Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  “Are you going to make some important decisions here or am I going to have to make them for you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, straightening up. “I will.” I felt great with Laszlo, but of course I didn’t feel good.

  “Okay then,” he said, and went to Brussels.

  Our living room was quite long, with doors that opened onto the tiny garden spanning the long wall. A four-seater couch faced the windows, and a love seat sat at a right angle to it under the window at the end. I was doing a crossword on the love seat when John came back from his trip. He hadn’t called at all while he was away, and I didn’t get up, just looked up from the paper. It’s a terrible moment for any woman when her man, hitherto clean-cut, professionally respected, runs his hands through his hair and leaves it sticking up like a child after a nap. Then it gets worse. He starts talking. “Why not me, Lillian? Those things he wrote that you did together. Why not me?”

  There’s a place in Saint John on the eastern coast of Canada I once went to from Vassar. It’s called Reversing Falls. A river flows into the Bay of Fundy there, but the tide comes in so forcefully that it pushes the river back up its course. There’s a deep churning and mingling, but the tide wins for a while. This was me. I wanted to leave the room, but I didn’t.

  One of the most useful things I’ve learned in my life is that I can have an out-of-body experience when I need to. It’s incredibly silly to me when people find it amazing, proof of life after death et cetera, that some people have watched themselves being operated on, particularly after a near-fatal accident. Has no one ever made the connection between them and victims of abuse? Incest victims leave their bodies and float around elsewhere so the body being assaulted is just flesh and bone, not spirit. Is there a greater sense of abuse than being sliced open and reorganized with few guarantees of success? Of course people in surgery leave their bodies and hang around near the ceiling. Of course.

  Some people will say that to improve my relationship with John I could simply have answered his question. But that’s kicking a man when he’s down. And he might have been able to talk about his feelings then too. That would have been too much. Just the hair sticking up and the new wrinkles around the eyes were already more than I could bear.

  I didn’t say anything for a while. My mind was frozen. My heart was frozen, except for the pity. The pity, and the part that had suddenly awakened to its power. Its ability to crack a cold man.

  He waited. I cleared my throat, which seemed to release him, and he sat. Maybe he thought I was preparing to speak.

  Pity is disgusting, above all when mistaken for love. When I put my hand on his thigh and slid it toward him with uncharacteristic firmness, most of me screamed in revolt and flew to the other end of the room. Sirens blared in my head until I was deaf. The room telescoped. The couple on the couch shrank. John was left alone on his back, staring unblinking and breathless, completely powerless, into the eyes of a reptile.

  I don’t want to think about this anymore.

  But it’s a useful skill, being able to leave your body when you need to.

  On Big Decisions

  Pandora likes to sit directly under the lamp on the kitchen table that I turn on when I read the paper. She sits up straight and tall as an Egyptian sculpture, front feet daintily aligned. After a while she falls asleep and her tiny detailed mouth drops open a little. She emits a string of miniature crystal beads. Even when she drools it’s dainty.

  There wasn’t a day in Europe and New York when I didn’t wish I had a pet, but how would it have been for the poor thing with me off on trips and visiting lovers? And I don’t think any of my beaux felt particularly kindly toward animals. More than one of them got annoyed by how easily animals distracted me when we were out together. Once, with Ted, I went mushy over a tottering old dog, and Ted said, “Lillian, its teeth are disgusting.”

  “Won’t ours be one day?” I snapped in response, and immediately regretted it, not so much because of the shift from disgust to dismay on Ted’s face but more because of the image from Death in Venice I had conjured in my own mind. Horrible book. And my bottom teeth were a little wonky already, so it was best not to draw attention to them. But meeting animals is always such a nice moment for me, even if I don’t get to pet the dog at the café or the cat on the arm of the sofa. Just looking at them I feel good, and I coo, and the man talking to me looks irritated.

  Someone tried to cure me of this once. It was when I was with Alec, a few years after John. We were away on one of our eating and riding weekends. It must have been 1965, in Herefordshire, at a bed-and-breakfast attached to a farm. We rode at a different stable, but this farm had ponies, and we were walking from stable door to stable door, meeting them. In the corner box there was a beautiful long-legged hunting dog lying in the straw with her puppies. Alec unlatched the lower door as if he owned the place and let us in, which of course made the new mother very anxious, and while I really wanted to stay and touch her I thought we should leave her alone, but when I turned around to pull Alec back outside the farmer was coming in. As well fed a man as Alec, but with ruddier skin. Tweed cap, army-green Wellington boots, dark green quilted jacket over more tweed, not a kind bone in his body. “That’s not the whole lot,” he nearly bellowed as he took possession of the small space. “There was a runt as well. Knocked him on the head.” He reached up to the top ledge of the dusty window and took down the tiny dead bundle. Immediately the bitch was on her feet, scattering her living brood, sniffing and whining and pleading, but the farmer just put the corpse back up on the ledge and smiled at its wretched mother. I could see him looking at a wife that way, calling her The Little Woman to his friends. Alec looked on. I could see a resemblance in the two men that made my heart contract. They thought of themselves as realists, but they were merely brutal.

  Some women are amazing. They simply do whatever occurs to them. There was a night in London, years and years ago. A dinner party at Victor and Nancy Ball’s, people from the magazine. They had found a cat in the garbage of an alley a few months before. It still felt it had to fight to survive, and they let it. I learned after the first time not to wear stockings I cared about if I was invited over. That night, while we were having drinks and I was running an ice cube up and down the angry scratches on my ankles, Nancy set half a dozen gorgeous dishes of food out on the sideboard. I was talking to a Russian woman named Lyena, a tiny bottle blond in a tight royal blue dress. Her eyes were a very light brown, I recall, with flecks of yellow. I remember because I thought they didn’t go with the dress at all, which was a shame. It was distracting. Then of course the cat jumped up on the sideboard. Victor picked it up and put it in the hall, but it was back in seconds. He put it farther down the hall, and this time I think he even said “No” to it. Back it came, determined to be quick this time. We all looked at Victor, of course, the other couple and Lyena and I, and he shrugged. “Must be a Communist,” he said, and I felt Lyena bristle and get up from the sofa. She marched over to the sideboard and delivered a speech to the cat in Russian, pointing right at its nose, then she picked it up by the scruff of its neck and threw it into the hallway so that it skidded a few feet on its claws before flashing away into a bedroom.

  “Communists wait,” she said, “like cows,” and sat again, looking around for the drink she had put down.

  I wait. There are things I need to throw down my hallway and all the way out the door, but I can’t. There have been people too. One, above all. Laszlo. He came along in London and exploded my relationship with John, and that was fine, but continuing the affair was not. John had been cold, and Laszlo was so hot. I don’t know what type of woman can handle that much heat, but I’m pretty sure they’re not produced in Missouri. Men like that can’t listen. They’re always planning. Some of them know to say “Oh yes?” from time to time when you’re talking, but usually they think all you want to hear about is how they feel in your presence. It’s funny. Neither
cold men nor hot men will tell you much about how they feel about the wider world.

  Laszlo called one evening and I told him with my heart beating in my throat that I really appreciated his attention but that I was very busy and couldn’t offer him what he desired. “I’ll take anything,” he said. “Crumbs from the table, the wine that drips down the side of the glass.”

  “Crumbs?” I asked.

  “Crumbs from you are like the plat principal of someone else,” he said.

  “How do you know?” I asked. It was a ridiculous conversation.

  “Please try,” he pleaded.

  I thought for a bit. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see you on Saturdays.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line and my momentary surge of confidence and power gave way to concern that I had offended him. But then he said, “Darling. You won’t regret it.”

  I did, though. For a few weeks I only saw him on Saturdays, but he called constantly in between, and when I saw him he was so frantic with desire I cringed. When a man I’d flirted with in Paris came over to London for work, I accepted his invitation for a weekend away. I came back so refreshed. He’d allowed me to talk, and had actually responded to what I said. But practically everyone I knew in London told me Laszlo had called them to find out where I was.

  The very next Monday evening I was walking near Sloane Square to pick up some shoes and Laszlo came out of a shirtmaker’s a little farther down the block. My heart sank but I smiled. He didn’t, of course. He just stood and stared and even from a distance I could see how the hurt in his eyes made them turn black. I said, “Hi, Laszlo,” as I got nearer, but his mouth didn’t move and now I could see the muscles bunching along his jaw. He clearly wasn’t going to speak, so I started to move over a bit to walk by him, and to tell the truth I was a little worried I might get burned by the heat coming off him. He was practically shimmering. But as I changed course he shot out an arm and grabbed me by the hair, and I gasped as he pulled me right up close to him. There were plenty of people on the sidewalk, joining friends for dinner after work or dealing with a few errands, like me. But they walked on around us, and I could hear the paper of their bags bumping against their legs as they passed by, and Laszlo continued to hold a big hunk of my hair in his long, desperate fingers. He didn’t say anything at all. His mouth was right by my ear, and I listened and listened but I guess his fingers said everything.

  God. The things we put ourselves through.

  Eventually he let go. The gesture was dismissive. I was glad for that, since I knew he had a better chance of preserving his manliness that way. But even so, dizzying waves of humiliation accompanied my first footsteps along the sidewalk away from him. Actually, they accompanied my footsteps for the next few days.

  Every once in a while, as I’ve grown stronger, I’ve replayed that scene, and I’ve made myself imagine reaching up with my own long fingers to calmly disentangle his and replace his hand by his side and walk away. Sometimes I simultaneously disentangle his fingers from my hair and break his pinkie. In another version I stay still until he lets go, and when he thinks I’m going to walk away I take him by the shoulders, the first shoulders that ever loomed over me, and push him backward through the shirtmaker’s display window. The crash is dazzling, and then I see Laszlo lying in the shards. He’s not bloody—I couldn’t handle that—but he’s stunned, with an expensive sleeve flopped across his head. Then I walk away. I bet that’s happened in somebody’s life. There’s a woman out there who could do that. I never will, though.

  When I had Pandora’s front claws removed because she was destroying the furniture, I took courage from the memory of Lyena. I’d never have the grit to throw my kitty down a hallway, but I mustered enough to have her claws removed and rule out the need ever to have that battle. It took me forever to decide on that expensive upholstery fabric. At least two years. You can only make a big decision like that so many times.

  On the Danger of Water

  When you wash your hands, you get to thinking. Maybe you take off your ring and put it on the corner of the sink in the public toilet you’ve just used, right where you can see it, with every intention to put it back on once your hands are dry, like you do at home. But human beings are weaker than water. You turn it on and your thoughts start flowing. You lather up and they slide even farther away, and when you walk from the sink to the hand towels you are anywhere but in that public toilet, and you walk out.

  When you go back, mouth dry, tongue thick, you’re willing so hard for the ring still to be there that when it’s not you can practically see those cartoon lines that indicate the absence of something. It is a cartoon sometimes, my life. I lose everything, at least for a little while.

  When I lost the ring that Poppa bought me I thought I’d kill myself. That ring was me. Poppa put it on my hand when I turned thirty-five and admired it, chuckling happily to himself, as he often did. It was summer, and I’d done my fingernails in bright pink, and the opal looked so at home on my hand. The little diamonds surrounding it smiled in the sun coming through the breakfast bay windows.

  The night before, after flying in from New York, I barely had time to unpack and bathe before sweet Eunice from two houses down was over for dinner with her coconut pie and Poppa was pouring drinks from crystal decanters. I have those now, as well as the necklaces they wear that identify their contents: scotch, gin, bourbon, vodka. Engraved in silver.

  Mother didn’t frighten Eunice. Maybe Eunice saw the good in Mother. She was the only woman I never heard Mother say a word against, so when Eunice was there, I caught a glimmer of the good in Mother too.

  I’d brought Mother cigarettes from duty-free, as usual, and cologne for Poppa. He’d put it on, I was sure. Mother and I smoked together, and Eunice asked questions about Paris, and we were all too polite to remind her that I’d moved to London. When she got up to leave I bent down and hugged her and felt none of what I did hugging Mother. No oversized pearls at my collarbone, no big buttons catching my belt, no hipbones in my thigh. Eunice was as warm and soft as a muffin.

  Poppa was clearing up the bar, collecting squeezed slices of lemon and lime, emptying the footed silver ice bucket, and Mother announced she was going up. I thought I’d climb the stairs with her; I recalled she had a bit of trouble with them at the end of the day. We went up at her pace. Halfway to the landing I said, “Thirty-five tomorrow. Can you believe it?”

  Mother snorted. “Thirty-five,” she said. “Unmarried.” I heard our shoes making a rhythmic shush, shush, shush on the pale blue carpet. On the landing, we walked a few steps, then she needed to go left to their room, and mine was straight ahead. I turned to kiss her good night and she fixed me with an angry look.

  “Even if you were divorced, at least you would have done it,” she said.

  It was the next morning that Poppa gave me the ring and chuckled to himself. Mother was at the counter in a navy dress and red lipstick making Sanka. By the time she sat down with us the moment was over. I put the ringed hand under the table, and Poppa took it in his.

  On Looking the Part

  Did Mother get married for the sake of getting married? I don’t want to think so. I want her to have fallen madly in love with Poppa. I wanted to marry. It pains me that she imagined I was being insubordinate rather than unlucky.

  I like to think I don’t regret anything. Rien de rien, as the song goes. But if I think about Alec too long, I feel regret like a cloud of lead.

  Alec was very tall, and broad, and had been bred to pass judgment. Even I was aware we looked very smart together. The first time he picked me up for dinner he looked me over and nodded once in approval, to himself it seemed, checking off some sort of box in his head. It irritated me but I tingled. In the restaurant he ordered for us both, which was also irritating, but if I’ve learned anything from life with other men, it is to keep my distance from male pride. It’s an electric fence.


  Alec had ideas for my wardrobe, just like Willis. It’s funny how some men don’t even notice clothes, like John, and others need them. Alec helped me buy riding things. Really good jodhpurs and a short jacket flecked with brown and black, one color to go with my eyes and one with my hair. I would have liked to be able to choose the clothes myself, but I’d only ever ridden in jeans. Afterward I did feel closer to Alec, something he appeared to intuit. He nodded to himself on the way from the shops to the car and said, “Tonight we go to bed.” I pretended not to notice.

  Pretending not to notice is the key to so much, I believe.

  When I was seventeen years old my mother had my portrait painted. It was my coming-out painting. I’m seated with my hands in my lap with my knees pointing left and my head turned toward the viewer. The only thing that’s really coming out is my neck. I’ve got a pearl choker on. The dress is white and sleeveless, fitted to the waist and with a full skirt. In reality, the dress had a detail of extremely sheer organza, sort of like a collar, from shoulder to shoulder. The artist decided not to paint it. Maybe it was too difficult. But I think not. If he could capture the way I sat up straight and tall because I was told to and not because I felt strong and upright, he could certainly paint a hint of organza. But the artist decided not to cover me up. Not to make me modest. It was a portrait of a girl who looked as if she had been surrounded by silver-backed hairbrushes all her life. If you didn’t know me, you might even see the look as haughty.