As I listened to the phone ring in Lucius’s house, I could almost smell his bed all the way in Ohio, almost smell Lucius himself—pine, wintergreen, coriander, Barbasol, a twinge of tiger balm, something like cloves—nothing more than his own scents mixed with the scents of his ablutions, but it made wings flutter against my pelvic floor. I had never known such intensity of want. I did not just desire to be with him, I wanted him wedged inside me—crammed, glutted in me as deeply as anything has ever penetrated. How does one say any of this without sounding vulgar or downright pornographic? How could Lucius say what he’d say to me, what he’d say when he was so far inside there was no closer we could be? He’d beg, Open your womb to me, and it was as if I could. We turned each other inside out.
“Hi.” His voice came from somewhere distant and dreamed, his hi a long, drawn-out word.
“Hi,” I said, and like children with paper cups against either side of a door, we strained to feel our connection. We breathed together.
“Come to me,” he said.
My breath came out ragged, a choke of admission that I was not already there.
“What do we do, Phillipa?” His question had no answer. “What am I doing without you?”
“Let’s drive tomorrow,” I said. “Meet halfway. Gary, or Chicago. For as long as we can. I need to feel you. I have so much I have to say—so much to tell you. To ask.”
“Just get up and drive to each other?” he asked.
“Yes, get up and drive. Get a motel. Steal a few hours. It doesn’t have to be seedy.”
“Oh, but I want to do terribly seedy things to you.” He sighed.
“You can be as seedy as you like. On clean sheets.”
“You’re serious,” he said. “Really?”
“Yes. Please, let’s. My body doesn’t know what to do without your body anymore.”
“Can it drive? When can it leave? How soon can I have it?”
“If I get out by seven,” I said, “I could be there, depending where, by say twelve-thirty, my time.”
“If we meet on your side of the line, then I get an extra hour with you.”
I laughed into the sheets, into Ginny’s old duvet. “My side, then.”
“Gary. Let’s aim for Gary.”
We stayed on the line another twenty minutes just listening to each other breathe.
MY ALARM WENT OFF at six-thirty. It was not enough sleep and it didn’t matter. I felt like a teenage boy, perpetually exhausted by my own exuberant growth, but still up for sex, always up for sex, ever ralliable for sex, even from the depths of slumber.
Bernadette was already in the kitchen, drinking her weak coffee, crunching her pale toast.
“Morning, Bernadette, how’d you sleep?” I did try to be nice. I did.
“Oh, not well. But I never do.” She slurped through crumbed lips.
“More coffee?” I readied to dump the rest of her pot. “Or can I make some for myself?”
“Oh.” She thought I thought myself too good for her Maxwell House swill.
“Sorry?” I asked. “Was that a yes or a no?”
“Oh, I’m all done here,” she said.
And down the drain it went.
“You’re up early,” she accused me.
I ground coffee beans in reply, then said, “Headed to an auction. Don’t want to miss anything!” Oh, the falsehood! The chipperness! As an alibi, I thought an auction would hold up nicely. But in our old life, Michael always joined me for an auction, and the idea that we’d never go auctioning together again wrenched something unexpected in me. I turned on the faucet just as my windpipe seized, and I sucked a gasp of air, the sound muffled by water pounding into the decanter. This life was already over. These banal, domestic morning rituals in the company of a woman I’d so disliked for so very long—it would all be gone, and I felt fear. I know: I chose it. But it’s like choosing to ride the roller coaster: you buy your ticket, wait in line, strap yourself in, feel the slow climb . . . Still, when the bottom drops out, that’s real fear.
I cleared her dishes, but Bernadette did not leave the table. I busied myself collecting things that might serve as a pile of dirty laundry; the washer and dryer were in the basement.
Michael came downstairs as the coffee was finishing its brew. “Morning, Ma.”
“Good morning, Michael.” Bernadette’s Michael always sounded forced, like she had to fight her own tongue not to call him Michel.
Before coffee, even Michael had trouble with Bernadette. He searched for a question to occupy her and buy himself some time. “So,” he said, “how was East Prairie?”
As Bernadette launched in, I asked, “Anything for laundry?” and backed toward the stairs. They shook their heads, and I slithered down to the basement where I could not help but notice, on the old recliner by the washing machine, a certain Sam’s Club shopping bag. I could hear her voice upstairs, but couldn’t tell what she was saying, which is a shame, for I’d’ve liked to hear her version of the previous day’s events. Still, I was more interested in the album. I opened it carefully to the dedication page, but then, upstairs, Bernadette’s voice dropped off, and I grabbed the bag to slide the album back in. That’s when I noticed, stuck to the inside, a small white price tag. I heard Michael speak and Bernadette begin to respond, and I squinted to read the worn print on the sticker. It said 35702, and, below that, $15.00. I recognized it: this was River City Consignments’ tagging system. 35702 was the consignor’s number, and they always used recycled sacks from other stores. I stuck the book in the sack, the sack on the chair, and my load of not-dirty laundry in the washer, and there is, to this day, very little anyone could say to convince me that Bernadette didn’t purchase the Hom-Wom-Wormbold family album and the ancestry contained therein at River City Consignments for fifteen dollars, plus tax. Chou-chou the puppy my ass.
THERE’S THE DRIVE to describe. Interstate 80, the same stretch Michael’d driven the day before. Five hours with my sore rear on a seat cushion I wished were a little cushier. I listened to Pippin, to Hair and Godspell, before I gave up and drove in silence. Farmland, road signs green as Astroturf, the Mississippi flat and wide, a thick brown ribbon dangling from the hat brim of a homely girl, America. Car dealerships lined the strip as far west as Joliet. The traffic around Chicago is traffic that never clears: funneled traffic, stalled and stopped traffic, Slow down, my daddy works here traffic. Through the exit, toll booth, town of shopping centers like a maze of nightmares. I was headed only one place: to the hotel, to Lucius, there, leaning against the hatchback of his burgundy two-door Honda in the midday sun of the Best Western parking lot, Gary, Indiana, May 2004. In rust-colored corduroys gone thin and coppery in the thighs, and a striped button-down—always a button-down from a seemingly infinite supply, as if he were once a suit-wearing banker. This one was white, rolled at the cuffs, with a thin red stripe and a thinner, intermittent green-blue. It was worn through at the elbows, but he wouldn’t retire the shirt until the sleeves ripped open and hung flapping like wings. He had no Eula to turn his used shirts into boxer shorts, as she did with Michael’s. Lucius’s discards landed in the rag bin under his mudroom sink; he used them to wipe down his cross-country skis. Lucius is fit—small and lean-muscled. His skin, pale and freckled with age and exposure, is always warm and feels powder-dusted against mine. He wears glasses only for reading, little half-lenses perched at the tip of his nose. What hair he has left is gray and white, wisped at the fringes of his skull, a baby’s scattered peachy fuzz over the dome of his head. I love the hair on his forearms, exposed below the rolled shirt cuffs, light—it makes me think of wheat fields. He was blond in his youth, the photographs attest. His skin is spotted with age, forearms like lichen-covered tree roots. He’s strong, a man at home shoveling snow. I have never seen him shovel snow, but I imagine him scooping great heaps of fresh powder, curb to front door, clearing the way so I can come to him.
I linger, now, in describing Lucius, but that day nothing moved fast enough. I spo
tted him, parked my car, and then I can’t track specifics. We got inside as quickly as we could, careering like blind-hurtling drunks, down the hall, through the antiseptic air to plunge key card in slot. Did we speak? I don’t know, we just moved until we’d gotten rid of the clothes between us, clothes that conspired with toll plazas and speed limits and directions and lane changes until we tore them aside and made it to each other, flesh to flesh, skin on skin. Deep inside one another, we could finally breathe. Fifty mostly decorous years I’d been alive, and then came this desire.
Not until after we made love could we pull our heads away and actually look at each other. “Hi,” we said. And then he was asking, “How was your drive?” and I was saying, “You made good time, no?” and then we were laughing, holding each other, our laughter reverberating in one another’s ribs. And then we were making love again. Somehow we were not too old for this—miraculously, we weren’t yet too old. Defying age and time, our desire stronger than the laws of decay. It was like we’d gotten a free pass: he was not yet in need of Viagra, I was not yet menopausal. My body’d hit an amazing stage of perpetual and barely contained arousal. We coasted on the magic carpet of our luck.
Afternoon sun tried to worm in under the heavy, industrial drapes, but it wasn’t strong enough, got stopped at the borders. We had business with the darkness, and such a tiny, stolen snip of time. “I have so many things I have to tell you,” I said, and he said, “Tell me.” He held me in his arms and said, “Tell me everything,” and I did, and when I got to the hardest parts to tell—the spanking, and the sex with Michael after the rehearsal dinner—Lucius held me closer, as if we were watching a movie and these were the brutal scenes, he held me to say: We are in this together. He stroked my hair, kissed my head, as though I’d done some brave thing.
“How?” I asked. “How do you understand this?”
“I’ve been married and divorced three times, Phil. I understand.” If I should have taken caution at this, it’s probably obvious that I did not. I knew, by then, the circumstances of Lucius’s three marriages: each entered earnestly, each failed for its own specific reasons. Each lasted about ten years; he was a serial monogamist who believed in marriage. I did not feel cautious, I felt understood. When the sun passed to the other side of the building, the air in our room felt newly still and empty. We lay beneath the sheet, the length of our bodies pressed together, face-to-face, my knee bent up between his thighs, his legs clutching mine. His hand gently circled the still-tender, purpled skin of my backside, and he said, “Just for the record: if I really wanted to spank you, I wouldn’t wait twenty-five years to ask.”
When the clock glowed 5:00 p.m., Lucius reluctantly said, “We should eat.” I hid the clock with a pillow instead. When I forced myself to check again, it was 5:15, and I conceded that I would love a glass of wine.
“No chance,” Lucius said sternly. “Coffee. You have five hours of driving ahead.”
It was all so radically untenable. In a few short weeks, Lucius would leave for two more months of research in France, and I was committed, without a wiggle of leeway, to teaching a six-week intensive course back at Iowa that I’d put off the summer before. It began the following day, would meet twice a week, Tuesday/Thursday, for three-hour blocks: Musical Theater History and Script Analysis I—about as exciting as the course title suggests. In the fall, I had to direct a mainstage production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and teach, the next spring, an advanced directing course without which four of our majors—all advisees of mine—would be unable to graduate. Neither Lucius nor I was ready—nor could we afford—to retire. If we were younger, we might have put ourselves on the job market, hoping to wangle appointments in reasonable proximity to one another. I’d never been on the job market; I married into my job, practically married into tenure. At my age, my rather undistinguished career mostly behind me, how could I account to a search committee for the twenty-five years in which I did my job, no more and no less, and raised a not-easy-to-raise daughter? Maybe if we were younger, five hours in a car to an exit-route motel would have seemed a reasonable way to conduct a relationship.
By six that evening we were sitting in a chain diner, overlooking a parking lot full of fat American cars with W bumper stickers, in a booth surrounded by other booths full of fat American families. A few tables over sat a bevy of Mennonites—not fat—their hats and snoods sticking out the top of the booth. We ordered breakfast for dinner, but the coffee looked so bad I ordered a Coke and sat half listening to conversational strands of other diners, people so afraid of life without a Candyland heaven at the end, they’d vote for a man who’d no sooner fight for their rights than he fought for the country he claims to love. They’d vote for him because he reminded them of their own recovered-alcoholic fathers every time he said “God bless.” Here’s something I’d like to ask: what ever happened to “may”? May God bless—if he so chooses, if he is pleased. We goddamn Americans shorten everything. No time to lose! Conserve a word: don’t ask, just demand. God: bless us. How about asking for once, America? How about some manners? How about a goddamn “please”?
“How about we join the Peace Corps,” I said, “you and me? If Bush wins again.”
“If Bush wins,” Lucius said, “I’m sure he’ll abolish the Peace Corps. Peace . . . makes us sound weak.” He fluttered his fingers like a rain of fairy dust.
“Wasn’t Hitler all about peace at the outset? Or is that just in The Producers? Peace through nationalism, peace through Aryan supremacy?”
Lucius sounded like he’d already devoted a good deal of thought to the subject when he said, “Dubya’s no Hitler. He’s not lacking charisma, but it’s not the right charisma, not enough steeliness behind it. Too shambly, too house dog–ish. Like there’s not quite the . . . If Bush and Cheney were one person, I think we’d be in real, no-jokes trouble. Someone comes along with the the charisma and the vicious intellect combined—or someone who convinces the disenfranchised white American masses that he’s going to buck the system for them—and this will be 1929 Germany, no question. And it’ll be too late to get anywhere. We’ll be fighting for survival right here.” He patted the table, warbling, “From California to the New York Island . . .”
“Woody Guthrie must never have visited Gary,” I said. “Who would fight for Gary?”
“What about France?” Lucius asked. When I didn’t respond, he said, “I’ve had contact with another: a man, and his sister. He’s in his eighties. Was a soldier then—French, but fought alongside the Nazis, for them. She’s younger—was twelve, maybe thirteen during the occupation. Lost it completely after the war. Institutionalized by sixteen.”
“Jesus.” The Lord’s name rippled in vain through the restaurant. I said it again, louder.
Lucius smiled, shook his head slightly, not in annoyance like Michael, but appreciatively.
“I think my mother-in-law’s a Nazi,” I said.
“Whose isn’t?” Lucius said. “So everyone thinks the guy’s dead twenty years. Then, 1965, he suddenly shows up in France. His folks have both committed suicide, couldn’t face what they’d done. But he finds his sister in the asylum, gets her out, spends his life taking care of her.”
“How do you find these people?”
“This found me,” he said. “I gave a talk. A woman—French—approached me afterward. She’d been contacted by a brother she hadn’t seen in sixty years. She’d married an American soldier at the end of the war, got out, never knew what happened to the rest of her family. Then came the Internet, and it turns out the brother’s still there, with the other sister, in the town where they grew up, living in the family’s old tailor shop on rue des Brebis.”
Our eggs arrived. We bent ourselves out of the waitress’s way. “More Coke?” she asked. I shook my head, and she tucked our bill daintily under the jam. “You-all have a good day.”
I leaned over my steaming plate. “And this guy’s willing to talk to you?”
He nodded. “We’ve been corr
esponding.” Confusion must have crossed my face, for Lucius smiled coyly. “Even former collaborationists can sign up for Yahoo accounts.”
“You’re emailing with a Nazi?”
“Collaborationist. In a complicated time.” He unfurled his silverware from the napkin.
“Indeed.”
“Will you come?” he asked. “To France? Join me? When your class is done?”
My composure melted. Something flipped in my diaphragm, fizzed, then flipped again.
“It’s stopgap.” Lucius inventoried his own emotions as he spoke. “But it’s something.”
I nodded helplessly, tears welling. It felt like a proposal, and all I knew was yes. For a few seconds the future seemed okay. Then I remembered what I had to go home to, and groaned.
“What?” Lucius looked at me with alarm.
“I dread my own house, going back to Michael and his mother.” I took a bite.
“How long will she be there?”
“Unclear,” I said, chewing. I swallowed. “I keep wondering: What if she weren’t there? Would I move to the basement? Ginny’s room? Until what? Am I leaving him?”
Lucius was slow to reply. “I don’t know how to answer that question, Phil. Are you leaving your husband? I don’t think it’s my question to answer.” He looked at his plate.
“I know,” I said. Those two words now seemed to imply their opposite, a silent “don’t” stuck between them. What did I want, anyway? For my lover of less than a month to say Yes, leave your husband, marry me, become my fourth wife? When you fall in love, do you promptly move out of your home and leave your husband of twenty-six years? I had no prior experience.
“How long are Ginny and Silas gone for?” Lucius asked. “Could you go to Eula’s?”
I honestly hadn’t thought of it. “I’ll call Eula on my way home and ask,” I said, but Lucius looked puzzled and I didn’t know why. “What?” Now I was confused.
Our Lady of the Prairie Page 10
