—So you’ll ’ave to find someone else, Mary says.
—Young woman, I do not need your sharpened sense of irony this evening. Now I would like some quiet before I go to bed. Will you please tend to your mother.
—She’s asleep.
—Very well, then, just leave me in peace, he says. I have some work to do. Both of you, please.
They leave him there, and go to their separate rooms. Mary undresses and puts on her nightgown, then sits at her window. She can see the rhomboid of light on the lawn, from his study below. The bare trees make skinny, crossing shadows. She watches the snow build up, and is glad of his presence in the house, though she’s also troubled by the complications of feeling he has always caused—restlessness and sleeplessness, worry, fear, and exhilaration. She’s obscurely sick at heart and happy, all at the same time and with the same degree of intensity. In the distance, the lights from the east end of the city make the snowy sky look like a smoldering wall.
TEN
1
BUDDY GALATIERRE started the clock for Tyler’s first paycheck, and then gave him his first week off. Lily wanted badly to find a place for them to live, but Tyler said he liked being in the house with what was left of his family. He had relaxed into it, and seemed so happy to be there. The intense quality of his attention to their every word and movement convinced her to go along, at least for a time. Besides, the novelty of being with them became something she rather enjoyed. She hadn’t had much of a family life, she realized, with Scott gone so much. Every evening, they all gathered around the dinner table and talked and played word games and were, well, silly with each other. And Buddy Galatierre seemed to preside over it all. He had a way of leaning on one elbow and raising the other arm to indicate someone at the table, asking for a story, or a comment, or an answer. Lily thought of a conductor in the orchestra pit, encouraging the notes along.
One night, late, after making love in the dark—surreptitiously, because someone was outside in the pool—she said to Tyler, “You know, I think I wondered if you came here hoping to cause some trouble.”
“What an odd thing to say,” he said with a little laugh.
“I just mean that I must’ve bought into Sheri’s paranoia.”
Though she couldn’t see his face, she knew from the faint sigh at the mention of his half sister’s name that he had rolled his eyes. “I wanted to get to know this side of my family. That was my dark purpose.”
He caressed her arm, a light trailing of his fingers down to the bones of her wrist, but left a moment’s pause. “I had resentments. My father was a shit sometimes and he had a way of reminding me when I disappointed him, and everybody thought I was Daddy’s boy because I was just desperate to please him, frantic to keep it all smooth every day. So, yeah, I had a lot of time, growing up, to build resentments. And I wasn’t ready to like Buddy as much as I do. And Sheri and Millicent—well, they’re all I’ve got left. I don’t have any other family.”
The following morning Sheri and Lily went shopping in town, and Sheri talked about her platonic friend, whose name she withheld, she said, because Lily might one day run into him, or blurt out his name to Nick.
Lily didn’t want to know any of it, but Sheri wasn’t hearing any objections. It was as though they had regressed to their old relationship as roommates.
“He teaches. At the university. He’s older than Nick, and sometimes I think he understands me in a way—well, in ways no one else does. I want it to be okay, you know. I don’t want to hurt anybody.” Sheri frowned, and then sighed. Lily already felt duplicitous around Nick, and she desired to be elsewhere. It was a source of wonder to her that her feelings for Sheri could go through such wide swings of affection and aversion.
When they had finished with the shopping, Sheri took her to the community theater in Oxford, a place called The Loft. It was up a flight of stairs alongside a tall wooden structure that had once been a combination pharmacy and dwelling, and was now cut into offices and the theater. There were white lace curtains over the windows on the second floor. It looked like a small hotel. A young woman was seated behind the desk inside. Sheri had known her in high school, and introduced her as Brandi. The two of them talked a little about their respective lives in and out of college. Brandi told them that she was engaged, then turned to Lily and explained that she knew Sheri’s Nick, of course, because Nick had taken part in a couple of productions two years ago. One was a failure called Too Much Food and Too Much Drink, by a local writer, a man who had taken a graduate degree in creative writing at Stanford, but had gone on to law school and become an attorney. When Brandi met him, the company was already working on producing his play. “I never met a bigger jerk,” she said. “He told me he had ‘jettisoned’ the wife and kids, and his lucrative law practice, to pursue literary fame. Unquote. Then he asked me out. Oh, and guess what the play was about? Nick had the lead role, too—playing a local writer who has, um, spent his life practicing law.” Sheri spoke the last phrase with her, nodding, and they both laughed.
Brandi was slight of build, with long, straight, dishwater blond hair, and elliptical dark eyes. She showed them around the place. Lily saw the flyers for the next production, a comedy called Twelve Thousand and Change. It had been produced with some success off Broadway several years ago. Brandi spoke about a large cast.
“Lily’s a writer,” Sheri said. “She’s working on a play, too.”
Lily stepped in. “I don’t have anything like a full play.”
“But you are working on one.”
“It’s probably years away, Sheri.”
“Her father’s Scott Austin. He’s been in movies.”
“Actually, I think I know that name,” Brandi said.
“I’d be very surprised if you did,” Lily told her.
“We’d be glad to have you come read for us.”
They walked out onto the landing, in the warm afternoon light, and Brandi Muller offered her hand. “We can always use more talent.”
After they had returned to the car, Lily said, “Sheri, don’t tell people about the play. I don’t have a play. I have some scribblings, some partial scenes. And a journal that anybody would think was—well, weird.”
“I thought I was helping,” Sheri said.
“I know, and I appreciate it. But there’s no sense getting ahead of things.”
2
I’VE BEEN READING in your first book, again, admiring your humor. And your astonishing descriptive powers. I would love to capture that quality in the speeches I write for you. Though lately I’m beginning to think that I’m not cut out to be a playwright.
Also I love how you could go away from yourself, from worries about yourself. I don’t remember who said that hell is other people, but sometimes, although I have no trouble being alone for writing, I find it quite the opposite: hell can turn out to be one’s self, without the mitigating, roomy promise and comfort of others.
Tyler has started work, and Buddy gave him a new sedan to drive as a demo. I teased him about his fast car, and a fast car is something I know you would like. The other morning, we were all in a parking lot where Buddy plays softball with a group of men from the dealership. A big gravel lot. The tires made their popping noise, that pleasant crackling sound, and I thought how it is a sound you never heard in your short life. There you are, in the last years of your century; and here I am in mine. So much has changed. And so much hasn’t.
For instance, the longing you felt for experience. That is the same, here. But you wanted to go away from home; I realize that I’ve yearned to find home.
Tyler sold his first car yesterday, so long after starting work. They came home drunk, the three of them; they’d been celebrating. Tyler got sick, poor thing, and I tended to him, and thought of you, with your practical medical knowledge gleaned almost entirely out of books.
I haven’t had any luck finding work, and it’s been three months. There isn’t anything to do at The Loft until they finish with this run.
I try to stay out of Millicent’s way—but I want to be of help, too. She seldom seems to want any—and of course there’s Rosa. They’re both perfectly kind, and yet I feel as if my presence may be a strain on them sometimes. How could it not be? I’m what Doris used to call “stay-in company.” I hope I can find something soon. Sheri has a job at a real estate office, and she tried to get me something there, with no luck. I’m spending a lot of time going through books—yours and others, and thinking about how I might find some way to travel to some of the places you knew. I get up in the mornings with Tyler, and we play and laugh and tease, and then we have breakfast with Nick and Buddy, and I stand in the doorway and wave good-bye. I cleared the breakfast dishes that first morning and Rosa let me know with sugar-soft sarcasm how much this displeased her. So now I leave the breakfast dishes and return to the downstairs room to read and try to write—and sometimes when Sheri lets me take her to work, I have the car, and go on into town to apply for work. I’ve had several interviews, and thought a couple of times I’d gotten the job; but nothing’s come through. I’ve visited the university library, which is a pretty good one. They actually have a rare first printing of your Travels.
I’ve tried to write home, but it’s just easier to call. So we’ve talked a couple of times. A bit clumsily. My father finally told Doris Peggy’s news. Doris says she’s happy. I can’t fathom the least aspect of that. But it’s their life. If they can explain it to each other, I can leave it alone. Or try to.
Everyone in the house, thanks to Tyler and Sheri, knows I’m trying to write this play. Nick is especially avid to know about it, and inclined to grin at me when I don’t have an answer for him—which I often don’t. He said he wants a part in it, and I laughed and told him I hadn’t thought I would put a jackass in. It’s sometimes a little difficult teasing with him, knowing what I know about Sheri’s “platonic friend.” I can’t help but feel that there’s an element of betrayal about it. But you can’t be with Nick without making light of things—that’s how he is with people; he tends to make everything into a joke, and I’ve noticed that a lot of the jokes are at his own expense. Except that his continual joking references to the play are making me feel almost sullen around him. Sometimes, he calls me Shakespeare, and I can see that he means it to be affectionate; there isn’t the slightest malice in it, and yet it grates on my nerves and I look for excuses to be quiet, or, better yet, away from him.
I wish I could get Tyler to move. But then there we all are at the dinner hour, laughing and telling stories, and it’s all so vibrant and I laugh so hard that I don’t want it to change. I’ve joked with Tyler that we could find a place of our own, but still come to the Galatierre house for dinner each night. We have such sweet times together, and I feel wrong for worrying so much. But Tyler and I will be so wonderful when we get off on our own. Last night we talked for a long time in the dark, and he told me that he has always had a terror of intimacy—that it’s all tied up in an overwrought sense of worry about what people think of him. And that’s a function of the daily moral attention he had to be in all the time with his father. For him, these evening dinner-table rounds of talk and laughter are like the richest nourishment. I said that telling me about a fear of intimacy is a pretty big admission, and very confiding, for someone with those feelings. “Well,” he said. “This is you. This is here.” My heart changed its rhythm when he said it. I put my arms around him and snuggled close and said I thought that was how most people are in company, anyway. But then he said the idea of getting our own place made him anxious, as if it would be a matter of responsibility he isn’t ready for. And it is as if we’re all playing at a game of being out of the ordinary flow of living.
Sometimes when we’re all together I see him watching them, and he has the most wondering and avid look on his face.
Something is happening to me that I won’t put in writing just yet.
3
EACH DAWN she awakened first, and she would wait for the dark to recede from the windows, feeling faintly sick to her stomach. There were episodes in the night, where she had to get up to pee. She would get back into the bed, the sheets still warm from where she had lain, and Tyler would move closer. The warmth of him, the smell of him, so close, calmed her, made the usual nervousness of being up in the middle of the night give way, and she would lie there thinking of the talk at the previous evening’s dinner.
Buddy, Nick, and Tyler had discovered that they shared a love of the woods. They talked about it a lot. They were going to go hunting in the fall, in deer season. Twice already they had gone into the north woods to hunt squirrels and other small game. There was a big land preserve north of town, a farm with several thousand acres of unused wilderness, and Buddy knew the man who owned it. He took Tyler and Nick with him, and when they all returned he made jokes about how the other two had lost their feel for wild nature, tramping around in their boots, afraid of snakes. The boys, as he called them, talked about having to go slow, to compensate for the great age of their companion.
That evening, Tyler told a story about being eleven years old and allowed to carry a shotgun for the first time. On that hunting trip, he was supposed to remain behind and observe. But a rabbit, flushed by the dogs, circled in the brush and high grass, and came right past him, within inches of his feet. He shot both barrels of the gun out of sheer panic, almost wounding himself and all but obliterating the rabbit. As he told the story, he did the sound of the gun, both barrels, standing at the table to demonstrate, and then sitting down, pantomiming the eating of that same ragged, cooked carcass, his father having made him prepare it with the scattershot still in it. Tyler acted out the surprise and difficulty of coming upon the pellets as he chewed, and he leaned forward and mimed spitting them onto his plate. He described the clanking sound they made. And then he portrayed his father, carrying on a regular dinner conversation with a woman he was seeing, evidently oblivious to the occasional clatter of the metal pellets, as if it were perfectly normal to have a boy at the table spitting out shot, and a woman sitting across from him with a look of horror and perplexity on her face. He even briefly acted out the woman, with her startlement and horror at each clanking pellet. It was quite a performance. No one could do anything for a time except laugh. Sheri had put her head down on her folded arms and gasped for air, pleading with her half brother to stop.
“That’s harsh,” Nick said, wiping his eyes. “Man, that is extreme.”
“That’s my father,” said Tyler, leaning back in his chair.
“You know what, honey, you’re the one with the acting talent,” Lily said, delighting in him. “That was so wonderful to watch. You did all three characters.”
“Man, but is that ever harsh,” Nick went on.
Tyler looked down the table at Buddy. “It’s a hunter’s justice, though, isn’t it?”
“I think I have to agree with Nick,” Buddy Galatierre said, still laughing.
One morning after the men had gone off to work, Lily worked for an hour in the downstairs room, and then started upstairs into the kitchen, to get a cup of coffee. She heard voices, a man and a woman. Something made her stop, and she heard Millicent say, “You’re sweet.” There was a suppleness of tone, an affection in her voice, tinged with another note—a disquiet.
“You’re such a zany lady, you know it? It’s all I can do to keep from making a pass at you. I don’t know if I can resist the urge.”
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t try so hard.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I should’ve said maybe you’ll keep trying.”
“How do you mean that?”
“I mean, I’m sure you’ll manage not to make a pass, Roger.”
“But you don’t want me to try so hard, huh.”
“Roger.”
“What if we both said exactly what’s on our minds?”
“Don’t stand so close. Someone might come in.”
“We’re alone.”
There was a long silence. Lily turn
ed and began, as soundlessly as she could, descending the stairs. But she heard the hurried clacking of Millicent’s heels on the kitchen floor, and now Millicent called to her from the top of the steps, “Hey.”
She turned. Millicent’s white blouse was rumpled, and her face gleamed with the heat, and with a breathless, anxious, fixed straining to smile. “I want you to meet someone.”
She made her way there, and Millicent introduced her to a trim, middle-aged, balding but very darkly handsome man named Roger Gault. Lily looked straight at him, her old habit asserting itself, of going against the grain of her own impulse, which was to avert her eyes. He was a contractor, a friend of the family. He had built the kitchen. Millicent indicated the fine cabinets and the woodwork. Gault leaned against the counter with a bottle of beer, and smiled at both of them. Millicent was agitated, but controlled, and she talked rapidly about plans to knock the west wall down and expand the room into the small den that Buddy never used, and to construct a solarium for all her plants. The work would begin sometime after the weather turned cold. Gault finished his beer and shook Lily’s hand, then turned to Millicent and said, with an unmistakable air of familiarity, “I’m a bad influence.” He leaned over and kissed her on the temple, and he had to lean farther than he had intended because of the way she pulled back from him, glancing over at Lily.
“Roger, really.”
“’Bye, girls,” he said.
They watched him go out along the edge of the pool and on, through the wooden fence, to his car. Millicent had her arms wrapped around herself. She cleared her throat, and then noticed that her blouse had come out at the waist. She tucked it in, while making an awkward few steps toward the entrance of the living room, as though she meant to run away. “That Roger,” she said. “He’s such a flirt.”
Lily remained silent. The remark did not really permit any response other than a nod.
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