For Love (10 page)

He turns to her, and here it is, the suddenly blank face, the eyes a little more hooded than usual:
Do I know you? Have we been introduced?
After a moment he says in a small, tight voice,
‘It’s just a wee figure of speech, Lottie.’ He stands up and brushes crumbs off his jeans. ‘A figure of speech, is all. Keys inside?’

‘Yes. On my worktable in the dining room.’

‘Okay. Later. Thanks for lunch,’ he says coldly.

Lottie moves out of his way so he can open the screen. ‘Okeydoke,’ she says.

After she hears the door shut behind him at the front of the house, she picks up the rest of the lunch debris and goes inside. She throws the paper away, sets the glasses and bottle down, and
then she stands, looking around the kitchen. Suddenly it seems pointless, all this sifting through what is, after all, trash. The broken bits of dishes and glass still lying on the foor make it
seem especially so. She gets out a big trash bag and begins wiping the counters and table clean, sliding everything in. She fills two bags. She sweeps the floor free of the glistening bits of glass
and china and ties the bags up, sets them in the living room until trash day.

Then she goes upstairs to change into painting clothes. Richard Lester has left his door open, and she can’t help looking in as she passes his room on the way back down. He’s begun
to pack for his move, she’s glad to see. There are liquor cartons filled with books and papers lined up against the wall.

Outside again, as she opens the bulkhead and begins getting the primer and brush out, she’s thinking of Ryan’s face when she chided him, his sudden coldness. How quickly he can
change!

Didn’t she start it, though? If it were anyone else, would ‘bummer’ have offended her so? Didn’t she, after all, act like a mother first? Of course he resented her tone,
her telling him what to do.
I own you
, that tone said. And what he was saying with his coldness was simply: No, you don’t. Why should she feel hurt when he acted like a grown-up son,
too big to be told what to do? He was, after all.

But hadn’t she spoken – she’s stirring the primer now – as she would to anyone who chose such an inadequate word? Who used language so callously? ‘Aaah!’ she
cries suddenly. ‘Murk!’

She climbs the ladder carefully, carrying her hook, her little bucket of primer, her brush. She hooks the handle of the can to a rung of the ladder.

She starts to paint the patches of wood trim Ryan has scraped bare. The primer is creamy and thick as she strokes it on. Its sweetly chemical smell combines with the odor of the sanded wood and
the sound of the leaves shifting in the moving air to soothe her. Her mind begins to slide loosely over the events of the last day and a half. After a few minutes, she’s thinking of Jessica
again. Picturing her. Jessica, as she imagines her in the ambulance, wrapped in white, the bloodstain widening under her head. Then Jessica as she looked that night when Lottie turned the light on
– the blindly frowning face, the long, beautiful body.

Later she and Ryan had argued about it.

‘But in
my
bed?’ Lottie asked. She was sitting at the dining room table. She’d been trying to work.

‘Have you looked at my bed?’ Ryan asked. ‘It’s about a foot across.’

‘Still,’ Lottie said. ‘It is my bed. It bothers me. A lot.’

‘Should I have asked?’ he said sarcastically. ‘Or maybe we should have talked about it when we chose rooms. “Who do you think’s gonna get laid more this summer, me
or you?” ’ Lottie flinched, and he lowered his strident voice. ‘Come on.’ He shifted his weight. He was standing in the doorway. ‘You just took the big bed, Mom. No
discussion.’

‘Well, I’m the grownup.’

‘Mom, you’re not
the
grownup.’ She didn’t answer. ‘I could argue that I’m bigger,’ he said. ‘I could argue that I’m sexually active
and you aren’t.’ He shrugged. ‘This summer anyway.’

Lottie fiddled with her papers. Then she said, ‘This isn’t the point, Ryan. You hardly know this girl, that’s the point. The night before, you were out with someone
else.’

‘
This
is the point? Listen to yourself, Mom. Listen to what you’re saying’

She didn’t answer him.

‘Do you know how old I am?’ he asked more gently.

‘Of course I do,’ she said.

He lifted his hands as if there was nothing further to talk about. But she didn’t look at him, so he started again. ‘Let me ask you, Lottie: you’ve never slept with someone
just to have some good old meaningless sex?’

She stirred uncomfortably. ‘What I’ve done or not done is none of your business.’

‘Why not?’

She looked over at him sharply. ‘Because I was discreet. Because I didn’t do it in front of you.’

‘Mom.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You were away for the weekend. And you didn’t bother to call me. To say, “Oh, gee whiz, Ryan, I’m coming home.” ’ His
face was like a nine- or ten-year-old’s in his eagerness to make his point. She saw that yes, he was right. But wasn’t she right too?

She has finished the area within her reach. There’s just a little bare patch beyond it at the upper edge of the window frame, and then she can lower the ladder. She yanks the ladder away
from the house, leaning slightly to the right, to walk it over a few feet at the top. Ryan has showed her this trick, this way of saving trips up and down when you want only a little more reach.
Under her hands the ladder slides; and then goes on sliding. Lottie squawks, her body convulses, she jerks the ladder back violently, and it stops, it stops almost as soon as it started. She stands
clinging to its side rails. The bucket swings wildly on its hook below her, the yard blurs to a green shadow down there.
Not me!
she thinks. She rests her head along the side rail. Her heart
drums irregularly as she shoves the picture of herself, the fall, the damage, out of her mind.
Not me
. And with the cold metal on her cheek, she closes her eyes and suddenly sees Jessica
stepping forward into the headlights, so young, so sure the car must stop for her, of course, for her.

Then slowly, carefully, her foot blindly caressing each rung before she shifts her weight lower, she climbs down the ladder to the squalor of her parents’ teeming, overgrown garden.

It was late in May, almost two months before the accident that killed Jessica, when Cameron had called Lottie to ask if she could come and help with the house. He was
apologetic about his request, and it might well have seemed to him that the timing was bad: Lottie had been married for only five months. As it happened, though, she was grateful, glad for the
possibility of getting away. And Jack, who knew her by then very well, seemed to hear that in her voice. At any rate, his eyes never left her face as she told him she was going; he looked as though
he was trying to read through her words.

They were still in the kitchen at his house – their house together now: Lottie had given up her apartment the previous December, a few weeks before the wedding. Megan, Jack’s
daughter, and the only one of either of their children still at home, had gone to her room after dinner, in all likelihood to talk to some friend on the telephone about how stupid her stepmother
was and what she had done or said tonight that proved it. Jack had cleared the table, and they were sitting over cups of decaffeinated coffee. ‘Well, of course,’ he said when
she’d finished talking. ‘If Cameron needs you.’

She blew on her coffee. ‘It’s not so much even that. It’s just I feel I owe it to him. After all he’s done.’

‘Is that it?’ He was smiling slightly now. His eyes were a strange color, a light brown that was almost gold, and to Lottie they made his face, which was deeply lined, seem always
youthful too. There was nothing about the way he looked, in fact, that wasn’t a source of deep satisfaction to her, and even in these difficult months since they’d gotten married, she
often found herself watching him – even while he did something as ordinary as clearing the table or lowering the shades in their bedroom – with an intensity that seemed to startle him
if he caught her eye.

She didn’t say anything now.

‘I know it’s been hard, Lottie.’

‘Nothing we didn’t expect,’ she said. She gestured vaguely upstairs to where Megan had shut herself in her room, away from them. They had been in family therapy, all three of
them, for several months, and only the day before, Megan had announced that what really bothered her about Lottie was her habit of clearing her throat repeatedly in the morning. She’d
imitated it, sounding like a motor trying to turn over:
hrmm, hrmm, hrmm
. That, Megan said, and the perfume she wore. ‘Gross,’ Megan had called it. Then her eyes had swiveled
wildly toward her father: had she gone too far this time? ‘It’s just, you know, a bunch of small stuff like that, really.’ She raised her narrow shoulders. ‘No big deal at
all. I don’t know why we all have to keep coming here,’ she said.

For once Lottie was in agreement with Megan. The family therapist had an office on Michigan Avenue, where they all met weekly. He kept the venetian blinds closed, presumably so they
wouldn’t be distracted by the view out over the lake, and they sat in the artificial dusk and leveled this kind of charge at each other over and over. The therapist seemed unable to move any
of them beyond these petty gripes. But it was just this kind of complaint that pained Lottie most, of course. And it seemed clear that Megan somehow knew this. How much more easily, Lottie felt,
she could have confronted accusations about being a liar, or an adulteress. Why couldn’t the therapist force them to talk openly about that stuff? she wondered.

‘I don’t mean just Megan,’ Jack said. ‘I mean me.’

‘Ah!’ Lottie said.

‘Ah!’ he echoed. He looked sternly at her. ‘
Don’t
say “ah,” please.’ Lottie smiled. Jack was a doctor. ‘Say yes, Lottie,’ he said
gently. ‘I know it’s true.’

And of course it was. Lottie looked at him. She thought of him as beautiful. Beautiful, and inaccessible to her. ‘Okay, yes,’ she said.

He twisted his head away as though she’d struck him. She swallowed some of her coffee and, over the rim of her cup, watched him compose himself again.
You said it first
, she
thought.

Jack’s wife had died almost a year before, after what is called ‘a long illness.’ In her case, a major and catastrophic stroke about ten years earlier, when the children were
all young, followed by periodic smaller strokes. Lottie had been involved with Jack for six years before his wife died. The night of Evelyn’s final stroke, Megan had called Lottie’s
apartment.

‘Is my father there?’ she asked. Lottie knew instantly who it was, though she’d never talked to Megan on the phone. She had waited a beat before she could answer. And then she
made a terrible mistake. ‘I think you must have the wrong number,’ she said.

‘Look, just get my fucking father on the phone,’ the girl’s voice had said. ‘This is an emergency.’

Jack hadn’t called Lottie for more than a week after Evelyn’s death. He hadn’t been able to make love to her again for more than a month. They had waited seven more months to
be married. The night of the wedding, Lottie woke up and heard him pulling on his clothes in the dark, then leaving their hotel room. She looked at the bright numbers on the digital clock. She
watched them change through the long hours. Each digit made a nearly inaudible click as it shifted its shape, became a new number. He hadn’t come back until five-thirty.

And he’d continued to get up at night through the months of their marriage, often staying awake for two or three hours. At first Lottie would get up, too, and sit with him in the living
room, sometimes with the lights on, sometimes in the dark. Always he smiled when he saw her, always he apologized. Once, early, he talked about it. He told Lottie he’d been so relieved when
his wife died, for her as well as for himself, that he didn’t feel he mourned at all. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I feel as though her death has given me back some earlier version
of her. The way she was then. And I feel so . . . tender for that person. I’m mourning that person now, I guess.’ He had looked at Lottie with pouched, tired eyes. ‘On your
time.’

Finally Lottie had stopped getting up with him. Often she didn’t even wake now when he slid carefully out from under the covers, when he padded across the carpeted bedroom floor, the
clicking of bones in his ankles the only sound he made.

He looked at her again across the kitchen table. His eyes seemed deeper momentarily, a darker color. ‘Poor Lottie,’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘Poor Jack,’ she countered.

He smiled. ‘In general, a sorry group.’

Lottie drank some more coffee and set her cup carefully in the saucer. The china was Jack’s – Jack’s and Evelyn’s – like almost everything else. It was elegant,
formal, some Wedgwood pattern with intricate little dragons chasing each other round and round the rim. Nothing Lottie would have chosen. ‘I don’t know what I expected,’ she
said.

‘But it wasn’t this?’

‘No.’ She looked at him. ‘It was this: I knew it’d be . . . hard. I knew you’d still be feeling terrible about Evelyn. But I didn’t expect it to feel the way
it does to me. I thought
I’d
be different, honestly.’

They were quiet for a moment. Faintly they could hear music, what Megan called music anyway: the steady punch, punch, punch of rap. ‘You’ve been a trouper,’ he said.

Instantly her eyes filled with tears. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t say a stupid thing like that. This isn’t something I’m enduring.’

He watched her as she grabbed a paper napkin and blew her nose.

‘When will you go?’ he asked after a minute.

‘Mid-June or so, I guess. Cam has to get the roomers out of the house, and that’ll be the hard part. They’ve been there forever. They’re entrenched. They’re working
on
theses
. And Ryan wouldn’t be able to come till then anyway. I’m going to try to reach him in the morning to see if he’s interested. Cam says Mother’s estate can
pay him, and I know he’d like the money. He loves money.’