Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  I tried. After a couple of years I was so tense from wondering about the future that I had to get away. I had plans to spend Christmas with George Junior and Judy at their home in Florida, so I told Ted that when I came back to New York in the new year, things would have to be different. I told him I needed a whole relationship. We were standing across from each other with his desk between us. It was winter, so dark came early. I couldn’t see anything outside the window behind him, only us, reflected. I saw myself walk into his office and close the door, and I saw both his front and his back when he stood up. He looked like he was going to come around the desk toward me, so I put up a hand to stop him. I walked right up to the desk, stepping a little to the left so that his body blocked my reflection in the window and I was just looking at him. I leaned my thighs against the desk for support. I said my piece, and when he said, “But,” I repeated myself. “I need a whole relationship,” I said again, and he dropped his head and looked down. When he did, he noticed that his pants had been rucked up over his crotch like a silly sort of empty erection. I was aware of it, of course, and it was helping me. He looked unkempt, for once. He looked wrong, for once. But then he noticed it and he shifted his weight and he smoothed the fabric, and when he looked back up at me he was perfectly handsome again. I nearly didn’t say the last thing I had come to say, but when he moved I saw myself reflected in the window and I had trouble looking myself in the eye. I stepped back from the desk. “This relationship has to work for both of us, Ted. Not just you.” I walked to the door and opened it, and I didn’t look back before closing it behind me again.

  In Florida, I told George Junior and Judy my news, and they hugged me and patted me, and I often felt Judy looking at me carefully to gauge my mental state when I came down to breakfast in the cold mornings. I concentrated on Zoë, who must have been about three. Her hair was still blond back then. I needed to be outside. I felt okay outside, and took her with me. We rambled around the land the house sat on. It was covered in enormous oak trees feathered with Spanish moss, and the ground under our feet was soft and rust-colored. We walked through a mysterious world and we made up stories. I held her up to touch soft lichen, and crouched down with her when she wanted to see where a bug had gone. I whistled at her when she sucked her finger because I thought it was time she was done with that, and she’d smile and hide her finger behind her back as if it were something she’d stolen, and then we’d keep playing.

  But every once in a while, a couple of times a day, I’d wander off out of their lives and back into my own. I’d be drying dishes, or brushing my hair, and I’d forget where I was. The dishes would be my dishes, the mirror would be my mirror, and I’d fall back into the usual imaginings, the normal daily fare of my mind. When would I be alone with Ted again? When was it he said he’d try to call?

  If he’d called when I was holding Zoë, or looking at old photos with George Junior, I might have had a chance, but I was polishing my black pumps for Christmas dinner. There just hadn’t been time before I left. I was remembering an evening when we’d been at a cocktail party on a roof, and we’d eased away from the rest of the crowd for a bit, finding some peace and quiet on the far side of the access door. I was feeling a little tipsy, a little reckless, and I stepped up onto the wide low wall around the edge of the roof, using Ted’s shoulder for support. “Don’t,” he said, and I turned my back to him in mischief, looking out at the beautiful cityscape. It was when he put his hands on my hips that I looked down and rocked with a lurch of vertigo. I concentrated on my shoes to stop the spinning, and reached for his forearms. I leaned back into him and stepped back off the wall, so grateful not to be in danger anymore, as if someone other than I myself had put me there.

  Willis would have joined me rather than stopped me. Laszlo would have started shouting. Neither John nor Alec would have left the party.

  So that’s where I was when Ted called to ask me to stay. Safe in his arms.

  After the robbery I wanted him in my bed, pinning me down in his heavy way. I wanted it more powerfully than I had in years. That’s what making love with Ted did. It nailed me in place. He penetrated me like a pin through a butterfly. There you are, said his thrust. I know exactly who you are, and you’re right there.

  On Getting out of Bed

  I hope Zoë can have that feeling with a man one day. Poor young thing. She called me recently from Milan, lost and crying. She took a job there when her relationship with her boyfriend fell apart, and she’s finding it very difficult on her own. “You have to build up a pile of rocks,” I told her. “These hard times are when you build the pile of rocks in your soul,” I said. And then the air in my body stopped moving. It always does that when I calculate the age my child would be if I’d had it. Twenty-seven. A couple of years had gone by since the last time I’d counted, since I’d admitted that I could be a grandmother. I can’t help doing the calculation when Zoë is sad, or when she asks me rather than Judy for advice. My breath stops, and I see a girl, I see a boy, I see a mirage that shimmers first as a young woman, then as a young man. I closed my eyes and breathed hard and jump-started my lungs. “Make them immovable,” I said with some force. “Then you can lean on them later.”

  She seemed to understand. It’s a wonder she hasn’t consoled herself with a romantic Milanese yet. I didn’t recommend it, but I think I will next time we talk. She says it’s really hard to concentrate at work. I know. I know.

  Sometimes, when I don’t have to be at the office, I can’t get out of bed. I have plenty of rocks in my soul, but they are there for emotional reassurance. They can’t do my taxes for me, or decide on birthday presents. It’s odd: When there’s a man in my bed, I get up. I pee and wash, and make coffee. I look through the fruit bowl for pieces that aren’t starting to rot. I bring in the paper, or even go out and get one if I know which one he prefers. Alone, though, there are days I do none of these things, except maybe pee. Coffee can wait. I just can’t get up. How strange that you can love being in bed so much and hate yourself so much at the same time. I had one of these mornings a few weekends ago. I let my mind wander for hours. The cat was also zoned out, undemanding. I studied the set of drawers in the corner for a while. I started thinking I should have painted them. White. The thick particleboard had seemed a pleasant tan color, sort of Scandinavian, and I’d been in too much of a hurry to put all my panties and stockings in the drawers to wait for paint to dry. I’ll do it someday. When I retire, probably, because I’ll end up looking at it more often then.

  Lying in bed that awful, dark day, I thought about Mother as I had last seen her: lying in bed, in the hospital. I never knew her to sleep in; the day simply had to begin. If she stayed upstairs longer than Poppa, it was because she never came downstairs without her hair set and her powder and lipstick on. Corky’s mother didn’t do this, and Corky said to me once when she slept over during high school that it was amazing that Mother did, given that she’d grown up on a farm, and I said, no, it was because she’d grown up on a farm. Of that much I was sure. In her hospital bed, though, she had just a little worn-out makeup on. She had fallen down the stairs; a broken rib had punctured a lung. George Junior and Judy had just dropped Zoë off at college in Chicago and had driven on down to Columbia for a visit. They’d turned into the driveway behind an ambulance. I was pulled out of a meeting to take the call. George Junior said, “I think you better hurry, Lil,” so I did.

  When I arrived in the hospital room and went straight to Mother to tell her I was there, I wanted to put fresh lipstick on her. I was so sure it would make her feel better. It would make all of us feel better. There wasn’t time, though. “Mother,” I said, holding her brittle arm through the sheet, “it’ll be all right.” She turned her strained and weary eyes toward me. George Junior came up behind me and told me Mother couldn’t talk. She blinked very slowly, and a large tear rolled down her cheek. Why? Because there was to be no more lipstick? But there was. I chose the shade for the u
ndertaker.

  Lipstick is very important, but it doesn’t get me out of bed any more than coffee does. After thinking about Mother’s death in bed that dark day, I came back to myself and stared at the pile of clothes on the chair in the corner. I’d spent so much time agonizing over the fabric and so much money having the chair reupholstered and now it was covered in blouses and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even turn on my side and look at something else. I couldn’t find the energy anywhere in my body. But eventually I got hungry. After tolerating the hunger for a while my mind walked into the kitchen and looked into the fridge and remembered I was out of eggs, and eggs were all I wanted. So I got up. Around three, I think. I got the idea to go uptown to the supermarket. I could have walked over to the 7-Eleven for half a dozen, but I wanted a dozen. And they say the supermarket isn’t a bad place for singles to meet. The Times even did a short feature on it. The best place is the frozen food section, I understand. It’s probably mostly true for the younger singles, but you never know. Why wouldn’t an elegant older fellow, perhaps a widower, take himself to the supermarket at the beginning of the weekend? He might have a housekeeper during the week, but might enjoy the walk to the store from time to time, to buy a paper and a pastry, maybe, or a bottle of wine.

  I’m trying to remember if Pyam ever did his own shopping. I don’t think he did. I’m so glad that dwindled to nothing, that connection. He was such a stringy man. And not fully a widower either. His wife was bedridden after a terrible stroke, and had been for years. So I was his companion; I was on his arm. He didn’t cut a bad figure at all, but eventually I wondered how much of this perception really had to do with his late father’s legacy rather than Pyam’s own character and posture. When the father changes the face of American diplomacy, it turns out to be impossible to think of the son as anything but a son. Never fully grown.

  When I look back now on that relationship, I remember how I thought I benefited. I mean, we went out so often, there was clearly something that kept me saying yes. I think I was trying to convince myself that pleasant conversation in sophisticated company was enough. Ted was gone and I couldn’t expect anything like him again. That’s what I must have been telling myself. I remember that I enjoyed dressing for diplomatic dinners. But under my dress I was still in withdrawal, gasping for a fix of passion.

  Once, when Pyam invited me to his home for a simple dinner after a consular cocktail reception, he told me he’d like to take me up to meet his wife. I’d met Ted’s wife many times. How not to, as his PA? How not to talk to her on the phone on a weekly basis? This was different, though. This meeting felt more professional than meeting Ted’s wife ever had.

  We didn’t climb a narrow gothic staircase to an attic room, but we did have to go up to the third floor of the slender house, where two rooms and a toilet had been fitted out for his wife and her live-in nurse. As I went up the stairs I realized I was a sort of assistant to Pyam, keeping society from pitying his situation. I wonder if he imagined he was doing the same for me.

  Her room was very pretty. Chintz, and a clean, pale carpet. The bedside light was unfortunately frilly, but it threw a warm light. Pyam sat on a chair by the bed and I stood. “Claire, this is Lillian,” he said to her collapsed face. Her one bright eye turned to me, and I said, “Hello, Claire. I’m very happy to meet you.” She looked at me a bit longer, then what she wanted to say seemed to take form deep down in her body, and it set her shaking as it moved up into her throat and then her mouth. She thrust the working part of her mouth forward. “Lovely,” she said, then she looked back at Pyam.

  “We’ve been to the British consulate this evening, Claire,” he said. He wasn’t holding her hand, just leaning toward her with his elbows on his knees. He gave her a brief account of the evening, naming the people there she knew, then he told her we’d be having some supper in the kitchen. He stood up and looked at me, so I told her good night. He went ahead of me down the stairs. I looked at the wrinkled depression at the base of his skull, above his fine suit and the spotless collar of his dress shirt. That evening was definitive for me. He was an upstanding man, but he was through and through as dry as the kisses I received on the cheek after each outing. Claire had had his youth. I didn’t want his old age.

  Going home that evening, I wondered if I would look for a platonic escort of my age if I were in Pyam’s position. I decided not. I’ll always want someone whose fingers are strong enough to pull my hair. Always. So I now have Michael. And anyway, escorting is what gay friends are for.

  I didn’t just get out of bed on that dark day a few weeks ago. I got up, I got dressed, and I went to the supermarket. No luck, but I felt better for having put myself out on the firing range. And then I had eggs in the fridge, which is so much better than not having them.

  On Fate

  Having is better than not having. There’s just not enough time sometimes. Often. People don’t give it to you. They sleep too long. Or life doesn’t give it. The Fates don’t. I’m completely with the Greeks on that. The Fates spin your life’s thread, tie it up in knots for fun, and when they think it’s the right length, they snip it, moving on. When people talk about changing their fate, I always want to laugh. If you’re going to talk at all about being fated, then that’s that. If you “change” your fate, then you were fated to change your fate. The words cancel each other out.

  The one thing I didn’t want the Fates to fool around with was my relationship with Poppa. It was so good. I never understood why he didn’t want to come and live with me after Mother died. I visited him five times, and I asked him every time.

  The first time, we were about to have breakfast. Poppa was sitting at the dining table with the paper, and I was in the kitchen. It was summer, and the sun was shining in through the windows, but even so, the kitchen didn’t feel alive. I opened the old fridge, feeling it rock in a way I didn’t remember, and found English muffins, butter, and the apricot jam I’d sent down in a care package. There was an unopened deli packet of ham on a shelf, dated ten days before, and there were a few rubbery potatoes in the salad drawer. I put the muffins in the toaster and took the top off the milky white Pyrex butter dish. The butter inside was bright yellow, and crumbled like soft chalk when I pressed the knife into it. It was the right color in the middle, and it took a long greasy time to cut the outside away and spread only the good stuff on the muffins. I doubted Poppa would even notice the difference in the butter himself. He’d spread it no matter what color it was, and he’d cover it with jam, and he’d eat it. Maybe he’d get sick. Then what would he do?

  I opened the jam and put it on a saucer with a spoon so he could serve himself, and took that and the plate of muffins out to the dining room. The dining room didn’t look dead. Dining tables and sideboards never look like their time has come and gone like fridges do, not as long as they’ve got all four legs. Poppa folded up the paper to make space for the food, and patted my hand when I sat down. “Anything interesting?” I said.

  “Nothing I’ll remember for long,” he answered, and pulled the jam toward him. I watched him put a big dollop on his first muffin half. Seeing him anticipate the first mouthful gave me the same feeling I had when I had fed John’s children. They’d always wanted me to eat too, so I’d pretended to, but mostly I’d just watched them chew and swallow and study what to attack next.

  “I’d like to be able to sit and watch you put jam on your muffin every morning, Poppa,” I said. He chuckled a little, and leaned over his plate to eat. Old age had collapsed his handsome straight nose and made it whistle, and he nearly got the tip of it daubed with apricot. I needed to come at the subject another way. My mouth was dry. “If you came to live with me,” I said while he chewed, “I’m sure we could get the Post-Dispatch delivered to my apartment for you.”

  He swallowed, and then he looked me in the eye for the first time that morning. “Don’t give up on me yet,” he said.

  “Give u
p on you? Poppa! How can you think that’s what I’m doing? I’m not giving up on you! I’m celebrating you!” God, that was so upsetting, that first conversation! “I’m rejoicing in you, Poppa,” I said as he took another bite of his breakfast and patted me on the hand again, looking straight ahead, chewing. “You wouldn’t be putting me out, you know,” I said, in case that was his concern. “Not at all. It would be no burden at all to have you with me.” He just smiled.

  “I like it here, Lillian,” he said.

  For a moment I had an image of throwing out all my furniture and moving all Mother and Poppa’s up to New York, so he could still wake up and sit at that table, and make drinks in the evening at that sideboard. Then he said it was time to go to church.

  He had always been the one to drive, so he drove us there, and only gently bumped the car behind us when he parked. At church he exchanged warm greetings with people who’d known him for decades, which was a bit of a consolation, so I didn’t bring the subject up again until the cancer had been confirmed and I flew down again.

  Which was harder, asking him the first time, or asking him the last time? That initial rejection wasn’t easy: that “I like it here” that meant nowhere else would do, not even the home I would make for the two of us. But the last time, the visit before I went down for his colon surgery . . . No one should have to experience a conversation like that. We were at the dining table again. I’d made sandwiches he’d hardly touched. We’d been having a sweet conversation about Mother. I’d asked him to remind me where they met, and he’d said, “At church, I guess,” and then went on to describe how he would visit with her on the porch of her parents’ home. He told me how the wicker love seat creaked, so they tried to sit stock-still even when he kissed her. We laughed at that, and then I blurted out, “Maybe I could get us a place with a porch, outside the city, and a couple of rocking chairs,” and that shut him down. He pushed back his chair, and then he put his knuckles on the table to heave himself up to stand, and the effort made him let loose into his adult diaper with a sound so embarrassing for him my heart broke in two. He made his way to the stairs, and I sat in the dining room with the smell he left behind hanging around me like a reprimand. I listened to him climb the stairs and close the door to his bathroom. I sat and cried, knowing that he was changing his own soiled diaper in the bathroom he’d been using all his married life, the bathroom he’d read the daily news in, and watched television in, and shaved himself clean and handsome in.