For Love (24 page)

Lottie knew he was saying she’d been gone long enough, he wanted her back. She made her voice light. ‘Murphy’s Law: The job expands to fill the time allotted to it.’

His light eyes had shifted to her. ‘I guess that should be my question, then. How much time have you allotted to it?’

Lottie lifted her shoulders. ‘You talk as though I’d chosen to go away. This is my summer job, remember?’

He watched her face. After a moment he said, ‘We miss you; that’s all I mean to say.’

Lottie laughed, and then stopped. ‘
We?
’ she asked. ‘Is that the royal we?’

‘Megan and I.’ Then he smiled. ‘Bader.’

‘Well, I’m sure Bader does anyway,’ she said.

He leaned forward. ‘Lottie,
I
miss you. I want you home.’

Lottie stirred uncomfortably. ‘I’m not finished here.’

He sat back again. He reached for his cognac but just held the bowl of the glass in his long fingers. Lottie shifted uncomfortably. ‘We’re not talking just about your mother’s
house, are we?’ he said finally.

Lottie didn’t answer. For a while longer she didn’t want to talk about their marriage, or Evelyn, or anything difficult. There was a little decorated matchbox on the table, and she
picked it up now and shook it, opened it. Inside, the matches were wooden, long and white. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘How fancy.’

‘Lottie . . .’ he began.

‘Shh, no,’ she said. ‘Please. Let’s not. Please, let’s be happy. Let’s play a game.’

He relaxed back in his chair, and she looked over at him. His face had fallen somehow; he looked defeated and sad.

Lottie had made her voice light again. She was explaining the rules as she laid the matches out on the table in expanding rows. They played a sample game. She won.

‘Marienbad. It’s an odd name for a game,’ he said as she was laying the matches out again.

‘It’s from the movie,’ Lottie said. He looked blank. ‘Don’t you remember that old movie?
Last Year at Marienbad
?’

‘I don’t think I do. Probably it came out one of the times Evelyn was ill.’

‘Oh no, it was long before that,’ she said irritably. Why did everything have to connect to Evelyn? ‘I think I saw it with Derek. Of course he loved it. Very mysterious. Maybe
very pretentious too.’ She paused. ‘I should probably see it again now, actually. It was about love. I
think
it was about love, so maybe I could use it.’

‘What happened in it?’

‘Oh, it had no plot. Or no recognizable one. It was just a series of visual images, as I recall, repeated over and over, like memories being formed. One was – I think I’m not
making this up – this woman in a sun-filled room, falling back on a bed, and then falling again. And then again. Elegant woman. Some French actress, Simone or Delphine or Monique
Something-or-other. She had a boa.’

‘Is
that
the way memories get formed? By repeating images, you think?’ He seemed genuinely to want to know.

‘For me, yes. Pictures I call up. In life, of course, you can change them a bit. Or you do, I think. You see different things at different times, or you see them in different ways.’
She frowned. ‘They might have in this movie too, actually. Done it differently each time. It might not just have been exactly the same frames being repeated. I can’t remember. That
would be more interesting, of course.’ His eyes were steady on her, but he seemed to be smiling, and this pleased Lottie. ‘I go first this time,’ she said, and she picked up two
matches.

‘There’s a trick here,’ he said.

‘Of course. And I know it.’

‘And I don’t.’ He lifted up a whole row. ‘Would you like a boa, Lottie?’

She looked up at him quickly, grateful. Maybe everything would be all right. ‘If it’d make you remember me over and over, yes, I would.’ She picked up four matches from another
row.

‘It might, as I think about the possibilities.’

Lottie laughed. ‘You’re a dirty, dirty man.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, and shrugged with stylized modesty.

She was about to win again. Abruptly she scooped all the matches from the table. She began to put them in the box.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Let’s stop,’ she said. ‘I’m tired of whupping you. It’s too easy.’

‘I’ll remind you later that you said that.’

‘What?’

‘That what’s too easy is tiring, boring.’

Lottie felt the pulse of irritation again – at his seriousness, at the return to the same theme. ‘That’s not what I said,’ she told him. ‘I make no such rule. You
want some things to be easy. And even if it makes things boring, I wouldn’t aspire to difficulty on that account.’

He signaled the waiter for the check. Then he turned to her. ‘You never have to aspire to difficulty, darling. It arrives, uninvited. Then it stays for dinner.’ He was looking at
Lottie with his light eyes. Suddenly he was smiling again, his broad easy grin. ‘Remember that stripper in the bar near the Loop, Lottie? She had a boa.’

‘I remember her, God knows. Not the boa, though.’

‘Now that’s funny. I remember the boa. Over and over.’

Lottie laughed.

The bed was made up when they returned, the coverlet removed, and the requisite chocolates wrapped in gold foil floated on the pressed pillowcases without making a dent. When Lottie came out of
the bathroom, Jack was standing by the closet, taking off his clothes, hanging them up. She crossed the room to turn on the lamp with the scarf over it, then came back and switched off the overhead
light. Just then Jack bent to pull his shorts off his long legs, his big feet. His body suddenly looked storklike and unwieldy to Lottie. How much work he had in life, living in such a body! The
entire length of each articulated limb to worry about, those enormous hands and feet. She felt a rush of love for him, and remembered a passage from one of the books she’d read this summer:
Edna Pontellier in
The Awakening
defending her love for Robert, defending it on the grounds that his hair was brown, that he had a little finger permanently bent from a baseball accident.
Just so
, she thought. She ran her hand down the long, shaped muscles of Jack’s buttocks. ‘Just so,’ she said aloud. He laughed.

While she peeled her clothes off, he lay back on the bed in the pinkish light. ‘Ah.’ His penis rested sideways, heavy-looking, slightly stiffened, across his thigh. He gestured at
the lamp. ‘This is as good as a boa, almost.’

Lottie crawled on to the bed, bent over him on her hands and knees, took him into her mouth. After she was finished, and had lain back too, he rose up and slowly, sleepily, returned the favor.
She watched him for a few moments down what seemed the long slope of her body: the shock of gray hair, the kind, worn face moving between her legs as though he wanted to nuzzle his way inside her.
And then she dropped her head back and drifted away, everything eased inside her. She could feel herself flailing around, bucking, moving sideways across the bed. When they stopped, she was wedged
into a corner by the headboard, her head nearly at the bed’s edge. ‘My pink, pink Lottie,’ he said after a while, and she felt his breath on her, and shuddered once more.

‘Oh, this is heaven, Jack. I could go on doing this forever.’

‘Mmm. We’ll have to get a few other men in, dear.’

‘Let’s. Let’s just stay here forever, having meaningless sex.’

He laughed and moved up beside her. ‘I love a woman who says “Let’s,” ’ he said. But she thought she heard in his tone the pinch of disapproval again. He lay still
next to her, not touching her. Lottie rolled to her side and turned off the light. Later she heard Jack in the bathroom, then over by the windows, closing the curtains. He came back to bed and
pulled the covers over Lottie, he lay down next to her again. She listened to his breathing thicken, finally the long slow pulls of sleep. She was glad for his peacefulness; but now she was wide
awake.

‘
Meaningless sex
,’ she had said. Why had she said that? It was not what she meant at all.

She was restless; she could have cried out or begun to sing, she felt so wild. Her hand slid down between her legs. She began a slow circling motion. She held her thighs wider apart, pressed her
fingers in a smaller, tighter circle. All her muscles were tensed, her heels dug into the mattress. In the dark she bared her teeth, she gasped, she shuddered once, twice, then stopped.

When she lay quiet again, there was silence in the room. Jack’s breathing had stilled to its waking rhythm. Her blood slapped in her ears. She listened, as she knew he was listening, to
her own breathing come slowly under control.
I won’t say anything
, she thought.
There’s no need to say anything about it.
And then she fell asleep.

‘
There
he is,’ Jack said, and banged the table with his hand as he stood up. Lottie had seen him too, her own son, but hadn’t for a second recognized
him in this place, a handsome blond man in an unfamiliar linen jacket and pressed slacks. She hadn’t even known he had such a costume. She watched them as Jack reached Ryan across the
restaurant, their greeting half handshake, half embrace. She watched them as they weaved back to her table, their faces moving animatedly at each other. Jack was the taller by several inches, but
Ryan was larger, more solid. Who were they, to her? These two enormous men. It seemed impossible her life could be so connected to them, so defined by them. She felt almost dizzy with dislocation
as they came to claim her.

Over lunch, Ryan talked about himself in response to Jack’s questions, and Lottie learned more about what he’d done in England and what he hoped to do than she had in all the weeks
they’d been working together. She leaned back in her chair and looked at them. She thought of Jack’s sons, Charley and Matthew, and his friendly ease with them too. How good he was! How
much she loved him. What was wrong with her that she held her heart so bitterly away from him?

Later in the afternoon, as she and Jack walked slowly to Cameron’s apartment, they talked about Ryan, about how differently Lottie felt about him when Jack was around. ‘I like
it,’ Lottie said. ‘I like the distance from him. I think of it as the way he’ll be with me someday. I like how polite and grown up he is.’ She sighed. ‘Why isn’t
he like that when he’s alone with me now?’

‘I suppose he’s busy creating that same distance in other ways now.’

‘I’ll say. His
eyes
, sometimes. If looks could kill.’

They walked down Dartmouth Street, past the skateboarders banging around in front of the Public Library, past the jazzy new Amtrak Station. ‘I like Boston,’ Jack said. ‘I
didn’t think I did. It used to be such a dour, prissy town.’

‘I like it too,’ Lottie said. ‘But it isn’t as though I know it any better than you do. I never came over here when I was growing up. I really knew nothing about it. It
was like living in the provinces, then, to live in Cambridge.’

‘Ah, poor Lottie,’ he said.

‘I’m not complaining, I promise you. Now that I’ve grown up and seen Duluth, I know better than to complain of my childhood in Cambridge ever again.’

Cameron had set out a tray on the trunk in front of the couch, with cheese and fat black olives, big wineglasses and bread. There was a blue bowl full of lemons next to all this, just for
beauty, Lottie supposed. He opened a bottle as soon as they’d all greeted one another, and they clunked the heavy wineglasses together and congratulated themselves on this occasion. Cameron
and Jack hadn’t met before. Cameron was saying now that he was glad Jack had come out, as much on his account as Lottie’s. ‘Though Char certainly deserves a break. Have you seen
everything she and Ryan have done?’

‘No; we haven’t gone over yet.’

‘Actually, you’d need the Before and After for full effect. It wasn’t until after it was cleared out that I realized how horribly Mother lived.’

They talked about the house, about the legal process, now almost complete, of having their mother declared incompetent. Cameron and Lottie talked about Richard Lester, about other roomers they
remembered over the years. Cam told a story about one of them who’d lived in the house for six years before their mother discovered he was a cross-dresser. ‘Not full time, you know. And
not extreme. Apparently there are subtle gradations. He was, I guess you’d say, a tasteful transvestite. But one night Mother looked up’ – here he imitated her blurry lifting of
the head – ‘and sees this . . . dame! This floozy she doesn’t know, heading up the stairs. “Excuse me!” ’ he said, imitating her high-pitched, indignant tone.
‘ “Oh, Mrs Reed, it’s only me, it’s Stan,” the poor guy says. The upshot was that I got a call the next day, and had to go over and throw Stan out. That was
it
.’ He shook his head. ‘I hated to do it to him; he paid his rent regularly and he was very quiet, very neat. But she was adamant. Wouldn’t have such a thing in her house,
et cetera, et cetera.’ His face was animate with a kind of anger or disgust that surprised Lottie. Then he looked directly at Jack and smiled, wryly. ‘This happened four or five years
ago. If it was today, he would have sued for his civil rights and stayed forever.’

Jack laughed.

‘I’m surprised,’ Lottie said. ‘I thought Mother was more open-minded than that. Or maybe that she didn’t have that much mind left, or something.’

‘Oh no. She was definitely offended. You’d be surprised at the number of things that offended Mother. Still do. It seems to be a response that outlasts cerebration.’

‘Uselessly,’ Lottie said.

They had relaxed by now, they had nearly finished the first glasses of wine, and there were bread crumbs sprinkled over all their laps, olive pits sitting on the plate. Jack had started to talk
about his parents, who’d died within months of each other a few years before; when someone knocked on the door. Lottie looked at Cameron’s face as he stood up to go and answer it, and
knew instantly it was Elizabeth. When he opened the door, she stepped toward him, kissed him lightly. There was a murmured exchange, and his hand rose to her face. Then she came into the room, her
wide blue skirt swirling around her. Just like Loretta Young, Lottie thought unkindly, as Jack rose.