The Hours (11 page)

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard

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ha
d stood beside her at a pond’s edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened into hers; his tongue (exciting and utterly familiar, she’d never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met it with her own. They’d kissed, and walked around the pond together. In another hour they’d have dinner, and considerable quantities of wine. Clarissa’s copy of The Golden Notebook lay on the chipped white nightstand of the attic bedroom where she still slept alone; where Richard had not yet begun to spend alternate nights.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

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M
r s. Brown

T
h
e cake is less than she’d hoped it would be. She tries not to mind. It is only a cake, she tells herself. It is only a cake. She and Richie have frosted it and she has, guiltily, invented something else for him to do while she squeezes yellow rosebuds onto the edges from a pastry tube and writes ‘‘Happy Birthday Dan’’ in white icing. She does not want the mess her son would make of it. Still, it has not turned out the way she’d pictured it; no, not at all. There’s nothing really wrong with it, but she’d imagined something more. She’d imagined it larger, more remarkable. She’d hoped (she admits to herself ) it would look more lush and beautiful, more wonderful. This cake she’s produced feels small, not just in the physical sense but as an entity. It looks amateurish; handmade. She tells herself, It’s fine. It’s a fine cake, everyone will love it. Its clumsy aspects (the scattering of crumbs caught in the icing, the

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squashe
d appearance of the ‘‘n’’ in ‘‘Dan,’’ which got too close to a rose) are part of its charm. She washes the dishes. She thinks about the rest of the day.

She will make the beds, vacuum the rugs. She will wrap the presents she’s bought for her husband: a necktie and a new shirt, both more expensive and elegant than the ones he buys for himself; a boar-bristle brush; a small pungent leather case that contains nail clippers, a nail file, and tweezers, for him to take with him when he travels, as he does occasionally, for the agency. He will be happy with all these gifts, or appear to be happy; he will whistle and say ‘‘Get a load of this’’ when he sees the expensive shirt and tie. He will kiss her, enthusiastically, with each present, and tell her she’s done too much, she shouldn’t have, he doesn’t deserve such fine things. Why, she wonders, does it seem that she could give him anything, anything at all, and receive essentially the same response. Why does he desire nothing, really, beyond what he’s already got? He is impenetrable in his ambitions and satisfactions, his love of job and home. This, she reminds herself, is a virtue. It is part of his loveliness (she would never use that word in his presence, but privately she thinks of him as lovely, a lovely man, for she has seen him at his most private moments, whimpering over a dream, sitting in the bathtub with his sex shrunk to a stub, floating, heartbreakingly innocent). It is good, she reminds herself—it is lovely—that her husband cannot be touched by ephemera; that his happiness depends only on the fact of her, here in the house, living her life, thinking of him.

Her cake is a failure, but she is loved anyway. She is loved,

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e thinks, in more or less the way the gifts will be appreciated: because they’ve been given with good intentions, because they exist, because they are part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

What would she prefer, then? Would she rather have her gifts scorned, her cake sneered at? Of course not. She wants to be loved. She wants to be a competent mother reading calmly to her child; she wants to be a wife who sets a perfect table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.

Virginia Woolf put a stone into the pocket of her coat, walked into a river, and drowned.

Laura will not let herself go morbid. She’ll make the beds, vacuum, cook the birthday dinner. She will not mind, about anything.

Someone taps at the back door. Laura, washing the last of the dishes, can see the faint outline of Kitty through the filmy white curtain. Here is the vague halo of Kitty’s brown-blond hair, the scrubbed pink blur of her face. Laura swallows a pang of excitement and something stronger than excitement, something that resembles panic. She is about to receive a visit from Kitty. Her hair is hardly brushed; she is still wearing her bathrobe. She looks, too much, like the woman of sorrows. She wants to rush to the door and she wants to stand here, immobile, at the sink, until Kitty gives up and goes away. She might actually have done it, stood motionless, holding her breath (can Kitty see inside, would she know?), but there is the

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proble
m of Richie, witness to everything, running now into the kitchen, holding a red plastic truck, shouting with a mix of delight and alarm that someone’s at the door.

Laura dries her hands on a dish towel covered with red roosters, and opens the door. It’s only Kitty, she tells herself. It’s only her friend from two doors down, and this, of course, is what people do. They drop by and are received; it doesn’t matter about your hair or your robe. It doesn’t matter about the cake.

‘‘Hi, Kitty,’’ she says.

‘‘Am I interrupting anything?’’ Kitty asks.

‘‘Of course not. Come on in.’’

Kitty enters, and brings with her an aura of cleanliness and a domestic philosophy; a whole vocabulary of avid, nervy movements. She is an attractive, robust, fleshy, large-headed woman several years younger than Laura (it seems that everyone, suddenly, is at least slightly younger than she). Kitty’s features, her small eyes and delicate nose, are crowded into the center of her round face. In school she was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them. Kitty and her friends— steady, stolid, firm-featured, large-spirited, capable of deep loyalties and terrible cruelties—were the queens of the various festivals, the cheerleaders, the stars of the plays.

‘‘I need a favor,’’ Kitty says.

‘‘Sure,’’ Laura says. ‘‘Can you sit a minute?’’

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‘‘Mm-hm.’
’ Kitty sits at the kitchen table. She says a friendly, slightly dismissive hello to the little boy as he watches suspiciously, even angrily (why has she come?) from a place of relative safety near the stove. Kitty, with no children of her own yet (people are starting to wonder), does not attempt to seduce the children of others. They can come to her, if they like; she will not go to them.

‘‘I’ve got coffee on,’’ Laura says. ‘‘Would you like a cup?’’

‘‘Sure.’’

She pours a cup of coffee for Kitty, and one for herself. She glances nervously at the cake, wishing she could hide it. There are crumbs caught in the icing. The ‘‘n’’ in ‘‘Dan’’ is squashed against a rose.

Following Laura’s eyes, Kitty says, ‘‘Oh, look, you made a cake.’’

‘‘It’s Dan’s birthday.’’

Kitty gets up, comes and stands beside Laura. Kitty wears a white short-sleeved blouse, green plaid shorts, and straw sandals that make a small, crisp sound when she walks.

‘‘Aw, look,’’ she says.

‘‘One of my maiden attempts,’’ Laura says. ‘‘It’s harder than you’d think, writing in frosting.’’

She hopes she is careless, debonair, charmingly unconcerned. Why did she put the roses on first, when any idiot would have known to begin with the message? She finds a cigarette. She is someone who smokes and drinks coffee in the mornings, who is raising a family, who has Kitty as a friend, who doesn’t mind if her cakes are less than perfect. She lights her cigarette.

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‘‘It’
s cute,’’ Kitty says, and punctures Laura’s brash, cigarette self at its inception. The cake is cute, Kitty tells her, the way a child’s painting might be cute. It is sweet and touching in its heartfelt, agonizingly sincere discrepancy between ambition and facility. Laura understands: There are two choices only. You can be capable or uncaring. You can produce a masterful cake by your own hand or, barring that, light a cigarette, declare yourself hopeless at such projects, pour yourself another cup of coffee, and order a cake from the bakery. Laura is an artisan who has tried, and failed, publicly. She has produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing, but true) to produce something of beauty.

‘‘When is Ray’s birthday?’’ she says, because she has to say something. ‘‘September,’’ Kitty answers. She returns to the kitchen table. What more can be said about the cake?

Laura follows with the coffee cups. Kitty needs friends (her own husband’s earnest, slightly stunned charm is not holding up particularly well in the larger world, and there is the matter of their continued childlessness), and so Laura is someone she visits, someone from whom she asks favors. Still, they both know how relentlessly Kitty would have snubbed her in high school, had they been the same age. In another life, not very much unlike this one, they’d have been enemies, but in this life, with its surprises and perversities of timing, Laura is married to a celebrated boy, a war hero, from Kitty’s graduating class and has joined the aristocracy in much the way a homely German princess, no longer young, might find herself seated on a throne beside an English king.

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Wha
t surprises her—what occasionally horrifies her—is how much she revels in Kitty’s friendship. Kitty is precious, just as Laura’s husband is lovely. Kitty’s preciousness, the golden hush of her, the sense of enlarged moment she brings to a room, is like that of a movie star. She has a movie star’s singularity, a movie star’s flawed and idiosyncratic beauty; like a movie star she seems both common and heightened, in the way of Olivia De Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck. She is deeply, almost profoundly, popular.

‘‘How is Ray?’’ Laura asks as she sets a cup in front of Kitty. ‘‘I haven’t seen him in a while.’’

Kitty’s husband is Laura’s chance to right the balance between them; to offer Kitty her sympathy. Ray is not an embarrassment, exactly—not a complete failure—but he is somehow Kitty’s version of Laura’s cake, writ large. He was Kitty’s high-school boyfriend. He played center on the basketball team, and went on to do well but not spectacularly at USC. He spent seven months as a prisoner of war in the Philippines. He is now some sort of mysterious functionary in the Department of Water and Power, and already, at thirty, is beginning to demonstrate how heroic boys can, by infinitesimal degrees, for no visible reasons, metamorphose into middle-aged drubs. Ray is crew-cut, reliable, myopic; he is full of liquids. He sweats copiously. Small bubbles of clear spit form at the sides of his mouth whenever he speaks at length. Laura imagines (it’s impossible not to) that when they make love he must spurt rivers, as opposed to her own husband’s modest burble. Why, then, are there still no children?

‘‘He’s fine,’’ Kitty says. ‘‘He’s Ray. He’s the same.’’

‘‘Dan’s the same, too,’’ Laura says kindly, empathically. ‘‘These guys are something, aren’t they?’’

She thinks of the gifts she’s bought her husband; the gifts he will appreciate, even cherish, but which he does not in any way want. Why did she marry him? She married him out of love. She married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism. He was simply too good, too kind, too earnest, too sweet-smelling not to marry. He had suffered so much. He wanted her.

She touches her belly.

Kitty says, ‘‘You can say that again.’’

‘‘Don’t you ever wonder what makes them tick? I mean, Dan’s like a bulldozer. Nothing seems to bother him.’’

Kitty shrugs dramatically, rolls her eyes. She and Laura, at this moment, could be high-school girls, best friends, complaining about boys who will soon be replaced by other boys. Laura would like to ask Kitty a question, one she can’t quite phrase. The question has to do with subterfuge and, more obscurely, with brilliance. She would like to know if Kitty feels like a strange woman, powerful and unbalanced the way artists are said to be, full of vision, full of rage, committed above all to creating . . . what? This. This kitchen, this birthday cake, this conversation. This revived world.

Laura says, ‘‘We’ve got to get together soon, really. It’s been ages.’’ ‘‘This is such good coffee,’’ Kitty says, sipping. ‘‘What brand do you use?’’ ‘‘I don’t know. No, of course I know. Folgers. What brand do you use?’’

‘‘Maxwell House. It’s good, too.’’

‘‘Mm-hm.’’

‘‘Still. I’m thinking of switching. I don’t know why, really.’’

‘‘Well. This is Folgers.’’