For Love (21 page)

‘Charlotte,’ Cam was shaking his head and grinning at her. ‘This is what we call left field, I think.’

‘Poor Em,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She’s such a mope anyway. I thought camp would be fun, but this is just so hard for her.’

Ryan began talking about the YMCA day camp he went to in Chicago, how he learned mumblety-peg there and various kinds of pool. ‘It was like a program in gang-banging or
something.’

‘Excuse me: gang-banging?’ Elizabeth said. ‘What a disgusting term.’

Lottie went out to the kitchen to get things ready. Ryan’s loud voice dominated from the other room, talking about his peculiar childhood. She was thinking of him as he’d been at
Emily’s age. He’d loved to dress up, in fact. He’d had a collection of costumes he’d assembled out of odd bits of her old clothing, out of hats he made her buy for him at
secondhand shops, out of cast-off jewelry of hers and ‘treasures’ he found put out in the trash up and down the streets of their neighborhood. The ideas came from various sources
– films, illustrations in books, television programs, comics. He was in some ways a socially powerful kid: he’d get others to participate, to play complementary roles. Sir Gawain to his
Sir Lancelot – wearing an old snoodlike hat of Lottie’s, a huge necklace worthy of Mr T, a ‘tunic’ made by cutting a hole in the middle of an old towel, a bejeweled belt
holding it in place.

As she remembered it, though, most of their playtime had actually been spent in the planning stages. ‘I’ll come in and I’ll say, “Avant,” and then you say,
“What is your name?” and I’ll say . . .’

‘No, first I come in and I say . . .’ It never got settled; and by the time it might have, they would have passed on to another universe, another interest – prisoners of war
planning an escape, football heroes. Yes, Robin Hood. Such cheesy dreams, so passionately embraced. But Lottie understood it – that wish to create a world, to control every detail, to be in
charge, always, of what was coming next. She shared every one of those impulses, she thought.

When everything was set in the kitchen, Lottie called, ‘Chow time,’ and they slowly meandered out, still talking. Lottie went back for the fan and set it on the kitchen counter.
Through the meal it blew the hot kitchen air across their faces, lifting Elizabeth’s hair from her neck at slow regular intervals. They talked about food, about diets. Lottie described
several of the more bizarre ones she’d discovered while doing her diet book. Elizabeth told them about a cooking school she’d gone to, briefly. Ryan complained about English food. It
grew darker outside and Lottie lighted the candles.

Ryan was finished. He stood up. ‘I’m history,’ he said. ‘I’ll be late, I think, Ma. Don’t worry.’

She made a face, and he grinned at her and shook his head.

Lottie had caught Ryan with Jessica by this time, and she had to will herself not to think about what the rest of each evening would hold for him when he disappeared routinely at ten-thirty or
eleven o’clock. In fact, she realized, she really had no idea. Two nights earlier, driving to the Square at around eleven-thirty to make a last-minute run for a book, she was waiting for the
light to change at the Porter Square subway stop, when suddenly a group of kids she’d paid virtually no attention to, kids who’d been quietly seated on the circle of benches in that
little urban park, jumped up yelling and sprang into a dancelike motion. They did a kind of elaborate do-si-do, their skinny legs kicking loosely around, and ended up, within about five seconds,
each sitting opposite the place where he’d been sitting before. Ryan, she saw abruptly, was one of them, was bent over now with the rest of them, laughing; and when the light changed, Lottie
drove on in such befuddlement about the innocence and humor of this, that within a block it seemed to her she must have imagined the whole scene.

Now the three adults pushed their chairs back and stretched out. For a while they sat at the littered table, talking and moving the empty plates and glasses around. Lottie noted that
they’d drunk three bottles of wine among them, though she hadn’t had very much. Someone had been working fast. Suddenly Elizabeth pointed to the huge bright-orange canister sitting on
the floor in a corner. ‘What is this immense, lethal-looking machine, Char? The hair dryer from hell?’

It was the steamer, Lottie told her. Rented for the weekend. Ryan had been doing the upstairs hall and the living room, stripping wallpaper. ‘I’ll finish tomorrow, if I have the
stamina.’

‘But why don’t we work on it tonight?’ Elizabeth asked. ‘Cam and I will help you. We should do something constructive with all this drunken energy.’

Lottie tried to put her off, mostly because she was tired after her own long day; but Elizabeth insisted, and in the end, they separated to change into work clothes, Cam going to Ryan’s
room to find some of his, Lottie and Elizabeth heading upstairs.

Elizabeth began pulling off her clothes as she stepped into the room. Lottie was slower, embarrassed to be wearing no bra, especially when she saw Elizabeth’s underwear. It was silk, a
sort of café-au-lait color, with creamy lace trim. The bra and underpants matched. Unthinkable to Lottie. She crouched, holding her own fat, small breasts, the one scarred white from surgery
and the radioactive rods that had laced through it for the last treatment. Awkwardly she pulled out a baggy T-shirt and a paint-stained pair of white work pants with a elastic waist, and handed
them up to Elizabeth.

Elizabeth even got dressed with sweeping, bold gestures, Lottie thought. She herself turned away, pulled her work clothes on quickly, hunched over with a schoolgirl’s embarrassment. When
she looked back at Elizabeth, she laughed out loud. The pants and shirt were much too small, and Elizabeth looked gangly and preposterous, her midriff showing, the pants barely as long as pedal
pushers on her. ‘Your dress-up,’ Lottie told her, ‘is not as good as mine.’

Elizabeth looked down and laughed too. Then she said, ‘If you’re not nice to me, I’ll tell Cam you’re teasing again.’

When they came downstairs, Lottie moved the steamer to the living room and fired it up. They took turns wielding the pad and scraping. Cameron brought the radio in, and they listened while they
worked to
Little Walter’s Time Machine
, all the old rhythm and blues, the early black groups Lottie hadn’t even guessed at the existence of while she bought forty-fives by Pat
Boone and Johnny Mathis.

There were three layers of wallpaper. The bottom one was probably original with the house – faded bouquets of flowers. Over that was a garish plaid, probably from the thirties. And on top
of that was the wallpaper Lottie had grown up with, a sort of fake Pennsylvania Dutch motif, patched here and there where it had been torn or scratched. ‘This is like peeling back the layers
of family history,’ she said, pulling off a long, satisfying strip.

‘Only you never get anywhere,’ Cam said. ‘Just down to this blank wall.’ His voice was, surprisingly, bitter. His face was turned away from her, but Lottie glanced at
Elizabeth and saw that she was startled too. It made Lottie remember his loving-kindness to their mother and wonder at it again.

Elizabeth had taken off her jewelry upstairs and left it on Lottie’s bed. While Lottie was scraping above her on the stepladder, she looked down at Elizabeth’s hands. They were
holding the steamer pad pressed against the wall just below her. Elizabeth’s head was thrown back – she was laughing at something Cameron had said – so she didn’t see
Lottie’s face as Lottie took in the scars drawn across the insides of both wrists. Old scars, white, and maybe not that deep, not that serious. But an unexpected sign of her capacity for
sorrow, for pain.
Elizabeth!
Lottie thought. And felt, for the first time, a sense of compassion for the other woman, of connection to her.

It was after two when they finished, and they sat in the nearly empty living room and had more wine to celebrate. Cameron was talking about the bookstore, about the difference betwen the used
section and the new. ‘It actually works about the opposite of the way you’d romanticize it. Or the way I’d romanticized it anyhow. It isn’t wonderfully erudite, educated
people who care about used books. On the contrary, by God. Because used books, finally, are collectible objects – like, let’s say, snuffboxes or walking sticks. As opposed to books as
content – as ideas, language, story.
Words
, which is what people buy new books for. I mean, there are always a few people looking for an out-of-print book, or an old one, because they
read it a long time ago and remember it and want to own it. Or because they need it for scholarly work or something. But most people upstairs just want to know what edition, what year, what
binding, what endpapers – that kind of thing. The content is utterly immaterial. And the worst, of course, are the decorators. ‘What do you have seven feet of in deep maroon?’

‘“A kind of dried-bloody color, preferably,”’ Elizabeth trilled, and they looked at each other and smiled. It occurred to Lottie that they were in the process of working
up some of those set pieces that couples who’ve been together a long time develop.

Richard Lester came in – from where? Lottie wondered; where did
he
go until this time every night? – and Cam insisted he join them. Lottie got him a little glass too and
poured him the last of the wine. They made an odd party, sitting in the half-dark living room with their jelly glasses on the floor by each chair. Little Walter squawked and blew horns on the radio
between songs. Cameron and Elizabeth and Lottie were drenched with sweat and steam. Their clothes stuck to them, along with bits of old wallpaper and clots of glue. Elizabeth’s makeup had
steamed off, her hair was limp and straggling. All her elegance was gone, but she turned her charm on Richard anyway, and he seemed to expand in its bright light. He confided in them about the
progress of his thesis, his job hunt. Lottie felt ashamed of all her small meannesses to him, the judgments she’d passed. And she clearly saw Elizabeth’s flirtatiousness not just as
compulsive behavior, not necessarily as a way for her to get something, but as a gift too, a generous gift that she made to others.

A slow song came on, and Elizabeth cried out, ‘Oh, Little Anthony!’ She leaned forward in her chair abruptly and said, ‘Let’s dance,’ to Richard.

He flushed deeply, he tried to fuss and demur – small noises, murmurs and ticking in his throat. But in the meantime Cam had stood up and pulled Lottie to her feet. Now Elizabeth rose too
and held out her hand to Richard. He struggled to heave himself up out of the chair. Cam reached down and jacked the volume up on the radio, and they all began to move slowly around the room. Cam
felt strange to Lottie, so much closer to her own size than Jack. Cam and Elizabeth and Lottie sang loudly along with the lyrics. ‘. . . and tempt! the hand of Fate . . .’ Richard held
Elizabeth out in a formal, ballroom posture and moved awkwardly, but his face was opened in a foolish, sweaty smile.

It only lasted for perhaps ten minutes – through two or three songs – before the music got fast again and they stopped. Cam turned the volume lower, and Richard stood painfully
thanking them for the wine and excusing himself for several minutes before disappearing up the stairs. Cameron and Elizabeth said their good nights too. Just as they walked into the front hall and
were about to leave, though, Rosie and the Originals came on, singing ‘Angel Baby.’ Cam said, ‘The last dance,’ and put his arms around Elizabeth. They glided back into the
living room together, and Lottie trailed after them and leaned against the bare, damp-smelling plaster wall to watch. Elizabeth’s eyes were shut, Cam held her in the way they’d danced
in high school, pinning one arm against her waist at the back, the other held low, along their legs. They seemed bolted together at the pelvis, and their upper bodies swayed with a rolling, sexual
motion.

It was nearly three o’clock. Even in the dim, reflected light of the living room, they both looked tired, they looked their age. Elizabeth seemed a plain forty-fivish woman, carrying on
her face, too, the scars of the things that had hurt her in life. But they moved smoothly together, they moved like the teenagers they’d been when they learned to move this way; and their
worn faces were imprinted with such an intense pleasure that Lottie felt rising in herself a belief in their foolish happiness, a wistful hope that it might hold out against all the odds.

By now Lottie had all but stopped working, though she would have had sufficient solitude in Cambridge and enough time to do whatever she liked. She might have accomplished a
great deal. Indeed, she had planned to. She had started to. In the first few days after she’d sold the dining room table and chairs to the cigars-moking dealer from Widespread Depression
– the store specialized in furniture of that era – she’d moved a small drop-leaf table from the hall into the dining room, opened it up, and set out all her books, her notes. And
at first she had lost herself, that’s how she thought of it, in reading, in making more notes. Even after Ryan arrived, she had most evenings to herself since he was so often out.
Occasionally she worked on the house project, but more of the time she sat in the dining room at her makeshift desk, her legs hooked around the legs of a chair, her eyes moving slowly down the
pages of print under the bright gooseneck lamp left behind by one of the tenants who’d moved out.

She’d already read the popular literature. That had been the easy part, the boring part – the books on love addicts, self-destructive love, men who can’t love, women who
can’t stop. Earlier, in Chicago, she’d read some Freud, some legitimate psychology, some sociology. Now she’d begun the random circling through fiction, biography, letters,
poetry, that was almost always part of what she loosely termed research. This was the aspect of her work Lottie usually loved best. She thought of it as her true education; the BA she’d
finally gotten from Roosevelt was simply too hard-won, too much an issue of scraping together whatever it took – time, books, pages written, money – either to have left her enough
energy to absorb much of what she was learning or to have been pleasurable, except as an unlikely achievement. No, this slow meandering-with-something-in-mind that had started after she began to
specialize in medical issues, this had taught her more than all those years of earnest scholarship wedged between Ryan’s feedings and baths, between PTA meetings and Little League games,
between her job and the occasional bit of social life. Sometimes she felt a nearly erotic pleasure in the simple, physical piling up of the books to be gone through, a kind of thrill as she sat
down at a desk or table strewn with them or with pages of notes, or articles clipped from the paper or Xeroxed in the law library or the medical library.