For Love (16 page)

Cameron said he was going to marry Elizabeth.

Lottie had felt yanked back to a country she’d forgotten the shape of, the climate of. ‘
Our
Elizabeth?’ she asked after a beat.

‘Elizabeth Harbour. My Elizabeth,’ he said.

‘But when did this happen? You guys haven’t been together in years.’ From twenty feet away, Ryan called to her, and she waved.

‘Oh, but we have. Off and on, off and on. We always come back to each other.’

‘This is since high school? This is, like, when she was in college too?’

‘Yes. It’s why I came back to Boston.’ Cameron had worked in publishing for a year in New York after college, then gone back to Boston and started working again at the
bookstore he later bought a share in. ‘She always had a key to my apartment, all through college. She wanted to be free – like Derek, I suppose, with his open marriage stuff, only we
weren’t married. I mean, I agreed with her. We both knew she was too young, that she needed time and space. And I wanted to give that to her. But just every now and then, I’d open the
apartment door and she’d be there. Like a gift.’ His face was stamped with a commanding awe:
Imagine this
.

And Lottie had imagined it then, Elizabeth with her long red hair, her big pale-pink mouth, waiting in the sunstruck apartment. Lottie had been in Cameron’s apartment a few times; it was
in Cambridge, on Mount Auburn Street, near the post office, a brick building with lots of windows and a tiny weed-choked courtyard. She saw Elizabeth in a chair, a Modigliani figure, the sunlight
glinting through the vine-covered window behind her. She saw Cameron in the open doorway with just this eager gratitude rising on his face.

‘Didn’t it ever interfere?’ she asked. ‘Other relationships and stuff? It must have.’

‘Oh yes. Lots of times. But those were the rules. Once, actually, I remember I came home with a woman I’d been involved with for a couple of months, and she was there –
Elizabeth – asleep in my bed.’ He grinned quickly. ‘Goldilocks. She was wearing a shirt of mine. And that was it with that woman. I mean, I took her home and all, but she
didn’t even speak to me on the way. That was it.’

‘It would be, wouldn’t it?’

Ryan had staggered up to them and fallen into Lottie’s lap. Now he flung his head back against her breast, under her chin, and reached up idly to explore her face and hair with his hands
while he watched Cameron talk. Lottie leaned forward and closed her lips over his fingers, sucked them gently for a moment. ‘And what about now?’ she asked finally. ‘I thought she
was at Berkeley?’ How did Lottie know this? She just did, she couldn’t remember.

‘Well, I’ve flown out a few times. And of course, she comes home a couple of times a year to see her parents.’

Lottie shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I never knew any of this.’

‘Why would you? I never said anything about it. And you and I haven’t exactly kept close watch over each other the past few years.’

‘True,’ Lottie said. She rested her head on Ryan’s. ‘And now you’re going to marry her. The famous happy ending.’ She felt a quick pang for her own failure.
She held Ryan tight for a second.

Cameron was looking away, off over the top of the ugly flat school building to the scudding clouds. ‘Well, Elizabeth doesn’t know it yet.’

‘Oh. You mean you’re . . . what? Like, proposing?’

‘I guess. Or more like carrying her off or something. She’s
supposed
to be marrying someone else.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ A phrase Derek had used when she said something that displeased or shocked him: ‘
If you ever do that again, I’ll leave you
.’ ‘
I
beg your pardon?
’

Cameron was smiling now, grimly. With his strong profile, the longish dark hair, he looked like an American Indian. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘But that’s not going to happen.
It’s all a mistake.’

‘Well, but you’re not getting married, then.’ Ryan had stood up again, and now he lurched off after a big, dirty-looking pigeon, crying out in excitement.

Cameron watched Ryan for a moment and then turned to her. The breeze lifted his hair suddenly. ‘Yes I am, Char.’ He spoke to her as though she were a very young child.
‘That’s exactly what I’m going out there to do.’

Lottie felt a sense of dismay: this seemed so wrongheaded. ‘But . . . Well . . . It sounds like Elizabeth has other plans, Cam.’

‘Elizabeth just needs to see me. She needs to listen to me. I shouldn’t have let her stay out there this long. It was too long, apart. She just needs to be with me again.’

‘But . . . I mean, it really sounds like she’s moved on, in some way.’
Let her stay out there?
she was thinking.

‘You don’t understand this, Char. I don’t think you and I should even be talking about this.’ His voice was chilly, suddenly.

‘Well, I do understand that you can’t force someone to love you again if they’ve stopped.’

‘She hasn’t stopped. That’s the point. And it’s not a matter of force. We just need to be together. We were meant to be together.’

Lottie was wishing they had stayed home and drunk a lot of the wine she’d bought. She would have liked to dismiss all this as wine talking.

‘But, Cam,’ she said. ‘If she’s met someone new, someone she’s planning to marry . . .’

He got up quickly. She had to shield her eyes to look up at him, a tall shadow in the bright, thin sunlight. ‘You don’t understand this, Char. You’ve always settled for things.
You’ve given up, you’ve compromised, you’ve settled. For what you could get, for what came easy. And Elizabeth and I have lived a different way.’ He turned abruptly and
walked off a little distance.

Lottie was stung. Her eyelids felt suddenly swollen, and she looked out, unseeing, after Ryan. After a few minutes, Cameron came back and said more gently, ‘I’m sorry, Charlotte, but
I don’t really want to talk about Elizabeth with you.’

Lottie didn’t say anything. Silently she rose too. As they folded the flapping blanket, they walked toward each other once, twice, three times, without meeting each other’s eyes.
Lottie pushed the blanket into the back of the carriage. Then she went to retrieve Ryan from his circular, futile pursuit of the bird. Later – often, later – she would think back to
Cameron’s remarks about her that day, to his comparison of his life with hers, and feel outraged. But at the time – with Ryan so happy to be around a man, any man; with her own sense of
her defeat as a lovable person so recent in her life – she had thought only that Cam might well be right. That real love might just be a universe she’d never been part of.

The next morning he was gone, even before Ryan’s gay crowing woke her up. There was a note on the kitchen table. ‘I’m off. Thanks for dinner and the bed. I’ll write when
things settle down. Kiss Ry for me.’

And that was all she ever knew of it. The next time he wrote was on a Christmas card. He was in Boston again. There was no word of Elizabeth. Somehow later – maybe through her mother
– Lottie knew of Elizabeth’s marriage, to a different man entirely, of several children. Nothing more until now. She’d assumed, she supposed, that Elizabeth had gone on to have
the kind of life they’d all imagined for her when they were young together: accomplished, distinguished, full of glamour and excitement. Because everyone had understood, of course, that
Elizabeth was special. Even when Lottie had hated her most, she had believed that. And it seemed, in some way, that now, long after she’d stopped thinking in these categories for anyone else,
she still did for Elizabeth. Or how else could she explain the senseless pant of envy she’d felt, leaning into Elizabeth’s car?

Ryan was calling her now from inside, asking her something she couldn’t quite hear. She stared at her wineglass for a moment, then poured what little was left out on to the ground and went
back in the house to see what he wanted.

Elizabeth telephoned a few days later. They arranged to meet at the Harvest – the best thing to happen to Harvard Square for years, Elizabeth said: a bar for grownups.
Lottie got there first. A sullen waitress with spiked black hair and a deadly-looking crescent of earrings dangling from one lobe led her to a table. It was outside, on a shadowed terrace at the
bottom of a well of tall office buildings. When Elizabeth arrived, Lottie watched her cross the terrace in her sunglasses and high heels, watched the middle-aged men trail her with their eyes.

Elizabeth kept her sunglasses on through the meal. Sparrows hopped at their feet eating crumbs, and in the office windows hidden by the tree arched above them, all the air conditioners hummed
with a sound as steady as rain.

Elizabeth talked freely – astonishingly so, Lottie thought – about the problems in her marriage, the details of her husband’s infidelity, of how she had found out about it. He
had been unable or unwilling for the moment to give his lover up. But he’d wanted to hold on to his marriage too. ‘I told him forget it,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I told him there
was no way I was going to cooperate for a minute in wrecking the children’s lives, in letting him wreck my life. And then I left town. Let him see how it feels to live alone with his bimbo.
Let him understand the damage he’s doing.’ Elizabeth’s dark mouth pulled down at the corners when she spoke of her husband, and Lottie could see now that behind her sunglasses,
there was a fan of delicate lines, fine as paper cuts, around each eye.

‘He’s the kind of person – I’m sure you know this kind of person – who simply won’t acknowledge the effect his behavior has on other people.’

Lottie was much more careful when she spoke about her life. She felt oddly protective of everyone in it, as though Elizabeth posed some danger to them all. She said nothing about her
difficulties with Jack, about his grief. She made it sound as though Evelyn had died years before, as though the folding together of their families had been smoothly accomplished.

Elizabeth sighed and lifted her hands to her heart. ‘A newly wed. How nice.’ Lottie noticed that the cuticles around her polished nails were ragged and torn. She was wearing the same
heavy, cufflike bracelets. Elizabeth smiled. ‘And all that success too. I love your articles. Whenever I see there’s one somewhere, I buy the magazine instantly.’

Lottie smiled too. ‘That’s awfully nice to hear,’ she said.

Elizabeth flung herself back in her chair, dramatically. She had drunk two gin and tonics with lunch. ‘God, who would have thought, all those years ago, that we would have ended up like
this?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, positions reversed, as it were.
I
was the one who was supposed to go on to fame and glory, wasn’t I?’

‘Oh.’ Lottie nodded. And then she asked, with deliberate innocence, ‘And what was supposed to become of me?’

‘Well . . .’ There was a pause as Elizabeth saw what she’d stepped into. ‘You were sort of going somewhere else.’ She laughed, nervously. ‘And look at me
now,’ she said rapidly. ‘What a mess I’ve made of everything.’ She leaned forward and tapped the table with a polished nail. ‘Much good it did to spend all those years
studying Keats and Shelley. I might as well have made my way to some
stud
farm in Kentucky and learned how to be a brood mare. And how very appropriate.’ Her splayed hands gestured
wildly, as though she thought she could distract Lottie with enough activity. ‘
Brood
is of course precisely the word . . .’

But as she talked, Lottie was feeling a pulse of confused anger left over from so long ago that she might have been holding the sticky Tampax in her pocket. She watched Elizabeth’s bright
calculated smile flashing at her as she spun her apologetic fantasy, and she thought of that sadder, stupider Charlotte who lived inside her still.

Elizabeth had barely finished speaking when Lottie set her coffee cup down and said, in a friendly tone, ‘You know, Cameron still lives in town.’ Elizabeth’s expression behind
the dark glasses didn’t change, but her body quieted abruptly. ‘I’m sure he’d love to see you. Maybe you should call him.’

Before they left the restaurant, Lottie and Elizabeth went to the ladies’ room, a tiny box with two stalls wedged into it. Lottie finished first. She stood in front of the mirror over the
sink, looking at herself in the bright overhead spotlight. Behind her, Elizabeth’s modest trickle seemed pathetically human, her story suddenly so sad. Under the harsh glare of the light,
Lottie looked older than she was; the lines at the corners of her mouth were fierce and embittered. Why had she said what she’d said about Cameron? How could it possibly serve her leftover
anger for Elizabeth and Cameron to come together again? She would remember this moment weeks later, when she heard about the accident; but even now she felt guilty, thinking of Cam. She felt
she’d sacrificed him to some ancient, childish need of her own. Something she should have outgrown long ago.

Elizabeth flushed, began talking loudly over the gurgling water. Lottie leaned toward herself into the shadow and applied her lipstick. She shrugged. Well, they were both adults now. And they
almost certainly would have bumped into each other anyway. Whatever happened between them at this stage of their lives, surely none of it was her responsibility.

Lottie was making a plate of deviled eggs for the cookout. She had boiled them early in the morning, a dozen of them, and all day the kitchen had held that gassy, sulfuric
odor. While she was working at the counter, still in her bathrobe after her run and a shower, Ryan came in from the backyard to get cleaned up. He had warned her he wouldn’t stay at
Elizabeth’s for very long, that he had friends he was meeting later in the Square.

‘Now who is this dame supposed to be again?’ he asked, standing by the open refrigerator with a glass jug of Gatorade in his hand. The cold air around him was visible, a faint, smoky
mist.

‘Shut the door,’ she said. Half the eggs were finished, and Lottie picked up another oval, rubbery white and began to fill the perfect little hollow with stiffened yolk.

The door whumped. ‘Okay, it’s shut. Who is she?’