For Love (2 page)

And then he opens the door and gets out to go and see what it is he has done for love.

Down the street, at the unfashionable end of the block, where the houses are suddenly smaller and clustered close together on their narrow rectangular plots, Lottie hears the
honking; but she pays no real attention to it. She has opened some of the windows earlier, when it started to rain again, in order to feed her mood on the steady disconsolate noise, and
that’s what she’s busy listening to. That, and the radio. The jazz station is featuring Billie Holiday with one suicidally masochistic song after another, and Lottie is singing along.
She’s had too much to drink too, as it happens, and she’s taken up with one of those mindless tasks that leave you feeling empty-headed while you are also utterly absorbed in a kind of
pseudo thought: she’s hauled all the pieces of kitchen equipment out from her mother’s nicked and battered cabinets, all the old dented, unmatched pots and pans and cookie tins and
dishes, and she’s sitting among them on the worn linoleum, trying to decide which is worth keeping – for herself or her brother, Cameron, or the Salvation Army – and which should
be thrown away.

She’s an odd sight, though there’s no one there to look at her – a small, slender, middle-aged woman with a mass of curling dark hair just beginning to be peppered with white,
sitting on the floor of the shabby kitchen in the cold fluorescent light of the circular overhead fixture. Her legs and bare feet are sticking straight out from under the very expensive gray satin
nightgown her husband gave her as a wedding present. One by one she lifts the worn and obsolete utensils, gazes at each with frowning, drunken concern, and then places it carefully in what she has
concluded is the appropriate pile.

This is a part of her job for the summer, assigned to her by Cameron and willingly accepted. They’re getting their mother’s house ready to sell. Cameron had to put the old woman in a
nursing home the winter before. She’d gotten more and more creepy and dotty as she moved into old age, and it was clear he had no choice when she was found for the second time meandering on
Mass Ave wearing only a slip and her frayed pink mules.

At first he and Lottie had agreed to try to hold on to the house for a while; the mortgage had been paid off years earlier, and there were roomers living in it who provided a little income each
month. But through the spring, Cameron – the one who lives in Boston, the one who has to do everything – has found it more trouble than it’s worth. Two of the roomers began to
complain that the third had a woman living with him now but wasn’t paying any more rent. This wasn’t fair, and they wanted something done about it. Many urgent messages about this
accumulated on Cameron’s answering machine. Then the toilet in the second-floor bathroom sprang a leak. By the time anyone noticed or called Cameron, the ceiling below was stained and
puckered and had to be fixed.

What’s more, the nursing home he’s found for their mother is expensive, too expensive, really. He called Lottie a few months earlier in Chicago and suggested maybe it was time to
sell the house. Prices in Cambridge, even for houses in the kind of shape their mother’s is in, have skyrocketed over the past few years, and he told her he thought they might get enough for
it so that the interest would pay the nursing home fees. By phone Lottie agreed. And she agreed to come and take charge of clearing their mother’s things out over the summer. He could have
asked her to do almost anything and she would have agreed. Lottie hasn’t had much to do with her mother since she was in her mid twenties, and she’s guiltily aware that it’s
Cameron’s inexplicable loyalty to the old woman that has made this possible.

The fact is, though, that Lottie could do this particular chore anytime. Tomorrow, the next day; the rest of her life. ‘Love is just like a faucet,’ she sings with the radio.
‘It turns off and on.’ Oh, isn’t it true. The reason she’s doing it tonight, sorting through utensils and dishes – and drinking and singing – is in order to
avoid thinking about just that, about the rest of her life. Her marriage, barely begun, is in trouble. Is over, is what she thinks. ‘It seems to me we have decided,’ she says aloud now,
and then she sets the rusted eggbeater in the pile of things to be thrown out. She sips from a little jelly jar filled with white wine. She sets it back down on the floor and then listens a moment
as the driven rain splashes and drips outside the rusted screens – and in the distance, a car honks and honks. ‘It seems to me I have decided,’ she corrects herself: her head nods
in a schoolmarm’s exaggerated insistence on precision, her hand rises and rests on her bosom.

She hadn’t meant to get drunk. It was the chance result of her long, odd day. At a little after one o’clock, hours before Cameron made his drive across the city
through the rainy dark, she was sitting with her son, Ryan, at the kitchen table, eating the pasta salad she’d fixed them for lunch, when she felt a portion of one of her back teeth –
an artificial portion, it would turn out – gently slide away from the rest of it. This has happened to her sometimes in nightmares, this and hair loss by the handful, and she had an instant
sense of mortal foreboding. ‘
Damn
it!’ she said out loud. She began to shift the food around in her mouth with her tongue, selectively and carefully swallowing until she could
extract the renegade piece. Little bits of it were crumbling off already; she could feel them between her other teeth.

‘What? What’s wrong?’ Ryan asked.

‘My tooth’, she said, holding up a finger that told him to wait a minute, he’d see.

He started to eat again as he watched her, a steady in-shoveling that was the result of his morning’s work. He was just back from a junior year abroad in England, and he was helping on the
house for the summer – mostly scraping and painting and minor repair. He was tall and blond, and he didn’t look anything like Lottie – except that right now they were both wearing
paint-splotched work clothes and that the exposed flesh of their arms and faces was similarly freckled here and there with Benjamin Moore’s semigloss Birch White. They’d been painting
the trim in the stairwell.

Lottie finally extracted a sizable silver nugget. She set it by her plate and stared at it gloomily. Her tongue swung over the rough socket left behind, and she felt a little jolt of pain shoot
skullward. ‘God, I’m going to pay for this,’ she said aloud. ‘I’m going to be so very sorry this happened.’

Ryan made a sympathetic noise but went on eating. Others can never understand our pain, particularly dental pain. Where had she read this? It didn’t matter. She knew it to be true.

Lottie cleared her place and went upstairs to the room that had been her mother’s, the room she had been sleeping in while she worked on the house this summer. She sat for a moment on the
bed, looking at her feet, encased in the paint-flecked old running shoes she wore to work in. She felt almost teary. She would gladly have lain back and fallen into forgetful sleep.

There was no reason why this – the tooth – should be so upsetting to her, she told herself.

But it was. Of course it was. Lottie was someone who believed in health. She’d had cancer seven years before. Mostly a bad scare: the doctor was sure they’d gotten it all. But now
she took good care of herself. She ate carefully, she ran daily.

She had bad teeth, though, terrible teeth, and from time to time they reminded her of all she could not now control, of all the things that had been out of control in her past – dental
care among them. She animated her teeth in her imagination sometimes, she thought of them as acting willfully on her. A set of bogeymen, half of them man-made at this point.

What’s more, Lottie was upset anyway. She’d barely been holding herself together since her husband’s visit the weekend before. He’d flown out from Chicago and stayed for
two days, and by the end of the time it was clear that nothing had changed. They’d fought just before he left, and neither had called the other since. Lottie assumed his reason was the same
as her own – that there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t lead to another argument.

And now this. Then she laughed out loud at herself: yes, first my marriage goes, and now my tooth. She reached for the telephone. She called Elizabeth’s house – Elizabeth, whom
Cameron was in love with – and got Elizabeth’s elderly mother, Emily, who fussed and clucked and gave her the name of the family dentist on Mass Ave. The receptionist there said to come
over, they’d fit her in. Lottie changed her clothes and washed the paint off her skin. She brushed her teeth carefully, so the dentist would believe she had good hygiene, that this was
something unfortunate that had happened to her, rather than something she was in any sense responsible for. She reapplied her makeup. On her way out, she stopped in the kitchen. Ryan was doing the
dishes. He’d cleared her place.

‘I’m headed for the dentist, honey,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be back sometime later. They said they’d fit me in between his other patients, so I’m not sure
how long it’ll take. I have a feeling I’m going to have read a lot of
People
magazines before you see me again.’

‘I hope I’m able to recognize you,’ he said.

It was raining out, a slow, soft rain at this point in the day, and when Lottie unfurled and opened the umbrella on the front porch, she saw that three of the spokes now stuck nakedly out from
the fluttering fabric. Last time she’d used it, only one had. She sighed and stepped down the stairs into the gentle drizzle.

The dentist was a small, grave man with sparse hair combed carefully over the top of his shining head. He was appalled by Lottie’s mouth; they always were. Most of the early work had been
done at a cut rate in her impoverished childhood by dental students learning the trade at Tufts University. Lottie didn’t bother to explain this; some part of her didn’t wish to give
the dentist the satisfaction of knowing what this suggested about her life. Instead she told him that she’d heard this many times before, that she’d never encountered a more competitive
profession than dentistry.

When the dentist poked in the base of the tooth that had lost the filling, Lottie gasped. He said this would be a little more complicated than he’d originally thought, and sent her back to
the waiting room until he had a longer gap between patients.

Lottie sat watching the gray rain fall on the shining cars, on the people moving from shop to shop along Mass Ave. She listened to the soft rock flowing gently from a speaker in the ceiling and
thought of the dental clinic. God, where had it been? She couldn’t even remember. Many subway stops, changing lines in the grimy, old-fashioned stations, the narrow escalators with slotted,
sloping wooden steps. And then, once there, you waited and waited under the flickering lights with all the other mendicants, hoping you’d get someone who had some minimal competence, who
didn’t actually seem to like to inflict pain.

Mendicants. Lottie had used the very word in telling the tale more than once, making an amusing, exaggerated story of her life. Today it seemed grimly pathetic. It seemed true. She felt sorry
for that girl-Lottie, that Charlotte, who traveled across the city alone to have her terrible mouth fixed in a way that dentists for years to come would shake their heads over.

Late in the afternoon, she stepped out into the rain again and began a slow walk back to her mother’s house. Her mouth was benumbed and it tasted of peppermint, yet it still ached. Exactly
the way she felt about Jack, she mused. Numbed, yet still in pain. She was glad for the numbness for the time being, though she wondered when it would hit her – the full sense that it was
over, that there didn’t seem to be a way for them to stay together. And then she pushed that thought, all these thoughts, aside.

Lottie subscribed to denial, the best defense, she said. She often claimed it was how she’d survived her childhood. And there was a way in which she was proud of rolling so smoothly
through the days since Jack had been here, proud of how little anyone might have guessed of the pain she was pushing under. But she had also pushed under, with far less consciousness of feeling it,
the sense of having had a
close call
with this marriage, the tentative pulse of relief that it might now be over. She’d pushed under the odd excitement about the blank slate that
waited once she’d taken the last, final steps of extricating herself. Now, too, she had a glimmer of this; but she quickly thought instead of Ryan, of how much he might or might not have
understood of what was going on. Not a lot, she suspected. And she was determined to hold it all together until he went back to college, so that he wouldn’t have to witness the terrible
details: the packing, the silence. Or, worse, the chilly politeness.

And what then? Whatever. Whatever came next.

Lottie started down the hilly street she’d grown up on, past the bigger, fancier houses where her childhood friends had lived. It was deserted today, in the steady rain. In the distance,
though, she could hear children somewhere yelling – soaked, no doubt, and wilder and noisier on that account. Her eyes swept the houses. How many streets in Cambridge were like this, she
thought. Streets where at one end lived the children of Harvard faculty, or lawyers or doctors; and at the other end – where the houses had peeling paint and wobbly wrought-iron railings on
their porches, where ornamentation had fallen off, leaving black holes like so many missing teeth – you had the children of janitors, or state employees; or, like her father, criminals.

Abruptly Lottie remembered that counting game, ‘Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .’ The way, when the kids chanted it in her presence, there’d be a peculiar pause
before they got to ‘thief,’ then a hard emphasis when they arrived; and she’d feel them watching her for a response. Early, she’d learned to keep her face perfectly blank;
somehow the image in her own mind at the time was of Little Orphan Annie with her empty white saucer eyes.