by Sue Miller
On Wednesday, before she left for class, Delia wrote a note to Nancy, saying that the topic had to be off limits, that she needed to work out the answers to her dilemma herself. She asked Nancy to try to imagine for a moment how painful it was to discuss it with anyone else. She asked her to keep her own sorrow private.
After that, things were easier, though there were occasionally long moments of strain when they both fell silent, full of the awareness of what they weren't talking about. Still, Delia felt she'd taken some necessary step with her daughter, some necessary step for herself. And when Nancy left, she turned back to her solitary life with renewed determination.
She threw herself even more resolutely into mastering French. Her teacher at the Alliance was a racist, she had decided. She brought most of their discussions around inexorably to immigration and its great evils, to the wish of the Africans to live without working on the backs of the industrious French. She harangued, she lectured.
Was this conversation, as it was supposed to be?
In their halting, primitive discussions in the hallways and on the sidewalks after class, she and the other students agreed: it was not. Slowly they began to venture to contradict their teacher, to argue with her. But Delia, anyway, was hampered by her lack of ease with any tense other than the present and the passé composé, and by her limited vocabulary. Her French was formal, hesitant, reduced—that of a polite, well-trained child of seven, perhaps. Madame rolled over her, time and time again.
Delia studied longer hours, determined to truly enter the argument by summer's end. It became what she did, instead of feeling shame, instead of grieving for Tom and the end of the marriage. It seemed miraculous to her, but she sometimes forgot all that, occasionally for an hour or longer as she labored over an exercise or worked her way slowly through an article in the paper. She started to be able to imagine her life going on, bringing her new pleasures.
The letters from Tom began in late May. The first one was short. It asked if she thought it might be possible for her to “keep the door open” in her life for him.
She didn't know how to answer this. She was overjoyed, momentarily, so happy she could hear the pounding of her heart as she set the letter down. And then almost instantly she felt humiliated by that very joy. She spent the better part of two days listening to music, drinking wine, crying. She didn't write back. She didn't know what to say.
He wrote again, at greater length. He'd made a mistake. Carolee was a lovely girl, but she was, as Delia had pointed out, a girl. He was not now seeing her anymore—in fairness, as much by her choice as his.
In her answering letter she pointed out that he had said it was over before.
He had lied then, he wrote, because he was so terrified of losing her.
When she read that, Delia was incredulous, then amused, then enraged. She wrote him a long letter back in which she spoke of her inability ever to trust him again, of her contempt for him, of her wish to be free of him.
He wrote again. He said he understood her feelings, that he knew he'd done something unforgivable, as he had so many times before; but what he ardently hoped—though he knew he had no right to—was that Delia could forgive him again, as she had done so many times before.
Then he mentioned the campaign, his campaign for reelection, which had already begun. When she came to this passage, Delia smiled bitterly. So this was what lay under it all—under the wooing, under the regret.
“It isn't going to be a tough one,” he wrote, “but my opponent is a good campaigner, and it will surely cut into my advantage if you aren't by my side, if rumors start. I need you, as I've always needed you.
“If you felt that you were able to do this for me, I don't know how I could repay you, but I would look forward to being in your debt, to doing whatever you ask of me. And of course, what I hope most of all is that you can find it in your heart to ask me to come back on whatever terms you set. That would be a request I could comply with gladly.”
After thinking about it for several days, Delia wrote back and said she would join him for the campaign.
She wasn't sure, even then, of her deepest reasons for saying yes. She didn't know whether she meant it as a one-time gesture of goodwill, or as the start of a reconciliation. Maybe she just wanted to exercise some power over him, however briefly. This seemed possible to her, as it seemed possible that she really wanted to help him politically in spite of the turmoil in her feelings.
What she knew—what she thought she knew—was that she had no wish to punish him politically because of her personal anguish. She believed in him, in what he fought for. It was the finest part of who he was, a part she wished to align herself with. She didn't want to see herself as vindictive in this arena.
She tried to lay this all out to him in her letter. She was as honest as she could be, given her own confusion about her intentions.
There was a kind of expansiveness, a joy, in his next letter. He thanked her, he recollected with a perceptible pleasure some episodes from previous campaigns, ones they'd done together.
She wrote back less guardedly too, for the first time describing her life in France, the neighborhood, her lessons.
After this they corresponded until the end of the summer in a more relaxed way. He wrote about their mutual friends in Washington, many of whom weren't speaking to him. She wrote about Nancy, about how deeply he'd wounded her, about how disturbed she was. He told her he'd written to Nancy three or four times, as he had the boys. Brad had written a kind note back, he said, but neither Evan nor Nancy had responded. Eventually he'd called both of them. Nancy had hung up when he announced himself. “Who can blame her?” he'd written. He'd talked briefly to Evan, who was, he wrote, “nothing if not honest about how he feels.”
Delia was trying to master the subjunctive tense. And how fitting, she thought, to be struggling here in this foreign city with the subjunctive, when she was going to have to live her life out, for the foreseeable future, in foreignness, in subjunctivity, in the conditional suspension of everything she'd known as real. She imagined herself campaigning with Tom, standing by his side, seeming to be the loving wife. And being, yes, the loving wife. For didn't she love him? Wasn't she still his wife? And yet not allowing herself lovingness, or wifeliness. Was there a verb form that could express this experience?
Intending to amuse him, perhaps also to hurt him, she wrote Tom a letter describing this, her double need for mastery over the subjunctive, in class and in life.
And he wrote back, as she'd known he would—hadn't she invited it, so she could say no once again?—asking her if she couldn't be truly what she'd consented to play at being.
· · ·
DELIA'S CLASS AT the Alliance was over. She had only four more days in Paris. Already she'd begun to pack. In her apartment there were stacks of neatly folded clothes and books and all the little things she'd purchased.
For weeks there'd been a notice up in the street window of the concierge's living room, announcing an apartment for sale in the building. After Delia had her usual breakfast—coffee and a croissant from the bakery next door—she went down to the concierge's apartment and rang the bell. She asked to see the place for sale. The concierge was busy—Delia could hear that she'd interrupted the family's breakfast. While they were talking, one of the children came to the beaded curtain at the kitchen doorway and stood chewing on a large piece of French bread, watching his mother and Delia, the silly grown-up woman who spoke only baby French. The concierge rummaged through the top drawer in a bureau in the entryway and produced a key. “Troisième étage, numéro deux,” she said, and turned away, went back through the clacking curtain.
In the dark hallway, Delia pushed the button for the overhead lights and they came on. The timer began ticking. Slowly she mounted the shallow steps of the curving stone staircase, holding on to the iron railing against the wall. She passed her own doorway on the parlor floor, and went up two more flights. The timer clicked off and the hall went dark agai
n just as she reached the door to number two, but enough light fell from the dirty skylight at the top of the building for Delia to find the keyhole and fit the key into it.
She stepped in and closed the door behind her.
There was a sense of echoing stillness in the empty apartment. The floors were bare, the furniture gone. She was standing in a little entryway, just like the one she had downstairs. As she came into the living room, she saw that it was narrower than hers, and that this was because its windows opened onto a balcony that ate up the space, a balcony that looked out over the interior courtyard of the building. She stepped across the living room and into the tiny, modern kitchen, everything half or even a third the size it would be in America. The floor plan so far was identical to the apartment she was renting, but the ceilings were much lower on this floor of the building, and less ornate. It made the apartment somehow friendlier, Delia thought.
She went down the long hallway, past the WC and the small extra bedroom, the one Nancy had slept in downstairs when she visited. She opened the door to the large bedroom at the back of the apartment. Its windows faced onto the air shaft, as hers did below, but from here you could look up and see the sky. Everything back here was permeated with the sweet, sweet smell of cooking butter from the patisserie on the ground floor next door—a smell that drifted up in the mornings to her lower apartment too.
She came back down the long hall into the living room, admiring the herringbone pattern of the old wooden floors. She opened one of the French doors and stepped out onto the balcony. It was about six feet deep, with an iron rail. There were three double doors from the living room that opened out on it. Their shutters, a peeling faded blue, were folded back against the stone walls. Below Delia, in the courtyard, a man emerged from one of the entryways, carrying a briefcase. His footsteps echoing, he crossed to the doorway that led into the main building and its immense double doors to the street, and disappeared through it.
Delia looked up. The sky was the deep, rinsed blue of late summer. She thought about what she would be doing in a week—the public appearances with Tom, the interviews. She thought about living here, alone, afterward. To ask Tom for it would be a kind of moral blackmail, she knew. She would be exploiting him, using his wish to have her back, his sense of sinfulness, even his Catholicism against him. But she wanted it. She could imagine doing it.
EVAN PICKED HER UP at the international terminal and drove her home to Williston, where he'd been staying by himself in the house since his summer internship ended. She fell asleep in the car on the way. She hadn't wanted to—she'd hoped to stay up until ten or so to get back on U.S. time. She waked as he pulled into the driveway. She was surprised by how happy she was to see the house, to walk into the familiar rooms.
After he'd hauled all her bags upstairs, after she unpacked what she needed for tonight, they decided to go out to eat, to the pub in the inn at the edge of the campus. Delia thought it would help her to stay awake if she were out somewhere, and she'd been yearning for an American hamburger. The pub was famous for its burgers.
There were only a few couples scattered around the large room, couples more her age than Evan's—though it was a Friday, normally a busy night, the students weren't back from summer vacation yet.
They sat down at one of the empty wooden tables. Delia ordered her burger, and Evan a Reuben sandwich. While they waited, the waitress brought her wine and Evan's beer. It was in a frosted mug with a pattern of indentations like thumbprints in its heavy glass.
“Cheers,” he said, and drank.
“Here's to you,” she said, lifting her glass.
“Why to me?” He thunked his glass down on the plastic-coated wood of the table.
“For getting me, for driving me. For interrupting your life on my account. For being such a good son.”
“Yeah, well. The thing is, I'm worried about you.”
She raised her hand. “Don't be.”
He leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Mom . . .” he began.
“Don't, Evvie.” She shook her head.
“Don't what?”
“Don't . . . worry, I guess. I'm all right.” She had a sip of wine. It was so cold it was almost tasteless. “I wasn't, before, but I am now.”
“But you're not going to do this, are you?” His face was pinched.
“You mean the campaign?” She had written each of the children as soon as she said yes to Tom. Evan and Nancy had both announced their opposition, Nancy in a long, difficult transatlantic phone call, with a slight time lag in the line making everything worse. Evan had written a passionate letter.
He sighed wearily, as though she were being disingenuous. “What else?” he said.
After a moment she said, “Yes. I am.”
“Well, frankly, I don't get it.” He sounded angry. “Nan doesn't get it.”
“You don't think I should.”
“Mom?” He shook his head, his eyes wide in incredulity. “We know you shouldn't. I think you know you shouldn't.”
“I don't. Know that. In fact, I think I should.”
He made a face.
“It's not . . . it won't be easy, but the thing is, I want your dad to have that. To win. It's his life. I want him to win.”
“So? Let him win without you.” His fist lightly pounded the table on the last word. Their glasses jumped a little, and a man at a table across the room turned to look at them.
“But he has a much better chance with me.”
Evan hunched forward suddenly, over the table. He spoke in a lowered voice. “It's a ploy, Mom, don't you see that? To get you involved, to get you back. And when he does get you back, it'll be the same thing all over again. He'll just go on, doing that stuff to you.” He shook his head. “This is a chance for you, don't you get it? To start over. You're not so old. You could have a life, another life. You could work. You might even meet somebody else. Someone who . . . who'd be better to you than Dad.”
“Evan.” Her hand came across the table toward his. “I know . . . it must seem simple to you. I mean, he did me wrong.” She smiled, but he didn't respond.
“And he did,” she said. “Do me wrong. And Nancy. And Carolee.”
His face changed. “Fuck Carolee,” he said.
“Well, yes. I can get behind that.” She sat back. “Fuck Carolee.” It gave her pleasure to say it.
He smiled back quickly in a kind of delight—though he and the other children, like everyone else their age in America, had become profane over the last years, she never spoke this way.
After a moment, she started again. “The thing is, I love him.”
Evan's eyes suddenly wouldn't meet hers.
“I don't imagine I can live with him any longer, but I don't wish him ill, sweetie. I love your father. He's in so many ways an admirable man.”
Their food came then, Delia's hamburger smelling wonderfully of fat and blood. She ordered another glass of wine from the student waitress, a girl who didn't look old enough to be serving alcohol. To be working at all, actually. For a while they were busy passing ketchup, mustard, salt and pepper back and forth.
Delia talked about France between bites, between sips. About what American things she'd missed besides burgers and her children. Her wine came.
She pointed to a spot on her own face and said to Evan, “Mustard.”
He raised his napkin and wiped at his cheek. Then he sat still, looking at her for a moment. “So is what you're saying that you're not going to stay married?” he asked.
She set what was left of her hamburger down. “Not as we were, anyway.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don't know. Just . . . things will be different. I don't, I can't, imagine how we'd live together.”
“Well, that's a relief, anyway.”
“You want us to be apart?” She was shocked.
“I don't want it, necessarily.” He'd set his sandwich down too. He looked down at the table for a moment, then up at her. “But yeah. O
kay. I want it.”
“But, doesn't our life as a family mean anything to you?”
He snorted. “Get real, Mom. Our life as a family, as you put it, didn't much involve Dad anyway, and it's really not going to involve him after this.”
Of course, Delia thought. Of course this was how it seemed to them all. She was momentarily startled at the revelation: while for her their family's life consisted in those moments they shared with Tom, Evan and the others thought of their life together as going on all the time, and that meant mostly without Tom.
“I mean, look,” he said. He'd pushed his plate away, his sandwich half eaten. “Do you imagine Nancy, do you imagine me, ever being comfortable sitting around with you guys together again? If you got back together? Pretending everything was okay? Pretending Dad wasn't a guy who . . . could do what he did to you.”
“He didn't do it to me.” Delia's hand rose on these words and rested on her bosom.
“Oh, and who did he do it to, then?”
“He just did it. That's all. He did it because he wasn't capable of not doing it. That's part of who he is. And that's regrettable. But I've loved him a long time and—”
“You know, you're an enabler.” He'd raised his hand, his index finger. He was almost shaking it at her. “You know that, don't you?”
“Oh, Evan.” She made a face. “That's just—”
He interrupted her. “Well, you are.” He sounded like a child to her, suddenly. A child calling names on a playground.
“That's jargon, Evan. It doesn't have to do with anything.”
Then she looked at him. She felt insulted. “Do you think I could have stopped this? Is that what you think? That I made it happen somehow? Or I made it possible?”
“I think if you told him you were outta there the first time he even looked at another woman, yes. This wouldn't have happened.” He turned sideways in his chair, his face set in self-righteous lines.
