Lesje, balancing her tray, steers towards an empty table surrounded by other empty tables. She no longer finds it easy to come down for coffee with Marianne and Trish or to join them for lunch. They’re still friendly enough, but they’re careful. She can remember this feeling and sympathize with it: those in the midst of crisis are bad luck. They’re curiosities and you talk about them when they aren’t there, but when they are there they silence you. For Marianne and Trish, she’s like static electricity.
Dr. Van Vleet is away; he gets rose fever every year, for which he takes herbal remedies prepared by his wife. Lesje wonders whether she will live long enough with Nate to learn herbal remedies and dose him with them. Or with anyone else. She tries to visualize Nate in an old man’s V-necked cardigan, dozing in the sun, and fails. Dr. Van Vleet often says “in my day.” Lesje wonders if he knew it was his day at the time. She herself does not feel that the time through which she’s presently living is particularly hers.
She wants Dr. Van Vleet to be here. He never listens to gossip, he’s heard nothing about her so-called private life. He’s the only person she knows who is willing to treat her with amused paternal indulgence, which at the moment she feels very much in need of. He corrects her pronunciation, she laughs at his epigrams. If he were here now, opposite her at the table, she could ask him about something, some technical point, and then she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. The feeding and breeding habits of the Pteranodon, for instance. If a glider rather than a flapper, how did it become airborne? Did it simply wait for a slight breeze to lift it by its twelve-foot wings? Some speculate that because of its incredibly delicate bone structure it would have been unable to touch down anywhere, on water or on land. If so, how did it reproduce? For a moment Lesje glimpses warm tranquil seas, gentle winds, the immense fur-covered pteranodons soaring like wisps of white cotton high overhead. Such visions are still possible, but they don’t last long. Inevitably she sees a later phase: the stench of dying seas, dead fish on the mud-covered shores, the huge flocks dwindling, stranded, their time done. All of a sudden, Utah.
She sits down, facing away from the room. Elizabeth is there; Lesje spotted her as soon as she came in. A few months ago she would have gone out again, but there’s no longer any point to that. Elizabeth, like gamma rays, will continue to exist whether Lesje can see her or not. There’s a dark, somewhat hefty woman with her. They both look at Lesje as she walks by, not smiling but not hostile either. As if they are sightseers and she is a sight.
Lesje knows that when Nate moved completely in, or as completely as he’s going to, Elizabeth should have felt deserted and betrayed and she herself should have felt, if not victorious, at least conventionally smug. Instead it seems to be the other way around. Lesje wishes that Elizabeth would vanish into some remote corner of the past and stay there forever, but she knows her wishes are not likely to have much effect on Elizabeth.
She peels the foil top from her yogurt and sticks the straw into her carton of milk. At least she’s been eating better since Nate moved in. Nate is making her eat better. He brought some cooking pots with him and he usually cooks dinner; then he supervises while she eats. It disturbs him if she doesn’t finish. The food he cooks is probably quite good, certainly better than she could do, and she’s ashamed to admit that she lusts at least once in a while for a package of Betty Crocker Noodles Romanoff. She’s been living for so long on convenience food, take-outs, heat n’ serve, she’s sure her capacities for appreciation have been blunted. In this way, as in many others, she cannot seem to avoid being inappropriate.
Her reactions, for instance. Reactions is Nate’s word. He finds these reactions of hers, not disappointing exactly, but surprising, as if only a barbarian or an illiterate could have the reactions she does. He doesn’t even get angry. He merely explains, again and again; he assumes that if she can understand what he’s saying she will of necessity agree with it.
For instance. Elizabeth, when she telephones, as she does fairly often, to ask if the children have left their socks or their rubber boots or their toothbrushes or their underpants behind at Lesje’s house, is always polite. Of what then can Lesje complain? The truth is that she doesn’t want Elizabeth to phone her at all. Especially not at the office. She doesn’t want to be disturbed in the middle of the Cretaceous by Elizabeth, wondering if Lesje has happened to see a red and white mitten. It upsets her, and finally, awkwardly, she has managed to blurt this out.
But the children forgot things, Nate said. Elizabeth had to know where these things were. There were not unlimited supplies of such items.
Perhaps, Lesje ventured, the children could stop forgetting things.
Nate said they were children.
“Maybe you could phone her,” Lesje said, “or she could phone you. Instead of me.”
Nate pointed out that he had never been very good at keeping track of toothbrushes and rubber boots, even his own. It just wasn’t one of his talents.
“Mine either,” said Lesje. Or hadn’t he noticed? On Sunday evenings, when the children were packing for their return, the house looked like a train station after a bomb attack. She did try, but since she didn’t know what the children had brought with them, how could she be sure they’d taken the right numbers of things away again?
Nate said that since neither of them was proficient at this and Elizabeth was, having had long practice, it made good sense for Elizabeth to phone when any of the said items disappeared. Lesje could only agree.
Sometimes the children would be there for Friday dinner when Lesje was expecting to come home from the Museum and find nobody there but Nate. “Could you ask her not to spring them on us?” she said after the fourth time.
“What do you mean?” Nate asked sadly.
“I mean, isn’t Friday a little late to tell you?”
“She told me on Tuesday.”
“No one told me,” Lesje said.
Nate admitted it had slipped his mind; even so there were better ways of phrasing things. Spring them he found rather blunt, even abrasive. “And I cooked dinner,” he concluded reasonably. “It didn’t inconvenience you, did it?”
“No,” Lesje said. She felt at a disadvantage: she’d had no practice at this sort of dialogue. Her parents, at least in her hearing, had never discussed each others’ behavior and motives, and her grandmothers had never discussed anything. They’d limited themselves to monologues, wistful reveries from her Ukrainian grandmother, raucous commentaries from her Jewish one. Her conversations with William had centered on an exchange of facts, and even their rare disputes had been more like the squabblings of children: I want. You did so. She wasn’t used to saying what she felt, or why, or why someone else ought to behave differently. She knew she was not subtle, that she often sounded rude when she meant only to be accurate. Invariably she came out of these conversations feeling like a mean-minded ogre. It wasn’t that she resented or disliked the children as such, she wanted to say. She just wanted to be consulted.
But she couldn’t say that; if she did, he might bring up that other conversation.
“I want to feel I’m living with you,” she said. “Not with you and your wife and children.”
“I’ll try to keep them out of your way as much as possible,” Nate said, with such dejection that she’d retracted immediately.
“I don’t mean they can’t come over,” she said generously.
“I want them to feel that this is their house, too,” Nate said.
Lesje isn’t sure any longer whose house it is. She wouldn’t be surprised to get a gracious phone call from Elizabeth saying that she and the children would be moving in the next day and could she please get the spare room ready and make sure all the stray socks and boots had been gathered together? Nate wouldn’t protest. He feels they should both try to make things easier for Elizabeth, which as far as Lesje can see means doing everything she wants. He often says he thinks Elizabeth is being very civilized. He also feels he is being civilized. He didn’t seem to think that Lesje should have to make any special effort to be civilized as well. She isn’t directly involved.
“We have each other,” he says. Lesje has to agree that this is true. They do have each other, whatever have means.
• • •
Lesje sucks up the last of her milk and puts the empty carton on the tray. She stubs out her cigarette and is bending to gather up her shoulder bag when a penetrating voice says, “Excuse me.”
Lesje looks up. The dark-haired woman who’s been having lunch with Elizabeth is standing beside her.
“You’re living with Nate Schoenhof, aren’t you?” she says.
Lesje is too startled to say anything. “Mind if I sit down?” the woman says. She’s wearing a red wool suit with lipstick to match.
“I almost did, myself,” she says neutrally, as if discussing a job she didn’t get. “I’m the one before you. But he kept saying he could never leave his family.” She laughs as if enjoying a slightly witless joke.
Lesje can’t think of anything at all to say. This must be Martha, whom Nate has mentioned in passing. She sounded ineffectual. Lesje expected her to be about five feet tall and mousy. The real Martha does not seem ineffectual, and Lesje now wonders if she herself may at some future date be reduced to an equally pallid shadow. Of course Nate would not have mentioned Martha’s large breasts and striking mouth, not to her.
“Having any trouble with her?” Martha says, jerking her head.
“Who?” Lesje says.
“Don’t worry, she just went out. Queen Elizabeth.”
Lesje wishes to avoid being drawn into a conspiracy. To say anything against Elizabeth to this particular person would be disloyal to Nate. “She’s being very civilized,” she says. No one could object to that.
“I can see he’s brainwashed you,” Martha says with another laugh. “God, the two of them love that word.” She grins at Lesje, a red gypsy grin. Suddenly Lesje likes her enormously. She smiles faintly back.
“Don’t let them do a job on you,” Martha says. “Let them start and they’ll turn your head to mush. Fight back. Give ’em hell.” She stands up.
“Thank you,” Lesje says. She’s grateful that anyone, anyone at all, has given her this much sympathetic thought.
“Any time,” Martha says. “There’s not much I’m an expert on but believe you me, I’m the world’s living authority on them.”
For at least fifteen minutes Lesje is elated. She’s been vindicated; her own perceptions, which she has increasingly begun to distrust and even to disown, are possibly valid. Back in her office though, replaying the conversation, it occurs to her that Martha may have had one or two ulterior motives.
Also: Martha didn’t say what she’s supposed to fight back against, or how. Martha obviously fought back herself. But it’s to be noted — a hard fact — that Martha is not currently living with Nate.