it from that visit you made to me in Chicago on the way. That you knew what was best for you and for her. That what you wanted had to be what she wanted, whether she knew it or not.’ Elizabeth’s bright dress flickers across the street, but Lottie doesn’t shift her eyes. She hopes Emily has told Elizabeth that she talked to Cameron, she hopes that Elizabeth by now understands she has to get out of here, fast. She hopes they are loading the car, but she can’t shift her eyes to check without signaling Cameron. ‘And you were willing to smash a few things up, then, in order to hold on to her. Weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

  He doesn’t answer. He’s just watching Lottie now.

  ‘She told me about what you did in San Francisco. That you broke in. That she called the police.’

  ‘Mom …’ Ryan says.

  Lottie looks over, sees that he thinks she’s gone far enough, or maybe too far. The skin around his eyes looks white. But Lottie has wound herself very tight with this conversation; at some point she’s stopped pretending outrage and has come to feel it. She looks back at Cam. ‘You’ve always claimed you had this understanding of love, this capacity for it that I don’t have. Stupid little Charlotte, who settles for what she can get. And you’re so noble, so high and mighty. But not above really hurting someone, really doing damage, are you? Are you?’ The sound of Lottie’s breathing fills the room for a minute.

  ‘Even Mother,’ she says, the thought suddenly occurring to her. ‘Even your great devotion to her. How good you are. How patient. But you can’t stand her, really, can you? It’s just that same myth you make about yourself. Cam the noble, Cam the good. Cam the romantic. But that’s it. It’s all about yourself. It’s all lies. Because you’re the only one who counts. You never really even see the others.

  ‘So if I kept it from you that she was leaving, why should that be the least bit surprising? Why shouldn’t I have wanted to help her get away? Why shouldn’t I have kept my mouth shut about her going?’ Lottie’s voice is loud and hard. She has gotten up again, and now she’s standing close to him, standing over him, really. He is sagging in the sagging chair, his head tilted back, looking up at her with what might be shock mingled with some renewed surge of fatigue.

  Then several things happen at once.

  There is the sound of someone starting up the front steps. Cam convulses and spins: Richard Lester. And behind him, across the street, the engine revs and Elizabeth’s car begins to slide backward down the long driveway.

  Cam pushes himself up out of the chair awkwardly, sideways. He slips back somehow, and Lottie grabs at him. He’s saying ‘Fuck,’ ‘Bitch,’ something like that; he shoves her. She feels the blow in her breast, her rib cage, and falls, hard, against the arm of his chair. He has made it nearly to the doorway when Ryan grabs him with both arms, a kind of tackle-cum-embrace.

  ‘No!’ Cam shouts. ‘God!’

  Later Lottie will remember how odd their noises were as they fought. Grunts, little cries. She’s struggling u
p. Richard Lester stands behind them in the doorway, filling it with his bulk, his mouth slung loose.

  And Cam hits Ryan. Lottie hears it rather than sees it. She feels herself moving forward too slowly, as in a dream. Ryan has let go of Cameron, he’s holding his face, ‘Jesus,’ he’s saying. Richard is there. Lottie is yelling something, and Richard is holding Cam now, he has grabbed him from behind. He encircles Cam, who is trying, jerking this way and that, to swing his body free.

  Lottie takes the last step and hits him, hits him as hard as she can, face, neck, shoulder – not punches but bludgeon blows with her fists, raining down on his head, on the bones of his body, beating and then slapping him over and over. She’s shrieking at him, wildly and senselessly; and then someone grabs her from behind – Ryan – and they all stop.

  There is gasping silence, and Lottie begins to cry. Between wails, she cries out, ‘You shit! What’s wrong with you? You’re his uncle, you bastard! What’s wrong with you?’

  CHAPTER XIII

  This is one of those situations you find yourself in, Lottie thinks, that you would swear could not happen to you. They’re all outside – her ex-husband, their son, the wife who’s replaced her, and the baby – sitting on the pretty deck behind Derek’s condo. They are all behaving wonderfully, their mild, pleasant voices floating out over the lawn, spiked now and then with polite laughter. Lottie has coffee, the others are drinking beer. Carol is nursing the baby. So far no one has asked about Ryan’s eye, but it isn’t really conspicuous yet. A little pink, a little puffy. Tomorrow it may be closed up, it may have begun to darken.

  Carol turns to her suddenly – they’ve been talking about rugby, which Ryan played in England – and says, ‘You look exhausted, Lottie. I wish you’d think about staying over. There’s loads of room.’

  ‘Oh no, but thanks,’ Lottie says. She’s appalled at the notion. ‘I really don’t mind the drive back. And I have a lot of work still to do. Packing up, that kind of stuff.’

  The baby shudders, suddenly, and falls away from Carol’s body, making a wet, smacking sound with its mouth. Carol bends her head, raises her hand to her blue-veined breast, and helps the baby reattach itself. A girl, named Genevieve.

  Ryan and Derek have continued to talk, and now Carol and Lottie sit quietly and listen. Lottie’s tooth is aching, gently but steadily. She looks out over the backyard. Though the condo is only a few blocks from Yale, it feels like a country estate. It’s in an old mansion, divided up into six or seven spacious apartments. Derek and Carol have the back of the first floor and two rooms on the second. The ceilings are absurdly high for the size of the rooms; the apartment is cool and dark. Everyone shares the use of this backyard, Derek told Lottie and Ryan as he showed them around. There is a woman out there now in a portable webbed aluminum chaise, sunbathing. A breeze puffs against Lottie’s face, and she closes her eyes. Ryan’s voice, Derek’s, seem distant and unconnected to her. She wishes that she were that woman on the lawn; any woman but herself.

  All Lottie had said to Derek on the telephone was that it would be better for her, more convenient, if she could bring Ryan to him right away, today. Something in her voice must have given her away; he responded with the instant sympathetic cooperation that we employ when we’re called to help in emergencies. Of course that was fine. There were a few things he’d need to rearrange, but easily done, easily done.

  She’d said they would arrive before dinner. No, she wouldn’t stay. Well, just for coffee, then, but she had to get back.

  Lottie couldn’t have told anyone, she couldn’t tell herself, how or when she’d decided on this course of action. There had been the horrible long seconds of silence after all the violence was over, when Lottie, still weeping – wailing, really – was aware only of being overwhelmed by confusion and sorrow. They were all frozen in their positions, as though they’d spun off from each other in the children’s game of Statues – as though each of them had been assigned to hold this posture indefinitely.

  Ryan moved first and broke the spell. ‘God, it’s bleeding,’ he said. He held his hand up in front of his face and looked at his palm. Lottie stopped and looked at him too. A narrow stripe of red streaked sideways down the back of his hand from between two fingers, over his knuckles, toward his wrist. Where had it come from? Then she saw that his nose was streaming with red.

  Richard began nervously talking about medicines – he had something, he said – and disappeared. Ryan turned and walked back toward his room, his head held up and back awkwardly. Lottie noted that Cam had sunk abruptly into a chair. She heard Richard panting audibly up the stairs, then the rattling of prescription bottles. She alone seemed unable to assert some will over her body; later she would describe this moment as being like those strangely peaceful nightmares you have every now and then of being dead, floating somehow above the activity of others, unable to find a way to intersect with it.

  Richard stumbled down the stairs toward her, hurtled past to the back bathroom, clutching something. Lottie looked stupidly after him, she looked again at Cam, who had slumped back and was gazing blankly at the ceiling, and she made her choice. She followed Richard to Ryan’s bathroom.

  By the time she had made sure Ryan was all right, by the time Richard had succeeded in stopping his nosebleed, the only thing Lottie clearly knew was that she wanted to get Ryan out of here, away from what she thought of as this mess, her mess. When she came back to the dining room to call Derek, Cam was gone, which didn’t surprise her. It just seemed irrelevant.

  And now, only a few hours later, here she sits on Derek’s deck, watching his second wife’s nipple slide in and out of their baby’s mouth and making polite chitchat. What’s wrong with this picture? Find the hidden wounds. But no one else seems to feel them. Carol has been attentive, Derek avuncular, as though Lottie were a dear old friend – no, perhaps a relative – who needed looking after. She is clearly the only one who sees all this as strange. She looks over at Ryan, who’s sitting forward with his elbows resting on his knees, listening with careful attention to his father. Lottie has a sense of herself as a sour presence among them.

  ‘Is there more coffee, Carol?’ she asks.

  Carol starts to struggle up.

  ‘No, no,’ Lottie says. ‘I can get it.’

  ‘There’s almost all of a fresh pot, right out on the counter,’ Carol says, relaxing. ‘You really can’t miss it.’

  Derek has started to rise now too, but Lottie holds out her hand. ‘I know where the kitchen is,’ she says. ‘I’ll manage, thanks.’

  She goes back in through the French doors, into the sudden deep peace of the living room. This was probably the study – the library – in the mansion in the old times. It’s richly paneled, and tall walnut bookshelves line two walls of the room, bookshelves full of the bright splotches of paperbacks, as well as the hardcovers. Many Penguin books, she notes, remembering how their orange spines always dominated the bookshelves she and Derek had while they were married.

  She goes into the kitchen – really just a galley built into a corner of the dining room. Everything is modern, white, clean. It’s an invented space, made cleanly from Sheetrock. The outer walls of the dining room, though, are original and must have been part of a sun porch: they are all glass, many-paned. Outside, sitting in separated splendor on a sloping bed of bark chips, are four or five young rhododendrons, several of them still wearing their plastic garden tags.

  She pours herself another cup of the coffee. It’s percolator coffee, and Lottie doesn’t like it much, but she’s fueling herself for the trip back. She opens the refrigerator to find some milk, and is instantly unnerved by the abundance. Three bottles of wine lie on their sides, cooling. There is the half gallon of milk Lottie reaches for; and another, unopened half gallon behind it. There are fruit juices in thick glass jars – pink, orange, a lemony pale yellow. In the bin at the bottom of the space, flattened green leaves press upward against the clear plastic lid, as though trying to escape. There are two p
int containers of fat strawberries, a big bowl of what looks like potato salad, and innumerable smaller bowls, with lids or plastic wrap on them. There is a curved platter that holds frosty-looking green grapes.

  Lottie pours the milk into her coffee, returns the cardboard carton to its shelf. Does Ryan stand drinking from jars and cartons in front of the open refrigerator here? She takes a quick pleasure in the idea that he does not. And then shames herself: what virtue is there, after all, in running the kind of house where that’s acceptable? Where wet towels lie on chairs and couches? Where books and papers fill half the bed? Who, after all, would not like this abundance, this neatness?

  And perhaps she’s wrong to assume that this is all Carol’s handiwork. Maybe Derek shares now. The baby, after all, is in day care part time, Carol has said. She’s gone back to work Lottie recalls, something vaguely social-servicey. Sociable cervix, they call such women in training hospitals. She wonders if Carol knows this term.

  As she’s approaching the open French doors, she hears Ryan mention Cameron’s name. She halts. But he’s only talking about the house, his grandmother, the work he’s done this summer.

  In the car on the way down here, she had looked over and noticed the swelling, the faint discoloration. ‘You’re going to have a shiner,’ she said to Ryan. ‘What will you tell your father?’

  ‘The truth?’ he suggested.

  Lottie had sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘You’d rather I didn’t?’

  ‘No, you should. It’s just… Well, I don’t know.’

  ‘What? Tell me, what?’

  ‘Oh, just that he’s always seen my background as so … seedy. Not that it didn’t appeal to him, in some way. But this will not. Appeal.’

  And then, as they drove along, she had pondered momentarily why her instinct so frequently was to lie. When she’d first met Jack, before she knew how important he was going to be to her, she’d told him that both her parents were dead, killed in an accident. Later, when she’d had to revise this (‘Well, not quite dead,’ she’d begun sheepishly), she’d tried to explain to him why she’d lied earlier. And there were some perfectly good reasons for the lie: it was shorter, easier, she didn’t have to get into her childhood with someone who might not care about it, her mother might as well have been dead to her. But the deepest reason – and Lottie knew this – was that she used the lie to push away the chaos of her life. And even if the lie was itself chaotic – an automobile accident! how awful! – this was a chaos Lottie controlled, not one she was a victim of.