Lifelines

by Caroline Leavitt

  “That was my mother’s ring,” he said.

  “Your mother?”

  “Dead,” he said, and kissed her again. “Well, Mrs. Martin Michaels.”

  “Duse,” she said, “Duse.”

  He had a place outside of Madison and a car, but they took the bus because he said the car was at the shop being repaired. He tried pointing out the sights to her, but she said that the things he was showing her were just buildings, just wall and brick. “Boy, you’re in a mood,” he said, still cheerful, looking over her tilted head at the sky.

  She was in “a mood” more and more. She felt cramped in his house, she sensed it was his more than hers. She wandered the rooms, trailing her hands over the wallpaper, the wood, the rugs. “Redo it any way you like,” he told her. There was a good patch of land behind the house and she went outside and stood on it. Trees hid her from the next house, and she liked that.

  Martin spent a lot of time staring at her photograph. He had it hung in the parlor, and as soon as they stepped into the house he went to look at it, to see if it still made him feel restless and burning, to see if his eyes were again pulled to that face of hers. He was just about to reach up his hand to touch it when Duse came in and looked at him.

  “Don’t sneak up on me,” he pleaded.

  “What’s the matter?” She was pulling him from the picture, the hypnotic veiling was being ripped free.

  “Nothing. I don’t know,” he said.

  “That’s me, isn’t it?” she said, pressing herself close to the photo. He looked at her, and then at the picture, and then he smiled at her, he held out one hand.

  At first, they were polite with each other. Duse felt as if she were being studied. He made her nervous at dinner so that she was always dropping her fork onto the floor, tipping her wine and tumbling it over the clean cloth. She, in her turn, watched him, watched her marriage line in her palm, and when he was asleep, she would gently lift his hand and read his lines, all the time trying to fathom what the connection between them was.

  3

  Duse would fall in love with Martin because of a line in his palm. At first she simply gave in to his ardor because she was curious about the strength of his passion line, the sudden and strange way it kept deepening, nearly cutting into the flesh of his palm. He always seemed to want her. It puzzled her how he was the most hungry for her when she was distant, when she was just standing outside by herself watching the stars erupt out into the darkness, when she was trailing her fingers over her own palm. He’d push himself into her, deep, as if there were some core he had to reach.

  It was Martin’s passion that instigated her own, that made that current charged and electrical in her own palm, forming a line as deep and solid as his own. Her passion surprised both of them. When they made love, she would take his hands and kiss those palms of his, one at a time; she would make his hands her own and glide them across her body. She wouldn’t let him speak. When he tried to make her name a sound, tried to whisper it, she clapped her hand over his mouth, she fluttered her heavy hair into his face and rolled on top of him, brushing her body against him, feathering it along his skin. She made so much noise during their lovemaking that Martin felt as if he should stuff towels along the bottom of their bedroom door in an attempt to smother in some of the sound. She couldn’t control herself, she wouldn’t. She would stretch out her arms as if she wanted to wrench them free from her body. She grabbed and clutched convulsively, taking handfuls of air, keeping it in her fists. Once her fingers found the rare Chinese lamp next to the bed and she sent it shattering to the floor, splintering the air with sound. She smashed the flowered porcelain water basin and the matching pitcher, both of which were antiques from his mother; she ripped their curtains, the delicate lace edging of their sheets.

  “Be still—be still—” he whispered, but she simply wrapped the sheeting about her neck, about his, she sometimes coughed and wrestled as if the knots she made from that fabric were strangling her, were taking away her air, but she would never stop to free herself. She deepened the tangles, she burrowd right into the bedclothes.

  After making love, he never wanted to sleep or be still. It was suddenly his turn to be moving, to pace, to talk. Duse loved the way he was then. She would ease herself up, exhausted, propping herself against the carved headboard, feeling the wood cherries pressing into her back. She was still then, content to listen to his ramblings, to his spitfire speech, his words like bullets stuttering holes into the silence. He wouldn’t slow down, his speech kept beat with his pacing. He walked back and forth in that room, stepping nimbly over the broken fragments, over the things she had violently sent cluttering to the floor. He frowned, he grinned, he twisted shapes out of the air with his fingers. He knew a little bit about everything. He could talk about monkeys and Paris and rivers, and one topic swelled right into another, spontaneously. Sometimes she asked a question, and then he would stop and really see her, he would tell her that he loved her now, he loved her, there might never be a reason for it, but he swore that he did. “It’s destiny,” Duse said once, warming.

  When he was tired of talking, his words winding down, he would go and get the camera. He knew how she loved having pictures of herself, how willingly she posed. He snapped her as she lay there, indolent and swollen against the wooden fruit of the headboard. Her face had lost its fever but the eyes still gleamed, and when she swooshed out a breath, he thought he saw whispers of smoke. He kept the nude prints of her hidden in his desk and sometimes Duse would take them out and study them. He loved photographing her. He told her he loved the thought of her carrying a baby, that he couldn’t wait to see what that baby looked like, that he hoped to God it looked like her. “It will look like itself,” she told him.

  He took other pictures of her, more innocent, and those he hung along every inch of wall that he could. He called those walls the picture gallery. He had framed snaps of her cooking, her face sweating from the steam, he had her standing in the back yard. He filled up every room with that secretive smile of hers, with her impossible hands.

  There were a few snags. She missed reading palms. She was restless staying at home while Martin went off to work every day. She didn’t like resting as Martin admonished her to do. She experimented with recipes, concocting dishes that both of them would pick at. All the time she was stirring her different broths, mashing vegetables into patties, she would wonder how to go out and get herself some clients, how to ferret out people without actually wandering the streets and ringing doorbells. Martin seemed to want to make her happy. She didn’t think he would protest her reading a few palms, especially if she wasn’t taking money for it.

  Her pregnancy made her easily upset. She began feeling frustrated, tense, and to alleviate some of that volcanic pressure, she would clean. It would become a habit with her, to line up those cleaning supplies, to start the minute Martin left and to finish just shortly before he came home. She ate while she mopped the floor, she sipped tea from a clear glass as she whipped the feather duster about. She washed down the walls so many times that the strips of wallpaper began peeling away, leaving faint blue whispers of the old paint. She wore herself out, and then, just before Martin came home, she would sit for a moment, one hand fitted into the other, lines feeding lines.

  She worried, too, about the baby. She didn’t know if she wanted something to be that dependent upon her, she wasn’t really sure just how responsible to another person she could be. She didn’t mind any of the body changes; she found those interesting, mysterious. Sometimes, too, she thought that her pregnancy had made her open to passion, had helped to generate her passion line.

  Martin couldn’t understand why Duse wouldn’t call Anna. He couldn’t understand that lack of family, not when he had been so rabid about his own. He told her how his parents had died in a freak car accident, how much his father had absolutely worshiped his mother, how nice that was for him to grow up with. He still talked about them as if they were alive. He told Duse how they
would have loved her, how his mother would have insisted on taking Duse shopping, on bringing over covered casserole dishes that Duse would just have to heat up and serve. His father had loved golf, he said; he would have made ace players out of both of them.

  He was absentminded about his parents. Duse sometimes saw him clipping out articles from the newspapers on things he thought they might be interested in. He had a whole desk drawer full of knitting patterns and sports news. She once saw how his face changed when he came across all those clippings, when he remembered. From then on, she made it a habit to clean his desk of those clippings, to keep him safe from that hurt.

  “Anna is my mother-in-law,” he said. “She’s the baby’s grandmother. We have to call her.”

  “You call her if you’re so anxious,” Duse said. She didn’t want to tell him that she was afraid to hear the currents in Anna, that she knew how things like that could live like parasites in your blood. She didn’t know what to write her mother. It was Martin, in the end, who did the writing, who sent Anna pictures of the two of them, and an open invitation to visit. Anna responded, brief and distant.

  “Jesus, would you just write the woman?” Martin said. He was a rough-edged piece of sandpaper, rasping at Duse, wearing her down. Duse finally wrote a hesitant apologetic letter, and Anna wrote back immediately, a letter thick with grief and love and advice. She didn’t understand how Duse could leave that way, she wrote, but then there was a lot she had never understood. She had gone to visit that woman Duse had worked for, Olya, who had told Anna that Duse would write. Olya had given Anna lots of advice on how a baby should be brought to life. An egg, she said, uncracked, wrapped up in a yellow shroud of soft clean cloth, should be thrown from the front of the house to the back, just before the birth. She didn’t trust hospitals. She said that she didn’t trust anywhere where you couldn’t see your own baby as it pulled free of you. You had to know that baby was yours, you had to see it. Anna didn’t write much more, only that she loved Duse, and that if Duse thought Olya’s advice was crazy (and Anna was not so sure that it wasn’t), then she should discard it.

  Duse tucked her mother’s letter into the back of a drawer and went to search the house for a piece of yellow cloth. There were always strips of stray material floating about the house, and she gathered the best strips and hid them away for later. She wasn’t sure about the egg business, but she didn’t have to decide. She could always find a midwife later, she thought.

  Martin took Duse to the best obstetrician in town. Duse hated him. He was old and quiet, and he waved her into a corner, toward a white robe hanging on a hook. She didn’t like the black leather table, the stirrups he pushed her feet into, and she was humiliated at the positioning of her body. His hands skittered on her, crablike, he was rough, and he wouldn’t listen when she winced and told him to wait, when she struggled to reposition herself. He gave her a big glass bottle of vitamins and he told her to come back. She thought about his hands, the way they read her belly, the way his mouth clamped shut and secret, refusing to tell her about her own inner workings.

  “How will it be in the hospital?” she asked him. “How is it done? Am I awake or aware of anything?”

  “Oh now—” he said. “What are you going to do, start worrying about everything before you have to?”

  He wouldn’t talk about it with her, and when he shut himself off in his office again, Duse tugged on her coat and stood outside, waiting for Martin.

  “Well?” Martin said, when he pulled over, parking the car so she could get in. “How was it?”

  “Disgusting. It was disgusting.”

  “Oh come on. He’s the best doctor in town.”

  “Aren’t there midwives around here? I don’t think I can give birth in a hospital.”

  “Duse,” he said. “They put you under. You don’t feel anything. And I’ll be right there in the waiting room. The whole thing will be over before you even know it.”

  “Before I know it,” said Duse. She was thinking of those soft yellow cloths, of seeing her baby connected up to her, just once, before she severed that cord herself, before she made the baby whole unto itself.

  “Duse—” said Martin again, but she was dreaming, looking out the window, and he jolted the car forward so she had to turn to see him.

  Martin wanted her to meet people, but she always seemed to have headaches when they were invited to dinner, she always felt nauseous when he wanted people in, so he just gave up.

  Duse wasn’t itchy for new people as much as she was for their palms. It was a raw hunger with her now, and when she saw people on the street, her eyes riveted to their gloves, the pockets they dipped their hands into. She wrote to Anna asking for a tracing of Anna’s hand, and when it arrived, Duse felt a pang of love.

  Duse began walking the neighborhood, tilting her head when she heard laughter, shouting. Once she made a move, once she introduced herself, there would be no going back. A piece of her would be exposed.

  In the end, she met one woman named Amelia Butler who had a small son named Amos. Duse saw them both sitting out on the curb, Amos kicking at the small pebbles, Amelia stretched out beside him.

  “Hello, I don’t know you,” said the woman, and Duse sat down beside her, lifting her face to the hot sun.

  They talked. Tentatively at first, about nothing really, about Amelia’s husband Ron who sold insurance, about Martin and his teeth, and then Duse brought up palms. “Jesus,” said Amelia, and Duse stiffened, but then Amelia jutted out her hand and Duse took it. She loved the feel of another hand, the sudden strange weight, and she would have lifted that hand right up against her nose to sniff, she would have drawn in the dishwater, the cold creams, the scents you get just from living, but she was afraid of Amelia’s reaction, she didn’t want to spoil a reading before she had even started.

  “Look at that line,” said Duse. “Look, right here by my finger. See that, how it curves? Talent, something special.” She looked at Amelia.

  “I like to sing some,” said Amelia.

  They became friends. Every afternoon Amelia would appear at Duse’s door, Amos in tow, a wood toy clenched in his fist. While he played, the two women talked. Duse had never really had a close friend, but she trusted Amelia, or at least, she trusted Amelia’s palm, the lines running in it made her feel as if she were dealing with one of her own.

  Martin was delighted, but when Duse told him about reading Amelia’s palm, his eyes narrowed.

  “I did it for free,” she said. “Don’t make that face.”

  “Who cares about the money?” he said. “It’s just, reading palms, it”—he fumbled—“I don’t know. It’s odd.”

  She railed at him. She reminded him that he hypnotized his patients, that they accepted it and he didn’t have one clue himself how hypnosis worked. “And you didn’t think reading palms was so odd when you met me, now did you?” she said.

  “It was just a way to get to know you,” he told her. “We’re married now. I don’t want this place turned into some parlor for all sorts of crazies. Not with you pregnant.”

  “It won’t,” she said.

  There were other things about her that erupted, things he didn’t want to learn about. He hadn’t seen how superstitious she really was. She would refuse to talk about the baby before it was born because that was just one more way to tempt fate. She wouldn’t read the baby books he brought home, but left them on the table, their spines tight and uncracked. He pricked at her, he asked how a city girl could be so countryish, so sheltered?

  He saw her studying her palm one night, charting it, and she was so involved that when he said her name, she didn’t look up, she made him feel invisible. He took her hand from her and kissed the center of it. “It makes me feel so funny when you do that,” he told her.

  “Why?”

  “It pulls you off. It puts you someplace I just can’t touch.”

  “You don’t always have to touch me.”

  “I do,” he said. “I do.” He looke
d at her, his face falling. “Don’t you know why I don’t want you reading my palm? I get worried you’ll see something in it that you won’t like, that you’ll get to hate my hands, and then hate me.”

  “You can change the lines in your hands,” she said, but he was just looking at her, and when they went to bed, she covered his face with her own two hands, with her own tremble.

  As Duse grew larger and larger with child, he gave her more space, he stepped back from her. He wouldn’t let her argue with him. He gave in on everything, on whose fault it was that the lights were on, on whose turn it was to switch off the radio. He bought her a television, a huge Teleking, the first on the block, but when he suggested that they have a TV party, invite the whole neighborhood in and fix popcorn, she said she didn’t want that. She didn’t like the way the scent of strangers became imprinted in their house, the way that smells could insinuate themselves right into the air. He let her be. He said nothing when she picked at her palm. The baby would connect them together—it would be something she couldn’t deny his part in.

  She began wearing his old shirts to sleep in. They were big and roomy and had a fine soft weave to them, and they covered her belly. She didn’t care that she was big, she still wanted him. She wouldn’t let him gentle their lovemaking. She bit and nipped and scratched and thrashed, she pushed his head down against her stomach, against the life.

  He babied her. He insisted that she didn’t have to get up every morning to fix him breakfast, that he was a big boy, and besides, he usually didn’t even eat anything mornings. He tried to teach himself to wake up without the alarm. He thought he could tiptoe, walk around the creaks in the floor as if the wood were seeded with mines. He thought he could thwart her early rising. But she was always there in the kitchen before him. He’d approach the table, groggy with sleep, eyes dimming with the weight of his own lids. He placed his two hands on the oilcloth of the table, he balanced against the smell of all that food twitching in his nostrils. She wouldn’t believe he didn’t like to eat. She would have pancakes set out, eggs scrambled with cheese and red peppers, cut pineapples and raisins and juice. She never ate one thing herself except an apple, but she liked to just sit and watch him.