Over the course of a couple of weeks, Amanda has moved some of her things into a spare guestroom down the hall from her and Earl’s bedroom. She now spends a lot of time in this room, rather than in the living room, or the bedroom, or the room that was once her study. She’s moved only a few books, her laptop, some underwear, and pyjamas. This move, though deliberately slow on her part, has nonetheless put the entire household on edge: her aunt Grace, her mother Millie, who walks around looking perplexed and afraid, and of course Earl, who has so far been quiet about this problem. Earl strokes his beard a lot and occasionally smokes a cigarette somewhere in the yard, out of view.
When Amanda started being down, crying in the evenings in secret, dressing badly, Earl must have decided that optimism was the best attitude to adopt. Better encourage her than dwell on the sadness. He is nearly thirty-eight and has suffered from depression before; Amanda is twenty-four and until recently has seemed to everyone confident and happy. Now, no one is sure what Amanda does in her room when she is alone there for hours. Sometimes they’ll find her with one of those thick women’s fashion magazines spread out in front of her; Earl understands the magazine is probably a cover, but a cover for what? Nothing, it seems. She sometimes gets a little angry when they disturb her, and if Earl asks her whether she’ll have supper with the others she might impatiently tell him that she’ll eat later. But following that, she also might take his hand, smile, apologize, and thus give him temporary relief.
It is the end of July, and two months since the four of them have returned from a vacation in Barcelona. Millie pleaded and persuaded the reluctant Amanda into the vacation, because she wanted, in part at least, to commemorate the togetherness of the four of them, to affirm how pleasantly Grace, Millie, Amanda, and Earl have lived together. Millie’s sister Grace is getting remarried in three weeks and they won’t be under the same roof, most likely, ever again. Grace has lived here for nearly a year; she moved in when Dan, Millie’s husband, left for the States on business. Grace and Larry’s ceremony and reception will be right here at the house. The house is large, as is the yard, and the yard slopes onto a ravine; you can stand at the far end of the yard on the edge of the ravine and see the shimmering surface of the river. There is lots of room for a small outdoor wedding of forty or so guests.
One part of Millie hopes Dan will come back for Grace’s wedding as he has told her he would. He has also promised he’d be flying back regularly, and has not been back once in more than a year of being away. But another part of her would prefer not to have the interruption of him at the wedding. Let him come when there are no guests, when the house is empty, formidable, silent except for the rustle of the poplar leaves outside, and Millie is ready and waiting with two glasses of Scotch on the coffee table under the sixteen-foot ceiling. Or let him not come at all. Before Dan went away this last time, he had spent nineteen months at Pennybrooke, a minimum-security prison an hour out of town. He was guilty of defrauding shareholders. Either Amanda or she visited him every week and brought him books to read. Sometimes she feels as if he has never lived here, has never slumped his slim frame onto the sofa and put his feet up after work, has never greeted the neighbours with friendly obscenities, as if it was always she and Amanda, or she and Amanda and Earl here in the house. Many times already she has bartered Dan away for the return of Amanda as she once knew her.
Today they are having dinner together, but Amanda has not shown up yet. Everyone worries about Amanda since she has changed the location of her pyjamas, and especially since she has told them that she wants to go back to Barcelona in the fall, for an eight-week course in Spanish language and culture. Millie has acquired the habit of writing her worries in letters to Grace; these letters often contain things she most wants to say, and she slips them to Grace in passing, on her way out to work, or even while they’re sitting in the living room. In the last letter she wrote about a dream she had in which Amanda, looking not quite like herself, tells her that there is no heart left in it, and Millie, panicked and heavy with foreboding, tries to understand what it means, what is the it. She wants to ask but for some reason can only touch Amanda’s hair, which in the dream is inexplicably blond. She gave the letter to Grace while Grace was having her one nightly cigarette out in the yard; so far, Grace has not brought it up.
“We have to fix up the yard,” says Grace as she spoons mashed potatoes onto Millie’s plate. She is just the kind of person to fill your plate when you’d like it to be filled, thinks Millie. She watches with admiration her sister’s tall figure, with a straight posture, thick around the waist and hips.
“Is Amanda upstairs?” Millie asks Earl.
“I knocked earlier but got no answer,” he says.
“I’ll go look,” says Millie.
“Oh, she’ll come on her own, let her be,” says Grace. “Though I do need to ask her about the tablecloths.”
They’ve put Amanda in charge of certain things to do with the wedding, the chair and linen rental, because it seemed beneficial and sensible to keep her involved with the wedding and to give her a preoccupation that could not, as far as they could see, have anything painful about it.
“Good luck getting her up in the morning if you don’t,” says Earl. They are in the habit of talking about Amanda as if she were quite inaccessible, though she goes hardly anywhere and spends most of her time upstairs.
“I’m sure she’s not forgotten. Amanda wouldn’t forget. Amanda is efficient with these things,” says Millie, and everyone knows that in saying it she is only remembering a time gone by.
When they start stacking the dishes, Amanda comes in from outside. Her brown hair is limp and her jacket undone. She’s gained weight in this last year and it shows most clearly in a layer of pudge around her jaw. She was once known for her beauty, and that she is indifferent to it now, is killing it with her indifference, makes the change in her seem, to Millie, an even greater loss.
“We’d all thought you were in your room and didn’t want to bother you,” says Millie. The look on Amanda’s face is part of the inaccessibility: a closed face, eyes averted to just below eye level. Because of the look, no one is sure if it’s a good idea to ask what she’s been up to.
“You out for a stroll, Mandy?” Earl asks. The feebleness of his voice is disagreeable even to him, but that distaste is not new.
Amanda does not raise her eyes, but makes a sorrowful little grimace as if the question hurts her, physically, and says, “What?”
Watching her now, Millie could weep. Her splendid, beautiful daughter, the kindest person one could imagine. Earl tries to take her hand, lightly, when she passes him to get to the stove and fill her plate. “Oh, what,” she says, sighing. “Groucho Marx,” he says. He’s trying to tease. A friend of Millie’s, a therapist, told them once that they should try to coax her out of herself, not let her retreat. Still, this is painful to watch. Millie feels actual tears somewhere behind her eyes.
“We have to landscape the yard,” repeats Grace.
“Easiest thing,” says Earl. He is a professional landscaper. “I’ll do it in one or two afternoons.”
“We are so lucky with you two,” says Millie. Beyond the kitchen the sun is setting and they all have a golden glow.
Earlier, Amanda was walking through the ravine on the other side of the river; it was warm and there were joggers and cyclists and other strollers out. She could not stand to meet anyone’s eyes, not even the few side glances of men; she carried a notebook with her and waited for the urge to write to build in her. She quickened her pace and at the next empty bench sat down and poised her pencil over an already half-filled page. Some time later she was startled by voices.
“Does she not hear? Miss, do you mind?”
“She’s pretending. Unbelievable. Hello, Miss, hello there?”
They were two joggers, hardly older than she was, and the man had one bloody knee and a scraped chin; they wanted to sit down and Amanda was sitting in the very centre of the bench. Horrified, feeling her face flush, she closed her notebook and walked quickly away. She walked until she was out of sight for them, and then walked farther to an empty bench. Now she sat on its edge, and opened her notebook again, keeping her pen poised while steadying herself. She could write only a sentence, and it said, That was a nasty tone.
Still thinking of it, thinking now of the streaks of blood running down the man’s shin, she is glad to be at home and walking upstairs, past the room she and Earl share, and to the guest room. This room is the only place she gets some relief. She lies down on the bed. They demand things of her each day, all day; things she can no longer give. She cannot eat dinner with Earl in a restaurant, can’t talk about films or about some friends’ breakup or drink wine at one of his friends’ house parties, or answer sincerely when he asks what she’s been thinking about. She cannot make love. She doesn’t know why, but she just can’t. She hasn’t been able to since before Barcelona, since before spring. The winter, when she was let go from her job at the photo shop, was bad. Neither can she sit with Millie on the sofa, watching some travel show and holding hands, like they used to do for hours in the time after Dan was sent to Pennybrooke. She can’t spend the afternoon book shopping with Millie, nor work through an elaborate recipe with her, nor listen to a story from her and Dan’s past, some blurry and dreamy time. She can hardly bear the familiar old feeling she still sometimes gets around her mother: love that is a pulsating tenderness for her mother’s small frame and brown curling hair.
Oh, she knows that they think that she gets all the time she wants to herself. She knows they talk of her as if it is they who bend to her demands. She’s accepted that as just one unremarkable injustice that cannot be fixed. She is sorry for all the things she cannot provide. And she wants to express, somehow, that she is sorry: when the pulsating tenderness appears, it shames her. The shame needs either a dark room, or an action, a gesture. This morning she shocked Earl by making him breakfast – of waffles, bacon, poached eggs, croissants with cheese, and sliced nectarines – because she remembered that they used to, when he worked early mornings and she had early classes, cherish a chance to eat together and linger over coffee. Millie, Amanda can see, is also pleased to see them get along, and Amanda likes to provide some small pleasures for her mother, too.
Although she doesn’t begrudge Grace her happiness, she regrets that Grace and Larry will not move in here. Being out of the house, Grace cannot be counted on for her calm presence, her company for Millie, her evening drink with Earl, her general lack of demands, whether explicit or implicit. She reaches for her notebook. The time of Dan’s trials – the one that was declared a mistrial, then the second, then an appeal – was a line that split her and Millie’s life into two. She and Millie found consolation in long talks over coffee and waffles, or wine and sandwiches, in the nook near the kitchen window. Their talk during that time hardly ever stopped – it seemed as if they were engaged in one permanent conversation, and coming home from work or school they could continue it without warm up, as if it were the real stuff of their lives and the other things were only the technical requirements. Arriving to pick up Amanda, Earl could see plainly that no detail or substance of the world Amanda and he had built was unknown or closed to Millie.
She remembers how she told her mom about Earl. Amanda was seventeen, and she and Millie were walking home from a thrift store, the one at which Earl worked occasionally to make extra money when painting work was slow. While paying at Earl’s till, Amanda said to Millie, “Mom, this is my friend Earl.” Millie shook Earl’s proffered hand. It had rained that day; on their way home, very near the house, Amanda stopped and told Millie that Earl was her boyfriend. She remembers her mother’s face, the curling wet strands of hair at her temples. Amanda didn’t know then that her dad would be arrested for fraud in a few weeks’ time. Millie had hardly ever been angry at her, but Amanda feared she would be angry now. Who is Earl, Millie demanded, and indeed Amanda hardly knew how to explain him. He was fourteen years her senior. He painted houses for a living, worked wherever else he could to help his mother pay off the farm he’d grown up on, the one his stepfather nearly gambled away. What else could she say about him? I know the kinds of men my mother pictured. And she pictured a procession of them, one after another trying to impress her daughter. But I only wanted my stocky cashier. Amanda was not only beautiful; there was something good and rounded about her that gave the impression she deserved good things – good men, good jobs, good friends.
To think of them all now as they were then pains her. She will walk down the hall, down the stairs, to her mother’s room and stroke her hair. She will find Earl and tell him she loves him and that everything, after all, will work out. But she can’t. It is enough that she is supposed to call someone about renting chairs. She dreads this. Dreads the sound of her own voice hesitating and uncertain. She used to be able to do things. When Millie and she were left alone, she was good at calling the plumber, cancelling insurance, firing the accountant, talking to men who called even after Millie changed and unlisted the house phone number. She was good at talking with her mother, good at getting her to like Earl.
Her dad served nearly two years, after the whole process that also took nearly that long. After he was released, came home to a house that seemed emptied of his presence, Amanda moved out with Earl. She can remember those days: they lived in a small flat; Earl’s friends were always dropping in; there was a wallpaper photo on the living room wall. She liked Earl’s friends. She tries to count back the years to when precisely that was. That tires her. She puts the notebook down for a moment. Last spring her dad went to Phoenix on a business venture. He’s supposed to come back, but Amanda no longer waits for it. It seems to Amanda that around the time he left, Millie began to shrink. Her posture changed and she lost about an inch of height. She began to speak in a murmur, knock plaintively on doors, eat her meals out of small side dishes. She had survived the investigation and Dan being in prison, she had accepted Amanda’s imperfect lover, but there’s a limit to what one can take.
Instead of moving to a two-bedroom apartment downtown, Earl and Amanda moved into Millie’s house. None of them wanted to sell it. Amanda would again do – she thought she would, everyone did – what she used to be good at: taking care of things and cheering up her mother. She moved into the house so that she might one day find Millie baking a German chocolate torte, with one of those upbeat chirpy waltzes playing in the background, smoothing the icing patiently and almost hypnotically, winking at Amanda when she caught Amanda watching. I used to endlessly come across one or both of my parents in some unaware moment, always the observer on the edge of the picture, surprising them – happily, it seemed – with my presence. Every now and then Amanda and Millie do try to bake together, but Amanda has so little to say. The fake cheer exhausts them both and each needs a lie-down afterwards.
Amanda wants to return to Barcelona. It was with apprehension that she broke this news to everyone, at once, and explained taking the course. She should have told Earl first; she would have, if it weren’t so hard to talk to him. Sometimes if she looks him straight in the eye she feels that collapse is imminent. What form would the collapse take – that’s still vague for her. The only secret is that there is no Spanish language and culture course as she has told them; or rather, there is one, she’s looked it up, she knows how much it costs and what it involves, but she won’t be attending it. How she will explain it later she can’t quite think about; she hopes it will not matter once she gets away.
What Amanda remembers about the city is the smell of men. During mass at the Basilica, she noticed the discreet colognes emanating from the fresh, upright collars of the men in the row in front of her. There were other smells: the colognes were beneath the smell of wood and old prayer books. She also loved the cafés, with the breeze carrying the scent of coffee, and the pairs and groups of men and women, packaged, perfumed, sometimes perfect and sometimes too worn; it all made her heady.
The rooms of the two-bedroom apartment they rented in Barcelona smelled of new furniture (the furniture was sparse) and of linden trees. They had to clean up after themselves, but a woman came and gave them washed and folded linens and towels, in various colours, every other day. The woman’s name was Lula and she was thin and stunningly pretty and looked perpetually fatigued. Whenever Amanda saw her, she either held her young boy at her hip or her posture alone suggested a great weight; her lids hung low and she gave the impression of a person continuously exhaling. She wore dresses in bold colours – fuschias, and blood reds, and aquas. Her dresses hugged her waist, hung below her knees, showed plump cleavage; her hair was thick and dark and curly and pushed back from her face. The combination of the mane, the bright colours, and the perpetual weariness affected Amanda as something beautiful and slightly disconcerting.
On the second day they passed by this woman while she was talking to an old man in the hallway. He was the owner of the apartment and his name was Arthur. The woman was his daughter-in-law, the wife of his son Jude. On the stairs Arthur invited them all for lunch and they obliged. Amanda liked old people and she liked Arthur; he was just the kind of old man she liked. Good-humoured and slightly satirical, as if one could not be otherwise having sampled the ways of the world. He treated all of them with interest and politeness. He treated her, in particular, as someone who knows less than he knows of how the world breathes, but also like one who will soon figure things out. His courteousness flattered Amanda because it approached flirtation – or did it approach flirtation only in the mind of the generation that did not expect to have chairs pulled out nor coats taken care of? He liked talking to Amanda about the nineteenth-century French novel; rather, that was the foundation that allowed him to like Amanda. It happened to be one of the last courses she had taken in her degree and so the titles and the salons and the unhappiness were still fresh. Based on two or three informed responses he had assumed, probably, a much wider breadth of familiarity than actually existed. But having a common foundation meant they were free to talk of other things.
Jude was not intended to have a part at all; he was merely the son, beleaguered by a beleaguered wife who was waiting for him to become a lawyer so she might hire a sitter or housekeeper and get some sleep. He was not a man who needed diversion or stimulation or complication, but a man who needed a bigger apartment. He was young – as young as Amanda – but with a child, a toddler, and this small, tired, striking wife. His hair was the slippery blond hair of an infant and his face the kind that passed for good looking in television dramas about small towns – an earnest, manly, serious face. He was not supposed to be in the picture but he was in it, the poorly defined figure somewhere near the edge of it. He smelled like cedar, woody cologne with a whiff of something orange; on the two hottest days, she remembers also being able to smell his skin, coppery and yeasty. She remembers Arthur and Lula’s scents, too: Arthur smelled like just-ironed clothes, and sometimes like caramels which he often chewed. Passing Lula in the hallway, Amanda smelled hair oil and lilac, and there was a whiff of orange around her, too.
Amanda’s first meeting alone with Jude happened by chance. She was supposed to meet Arthur for an afternoon drink, but she was late. Arthur waited for Amanda at a corner table of the café down the street from his house. This was his regular place; he took his coffee here every other morning. He liked putting on his suit pants and a dress shirt to walk over and be served.
The wind blew wisps of his white hair as he thought about the girl: she was a bit of an unexpected pleasure, a breeze when you thought all the windows were closed. He was not sure that she was as young as a girl; the precise age of the young eluded him. Regardless, here was a person he could get used to talking to. She had a lovely manner, a nervousness that showed in the movements of the hands, and a habit of staring at a person for moments after he or she has stopped speaking. But that entourage of hers – why did they all travel together like that? Though the mother was lovely. Attuned to the daughter – when the girl saw a fly in her lemonade, the mother’s eyes immediately searched out the waiter. Did the girl see the mother do that? Another time the mother broke the spell of the girl staring at him by asking her a question – to his regret. The mother seemed nervous too. The aunt and the boyfriend were not nervous. When the mother looked for the waiter to inform him of the fly, the boyfriend watched her as if trying to signal something. She then put down her hand and he went inside the café and returned a minute later with a fresh drink.
The aunt and the mother and the girl resembled each other, and he covertly spent much of their lunch trying to pinpoint the similarities and differences. Around them the girl did not talk very much; that’s why he had enjoyed showing her his house and then their brief stroll alone, yesterday, more than the time with the entire package. He thought he started to understand about the family and about the girl. And so he came on the idea of making her an offer. He hardly ever rented the apartment off-season and he liked talking to the girl. He realized he liked her a lot more than he cared for his daughter-in-law.
But now the girl was late and he was feeling his allergy act up. He had nearly finished his coffee and was starting to feel nauseous, a symptom, he suspected, of a new blood pressure medication. The day was hot and he was growing uncomfortable. When he saw Jude walk by, on his way home for lunch, he waved him down and asked him to be kind enough to wait for the girl and tell her that Arthur had to return home. He put a bill into Jude’s hand and walked away.
Amanda was hurrying along because she had misjudged the time and now realized herself nearly half an hour late. It happened often that half an afternoon passed before she realized that it was no longer morning. When she saw Jude sitting at the café table, she thought that she must have got more badly mixed up, until he explained about his father having to leave. She had mentioned to Millie that she was meeting Arthur for tea and hoped now that no one would see her here and think she had lied. Jude’s smell was a thin edge of cologne mixed with clean coppery sweat; there was sweat at his hairline and on his neck.
“Will you have lunch with us? Lula has made some kind of tuna pasta salad, I think.” Because she said nothing, he added, hesitatingly, “Do you like tuna?”
“Sure,” she said, “thank you.”
If Lula was made uncomfortable by Amanda’s unexpected presence at lunch, Amanda could not discern it. She smiled at Amanda through her sleepy lids and pointed her to a chair. She wore a turquoise dress, and held the boy in one arm as she set the table with the other. As they ate, the boy turned his eyes to Amanda repeatedly, prompting Lula to say, “He likes you,” the first thing she said since the initial hello. Jude was the one keeping up a conversation by asking Amanda what she and the others had visited.
Amanda had no memory for names and dates of art works, or names of streets, and found it impossible to keep talking about places and things she’d seen.
“He seems very bright,” she said of the boy. Shortly after, Lula rose from her seat, put her plate in the sink, and said, to the child rather than either Amanda or Jude, “We’re going for our little walk, aren’t we.” She stopped near Amanda’s chair and said to the boy, “Wave bye-bye to the lady.” With that Jude and Amanda were left at table with their plates still half full. He moved his plate to the side and she felt it meant that the visit was something of a chore for him, one that could now be concluded without loss of politeness.
She walked out of the apartment minutes later, walked to the corner, and turned left. She was walking toward a vendor’s stand where she had seen, the day before, a print she liked: of a field, an open road, and an old-looking horse, in repose. It was a generic print, but she liked the horse, which looked pathetic and unfriendly. The stand was there, and there was a small crowd browsing or waiting to pay. Several Spaniards were involved in a conversation with the seller. She found and took hold of the print. On the last occasion she saw Arthur he told her that if she ever wanted to return to Barcelona, he’d be happy to let her stay in the flat. At the end of summer for instance – she could return at the end of summer and stay as long as she liked. As a young man he had found that it benefited him greatly to experience new surroundings, he said; he’d spent a transformative three months on Greece’s Saronic islands. She pictured herself walking down this street alone, reaching the street of their flat, past the fountain and up the stairs into a quiet apartment, empty, entirely hers.
The seller was still in conversation and she turned toward the street. Walking not far from her on the sidewalk was a pair of young men; one of them was twirling something like a short thick cable. She would have turned away, but the man then suddenly ran up, quickly, and smacked the cable – it was hard to tell what exactly it was – loudly across the bare thighs of a woman standing near Amanda and among the other tourists. Up close Amanda saw that he was not a man but a teenager. He ran away swiftly to where his friend was and then continued walking at a lively pace, turning back to look toward the woman and laughing. The expression on the woman’s face was one of white shock and shame, and pain. The man next to the woman, who was with her, stared after the young laughing boys with an expression of mouth and brow that he might have worn while watching news of violence in other parts of the world, a baffled and concerned expression. Amanda looked away from the woman, to overcome the shame she shared with her. She saw that the woman wanted to rub the place she had been hit, but her hand merely hovered near it. No one else seemed to have seen, or comprehended, what had happened. Amanda shook her head, and said, “They are awful,” though she did not know what language the woman spoke; nor was the woman looking at her. After a pause, Amanda put the print back, realizing she could not, anyway, bear to draw attention to herself and ask the vendor if he spoke English. Nasty, she thought, and stopped on her walk home to take the notebook out of her purse and write it down. At the flat she complained to Earl of a stomachache, and wrapped herself in the quilt on the bed. He brought her tea, a book, and she let him move the strand of hair falling across her eye, and she let him lie next to her, and she did not go out for the rest of the day.
Millie sits at her vanity and thinks about Amanda wanting to go to Barcelona to learn Spanish. When Millie first asked why Amanda would not choose to learn, for example, French instead, Amanda said she had just liked Barcelona so much. This was not one of the things Millie remembered about Barcelona, Amanda liking it so much. To Millie, Barcelona was all hot, sticky air, lush foliage, and corrugated metal shop doors that were pulled down at closing time. But what she remembers about Barcelona most clearly, somehow, is the baggy dress and funny little slippers Amanda wore day after day. It was a short, wide dress, with a deep front, and when they sat down in cafés, the waiters – men, almost all – could see much of her bra.
“It’s summer,” Amanda would say, inexplicably, when Millie said the dress doesn’t fit well. It was warm, yes; in fact it was hot and oppressive and full of people. The dress became a joke. Millie remembers the south-facing apartment and that in the morning they took their coffee on the little canopied balcony. She remembers the bus stop just down the block, and that they would watch people waiting for the bus: youngsters and ladies going for groceries. The bus came every twenty minutes, they had figured out; she thinks now that they never saw anyone run for it. There was an urban sleepiness to everything in that neighbourhood, not stillness, but an unhurriedness to the rhythms of life, the closing of doors, the gentle way the cars pulled away from the curbs. Sometimes Amanda slept in and Earl and Millie and Grace had breakfast without her under the canopy. “Let’s leave her for the day,” Earl would joke with Millie and Grace, to lighten things. Then, as Millie rinsed plates, she would hear a plaintive voice behind not-quite closed doors, Earl’s voice, gently coaxing Amanda out.
Through her window Millie can see Earl pruning a bush. He’s not protesting Amanda going to Barcelona, as far as Millie can tell. Would she know if he did protest? She doesn’t know if she would know. Earl may not be what she had once, long ago, pictured for her daughter: before he appeared, she had imagined Amanda with many types of men – tall and gallant and intellectual, kind and self-effacing and brilliant. What she got was Earl, his friendly-neighbour manner, a provincial familiarity, advanced age, and few credentials. But she now certainly doesn’t want to picture anyone else in his place. She has tried to help them where she could. She gave up the house to him and Amanda – she really only needed one room, two at the most – and a few years ago cashed in some bonds to pay for Earl’s two-year diploma. But how are things between them now – she would give up many things to know. Amanda doesn’t talk to her anymore, and Earl, of course, won’t suddenly start. This tells Millie what she dreads, that things are getting worse. Millie remembers the old man they rented the apartment from in Barcelona, and his son and the housekeeper, the son’s wife. It was months before the trip that Amanda’s oddness began, and when they were in Barcelona, Grace said it was great to see Amanda engaging with people. She was right – the thing Millie had dreaded about the trip was that she would have to implore Amanda to leave her room at all. It had turned out that she didn’t have to do that, most days.
One afternoon, standing by a fountain on the corner of their street, she saw Amanda leaving a café with Jude, not Arthur, walking with her hands in the pockets of her funny dress. She didn’t tell Earl what she saw. Amanda came home within the hour, and Millie would surely have cut off her own ear to have Amanda lean into her on the terrace and tell her what she and Jude talked about. Why does a depressed girl have enough energy to talk to strangers and not to her own family? She was encouraged by seeing Amanda choose restaurants and discuss literature, but why should it have been strangers who got the pleasure of the real Amanda, the one Millie has been waiting to wake up to one morning? Millie wanted to help Earl, if only she could. In their bedroom are pictures of Amanda and of the two of them together – Amanda with her mouth full of Timbits and her eyes open wide, Amanda dressed like a 1920s flapper posing for the shot with a gloved arm holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, Amanda and Earl on a bridge in Banff, night-time and the reflection of lamps in the river behind them, embracing tightly.
Millie looks out again and sees Earl still pruning. She drops her hairbrush, walks out of the room, through the kitchen, out the front door, and into the yard towards him. She sees him notice her and smile. She walks right up, holding up her hand as a shield from the sun, and asks him if he needs a drink – nope.
“It’s starting to look good,” she says.
“Be ready in a few more days.”
“It’ll be strange without Grace around,” she says, “won’t it?”
“I’ll miss that old broad.”
“Oh, Earl. It will be strange without her. A little bit empty.”
“She’ll be over lots, I’m sure. If Larry goes away on some contract, she might come and stay here, hang out with you and Amanda.”
Here Millie brightens a little.
“She’s always welcome, of course. What’s Mandy doing?” Millie was in the habit of asking Earl about Amanda as if they didn’t all live in the same house.
“Oh, chatting on the phone or something.”
This can’t be true because Amanda never talks on the phone.
“Oh. Do you think she’s serious about this Barcelona thing? The language course thing?”
“Seems like it. Might be good for her. You know there’s work in languages – translating, interpreting, things like that.”
It irritates Millie when Earl says far-fetched things that sidetrack her from what she is obliquely trying to say. As if Amanda is going to go to Barcelona to begin a career in interpreting for the United Nations.
“Right. I was thinking I’d feel better about the whole thing if you were going with her.”
“Yes?”
“It’s only that she doesn’t know anyone there. She hasn’t asked you to go with her?” He pauses, making Millie fear that she’s been far too direct. Earl is capable, she knows, of shutting down conversation, her conversation about Amanda specifically, quite politely and unmistakably.
He says, “No, she’s not asked me to come along. I probably could have. Work drops off in the fall.”
Millie titters with something like fear. “Well, I think she ought to have. You deserve some travelling as much as she.”
He squints at her. “I guess she just wants to do something for herself.” He keeps his eyes on Millie as he says it. She can hardly believe she is getting all this from him. What passes through her head is, What doesn’t Amanda do for herself these days?
She says, “Oh, I don’t know. Has she said that?”
“That’s what I think, anyway. I don’t actually know, she doesn’t explain too much.”
“She doesn’t?” Millie’s heart rate quickens.
“You know how she is.”
“So secretive. Oh, I can’t tell you how it worries me. Just tell her you want to go with her.”
Earl smiles. “She’s free to do what she wants,” he says. Millie thinks of what to say next, but it does not matter – it is too late, the minute has passed, and Earl is readjusting his work gloves and smiling, and she knows of course what that means.
Jude invited Amanda to a music performance.
“That Allejo is a kind of magician, isn’t he,” Arthur, sitting at the table with them, had said. Amanda had her hands on the table and on hearing the invitation interlocked her fingers. But the tone of Jude’s statement so faintly resembled the tone of an invitation that she hardly knew how to answer. He had said, “You should come with me to a concert on Friday,” and the suggestion sounded hypothetical and indifferent. Only the old man’s just perceptible encouragement suggested it may be something else. Amanda was afraid to accept what had not necessarily been offered.
Jude said, “I like to walk over from the park; you can meet me there and we can walk together.” He knew that she was here with others and that she shouldn’t have been desperate for company.
“Yes,” she said, “I will.” She thought, I will tell the others Arthur will be going too, and Lula, and other people. But ought I not to invite Earl, if not Millie and Grace? Well, she had already said yes. She would find a way.
He had not mentioned dinner, but after the performance he guided her to a restaurant.
“So you are a graduate of literature,” he said.
“No,” she corrected, “of media arts.”
“Ah,” he said. “I don’t believe we have an equivalent of that here. Do you have siblings?”
“No, only child.”
“Ah. I have six, but they are all half-siblings. So in a way I am an only child too. In a way I grew up alone. Did you grow up alone?”
“I grew up in a huge house and all the friends I had in school always ended up playing at my house. My parents let us go into almost any room. They were what I think people call modern parents. They were very happy, that’s what I remember about them and my childhood. I would exist all day in some imagined world, a fortress of couch cushions, and emerge suddenly into their presence, a shock of happiness.”
“My parents seemed to me like such public people – you know? I think I was shy of them most of my childhood. If I caught them in an intimacy, my dad in his shorts, I would get embarrassed. You’re here with your family.” There was a pause that seemed to stress the absence of her family from this table, here, now.
“Yes, they like it.” That was not what she had wanted to say. “We live together.”
“In the huge house?” He smiled. She smiled and nodded.
“My aunt, my mom’s sister, came to live with us – we could not keep up the house, my mom alone couldn’t, not without others. She is reluctant to sell it.” He nodded vigorously, as if to show he understood all about the weight of houses.
“It’s a unique house. Architecturally speaking.”
“Lula wants a house – though my father has several flats we can choose from. She’d like to put all we have into a house. I prefer to keep something on the side – for travel, pleasures.”
“A house is a lot of work,” Amanda said, thinking of Lula’s droopy eyelids. “I would not put all I have into a house.”
“We are the same age, you and I, are we not? Your boyfriend is older.”
“Yes. I was young when we started dating. I mean, compared to him; I was seventeen. He was thirty-one. My mother, at first, ignored the whole thing so that it might go away.”
“Of course,” he said, “of course. But you didn’t care? I mean it didn’t stop you.”
“Oh, it could have. But I guess the happiness was already cracked by then and I didn’t have a complete terror of spoiling it.”
“Right.”
“Only ordinary fear.”
“Of course. Should we order dessert?”
“I like your father,” she said after a pause.
“Your mother seemed very pleasant. There is quite a resemblance with the three of you, you and your mother and your aunt. You return on the Sunday, you’ve said?”
For the first time in the conversation she didn’t know what his words were intended for. The guilt had not yet started pouring in for her. The lights of all the restaurants, the glassware on the tables, shimmered. She was a woman talking earnestly over dinner with a man. It was what a person wanted from travel, memorable connections. A memory of light reflecting off wine glasses and a stranger’s life unpeeling in front of you. No pulsating tenderness, no shame, no love or remorse. Only civility, freshness. Possibility.
“Do you remember when the happiness had started to crack, as you said?”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
It’s the early morning of the day of the wedding, Saturday. Amanda and Earl are in her room; the room is shuttered and lines of light coming through the shutters stripe the furniture. Amanda keeps it this way most of the time. She and Earl sit propped up on the bed. Her long hair hangs down the sides of her face and part of it touches his shoulder; that’s how close they are. He’s ventured to put his hand on top of her hand. She used to put a lot of work into her hair. He touches a strand of it with his free hand. He has not physically changed since they’ve met. His fingers are the same. His beard is the same, and the skin on his face is still perfect. He observes the room like a visitor. There is a magazine on the table near the window and a plain glass vase, empty. The room reveals nothing. He puts his arm behind her and around her shoulder, though he knows she might squirm away. This time she doesn’t. This is not right, he would like to say. One ought to be able to hug one’s girlfriend without fear that she’ll pull away as if she’s been poked with something sharp.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” he says. She closes her eyes. He wishes to not feel as if he were torturing her. “I got a contract for October,” he says.
“Oh, good,” she opens her eyes. She sits there in fear of what he will ask of her that she won’t be able to give.
“Spain will be warmer than here this time of year,” he says.
“I suppose,” she says. “I might even come back tanned.”
“What day do you return?”
“The sixteenth, I think. I have to check the ticket. It’s in the drawer there, you can look.”
But he won’t. Something about that feels false, she telling him to look at the ticket. He doesn’t want to look at it. He moves his hand from behind her back.
Maybe he can take her out of this room, out of whatever fortress she has built for herself. He smells her hair, covertly. She leans into him; she leans into him. He won’t move, won’t ask for more, won’t say something and spoil it. He can get her out of it. It doesn’t matter what will happen later, but he sees now he can get her out of it.
“What is it?” he says. “Because we can change things.”
“Don’t – don’t talk. I don’t know. It – when we were in Barcelona, that woman who got hit.”
“Which?”
“At the stand. I was going to buy a print – it doesn’t matter what – they just walked by and hit her, with – a cord or something. I don’t know. It’s just that nastiness.”
“Who were – did they hurt her?”
“No – you mean, was she bleeding or something? No.”
“You’re scared that it could happen to you?”
“It doesn’t have to happen to me. It’s only that it’s out there, always.”
There is a timid knock at the door. They don’t move to answer it; they know it’s Millie. Then Amanda sighs and straightens.
Earl grabs her hand, says just what he means: “I can get you out of this.” If not now, he will lose her. She is looking at him. He could cry but doesn’t. Millie calls apprehensively, “Hello?”
At supper the previous night Amanda mentioned the good deal she got on her flight. The definitiveness of a plane ticket put Millie in a panic. Until Amanda brought it up, the supper was festive: Millie had cooked, Grace had picked out a fine champagne left in the pantry since the days of Dan. It all threatened to destroy Amanda’s resolve. Just yesterday morning all she could think was away, away – that while listening to Earl’s humming as he brushed his teeth and Millie starting the juicer. Then in the evening, while Grace was setting the table, Millie knocked on her door, opened it, and said simply, “Amanda, my love, darling.” That darling cut like a polished, well-prepped blade. Later, sitting at the table, Amanda thought, this is all my mom needs, her family about her, light conversation, an occasion to justify putting out the good china. Me, looking content. And who else but Earl would live in this house and grow to love this family of hers? Barcelona was a risk: it was one thing to be alone in a house full of people, and another to be alone in a stranger’s apartment beyond which strangers waited for their bus.
So when Earl came to her room this morning, she was already worn down with a sleepless night and the dread of indecision and the struggle to hold on to the certainty that had been wavering consistently. It would have been a superhuman effort to change tracks and reach out, hold on to him so he might help her. And when Millie knocked on the door, the easiest thing was to open it.
By the time Amanda opens the door, Millie is gone. Millie hurries down to Grace, who will not look at what Millie wrote for Earl.
“Earl is devastated,” says Millie, refolding the letter, “he doesn’t have to say it – I can see it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Grace says, “it’s only a goddamn course.” She thinks, enough of you and your letters. “Do you really think Amanda would have anything to do with that bland Englishman? She’ll be back before you notice she’s gone.” The latter platitude is of course impossible, since Millie notices everything to do with Amanda, but Grace is exhausted. Since Dan left it has been too much of this. God bless Larry.
“You’re always welcome here, Grace.”
“I know,” Grace says, “I read your last letter.”
Millie again starts to unfold the letter for Earl. Grace turns away from the lined notebook paper. She has an idea of what Amanda wants in Barcelona; it’s not Jude. Earl could have seen that, if not Millie. But Grace is not about to tell them. She has her own life to consider, thank God, and she will not get caught again; no, she will not read any more letters. Instead she will visit with baking for an evening or an afternoon, and her presence in the house will be only the breeziest, lightest caress of a kind hand.
At the airport in Barcelona it is indeed Jude who picks her up. She is sick – physically nauseous from the turbulent flight and sick with fear. She packed for the stay as if moving through a dreamscape, as if she were a soldier who doubts the mission, gets a bad feeling in the stomach from thinking of it, but must put her hope in the wisdom of those who planned it. In this state she was driven to the airport, Earl driving, Millie in the backseat. In this state she kissed Earl and hugged her mom, letting Millie hold her tightly for a moment at the airport security checkpoint.
Landing in Barcelona, she wishes to take a taxi, give the name of a hotel where no one could know her and, after putting a few drops of sleeping aid into a cup of hot water, escape into sleep. Jude is courteous, opening the passenger door for her, swinging her suitcase into the trunk. During the ride he keeps his eyes on the road and doesn’t try to force talk, so that for some time the only sound is the smooth hum of the car’s machine and the murmur of a voice on the radio.
After a while, worried her silence might verge on rudeness, she says, “It was good of your father to let me stay at the apartment.” Jude turns only briefly, smiles.
“He likes you. Anyway, he has other apartments.” Another smile crosses his face. What she wonders is, what does he think she is doing here?
When they arrive, he carries her suitcase up the stairs and says, “My father hoped you’d call him when you recover from the difference in time zones.” On a pad of paper that sits on top of the shoe rack in the hallway, he writes down two phone numbers, Arthur’s and his own.
She thought all she wanted was to sleep, but after he leaves, after she takes off her shoes and her watch and splashes her face with water at the kitchen sink, she then opens the balcony door and steps out onto the tiles, which are warm – it is after ten in the evening, a hot night, though it looks to have rained earlier. She sees people walking on the street, entering buildings, parking their cars and exiting them, talking and laughing and jingling their keys. She can hear their voices. She can hear a distant thump of bass from somewhere in the small building, and a thin sound like an amateur oboe. On the balcony below and to the left of her a man with a fleshy back and light brown hair is lifting undershirts from a clothes line, speaking to someone inside; she cannot understand most of the Spanish, but she picks out the words mujer and dulce. She can smell warm, wet air and hackberry trees. Her heart begins to beat fast. It is not only fear. It is that she has not slept much in twenty-four hours and has not eaten on the plane. It is that she knows she will have to call home now, and either talk about the Spanish language course or say something true. It is also that she feels the difference between being dead and being alive. The ugliness deadens one, and then also a hollowness that is hard to ascribe to something specific. Arthur and Jude made her alive, briefly, and now the smells and the people. And her heart also beats fast because she sees that whatever she has begun by coming here, and whether it ends with life or death, this is only the beginning of it, and it will get much worse, before it ends, one way or the other.
Millie finds Earl in front of his laptop, his head down on the table on his hands, headphones on his head. She knows he dozed off waiting for a call from Amanda’s computer. In the nine days since she has left, Amanda’s made some vague but troubling statements. The course did not work out, they found out, but Amanda wants to stay, and extend her ticket even, perhaps. Millie still has the letter she never gave Earl, tucked into the cover of some books that sit on her bedside table. She doesn’t like to think of the letter now. She touches his shoulder lightly; he wakes with a shudder.
He was not exactly asleep; he may have sunk one layer below wakefulness, while thinking of the same things he’s thought about as the other days since she’s been gone – of the fact that it’s been eight years. That he’s not young, and that there is no consolation for him. All he wants, all he’s wanted all along, is Amanda. For her he had let himself get absorbed into her family’s palace, for her he used to, years ago, leave parties early and drive across the city in blizzards, tipsy, so she might take a last cup of tea before bed with Millie and Dan. He wanted to love what she loved. Or he feared that unless he did, he would not last, like her friends never lasted. For her he’d learned to understand Millie, had accepted the house, the daily precariousness of moods.
“It’s nearly six now,” Millie says, “and Amanda must be asleep over there.” She says it gently. He takes off the headphones, rubbing the ache they have left around his ears.
“I wanted to tell you I talked to Dan. He wants to come home now. What with Amanda and everything.”
“I heard there’s a heat wave in all of southern California.”
“Oh yes, he’s hating it. Here it’s twenty-two degrees, perfect. Will you come outside and eat? The air is so lovely. I baked rolls earlier.”
“I could smell them.”
“We still have to eat,” she said, “don’t we.”