For Love (23 page)

She carried both books to the cash register. When she’d paid, when they’d been put in a plastic bag, Lottie walked out, happy again. She ambled slowly back through the couples with
ice cream cones, through the straggling groups of summer school students who made it necessary for people to step off the curb, to hug the storefronts. The bag swung against her leg, the books
slapped her rhythmically as she walked along in the cheerful carnival atmosphere.

Past Appian Way the street was abruptly darker, quieter. Lottie turned back into Radcliffe Yard, feeling the air shift, welcoming the sense of dampness, of dark. She first heard, then saw, a
group of young men two thirds of the way across the black grass, clustered around an old, tentacled fruit tree. Their voices were loud and flat. There was a laugh, then someone said, ‘The
fuck you say . . .’
Bad boys
, Lottie thought. And then reassured herself: Ryan might be in such a group. She kept walking, but without thinking of it, she made her step brisker and
more businesslike. She could hear the slapping, tarty scuff of her sandals on the sidewalk.

And then they noticed it, she could feel them noticing with a kind of doglike attentiveness. There was a pause, and one of them called, ‘Hey, baby, over here’; and they laughed
again.

Just keep walking, Lottie thought. She clutched the bag and her purse against her chest.

Now one of them angled out from under the tree, across the grass toward her. Unless she turned, she would encounter him.

She wouldn’t turn. This was just their idea of a joke. Scaring her, talking a little dirty maybe: just fun, for them. She concentrated on keeping her stride even, but she stepped to the
right side of the walk, toward where she would turn off quickly when she got to the little side path that led to Garden Street.

He was tall, the boy approaching her, he had a predatory strut. He passed under one of the dim lights, and she saw him grinning.

She was almost up to him, and she braced herself for it: the comment, the ugliness, the claim to some part of what made her female.

But he stopped before she did. No smile; then a wider one, amused. He turned and called over to his friends. ‘Hey, man, she’s
old
!’ He started to walk back to them.
‘She’s fucking
old
, you assholes!’

It was the third week in July when Jack called. Lottie had already been gone longer than she’d told him she would. ‘You’re learning to get along without me,
aren’t you?’ he asked in his hoarse voice. ‘I think I’d better come out there and remind you of what you’ve left behind,’ He told Lottie that Megan was going to
a friend’s house in Michigan for the next weekend. He had arranged coverage and booked a round trip to Boston. ‘Will that work for you?’ he asked, and Lottie could hear all that
was tentative in his tone.

Her own answering voice was shaky, but they arranged it quickly, getting to the point without much conversation, like the flurried undressing for hungry sex. Lottie would get a hotel; who needed
Richard and Ryan listening in? Jack would come there by cab from the airport. The plane got in at eight. He ought to be with her by nine or so.

For the next days, Lottie was distracted, repetitively reviewing the history of her love for Jack, her life with him, as though she’d been asked to decide, in this short span of hours
before he arrived, whether to stay with him or not. She felt a kind of heartsickness as she remembered the way they’d lived together in the days before she left: so careful with each other,
so polite. ‘I can’t go back,’ she thought she might say to him. ‘You have to understand, I was dying.’ But how could she say such a thing to him, who knew what dying
truly was?

That was part of the trouble, surely: how could she say such a thing to him? There were too many things she couldn’t say to him. She had no right.

Instead, then, she thought of the house itself, Jack’s house, as the problem. It was too thick, too heavy, an impossible burden their marriage had to carry. She imagined it again and again
with a kind of dread: brick and enormous, set far back from the street on a neat lawn in a neighborhood near the university. The front terrace had a huge cement urn at each corner. Lottie had
peered into one once. It was filled with gravel and a few ancient cigarette filters. The rooms were all large, gracious, the windows heavy, with leaded panes in the top halves. You could be in
Lottie and Jack’s bedroom and not know whether anyone else was home, whether Megan and her friends were talking in the den or the living room. There
was
a den. A den, a living room, a
study, a kitchen, a dining room, a maid’s room. That was just the first floor.

The streets around the house were solid with other silent, dignified homes, just like Jack’s. There wasn’t a café, a bar within walking distance. There wasn’t a
laundromat – why would there be? – or a bookstore or a bulletin board. When Lottie left the house, she never walked. She got in the car and drove to Hyde Park. Often, actually, she
drove to the North Side, where she’d lived with Ryan, and she cruised the crowded bungalows in her old neighborhood, stopped at places she’d gone to then.

This was unfair, she’d told herself. This was just a kind of homesickness for her old life that she was blaming Jack for. And she made herself number the reasons she’d come to love
him. The fact that he could play the clarinet part to ‘Miss Brown to You.’ How once in making love, after she’d carefully lowered herself on to him, adjusting her hips a little
this way and that, he’d said, ‘Prettily arranging her skirts.’ How his exuberant gray hair, which he combed down so tidily each morning, gradually rose and took on a life of its
own over his long workday. Yes, of course, how he’d taken care of Evelyn.

But then she remembered, too, the time he’d come to join her at a hotel in Seattle when she was on the road doing publicity for the diet book. When he’d called that time, he
didn’t ask if he could come, his voice was not hesitant. ‘I’m coming out,’ he’d said. ‘I’m going to lavish money and sex on you whether you like it or
not.’

That was what she wanted, Lottie thought. That ease, that honesty. That need. She wondered if she could conjure it, if she could set them both free from the spell they seemed to be under. This
weekend, this weekend, she swore, she’d make it happen, she’d make it be the way it was before between them.

The room at the hotel overlooked the Public Garden. Through the thick veil of leaves Lottie could see the drooping willow fronds over the rain-pocked water, and white glimpses
of the tethered swan boats. The light by the bed was too bright, so she went downstairs to the lobby and bought a very expensive red silk scarf in the little shop there, which she thought she could
drape over it. There was still more than an hour until the time Jack might be expected to arrive. Lottie stood in the shop and leafed through a magazine or two, and then she walked outside into the
rain, across the street and down a winding path into the green of the garden. It was getting dark, the rain was light, and the air smelled of the sea. The living swans, as motionless as their giant
wooden replicas, slept, floating close to the grassy banks, their heads tucked under their wings. Halfway around the pond, she passed a couple, laughing and jockeying for position under a small,
collapsible umbrella. She realized abruptly how wet she was getting, and turned back. At the hotel, though, she didn’t feel ready to go up to the room. Instead she found the lounge and had a
glass of wine, sitting by a window looking out into the rain. There was a young man in a tux at the grand piano in the center of the room, playing Gershwin and Cole Porter tunes. He had on black,
high-cut gym shoes, Lottie noted. Outside, the streetlamps had come on.

Finally she went upstairs. She tried the scarf over the lamp. A bit bordello-like, but better. She turned the light off. She opened the narrow, moveable portions of the window and welcomed in
the heavy air, the faint sibilance of the rain and wet things stirring in the slight breeze.

She called the airport. The plane was on the ground, just arriving. She was nervous, as she’d been with Jack in only the craziest times. She went into the fancy bathroom and brushed her
teeth. She fussed with makeup, covering a blemish. Then she decided that the cover-up itself was too visible, washed her face, and started all over. By the time she heard his knock on the door, she
had actually changed once into the nightgown he had given her, and then, when it occurred to her he might want to undress her, into street clothes again.

She was at the door within seconds. His embrace engulfed her – the length of him! – her throat clogged, and she couldn’t speak. She’d forgotten him, the way it felt to be
held by him, his doctor smell, as she thought of it, the solid flat of his back under the fabric of his shirt, the long muscles of his thighs. It was at once familiar and completely strange, and it
suddenly occurred to Lottie how little she knew him, that his touch could shake her this way.

Lottie pulled him over to the bed. ‘C’mere, c’mere.’ Her voice was rough and strained. They fell on the fancy coverlet, grappling, laughing.

‘But it’s lovely to
see
you,’ Jack said artificially formal. He pushed the dampened hair back from her face.

But Lottie didn’t want to be looked at, didn’t want to make jokes. She pulled his face to hers, mouthed his jawline, his cheek. Then his lips, her body convulsing against his. Her
fingers clutched at his shirt buttons and worked them open, pushed frantically at his belt. He rolled away and reached down to undo his pants, to push them down, his hips arching up. Lottie hoisted
her skirt to her waist, and he helped her with her panties. She was stroking him already, pressing against him, bucking rhythmically.

‘Shh, darling, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

She felt him try to slow her with his weight, but that wasn’t what she wanted. With her teeth, her tongue, she stroked his chest, then his shoulder. Her mouth made senseless pleading
noises, ‘Hnhh, hnhh.’ She lifted herself against him, her legs rose, opening herself – she thought of this as a gripping, a reaching too – and then he was in her, she pumped
violently, she bit down hard on his shoulder’s flesh and heard him gasp.

He pushed up, he arched away from her desperation and moved them now to the slower rhythm he chose. It was twilight in the room. He was a dark shadow humping over her, her own feet and legs like
wings rising above his shoulders. The cars rushed past outside in long sighs. Jack cupped his hands under her buttocks and lifted her against him. His thumbs pushed her thighs down open, more open,
and he shifted her to please them both, so easily that she forgot her greed, she forgot her body as the dense form she lived in daily – it was so light, so insubstantial that it was only
feeling, a space, a beautiful dark room with the doors opening out on sun, air. ‘Darling,’ he cried, and then more urgently.

‘Oh, say
Lottie
,’ she whispered, and he did.

They lay heaped together for a while, panting, then side by side on their backs, watching the reflected light from outside slur across the ceiling. They began to talk, slowly. His voice floated
over Lottie. ‘That was lovely.’

‘I was too hungry for you,’ she said.

‘You were pretty scary,’ he said. She didn’t answer. ‘We have lots of time, you know. All the time in the world.’

‘Mmm,’ she said.

His hand moved over between her legs and she opened to it. His fingers slid down her, then pulled up, cuplike, and spread the warmed syrup, rubbed it in cooling circles on her belly, in her
coiling hair. His hand rested on her belly. Their talk idled along. He told her about the summer with Megan, about a visit from his oldest son, Charley. Lottie talked about Ryan, about the house
and her pleasure in that work, about her inability to write. It was quiet for a few minutes. Lottie reached over and touched him. ‘I want to do everything.’

‘Baby steps first,’ he said. He rose above her again, unrolled her damp skirt, pulled it down. He eased her arms out of her blouse. He moved his hand over Lottie’s belly, down
between her thighs again, where it was still slick and warm. Lottie opened her legs, and his fingers moved on to her, into the folds of her flesh with a light, wet sound. ‘Mmm,’ she
said. ‘Clickety, clickety.’

‘My fine hen.’ He’d already found the right slow rhythm.

Lottie laughed, mostly to herself, and held her knees open at her chest while he knelt back to watch his fingers on her.

Later they decided to get dressed again and go downstairs for a drink and maybe something to eat. ‘Let’s live in a hotel,’ Lottie said as they walked down the wide silent
hallway to the elevator. ‘Forever and ever. The hell with our children. The hell with houses and jobs.’

He laughed, but when she looked up at him in the big mirror above the console opposite the bank of elevators, his face had already tightened, she saw he was unhappy. She had hurt him. Lottie
felt a quick irritation. She glanced quickly back at herself, now blurred her eyes to take them in, Jack-and-Lottie, as a couple. She was startled by their appearance. So respectable. So oddly
matched. Next to Jack she looked tiny and delicate, and it always surprised her to see this version of herself, diminished, made so feminine. Mutt and Jeff, she called them to Ryan once.
‘Who?’ he’d said.

Lottie asked to be seated by a window again in the dimmed, plush lounge. The rain was heavier now; it stroked the glass audibly. There was only the odd pedestrian, moving fast. The nuts in the
little silver bowl the waiter brought were so good they decided not to have anything else to eat. They each had a glass of wine, then a cognac, and the waiter kept filling the bowl with nuts.

‘He disapproves of us,’ Lottie said. ‘Moochers, is what he thinks.’ She was conscious of flirting with Jack now, of trying to win him back.

‘I can live with it,’ Jack said.

‘I’m humiliated.’ Lottie shook her head and smiled across at him. ‘For both of us.’

But Jack was looking out at the steady rain. After a minute, he said, ‘So, Lottie mine, how soon do you think you’ll be done?’