MONDAY MORNING OLIVIA DROVE SAM TO THE train station. It was raining and the wind blew; a cold mist joined heaven and earth. The Leyden train station was rudimentary: a little brick warming house where tickets and magazines were sold, and a covered staircase leading down to a wooden platform badly in need of paint, where every two or three hours a train came down from Albany or Niagara Falls on the way to Manhattan.
As Olivia pulled into the little parking lot, Sam rubbed a porthole into the steamy window and looked out.
“Is the train coming?” Olivia asked.
“Not yet. What if he took the train to New York?” Sam asked.
“I know. I called everyone we know there.”
“So now they know, too.” Sam closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. “Fine. Who gives a shit?”
“Sam. It doesn’t matter.”
“I just wanted everyone to think we moved to the country and everything was great.”
“It’s hard to keep secrets when everything is falling apart.”
“Right. That’s the incentive for keeping your life running neatly. Look, I don’t care what you tell our friends. Just—” He stopped, looked away.
She didn’t really want to know what it was he didn’t want her to say. She was tired of bearing the burden of his feelings. He kept on coming up with new ones anyhow, and they were so various and so strong they didn’t seem altogether real to Olivia, whose character was more stoical. When she read about marriages in the magazines, it seemed she was the man and Sam was the woman: it was he who clamored for more and more communication, constant contact, reassurance, and she who often wanted privacy, silence, just to be left alone. Anyhow, when Sam wanted to say something, there was no need to coax it out of him; in fact, he would say it whether or not she wanted him to.
He turned toward her, his face a mask of utter vulnerability. “Just don’t tell anyone I only have a medium-sized penis.”
She began to laugh, and Sam, pleased to have amused her, laughed, too. He was delighted; he was vindicated. It sometimes seemed to her he would say anything for a reaction. And the more she resisted giving him his reaction, the more thrilled he was to achieve it.
“I wish you weren’t going,” Olivia said, turning off the windshield wipers. Rain sheeted the window like melting silver.
“I’ll be back. Tonight.”
“Just the look on Amanda’s face when we dropped her at school…Too much is going on.”
“I know. But there’s not an awful lot I can do here anyhow. I just keep driving around.”
“He’s out there. Somewhere.”
“At least we know he’s all right.”
“Do we?”
“He’s calling. He’ll call again.”
Sam had the impatience of the one who is leaving and she was stuck with the slightly shaming recalcitrance of the one who stays behind.
The train appeared, waving its plume of smoke, its whistle howling through the early-morning gloom.
Sam reached in the backseat and grabbed his briefcase, a birthday present from Olivia ten years ago. She was so convinced he would sense its extravagant expense and return it that she paid an extra fifty bucks and had his initials burned into the leather. Today, it was filled with a little umbrella, a copy of Cioran’s The Temptation to Exist, which Sam began three years ago and forgot to finish, a copy of Newsweek, in case the existentialism didn’t hold his attention, and a roll of antacid tablets.
“I’ll call you,” he said, kissing her. His breath smelled of toothpaste and coffee.
“You are coming home tonight, aren’t you?”
“Of course. But I’ll tell you which train. Help Amanda with her spelling words, okay? She needs the whole week to get them right.”
With this final gesture toward fatherhood, he bounded out of the Subaru. He wore gray slacks, a slightly linty blazer. Olivia momentarily wished she was one of those women who take good care of people. She watched him go, with his briefcase slapping him like a saddle bag against a pony. It was so strange, so unexpectedly moving to now and again spy the surviving boy within him. When, sixteen years ago, she surprised him with the news of her pregnancy, she told Sam (trying to make it up to him, unfortunately) that now he would always have someone to play with—he had already exhausted her appetite for board games and long walks, his antic jokes were as frightening as they were funny, and his early-morning high spirits were appalling. But it had not worked out like that. The children were not proper playmates for Sam; they were more like her. Victory left them cold, defeat insulted them, and the rules to games seemed arbitrary, exhausting. If she and Sam ever shared an old age, he would certainly add this to his litany of complaints, this failure on her part to give him amusing kids. He had no one to play catch with, no reason to join a gym, no excuse to visit the sporting goods shops for high-tech Frisbees, dart boards, tents. Once, trying to whip the family into enthusiasm for a dog, Sam placed an empty economy-sized mayonnaise jar on the table, asking them to drop their spare change in, with the plan being the adoption of a dog from the Humane Society, paying for its neutering, shots, upkeep. But only Sam dropped his quarters in; the others forgot, weren’t really that keen about a dog in the first place. No: actually, Amanda tried to help, too—with pennies she had painted with red nail polish so Lincoln looked like Lenin. Sam was so discouraged by his family’s lackluster response to his scheme that he emptied the jar into an old Yankees cap and bought himself an atlas. “You used Mandy’s pennies,” Olivia had scolded him, regretting it as she did but holding her shaky ground nonetheless.
She waited in the parking lot until the train pulled away. She listened to the car’s guttural idle. Her hands gripped the steering wheel. Her heart beat in a strange way that was at once annoying and frightening; the beat did not seem to come from its center but from the side.
Olivia steered the car out of the parking lot and headed back toward town. Daffodils pushed their way toward the huge slate sky. One of the town’s few surviving farms had its Holsteins out to pasture; the newborn calves watched their mothers chew fresh shoots of grass. Olivia stared at the cows, the blue enamel silos, the old fences in need of repair, a long giant willow spreading its hazy yellow branches over a pond. Lost in reverie for a moment, she gasped, suddenly realizing she wasn’t looking at the road. She yanked the car to the right as a school bus shot past. It was filled with boys from the Cardinal Morgan School, neurologically impaired welfare kids, with their faces pressed against the smudged windows, calling out to her.
She pulled to the side of the road, suddenly needing to catch her breath. Even in duress, her life was tinged by the miasma of déjà vu. She was one of those people whose life had assumed the qualities, shape, and dimensions she had always more or less expected. There was something endlessly unsurprising about her life. She had once tried to explain this to Sam. “Nothing really surprises me,” she said. “A weather report or a knock-knock joke surprises me more than my own life.” He had looked at her balefully, as if this might mean she did not adore him. He could not understand that this was not about him.
She drove to Leyden High School. Classes began at 7:45, and she and Sam had been posted there earlier in the morning, watching the students come in. Now she just wanted to make sure Michael wasn’t lurking outside. The building was squat, red brick. A banner hung outside the main entrance: JUST CAN’T HIDE THAT LEYDEN HIGH PRIDE. The banality was crushing; she felt generally bad about sending her children to these hopelessly tacky schools, to memorize faded facts with kids named Sean and Tara, almost all of whom actively hated school and planned never to read a book in their adult lives. But what choices were there?
Olivia herself had gone to the University of Chicago Lab School, steeped in Western Civ in the company of suicidal little geniuses with dark circles under their eyes. It hadn’t worked out for her. The intensity of the students, the superior attitudes of the teachers—she felt like a lightweight, a very ordinary mind who was there because her parents were U of C faculty. Furthermore, the Lab School curriculum was so advanced that her first two years at college at Skidmore were like a series of review courses, and by the time challenging material was presented, in her junior year, she had lost the habits of study. Suddenly, she was a C student, and then, in the midst of a consuming love affair, she was a D student, and then she quickly dropped out of school before she visited any more disgrace upon herself. She went to New York to live with her sister, Elizabeth, who helped Olivia save face by getting her into an intern program at Rolling Stone.
Her own education had left her feeling skeptical and a little annoyed at those parents who approached their children’s schooling with such vigor and anxiety. She was content to let Michael find his own way through the public schools—and it was just as well, since they were never able to afford a private one. As for Amanda, she might end up needing a little extra help, though Olivia suspected that what appeared as slowness was mostly shyness, idiosyncrasy, and distraction—Mandy had an artist’s temperament. She would do fine; her time would come. What formed you was not school and grades and letters of recommendation but some alchemy of character, luck, health, and timing.
She waited in the school’s parking lot, looking at the building, the soccer field, the scrubby fringe of woods to the west of the school. She thought, for a moment, she saw something—a person, a deer—but when she rubbed the steam from the window to get a better look all there was was emptiness, and rain, and mist rising slowly from the wet ground.
A Ford Explorer pulled next to her. It was a rugged, practical-looking vehicle, full of horsepower, with deeply grooved, wide wheels, a search light attached to the side, and a sticker on its wide chrome bumper that said HUGS NOT DRUGS. At the wheel was Russ Connelly, in a suit and tie, and next to him was Greg Pitcher, wolfing down the last few bites of a donut. He drank something from a cup, put it back in the Explorer’s cup holder, and then grabbed his books and hopped out.
“Greg,” Olivia called out, quickly rolling down her window.
Greg stopped but did not turn around. When he finally faced her, his expression was guarded, put-upon.
“Have you seen Michael?” Olivia asked.
“No!” said Greg, his voice cracking with anger. “What am I supposed to be around here? I don’t know anything about it, okay? I don’t even know Michael.”
“What’s going on?” asked Russ from his truck. He threw the door open and jumped out, but once out in the raw weather he stopped, looked around, as if he were just becoming aware of the rain.
“You stayed at our house, Greg,” Olivia was saying. “Of course you know Michael.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. We’re just worried, that’s all. We’re extremely frightened.” It was a mistake to say that; she felt the sting of tears in her eyes, felt her insides shaking like the bough of a tree.
But Greg seemed not to have noticed at all how upset she was, or he noticed and didn’t care.
“I said I don’t know,” he said, as if she were a complete idiot.
“All right, buddy, that’s it,” said Russ, who was by now next to Greg and gripped the boy’s arm. “I have had just about enough of your selfish us-against-them attitude.”
Greg tried to yank his arm away, but Russ’s grip was strong. Olivia sensed the frequent terrors of the Connelly household, with Russ’s self-righteous anger lurking beneath his cheerful exterior. Finally, he was the type of man who awakened teenagers in the middle of the night and marched them down to the kitchen and silently pointed at the uncapped jar of Skippy left on the counter top. Watching Greg trying to wrest his arm from Russ, Olivia’s stomach slowly turned; yet she could say nothing to interfere. It was not her business. And what if Greg actually knew something?
“I don’t know where he is,” Greg said. The fear was leaving his face. It was as if he were losing the last of his innocence before their eyes, standing in that parking lot, in the rain. The fear drained away, and taking its place were fury and contempt.
“You don’t know,” said Russ, sarcastically. “You don’t know anything anymore. You don’t know if you have any homework, you don’t know where the chainsaw is. You don’t know whose turn it is to feed the snakes. And today you oversleep and I have to drive you to school.” Greg turned quickly on his heel and walked toward the school, hefting his book bag, keeping his head down. Russ turned to Olivia and shrugged. “You want to know what?” he said. “I think he’s telling the truth.”
“I didn’t mean to make you think he was hiding something.”
“Why not? He lies all the time—they all do.” Russ grinned. “It’s the hormones.” When Olivia failed to respond, he pushed the matter a bit further. “We’ve all got them, you know. Men too.”
There was something intrusive and faintly distasteful about Russ talking about hormones. Yet as vulgar as he was, there was something in him, as in nearly every man, that frightened Olivia. She hated this fear, but it would not go away, she could not break it. It was pliable; it wrapped itself around every relationship she had with a man. Their bodies, their neediness, their rage.
“I better be going,” Olivia said.
“If there’s anything we can do,” said Russ. “I realize you haven’t had long to establish yourself in Leyden, so feel free to call on Sharon and me. Okay?”
He reached for her, touched her wrist, smiled. She wanted to pull away, but she stayed there, transfixed by a frightening glimpse of some inner Russ, as tender and repellent as that rim of red children show each other when they yank back their eyelids.
The police knew nothing more about Michael. They had called the youth shelters in a fifty-mile radius, informed police in neighboring townships. What had she expected— bloodhounds fanning out through the forests, helicopters dragging their searchlights up and down the riverbanks? Instinctually, she withheld the fact that Michael had called home; with that bit of information, the police might stop paying attention to them altogether.
Olivia sat at the kitchen table, paying household bills and waiting for another call from Michael. The silence was oppressive; the paperwork, too. She could not bear paying bills, though the chore had fallen to her. Sam used to do it, but now she protected him from those fits of despair. “What am I doing with my life?” he’d ask, waving a sheaf of invoices from MasterCard, the fuel company, New York Telephone. “Look at me! I can’t even support my family!” He didn’t blame the credit company for its usurious interest rates, he didn’t blame Gateway Oil for price gouging; he only blamed himself for not somehow managing to drill into that rich vein out there in the cultural mountains where the gold freely flowed.
She longed to call her mother, but it was only ten o’clock in Leyden, seven in the morning in Santa Barbara. The ocean was inky; cool fog still wreathed the jacaranda. America’s Riviera, the place actually made Olivia physically ill. The town seemed so pleased with itself, so appallingly unfazed by its own wealth. She had never seen so many frozen-yogurt shops in her life; everyone in town was fixated on putting friendly bacteria into their lower intestines. They were health know-it-alls, they knew the best foods, the best waters; they seemed perfectly content to outlive the poor. “The earth belongs to the Santa Barbarians,” Sy Wexler proclaimed; but what was she to make of the implied irony of this if he chose to make his life among them, eating free-range chicken on their patios, joining their clubs, even taking tennis lessons from their slow- witted nephews?
Maybe Lillian, her mother, would be up early. Like Sam, she used to wake with the birds; it was part of being virtuous. Lillian used to paraphrase Wallace Stevens— something about life being two dreams, and what kind of fool would choose the dream obscured by sleep? (For most of her adolescence, Olivia slept with a goose-down pillow over her head, protecting the sanctity of her own dream theater.) Back in Chicago, before retirement, Lillian fought off creeping arthritis by swimming in the pool in Ida Noyes Hall every morning for an hour, after which she had a second breakfast with her friend Abigail Dobkin, who taught dance at a nearby Jewish community center and who shared with the Wexlers a youthful Trotskyism. Sy used to rise early, too. He liked to do Canadian Air Force exercises in his striped pajamas and leather slippers, run hot tap water over a couple of spoonfuls of instant coffee at the bottom of an unwashed cup, and then meticulously correct student papers until his morning class on the Russian Revolution, come home, drink some Manischewitz borscht out of the bottle, and correct more papers until his afternoon class on the Revolution Betrayed. Olivia used to secretly admire her parents’ vigor, and the separateness of their days seemed romantic to her—they were bachelors by day, happily reunited each night.
Now, however, retired to Santa Barbara, they were inseparable, and it didn’t seem like intimacy but fusion. They shopped together, walked hand in hand on the beach, attended lectures at the university, and whispered to each other while all around them young students assiduously took notes. They slept close, curled into each other like little groundhogs until ten or eleven o’clock and chose their slacks and tropical shirts from the same large cedar closet. It didn’t matter who wore what; they were both the same size, virtually the same sex.
Yet Olivia must not call her mother, regardless of the hour. Relations were cordial, but not as close as they might have been. The impediment between them was Sam: it was her mother’s unstated but unwavering belief that Olivia stole Sam from Elizabeth, Olivia’s older sister, with whom she lived after dropping out of Skidmore.
Elizabeth had flourished in the academic boot camp of the Wexler home and had gone on to Radcliffe and a year of graduate studies at the Sorbonne. While well enough connected to get Olivia a job at Rolling Stone, she herself worked, for less money, at a short-lived but tony literary quarterly called Cradle, which published well-known writers such as Tennessee Williams and Doris Lessing along with newcomers like Sam. Cradle was owned by a man named Val Gryce, the dissolute heir of a fading New York fortune made originally in pelts and then squandered on Broadway. Gryce was a man of sharp, rapid-fire wit, except with Elizabeth, with whom he was in love, despite being thirty years her senior.
Sam’s story ran in the last issue of Cradle—Gryce was killed in a fire in the residential hotel he called home up on Broadway near Columbia, and the magazine folded. Sam’s piece was an excerpt from his first novel, which at that point he had entitled My Holocaust. Elizabeth had read the excerpt aloud to Olivia one night, her usually unper turbable alto cracking with emotion. “This guy is so tender and brave,” Elizabeth said, holding Sam’s manuscript to her breast. “Val is making me have a party and we’re inviting our authors. Maybe Sam Holland will come. He’s so great.”
“I don’t know how you stand writers,” Olivia said. “I want to meet musicians or baseball players or even criminals—people who do something rather than just talk about it all the time.”
Elizabeth’s party was on a sultry summer evening; their two-room apartment on West Eighty-eighth Street smelled as if the paint were cooking right off the walls. As it happened, both Sy and Lillian were in town to see Max Schachtman, one of Leon Trotsky’s former secretaries and a man whose splinter group had once been the Wexlers’ ideological home. Schachtman and his wife, Yetta, were holding court in their Chelsea apartment, with Max propped up in his bed, his large, lethal belly slowly shrinking beneath a single dingy sheet. He was dying, and former comrades from all over the country were coming to say goodbye. Sy was still with the Schachtmans, but Lillian had come back to Elizabeth’s to help with the party, though she was no help at all. She could only make curt, old-fashioned suggestions—she wanted a silver cup filled with cigarettes, she said they needed rye and sweet vermouth, she warned them about playing the stereo too loudly—and was too tired and sad to lift a finger, except to now and then brush away a tear that rolled down her stoically expressionless face.
“Try and cheer up a little, Mama,” Elizabeth said, as she ran the carpet sweeper under Lillian’s grudgingly raised legs. “I’m sorry about Mr. Schachtman, but I’ve got people coming over any minute.”
“The man defined an entire generation of anticommunist radicalism,” said Lillian. “Everyone from Howe to Draper sat at his feet. His analyses of the new class in Russia is still twenty years ahead of its time, and all you’re worried about is a party?”
“He’s not even dead yet, Mom,” answered Olivia.
“Who knows?” said Lillian, her voice heavy and humid with sarcasm. “Pick up the phone. Maybe he is.”
The humidity was not only in Lillian’s voice. It was everywhere. The leaves on the sycamore out beyond Elizabeth’s window hung as if defeated by the August heat. Fish fried a week ago still scented the air; every aroma was as clear and dreadful as skid marks on a country road. The ice melted in the ice buckets and the new ones came out of the freezer as insubstantial as spun sugar. The guests arrived flush faced; more than a few seemed snappish, and Val Gryce, who had encouraged Elizabeth to host this soiree, was in foul temper. Tennessee Williams was nowhere in sight, nor was Doris Lessing, or any of the other well- known writers who had appeared in Cradle. However, the younger writers were at the party, and even as they sweated through their clothes they managed to go through the drinks and crudités like a swarm of literate locusts.
Sam arrived late. Of all the novice writers present, he seemed the only one who had to work a job that paid wages; he sold men’s furnishings at Altman’s and, by night, doctored theses for NYU graduate students. It was the summer of ’75. He arrived in a white shirt, baggy khaki slacks. His hair was slicked back. After Altman’s he had stopped to take an aikido class at a dojo on Fourteenth Street. Olivia watched him as he entered the apartment. Elizabeth made a signal: There he is. What do you think? Sam poured himself what was left from a bottle of Mâcon Villages and then stuck the dead soldier into the bucket of ice water, neck first. Carrying his plastic cup of straw-colored wine, he walked directly over to Olivia.
“All my life,” he said, “I’ve been seeing you getting in and out of taxicabs, coming from dance class, or a concert, sometimes with snowflakes in your hair, or a bag of plums in your hand, and I’ve always wondered where you were going.”
“Me?” she said.
And in the years to come it would seem not only an intelligent question but a prescient one as well. Sam fell in love as soon as he saw her, but what became less and less clear was: with whom? The composite, desirable, unattainable multitudes of women who he decided were represented by Olivia? Or his own luck, his rising fortunes, his face which he saw reflected back in Olivia’s placid, unformed oval?
Lillian saw what was happening, and she abandoned her self-appointed task of cheering up Gryce and concentrated on Sam. She talked to him about Max Schachtman, the theory of bureaucratic collectivism; Sam, to her surprise, knew what she was talking about. Someone at the dojo was an old Schachtmanite. (But then, Olivia was to learn, Sam knew a little about a lot of things. There were very few conversations he could not get through, though this gift for gab was finally a hindrance, like a trust fund that gives you just enough money to sap your ambition.) As they spoke, Lillian kept her hand on Sam’s shoulder, guiding him toward Elizabeth, who had been cornered by a large, extravagantly freckled nun who was writing an essay about Flannery O’Connor. Yet even as Sam talked about the Independent Socialist League and expressed his regret over Mr. Schachtman’s illness, and even as he allowed himself to be steered toward Elizabeth, he continually scoured the room for Olivia.
Sam, in courtship, was a heat-seeking missile. He had had early success with a technique based on frankness and persistence, and that was now his permanent style. When he left the party, he pointed at Olivia and called out, “I’m going to phone you and make a dinner plan. Okay?” The remaining guests stared at Olivia until she nodded yes, as subtly as possible.
“I liked that Sam Holland of yours,” said Lillian, as she and the girls cleaned up the party’s debris, emptying ashtrays, plunging Pottery Barn tumblers into the hot suds, opening the windows as wide as possible and waving the galaxies of gray-violet smoke out with wet dishtowels.
“Of mine?” said Elizabeth, with a high, fluttery laugh.
“Wasn’t he the one you said you were interested in?” asked Lillian, in a voice that sounded so innocent, but she looked at Olivia with alligator eyes as she said it.
Sam called that very night, right after Sy picked Lillian up and they cabbed it over to the Mayflower Hotel. As quietly as possible, Olivia held him at bay, but still, somehow, at the end of the call, she agreed to meet him at the Riviera on Sheridan Square the next night.
“He was supposed to be for me,” Elizabeth said later that night, but even this was delivered in a not-quite-direct tone. It made it possible for Olivia not to respond, and in the silence she realized something about herself. Sam had moved some great wheel that had been stuck in the goo of her natural dreamy ambivalence and pessimism, and now that it was moving there was no stopping it, no wanting to. She could feel her internal landscape changing.
“Oh well,” Elizabeth was saying, “that’s what I get for having a younger sister.”
Elizabeth had always criticized Olivia for her life’s lack of direction. And until this moment, as Elizabeth finished the last of her eighth glass of water for the day and silently belched into her knuckle, and Olivia sat on the sofabed and felt its springs through the stingy mattress and the cold of the metal frame on the backs of her legs, somehow Olivia had always accepted the characterization. It was her fault; she was not as clever as Elizabeth, not as serious. But suddenly all that was changed. Elizabeth might have construed that Sam was for her, but nature would have it otherwise, and here Olivia was on the side of nature. Something was within her that drew Sam toward her. There was a Tightness to it, a sense of fate—though even at twenty, Olivia realized that everyone falling in love feels the hand of fate.
Elizabeth forgave Olivia for falling in love with Sam and letting him fall in love with her, but Lillian cooled to Olivia after that. It was a remarkable blow to Olivia’s sense of her place in the world. The politics of the Wexler family were such that none of the children felt the complete ease in confiding in each other that they felt in opening their hearts to Lillian, and now, with Lillian angry with her, Olivia lost not only the approval of her mother but the person in whom she would naturally want to confide that loss as well. When Michael was born and the Wexlers were crammed into Sam and Olivia’s apartment, Lillian cuddled and bathed the baby while maintaining a little wedge of aloofness between her and Olivia. She even managed to give Olivia a sponge bath and feed her consommé and read an issue of The New Yorker to her and still keep that quarantine around their old easy intimacy.
For quite a while, Olivia noted this development without feeling so awfully bad. She had her own life, and the love she felt for Sam sometimes made her feel lucky she had enough left over to give to her child. She adored them both; she accepted the richness of her life with a calm gratitude, as if it were an inheritance. She knew it was old-fashioned and probably a little nuts, but Sam thought she was his muse, and it was flattering. No, it was more than that: his adoration of her and his need of her went to the center of her being; it filled her and erased her, over and over and over, until she could not imagine herself without it. Even when the pressures of poverty and parenting began to take their toll, Sam sometimes crawled across the floor and kissed her feet; her sexual nature entranced him, the sounds she made, her taste and smell. He would sometimes just come up to her and touch her arm and breathe a sigh of relief, as if he had for a moment been afraid she was a figment of his imagination. He told her everything that ever happened to him; he wanted to hear about every moment of her life. He was insatiable; he would have driven a woman like Elizabeth mad. He would have driven a great many women mad. He showered her with presents, brought coffee to her bedside, wrote poems to her which he would read aloud over a bottle of wine and then throw away because they were not good enough to keep. When a child would awaken her in the middle of the night, she would have to extricate her hand from Sam’s.
“I’m so in love with him,” she told her mother, on a visit to Chicago, after her parents had decided to move out to Santa Barbara and the children were invited to ransack the family house on Dorchester for keepsakes, photographs, old toys, baby clothes. Olivia was pregnant with Amanda at the time, and Lillian was kind, solicitous, aware of every possible discomfort Olivia might be feeling. But still the hedge of reserve was there, and Olivia quite consciously began to push at it with declarations of her love for Sam. Could Lillian, upon hearing the truth of Olivia’s feelings, possibly believe that Elizabeth would have been happier with Sam? Wouldn’t Lillian come to understand that Sam had gone to the daughter for whom he would do the most good?
“For a while, I thought I loved him so much because he showed me such affection,” Olivia said, sipping a glass of ale, with her feet propped up on the immemorial ottoman, while Lillian maintained a metronomic rhythm of busyness, dusting the top of a Daniel Bell book, and then the top of a Durkheim anthology, and placing them in a packing crate. “But now I see that is just the beginning of it, my feelings.” She cringed inwardly. How could something that had such searing internal clarity come out so muddled? She forced herself to go on with it. “It’s that Sam lets me love him. I think that’s so rare, don’t you?” Lillian looked up at her—skeptically? Olivia kept her eyes on the window, at the budding maple dancing back and forth in the brisk Chicago wind. “All the love I ever wanted to give any man but couldn’t, I now can give to Sam. He welcomes it, and so I feel welcomed.”
“You’ve been feeling unwelcome?” Lillian asked, a little sharply.
“Maybe what I mean is underutilized.”
“Your father always loved you. In fact, I’d say he adored you.”
“I know, Mom.”
“He is a person of enormous dignity. There could conceivably have been some confusion because of that.” She shrugged and went back to packing the books she’d been using in her course work for the past twenty years.
“You know what your Sam once said to me?” Lillian asked, a note of humor in her voice—though this was not necessarily a good sign.
“Am I going to like this?” asked Olivia.
“He said that sociology was the American academic establishment’s answer to Marxism. Is he a Marxist?”
Olivia shook her head no.
“I didn’t think so,” said Lillian, and went back to her books.
Olivia took a long drink of the ale. She had been raised on unrefrigerated beverages—it was one of her parents’ European affectations—but on her own she had become used to the icy American taste, and the tepid ale tasted like spoiled bread.
“It’s hard for me to keep track of myself, sometimes,” Olivia said. Her voice was steady; she realized now what she had been wanting to say. “I think about Sam so many hours of the day—what he’s doing, how he might be feeling, the way he touched me the night before. I still get excited when I hear his footsteps coming up the stairs.”
“That’s because you’re there, waiting for him.”
“I know. I haven’t made much of my life.”
“I don’t mean to say that.”
“I realize that I’ve given my life over to love, and now to children. That never works out.”
“Well, perhaps it will for you, Olivia.”
Olivia put her glass down and folded her hands over her belly. She felt a stirring—the first. The child inside of her was alive, moving now for its own mysterious reasons. It gave her the courage she needed.
“You’ve never really forgiven me for marrying Sam, have you, Mom?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
“It wasn’t as if he and Beth were lovers. They weren’t even going out. It’s just been so crazy. And I miss you. We were always so close. Really. What have I done?”
Lillian draped her dust rag on the side of the packing crate and turned toward Olivia. Suddenly she looked alarmingly keen. Lines appeared above her upper lips as if the skin had been scored by the teeth of a comb. “I always believed that women should support one another. God knows, I’m not a radical feminist, but I do maintain that simple courtesy and compassion ought to be the rule among women—especially sisters.”
“I do, too.”
Lillian had sadly shaken her head. “You’re my daughter, no matter what, if you want to talk about the bottom line.” It was a consolation prize. The resignation and finality of it shocked Olivia. She would come to wonder if the misery of that moment permeated her amniotic sac and marked poor Mandy forever.
At eleven the phone rang. Michael. She knew from the sound of him that he was inside.
“Hello,” was all he said.
“Where are you?”
“Mom. It’s okay.” As if he were being patient with her.
“Is it? Where are you calling from?” She heard her own voice, shrill, helpless; she was becoming one of those people. She took a deep breath, looked out the kitchen window. An upside-down chickadee was prying out the last sunflower seed from the Hollands’ Lucite bird feeder. It was typical of them, thought Olivia, to lure the local birds with promises of ready food and then to let the feeder go empty for weeks at a time.
“Everything’s fine,” Michael said.
“Michael, nothing is fine.”
“How’s Dad? How’s Amanda? You two ought to get off her case. She’s a great little kid. She’s just different, that’s all. But in a good way. You two think that everything has to be a certain way or else it’s all wrong, and then you get so freaked out and everything. But it doesn’t have to be just one way. What if Mandy never learns to read? So what? You know what I mean?”
He was, Olivia decided, drunk. Or high.
“You don’t sound well, Michael.”
“I feel great. Can I tell you something?”
“Yes.”
“I met some people.”
“What people?”
“People.”
“Where do they live? Are they your age?” She had no idea where her questions came from.
“Some of them.”
“Are you safe?”
“Are you?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. I better hang up. I just don’t want you to worry.”
“But I am worried. We all are. You have to come home.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“In the city. He had an important meeting.”
She was going to explain this further, but she didn’t want it to seem she was making excuses. Sam was doing what had to be done—even though nothing on earth could have made Olivia leave Leyden with Michael on the loose.
“Amanda in school?”
“Come home.”
“I’m okay, Mom. I promise you I’m safe. And I will come home.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.” There was a silence, and then he said, softly, in a voice she knew could only tell the truth, “When I can.”
“You can right now,” she said, inwardly realizing that for some reason he couldn’t.
“No.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Everything.”
“Michael…”
“I have to hang.”
“Michael…”
“Don’t ask me any more questions, Mom. If I wanted questions, I wouldn’t be out here. Don’t you see? I’m here because I can’t answer your questions.”
She sighed. Irritation rose up in her, like a swarm of bees. The boy was so fucking dramatic, but he came to it honestly: Sam’s emotions often ran toward the grandiose.
“Michael…”
“Bye, Mom. Sorry. Take care of yourself.”
As soon as the connection was broken, Olivia called the police. It made her feel as if she were betraying Michael, and when the dispatcher answered the phone Olivia was so rattled she couldn’t remember the name of the cop they had spoken to Saturday night and Sunday.
“This is Olivia Wexler,” she said. “I have a missing son?” Silence. The dispatcher patiently waited for her to say more. She pictured him there, a Drake’s Cake resting on its own cellophane next to a styrofoam cup of coffee.
“Is there someone I can speak to about this?” she asked. “I have some new information.”
“Is your son home now?”
“No. But he called. And I have a theory.”
“A theory?”
“I think I know where he is.”
“Where, Mrs. Wexler?”
Another conversation going nowhere. She had nothing specific to tell, no address, no phone number, no hot tip, and so she would be ignored. Her intuition that Michael was living in an abandoned house was meaningless to the police; her sense that Michael wanted to come home but would now create circumstances that would make an easy return impossible would be not only meaningless but completely ignored. The sum total of everything she knew about Michael meant less to the police than would one number from a license plate.
She placed the phone back into its cradle and looked at the blur of paperwork on her table. She rubbed her fingertips into her closed eyes. It felt remarkably good. It felt wonderful. She couldn’t stop. She felt the brightening jelly of her eyes beneath the silky sheath of their lids. The pleasure of it was sublime, and when she stopped and looked out toward the bright window the air exploded with circles, crescents; the world was oil on water. And when it clicked back into its customary intransigence she felt a surge of desire go through her; a flaming arrow of sex shot across the inner darkness. She did not want to be kissed or held; she did not want her nipples caressed, she wanted no tongue in the ear, no words of love: she wanted to be entered, filled, fucked. The brutality of this need startled her, and then, quickly, it was gone.
The phone rang, and though she was normally shy, even phobic, about the phone, she picked it up before it was through its first ring.
“Hello?”
“Olivia? This is Sharon. Russ’s wife?”
Olivia noted the centuries of female oppression in that form of identification, and then said, “What’s up?” She had a curt phone manner, partly out of annoyance with the instrument and partly in reaction to Sam’s telephone effusiveness—he always sounded so pleased when someone called.
“Russ saw you at the school today.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You must be so worried, Olivia.”
“Michael called. Just a few minutes ago.”
“Oh!”
Of course, Sharon didn’t know what this call meant, and Olivia had no impulse to make it clear. The chickadee was back at the bird feeder, this time with five others from its flock. It was able to communicate where it had gotten the sunflower seed, but not that there were none left. The birds fluttered around the empty Lucite cylinder.
“You must be so relieved,” said Sharon. “I’m very happy for you, Olivia.” Sharon’s conversation was slow, a little stilted; she hovered over every syllable she spoke, holding her accent at bay.
Yet Olivia believed her, suddenly, rapturously, overpoweringly believed her. The simple goodwill of “I’m very happy for you” made Olivia swoon; she lowered her head, breathed heavily through her mouth.
“This has been a nightmare,” Olivia said. “It should happen to Hitler, as my father says.”
“I was wondering if you wanted to come over,” said Sharon.
“I can’t now. Sam’s in New York.” That didn’t quite make sense, but no matter. “But thanks.”
“It’s a business thing,” said Sharon. She said it with a slight flirtatiousness, as if doing business would be like drinking wine in the middle of the day, or going to one of those clubs where middle-aged women slip dollar bills into the Lycra jockstraps of male dancers.
“What kind of business thing?” asked Olivia. She wondered if Sharon was being kind, getting her out of the house, away from her troubles.
“Your business. You buy antiques, don’t you?”
As soon as Sharon said this, Olivia knew it was about the Tiffany painting hanging over the Connelly fireplace.
“Yes, I do. Is there something you want to sell?”
“We think so. But it would be so helpful if you could take a look at it.”
“Is it portable?” Twenty questions. Is it animal, vegetable, mineral, bigger than a bread basket?
“I guess so.”
“That would be better. I feel I need to stay near the telephone.”
“Oh, of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that Russ and I are nervous, with so much going on.”
“So much going on?”
“There’s been many robberies. They don’t put it in the newspaper, but Russ has good friends on the police force. That’s why Russ wants to sell the painting.” Sharon paused, and then was somehow compelled to add, “It’s not that we’re desperate for the money or anything. It just seems a little foolish to have something so valuable in the house, with all that’s happening.”
“How valuable do you think it is?”
“Well, that’s what we wanted to get from you, Olivia. If you’re not too busy.”
“If you’d like to bring it over, that will be fine,” said Olivia.
“Thank you. I’ll come right now. I’m just taking some zucchini bread out of the oven. Do you like zucchini bread?”
Do I like zucchini bread? thought Olivia. How the hell should I know?
“It’s very dietetic,” said Sharon. “I use almost no sugar and only one egg.”
“Okay, then. Thanks.” She tried to think of what else to say. She struggled for the next phrase, as if she were in France. “I’ll make some coffee.”
When she hung up the phone, Olivia sat silently, motionless at the kitchen table. She thought about the painting, closed her eyes to remember it better. It was mostly sky and water, with the brownish plane of the river’s distant shore cutting the canvas in half. In the bottom of the painting, a farmer stood in his one-horse cart, slightly obscured by the gathering blue darkness. The cuffs of his undershirt were the same bright white as his horse’s-rear socks. The reins were slack in the farmer’s hands; his head was bowed in reverie. That was the sweetest part, that bowed head.
At last, Olivia picked up the pen with which she had been writing checks. It was a stubby, maroon-colored ballpoint, bearing the name of the Wyndham Hotel. Wasn’t that one of the places Sam stayed when he was in New York? She no longer paid attention, not really. She turned the pen around in her hand and looked at it, mildly, emptily curious.