For Love (20 page)

The first time she came, she seemed almost shy, hesitant; and Lottie contributed to the awkwardness since she couldn’t figure out why Elizabeth was there, standing with her hands on her
hips, surveying the work Ryan and Lottie were doing as though she were the contractor in charge of the project. She’d left her paintbrush lying across the open can too, and the image of it,
its bristles hardening slowly in the damp air, kept recurring in her mind’s eye as she slouched against the doorjamb, talking uncomfortably to Elizabeth for about ten minutes. Finally
Elizabeth left.

The next day, when Elizabeth showed up again, Lottie thought to offer her coffee. They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. Elizabeth leaned forward and set her elbows down, and
suddenly she looked so completely settled – relaxed – that Lottie realized that this was the point, that she simply wanted to talk.

And so it started. Sometime usually around ten or ten-thirty, Lottie would hear Elizabeth’s voice echoing in the open hallway, the question mark in the ‘hello,’ and she’d
come from whatever she was doing to make a fresh batch of coffee and sit in the grim little kitchen with her for a while.

Her subject was Cameron, Cameron and herself, and virtually nothing else. She’d repeat various things he’d said to her, she’d describe how he looked when he said them. At first
Lottie could scarcely believe how bored she was. She barely needed to listen, really. She knew the basic themes so well. She remembered behaving just this way when she’d been so intently
focused on Jack. Her closest friend then, a magazine editor Lottie had met through her work, had heard the same kind of details. ‘Mmm,’ Lottie would say to Elizabeth – as her
friend had said to her – and pour herself another cup of coffee. ‘No kidding,’ Lottie would offer, and unbelievably, that was enough to keep Elizabeth going. Once she actually
made a note to herself while Elizabeth spoke, a note she thought might be useful for the article she was still working on:
Exhibitionism
, she wrote on a folded paper napkin.
The early
stage of love which requires an audience.
Elizabeth’s eyes had followed Lottie’s hand as she uncapped the pen, as the spidery vertical script bloomed on the napkin; but she never
stopped talking. Lottie’s behavior clearly didn’t exist on the same plane of consciousness with her preoccupation with Cameron, with her need to speak of him. She watched Lottie sit up
straighter and push the napkin into a pocket of her jeans without her attention ever appearing to waver from her own train of thought.

Slowly, though, over the course of ten days or so, Lottie was drawn in. She found she actually began to look forward to Elizabeth’s arrival. She realized that at least part of the reason
this could happen was the curious blankness of her own life in Cambridge and the way in which what was going on between Elizabeth and Cameron seemed a comment on it. But some of it, too, was the
glacial but inevitable course of the drama, the steady slow flow of information shifting just slightly over the days. It made Lottie remember the period just after she had separated from Derek,
before she finally gave her television away, when she had religiously followed the soaps. She was working mornings then, and she’d pick up Ryan from the baby-sitter after lunch and put him
down for a nap almost as soon as they got home. Then she’d lie down herself in front of their tiny, blurry TV, and watch the self-destructing love affairs, the bitter rivalries, the medical
and legal entanglements, as they played themselves out incrementally.

Now, against her will, her better judgment, she felt the same eager fascination for Elizabeth’s slow-moving narrative, her tedious piling up of mundane and yet – to Lottie –
compelling detail. And as though she sensed Lottie’s appetite, Elizabeth began to elaborate her stories, began to reveal more and more intimate aspects of her falling in love again with Cam
– though she never gave it that name. ‘Our little romance,’ she called it. ‘Our recycled affair.’

And so Lottie came to know that Cam had wept the first few times they made love again. She knew when Elizabeth gave Cam the key to her mother’s house so that he could sneak in and up to
her room after everyone had gone to bed. (After that Lottie had to will herself not to watch for the Volvo at night, had to keep herself away from the front windows.) Elizabeth told Lottie about
the rainy night when they’d turned into a dark passageway between buildings in Central Square and made love against a wall there, how she’d just stepped out of her panties when they
left, how she’d looked back as they reached the sidewalk and seen them lying there, a flag of white in a black puddle.

Lottie knew that Cameron’s body hadn’t changed much, she knew that he had what Elizabeth called ‘a lovely fat penis.’ She thought she had probably flinched when Elizabeth
told her that, so startled was she that this could be something Elizabeth would want someone else to know. It occurred to her to wonder when this kind of discussion had become possible among women.
Had the women’s movement done it? She thought about it and recalled herself in one of the three groups she’d belonged to over those years, talking explicitly – yet never, she was
certain, without a sense of at least
overcoming
a kind of embarrassment – of Derek, of what he had liked to do in bed; and then, she remembered, of new lovers too. Yes, of penis size,
of varying styles of pumping, foolish things said, postcoital behavior. And this was exactly the kind of thing it seemed Elizabeth needed to tell Lottie, again and again.

And gradually Lottie dropped her guard too, at least partway. She began to tell Elizabeth about her life. Never about the situation with Jack, never about her fears in that regard. And she was
always vague about Evelyn’s death. But she revealed at least some of the particulars of their courtship. She told Elizabeth, for example, about the first night she’d spent with him,
when someone had taken the opportunity to leisurely tear her apartment up, taking only two things in the end – an electric can opener she’d gotten as a gift when she married Derek, and
her very beat-up stereo. Jack had bought her a new stereo to prove this wasn’t God’s judgment on them, and its sound reproduction was so good she’d had to throw away most of her
records. ‘They went ga-thunk, ga-thunk,’ she told Elizabeth. ‘Or they’d get to a certainly gluey part and just scrape over it to the end. We used to weight the old player
arm with a nickel to push it right into those gummy grooves, but we knew we couldn’t do that with this machine; it wasn’t somehow ours in the same sense.’

She told Elizabeth about therapy with Megan, about how Megan had said she didn’t need another mother, the last thing she needed was another mother. ‘So I said to her, “What can
I be to you, then?” And she truly didn’t know what to answer. I think she hadn’t thought that far ahead, that I would have to be
something
to her. She hadn’t reckoned
on it, poor thing.’

She told Elizabeth about having cancer.

Elizabeth’s braceleted hand clutched her own throat. ‘Cancer! Oh God, I’d be so terrified. And you must think about it all the time, ever after.’

‘Oh no,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s been years now. And even at the time – I mean, you just deny like crazy. It’s an argument for the usefulness of denial, actually.
I’ve never admired an unhealthy psychological phenomenon more.’

‘But never to
know.
When it might recur!’

‘Oh, that’s not true,’ she said. Elizabeth was a wonderful audience, really. Lottie was almost regretful she couldn’t tell her about Jack and Evelyn. ‘You get into
these statistical pools. I’m in a great one now, having survived for seven years. In fact, I’d bet money I’m in a better pool than you. But see, you probably don’t even
know
your pool.’ Elizabeth shook her head. ‘And I do, so there you have it.’

They even talked a little – gingerly, carefully – about their growing up, their parents. Lottie told Elizabeth of the permanent silence that had fallen between her mother and
herself, of the sense she’d had of being orphaned from very early on.

‘But it was precisely that that I envied you for,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I mean, I’m not saying I didn’t also think your life was difficult, because I did. But you were
also so
free.
Everything I did was simply . . . miraculous to my parents, was their possession. I suppose it was partly after having all those
boys
, that I was unique, just a
different kind of creature to them. But I couldn’t do a thing, not a thing, without its being held up and turned this way and that for the most minute and careful examination.’

‘Yeah, but the unexamined life is not worth living,’ Lottie said. And though she meant it as a joke, she felt it too, in a twinge of familiar pity for her old self. ‘Sad but
true.’

When Elizabeth didn’t come, Lottie missed her. Were they friends, then? Lottie wouldn’t have said so, exactly. But on the days when Elizabeth didn’t show up, Lottie often
stopped what she was doing anyway at about the time she usually arrived, and sat restlessly over her solitary coffee, daydreaming.

It forced her to acknowledge, finally, that she’d been using Elizabeth too. To be exact, that she adapted Elizabeth’s accounts to feed her own fantasies of Jack. To transform them,
so that she often pictured herself and Jack doing the things Elizabeth told her she and Cameron had done. Alone in her mother’s room, she had imagined herself and Jack in the rainy passageway
in Central Square – imagined the soaked clothing, the wet hair, the desperate need, the fogging pants of breath, the rough brick scraping her shoulder blades. Elizabeth’s story of
herself and Cameron nearly getting caught by her oldest son making love downstairs in the living room became, in Lottie’s imagination, herself and Jack yanking themselves upright, hurriedly
rearranging clothes, wiping stains, shoving underpants under the striped couch, as Megan returned from an evening out. For Cameron’s light, pressured, curiously expressionless voice saying
that he hadn’t really been alive until Elizabeth returned to him – that she was the love of his life – Lottie substituted Jack’s hoarse one, promising her the same things as
they, too, sat in a car and heard the drumming rain on its metal roof.

Several times a week Jack called, or Lottie called him. Though his voice never failed to thrill her, there was something awkward and unsatisfying about their conversations. They were too polite.
Lottie concluded that both of them were probably afraid of confronting what was most central in their thoughts: the idea that somehow it might
not
all work out over time.

But all the while Lottie was struggling so unsuccessfully to talk to the real Jack on the phone, she was allowing her fantasies about him to grow ever more elaborate, ever more concrete,
nourished by Elizabeth’s indiscretions. From time to time she thought about all this and was momentarily disturbed; and then she performed a kind of mental shrug. Really, what was the
harm?

Because Lottie was used to giving herself permission to have fantasies – perhaps most women who have lived alone for long periods of time are. When Ryan was very small, the length of time
between lovers would sometimes stretch to eight or ten months – occasionally longer – and her answer to this had been to conjure lovers in fantasies constructed around men she worked
with or friends’ husbands, or even movie actors, singers. Her rule was that she couldn’t let the fantasy spill over into her life, she couldn’t get
crushes
, for God’s
sake. But that as long as she was in control, she was free to use whomever, whatever she wished. So now she made no effort to stop herself either, without thinking about the damage she might be
doing to what was, after all, her very real love.

One night, about two weeks or so after Elizabeth’s cookout, Lottie invited her and Cam over for dinner. Partly it was a polite wish to return Elizabeth’s
invitation, but partly it was that Lottie was curious to see for herself how they behaved together, how they looked. She planned the dinner carefully and spent a good part of the afternoon in the
kitchen.

Lottie was a fine cook when she felt like it. It was true that she had served Ryan oatmeal and fruit for dinner at least once a week when he was growing up, but that was because she didn’t
feel like it all the time. Nothing was worth being claimed by, she felt, particularly not kitchen work.

Tonight she’d made a seafood stew, a lemon tart for dessert. She had to serve it, though, on her mother’s stained plastic plates, with her mismatched and bent utensils. When Ryan
drifted into the kitchen, he stopped at the oddly set table and said, ‘Cute, Lottie. It’s like you’re playing house, or something.’

Elizabeth and Cameron arrived together, both with damp hair and the pinkish yet sleepy health of people who’ve spent the afternoon making love. Before dinner they all sat in the sagging
chairs in the living room, the fan Lottie had bought in her first days here resting on the floor in their midst, turning its benign wire face from side to side as though listening politely to all
of them. Alternately it rippled Elizabeth’s skirt, then Lottie’s, against their bare legs.

Elizabeth was bangled, she had on three or four beaded necklaces, one with a carved pendant. She was talking about the day camp she was sending little Emily to, the premium put on creativity,
how Emily worried every day that what she made, or thought up, would be ordinary. ‘They have
activities
,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Dress-ups, for instance, is an
activity.’

‘And it’s possible to be inferior at dress-ups?’ Lottie asked, incredulous.

‘Apparently so,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Robin Hood,’ said Cameron censoriously. ‘Dreary.’

Lottie grinned. ‘The Fairy Godmother,’ she offered. ‘How . . . banal.’

‘That’s how she feels, I’m afraid,’ Elizabeth said.

Lottie gave her opinion: children’s imaginations ought to be predictable and boring.

‘C’mon, Mom. You don’t think that,’ Ryan said.

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘It’s like the brain patterning that occurs through learning to crawl before you walk. There’s a need for it. Nobody wants a baby who rolls
over, stands up, and begins to move like . . . Isadora Duncan.’