Lillian on Life (5 page)

The toilet was clearly designed for ladies, and quite recently. Maybe there weren't any toilets on the ground floor originally. Maybe upstairs they were still connected to high cisterns and flushed with a long chain. I would have loved to creep up the stairs and look around, but there was the question of the valet. This toilet was modern, in a room with a tiled counter inset with a pretty porcelain sink. I could breathe in there, although the mirror showed me terrible things. I had known my lipstick would be gone, but I hadn't anticipated that the nervous sweating I was doing would have begun to curl my hair. I looked mortifyingly Midwestern, but in my haste to leave the dining room I had left my handbag on my chair. So stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I made sure the door was locked, took off my jacket and camisole, and splashed my neck, chest, and underarms with
the extremely cold water that came out of the tap. It felt so good I did it again. I wet a corner of a linen hand towel and dabbed at my face. I decided that if I messed up my eyeliner I'd leave the château immediately, but I did okay. Before putting my clothes back on, I flapped them smartly to dispel the smell of distress. There was nothing to do about the curls, but I ran my fingers carefully through my hair so at least they would curl in the same direction.

When I finally emerged, the unsmiling valet appeared from around a corner. I felt I'd never experienced anything more discreet in my life. He showed me back to the dining room. The count stood, I sat, then he sat. The pineapple was gone. Cheese and grapes now dominated the table.

I said, “Wow!” and the count laughed. I took a sip of calvados, which was pure fire in my throat. I pretended the coughing was brought on by the laughter.

In bed that night, Willis said, “Sure you're satisfied with the likes of me?”

It was an excellent question, but I had no idea why he asked it. It wasn't his style at all.

“Why?”

“Because you could be having yourself a count.”

“What?”

“He was yours for the taking, babe.”

“He was not.”

“Ripe for the plucking.”

“He was
not
. You just don't know a gentleman when you see one,” I told him. Then I thought for a while, blinking at the dark ceiling, replaying the event. I decided Willis was mistaken. Willis really, really didn't understand anything.

O
f course my parents had a bit of trouble swallowing Willis. Among other things.

On the first day of their first and only trip to visit me in Paris, I walked into their hotel dining room to find Mother shocked and disgusted. I have to say she looked otherwise handsome, but her face was pinched with discomfort and I thought,
Oh God, it's only the first day, please let this be something we can get over quickly.
There are so many confusing feelings involved in entertaining Midwestern parents in a European city. I suppose I'd been in Europe too long to remember that not everyone in the world hankered to start the day with a croissant. No matter where they were, Mother and Poppa asked for sweet rolls for breakfast in hotels. It was nearly lunchtime already, but they still insisted on starting the day the usual way. Apparently when they asked for sweet rolls they had received blank looks and had rightly understood that the word “roll” was the culprit, so tried asking for sweet
bread
instead. I arrived just after the waiter had taken the lid off the thymus gland of a calf.

Mother said, “Calf's
thymus
, Lillian? I wish I weren't too tired and hungry to laugh.”

“Well, you could try it, since it's here now.”

“Don't push her, Lil,” Poppa said, squeezing my elbow.

Impasse. So I said I'd eat it. I waved a waiter over and ordered Mother a selection of pastries, and I ate the sweetbreads, pretending not to mind in the slightest. They tasted a bit like bacon, so I told Mother they tasted a lot like bacon. I added that I'd heard that sweetbreads of pancreas rather than thymus were said to be more delicious. She laughed at that, and it was nice to see.

After we finished eating, Mother pulled out her cigarettes and I surprised them both by pulling out mine. Poppa didn't miss a beat, though, and lit them for each of us, Mother first, of course, and went back to his coffee, smiling at the spring sun coming through the windows. Mother and I puffed. I didn't want a cigarette; I wanted some orange juice, but instead I built a smoke tower to rival hers. Smoking is only convivial if you partake of the same pack; otherwise it's territorial.

I knew very little about Mother then. I still don't have the facts straight. She wouldn't tell anyone what year she was born because she was a year older than Poppa. She had been a rural teacher before marriage and the suburbs, but
showed no teacherly tendencies at any point in my life with her. She had two charming sisters who irritated her but nonetheless kept her secrets. Her drink was bourbon on the rocks. Sitting across from her in the hotel that morning, though, what I did or didn't know about her and what I did and didn't like about her didn't matter. I wanted my parents to have a good time, and I wanted to show them what a big girl I was, and I wasn't sure how to work it all out. Then it hit me like my own private earthquake that Mother and I were wearing the same shade of dark red nail polish. I put out my half-smoked cigarette and tucked my hands under my thighs.

“So,” I said in my high school voice, “what do you want to do today?” They visibly relaxed. It's unfortunate how we have to cripple ourselves for love, but it's a fact. We have to. Poppa did that more elegantly than any human I've ever met, keeping his thoughts to himself on Mother's complaints and desires, giving the impression that he had gained rather than lost something as a result.

I can't remember where I took them that day. Probably the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. That would have made sense. I know we had beautiful weather. I remember our nail polish flashing in the sun. For dinner with my parents and Willis, I changed shades. He would
have remarked upon the matching fingernails.
The clotheshorse doesn't fall far from the tree, now, does it?
he'd have hooted. I took off the red and put on an extremely dark plum after my bath, knowing it would look as good with the black-and-white satin dress as the red, and sat naked on the edge of the bed waiting for it to dry. Willis took a photo. When he couldn't keep his hands to himself any longer, he pushed me onto my back and took me. I kept my hands in the air, away from our bodies. That was fun. It was fun to think of when we walked into the hotel bar and greeted Mother. Less fun to think of when I hugged Poppa, though, and when I introduced him to Willis.

Willis ordered drinks and commandeered the conversation. He was just back from Naples, where he believed not only that every other person he met was a Mafioso but also that they were now his best friends. I drank and cringed and watched my parents' reactions. Mother smoked and accepted another drink and asked Willis about his people in Texas. Willis was succinct for once. Poppa stuck with two drinks and nodded. Willis turned to Poppa and said, “You saw some of the first war here in France, Lil tells me.”

“Well, yes, I suppose I did,” Poppa answered.

“You suppose, huh?” Willis said, ready to laugh, but he caught my look. “Well,” he said, and took a swig of his gin.
“Paris has a brand-new face on these days anyway. It's not the same town you liberated, George. No, sir. You'll see that. We're back to flowers and smooches in the street now, aren't we, Lil?”

“Hallelujah,” I said, and raised my glass. Willis and Poppa and then Mother followed suit.

“To smooches,” Willis said.

Mother and Poppa hesitated—it wasn't their sort of word—so I said it, “To smooches,” and we drank.

At dinner, Mother talked about the trip she and Poppa had taken to Florida two months before to visit her sister Celia, and how Celia's husband had spent so much time tending his hunting dogs that she wondered why Celia didn't come back to Missouri, and Poppa said he supposed she enjoyed the beautiful sunsets over the lake. Mother said, “Celia?” but I knew Poppa was saying that he had been touched by that evening light.

For all Willis's brutal directness, I knew that he would have loved the Florida sunsets too. I also knew that it would be hard to convince anyone that this was true. People say it shouldn't matter, that you shouldn't worry about whether or not other people see your lover the way you do, but when are things ever that simple? Have the people who say that lived at
all
?

I spent a lot of money telling all this to Alma years later in New York, when the strain of loving Ted, and waiting for Ted, and enduring the disapproval of the family got too great. Alma smoked while I talked and cried. It's a shame shrinks can't smoke in their own offices anymore. The smoke looked like her thoughts. Shrinks who just listen make me nervous. We entered areas of feeling that I worried might overwhelm me completely. Hate, for example. It's an emotion I continue to avoid, both in myself and in others, but I like to encourage others to admit to it if they can. I like to watch when they do. I now prefer women who breathe fire when truly provoked to those who sit alone in their bedrooms and cry. Back then, though, I was still convinced that hate wasn't allowed, and that crying was the only path to peace. As I told Alma my stories, my crying led not to relief but to more crying. The well felt bottomless. Standing at the door after an early session, knowing there was someone in the waiting room who deserved his or her turn, I couldn't get myself to leave. Alma asked me if I'd like to come more than once a week for a while.

“Yes, please,” I blubbed.

“That's okay. We'll do that,” she told me.

This still didn't get me out.

“Would you like to come every day?” She was smiling.

“Yes, please.” I meant it. Still I stood.

“Would you like to move in?”

Now I laughed, which released me. I felt really stupid, but I could finally walk through the door, and, more importantly, back out into New York and my life. My life with Ted but not with Ted, with, without, with
and
without. Alma said that would keep until we'd talked about Mother, and Poppa, even George Junior, which was weird, and Vassar. She made a joke to get me back out on the street, but out there I cried again. Once even, actually maybe twice, on my way home, I imagined coming across a sharp rock protruding from the sidewalk and deliberately falling so that it pierced my temple and killed me, but of course there never was one. Also, Alma had tried to convince me that even though I felt each time I saw her that I was descending deeper into a dark, rank pit, I was actually climbing a ladder out of
it.

M
ichael likes tea in the morning, and I always wish I could have a steaming pot waiting for him when he comes into the kitchen, but it's impossible to time it correctly. I sat at the little table for a while after I finished my breakfast and wondered what to do about the corner cabinet. I can't just keep putting Scotch tape on it to keep it closed. Well, I can. But there must be something else I can do. Maybe a sliver of cardboard in the hinge. People who ask me why I don't just replace the old cabinets don't understand at all. When you choose new kitchen cabinets you don't just choose new cabinets. You set off an avalanche of decisions to be made: Will they clash with the countertop? Will I hate the way the handles stick out? Will having new cabinets make the old fridge look too shabby? I keep meaning to have some gay friends over to ask their opinions.

I like to think that if Mother had been born a bit later and in more cosmopolitan circumstances, she would have had gay friends. She would have had a good laugh with them, maybe even a good, wicked laugh. They would have
enjoyed her well-made dress suits, and maybe they would have improved her taste in interiors.

She had a decorator over once, when I had just finished college and was volunteering here and there. This woman looked around the house at all the details—the things that couldn't be reupholstered or painted over, the paintings. She came last to my room and pointed at the little Zao Wou-ki watercolor I had just bought. “Well,” she said, “that's the only art of any value here.” I saw Mother stiffen.

It didn't go with my ice-blue room at all. I had leaned it up against the wall in anticipation of living somewhere else. I still do that. I buy stuff for future walls. Fantasy walls. This was the first, though. I'd seen the painting in the window of a little gallery in St. Louis, and started going in to stare at it after my activities with the Junior League nearby. I had volunteered to read to children in a hospital in the city, which I adored. Afterward, someone from the Junior League would drive me to the bus station. But first I went into the gallery. I couldn't walk by it; I had to go in. If this has happened to you, you know what I mean. Time stops. You don't feel your body, just the swirl behind your eyes. Finally the woman in the shop asked me how much I felt I could pay, as it was obvious to her I was blocked by my budget. I floundered. After a moment she very elegantly
suggested an installment plan. I would bring her ten dollars as regularly as possible, and she would leave the painting up with a little
SOLD
sign beside it. “Good for you, good for me,” she said, explaining how
SOLD
signs always got hesitant browsers' juices flowing. So eventually I had it, a little watercolor window on my future propped up against the wall of my bedroom, and Mother had to eat crow, because she had said it was very strange and the decorator had called it valuable.

I can admit that I now need a decorator. I know this kitchen is ridiculous. Not enough space to swing a cat. Between the sink and the oven there's no space to swing even a mouse. Silly. But no one's offered a solution that feels right. I should see the design and time should stop. You should know it's the one for you.

That was Ted. The first time I saw him I knew, and it wasn't just how he looked; it was the energy that came off him. I felt it coming out of his eyes but also off his forearms when he rolled up his starched sleeves. It was in the shine on his eyebrow hairs and in the deep creases on the tops of his gleaming shoes. I felt it in the way his trousers slid along his long calves when he walked.

It was August 15, 1968. I was thirty-five. We knew that the new managing director would be moving into the New
York office that day. Those of us who were interested had read his bio, and some people in the office had met him when he was with AP. Most of the assistants hadn't thought too much about him, but I was going to be his PA. I read the bio. I asked around. He'd attended the School of Journalism at Indiana University. He also had a law degree. He'd worked for newspapers in Pennsylvania and California before joining AP, where he progressed from reporter to editor. He had a wife and three children. He was fifty-one, and, as I noticed when he walked across the outer office to where I was standing by my desk, he limped.

He limped, but he did so as if he'd always limped and that was the normal way, when in fact he'd been wounded in the war, before most of our boys even had a chance to be. It was months and months before he was willing to tell me, actually. We could only snatch short moments alone for ages, but there was finally a trip, a hotel, a chance to sleep and wake up and see his skin against white sheets. I traced the scars on his thigh, just above his knee.

“France?” I said, watching my fingers.

His hair shushed against the pillow as he shook his head no. “Libya,” he said.

“Were you there for long?”

“Not long enough. Went in August, back home for Christmas. Nineteen forty.”

My sleepy mind ticked over. “Nineteen forty?”

“That's what I said.”

“But we didn't enter the war until nineteen forty-one, right?”

“That's right.”

I tipped my head back to look into his face, and he was smiling at me. “Speak,” I said. He just looked down at my hand on his knee. I pushed him with my body to shake the words out of him. “Speak,” I said. “Speak now, or forever hold your ears to block out the nagging.”

When he decided to talk, he pulled me to him so that his chin rested on my head and my right ear was suctioned against his neck. It's awkward to try and listen like that, with your neck twisted that far and only one ear available, but I didn't dare move. That's how he wanted to tell me, so that's how I'd be told.

“I enlisted with the British, before we entered the war,” he said. “Rifle battalion.”

He didn't say anything for a while, but kept me held against him, so I figured he wasn't finished. I tried to imagine what he was seeing. “Bayonets?”

“Yes.”

“It's hard to imagine. Like you were fighting in the Boer War, or something.”

“They were very important.”

“But you have to get so close to use them.”

He nodded against my head. “You save ammunition, though.”

“But what if they have guns? I mean, who can you actually get close to without being killed first?”

“Sometimes you got close under cover of smoke. Sometimes you came across soldiers manning mortar, all spread out. I don't know why they weren't better armed.”

“You stabbed them.”

“If you could.”

We were quiet for a moment. I felt like the room wasn't attached to a hotel anymore. It was just our minds. It was the inside of our minds.

“And did
you
stab people?”

He nodded against my head and I felt him waiting, like he didn't know how I'd feel about that, so I pulled him closer against me with the hand I'd been touching his scars with, the hand I wasn't lying on. I wanted to press my lips against his neck, but that would mean pulling my head away a bit, and I didn't want him to feel any separation
between us at that moment, so I just waited. When he didn't say anything, I said, “Did people stab you?”

“No.”

“So what got you in the leg?”

“Shrapnel.”

Now I nodded, and my ear popped away from his neck, which was a relief, and since we were talking about the wound I felt I could look at it again. I went up on one elbow and leaned over toward it. “Did they need to reset the bone?”

“Yes, lots of it.”

“And did they do that in Libya?”

“Yes.”

“In a field hospital?”

“Those were in France. Ours were called desert hospitals.”

I was about to ask another question, because it seemed that was what I had to do, but he said, “You know what I remember most vividly from that hospital? There were creases in the pillowcase. I was in pain when they brought me in. They'd bandaged me up before transporting me, but they hadn't had anything to deaden that kind of pain, so I wasn't clear in my head. I don't remember who was holding the stretcher, anything like that, but when they lifted me
up and I looked at the cot I'd be transferred to, even as they tipped me onto it, I noticed the creases in the pillowcase, and it was everything I could do not to cry. You get used to things being dusty and gritty and oily. You really do. But then when there's something clean, something that's been folded carefully, and unfolded carefully, and it's there for your head, it's like your heart, it's like, I don't know. I can't describe it.”

I wished he could. I wished I could have been the one to hear exactly what happened to his heart that day. But I didn't push him.

“Did you receive a Purple Heart?” I asked after a bit.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was with the British, remember?”

“Oh yes. So did they give you anything, or just a clean pillowcase?”

“The Military Cross.”

“For being wounded?”

He cleared his throat. “For gallantry, actually. I think it was ‘exemplary gallantry.'
”

I looked at his face again, and he shrugged. “No idea what for,” he said. “It came as a surprise.”

“No.”

“I'm not lying.”

“I still don't believe you.”

“Suit yourself.”

I thought for a second. “Maybe they thought it was gallant that a Yank signed up to help.” I put on an English accent. “Jolly good show, soldier.”

He laughed. “Maybe. Come here. I'll show you a jolly good show.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “I'll show you exemplary gallantry.”

So you see? You see how right he was? You see how the design was just right? And how Willis and I weren't just right? Willis bought me beautiful clothes and took me beautiful places, but he got angry and said crazy stuff and was embarrassing when behavior mattered. I tried to imagine marrying him, but the idea was ridiculous. He would have been fun at the reception but a nightmare at the ceremony.

The transfer to London saved me. I remember packing, stuffing my suitcases with the clothes he'd given me. I even had to buy some webbing to tie them shut with. And then unpacking everything, and all of it looking so out of place in my dowdy little tenement.

When he came over to England to ask me to reconsider, the familiarity I felt when I was with him paled in comparison to the relief I felt at having the Channel between
us. Actually, the familiarity had simply paled, even without the comparison. It didn't take long. When you're in a relationship you mold yourself to it. You curve your body around it and you curve your mind around it, in order to maintain it. Sometimes you don't realize you're crippled until it's too late.

That's not how I worded it to myself back then, of course. I was so unclear on things. But my heart was tender, and I knew that he chafed it.

We had dinner when he came over to London, and he looked different to me. I knew all the clothes he was wearing, and his hair was still the same, neatly trimmed, lightly oiled, as always belying his interior volcano. But he was no longer someone I adapted to. I chattered about my new job for a while, fiddling with my bread, until he couldn't stand it.

“Your new boss handsome?” he finally asked.

“Not especially,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said, and stretched a leg out to the side and looked at it.

We didn't talk or eat much after that. On the walk back to where I was staying it pained me so much that I had caused such a noisy man to fall silent. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, or on his heart. But of course I didn't
reach out to him. If you touch them, it means they are allowed to touch you, and if he had touched me I would have screamed.

I was staying temporarily in what the English call a bedsit. It was on the second floor of a drab terrace house and had its own door at street level. I left Willis at the bottom of the stairs and turned at the top. He still had his hand on the door, keeping it open.

“Sure?” he said, after a moment.

I nodded. After another moment he let the door close and left.

I don't want that to happen with this kitchen. I don't want that horrible, exhausting confusion of moving away from the old but being unclear about the new. I want to see a design, and I want to
know
, because in my experience the new
has been an extremely mixed
bag.