For Love (30 page)

‘Lame,’ she says. ‘I’m not even going to hammer you over the head with the overwhelming number of examples that can be offered of men who absolutely put love, want love,
at the center of their lives. I’m just going to say that your argument is circular. And lame.’ She turns and steps into the darker part of the hallway, toward the front door.
‘Pathetic. Retrograde.’ She opens the door, and he comes and stands opposite her in its frame.

He is grinning. ‘You didn’t buy it, I take it.’

‘I wouldn’t even bid on it,’ Lottie says.

He bends close to her; his breath warms her face. ‘Well, thanks for the information, Lottie,’ he whispers.

‘What information?’

‘Exactly,’ he says.

His hand slides across the back of her neck, inside the fabric of her dress. He pulls her forward and kisses her again, roughly this time, maybe because it has been decided nothing more will
happen, maybe because she’s been snotty to him. Then he’s gone, the slip, slip of his fancy shoes crossing the porch, going down the stairs and across the street. The night air makes
Lottie’s hair tremble; she catches her breath. He’s disappeared on to Elizabeth’s lawn when she shuts the door.

She goes back into the kitchen and looks at the clock that is part of the rounded back panel of the stove. It makes a constant, effortful, grinding noise, which Lottie has come to think of this
summer as the very sound of time passing. Only ten o’clock. She planned to run after the evening at Elizabeth’s, but now she’s had the wine, she’d better not.

She feels a wave of self-disgust. She blames it immediately on drinking when she hadn’t intended to, on not running for two nights in a row. And then she laughs out loud. ‘And how
’bout almost
balling
Larry?’ she says. ‘How ’bout almost
doing the nasty
, honey bun?’

Lottie rubs her neck and frowns. What was it? What could it have been that brought her so close? Maybe some wish to seal the end of her love for Jack? Because it would surely have done that,
wouldn’t it?

Or maybe it was just the sense of familiarity with Larry. He’s like a half-dozen guys she’s slept with – for no good reason, except that she wanted them at the moment. She
thinks again on the tough way he held his cigarette, of the way he seemed pleased to announce that his father beat him. She liked all that. Cheap taste, she thinks. White trash.

White trash
. She remembers that this was what Al called her, Al, the roommate of Derek’s, whom she’d slept with first, who seemed to understand how Lottie felt about herself
before she did. White trash: he made a joke of it. Of everything. Of sex.

Al. He was a biochemist. He’d disappear for two or three days at a stretch, running experiments that had to be continuously monitored, and then Lottie would answer the knock on her door at
two in the morning, or four in the afternoon, and he would be standing there grinning, his fly unzipped, his penis hanging out.

He called his penis Al too. ‘Al would like to go swimming,’ he’d say, nudging her with it. He embarrassed her. She felt he was irreverent. She wanted love and sex to be
elegant, and Al was not elegant. She misunderstood him too. She thought his long absences, his seemingly cavalier attitude, meant he didn’t care for her.

When Derek asked her out during one of Al’s experiments, she was glad to go. Derek was a poet; he had long, carefully combed blond hair. He wore Brooks Brothers shirts in pale colors that
reminded silly Lottie of Gatsby. By the time Al reappeared, it was over. He walked in on her and Derek, actually, embracing in the kitchen. ‘Well, all my friends!’ he said.
‘What’s for dinner?’ Was that the response of an elegant person? Lottie thought not, at the time.

Years later, long after Lottie was divorced, he’d looked her up when he was at a conference at the University of Chicago. He was married by then, to another biochemist, and they were both
teaching at Cal Tech. He had a good life, a nice life, he told Lottie. He showed her a photograph of his kids, taken by a jewel-blue pool in a sunlit California backyard. They squinted into the
bright light. There were palm trees behind them.

Later in the evening, drunk, they mildly kissed for a while. Al got teary about the past. He said he’d loved her then. He asked her why, how it could have happened that she’d chosen
Derek.

Lottie was teary too. For what? For her youth, over before she felt it? For all the wrong choices she’d made? For her tiny poolless apartment across from the el in this gray and frigid
city? ‘Oh, Al,’ she cried. ‘I had such a cold heart, you wouldn’t believe it.’

In his kindness, Al had protested. ‘You only think it was cold, Lottie,’ he said, and they both had a good cry and swore they’d stay in touch and so forth, which they
didn’t do, of course.

And ain’t this your cold little Lottie revisited? Lottie thinks now.

‘I should lock the door,’ she says aloud. And she goes back into the dark front hall and flips the little knob on the lock to the right. Closing the barn door. She thinks about Larry
again. Elizabeth’s husband. His kiss. Why had she let him in? She licks her lips. Her mouth still tastes faintly of cigarette. She goes into Ryan’s bathroom, puts a half inch of
toothpaste on his worn, frazzled-looking toothbrush, and scrubs her teeth. The new filling on her tooth twinges, just slightly, and after Lottie spits out the toothpaste, she bites down hard on it,
to feel it again.

She comes back into the dining room and stands in the doorway, surveying the mess she has sometimes thought of as welcoming. I should do a little work, she thinks. Dutifully she sits down.

Then suddenly she stands up again. She goes upstairs and puts on her running shoes, then comes back down, gets her keys, and goes outside.

Though she is walking, she slowly traces the pattern of right and left turns she usually makes when she runs. The streets are emptied, and she walks on the smooth asphalt instead of the brick
sidewalks, so she won’t have to think about where she’s putting her feet, the bumps and sudden gaps in the brick. It’s ten-thirty by now, and there aren’t many lights on
downstairs in the big wooden houses. Lottie usually runs earlier, midevening, when kids are still playing in the streets on certain blocks, when people are on their porches or in their yards, and
lights are just coming on in the living rooms, the kitchens, you can catch quick glimpses of all the variations of family life. Tonight everything seems desolate to her.

A light rain is beginning to patter in the leaves above her, and Lottie feels a drop or two. She stops in front of a lighted window on Hilliard Street, one of those many-paned windows that reach
from the floor to within a few feet of the ceiling. A couple sit on a couch with their backs to Lottie, their heads and shoulders rising above the curved frame of the couch. Each head is bent
forward – they are apparently reading – each lost in whatever universe his book holds. They sit about three feet apart on the couch, infinitely companionable, it seems to Lottie, but
separate. How does this happen? How do you get that? she wonders.

She hears footsteps approaching in the distance, voices, and she makes herself move on. She passes a young couple, the girl talking that idiotic young talk: ‘I was like,
duh
, you
know. I mean, I was like, so out of it, then. When I think of it now, I’m like, wow, was I ever so young?’

Yes, my dear, you were. You, like, are.

At the corner, Lottie stops. She’s been headed for the river, but the rain is falling harder now. She turns and walks back up Hilliard on the other side of the street. At the window she
pauses again. The woman’s head is lifted now; she is turned to look at the man. She sits, impassively staring at him, and Lottie stands outside, staring at her, getting drenched. She’s
aware of this, suddenly, the absurdity of it, and she starts to walk again, quickly this time, in the direction of her mother’s house. She’s like some creature from outer space, she
thinks. Some Martian, reading her books, staring in through windows, trying to figure out what it means to be human.
What is this thing, called love?
She jogs a little, humming, then slows
again to a fast walk.

And after all, how can you tell, how can you know? Maybe what looks like peace in the living room is anything but. She stares at him with love, Lottie had thought. But why not hate? Or a sort of
shocked indifference: you look up from a book that’s full of feeling and importance to you and encounter a face, a self-contained and alien face, reading its book. Maybe you think,
Who is
this person whom I live alongside of? For whom I feel this sudden nothing?
A couple lives together happily for twenty-five years, and then the man runs off with a woman exactly the age his wife
was when she married him. They live together unhappily for twenty-five years, and when she dies, he’s besotted with grief. ‘Besotted,’ Lottie says aloud.

Lottie remembers that one of her closest friends, the editor who’d endured her obsessions about Jack, told her she’d been married for seven years to a man who wanted to live close to
the earth, who rejected civilization, filthy lucre. She said that for all that time she bought into it, absolutely. They built their own house, on difficult rocky land miles from anywhere. They had
no electricity, no running water. They used a wood-burning stove for heat and to cook on. Diane had kept goats for milk. She made cheese, she put up quantities of vegetables and fruits each harvest
season. She sewed all their clothes.

And one day she walked the four miles down to the highway and hitched a ride to Denver, and it was over. She said if anyone had asked her the day before whether she would ever think of leaving,
she would have told the person he was out of his mind.

The lights are off downstairs at Elizabeth’s house, but her bedroom windows are glowing through the old, parchment-colored shades. Lottie thinks of that marriage, the way Elizabeth
described it in her letter to Cameron: steady, full of devotion. Can that be true? And if it is, does it matter that Larry has affairs? Does it matter that Lottie has almost slept with him the day
after he’s returned for Elizabeth?

Who can know about anyone else’s marriage, really? Maybe Jack and Evelyn weren’t so happy, even when she was whole. Maybe when he played the clarinet, it drove her wild, she went
through the house, slamming doors; and he pretended not to notice. Played louder, in fact. Maybe every now and then he wished she’d get a job,
get a life
. Maybe he came home sometimes
and saw the carefully-addressed invitations to the carefully-orchestrated dinner parties stacked on the little burled maple table in the front hall, waiting to be mailed; and wished he’d
married a different kind of person.

As she reaches into the dining room to turn off the light on her way upstairs, Lottie suddenly thinks of a passage she read a long time ago in
Anna Karenina
, a passage about how arbitrary
our decisions about marriage, about whom we should love, are. It connects to all this, somehow, to everything she’s been thinking about. She squats by the stacks of books on the floor and
finds
Anna Karenina
. She flips through the pages until she comes upon it.

But it isn’t quite what she was thinking of. It isn’t apt. It describes a moment when two minor characters have gone for a walk to collect mushrooms. She is sure he will propose; and
he has decided that he will, today. And there comes a moment as they move toward each other when it seems this will happen. But it doesn’t. And then, because it doesn’t at this moment,
it becomes clear to both of them that it never will.

Puzzled, Lottie puts the book down. She turns off the light and goes upstairs. She’s wet, and cold. Her bedroom window is open, and a raw breeze is blowing in. She shuts it and peels off
her clothes. Water has beaded on the floor in front of the window. She wipes it with a T-shirt, puts on her robe, and goes down the hall to the bathroom.

She lets the hot water pelt her back, not even soaping herself. She turns and feels it beat against her breasts – the sensitive, radiated flesh – against her belly. She looks down.
Her wet pubic hair is pulled to a point between her legs by the water, like the point of an old-fashioned valentine heart. The water makes a jittery dotted line down from it. She leans her head
back, shuts her eyes, and lets the water strike her face, puddle in her open mouth.

Then she moans aloud suddenly, opens her eyes. She’s remembered: she first thought of the passage from Tolstoy not when she was pondering the mysteries of decisions and feelings in
marriage, in love; but earlier, when Lawrence – Larry – kissed her. When she, or he, or the moment itself, decided that they wouldn’t sleep together. They wouldn’t ball each
other. Thinking of the difference between that trashy scene and the beautiful, sad passage in Tolstoy, Lottie twists her head back and forth sharply. Then she reaches down and pushes the stiff knob
above the faucet. The shower stops; after a second the water courses out of the faucet. And Lottie stands there wet and shivering, watching the thick silver ribbon of water divide and splash over
the tops of her feet.

The next morning is dry and hot, and Lottie sleeps late, not wanting to wake into the memory that waits behind her dreams. She’s sweaty and tangled in the sheet when she
does open her eyes, and she lies for a moment staring at the ceiling. Though the window is closed, she can hear children yelling in the street. A window somewhere slams shut. And already Lottie is
going quite carefully over the evening before, calling up each element of her own participation in it, remembering the real excitement she felt, playing her shabby game with Larry. She conjures an
image of Jack – his lined, gentle face – to shame herself more, to increase her own guilt; and then feels this, abruptly, as the shabbiest behavior of all. She cries out, and unwinds
herself from the sheet. Her problems, even her self-disgust, are purest self-indulgence, she thinks. After all, Jessica is dead, Cameron is mourning.

She’s naked; she dresses quickly. In the bathroom mirror, her hair is crazed – flattened, a tangled wild wedge shape. She smiles at her own ugly reflection. ‘Just so,’
she says. She brushes her hair, rubs it with a wet washcloth to restore its even curliness. She brushes her teeth and is suddenly aware that her tooth is sore, it aches slightly.