For Love (34 page)

‘I want to see you.’ He sounds almost tearful.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘You just said if I behaved reasonably . . .’

‘But you haven’t. You’ve been absolutely . . . wacko! Nuts!’

‘I need to see you.’ His voice is urgent.

‘Cameron, look. There is just no way . . . Look. I
came
to see you. I wrote you a letter. I made every effort to end this thing kindly. Reasonably. And look what that produced:
this. You! Crazy. Sneaking into my bedroom, for what?’

‘I told you, to look at you.’

‘To look at me? That is nuts!’ Her voice shrills, then she drops it again. ‘See? That’s what I mean. That’s absolutely crazy.’

‘I need to see you, Elizabeth.’ Lottie grimaces at his pleading voice.

‘No! If you needed to see me, you could have. I was calling you. For hours yesterday. I came over. I already did that. Where were you? Yesterday, where were you? Hiding? I mean,
Christ!’

‘I was watching you.’ He’s almost whispering.

There’s a beat. ‘Don’t tell me that. That’s too sick.’

‘It’s true.’

‘When I came to your place, Cameron, yesterday morning, where were you?’

‘I was out then.’

‘Out! Where?’

‘I was out all night. Christ, Elizabeth.’ There’s some percussive sound behind him, he’s hit something. ‘Think about it, will you? I killed someone. And then you .
. . you pretended I was sort of . . . some acquaintance. A distant friend, or something. So, yes, I was out. I was out. In the first place I was with the police for about four hours. I had my blood
taken. I must have sat in the emergency room for . . . And then I just lost it. I walked around awhile. I thought I’d get the car. I was there, at your house, when I realized I didn’t
have the keys; I didn’t know where I’d left them. For a while I just sat in the car. I watched your windows. When it was light, I took all the change from the car and went to Mass Ave.
I had some coffee. I waited awhile. Then I came back. The car was moved by then. Your shades were up. I thought I could get in touch with you, I needed to see you. I went back to Mass Ave and I
called. I got him. I called again after a while, and I got Emily this time. So I had some more coffee, I walked around, I came back to your house, I don’t know, I went back. I must have
called four, five times.’ He ends, exhausted.

‘And then hung up?’ she says, after a second.

‘I only wanted to talk to you, Elizabeth. I had nothing to say to him, or to Emily.’

‘I knew that was you.’

‘In the afternoon I came home. I slept.’

‘So you
got
my letter.’

‘No.’

‘No, what? Did you get my letter?’

‘No; Charlotte has your letter.’

‘That’s ridiculous! Why would Charlotte . . . ? This is absurd. Why would Charlotte take my letter?’

Lottie shifts on the bed.

‘She did.’

‘Why?’

‘Ask Charlotte. I just know she took it.’

‘That’s absurd. It’s preposterous. How do you know that?’

‘She left me a note. She said she had it. She wanted me to call her. I don’t know. Maybe she took it so I’d call her.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘What difference does it make anyway?’

‘Because, Cameron. Look. I explained everything to you in the letter. I think you should—’

‘It’s self-evident, isn’t it, what you wrote in the letter? You said goodbye, right?’

‘Cameron, I explained to you—’

‘You said goodbye. You told me to kiss off. You said, in effect, that if I came for you, I’d find you in bed with someone else, right?’ His voice cracks. After a few seconds he
says, ‘And I did, and you were.’

‘Jesus Christ, Cameron, Lawrence is not
someone else
. He’s my husband.’

‘Remember what you said when you gave me the key, Elizabeth?’ His voice has dropped, suddenly. It is gentle, urgent. He is desperate, wooing her.
Don’t
Lottie thinks.
‘Do you remember?’

There’s a silence.

‘Do you? Do you remem—’

There’s a light click, then the quick empty fizzing of blank tape for a few seconds, and then the machine turns off. No more of this. And no more messages. He must have turned the machine
itself off completely just after they finished talking.

Lottie sits on the bed for a minute, staring through the open doorway into the light-filled room beyond. She finds herself wondering if he played the tape back for himself before he turned the
machine off. If he listened to himself and to Elizabeth, to the venom, the desperation, in their voices. She wonders what else they could have talked about after the machine stopped taping. Where
could they have gone from where they were?

She sits motionless, unsure of what to do next. She thinks about calling Cameron at work again, but then thinks,
why
? He’s gotten her messages. Probably every one. And chosen not to
respond. He might even be there. Or driving around. Or watching Elizabeth again. The point is, there isn’t any need, anymore, to worry. He has rarely sounded so alive as he does in this
telephone conversation with Elizabeth. What was it Larry said about him last night? That he was full of life.

But not a kind of life Lottie has sympathy for. She feels distanced from him. For the last day and a half she has thought of him as mostly focused on Jessica, on the accident, on her death and
his responsibility for it. For Lottie – and for the Cameron she’s been imagining over these hours – the news that Elizabeth was abandoning him was incidental. Sad. Awful, even.
But, in the balance, not that important.

And of course, that’s not the way it is for him in reality. In reality Jessica’s death for him is . . . what? Something he’ll think about later? Something that just intensifies
his feelings about Elizabeth? She can’t imagine it. But clearly what he is focused on now is Elizabeth, only Elizabeth

Lottie hears again Dorothea Laver’s quiet, apologetic voice.
He’s not even thinking about your daughter
.

She looks around the room at the scattered darkening roses, their curling petals. A thick curved shard of the broken vase lies by her feet. Abruptly she remembers Ryan turning, sweeping the
glassware and tins off her mother’s table, marking, she supposes now, his own powerlessness in the matter of Jessica’s death, of death itself. The coincidence of the violent ceremonies
seems remarkable to her momentarily.

And then she remembers how readily she’d knelt to help Ryan, how pained she’d been by his pain. She stand up.
Not this
, she thinks, and picks her way back across the room. At
the door, she stops and looks once more at the running stain on the wall, at the splotches of bloody rose drifted over the bed.
Not this time
, she thinks.
Not me
.

As soon as Lottie turns left on to Storrow Drive and the river comes into view, she has that curious uplifting of the spirit you get when you start out on a trip, which she
had, in fact, when she came east earlier in the summer. There’s some heartbreaking adagio on the radio by – she thinks the pontificating announcer said Schubert. The white sails of a
gaggle of boats tilt their way east across the river basin, and the silver maples leap and flare in the breeze, and suddenly Lottie could sing. She feels she’s been put on earth to experience
this, to see this.

She knows that what she is feeling, at least in part, is relief. For the last day and a half when she’s thought of Cameron, what she’s really been thinking of is
herself as
him
– what she would be doing if she were he. Because, she sees now, she thinks of herself as
like
him, she thinks of his crazy desperation for Elizabeth as like things she’s
felt. She thinks of the accident – the dead girl – as something she might have done in that desperation.

The revelation that what he’s been feeling and thinking is so much not what she expected, is so different from what she might have thought or felt – this, combined with Dorothea
Laver’s muted politeness and the frightening image of him making his way through Emily’s cavernous, darkened house: these have set Lottie free. He is himself, and she is here,
not
him
, driving her car along the river. To her right, the beating oars of a cluster of long narrow boats catch the light suddenly, as the wings of a flock of birds will sometimes do when they all
turn at once in the sky.

Harvard Square is jammed with traffic, and Lottie has to move slowly through it. She’s so gracious to jaywalkers that she infuriates the guy behind her, who leans on his horn to encourage
her to get into the right spirit. As she approaches the gourmet sandwich shop near Porter Square, she remembers Ryan and their comradely lunch on the back stoop the day before. She parks and goes
in.

The place isn’t as full as she expects. She looks at her watch and is surprised to see it’s one-thirty: the lunch hour is mostly over. She realizes she hasn’t eaten yet today.
While the young man behind the counter – who might be moving underwater, everything happens so slowly with him – fixes her expensive sandwiches, Lottie has a cup of coffee and a brownie
in the little back room. She has to shift the chewy cake to the left side of her mouth, away from her sore tooth.

There’s one guy sitting alone back here, smoking what smells like a Gauloise and reading a paper; and there are eight or ten people gathered around several tables they’ve pushed
together in the corner, having a meeting of some sort. It is orderly in the extreme. They raise their hands to make their announcements; gatherings are planned and signed up for months ahead of
time.

They are wearing Earth shoes; two of the men have beards, the women have on peasant blouses and ethnic jewelry. Their goodness, their worthiness, are apparent. ‘Terry and Felice are going
to have a potluck the week before Thanksgiving to plan the Christmas events, and they need to know how many are coming. A show of hands.’ With her face bare of makeup – not even washed,
she remembers! – Lottie probably looks like a potential member. Yes, a woman catches her eavesdropping and smiles warmly. Someone else speaks of the need for visits to Naomi in the hospital,
and some time is taken working out a good rotation. There’s a discussion of the Christmas ‘events’ – are there too many? not enough? It’s noted that it is a tough
season to get through. There are moans of agreement.

These people are Lottie’s age or maybe just a little younger. She is incredulous and, she notes, slightly jealous, even while she knows she wouldn’t be able to sit through a whole
meeting like this. But to fill your life with such harmless happiness seems remarkable to her. Who cares if it’s makework? There is something to be said for the sheer mad organization of it.
Does your group have a purpose? she wants to ask. Are you concerned with some greater good? Or are you, say, a volleyball team with social life appended? They are still at it when she leaves to get
her sandwiches from Mr Thorazine.

She pulls up in front of the house and looks at it. The porch sags, she sees this clearly as if for the first time. And without the shutters the neighboring houses have, the house itself looks
blank-eyed, a pale woman with no makeup. Still, it will sell. It will all take care of itself. It will sell, and this part of her life will be gone, finally. And she will be nothing but glad. She
thinks of her mother again, her mother and her yearning for home. Is it this building, this street, she yearns for? Somehow Lottie doubts it. It’s probably finally as abstact as the pang
Lottie can sometimes feel when she hears the word ‘mother.’

Lottie suddenly remembers a moment of seeing her home just this freshly once before: when she’d come back from college in final defeat. Seeing it and thinking,
No
. She’d
yearned for it while she was away, she’d convinced herself it was the right thing to do, to leave college, to come home and save more money before she tried it again. But stopped then in
front of the house, having hauled her suitcase up from Harvard Square, she couldn’t believe how cheap it looked, how little and shabby. Somehow it wasn’t the
home
she had in
mind.

That night her mother had made a meal, she remembers, and they sat together at the kitchen table to eat, as they hadn’t, it seemed, in years. Chicken and mashed potatoes. Her mother had a
glass of beer by her place. They ate in silence. Neither of them really knew what to say. That her mother was glad she’d come home was clear. Lottie can’t remember her own feelings;
perhaps she didn’t have any.

But then somehow Lottie’s mother started talking about Cameron, about how ‘high and mighty’ he was. Her mouth had shaped a bitter curve. ‘He always thinks so well of
himself, he’s always trying to be what he’s not.’ And then her voice had warmed. ‘That’s not the way you are, Charlotte. You’re more down-to-earth.’ She
said a number of other things, all meant to make Lottie feel allied with her – but what Lottie was feeling was a growing sense of shocked clarity: her mother had wanted her not to make it!
She had seen Lottie as less than Cam! Lottie had remembered then all the small things, mostly things not done, that had made it harder for her to get out, to go. All the ways in which her mother
had insisted, somehow, that Lottie was hers. That to have ambition, to want out, was to be ‘high and mighty,’
to think well of yourself
. Oh, why not? she wants to cry out now on
behalf of that younger Charlotte.

At the end of the meal, her mother piled the dishes in the sink, saying she’d do them the next day. Perry Como was on; she wanted to watch. When Lottie didn’t join her in the living
room within a few minutes, she called out, ‘I hope you’re not doing those dishes in there, Charlotte. I said I would, and I will – in the morning.’ The height of
graciousness.

Lottie had sat for a while at the table, thinking in a variety of befogged ways about what she should do next. For so long she had simply wanted to be where she was. Now she saw she
couldn’t stay, and a void seemed to yawn in front of her. Life. Lottie hadn’t a glimmer of an idea about what came next.

And now, twenty-five years later in her car in front of the house, she has something of that same feeling. Bridges burned, it seems. Decisions to be made. She sighs. She can hear what she
assumes is Ryan’s radio faintly from the back of the house. There are little kids on bikes pedaling in big looping circles behind her in the wide street. She opens the door and heaves herself
out of the car. She walks slowly up the front stairs, and then through the empty rooms to the back of the house. The back door is open, and through the rusty and paint-dotted old wooden screen, she
sees the dappled sunlight as blotches of lighter green in the scraggly yard. She pushes the door ajar.