Lillian on Life (9 page)

W
hy did I buy these paper napkins? Tartan? Things so often look better in the shop than in your home, where there are so many other things to compete with. I wish everything in my apartment were white, actually, except maybe the geraniums on the windowsills and the fruit on the dining table. A white porcelain soup tureen, even if you never use it, even if it sits for decades on the sideboard, can make you feel clean and calm. Imagine opening it to reveal red pepper soup. Red berry tea in delicate white cups on a glass table touched with sunlight. An ostrich egg. I used to have one, don't know where it is now, but I could put my hand on its excellent cool shape and feel a funny connection.

I read somewhere that the reason Japanese advertising is often so simple and peaceful, always giving the impression of a light breeze blowing through, is that such an atmosphere is just a dream in that country, almost impossible to achieve when living cheek by jowl. I leaf through my magazines—
Architectural Digest
,
House & Garden
,
Vanity Fair—
and I pull out the pages of my dreams. White
curtains blowing out over the back of a white couch. White shelves supporting a few white objects—porcelain, shell, faded wood, rice paper.

Colors keep crowding me, but it's my fault. I'd have everything white if I were organized.

Even love hasn't had the power to clear my clutter.

There was an awful day after I moved to the New York bureau when I had to reconstruct the board meeting minutes and I couldn't find my notes. I was scared and ashamed and Ted said to me, “Do you know why the ropes are always coiled in the same way in the same place on yachts, Lillian?” Of course I didn't. I was a deer in headlights. I'd been on yachts, but I hadn't thought about the ropes. “It's so that when things get dicey and everyone needs to keep the boat safe and sailing, there's no question as to where things are and what's been done with them. You can put your hand on anything you need because it's always where it should be in the way it should be there.” He spread his big hands, palms up, to indicate the mountain of papers and magazines on my desk, and left.

A few months before, Ted and I had worked late and made love on the floor of his office until even later. I don't know what Ted needed to work on that night, but I was as usual trying to catch up. The sun went down and I finished
typing, separated the copies from the carbon paper, left mine on my desk and took Ted's into his office, thinking simultaneously about how I'd need to wash my hands well in order not to get blue on my dress and about how handsome Ted was with his sleeves rolled up, reading in the light of his desk lamp, chewing his lip. A big man chewing his lip is an attractive, vulnerable thing. A small man chewing his lip is a rodent.

I could have stayed opposite him and handed him the papers across his desk, but something kept me walking around to stand on his left. Maybe I manufactured something to point out to him. His face was a few inches from my arm. He turned his head slowly and rested his lips on my blouse, and I could feel the warmth seeping through the fabric and into my skin, and neither of us moved. Sometimes the grandest moments are the quietest. Then he dropped his left hand and pressed the backs of his fingers against my calf, and the colors crowded in.

When he told me I needed to be shipshape three months later, I wanted to be shipshape. I came in on the weekend in slacks and rolled-up sleeves and cut the mountain down to size. By Sunday afternoon I was standing by the filthy window, chewing on a heel of bread, feeling like a normal person.

Sunday night I washed and styled my hair, cleaned up my cuticles and painted my nails. Monday morning I put on a gray skirt and a long red cashmere sweater. It was early December. Sitting in my office, I tapped my nails on the clean top of my desk and allowed one piece of paper at a time onto my blotter. Of course it didn't last. Systems don't stick with me. I forget I even
have
systems sometimes. But that was a lovely moment in a strange, strange day.

At lunchtime Ted came in and said, “You're coming with me.” It sounded professional, maybe something had gone wrong in Munich again, but he took me into the elevator, which could only mean we were leaving the building.

“Everything okay?” I ventured.

“Yep,” he said, then he cleared his throat, the doors opened and we walked briskly out of the building, straight to the corner and left on Forty-ninth Street. A block and a half down he turned to look behind us, took my hand and pulled me through a dark door past photos I had no time to take in. We ducked through deep red velvet curtains and were in a small cinema. The movie had already started and the tiny space was full of the lip-smacking noises of a man sucking on a hugely endowed woman's nipples. Ted exhaled audibly, squeezing my hand. I looked at him and he looked down at me. “Safe,” he whispered, and had me follow him
into a pair of seats. I looked at the screen, and I looked at Ted looking at the screen. After a bit he leaned toward me, not taking his eyes off the ecstatic couple. “Okay?” he asked. I wasn't sure, but he looked so thrilled. So boyish, and also so powerfully male.

Mother was a constant stream of what you couldn't do, what wasn't done. I could only imagine Ted's wife was similar in her way. She kept very busy volunteering and organizing charity galas and performing in amateur theatricals. I think she also wrote some of them. Her hair was still Jackie Kennedy long after Jackie was Onassis. She made picnics for the family to eat in Central Park on weekends. So I put my hand on his crotch.

People say that some things are meant to be. The question that doesn't get answered, or even asked, is
what
these things are meant to be. Then there are more questions. I can say I was meant to be with Ted. But then, what does
with
mean? Or even
be
? He was completely under my skin. He still is. His breath crawls beneath the first layer. His ghost is the air under that. How much more with can you get? How much more be?

I was never allowed to make visible marks on him. We washed my blue carbon-paper fingerprints off him after that first time. But I once had a dream in which I was alone
in a peaceful white room. There wasn't any furniture, just curved white walls in a perfect circle around me. No windows to complicate the sight, just light streaming down from high above. I turned around and around, studying the room. Then I stopped, reached into my pocket and pulled out a ring. It was a beautiful ring of platinum and precious stones, not something I recognized when I woke up but in the dream it was absolutely mine. I went over to the perfectly white wall, and started using the ring to draw on it, just like a caveman: “I was here. Something happened. I want you to know.”

I
always tell Judy when I take someone to bed. I don't know why. She's always disapproving, and her eyes go a little wild. She lets me tell her, though. She's never said she doesn't want to know. And she keeps sending people to stay with me for the few nights they're in town for meetings or a reunion.

It's usually the wine. Red, above all. I love to drink it, and if they love to drink it too, then when we head for the bedroom it's really like all we've done is dive in. The sheets are waves of wine moving over us as we swim in the glass.

Judy even sent me a lord once. And then she was aghast when he proved temptable. Either she's been married too long, or not long enough. To tell the truth, though, Alfred kept a polite distance for so long that I thought I'd be sleeping alone that night. He spent a lot of time staring bemusedly into his glass. I was at the head of the table and he was sitting to my left, so I had a view of his profile for most of dinner. The candles made the wine look as velvet as usual, and he seemed to enjoy looking at it more than drinking it. Eventually I got tired of studying his lips and
looked at his ear. I've studied my share of aristocrats, and had expected the long lobes that tend to accompany the narrow nose and tall forehead of the aging gentry. His were small, though; they were the first I'd ever seen that truly reminded me of shells. Even if I hadn't been drinking, I think they would have touched my heart. They were a child's ears. We had been talking about Budapest—he'd just been—but his silence had lulled me into imagining that touching him would have no effect. It was peaceful. I reached out to feel the perfect inside of his ear, forgetting it was attached to a man. I was startled when he leaned into my hand—

This is how I told the story to Judy. I think I went on about his ear for a really long time, actually. The truth is, I studied his ear after he fell asleep. I always do this. I study the sleeping profile and imagine that I'm seeing it for the four thousandth time. So the truth is I didn't touch his ear at the dinner table. I eventually said, “You'd be welcome in my room tonight, Alfred.” He continued staring into his glass. I slipped my left foot out of my shoe and put it on his thigh. If he gave my foot firmly back to me, I'd say,
Never mind, I completely understand,
but he wrapped his hand around it and squeezed. He squeezed so hard that it hurt,
but it didn't feel like
You whore,
it felt like
Yes
, so I blew out the candle closest to me and he blew out the other and I had him.

“Oh, Lillian, not
Alfred
,” Judy said. I made up the ear story on the spot, told her how maternal it made me feel, how curious, and how I'd had to change gears entirely when he responded to my touch. I doubt she believed me but she was too polite to press it. We were at their house when I told her all this. George Junior was playing the piano in the living room. I was chopping vegetables for gazpacho. She was slicing crusty bread in her determined way.

“Isn't it awkward in the morning?” she asked after a time, then sliced more quietly to hear my answer.

“Never has been,” I said, transferring vegetables from cutting board to blender. “Not when we both know it's not going to happen again. Alfred was up and dressed, reading the paper when I got up. I've learned not to talk too much in the mornings, to let them come to me. I go about in my nightie for a bit, drinking my coffee, and they join me if they feel like it and don't if they don't. Then I dress. Saying goodbye clothed has a nice finality to it.” I switched on the blender and the beautiful bright tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and onions leaped and danced and dissolved. I turned
it off and the quiet was fragrant. “If Ted leaves me in the morning I like still to be in my nightie. The goodbye embrace is so intimate that way. But with others,
les passants
, I'm dressed, totally pulled together. New day. Page turned. Unless . . . No.”

Judy brought me three bowls. “Unless what?”

“Nothing.”

Unless they've already left when I wake up.

When I went into the office on the day after Ted and I made love for the first time, I wondered if he'd behave coldly, or come out and tell me it had been a mistake that couldn't be repeated. I prepared myself for business as usual, and business only. If I'd felt more confident, I would have gone in to the office early, to be alone with him before the workday started, to get up close and smell him again. I was awake before the alarm, but I made myself wait. I didn't want him to feel awkward being alone with me. I changed my nail color and I looked again at the impossible parts of Sunday's crossword. I thought through a dozen outfits, and decided black would be best. A-line skirt, long-sleeved top, stockings, heavy silver earrings. Serious.

I said good morning to people as I walked through the newsroom to my office outside Ted's, but not overbrightly. I tried to look like I was thinking about a meeting. He wasn't
at his desk when I got there and I just went to work, pretending there was saliva in my mouth when it was bone dry. I had something to type that required three pieces of typing paper and two pieces of carbon paper. It took forever to get the pages lined up and another eternity to get them behaving themselves on the cylinder. I swore at the thing, and he arrived in the doorway just in time to hear it.

“Does your mother know you use words like that?” he asked as he moved toward the door to his office, smiling. I picked up a pen and my notebook, as usual in the morning, and followed him.

“My mother doesn't know much about me at all,” I said.

He went behind his desk and sat down facing me. “Oh? You don't tell her much?”

“Not anymore.”

We were both smiling. Smiling to beat the band. I thought we weren't going to be able to stop, and then a look I couldn't interpret traveled across his face. It looked a bit like sadness, but maybe it was shyness. He glanced away from me and inhaled, and when he finally looked back he was smiling again, but warmly this time.

“Would you like some more things not to tell your mother about?” he said, and a nipple-hardening rash of joy scorched my torso.

Whenever I leave after telling Judy about my sex life, I know she tells George Junior my stories. I worry a little about that. But if I've learned anything, it's this: The world has never loved a spinster, and never will. The more people she tells, the merrier.