In the confusing aftermath of a tragedy, of any terrible event, we sometimes try to make sense of it by finding a way to blame ourselves. It seems to Lottie in the afternoon after Jessica has died that Ryan is feeling something like this – responsible, and miserable on that account. After he’s come back from the hardware store and they’re working mostly silently together at the back of the house, she remembers abruptly a time when he was three or four and she was grocery shopping with him. Someone had spilled coffee beans in a corner of the store, and he kept wanting to return to that spot, to look at the mess. Finally he had asked her in a hushed voice, ‘Did I do that?’ She had felt such a sweep of compassion, such an aching familiarity with this sense of oneself, that she knelt and held him tight for a moment before she could tell him, ‘No, of course you didn’t.’
It’s only more slowly as the long afternoon wears on that she realizes she is doing it too. That she is calling up again and again those few moments when her actions might have had something to do with what happened. She remembers her anger when she told Elizabeth she ought to call Cam, that he still lived nearby. Perhaps that was what had set it all in motion. Or perhaps if she’d left when she was supposed to, she thinks, some element in the equation that added up to Jessica’s death would have been different, and the girl would still be alive.
When she catches herself, she makes herself stop. It’s absurd. She knows this.
But she does keep calling Cam through the afternoon. He’s never home or at the store, but she talks to Maeve twice more. The second time, he’s called there again, and Lottie feels the same sweep of lightness, of relief, she felt earlier at this news: he is safe, he is all right.
It’s only a few minutes after this call that Elizabeth comes over to ask Lottie to drop by her house later in the evening; and this may be why Lottie so readily says yes.
It would help them out, Elizabeth says. She’s breathless, apologetic, and confusing in her attempts to explain everything. If Lottie hadn’t read her letter to Cameron, she might not even be able to understand what Elizabeth is saying. But what she gathers, after Elizabeth has explained Lawrence’s call from the airport, his sudden arrival in the afternoon the day before, is that Elizabeth has used her, Lottie, as a kind of cover for Cameron’s appearance last night.
‘Lawrence said, “What was he doing here anyway?” – you know, late in the evening, long after the accident. And I said that one or the other of you popped over all the time, that we’d done lots of stuff together this summer.’
She’s standing with Lottie in the front hall. Ryan is still outside. ‘So it would just give me some credibility if you’d come over tonight and have some coffee and dessert or whatever.’ Elizabeth is dressed up again, Lottie notes. She’s wearing slacks and a vibrant purple silk shirt. She has beaded sandals on her feet. ‘Plus, of course, it’ll just distract us.’ She runs her hand over her head, down her hair. ‘It’s been a ghastly day, Char. I’ve been so worried about Cam. I managed to get over there once, but of course there was no sign of him. And poor Jessica’s parents came by this afternoon. The children, of course, are frantic. Basket cases. And in the midst of all this, I’m trying to hold on to some sense of reunion with Lawrence.’ He’s leaving the next day, Elizabeth tells Lottie. He needs to get back. Elizabeth will stay on until after the service for Jessica, and then she’ll fly home.
‘You understand, don’t you, Char?’ Her voice is nearly pleading. ‘I wrote Cameron a letter and tried to explain it to him, but what I couldn’t say, of course, was that as soon as I heard Lawrence’s voice on the phone, it was over. It was decided. After all this happiness this summer . . .’ Tears fill her eyes. ‘I just feel so fucking . . . shallow, I guess.’
Lottie doesn’t say anything.
‘What was it?’ Elizabeth whispers. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t mean to hurt him.’
‘Maybe you needed a little ego food,’ Lottie says. Her voice is drier than she intended.
‘No,’ Elizabeth answers firmly. She shakes her head. ‘I think I do love Cameron in some way. And maybe if he were more, sort of, settled . . . I mean, if I’d felt he could have, somehow, taken us on. Maybe. But the way he lives, Lottie.’ She holds her hands out. ‘I mean, he’s almost fifty, and I don’t even think he has life insurance. Realistically, I guess I must have known all along there was just no way he could have had the children and me. I mean, what would I have done? Taught freshman comp somewhere?’
‘A lot of people do. And even more horrible things. Hell, I worked as a secretary once.’
Elizabeth’s head tilts. ‘Don’t be hard on me, Char.’
‘I’m not being hard, Elizabeth. It’s the truth. Besides, I feel for Cam. How could I not? I know it’s been stressful for you. But Cam’s the one I feel for.’ Lottie shrugs. ‘You can understand that.’
Elizabeth says she does. She’s sorry. ‘But can you come over?’ she asks, after a long silence. ‘There’s just this one more night to get through, with Mother hovering; and the children, and Lawrence just . . . perplexed, I think. And I think if you came it would answer some questions he’s got, first of all, and then simply help us get through a few hours. Please.’
And so Lottie says yes, in part because she has the hours to get through too. She fixes dinner for herself and Ryan, and they both eat, ravenously. Then he goes out, and Lottie showers and changes and crosses the street to Elizabeth’s house.
And now she’s walking home – she’s being walked home – by Elizabeth’s husband. Lawrence. She stumbles on a dent in the lawn, her ankle bends, and he reaches over in the dark and cups her elbow with his hand.
‘I’m all right now,’ she says. ‘Really.’ His hand on her flesh is warm, moist; and he doesn’t let go. ‘You really don’t need to be doing this anyway. It’s not New York, or something. I go out all the time by myself at night. Here, and in Chicago. I run after dark.’
They step off the curb, into the wide, black street. There’s no light on at Lottie’s house. Ryan has gone out with a friend from college who lives in Boston. He said he would be late. Lottie is aware of Lawrence’s physical presence, like a heat that travels in the dark beside her.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I was hoping, actually, you’d offer me a drink.’ Lawrence has a quiet voice, an insinuating voice, Lottie would have said. But what is it insinuating? She can’t tell. She looks over at him again, but his face is turned away and obscured in the shadows.
‘I’m not really sure what we’ve got in the house,’ she says.
‘Really? From what Elizabeth said, I would have guessed you inherited a sizable liquor cabinet.’
Lottie laughs. ‘Now that wasn’t nice of Elizabeth, was it?’ she says. ‘And it’s not true. A bottle at a time was Mother’s motto. Waste not, want not. The New England virtues.’
‘Still, how ’bout it?’ he asks. There’s something urgent in his voice. ‘I’d settle for a beer.’
They’re standing now at the bottom of the porch stairs. Lottie suddenly has no wish to go into the dark house alone. ‘Well, we’ll see what we can dig out,’ she says, and he follows her up the stairs.
In the kitchen, she leans over the refrigerator door, the Ryan pose.
‘Okay, there are two beers, Anchor Steam. And part of a bottle of white wine. A California Chardonnay. But a cheap one, about four bucks a bottle, so you know what that means. And’ – she turns to the counter – ‘some red, though it may be vinegar by now. And I think . . .’ She opens the freezer door. ‘Yes. Some vodka. But no tonic or anything.’
Lawrence is standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘I’ll have vodka. Neat.’
Lottie pours him some in one of the little jelly jars, and pours some white wine for herself. ‘Why don’t you go on into the living room? Such as it is,’ she says. ‘I have one call I need to make.’
She can hear him in there, shifting. She feels she can see him looking around. The rotary dial on her mother’s phone seems slower, noisier than ever, and she hangs up as soon as she hears Cameron’s recorded voice start his message again.
When she comes into the living room, Lawrence is sitting, leaned back in one of the chairs – the first person, it occurs to Lottie, to somehow manage to look comfortable in here. His feet are stretched out in front of him, crossed at the bare ankle. His shoes are light-brown loafers of a leather so soft-looking it seems a dully shining fabric. Lottie can see the shape of his toes through it. He drinks, a long swallow, and sets his glass on the floor under his dangling fingers. He rests his head against the chair back and looks around. ‘Your son is helping you in this . . . enterprise?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Ryan.’
‘And then you’re back to Chicago?’ She nods. ‘To your husband too,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ she answers. She slides one of the chairs across the floor and turns it, sits down almost opposite him. The light from the dining room falls in a long rectangle that slices across his pants’ legs. Lottie rests her toes exactly at the rectangle’s edge on the other side of the room.
Lawrence is watching all this carefully. After she’s settled herself, he says, ‘So. It was an unhusbanded summer for you and our Liz.’
Something in his voice makes Lottie feel uncomfortable.
‘She seems to have flourished,’ he says.
Lottie doesn’t answer.
‘For you, of course, I have no way of knowing. No baseline, as it were.’ His face is back in shadow, but Lottie can see he is smiling again. He has improbably white teeth.
Lottie shrugs. ‘She has, I think. Flourished.’
‘Not you, then.’
‘It’s been a different kind of summer for me.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t want to talk about it, really.’ Outside, behind Lottie, a car drives by. ‘Hard,’ she says. ‘It’s been a hard summer for me.’
‘And not for Lizzie?’
Lottie smiles across the band of light at him. ‘Well, she got you back, in the end. And I think that’s very much what she wanted, all along.’
He lifts his glass again, raises it slightly as if to acknowledge Lottie’s point, and drinks, a quick, small sip. He says, ‘And you were all . . . great friends, as children.’
Lottie makes a face. ‘I don’t think children have “great friends,” do you?’
‘Elizabeth is someone who did have great friends as a child. You can’t believe the numbers of them.’
‘Yes. Well. That is Elizabeth. What I’d say, I think, is that we played together and loved each other and hated each other in almost equal measure. Certainly, at any rate, we knew each other well.’
‘And this summer you’ve sort of picked up where you left off.’
Lottie laughs. ‘Oh, it’s been lots better than that, I hope.’
His bright smile flashes. Then his head lolls again, left, right. Lottie sees his eyes slowly measure the room. He says, ‘You guys had no dough.’
‘Zilch.’
‘See, I hadn’t got that part. Your brother . . . confused me, last night. I saw him as a kind of tweedy, academic guy. I saw him the way I saw Elizabeth’s father.’
‘Well, he is a tweedy, kind of academic guy. You’re not frozen forever the way you were when you were ten. Thank God.’
‘But he’s not an academic.’
‘No,’ Lottie answers. ‘He owns a bookstore. Part of a bookstore. I think it’s pretty successful, actually.’
He nods. ‘He’s an interesting character.’
‘I suppose. It’s not quite how I think of him.’
‘But you’ll grant . . .’ One hand swings up toward Lottie.
‘Well, I’m not sure what you mean: “interesting.” ’
‘Oh, just a guy like that, driving a car like that, at his age. Our age. Intense. A little humorless. Sort of on the fringes.’
‘But there are lots of people like that. Particularly in big cities, or near universities. He’s not really that unusual. You know that Randy Newman song.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘It’s about people who hang out in bookstores, as he puts it. Who work for the public radio. Who carry their babies around on their backs.’ She lifts her shoulders. ‘Mostly, it’s about people who just don’t know how to make money.’
He seems amused. Then he regards Lottie for a moment. ‘He’s different from you in that regard.’
‘I wouldn’t say so. I’ve never made much money either.’
‘Haven’t you? That’s not the way Elizabeth tells it.’
‘Elizabeth doesn’t know.’
‘I thought she did. I thought you and Elizabeth were great friends. Had become great friends, this summer.’ He sits up a little bit; his knees bend, and his legs slide apart.
‘She misunderstands. She thinks to be published in certain slick magazines is to have a certain slick amount of money. And that’s not the case.’
‘But your husband has a dime or two, I guess.’ Lottie shrugs. ‘He’s . . . what? A cardiologist?’
‘No. Cancer. An oncologist.’
He nods. ‘Elizabeth thought heart. Cardiologist. But there you go. Everything comes back to the heart, with Lizzie.’ He taps his chest, and then he smiles at Lottie. ‘Not like you, eh?’
‘What do you mean?’ Lottie asks.
‘Just that you seem tougher, I’d say.’
This is so unexpected that it takes Lottie’s breath for a moment. Finally she says, ‘I find Elizabeth tough. Tough as nails.’
He laughs. ‘Do you? Well. I’d have to disagree.’
Lottie gets up to refill her glass. On the way across the room, she looks over at his. He appears to be nursing it. As she leaves the room, then as she returns too, she’s aware of his eyes on her, on her legs and hips.
After she’s sat down again, she says, ‘Isn’t Elizabeth going to be worried about you?’
‘Should she be?’ He’s smiling at her.
‘Oh, come on,’ she says. She’s not surprised, she realizes. ‘Don’t start that stuff.’
‘But this is fun, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Lots better than the Harbour parlor, at any rate. You and I, we understand each other, I think.’
‘Do we?’ Lottie asks. ‘I think you think you understand me. And maybe you partway do. But I don’t much understand you. Why you’re here, for instance.’
‘I’m here for Elizabeth.’
‘No, I mean here, in my mother’s living room.’
‘I’m here so I don’t have to be there.’ He nods his head at the windows, the street. ‘Elizabeth and I need to get off her turf. Her family’s turf. Her mother’s turf.’
‘I like Emily.’
‘I like Emily too. I like her a lot. But to be around her and Elizabeth together . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s like drowning to someone like me.’ Lottie grins in recognition. She feels this way around Emily too. ‘So I’m here,’ he says. ‘And I’m curious.’
‘About what?’
‘About you. About your brother. About what’s been going on here this summer. I thought maybe you’d care to enlighten me.’
‘I’m not sure I could.’
‘Oh, come on, Char.’
‘It’s Lottie.’
‘Lottie?’
‘Yes, Elizabeth and my brother and mother are the only ones who still call me Char. I prefer Lottie. By a country mile.’
‘All right then, Lottie. And I’m Larry, by the way. Elizabeth is the only person who calls me Lawrence. Elizabeth and Emily.’
‘Larry,’ Lottie says.
‘Right.’ He lets a little silence fall. ‘So, Lottie. Clue me in.’
‘As I said, I’m not sure I can.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well. I’m not sure what you’re asking, for starters.’
‘Who’s zooming who? That’s all. What’s been going on? Your brother, for example: he was involved with the baby-sitter?’
Lottie is startled. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘You don’t think so?’
‘I know it’s not so.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Elizabeth thought he might have been.’
Lottie laughs, a sort of admiring laugh. ‘Did she?’
‘Yes. You’re surprised by that.’
‘I sure am. I think Elizabeth knows better than that too.’
‘Well, as I read it, there was something funny going on.’ He tilts his head. ‘Could it be he was involved with my wife?’
Lottie looks levelly at him.
‘Or maybe there’s some other possibility I’m not picking up on. But I think you know. So I’d like to know.’ Lottie shifts in her chair. ‘Is all. Fair, don’t you think?’
‘He wasn’t involved with Jessica.’
‘What about Elizabeth?’
She sips some wine. ‘Why don’t you ask Elizabeth?’ His eyes are steady on her. She crosses her legs, aware of the sound of her sliding flesh. ‘You know, I probably wouldn’t tell you he was sleeping with Elizabeth, even if he was.’
‘But you’d tell me if he wasn’t, I bet.’
Lottie recognizes that this is true, and she’s uncomfortable. ‘Why don’t you ask Elizabeth all this?’ she says.
‘Why would Elizabeth tell me the truth?’
‘Why should I?’
‘You seem to me like a truthful kind of person.’
Lottie feels confused, suddenly. It’s a few seconds before she answers. ‘I don’t think I’m the right person for you to talk to. To talk to you. If you have doubts about Elizabeth’s . . . fidelity. Though I’m not sure you’ve got much of a leg to stand on. So to speak.’
‘No, no. You’re certainly right, there. But I love Elizabeth. I do.’ He smiles. ‘And I understand her so well. I understand what she needs, maybe more than she does.’
‘What does she need?’
‘Romance. For life to be romantic. She has to have things very . . . intense, all the time. In a way, she’s kind of a phony, you know what I mean, but she’s alive. I get a genuine kind of charge out of her. I always have. So maybe you’re right. Just drop it. Be glad she’s coming home. That life is back to normal.’ He sits up suddenly, hunches forward over his knees in the chair. ‘The thing is, I gave up a lot for her. To get her back.’
‘Your girlfriend.’
‘It was a lot of girlfriend.’
‘Hmm.’
‘You’ve been there, I suspect, haven’t you, Lottie? You seem like someone who likes to fool around a little bit.’ He waits. His voice, when he speaks again, is intimate, urgent. ‘I couldn’t keep away from her. She was a wonderful, a very dirty girl. I liked that a lot.’
Lottie doesn’t say anything, and after a moment he sits back.
He pulls out a cigarette. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
Lottie shakes her head. ‘No. Go ahead.’
‘Thanks.’ He lights the cigarette and inhales deeply, as though he’s been rationed for a while.
Lottie walks in front of him again, enters the band of light. She goes through the dining room and fetches a chipped saucer for him from the kitchen. She squats to set it on the floor by him; and then feels uncomfortable, servile, as she gets up again. Stepping back to her own chair, turning, sitting, she is suddenly ashamed and angry. Is he doing this? Is she? He watches her across the shadowy space for a long time, smoking. Lottie notes that he holds the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, with the lighted end turned in toward his palm; like the tough guys, the hoods, in high school. What is she doing? Lottie thinks. What is this man doing here?
Emily – big Emily – had answered the door earlier this evening, and her plump face had puckered at the sight of Lottie. ‘Oh, Charlotte, my dear.’ She stepped forward and embraced Lottie on the porch. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered in Lottie’s ear. She smelled of talc, and her hands were damp on Lottie’s arms. She stepped back after a moment.
‘Well,’ she said. Lottie saw that her eyes were glittering, but she’d clearly decided they were to have the usual chirpy conversation. She launched herself, her watery, lapping voice: ‘Elizabeth said you might drop by, and I’m so pleased to see you, just come in, come in, we’re all sort of drifting around aimlessly, postprandial I guess you’d say, but we’re about to have coffee and tea and that sort of thing . . .’ Lottie was following her into the gloomy front hall. ‘. . . and little Emily and I made some dessert this afternoon. My dear!’ Her voice lowered abruptly. ‘How is Cameron?’
They had paused on the threshold of the living room. Lottie could hear voices, adult voices, in the kitchen. ‘I think he’s fine. I haven’t actually been able to reach him, but they’ve talked to him at the store.’
Her head bobbed. ‘Poor man, that’s Elizabeth’s experience too, and I want you to know that I am so sorry for him, if you speak to him please tell him so.’ As Elizabeth emerged into the long hallway from the kitchen, Emily squeezed Lottie’s elbow again, for emphasis.
They had sat in the immense, cheerless living room, decorated in its faded liver colors. Lawrence was a slender, compact man, with shining flat hair and smooth skin. He was beautifully dressed, Lottie noted, in loose, crushed-looking clothing Lottie guessed to be ridiculously expensive. He and Lottie were drinking decaf, Emily and Elizabeth tea, and the children had soft drinks.
The children seemed chastened to Lottie, scared. They sat silently and listened to the adults. Little Emily pulled her legs up on to the couch – you could fully see her white underpants – and leaned against Elizabeth, sucking her thumb.
For reasons that were unclear to Lottie, Emily was explaining at great length about the flowers on the living room rug, which had come from her family. That they had been part of a punishment ritual when she or her sisters misbehaved: they had to sit silently on a rose for a designated number of minutes while their father read the paper. ‘Oh, I remember him as clearly as if he were alive today,’ she said. ‘The way the paper would drop as soon as we began to wiggle or be the slightest bit restless, and Father would say, “Emily, hold that rose.” Emily, hold that rose,’ she echoed. ‘I used to say it myself later, still do, sometimes, when I’m impatient or have to endure something: “Emily, hold that rose.” ’
Was there any situation, Lottie wondered, that Emily couldn’t talk her way through? She took another bite of the cake the two Emilys had made. Her portion was iced in a violent purple, little Emily’s choice for half the frosting on the cake’s top. Others had a yolky yellow. She wondered if her teeth were staining.
Now Elizabeth was telling the children about how she had been disciplined: her father had set her to memorize passages of poetry, the more serious the infraction, the longer the passage.
‘Bummer,’ Michael said; and Lottie thought instantly of Ryan earlier this afternoon, his anger at her, hers at him.
‘How ’bout you, Daddy?’ Jeffrey asked. There was shy eagerness in his voice, a remnant of his summer’s sorrow. ‘What was your punishment?’
Lawrence had an odd smile on his face as he looked from one of his children to another. ‘My father beat us,’ he said quietly. ‘With his belt.’ He looked at Lottie then. It felt to her as though her eyes must be open too wide, and she looked away quickly. The room seemed to have lurched slightly.
‘Oh, Lawrence, how terrible!’ Emily cried. ‘Surely it isn’t true – that lovely man, I so enjoyed him, to think of his raising his hand to you, to any of you. It just breaks my heart, dear, I wish you hadn’t told me.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Lawrence had said; but Lottie could see that he wasn’t, not a bit.
Now he pulls on the cigarette, and Lottie can hear the air slide between his lips. ‘You knew the sitter,’ he asks quietly, finally.
‘A little. Her name was Jessica.’
‘It’s a tough thing. For your brother too,’ he says. Then, lightly, ‘How’s he taking it?’
‘I don’t know, really.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just I haven’t been able to . . . he hasn’t been home since last night. I’m a little worried, actually. I’ve tried him on and off all day. Right up until I came over to Emily’s house tonight.’ Lottie had left another message just before she crossed the street. ‘And the call I made here. When we first got here.’ She lifts her helpless hands to indicate that he wasn’t there. ‘But he’s called in at his bookstore. So I have to assume he’s just walking it off. Or drinking it off. Or avoiding me. Or all of the above.’
‘He’ll turn up. He’ll turn up.’
Lottie feels, oddly, a sense of comfort in this. ‘What makes you think so?’
‘Just . . . there was something last night. There was lots of nervous tension in the room. Lots of life, in some way, when the cops were there with your brother and so forth. He was upset, sure, but not . . . not depressed. I thought, to be honest, he might have been on something. But Elizabeth said no, he doesn’t. That’s when I asked her whether he was balling the sitter, actually.’
‘And she said he might have been.’
‘She said she didn’t know, but that he might have been. Right.’
‘Well, he wasn’t. That’s all. He wasn’t.’
‘He wasn’t.’ It’s a question.
‘He wasn’t “balling the sitter.” Okay?’
‘Okay, I believe you.’
He puts the cigarette out. A long but somehow comfortable silence falls in the oddly lighted room. Lottie is startled when he speaks again. ‘Tell me the hard part.’
‘What?’
‘Of your summer. You said it was hard.’
Lottie lifts her hands. ‘Won’t this do?’ She means Jessica, Cameron.
‘But you implied it was hard before this.’
‘I suppose. But I think I also said I didn’t want to talk about it.’
‘It’s funny.’ He waits for her to respond, but she doesn’t. He purses his lips and then continues anyway. ‘Elizabeth portrayed you as so happily married. But I don’t think that’s the case, is it, Lottie?’
‘I really don’t want to talk about it.’
He holds up one of his hands so Lottie can see the palm. ‘Okay, okay.’ After a minute he asks conversationally, ‘How old’s your son?’
‘He’s twenty.’
‘You look young to have a son that old.’
‘Well, thanks. I was twenty-three when I had him. Not so young actually.’
‘You married young, though.’
‘I suppose so. I was twenty. Is that young?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘How long?’
‘How long what?’
‘How long were you married?’
‘Oh, only a few years. We split up a couple of months after Ryan was born.’
‘So you were single awhile.’
‘I was single for almost twenty years.’ Lottie has said this in a loud voice that surprises her.
‘You seem single now.’
‘Oh, come on.’
‘No, you give off single vibes.’
‘Are you coming on to me now?’
‘Maybe.’ He laughs, a bitter sound. ‘Maybe I’m just pissed.’
‘Why?’
‘Because everyone’s being so mysterious about what’s been going on here.’ He moves his feet in the patch of light. ‘So maybe I’m just needling you, Lottie. Maybe coming on a little, but just trying to get to you, basically. You can ignore me. Not – you should know – that I don’t find you attractive. I’ve always liked your type.’
‘I suppose I should say thanks.’
‘I would understand if you didn’t.’
‘I suppose I should ask you what you think my type is.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘What the hell,’ she says, trying to make her voice light. ‘I can take it.’
He’s smiling at her, as though they’ve agreed to something. ‘You’re one of those small, high-energy women,’ he says. ‘Narrow body, wide hips, loves to screw.’
Lottie is shocked, though she shouldn’t be. ‘That’s a type?’ she asks finally.
‘You tell me,’ he says. ‘You were single all those years, you must know yourself pretty well. Am I right?’
Lottie is smiling back at him now. She shakes her head. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘this feels to me like one of the more cynical interludes I’ve participated in.’
‘I’ll go, anytime you tell me to.’
‘That’s what I mean: I haven’t told you to.’ She lifts her hands, gestures. ‘This beautiful young woman is dead, my brother is out there somewhere, somehow suffering with it. And you and I are sitting here, toying idly – maybe toying theoretically is more like it – with various quasi-sexual ideas.’
‘Why do you suppose we’re doing that?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. Well, you, I’d guess, because you’re pissed, as you say, about what you don’t understand. But maybe you’re angry too, just that you’ve come back.’ He is smiling again. ‘She left you. You chased her. On the great seesaw of love, she’s up now, and you’re down.’
He nods. ‘All right. I’ll say all right to that. But how do you explain yourself? Why are you playing the game with me?’
Lottie sighs. ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m riding my own seesaw. With my husband, I mean. The stuff I’m not going to talk about. Plus . . . well, wouldn’t it be a kind of revenge on Elizabeth, to fool around with you?’
‘Revenge for what?’
‘For having had an easier life. For any number of small moments of pain. Insults. For living across the street from this house in that house.’
‘You don’t need revenge on Elizabeth for that.’
‘Oh, I know. Water over the dam, under the bridge. Spilled milk, and so on.’
‘Plus she’s already in agony over your success.’
Lottie realizes abruptly that she has known this about Elizabeth.
‘You are aware, of course, that that’s the biggest fuck-you you’ve got going?’
‘Yes.’ She nods. ‘Yes, I am aware of that. As a matter of fact, it’s given me some real pleasure this summer, I admit it. And I do feel that, some quiver of that, every time I see my name in print. Succeeding is an angry thing to do. For some people. For me. For you too, I suspect. I suspect, in fact, that that’s one of the few ways you and I do understand one another.’
They sit looking at each other for a long moment. Then he stands up abruptly, steps across the stripe of lighted air, bends over Lottie, and kisses her. Lottie lifts her face to him, she kisses him back, but she does not stand up, she does not move her hands, which are enlaced around the jelly jar full of wine. His tongue comes into her mouth.
Which of them decides it first, that it won’t happen? It would be hard to say. If she had responded. If he were more insistent, if he’d touched her body. If Elizabeth weren’t waiting across the street. If Richard Lester or Ryan couldn’t come through the door at any minute. By the time he lifts his face from Lottie’s, though, they both know it won’t. But they smile at each other in a kind of complicity even about this.
He steps back across the room, picks up his glass of vodka from the arm of his chair, and gulps it. Then he holds the glass out to Lottie. She stands up and takes it. It seems the final part of some exchange. ‘I should be getting back, I guess,’ he says.
‘Yes, I suppose you should,’ she answers.
But at the door to the dining room – to the light – he pauses and gestures at the messy table, the books, the papers. ‘You working on some new story?’
‘An article; yes,’ she says.
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about love, actually.’
‘You’re reading books to learn about love?’
‘Well, that plus extensive man-in-the-street interviews, of course.’
He leans against the doorjamb. ‘Ask me. I’ll be your man in the street.’
‘Umm. Okay. Love. Sir: A: Do you think it’s yearning, love? Or fulfillment? B: Is it knowing someone, or not knowing them? C: Is it having someone, or not having them? Then we come to the subquestions. Can you know someone? Can you, as it were, have someone?’
He is shaking his head. The gleaming, polished hair stays perfectly in place. ‘These are not useful questions.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they don’t get at the real issue, and the real issue is, do you want love at the center of your life? And I think women want it to be at the center and men don’t. That’s all.’ He holds his small, pretty hands out.
Peculiarly, Lottie is disappointed. Did she think he was going to reveal something to her, then? She did, in fact, she realizes. She thought he might have brought her news. She feels a jolt of contempt for herself; and then for him. ‘But weren’t you, in fact, putting it at the center when you held on to your girlfriend?’ she asks. ‘When you forced Elizabeth’s hand?’
‘Not at all. I told Elizabeth it wasn’t going to last forever, that it was just a kind of craziness. I never forced her hand. I never said I loved the woman. I didn’t love her, as a matter of fact. And if Elizabeth had been able to believe me, she’d never have gone through – she’d never have put the children through – what they’ve gone through this summer.’ He sounds angry for the first time, and Lottie feels strangely as though she’s scored some sort of victory over him.
‘But she sure would have gone through something else, wouldn’t she?’ she needles. ‘Sitting at home, waiting for it to be over. Maybe, in fact, she speeded that up by leaving. Do you think?’
His lips purse in a dismissive expression.
‘I mean,’ she says, ‘let me put this situation to you: How easy would you be about being just a part of Elizabeth’s life, if another part of her life happened to be someone who was fucking her into oblivion daily?’
‘It means something different.’
‘Say what?’
‘It means something different to a woman. For the very reason, specifically because, women put love at the center of their lives, it means something different when they have an affair.’ He believes this, Lottie sees.
‘Lame,’ she says. ‘I’m not even going to hammer you over the head with the overwhelming number of examples that can be offered of men who absolutely put love, want love, at the center of their lives. I’m just going to say that your argument is circular. And lame.’ She turns and steps into the darker part of the hallway, toward the front door. ‘Pathetic. Retrograde.’ She opens the door, and he comes and stands opposite her in its frame.
He is grinning. ‘You didn’t buy it, I take it.’
‘I wouldn’t even bid on it,’ Lottie says.
He bends close to her; his breath warms her face. ‘Well, thanks for the information, Lottie,’ he whispers.
‘What information?’
‘Exactly,’ he says.
His hand slides across the back of her neck, inside the fabric of her dress. He pulls her forward and kisses her again, roughly this time, maybe because it has been decided nothing more will happen, maybe because she’s been snotty to him. Then he’s gone, the slip, slip of his fancy shoes crossing the porch, going down the stairs and across the street. The night air makes Lottie’s hair tremble; she catches her breath. He’s disappeared on to Elizabeth’s lawn when she shuts the door.
She goes back into the kitchen and looks at the clock that is part of the rounded back panel of the stove. It makes a constant, effortful, grinding noise, which Lottie has come to think of this summer as the very sound of time passing. Only ten o’clock. She planned to run after the evening at Elizabeth’s, but now she’s had the wine, she’d better not.
She feels a wave of self-disgust. She blames it immediately on drinking when she hadn’t intended to, on not running for two nights in a row. And then she laughs out loud. ‘And how ’bout almost balling Larry?’ she says. ‘How ’bout almost doing the nasty, honey bun?’
Lottie rubs her neck and frowns. What was it? What could it have been that brought her so close? Maybe some wish to seal the end of her love for Jack? Because it would surely have done that, wouldn’t it?
Or maybe it was just the sense of familiarity with Larry. He’s like a half-dozen guys she’s slept with – for no good reason, except that she wanted them at the moment. She thinks again on the tough way he held his cigarette, of the way he seemed pleased to announce that his father beat him. She liked all that. Cheap taste, she thinks. White trash.
White trash. She remembers that this was what Al called her, Al, the roommate of Derek’s, whom she’d slept with first, who seemed to understand how Lottie felt about herself before she did. White trash: he made a joke of it. Of everything. Of sex.
Al. He was a biochemist. He’d disappear for two or three days at a stretch, running experiments that had to be continuously monitored, and then Lottie would answer the knock on her door at two in the morning, or four in the afternoon, and he would be standing there grinning, his fly unzipped, his penis hanging out.
He called his penis Al too. ‘Al would like to go swimming,’ he’d say, nudging her with it. He embarrassed her. She felt he was irreverent. She wanted love and sex to be elegant, and Al was not elegant. She misunderstood him too. She thought his long absences, his seemingly cavalier attitude, meant he didn’t care for her.
When Derek asked her out during one of Al’s experiments, she was glad to go. Derek was a poet; he had long, carefully combed blond hair. He wore Brooks Brothers shirts in pale colors that reminded silly Lottie of Gatsby. By the time Al reappeared, it was over. He walked in on her and Derek, actually, embracing in the kitchen. ‘Well, all my friends!’ he said. ‘What’s for dinner?’ Was that the response of an elegant person? Lottie thought not, at the time.
Years later, long after Lottie was divorced, he’d looked her up when he was at a conference at the University of Chicago. He was married by then, to another biochemist, and they were both teaching at Cal Tech. He had a good life, a nice life, he told Lottie. He showed her a photograph of his kids, taken by a jewel-blue pool in a sunlit California backyard. They squinted into the bright light. There were palm trees behind them.
Later in the evening, drunk, they mildly kissed for a while. Al got teary about the past. He said he’d loved her then. He asked her why, how it could have happened that she’d chosen Derek.
Lottie was teary too. For what? For her youth, over before she felt it? For all the wrong choices she’d made? For her tiny poolless apartment across from the el in this gray and frigid city? ‘Oh, Al,’ she cried. ‘I had such a cold heart, you wouldn’t believe it.’
In his kindness, Al had protested. ‘You only think it was cold, Lottie,’ he said, and they both had a good cry and swore they’d stay in touch and so forth, which they didn’t do, of course.
And ain’t this your cold little Lottie revisited? Lottie thinks now.
‘I should lock the door,’ she says aloud. And she goes back into the dark front hall and flips the little knob on the lock to the right. Closing the barn door. She thinks about Larry again. Elizabeth’s husband. His kiss. Why had she let him in? She licks her lips. Her mouth still tastes faintly of cigarette. She goes into Ryan’s bathroom, puts a half inch of toothpaste on his worn, frazzled-looking toothbrush, and scrubs her teeth. The new filling on her tooth twinges, just slightly, and after Lottie spits out the toothpaste, she bites down hard on it, to feel it again.
She comes back into the dining room and stands in the doorway, surveying the mess she has sometimes thought of as welcoming. I should do a little work, she thinks. Dutifully she sits down.
Then suddenly she stands up again. She goes upstairs and puts on her running shoes, then comes back down, gets her keys, and goes outside.
Though she is walking, she slowly traces the pattern of right and left turns she usually makes when she runs. The streets are emptied, and she walks on the smooth asphalt instead of the brick sidewalks, so she won’t have to think about where she’s putting her feet, the bumps and sudden gaps in the brick. It’s ten-thirty by now, and there aren’t many lights on downstairs in the big wooden houses. Lottie usually runs earlier, midevening, when kids are still playing in the streets on certain blocks, when people are on their porches or in their yards, and lights are just coming on in the living rooms, the kitchens, you can catch quick glimpses of all the variations of family life. Tonight everything seems desolate to her.
A light rain is beginning to patter in the leaves above her, and Lottie feels a drop or two. She stops in front of a lighted window on Hilliard Street, one of those many-paned windows that reach from the floor to within a few feet of the ceiling. A couple sit on a couch with their backs to Lottie, their heads and shoulders rising above the curved frame of the couch. Each head is bent forward – they are apparently reading – each lost in whatever universe his book holds. They sit about three feet apart on the couch, infinitely companionable, it seems to Lottie, but separate. How does this happen? How do you get that? she wonders.
She hears footsteps approaching in the distance, voices, and she makes herself move on. She passes a young couple, the girl talking that idiotic young talk: ‘I was like, duh, you know. I mean, I was like, so out of it, then. When I think of it now, I’m like, wow, was I ever so young?’
Yes, my dear, you were. You, like, are.
At the corner, Lottie stops. She’s been headed for the river, but the rain is falling harder now. She turns and walks back up Hilliard on the other side of the street. At the window she pauses again. The woman’s head is lifted now; she is turned to look at the man. She sits, impassively staring at him, and Lottie stands outside, staring at her, getting drenched. She’s aware of this, suddenly, the absurdity of it, and she starts to walk again, quickly this time, in the direction of her mother’s house. She’s like some creature from outer space, she thinks. Some Martian, reading her books, staring in through windows, trying to figure out what it means to be human. What is this thing, called love? She jogs a little, humming, then slows again to a fast walk.
And after all, how can you tell, how can you know? Maybe what looks like peace in the living room is anything but. She stares at him with love, Lottie had thought. But why not hate? Or a sort of shocked indifference: you look up from a book that’s full of feeling and importance to you and encounter a face, a self-contained and alien face, reading its book. Maybe you think, Who is this person whom I live alongside of? For whom I feel this sudden nothing? A couple lives together happily for twenty-five years, and then the man runs off with a woman exactly the age his wife was when she married him. They live together unhappily for twenty-five years, and when she dies, he’s besotted with grief. ‘Besotted,’ Lottie says aloud.
Lottie remembers that one of her closest friends, the editor who’d endured her obsessions about Jack, told her she’d been married for seven years to a man who wanted to live close to the earth, who rejected civilization, filthy lucre. She said that for all that time she bought into it, absolutely. They built their own house, on difficult rocky land miles from anywhere. They had no electricity, no running water. They used a wood-burning stove for heat and to cook on. Diane had kept goats for milk. She made cheese, she put up quantities of vegetables and fruits each harvest season. She sewed all their clothes.
And one day she walked the four miles down to the highway and hitched a ride to Denver, and it was over. She said if anyone had asked her the day before whether she would ever think of leaving, she would have told the person he was out of his mind.
The lights are off downstairs at Elizabeth’s house, but her bedroom windows are glowing through the old, parchment-colored shades. Lottie thinks of that marriage, the way Elizabeth described it in her letter to Cameron: steady, full of devotion. Can that be true? And if it is, does it matter that Larry has affairs? Does it matter that Lottie has almost slept with him the day after he’s returned for Elizabeth?
Who can know about anyone else’s marriage, really? Maybe Jack and Evelyn weren’t so happy, even when she was whole. Maybe when he played the clarinet, it drove her wild, she went through the house, slamming doors; and he pretended not to notice. Played louder, in fact. Maybe every now and then he wished she’d get a job, get a life. Maybe he came home sometimes and saw the carefully-addressed invitations to the carefully-orchestrated dinner parties stacked on the little burled maple table in the front hall, waiting to be mailed; and wished he’d married a different kind of person.
As she reaches into the dining room to turn off the light on her way upstairs, Lottie suddenly thinks of a passage she read a long time ago in Anna Karenina, a passage about how arbitrary our decisions about marriage, about whom we should love, are. It connects to all this, somehow, to everything she’s been thinking about. She squats by the stacks of books on the floor and finds Anna Karenina. She flips through the pages until she comes upon it.
But it isn’t quite what she was thinking of. It isn’t apt. It describes a moment when two minor characters have gone for a walk to collect mushrooms. She is sure he will propose; and he has decided that he will, today. And there comes a moment as they move toward each other when it seems this will happen. But it doesn’t. And then, because it doesn’t at this moment, it becomes clear to both of them that it never will.
Puzzled, Lottie puts the book down. She turns off the light and goes upstairs. She’s wet, and cold. Her bedroom window is open, and a raw breeze is blowing in. She shuts it and peels off her clothes. Water has beaded on the floor in front of the window. She wipes it with a T-shirt, puts on her robe, and goes down the hall to the bathroom.
She lets the hot water pelt her back, not even soaping herself. She turns and feels it beat against her breasts – the sensitive, radiated flesh – against her belly. She looks down. Her wet pubic hair is pulled to a point between her legs by the water, like the point of an old-fashioned valentine heart. The water makes a jittery dotted line down from it. She leans her head back, shuts her eyes, and lets the water strike her face, puddle in her open mouth.
Then she moans aloud suddenly, opens her eyes. She’s remembered: she first thought of the passage from Tolstoy not when she was pondering the mysteries of decisions and feelings in marriage, in love; but earlier, when Lawrence – Larry – kissed her. When she, or he, or the moment itself, decided that they wouldn’t sleep together. They wouldn’t ball each other. Thinking of the difference between that trashy scene and the beautiful, sad passage in Tolstoy, Lottie twists her head back and forth sharply. Then she reaches down and pushes the stiff knob above the faucet. The shower stops; after a second the water courses out of the faucet. And Lottie stands there wet and shivering, watching the thick silver ribbon of water divide and splash over the tops of her feet.