For Love (11 page)

‘Well. It’ll be nice for you to have some time alone together with him.’

‘Yes. In all honesty, I was dreading this summer here. The two of them in the same house.’ She gestured vaguely up at the distant pulses of Megan’s music.

But this wasn’t the truth. The truth was that Lottie hadn’t been able to imagine Ryan living here with them. Jack was used to a more public life with Megan and his other children.
For years there’d been a housekeeper and a daytime nurse for Evelyn, and the shape of their life together seemed connected to that: they were all polite with one another. She would have
called it
distant
if she couldn’t feel the affection too.

She and Ryan had always had a messier relationship, volatile and intimate. They fought loudly and often, and he sometimes swore at her; but he was also capable of a rough affection –
wrestling holds that loosened to a kind of embrace, occasionally a visit to her bedroom after a date or an evening out, when he sat by her feet and earnestly and self-importantly explained his
feelings about some girl, or a political event, or something he’d read, liberally sprinkling all his comments with profanity. How could any of that become part of her life in this house?

‘Megan likes Ryan,’ Jack said. ‘I thought she even had a crush on him during the wedding stuff.’

‘She hasn’t had to live with him yet.’ Lottie got up and took her empty cup to the sink. From here she could see across a wide patch of grass and low bushes to their
neighbors’ house. The lights were off in their kitchen now, but all the upstairs windows blazed. Homework, Lottie thought.

‘You think it’ll be most of the summer, then?’ Jack asked behind her in a cautious tone.

She turned and looked at him. ‘No, no. But maybe a month, I’d guess. You can’t imagine the way she lived. Bottles, bottles everywhere. And lots of drops to drink. It’ll
take a while to clean it up.’

He nodded. He knew all about Lottie’s mother, though he’d never met her. ‘Will you drive?’

‘Yes. I should think having a car would be convenient.’ She came back and sat at the table again. She’d left already in her mind; she was thinking ahead – to the house,
the work. To Ryan. To her freedom.

‘If you could leave on a weekend, I could drive out with you and then fly back.’

The pinch of claustrophobia Lottie felt at this suggestion startled her and made her feel sad for both of them. It made her remember, too, how often they had sneaked off together while Evelyn,
Jack’s wife, was still alive. Lottie would be working somewhere, interviewing someone, and Jack would join her for a night or, occasionally, a weekend. She could suddenly see one of their
crummy hotel rooms, the bed, the orangey drawn curtains that didn’t quite close. She remembered the rush of erotic weakness in her spine at the thought that he would be there with her that
night. The things they would do.

‘Oh, no, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I’ll stop halfway or so and have a motel night. I’ll be fine.’

Bader came in stiffly, his toenails clicking on the tile floor. He was Jack’s family dog, named by his sons so they could call him Master Bader, a joke they were sure their parents were
too out of it to get. The dog was elderly now, grizzled from the bottom up, as though he’d been dunked partway in white paint. He had fallen in love with Lottie, perhaps because she was the
one who was home with him all day; and now when he saw her, his mouth fell open in a foolish panting smile and his tail swung steadily back and forth in a low arc.

He came and put his muzzle in Lottie’s lap. She bent over him, grabbed his ears, and moved his head back and forth. ‘Ohhh, I’ll miss you, sweet old Bader. Bader. Old
Bader.’

She patted him in silence for a minute, and when she looked over at Jack again, she saw he was watching her, as she’d known he would be, with a pensive, almost stricken look on his face.
The thought had obviously occurred to both of them that the same time that she’d been able to say to the ancient dog the very thing she couldn’t say to Jack.

In the night, Lottie was the one who woke. Jack was on his back, breathing heavily next to her, his mouth fallen open as though something shocking had happened in his dreams.
She sat up and slowly got out of bed. Bader met her at the foot of the stairs – he no longer climbed them – and followed her to her study, off the kitchen. In Evelyn’s time and
before Lottie married Jack, this had been the housekeeper’s room. Idalba’s. Megan had liked Idalba’s cooking. ‘Why can’t you get some of
her
recipes?’
she’d asked one night as she scraped most of her dinner into the disposal.

It was the one room in the house now where Lottie felt completely comfortable. She had painted it herself, a deep ocher color. ‘We can hire someone who’d finish it up for you in a
day,’ Jack had said the second night she came to the table with paint in her hair. But she had wanted to make the room hers the same way she’d always laid claim to the spaces
she’d lived in before she married him: by doing it all herself. She’d kept the pretty iron bed Idalba had slept in and had bought a big square table she painted white to put her word
processor on. There were overflowing bookcases against two of the walls, and more books piled on the bed and the floor. Photographs and clippings were tacked on the walls in no apparent order.

From the windows of this room you looked out over the deep backyard to the alleyway. Lottie had driven slowly down that alley more than once when she was still Jack’s secret.
His
paramour
, she thought. She had driven by and seen the light on late at night in Idalba’s room and thought it was Jack, in what must be his study. Alone in her car, she had thought of him
as being as restless, as sleepless as she was, in his tragic house. She felt connected to him when she looked up at the glowing rectangle in the night.

Instead, though, it was Idalba, Jack told her when she finally confessed to him. Idalba, who drank thick black coffee through the evening and stayed up late every night reading cheap American
romances in order to perfect her English. Lottie had made him laugh, she remembered now, playing out a balcony scene between a lovesick version of herself and a confused Idalba imagining one of her
paperback fantasies had come to life.

Now she turned the light on and looked over the clutter of her desk. She had to decide – it must have been this, she thought, that had waked her – how much of her work she would try
to take with her. She sat down and flipped slowly through her notes, the odd multiple starts she’d made on an article she was doing.

Lottie specialized in medical issues, explaining them simply in short essays usually published in the health or beauty columns of expensive women’s magazines. She’d done several
books too. It was how she had met Jack. She was writing a book on cancer at the time.

She had just recovered from it then – breast cancer: they’d removed the lump and given her radiation. The result was only a small, smooth dent in her right breast that her hand
restlessly fluttered back to over and over in the first months after it was removed; and a roughened patch of skin that was supposed to return to normal slowly. Her own doctor was reassuring, said
it was contained and small, with what he called ‘clean margins.’ He was certain they’d gotten it in ample time. But Lottie had been scared for months, scared in the way that wakes
you at night dry-mouthed, scared in the way that had her calculating how she would arrange for Ryan’s growing up. And her method of coping with that had been to begin to read, to read
everything she could about the choice she had made, then about the rationales for all the choices, then about the history of the rationales, then about the wackier, less researched, less
respectable choices: coffee enemas, macrobiotic diets, reinjecting your own washed blood, crystals. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she’d decided to write the book – or she’d
decided that she was, already, writing it.

Jack was an oncologist, and he was willing to talk to her. A lot of doctors weren’t, she’d discovered over the years of research on this and that. They didn’t want their work
popularized. They felt that it led to hypochondria, to people diagnosing themselves, medicating themselves, questioning the doctor’s wisdom.

But Jack had seemed to like their conversations. They had met at first several times in his office, among his diplomas and the pictures of his family. Lottie remembered clearly the photograph of
Evelyn on his desk, strong and young-looking in tennis whites. It wasn’t until after the first time they met for dinner that he explained what his life with Evelyn was like now – what
she was like.

From the start Jack had enjoyed playing with analogies that he thought would make the medical intricacies clear to Lottie. It was only very slowly that it dawned on both of them that all of this
was an elaborate analogy, itself, for courtship. A courtship he felt he had no right to, in literal terms. But by the time they discovered it, it had done its work. In spite of the invalid wife,
the children at home – Lottie’s son at her home – they were in love.

Although love was not what Jack offered her, or chose to offer her. In fact, he scrupulously avoided offering it. ‘I need to believe,’ he said to Lottie, ‘– no, I
do
believe – that in some sense or another I still love my wife.’

And Lottie, who thought of herself as big and tough and having been around the block a few dozen times, had said yes, that was all right, she could manage that. She was, after all, a grownup,
with her own life. She had felt, actually, that this might be almost ideal for her, to have a lover who wouldn’t want to see her all the time, who couldn’t focus very much of his
attention on her.

The first time they made love, Jack was passionate and thorough. About ten minutes after they were finished, his beeper went off. He had rented a room for them in an expensive hotel near his
office, and as he dressed, he told Lottie she should just drop the key off at the desk on her way out, it was all taken care of.

‘Including me,’ she said. ‘You thought of everything.’

He’d smiled and bent over to kiss her, a tall, lanky man whom she’d been completely pleased to see naked earlier. Now he pulled a tie through his collar and slid his long arms into
his jacket. ‘I’ll call you, about the middle of next week, okay?’ he said. ‘The weekend’s full of sports and lessons and kids for me.’

‘I’ll be waiting,’ she said.

After he left, she’d put on one of the hotel’s thick robes – it probably cost three times what she paid for the robe she had at home – and opened the curtains. Out to her
left she could see the lake, gray and swollen-looking, and, far below her, shoppers streaming down Michigan Avenue amid the first pale blossoms of a chilly spring day. She stayed in the hotel room
for several hours. She ate part of a jar of cashew nuts from the honor bar and drank a little bottle of white wine. She ran a bath full of scented gel and soaked in it. She applied her makeup
carefully in front of a magnifying mirror and dried her hair with a fancy little dryer. She was alone and she felt perfectly happy.

She felt happy shopping for Ryan and herself later that afternoon, and happy still cooking dinner and talking to him; and then sitting down at her desk around ten or so to begin her
evening’s work. On her skin she could smell the scented gel from the hotel. She thought of Jack’s touch, of the graying hairs on his chest, of his sleepy, strong erection, his gentle
fingers. And she was glad he wasn’t with her.

Everything worked, beautifully, for about a year. She saw Jack for lunch once or twice a week, and they met to make love once every two weeks or so. Occasionally they had what he called ‘a
date.’ Sometimes they drove to a seedy pool hall to the west of the Loop. He taught her to play cowboy pool, and they sat in the big scarred wooden booths and drank beer and dropped quarters
in the jukebox. Three or four times he took her to a crowded dance hall in a Polish neighborhood, where every third number was a polka and they seemed to be the youngest people present. They
listened to jazz in black bars on the fringes of the ghetto; once they actually went roller-skating. They never spoke of it, but Lottie assumed that one reason for the peculiarity of these evenings
was that they weren’t likely, in these settings, to run into anyone who knew Jack, who’d known Evelyn. It didn’t bother her. They were things she would have liked to do with him
anyway.

She talked to friends about it sometimes, about how made-to-order for her busy life this relationship seemed. She finished the cancer book and began to work on a book she’d actually gotten
a good advance for – the first real money she’d made writing: a book about fad diets and the medical realities and ramifications of them.

And then Evelyn had another stroke. Jack called her at home and told her. He said he wasn’t sure how soon he could talk to her again. He was at the hospital, and it was touch and go.
Evelyn’s parents were flying in and would be staying at the house for a while.

Lottie was understanding, completely sympathetic. But for the week or so until Jack called again to say Evelyn would survive, she was appalled to find herself sometimes lost in a waking dream of
Evelyn’s death, and of herself married to Jack, living with Ryan and Jack’s kids in the big house she’d driven by once or twice when she was in his neighborhood.

They didn’t see each other for more than a month that time, and Lottie didn’t seem to be able to stop herself from thinking of Jack over and over. Of his angular body, his lined
face. Of his hands with their knotted knuckles and joints. Of his odd-colored eyes. She was traveling a good deal, interviewing the originators of various diets, and often she couldn’t sleep
in the strange cheap hotels she stayed in. She sat up late watching TV, listening to arguments or lovemaking on the other side of the Sheetrock walls, and thinking of him. In airports, in
restaurants, driving over unfamiliar terrain in small rental cars, she would see his image in front of her. His hands, his hoarse voice. She remembered the moment he’d reached over and turned
off the tape recorder she’d set on the table between them while she asked her carefully researched questions. Startled, she’d looked up from her notes and noticed his eyes for the first
time. ‘This is something you can’t use in the book,’ he’d said. ‘I’d like very much to make love to you.’