by Sue Miller
By the time we’d finished dessert, it was after five. Sadie went upstairs to call some friends who would also be home for the first holiday since college had started. Cass picked up her guitar and began strumming in the living room. Nora went to her room, to change, she said, but maybe just to be alone. Daniel and I worked in the kitchen on food for the next day’s party, and then we sat at the table to sort out what our chores and duties would be. At six-thirty I drove over to the clinic to feed and exercise the animals again. The snow had stopped, though the plows were still working here and there.
When I got back, there were extra cars parked in the plowed-out drive. I could hear the bass line of murmurous music and the sound of animated conversation pitched above it as soon as I got out of my car. Inside, I greeted them—Sadie’s friends—and then withdrew to the kitchen. Cass came in and cut herself another piece of mince pie. She hunched at the kitchen sink to eat it from her hands.
“Watch it,” I said. “You’ll lose your skinny job.”
She made a face.
“Where’s Daddy?” I asked.
“Out yonder.” She tilted her head.
“Are you going to retreat upstairs?”
“Naw. Nor and I thought we’d go over to the inn for a while.” She began to lick her fingers.
“Oh, nice,” I said. Could it happen? Had they been apart long enough, had they grown far enough away from each other, that they could be friends at last?
I took a corkscrew, two glasses, and a bottle of wine through the snowy yard to Daniel’s door. “It is I,” I called. “Let me in.”
He was smiling as he opened the door. “You couldn’t take it either, could you?”
“It is noisy.”
“One day of togetherness, and you’re hiding out here with me.”
“Well, you’re my pal.”
“Don’t forget it.”
There was a book on the daybed, Memory’s Ghost. He moved it and we both sat down, propping ourselves in opposite corners, our legs stretched out, touching. I opened the bottle and poured the wine. We leaned forward to knock our glasses together before we drank. “En garde,” I said.
“What are we toasting?” he asked.
“Cass and Nora are going to the inn,” I said. “Together. That’s toastworthy, if anything ever was.”
“Ha!” he said as he leaned back again. “Maybe now that it’s too late, they’ll get along famously.”
“It’s not too late!” I cried. “It’s never too late. What do you mean, too late?”
“Too late for us. Fine for them. Great for them. But too late for us as a family.”
I sighed. “You’re right, damn you.” I drank some wine and set my glass down. “This is all pretending, isn’t it?” I made a wide sweep with my hand. “We’re not really a family anymore.”
“I wouldn’t be so absolute.” He set his glass down, too, frowning. His hand reached out, pushed my skirt up over my knee, found bare flesh. His fingers were cool, he spoke gently. “Why are you always so cataclysmic, Jo? First it’s never too late, then the whole thing is false anyway. Slow down, sweetheart.”
I looked at him. “Daniel, Daniel, master of the Golden Mean.”
“Why not? Why not try it?”
“No, you’re right.” I shifted slightly for comfort. “But it is irretrievable, isn’t it?”
“It’s just different, Jo. It’s another thing, with its own pleasures and pains.”
“But they’re pleasure and pains that . . . take me up less. They’re in their lives, and it’s all more remote from us. See, I miss it. I miss feeling in it with them. I want to feel used more. I used to feel useful.”
“You are useful.” He squeezed my thigh.
“To what? To whom?”
“To me, utterly. To your work. To your clients and your animals. You’re necessary. You’re being used, all the time.”
“Then why don’t I feel that? Why don’t I feel better?”
For an answer, he slid across and sat next to me. He kissed me, slowly. “Let me make you feel better,” he whispered. “Let me use you.”
I felt sorrowful still. I didn’t want to make our sweet comfortable love.
But Daniel was willing—eager—to do all the work initially. He shifted off the daybed. Holding me at the waist, he moved me in two long slides so my hips were at its edge. He knelt on the floor then, between my legs, and pulled off my woolly knee socks with elaborate care, stroking my feet, my calves. I lay back, my head touching the wall, and watched him, his pale face intent on his task.
He reached up under my skirt now and eased my underpants down. Gently he kissed the inside of each knee, and then pushed them both back and up. I closed my eyes, swung my head to the side. I felt his hands slide down the insides of my thighs, his thumbs and fingertips fluttering, finding me, circling, entering me for moisture and then circling more. The pressure was light but steady. And now he pressed his face to me, and I felt his tongue, too, and then I couldn’t tell it, tongue from fingers.
I felt his hands shift around under me again, cupping my bottom. He slid me a little more toward him, opened me wider still. I let my legs fall fully back—the openness was what thrilled me, that and his tongue licking me everywhere and his fingers teasing me, coming into me. I tried to hold on to just this moment, to feel it and feel it, but I began to ride higher and higher as he played with me, and then I came, calling, with his face pressed against me, and behind my closed eyes, oddly, what I saw were field flowers, pale yellow, purple, devil’s red. Flowers, as I bucked and held on to his hair, his ears.
When I’d finally relaxed completely, when my breathing had begun to come back to me, I turned on my side and swung my legs up to make room for him. He climbed up next to me on the daybed. We lay facing each other. My breathing evened out completely. I heard the metallic ticking of the baseboard heater, the wind in the pines outside.
Daniel had unfastened his pants at some point, dexterous man, and now I felt his hard, silky penis push against my legs. I reached down, lifting my leg to rest it on his hip, and helped him come into me.
We lay there, nearly face-to-face, Daniel moving in me from time to time with a gentle, wet sound. His breath was warm in my ear. “Mmm,” I said, and he answered me.
“Why is it like this?” I asked him after a while.
“Like what?” he asked, pulling himself back and then slowly pushing in again. “What do you mean?”
“Sex. It’s gone for so long, not happening much, or just routine. And then it comes thundering back.”
“What’s the alternative?” he said now, and he moved deep, two or three times, in me.
“Unhhh,” I said. “I don’t know.”
“Always fantastic? Always hot?” He smiled. “Hard to imagine.” Now he drew back and came out of me. After a moment, I reached down to touch him where he rested, wet against my belly. I held him and stroked him, slowly and then faster, my arm finally aching in its awkward position between us. Just as I felt I couldn’t do any more, he rose above me, turning me on my back, and entered me again, pumping harder, watching us where we were joined. He worked, his face deeply concentrated. Then suddenly his head dropped back and he cried out, twice, three times. He slowed, and gradually I felt him soften within me. I was gripping my own knees, swiveling myself around him. He fell forward onto me finally, and we lay still together, holding each other.
After a while, he said softly, “It’s circular, Jo.” Then he laughed. “Cyclical, I mean. It just comes around from time to time. ‘Howdy. Remember me?’ ”
“See, that’s it.” I was whispering to match his voice. “I don’t want it to be circular. I want linear. I want events. I want to be blown away.”
“Joey,” he said tenderly. He stroked my face, put his fingers in my mouth. His hand tasted of salt and sex, his and mine.
I chewed on him, gently. “Maybe if we took lots of vitamin E,” I offered after a few moments.
“Would you want it, though?”
he asked. “I like its ebb and flow. I like it to stop so it can start again.” He moved his hand. “ ‘How can I miss you if you won’t go away?’ ”
I laughed. We shifted. After a few moments, I reached for my wineglass over Daniel’s body.
Then suddenly, from the yard, we heard the voices calling, laughing. Car doors began to slam, one after another. We had a little flurry of guilty activity—sitting up, fastening pants, pulling panties and socks back on. Skirt down, hair smoothed, shirt tucked in. And then, with an elaborately slow John Wayne walk, Daniel moved behind his desk and took his seat. I stretched out demurely on the daybed, and we looked at each other and lifted our glasses again, saluting, I think, our transformation back to the people Cass and Nora and Sadie believed in.
CHAPTER
9
Toward the end of the party, a bunch of the young people were dancing in the corner of the living room by the stereo, one of them holding a baby of six or eight months, twirling it slowly while the baby patted his face and they laughed at each other. Allie, who loved to dance, was circling them all with a herder’s nervousness, barking from time to time. The talkers were talking louder to hear one another over the noise, though the music was still fairly subdued—Latin stuff.
I went to the kitchen to consolidate platters of food so I could carry them out to the living room, where almost everyone seemed to be at this point. Things had thinned out a bit, but those who had stayed seemed committed for the long haul. Mostly people I’d known for years, they were locked in conversation, in pleasant social interchange all over the room: here a group sitting in a cluster by the fire, there a person leaned against the wall, head bent forward and down to listen to someone else.
I looked up as I was working and saw Eli standing in the kitchen doorway. “I like your house,” he said, looking around the huge room. He and Jean had arrived fairly early on, and I’d made the rounds with them, introducing them to people I thought they’d enjoy. I’d been pleased to see them moving easily around on their own after that, Eli at one point launched into a fierce argument with a radical friend of Nora’s from high school, Jean standing in a group of five or six people including Mary Ellen, laughing.
“Thanks,” I said now. “It is sweet, isn’t it?”
“It’s more or less what we imagined when we decided to come to New England. An old farmhouse, with these kinds of rooms opening up off each other ad infinitum. Beams.” He gestured up at ours, darkened and cracked, hung with drying herbs from Daniel’s garden.
“So why didn’t you?”
“There wasn’t one on the market when we were looking that didn’t need lots of work. Lots of work, and we didn’t want that. And then we saw the house we got, and decided new was nice too.”
“Those houses are pretty swell.”
“You’ll have to come over and see it. You and Daniel.”
“Daniel, yes.”
He nodded. “I talked to him briefly. He’s not a minister, is he?”
“Yes, he is. Why?”
“Oh, something he said made me think that, but then I thought surely not.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” He lifted his shoulders. “Well.” He grinned. “I don’t know ministers, that’s all. I guess I’m a pretty parochial person. Anyway, I was just startled to think it might be so.” He gestured at the table. “What are you doing here? Can I help?”
“I want everything on these two plates,” I said. “I want to take it all out into the other room. I want it eaten up.”
“Done.” He stepped closer to me and started to work, too, piling all the little rounds of bread at the edges of the platters. After a moment, he said abruptly, “How does that affect your life?”
“What?”
“His being a preacher.”
I looked over at him, but he was steadily working. I smiled. “How does your wife’s being a political scientist affect your life?” He looked at me, too, and after a second smiled back, acknowledging the point.
I said, “He likes his job, and that’s good for our life. And he’s a great listener. That’s nice for me.”
Eli nodded. Then he stopped working and turned to watch me, to watch my hands. He said, “Look, I wanted to thank you, for your support. For your understanding and sympathy. About Arthur.” His voice had changed.
I straightened up. “Oh, Eli, thanks aren’t necessary.”
“No, they are. You’re a good listener too. It meant a lot to me to have you be his vet for that moment, to have you put him down. Or whatever we have to call it.”
I didn’t know what to say. I bit my lip. “Well, I’m touched,” I managed. I reached out and set my hand on his arm. And felt again the thick massiveness of Eli, the unexpected heat. We stood there for a moment. He was looking down at me, and I was aware, as I never was with Daniel, of feeling small, of feeling very female. Then I moved my hand away. I turned and began to work again.
He said, “It’s an odd kind of bond, wouldn’t you say? It’s as though we’d committed some kind of crime together.”
“Eli, no!” I cried. I’d stood up straight. “No, not at all. You mustn’t feel guilty about it. No. It’s as though we’ve endured the death . . . the death of a friend together. That’s all.”
“I know. I know you’re right.”
I turned away from his gaze. It was too serious, too open for me.
“And we have endured the death of a friend, haven’t we?” He was standing very close to me, and his voice was deep, intimate. “I mean Dana,” he said.
I felt a kind of thrill, the near dizziness you get when someone first speaks of love. I lifted my hand to my throat and swallowed. I said, “I’m so glad to have you speak her name.”
“Sometime it would be good to talk about all that.”
“Yes.” I turned and began to bend and reach over the table again, sliding the last wedges of cheese onto the platter.
“I’ve been feeling . . . pleased, Jo. I wanted you to know this. That if I had to meet someone from that time again, it should be you.”
Now I looked hard at him. “Thanks. I think thanks,” I said.
He laughed quickly and stepped back. I picked up one platter, and he followed me in to the living room, carrying the other.
He and Jean left shortly after that. At the door, she promised they’d have us to their house soon—maybe a light supper the next week, before the holiday rush started? Lovely, I said. They turned and waved under the porch light as they started across the snowy yard.
The kids had definitively jacked the music up in the living room by now, and their dancing had gotten wilder, claimed more space. Finally the adults retreated to the kitchen, those who were left—a familiar core of us, a group that had had babies at the same time, that had traded child care and sat in each other’s yards at summer barbecues until there was no light left; or in one another’s kitchens on winter nights, reluctant to end the evening, to drive home down the empty, snowy roads. We talked now of the town elections, of the scandalous breakup of a friend’s marriage, of the lives and doings of the nearly grown-up children in the next room.
Shortly after midnight, the last two couples left, together. Daniel went into the living room and announced he was cleaning up. Several of the kids helped, and then slowly they began to drift away too. The music was soft now. As I undressed, I could hear the voices calling good night in the yard, the whumps of the car doors.
It was around one-thirty when I climbed into bed next to Daniel. I was thrumming with energy still, wildly alert. “It was a nice party, wasn’t it?” I said.
“Mmm.”
“I heard a really funny discussion with Mary Ellen and some others about Watergate at one point. Watergate! Can you believe it?” I began to recount it to him. He made no response. I stopped and after a moment said, “You’re not too interested in this, are you?”
“I’m interested, Jo. Tomorrow I’ll be interested. I have to sleep now.”
“I can’t, yet.”
“Get the light, though, will you?” He was frowning, his eyes shut.
I flicked the light off and lay in the dark. My ears were ringing, as though I’d been on an airplane. And indeed I felt that way after the noise and energy of the party, a kind of traveler’s speedy dizziness. I wasn’t ready yet to be lying here. To sleep. I got up and shut the door as quietly as I could behind me. The murmur of the girls’ voices pulled me through the darkened living room to the kitchen. They were sitting at the table, with the overhead light on. It looked like a painting, framed by the kitchen doors. They laughed as one, the same uplifted faces. Then I saw that Cass was smoking. I resolved to say nothing, though it was a house rule that she shouldn’t inside. But I didn’t want to interrupt what seemed their easy familiarity, I didn’t want to give her a reason to be angry at me tonight.
Nora’s eyes focused on me in the doorway. “Mumster!” she announced. They all looked over.
“Hey, are you pleased with your party, Mommy?” Sadie asked. She was already in a nightgown. The other two were still dressed.
“Of course. Are you? Did enough good things happen?” I pulled out a chair and sat down with them.
“Umm,” Sadie said. “I’ll say! I got to dance with Ivan Baloff, the hunkiest hunk of honey here.”
“No way,” said Cass.
“I did too. And not just once. A bunch of times. We were hot.”
“I mean, no way was he the hunkiest hunk.”
“Who was, then?” Sadie asked.
Cass thought for a moment. “I’d have to vote for Guy Talbot,” she said.
“Guy Talbot?” I cried. This was one of our friends, a real mope. “But he’s such a gloomy Gus, Cassie. He’s like a character out of Dostoyevsky. He’s always in some kind of agony.” He was handsome, though, I realized that suddenly. Handsome in a way that didn’t matter in the least to me.
“But see, I love that,” Cass said. “I love tormented guys.”
