Every Day (10 page)

The idea that the end to this waiting is nearer cheers me.

This is the sort of scene Fowler would plunder.

“You know,” he said when we were at Hastings, before we were discovered, “all those things you think about your parents, all that raw, awful business, will be very useful. It’ll fly out of you, mutate, become something.”

He was working on a film about the tenacity of the Southern belle. He’d been taking liberties with weekend dorm duty, ignoring it completely, sneaking me off campus immediately following Saturday morning classes to the train station. We’d be in Manhattan by late afternoon, bypass my parents in favor of La Guardia, fly to Charleston and drive two hours to stay overnight with his parents, J.T. and Evelyn, in their pillared house that gave onto vine- and shrub-smothered
property. Fowler told her I was a film student at N.Y.U. and she smiled with vague interest.

“Jimmy always finds interesting girls,” she said.

To her I was a short, dark Northerner, possibly Jewish, another of her son’s experiments, her ambitious son who needed sexual sustenance along the way to his impressive future. She was forgiving of him, but of no one else. Really, the sun rose and set on Fowler. And, I was horrified to note, he returned the obsession. Mama, he’d call her, and tell her how fine she looked, how well rested, how dazzling in whatever new or revitalized outfit she’d chosen for the day. She dressed as if for cocktails every morning, late summer cocktails, my mother might have said. Whites and pastels and stockings she ordered by the dozen from Gump’s or Neiman Marcus. They were hazy as summer dusk and shimmered slightly, making her legs look young and cared for. Having crested fifty, she had barely a wrinkle. She was indeed cared for. There were three or four black servants (my father would have risen up in outrage and left upon seeing them; my mother would have wrung her hands in apology and followed him out), and there was Fowler Sr.

He was a lawyer, tall, with Irish coloring, T-square shoulders, a craggy historical face, like one of the older movie stars, O’Toole or Peck. Sometimes, when Fowler and I were making our sad love up in his boyish bedroom, I’d imagine Fowler Sr.—J.T.—in his place. It was dangerous and exciting for me to do that, and it enhanced the actual danger in our leaving Hastings together. I’d substitute whatever Fowler said for what I thought J.T. would say to me: “mouth” instead of “sweet,” “baby” instead of “Leigh,” “come” instead of “yes.” At the elaborate Sunday breakfast table, where the four of us lazed until well after noon when Fowler and I would have to leave to make our various connections, I could not look J.T. in the eye for the power of my imagining.

“Let me get you more coffee,” he’d say to me, and I’d bring to that, “Let me take you,” or just “Let me.”

Fowler loved it. One time, while he and his mother flirted the morning away, tossing local gossip back and forth, I let J.T. get me coffee, walk me under the kudzu, point out types of birds and shrubbery. I had just figured out that I was pregnant, not with the help of chemicals, but on my own. I knew from the way my stomach was fluttering, from the separation and safety I felt because of it. The fluttering traveled, up into my throat, down through my thighs and knees to my feet, where I felt it telling me, “You’re different now. You’re beautiful, you cannot be contained. You are too much for any one man.”

I took a bad step, into some mud. I didn’t fall, just slipped in slow motion, and J.T. caught me. He had me by both elbows.

“Will we see you next weekend?” he said, as if it were easy. As if we came from two towns over.

“I hope so,” I said, looking back at him for a change.

He kissed my forehead, and we stood still for a minute, pressed against each other in that landscape I never dreamed I’d see and which I suddenly loved because of him, not Fowler.

He said, “You be careful, Leigh.”

I always wanted to take Isaac to him, but I didn’t want to run into her. I didn’t want her withering commentary anywhere near my son because he wouldn’t have been able to fathom its cruelty, to ignore it.

Back we walked to the foreign civility of the house, J.T. at times guiding me by the elbow in instances of mud or steepness.

The breakfast room was empty. Fowler and Evelyn were in the sitting room. (I couldn’t help loving the house, its sitting rooms, servants’ wings on each of three floors.) They were going through drawers, looking at documents. Evelyn
was putting papers in piles, first showing each as a treasure of family history. I learned that she was submitting Fowler’s genealogical papers to several patriotic societies, which couldn’t have better fed his need for nuggets for the film. His take on the Southern belle, that she was by no means a dying breed but was instead alive and biting and scratching to keep her place against any
nouvelle arrivée
daring to attempt entry into the Southern upper class, would be revealed through interviews with debutantes and their mothers, all of them unsuspecting as to his purpose to render them idiotic and remote. He’d do the interviews in the summer, leaving me in a sweltering apartment for days on end. He was determined to expose how such a creature as the Southern belle could thrive in contemporary society, which seems so hostile to exclusion, the answer being: by exploiting the downtrodden, by persisting in outlandish comfort habits, by literally taming the hell out of their men.

I had one on her there. She hadn’t tamed hers. But with Evelyn around, Fowler had his hands full. I may as well not have been there at all, so it was wonderful to have J.T.’s occasional focus. Every time there was a polite opportunity I kissed him and he’d give me a squeeze.

Fowler said on the plane, “J.T.’s got his eye on you.”

His amusement indicated that this was not unusual, for J.T. to take a shine to one of his women. I was more upset about J.T. walking Fowler’s other women through the kudzu than I was about Fowler having them in the first place.

And Evelyn’s got her eye on you,
I wanted to say but couldn’t. You didn’t do that with Southern men, I was discovering. Maybe you didn’t do that with any man, take him to task about his mother.

So I just said, “He’s a handsome man.”

“It’s no wonder Mama’s got her talons out.” He was looking away, entering the private tragedy that was to mutate and become something public in the film,
House Afire,
although
only a few hundred college students saw it, as far as I know. He completed it the summer we lived in New York. We showcased it up and down the East Coast in the fall, shortly before I had Isaac. Because of it, because we were peddling it and not some other work of his, I always felt Evelyn was between us, pulling at him, not even entertaining the notion that he could have a true connection with another woman. If there were anyone to blame for this mess, if blame had a rightful place among the forces that have synchronized to bring us, me and my husband and my children, here, I’d put a little of it on her.

“Jimmy’s got a new girl.” As long as she could keep saying this into her telephone, keep believing in the turnover, I couldn’t be a threat.
Jimmy’s got a new girl pregnant!
I wanted to scream.
Get over yourself!

The film bombed. No one cared. Why would they have, watching rich debs bemoaning their loneliness and boredom, their quicksand marriages, their empty, elegant lives? But Fowler had conviction. Enough not to pay attention, to go on working and assuring himself, through the obsession, an escape from me and his baby. I don’t think Evelyn has been told about Isaac. And since she would only rely on him to ring her, she didn’t have a phone number for us. She never had occasion to call and hear infant wailing in the background or wake us from desperate naps or know that I was Fowler’s, that Isaac was ours, that for a brief time we had a home.

What he’d be charged about here, in my home with Simon, is the oppression, the suspension of will, the allowance of the disturbance to tyrannize rather than enliven the one who has acted in good faith to her own nature.
Rage!
he’d urge.
Go ahead. Sharpen your teeth. Find out how deep the hurt goes. Come what will.

Fowler has always known luxury, has trusted in excess. But I have to do this my own way. Short of screaming out
that I liked it, fucking Fowler, that it stirred me, moved me out of the haze that’s settled between me and Simon, I can only dream of action. I can only imagine other women in my place, know that they’d behave more resolutely, more admirably. Gillette wouldn’t give staying a thought. Kirsten would go on fucking Fowler in secret. Pam? Who would know anymore? Catherine, I know what she’d do. She’d go find him and bring him here. She’d sleep with him in the garden.

•   •   •

Daisy’s door is wide open. She’s asleep on her side, her hands enmeshed in a pink blanket I knitted. I squirrel some diapers and clothes into my shoulder bag and lift her up. Her weight stuns me. She settles her head just below my chin, and I remember playing the violin as a child, having to pad the chin rest with my father’s handkerchiefs to get the instrument to fit the space offered by my long neck, struggling unsuccessfully to soften the violin, to make the whole process of my playing it enjoyable. In her heavy sleep, Daisy finds the right place for her head, the place I could never find for the violin.

Without incident, I get us out on the front porch, where the open stroller rigged with diaper bag waits, and we’re out of there, walking in a cool wind to the train. You would think that a person such as myself, doing what I’m doing, would know enough not to allow herself to think of the biggest heartbreak. But I allow it, and she is everywhere, in the moving branches, the still houses, the long gray road, the hill: Jane, my Jane, my record keeper, spine of our family. Again, unthinkable.

•   •   •

At the station I park us as far as is possible from a hissing radiator, something someone ought to attend to, now that it’s summer. Daisy stretches luxuriously in half sleep, and I panic that she’ll wake in this well-lit, unpeopled purgatory
of a place, where the ticketmaster doesn’t darken the door until after seven and it’s up to the solitary commuter to purchase tickets in book form or just singly from the conductor once on the train and zooming into Manhattan. To anyone I do not know, it would appear I’ve stolen this baby.

“Waff?” she says.

Waffles. She wants waffles. I unbuckle her, draw her up.

“We’ll get you waffles. When we get to Grandma’s.”

I fish out half a stack of Ritz crackers from the diaper bag, then carry her to the water fountain to fill her bottle.

“Waddey.”

I drink too, with a vicious thirst, as if the more water I get down, the easier my future will be.

We settle back into our niche by the radiator. Daisy eats happily. She shakes her bottle.

“Jay?” she asks me.

I hug her. “Yes,” I say, but no sound comes out.

•   •   •

I have forgotten to mention Paris.

After my expulsion from Hastings, Fowler and I went there. J.T. and Evelyn had given him some money for graduate school, so we used some of that. In Paris I learned to ride trains the way I’m riding this one, aching with love for my traveling companion and with sadness for those absent, to places threatening in their decay, their beauty.

Our first train was out of de Gaulle airport. We were sleepless, speeding on coffee, taking in as much of the whizzing in-between of suburb and city as we could. The Défense stood out, monolithic, horrible in contrast to the miles of clay roofing of nearly all of Paris. It was June, and I was four months along with Isaac, just over the nausea, and I felt no exhaustion, only the fluttering stomach that could have been his heart beating or just anticipation of all that lay ahead: Europe, the birth, the baby, a lifetime of Fowler and joint-effort films. The only sadness was for my parents and their
aging, their being out of this stage of life and having made peace with their particular estrangement.

Fowler said that the tiles of the clay roofs, long, rust-colored half-cylinders, were, before French roofing became industrialized, molded on women’s thighs.

“What,” I said.

“Really!” he told me. “The long legs of beautiful women who sat under the wet clay until it dried.”

“Beautiful, patient women,” I said.

“Yes,” said he, squeezing my hand, leaning back in his seat, exhaling satisfaction.

I had a baby with a man who could almost convince me of a story like that. I had two more with a man who would take in those roofs without making mention of them. My mistake: I love both of these men.

Riding this train, my youngest draped over me in silent wonder, the gray Hudson on our right, attempts at permanence on our left, I come to this: I have always been this person, the one I am, who sees this way, whose actions connote a vision of the world as enormous, capricious, ultimately sacrosanct. The current leave-taking alters none of this for me.

Later that morning I sat in a double bed in a pension on the left bank, drinking espresso and crying behind a section of
Le Monde,
willing myself to stop, failing.

Now tears darken my daughter’s fuchsia sweatshirt, and I feign a coughing fit. She shifts against me, a familiar turning, as of the fetus in the later months, dragging me back. She’s a perfect size for this posture, and she turns her head so that we both face the river, our cheeks aligned, and we ride into the city, watching.

Mother is upon us as I push open the door (I always carry a key), stroller on one arm, Daisy on the other. Of course, instant alarm.

“Leigh! My goodness!”

It seems to me that a woman who can manage to be in a skirt and blouse by seven in the morning and has no office to get to should be able to field an interruption like this one without so much as raising her voice. But there is the other, umbilical, consideration

She takes Daisy, whose delight is immediate.

“I was just on my way out for the paper,” she explains frantically, “but let me get you some coffee and breakfast. What on earth is going on. Poor Daisy, is she all right. Where are Jane and Isaac.”