“Wait a minute,” Lily said. “That’s not what the play is about.”
“Well, in a way it is. I mean, what’s all that stuff in the prologue about: ‘Don’t let them tell you I wasn’t in love,’ or words to that effect. That announces it, doesn’t it?”
“That’s not how I meant the play,” Lily said. “I meant it to be about how she used what life gave her and went out and saw what she could see. I meant it to be about bravery. The different kinds of bravery. She had it for everything that ever happened to her.”
“Okay,” Dominic said. “And she had it for the fact that no man ever loved her, too.”
“What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying that’s there. It’s in the play as you wrote it.”
Lily shook her head, and for a moment, no one said anything.
“Don’t be upset with me,” Dom went on, laughing softly. “I love it. I think it works on every level, the ones you say and the ones I say.”
Lily sighed. “I’m in a bad mood. I had a letter from Tyler today.”
Dominic’s smile disappeared. The others simply stared at her as she told them the rest of it.
“Are you going back to him?” Dominic asked.
She frowned and gave him an incredulous look.
“You’re going to tell me you don’t feel the slightest pull?”
“I know what I’m going to do,” Lily told him, “and what I’m not going to do. I don’t want anything from Tyler.”
“Can I see the letter?”
“I threw it away.”
“Where? The trash hasn’t been emptied, has it?”
“Leave it alone, Dom. It’s just a lot of self-excusing bullshit. Really.”
Violet said, “She was moping around all afternoon.”
Lily turned to her. “It’s still all right with me, Aunt Violet.”
“Okay, cher. I’m sorry to interfere.”
“I’d like to see the letter,” Dominic said.
Lily put her fork down. “What difference does it make, Dom? I told you what it says. I’m not even going to respond to it.”
“You’re still in love with him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, what difference would that make? Even if it was true?”
“It makes a difference to me.”
“Why? Why does it make any difference to you? How could it make any difference to you at all, Dominic?”
“Both of you—that’s enough now,” Violet put in.
Dominic stood. “I only wanted you not to be suffering it,” he said. “I wasn’t looking for comparisons.”
“Now, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” Lily said. “What in the world are you talking about? Comparisons—what is that?”
“Forget it,” he said. And started to move from the table.
She stood and caught his arm. “No, tell me. I want to know what you meant.” As she spoke, she was aware of motion to her right, and a sudden banging. Manny had begun beating the end of his fork against the table.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it.” His voice was even, the words clipped, calm. But the banging upset Mary, who began to cry. Lily went over to her and lifted her out of the chair. Manny went on, “I hate this day. I hate this day.”
“All right,” said Dominic. “It’s cool. We’re having a discussion. Let’s everybody calm down.”
“This is not a good day,” Manny said. “This is a bad day.”
They all sat down, Lily holding Mary on her lap.
“I was fired today,” Manny said. “My job ees over. The manager found out about my—about the positive—the HIV.”
Dominic seemed rather visibly relieved. He sighed and shook his head, and then strove to appear concerned. “You’ve already got the other job. Start early. We’ll be all right,” he said. “Christ, don’t scare me like that. I thought you were going to tell us that—well, just think before you say a thing like that: ‘This is a bad day.’ Jesus, Manny.”
The baby had come to a standing position on Lily’s thighs now, facing her, the unsure baby feet pressing and shifting the small weight into Lily’s bones, reaching beyond Lily’s shoulder for the statuette on the counter. She turned the baby and held her up, then set her in her lap again, wrestling with her, because Mary wanted down. Looking across at the others from this straining, she said, “Mary and I have to find some other place to live.”
“No,” Dominic said. “That’s just not so.”
Manny shook his head. “I don’t want anyone to leave.”
Aunt Violet sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Everyone finish eating. The wolf hasn’t broken the door down. We’re all right.”
“No one has to leave,” said Dominic. “We’ll work it out. That’s my child, too.”
“No one’s contesting that,” Lily said.
“Well, you can’t make a decision like that—you and Mary leaving. You can’t just decide that like it’s only the two of you and I’m not involved.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Lily told him.
“Both of you be still,” said Violet. “Before you say things you don’t mean.”
“No one has to leave,” said Manny. “Please.”
The baby began to complain and cry, and so Lily set her down and watched her crawl to the other side of the room. They all watched.
“Manny,” Violet said. “You have a job to go to.”
Manny said, “What if they find it out from the restaurant about me?”
“It’s a motel clerk’s job,” Dom said. “It couldn’t matter to them.”
5
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Violet and Manny took a cab somewhere. Amy took Mary, while Lily and Dominic went off to work. The morning was gray and misting, the color of dashed hopes. They didn’t say much. Dominic was still smarting over the night before, and Lily was beginning to have thoughts she knew to be unworthy of her: that all men were alike; they were all possessive and selfish in the same way, all involved in their children only as aspects of ego. She thought of her own father, with his midlife affair and his marriage to a girl half his age. A girl. That’s all Peggy was. And they were having a child. Scott would be fifty by the time a child was born. He would have to live as long as Violet to be able to give that child a parent as other children are accustomed to parents. It was selfish and the whole country had given over to it: the entire culture was built on greed and avarice, not so much for money, but for ease and power, or the illusion of power, or for pure empty sensation. She was occupied by these thoughts when she dropped Dominic at the bookstore, and they exchanged a few words about how he would get home. He would get a ride from one of his co-workers.
“Fine,” she said, feeling priggish and dismal.
“Are you still upset?” he asked.
After a pause, she said, “No.” And she felt like crying.
She drove the Olds through what was now a downpour, passing the cemeteries with their teeming blocks of heavy stone, packed-together granite mausoleums and statues and towers, all gray with a watery, stained grayness, as if tarnished by the rain. She thought of George Kingsley, traveling the globe to keep from fulfilling his responsibilities to his wife and two children. Her disaffection had settled into a kind of imponderable gloom, in which it was impossible to have a positive thought. The play was finished and nothing would come of it, and all the work on it had been wasted.
At the school, she was greeted with a crisis involving four students who had gotten into a fight, and the fight had racial overtones—two of the boys were black and two were white; there was still a lot of tension in some parts of the city over the previous winter’s protests about the krewes and Mardi Gras. Lily didn’t understand it all fully, but she had seen enough racial tension to know that this would not yield to talk. She was placed in charge of resolving the matter—calling parents to apprise them of the situation, and speaking to the four boys who were involved.
The morning’s work took all the energy she had. There
were students decorating the classrooms, and the bulletin boards in the hallways, for parents’ day; the school chorus was preparing a concert. Their rehearsing sounded in the bricks and mortar and beams of the old building, and there was no escaping it: Christmas cheer. The song they were working so hard to perfect, using a complicated descant and a polyphonic arrangement of many harmonies, was “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The song rang in Lily’s ears and embedded itself in her thoughts, adding to her dejection.
She drove back to Burgundy Street with the radio blasting jazz, and nothing would erase the song from her mind. Her usual parking space was taken, and she had to pull around the corner to St. Philip Street and go halfway up the block. She got out of the car in the rain—it was still coming down, a steady, straight, windless screen—and hurried to the corner and up to the entrance of the house, getting soaked and feeling all the more fractious as a result. She was muttering curses as she climbed the front steps of the house.
And almost ran into Nick.
He was standing at the door, having apparently just rung the bell. And he had seen her hurrying toward him on the street. “Hey,” he said, with a casualness that seemed faintly rehearsed. “I thought that was you.”
She couldn’t speak for a moment. She was very glad to see his face. She stood back a little and could only say, “Nick.”
“I rang the bell,” he said, indicating the door.
“The baby-sitter’s here somewhere with Mary.”
He smiled. “Are you locked out?”
She came to herself. “No, of course not.” She reached in for her key, and opened the door, pushing in ahead of him. Water spilled from the folds of their coats onto the hard wood floor of the hall. She called for Amy, and led the way into the living room.
Amy came from the upstairs, where she had put Mary down for her nap. She was introduced, and then softly excused herself. She had work to do at home. Lily walked her to the door, thanking her, and helped her into her coat. She watched Amy walk away down the streaming, rainy sidewalk, holding her umbrella. Nick was still standing in the living room with his coat on.
“Hey, take your coat off,” she said. “Stay awhile.”
“I can’t stay very long. I just thought I’d—you know—” He looked at her. “Stop by.” The falseness of the note he struck rendered the moment nearly absurd. She drew in a breath to ask what he was doing in New Orleans, and saw how much this would contribute to the already considerable awkwardness of the moment. In the next instant, she decided that a joke was the only possible response.
“You just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
“I—I took a day, you know.” He shrugged, and it was as if she had caught him out in some way; the look on his face was so sheepish.
She took the step toward him: “I’m so happy to see you.”
He looked down, muttering, “Well, you know. Thought I’d—come by.” Then, seeing the place on the carpet where his coat had dripped, he murmured, “Jesus.”
“Here,” she said, reaching for the coat as he took it off.
She hung their coats on the coat tree in the hall, and was momentarily grateful for the pause to think.
He still stood in the living room, in the gray light of the windows.
“I finished the play,” she said, reentering the room.
“Oh—hey, that’s great. That’s good news.”
“Dominic’s read it, and says he loves it.”
Nick smiled. “No prejudice there.”
It was a glimpse of the old Nick, she thought. But then he shifted his weight and looked very uncomfortable, even regretful, as if he wished to call the words back.
“I’m not going to send it to my father.”
“No?”
“I haven’t decided where, yet.”
“You don’t want to put him on the spot.”
“You’ve grasped it.” She smiled. “Do you still want to read it?”
His expression lightened. “Yes. Very much.”
“What if it’s awful?”
He grinned, shaking his head. “I’ll deal with it.” The rainy light from the tall front windows gave the room a painterly look—soft contrasts, coupled with a muting of the colors, Nick standing there.
“Actually the rules are these: you have to like it, you have to say you like it, and you have to mean it.”
“I accept the rules with an open heart,” he said.
There was something downcast about him, and she took another step toward him, noticing, with a mild sense of chagrin, that he took a small stride backward. “Nick,” she said. “What is it? Is everything all right?”
“Sure,” he answered, nodding automatically. “Sure.”
The silence stretched between them. She started into the kitchen, saying that she wanted some coffee, and asking if he would have a cup. He said, “Sure,” and followed her, and took a seat at the table. He looked around at this room with the same placid expression, not incurious, but polite, mildly observant, more a kind of nervous movement of his gaze away from her. He tapped his fingers on the smooth surface.
“Nick, have you got some kind of news?”
His face didn’t change. “I had to come down here to see about expanding the dealership. There’s a Mazda dealer looking to sell out.”
“So you’d—you’d have one here?”
“Maybe. I haven’t looked at it yet. It’s Millicent’s—Millicent wanted us to look at it. She and Roger have begun to take more of an interest in things.” He emitted a small laugh, out of one side of his mouth, and when he spoke it was more to himself than to Lily. “And I was the one who wanted to expand.”
“Would you move down here?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m leaving the business.”
She was attending to the coffee. She stopped and looked at him. “What are you going to do?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. I don’t want to use it. I’m looking around, I guess. I haven’t said anything to the others.”
“Will you stay in Oxford?” She had still not gone back to what she was doing.
Again, he shrugged. “Maybe, I don’t know.”
She poured water into the coffeemaker, spooned the ground coffee into the top, then turned it on. He had put his hands up to support his chin, and was simply staring at the tabletop.
“You seem down,” she said.
“I’m okay.”
“Are you?”
He looked away. “I’ve been better.”
She waited for him to go on, but he said nothing.
“How’s Sheri?” she managed.
“Let’s see—how’s Sheri. It turns out that Sheri is seeing somebody. Sheri is looking for herself, I guess you’d say. And she’s figured out that the best way she can be a good wife to me is to see other people. It’s the nineties, you know. She spends all her time lately with this one person. A shrink, this guy. Lots of inner-child crap. Have you ever looked at the list of ‘rights’ those people say everybody has? It ought to be called the inner Hitler. But before Dr. Freud Lite, as I’ll call him, there was a professor. I don’t know.” He drew an invisible circle on the table with one finger, avoiding Lily’s gaze. “She’s—she’s performing stupendous feats of rationalization and mental gymnastics to have her way, and still have me and all the trappings that tell her she’s not out of her fucking mind. This shrink is married, by the way.”
Lily attended to the coffee.
“And that’s how Sheri is. But then you already know most of this.”
She looked at him. “I hated it, Nick. And I told her so.”
He frowned now, folding his hands, as if about to recite something. “In fact, I wasn’t going to say anything at all about it. To tell you the truth, I hoped it wouldn’t come up. I wanted to see you. My friend. That’s all.”
Neither of them said anything for a beat.
“Do you—are you angry with me for not telling you about it?” Lily asked.
He pondered thi
s, without taking his eyes away. Then he looked down as he spoke. “No.” A second later, still looking down, he added, “To be absolutely truthful with myself, I haven’t been completely faithful to Sheri, either.”
Lily allowed him the space to continue.
“I mean I wasn’t physically unfaithful.”
“She said she wasn’t either—”
He interrupted her. “It was you, Lily.” His voice was almost too low to be heard. “I spent an awful lot of time, from the beginning, thinking about you.”
She sat down across from him, and put her hands on the table. He wasn’t quite looking at her. “From the beginning?”
“From the first minute, yes.”
She stood and set about getting cups and saucers from the cabinet, and found herself talking of the house itself, its high ceilings and the old radiator along the wall. She poured coffee into two cups, took them over to the table, set them down, and took the seat across from him again. The rain was running steadily on the windows, creating a wavering, liquid look on his face, like the shadows of melting.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 76
