For Love (17 page)

‘She lived across the street when we were growing up. Elizabeth. Née Harbour. It’s something else now. Elizabeth Something-or-other. She’s married. Though actually
she’s separated now. I had lunch with her last week.’

‘So she was a friend in the old days?’ He was smiling at her, a teasing smile. ‘So very long ago, when you were young?’

She made a moue. He was like an old man in the way he kept reworking the same familiar jokes, she thought. She remembered Derek’s grandfather, who’d told Derek every time he met
Lottie that Derek better watch out or he’d run off with her himself. ‘More Cameron’s friend than mine,’ she said. ‘An old lover of his, actually.’

‘Aha!’ He set the jug down on the counter.

‘Aha’ what?’

‘Aha, the plot thickens. Aha, the story becomes more complicated. Aha, perhaps we watch them rekindle their romance.’ He was walking by her. As he passed the plate, he picked up a
stuffed egg, popped the whole thing into his mouth.

‘Ryan! Come on!’

He grinned, a disgusting eggy grin, and then he was gone.

Lottie continued to work. Then she stopped and laughed out loud. She’d suddenly realized she was humming ‘The Second Time Around.’

Because Elizabeth had called Cameron, of course. Probably thinking only that Cameron’s was a devotion she could count on having lasted all these years, and that she could use a good dose
of devotion. All she’d told Lottie yesterday when she called to invite them to the cookout was that she and Cameron had been ‘having a lovely time.’

Lottie got ready for the party at a leisurely pace, trying on first one dress, then another. Though she wore the scruffiest of clothes around the house to write in – she was often still in
her bathrobe at noon, at two or three o’clock; or wearing faded jeans, old shirts of Ryan’s – she liked fine clothes. Even when she was her poorest, she’d worked hard for a
worn elegance, anyway, when she went out. She’d bought things secondhand then, or at antique-dress shops. And she had drawers of scarves and jewelry she liked to experiment with.

Tonight she finally decided on a loose black cotton-knit dress with a scooping back, and therefore shoulders that occasionally slid a little way down her arms – a dress Jack had once said
made her look ‘eminently fuckable.’ She belted it with a bright, narrow scarf and slid into a pair of low-heeled sandals. She hooked long, filigree-delicate earrings into her earlobes
and applied a lot of shadowy eye makeup.

As they crossed the impossibly wide street, Ryan said to Lottie, ‘I feel weird. I feel like we’re the slaves being invited up to the massa’s house for some completely
irrelevant celebration. His birthday. The acquisition of another hundred acres.’

Lottie smiled. ‘That’s probably apt,’ she said. ‘In fact, I bet the little houses were built for servants of people in the big houses.’

‘Think so?’

‘Well, a very different class of people anyway. Just look.’

They stopped in the middle of the street and looked back at Lottie’s mother’s house, crammed in a row next to the other two miniatures; and then over at Elizabeth’s house, with
its wastefully deep, curving porch, its sloping lawn, its porte cochere, its turrets and elaboration of ornate woodwork.

‘Say no more,’ he said, and started for the curb. He had dressed up a little too, in baggy cotton shorts and a clean black T-shirt. He wore European sandals on his feet, sandals that
oddly looked almost exactly like the ones he’d worn as a little boy. He seemed, to Lottie, unbelievably handsome.

‘When I was a kid, though,’ she said, trailing him, ‘it was all invisible to me, these differences. Up to a point, of course.’

‘Yeah. Kids don’t care, do they? Until they do care.’

‘That’s about it,’ Lottie said.

As they walked up Elizabeth’s driveway, they could hear her children’s shrill voices out in the backyard, so they continued under the porte cochere and came out behind the house. The
backyard opened before them, huge and slowly sloped uphill to a row of tall evergreen trees at the property line. The children were playing badminton on a net set up just in front of these trees.
In the corner of the yard loomed a carriage house that was probably larger than two of Lottie’s mother’s house. Elizabeth waved from the flagstone terrace off the kitchen. She and her
mother and Cameron were sitting in wooden chairs there. Cam got up and strode barefoot across the grass to them. He shook Ryan’s hand, kissed Lottie on the cheek. Loose blades of grass clung
to his white, arched feet. He wore slacks and an old shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His collar was so frayed it had split along its top edge. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said, with a
gratitude that seemed proprietarial to Lottie. As they all walked back to the terrace, she filed this away mentally.

Emily Harbour, heavy and slow, was struggling up out of her chair. She had sturdy sandals strapped on to her swollen, bruised-looking feet. Her varicosed legs were partly covered by an
unfashionable wraparound skirt, and her doughy white arms looped out of a wrinkled sleeveless blouse. Her face was still pretty, though, the way fat women’s faces can be as they get elderly
– plump and unlined. And she still wore her hair exactly as she had in Lottie’s childhood, in a wispy bun low on her neck. It was a pure yellowy-white now.

She greeted Lottie warmly, was pleased, pleased indeed to meet Ryan, and effusive about the eggs. She asked Lottie to help her, and Lottie followed her into the house, into the cavernous old
kitchen, unchanged in twenty-five years it seemed, except that the gray walls had darkened – the higher, the darker – with greasy soot. Emily spoke in a steady, unpunctuated, and gentle
stream, with a light, girlish voice. ‘It was just so kind of you, Charlotte, to bring over deviled eggs, and I can’t begin to thank you, they are beautiful, I’ve never been able
to make a reasonable deviled egg myself, they always run a bit and they’re not supposed to do that, of course, so I just confine myself –
here
you go,’ she said, handing
Lottie a plate from the refrigerator, ‘– to slicing things, it’s much safer and it takes much less of a knack, you know what I mean, just whack whack whack and you’re
finished.’ On the chilled platter under the plastic wrap there were tomatoes, radishes, celery, carrots, flat glistening circles of Bermuda onion. Lottie unwrapped this and set it on the big
square table in the middle of the old-fashioned room.

Someone would certainly redo
this
kitchen, Lottie thought, as she followed Emily’s instructions for finding additional bowls and plates in the Hoosier cabinet. There were no
countertops, just a series of separate pieces of kitchen furniture set against the walls – a sink with a drooping grimy skirt of faded blue gingham, an old electric stove, the Hoosier
cabinet, painted a pale green, and another cabinet, a hutch, really, stacked with plates. There were also several wooden tables of various heights, and a huge, bulbous refrigerator with bright
strips of shining metal on its door in an art deco pattern. It reminded Lottie of the Chrysler Building.

Emily was lumbering painfully back and forth from the pantry to the big table in the middle of the room, bringing jars of pickles and olives, mustard, mayonnaise, talking all the while. First
about picnics: ‘. . . some Latin derivation for the word, I believe, but it’s charming, nonetheless, when you think of it, isn’t it? pic, nic, pic, nic. But basically such a
wonderful idea too, just to escape from the necessity for all that fancy folderol at the dining room table, especially with the children here, don’t you know . . .’ She ripped open
several bags of potato chips and dumped them into one of the bowls Lottie had found. ‘Here they come now, tumbling out, pure salt, pure fat, dreadful for you, I’d never allow myself to
have them if I didn’t pretend I was getting them for the children, in fact I adore them, and the children are such a wonderful excuse, aren’t they?’

Lottie murmured her unnecessary responses. She was remembering how proud she had felt as a girl of her mother’s kitchen when she compared it to the Harbours’. Her mother’s
kitchen was
modern
, that was the point. The linoleum counter with the gleaming aluminum strip along the front edge, the fluorescent bulb overhead, the marbled plastic table with matching
chairs: these were things you saw in magazines. This room, by contrast, had seemed pathetically dumpy and old-fashioned to Lottie, and her mother had confirmed that for her. ‘I don’t
know what they think they’re saving it for,’ her mother would say after one of her rare visits to the Harbours. ‘You can’t take it with you.’

When Emily had everything ready to her satisfaction, Lottie went in and out several times, setting the food, the plates and napkins and bowls, on the large wooden picnic table on the terrace.
Cam helped too, bringing out candles in colored glass jars, and then a plate of uncooked hamburgers the children had apparently shaped earlier in the afternoon.

Ryan had joined the badminton game – Lottie saw there was a girl his age playing, a girl with long dark hair tenting her shoulders – and Elizabeth was at the net too, talking to the
youngest child, her daughter, who was upset about something. Cameron had started some coals earlier, in a round metal grill. (‘I don’t know why one feels a man has to start the coals,
but one just does, I suppose, and anyway it’s such a messy job, if there’s a man around I’d just as soon foist it off on him in the name of whatever – male superiority, fine
with me.’) Now he began to cook the hamburgers. Elizabeth drifted back down from the game, carrying her daughter. The child was so big Elizabeth seemed engulfed, wrapped in the girl’s
long, skinny arms and legs. Emily, she said the child’s name was. After her grandmother. ‘This is Charlotte, sweetheart. Can you say hello?’

The girl turned her face for a second to look at Lottie and then buried it again in her mother’s neck, tightened her limbs’ clutch on Elizabeth. She was a pretty girl, with a long
oval face and Elizabeth’s red hair. She’d been crying.

Now Lottie sat down by Emily Harbour, as instructed, and as the older woman talked, she kept offering the requisite supporting murmurs and comments. But she was watching Elizabeth and Cameron
together. Normally Elizabeth had an exaggerated, stylized animation, but she was even more dramatic tonight than usual. You could hear where the italics would fall when she spoke. She laughed
often, a bright, gay laugh that made Cam’s head swing toward her, even when she had wandered off again with little Emily, even when he began talking to Lottie and Elizabeth’s
mother.

Finally the meal was cooked, and the sweaty children and Jessica, the au-pair girl, trooped down to the terrace. They all sat on the long wooden benches at the sides of the table. Big Emily, as
they were instructed to call her – horrible, Lottie thought – and Cameron were on chairs pulled up to the ends of the table, but Lottie was squished among the children, between Jessica
and one of Elizabeth’s boys. There was a frenzy of questions: what grade, what school, what sport, what major, and so on. They were eating too, of course. There were plates, condiments,
pushed and passed up and down the table along with the conversation, and people had to raise their voices to be heard.

‘Well, I think Cambridge is sucky,’ Elizabeth’s smaller boy said.

‘Oh, Jeff. What do you even know about it? Nothing. Have you ever even been to Harvard Square at night? No, you haven’t.’ This was Michael, the oldest. His eyes skipped around
the table, asking the adults to notice how much more like them than his siblings he was. He was fourteen or so, Lottie guessed. Both boys were dark and stockier than the little girl. Little
Emily.

‘Sucky is an awful, awful word, darling. I won’t even discuss its meaning with you. Just do not, please, do not ever use it again in my hearing.’

‘Where is the mustard? Or did big fat Jeffrey eat it all?’

Now big Emily’s voice floated down the table toward Lottie, and Lottie leaned forward to hear. ‘Elizabeth tells me you’re a writer, Charlotte. Now there’s a hard job, so
solitary, inner strength, it just befuddled me how long my husband could just sit alone all day, writing, writing, writing.’

‘I suppose so,’ Lottie answered. She had to pitch her voice above the squabbling children next to her. ‘But I suppose if you do it willingly, there’s a part of you that
likes to be alone.’

‘Yes, I can see that, one gets used to solitude.’ The old woman’s head bobbed thoughtfully, and she was off: ‘I enjoy it myself, finally, though I never thought I would
when I had a houseful of children and my husband, oh, that was lovely, and of course’ – she lifted a fat hand in a circling gesture meant to include her daughter, her grandchildren
– ‘this is always wonderful too, but I know what you mean, it can be very satisfying, though of course I don’t claim to do anything much of use with it, just putter around,
keeping busy, but one does like it . . .’

Lottie kept nodding in the swirl of voices around her. She saw Elizabeth smile radiantly past her at Cameron. He had been describing what sounded like a convention for booksellers, Lottie
thought.

‘So, Ryan, when do
you
start?’ Jessica’s voice, behind her. This was Jessica’s third or fourth question to Ryan, Lottie noticed. He was sitting on the bench across
from Lottie and Jessica.

‘Classes? I guess the seventeenth or something. Registration is a little earlier.’

Elizabeth got up and went into the house. Lottie had begun to talk to Michael about school. He was polite and thorough in his answers. She was learning more than she’d ever wanted to know
about the cutoff ages for junior high and high school, and how much you could and couldn’t manipulate them to get maximum playing time on the basketball teams. But she kept sneaking glances
at Cameron, and she could tell without looking up when Elizabeth was approaching again, his face was so altered, so lifted – though he too was talking, politely, to Ryan and Jessica.

‘Oh, I adore them,’ Jessica was saying. ‘I went to one of their concerts last year and we had great seats, so close that their sweat actually fell on me.’