by Sue Miller
She put her finger in her place and looked at Daisy. “Well, that can happen. This isn’t a hotel. It’s an old, beat-up house.”
“But can’t you fix it?”
“I can, I think, and I will try, if you will speak to me just a little bit less like a servant.”
“Oh, Christ, Mom.”
“And less like that, Daisy, too.”
“All right.” Daisy swung her head, throwing her hair back behind her shoulders. She pulled her face into a new, artificially sweet expression. “Mother dear, Mommie dearest,” she said, “could I ask you please to try to do something about the fact that only cold water is pouring out of the hot-water faucet?”
Eva got up. “Yes, my darling daughter. But even if I get it turned on again, it’ll take a while to heat up, so you should get some clothes or pj’s or something on while you wait.”
Eva went into the butler’s pantry, off the hall between the living room and kitchen. She found matches and a flashlight in the drawers there. She descended the stairs into the basement. It was unfinished, cobwebby and dank, a place they all avoided. The water heater was in a far corner. She knelt by it and took the cover off the service opening. Bending over, she could see that, yes, the pilot was off. She rested the flashlight so its beam was aimed into the hole. Reaching in, she pressed the gas button and offered up a lighted match. With a little rip of enthusiasm, the pilot went on; and seconds later, more enthusiasm, the gas itself lighted.
Eva recapped the hole and was about to stand up, when she noticed the glue trap behind the tank. It was one of many scattered around the basement, most of them holding only insects and grit. But a mouse had died in this trap—months ago apparently. At any rate, bugs had devoured its flesh long since. Its skeleton lay curled on its side on the clear glue. Eva picked the trap up carefully, avoiding the stickum, and looked closely.
It was perfection—the exquisite miniature bones of its paws, the hollowed-out, belled delicacy of the empty white rib cage, the tiny skull, the teeth smaller than the smallest grains of rice. She was struck—made suddenly tearful actually—by the extravagance, the loss: this much beauty lavished on this tiny dead creature, useless or worse to her. She thought of John, his bones. How they had felt when she scattered them, the odd chunks among the gritty ash, which reminded her of his final fragility, of the way he had so quickly and carelessly been destroyed, the bone that had shielded who he was so easily smashed to bits. Exactly such bits as she had thrown off to the sides of the path up Mount St. Helena when she scattered his ashes.
In two weeks he would have been dead a year. Perhaps he and the mouse had died at the same time. She hadn’t thought she would mark his death in any way. It seemed morbid to her, grim. Better to remember him alive, every day—as she did, she thought—than to make a fuss about the anniversary of his dying.
But it seemed to her suddenly, holding the little white tray with the dead mouse, that she’d betrayed him. That she’d started down the wrong path, with Mark, with the stirring of feeling for him she’d allowed herself. Even the way she’d thought of it, the way she’d limited it in her mind, seemed wrong, seemed disrespectful of what she’d had with John.
She imagined carrying the mouse upstairs to John, as she would have done when he was alive, and marveling at it together. A tiny Yorick, she might have said. Yorick-ini. And then John, no doubt, would have recited half the passage from memory.
When she went upstairs, she threw the glue trap away, covering it with paper towels in the trash compactor so Daisy or Theo wouldn’t see it and be revolted, or scared. She washed her hands. She went up to John’s study and looked up the Yorick passage.
Sitting at his desk, she read, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?” She resisted the tears she felt. Cheap, she thought. Then she read, “Now get you to my lady’s chambers and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. Make her laugh at that.”
An image of her mother, her face seamed and embittered by the lines of age, rose in her mind—her mother as she set her sherry glass sharply down and spoke: “As I said, dear, Death.”
BY THE TIME she left the house on Monday evening to meet Mark, she didn’t want to go. She was sorry she’d called him. She saw it as weak on her part, wrong—the wish to flirt, to be held, to be admired, or, in Mark’s fashion, loved. John’s memory should be enough for her, she thought. His memory. She had been truly loved. John had loved her. And she had learned how to love from him.
Sitting opposite Mark, she felt herself distant and sad. He looked wonderful. He’d been working flat out with the end of the crush, he said, and she remembered how he had always loved this season, the nonstop pressure, the excitement of it. His hands holding his drink were stained dark.
Their talk was more desultory than it had been before. The energy to be flirtatious, the wish to be found attractive, was flattened in Eva. She found herself thinking about what time it was getting to be, thinking about how much longer she would have to stay, looking forward to arriving home again, to reading for a while, to sleep. Perchance to dream, she thought.
Mark asked her for the jokes, and at first she couldn’t remember what he was referring to. But then she told them, including the one she hadn’t told Daisy, about the old man in the whorehouse.
He laughed. They sat quiet for a long moment. They seemed to have run out of things to say. Eva was about to announce that she needed to get back, she was going to make up some excuse about Daisy’s needing homework help, when he said, “Do you sometimes compare me to other men you know? You know, when you’re sitting here with me?”
“Other men I know?”
“The guy you’re dating, for instance.”
She made a face. “My, word certainly gets around.”
He lifted his shoulders. “Gracie,” he said. “Our pal.”
Gracie. She nodded. “Well, I don’t know that I’d say I’m dating, exactly. That seems to imply a more … a bigger commitment of some kind or another than anything I’m thinking of at the moment.” She saw his face relax, some tension ease. “But I suppose I’ve thought at one time or another about the differences among various men I’ve known, you included. That would be human, would it not? I don’t think I’ve done it when I’m with you, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking.”
“What are you asking, then?”
“I don’t know.” They were at the inside bar tonight. It was cool and dark out, the tall windows behind him were black. “I suppose … what you want. Why you called me. Why we’re here.”
Eva felt ashamed, embarrassed. But he had every right to ask her this, because she hadn’t known what she was doing either when she called him. She struggled to frame a reply, an answer, that wouldn’t wound him.
“Oh Mark, I don’t know,” she said. “Because I’m human. Because I’m alone and sometimes that’s hard.” He started to reach over to touch her, but she went on. “Because you’ve been kind and … attentive, and I felt I needed that. No simple answers.”
“No.” He watched her face, steadily.
She had forgotten how beautiful he could be, how much pleasure you could take just in looking at him. “I should go, I think.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” His hands reached across the table and closed over hers.
“No, really, I think I should.” She slid her hands out from under his, and lifted one to signal the waitress.
A silence fell between them. Eva was looking away from him, out the dark window. There were candles on the empty outside tables, flickering. “I feel I owe you an apology,” she said.
“What for?”
Eva didn’t know how to put it. For misunderstanding myself? For using your affection to comfort myself? For using you? “I’ve been so … unstable, I guess. Not myself. Or, I feel actually, I’m only gradual
ly becoming myself again. I’ve sort of … flailed about. I haven’t known what I wanted.”
“Well, that seems pretty natural, doesn’t it, given the circumstances?”
“I suppose. But it still bothers me to realize it.”
“You’re being awfully hard on yourself.”
“Not hard enough, I assure you.”
He smiled at her. “Eva. You’re always too hard on yourself.”
“Well, then, that’s how I have to be apparently.”
The waitress set the check down in its leather case. They fumbled, argued, but Eva insisted on paying it. She had, after all, asked him out, she said. And hadn’t even been very good company.
She felt an urgency to be gone, almost a physical need. She left too much money for the tip, not wanting to wait for change. She stood up. Without speaking, they walked through the bar, across the foyer with its mammoth bouquet of lilies, and out to the parking lot. Eva was walking just ahead of Mark. She turned at her car to say good night. Mark reached for her, and she stepped into his embrace—one last time, she told herself. It felt so familiar, so wonderful, his long, muscled body, his smell. She felt she was holding their youth together, their start, their hopes and then all that had wrecked that. She felt she was holding her past, something she’d already said good-bye to, at great cost, and now unexpectedly had to part with again.
He kissed her, and she kissed him back, but when he pushed harder against her, she pulled away slightly. With her hands still around his neck, she lowered her head, resting her forehead against his chest. His hands moved up and down her back.
“This is all I want, Mark,” she said after a moment, and then she stepped away and bent to open her car.
She didn’t look at him as she backed out, as she shifted gears and pulled forward toward the gate at the entrance to the lot. But she couldn’t stop herself from looking in her rearview mirror just before she turned out into the driveway, and he was still there, standing where she’d left him, his face and his shirt pale smudges in the dim light.
As she drove slowly down the curving drive, she felt overcome by a sense of loss, a sense that included John, and herself somehow too. It shouldn’t have to be so hard, over and over, she thought. It’s too hard. She slowed and stopped at the road, and waited, her turn indicator blinking steadily, until she had forced down the tears that welled in her throat and eyes, until her vision cleared and she could start the drive home.
Chapter Ten
DUNCAN WAS FULL of opinions.
(It was only after Duncan, years after Duncan, when Daisy began to have love affairs with people her own age, college students, that she realized how unusual this was. She lay next to one or another new lover and listened to them talk, listened to them tell their stories—about how they ran away from home one summer, about how their brother was killed in a car crash in high school and the family was never the same, about how their mother slipped into heavy drinking and they finally performed a family intervention—and she missed Duncan: the blankness of his past and his endless opinions. I’m not interested in stories, she would think. I could tell you a story. What about your opinions?)
Duncan thought that the problem with contemporary politicians was that they didn’t believe that there was a permanent and deep evil in the world. Therefore they had no capacity to understand and take any dark pleasure in life, no wit. Kennedy was the last president with true wit, he said, and that was because he was Catholic and understood the power of evil.
It was Duncan’s opinion that the Napa Valley had become absurd and precious. That it represented all that was bad and would get worse in America about the connection between wealth and race. That eventually everything would get so expensive that no one normal would be able even to afford the wine anymore, and the Mexicans would still be living in cheesy housing and drinking bad beer, and everyone would still be pretending that was just fine because they were a different kind of human being from the white folks who grew grapes.
Duncan thought her taste in movies was idiotic. He thought that the only contemporary directors whose films were worth seeing were Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, the Coen brothers, and occasionally something by Woody Allen. She shouldn’t even speak to him of Bergman. (She wouldn’t have been able to, never having seen one of his films.) Bergman, he said, that fraud, who abused his art to moralize, to moralize simplistically about good and evil.
Duncan thought that computer use wouldn’t become widespread until the techies, who were in love with what they’d created, stopped insisting everyone else had to love it too. “We’re Americans,” he said. “We want something we can turn on, and it goes. Like the car. Like the electric light. We don’t want to have to admire the complexity or be involved in it. We don’t want to understand how. Americans don’t care about how. We just want to press the button and be happy.”
It was Duncan’s opinion that American girls were insipid. Dull. Because they had no culture, they had no deep sexuality. He had rescued Daisy from this fate. He would be a story she could dine out on.
“Yah, and who in the wide world would I ever tell this particular story to?”
“I promise you, Daisy, you will.” Suddenly, he smiled. “ ‘And when you speak of me,’ ”—she could tell he was imitating someone, quoting someone—“ ‘Be kind.’ ”
Daisy took in all this and much more over the course of the fall, even as she was learning from Duncan everything about her own body and how it could be brought to pleasure. Because she’d gone on seeing him.
Though she hadn’t known, after that first time, that she would. In the car that afternoon on the way back to St. Helena, he had said, “Well, we’re even now, Daze.”
She wasn’t sure what he meant. She was stunned with what they’d done, what she’d done.
And now, his saying this. Was it over, so soon? Was that all he’d wanted? Did it end here? Was this the way things worked with grown-up sex?
Of course, she knew it wasn’t even really sex at all—he’d never put his penis in her; she hadn’t even seen his penis—but maybe these were the rules.
She said, in what she hoped was an indifferent tone, “Okay.” She looked away from him, out the window at the hillside that rose on the eastern side of Silverado Road, at the driveways cutting uphill, the houses you could see through the woods and undergrowth.
“Of course,” he said after a while, “if you’d like to do this again, have a spot of tea, as it were, I’d be willing. What do you think?”
She looked over at him. His face was pleasantly blank, unreadable. She shrugged. “I don’t care,” she said.
He grinned then. “Liar,” he said. “Pants on fire.”
She couldn’t help smiling slightly. “So?” she said, after a minute. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
Daisy looked back out the window. “If we should.”
“I think we should, Daze.”
Her heart thudded heavily.
“Don’t you?”
She shrugged again.
“Come on, Daisy. I’ll be your slave. Every teenage girl should have a slave, don’t you think? I’ll put my hands wherever you like. I’ll put my mouth wherever you like. I’ll look at you and simply adore you. All parts of you.”
She kept her face turned from him, but she could feel herself blushing.
“You liked it, didn’t you, Daisy?” His voice was serious, suddenly, and she looked over at him.
“Yes,” she said. “I loved it.”
“Would you like it again?”
“Yes,” she said, and felt funny, heavy and thick between her legs, in her abdomen.
“Good.” And when she said nothing more for a long moment, he said, “Is there a problem then?”
She said, “What about Gracie?”
This wasn’t what she meant, not really. Though she would have said she loved Gracie, she didn’t truly care about her in relation to what had just happened with Duncan. She meant something else, some
thing about what all the other grown-ups would think, something about how illicit this was. She wanted him to acknowledge this, to make sense of it for her, though she couldn’t have found the words to ask for it.
“Well, we won’t tell Gracie, I wouldn’t think.” She could see his mouth twist a little bit. He looked over at her. “Just as we won’t tell Eva about your larceny.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. And then, “They’re not the same, anyway.”
“But in a sense, they are. You’re taking from Eva what belongs to her, because you need to, for your own private reasons, and I’m taking from Gracie what belongs to her because, I would say, of my own very private reasons. Isn’t that the case?”
She didn’t answer. You didn’t always need to answer Duncan, she was discovering.
“Has Eva even noticed?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No,” she said reluctantly.
“And I can promise you Gracie won’t notice either.”
“But …” She was searching for exactly what it was she wanted to know from him.
“What?”
“Don’t you love Gracie?”
“Love,” he said. “I don’t quite believe in love. We see where love gets you. ‘Love me tender.’ ‘Love is all you need.’ ” He looked over at her. “We don’t agree, do we, Daisy? We understand that love is an idea, a big fat overblown Western idea. Culturally imposed.” His voice mocked his own words. And then he was quoting something, something Daisy would recognize with a start years later, getting ready for an audition for a play. “ ‘Men have died from time to time,’ ” he said, “ ‘and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ ”
