The Last Worthless Evening (18 page)

This was during their time before dinner, when each evening they sat in the living room of the house Norman had left, and during Claire's cocktail hour they talked.

“I had to learn to sell real estate, then I had to sell it. And I learned something else. This was during Vietnam. That it wasn't just the Pentagon and the President and Congress that lied. And were cowards. And were evil. Doing terrible things and calling them something else. It was people everywhere, little people. They made money and maybe thought they had power but whether they lived or died wouldn't make any difference. Not to the world. They were people with jobs. It's how they got the jobs and made money. They're cowardly with their bosses and they call it being shrewd. Smart. They call lying ‘business.' They always call something by another name. I think it's because people know. They know what's right and what's wrong. And they want to be good. So when they do something evil they say it was something good. It was justified. I've never heard anyone say, ‘I did this terrible thing to somebody and I loved it.' Except a boy I knew who'd been to Vietnam. But that's different, and we can't understand it. So it wasn't just Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger and all the rest of them. The country was at war over there, and it was a war here too, of beliefs, and every day it was with me. A confrontation—a fight—between good and evil, truth and lies. People marching in the streets. And there I was with my little life. Working with real-estate agents, and lawyers, and banks—Jesus:
banks
—and architects and building contractors. And I think everything would have been blurred. For me, anyway, if it weren't for the war. I think I would have figured, this is the way the world is. And maybe that's how these people got that way when they were young. Maybe they just figured this was it: lying and fucking over people. And they either had to do it or go live in the desert on locusts and honey. But the war gave me a—moral energy, maybe. Or maybe it just woke me up. Because everything connected in the war. You could hardly buy anything without supporting some corporation that made money on killing people. And your taxes. And the money you earned: you never knew where it came from. What stocks. What profits. So there was always blood on it. None of this got to Norman. He almost cried at the My Lai pictures. The ones I showed you. I never saw him cry but that night he looked like he would. Then he went upstairs to work. And I sat downstairs with the
Life
magazine. The same one we threw away last year. I was pregnant with you. And I sat there and knew we did not live alone anymore, me and you inside of me. I was part of the war. So I was part of everything. I had paid for bullets, and I started imagining money I had spent working itself through the economy. From the counter at the store to the people who made what I bought and made bullets too, and I saw my money finally buying bullets for Calley's gun. And I saw my money spent on those bullets coming back to us—you and me— in Norman's paycheck. I didn't do anything. I didn't stop buying, or paying taxes, or go to jail or march in the streets. But by the time Norman left I had at least learned something. So I'm glad I went to work late in my life. I didn't connect it right away with the war. But I do now. I've never done anything at work I'm ashamed of. I'm ashamed of a lot of things I've done as your mother. But I'll keep learning how to do that, all my life. I don't lie to my clients.”

A year after Norman left, when it was clear that he would not be a father for Molly, she changed their names from Thornton back to Cousteau. It did not feel like a change. Even early in the marriage, when she wanted his name, it was strange on her tongue and in her ears; at times she felt pride and love, yes, but she also felt separated from the name, as though it were an acquired title that did not touch all the depths of Claire Cousteau. By that time she was working and Molly was with sitters during the day, so after work Claire gave her the attention she would have shared with a man, if she had been with Molly all day, and if she had had a man. Now her companion for cocktail hour and dinner was Molly. And Claire did not go out in the evenings before she and Molly had eaten dinner together and Molly was asleep. At work Claire missed her, and called home and spoke to the sitter and then to Molly: the pleased and confused child holding the phone to her face, repeating Claire's greetings and the promptings from the sitter:
We played in the snow; I ate pea soup
. After work she drove home to a daughter whose company she dearly wanted.

By the time Molly was nine she was a sensitive and eager listener who understood everything, it seemed, that Claire told her of work, of what she had learned and was learning about people, how much of themselves they would give away for money or simply to avoid standing their ground, even when the issue was trifling and the consequence they feared was only embarrassment. You could see in their eyes the cages they had built between their lives and their beliefs.

“It's what makes people age,” she said to Molly. “I'm sure of it. Not wrinkles, or gray hair, or getting flabby or dull. It's that compromise, over and over for years. That's what you see in those tired old faces. You and I—only our skin and hair will age.”

Molly was able to connect her own moral landscape with Claire's: the disloyalty of children at school, and their fear of teachers and other children, and their willingness to do anything, say anything, so they would not seem foolish, or separate from the others. Molly could listen to Claire talking about a man she was seeing: what Claire liked about him, what she was uncertain about, what she found amusing, and Molly could talk about him, and on these evenings the two of them were like roommates as they recounted and mimed the comic flaws of Claire's lovers.

She never had more than one at a time. In her affairs she obeyed a pattern she had lived with before marriage and was comfortable with as a divorced woman: a series of dates, a ritual of drinking and eating and talking and touching and kissing that allowed her to believe that she and the man were learning to know each other rather than simply increasing their excitement by conducting foreplay while clothed in restaurants and movie theaters and bars. Norman had been her first lover, and from her marriage she had learned that the desire to know another, and to be known by him, was futile. But she could live with the illusion of it. She believed there was nothing harmful in living a lie if you knew you were. It was, in fact, good. For how else could you live, except to will yourself into an alteration of the truth you were dealt at birth?

When Molly was twelve, her curiosity about sex became concrete and personal. Until then, beginning years earlier, Claire had given her long answers to her questions about procreation, pregnancy, menstruation, childbirth, nursing, and these lessons had seemed to Claire abstract and general, like their talks about death. Now Molly knew girls only a year or two older who kissed and let boys touch them and even touched the boys. Some old instinct urged Claire to lie: to tell Molly it was wrong. But she knew the emotions of that instinct were fear and a desire to protect Molly, and she resisted them because the truth was that girls no longer had to worry about either pregnancy or bad reputations, they were as free as boys now, and so there was little to fear, little need to protect Molly. The world she was growing into held in waiting far more complex and dangerous threats to her young spirit. And women, even girls, had always been more sane about sex than men, than boys: women's instincts were sound, and saved most of them from the damages of promiscuity or guilt.

She forced herself to look across the dinner table at Molly's eyes: at their curiosity, their fascination. And gratitude too, for being able to talk to her mother, with the confidence that her mother would tell her the truth. So Claire felt blessed, sitting in candlelight, pleasantly well-fed, drinking wine; and oblivious of their soiled plates on the table and the pots waiting in the kitchen to be emptied and cleaned, she sank warmly into the deep pleasure of motherhood. She said that she discovered after Norman left—always she called him Norman when she spoke to Molly—that you had to find some answers for yourself. And after a long and painful and frightening time—about six months, while men invited her on dates and she said no—she decided she did not have to either marry again or be doomed to loneliness only because as a young woman she had loved, then married, a man who believed he wanted marriage and children and learned too late that he did not. But as soon as she said the word loneliness, it jarred her. She said to Molly: “No. I didn't mean loneliness.”

She believed she said this so Molly would not feel that Claire could live with her and still be lonely. Then she knew that wasn't the reason either, and for the first time since divorce she went beyond that word she had used for years as a name for her desires. Now she felt as though she were actually removing the word from her tongue, or from the air between her and Molly, and holding it before the candles' flames, turning it in her hands, squeezing and probing it, finding that it was not the truth, was not even close to it.

“No,” she said to Molly. “I was never lonely. Not after Norman left. I was lonely when he was here, around the end of him being here. Because there were three of us, and we had a home. But the truth is there were only two of us, and we had a house and a two-legged pet I fed. Not a domestic animal, though. Norman was never domestic, except like an ashtray is, or a vegetable bin. Something that's in a house, and only receives. Maybe he was a Goddamn Christmas tree. When he left us I wasn't lonely. I wanted a man. It's—” She looked over the candle flames at their moving light on Molly's eyes. Molly had dark skin, like Claire's, and her black hair too, as though pallid Norman had truly left his daughter without a trace. “It's wanting to be wanted. Listened to. Really listened to. The way a man listens when he's attracted to you. Soon you'll know what I mean. You say something—anything, the stuff people are always saying to each other, and none of it's important. Except that it's you saying it to someone you care about, and who cares about you.
I never remember my dreams. I need a new raincoat
. It's the way a man listens. The way he looks at you when you talk. You're not talking about a raincoat anymore. It's as though you're showing him everything you remember about yourself: the girls you used to jump rope with, the tree you lay under as a child and daydreamed, your first crush on a boy in second grade. And the way a man will notice you. The gestures you make all day, every day. The way you push your hair back from your face. Or knit your brows or tighten your lips when you're trying to remember something. Your different smiles. When you do one of these, you can see it in their faces—it's a sudden look of appreciation. Or satisfaction. That they anticipated what you'd do. They notice everything, so you dress for them, you bathe for them, put on perfume and make-up for them. They do their own version of that for us too. And you feel known. Then you're not just one person among everyone. You're one woman among all women. You're you. That's what it feels like to be loved. And when you're not loved you become worse than part of a crowd. It's like you don't have a body anymore. You become abstract: just your voice inside you talking to yourself, and you feel like you don't even occupy the space you're standing in, like you're weightless. You're standing on a spot on the earth, but your feet are like air.
You
give me weight,” she said to Molly, the child's face intense still, curious still, fascinated and grateful still, with a shade of fear too in her eyes: but always you had to tell your children something that brought that fear to their eyes, that awakening to what waited for them. “And I hope I give it to you.” Molly nodded twice, three times. “And you need it from your friends too, your teachers, right?” Again the nod: a quick motion of agreement that asked Claire for more of this knowledge, this disclosure in candlelight and her mother's cigarette smoke, and the scents of melting wax and her mother's Burgundy. “And I need it from my woman friends. And from a man. From a man it's not really love. Not true love. But it has all the feelings of it.”

“Why isn't it love?”

“Because love is a vocation.”

“A what?”

“Work. Work that you love. That you must do to be whole. That you devote your life to. They don't teach it in school, but they should. I learned it with Norman. We got married thinking marriage was the happy ending, like in the movies; we had to learn it was the beginning of a vocation. He never did. He didn't want to. So with men—for me, anyway—it's not love. But it's close enough. And there's the pleasure.”

For this she needed a cigarette, and as she lit it she glanced at Molly and saw in her daughter's face, watching Claire inhale and blow out smoke, an expression of desire, and she knew that Molly wanted to smoke and was twelve years old but would do it anyway; remembering now her own girlhood, watching her parents and their friends smoking and waiting for the time, only a little longer but so long in childhood, when she would have the courage to steal and smoke one, the knowledge that she had to wait based not simply on fear of being caught when she was so young that her parents' anger would be even worse, but also on an instinct in her very flesh that told her you spared your body certain pleasures, and smoking was one of them, until you were older. Her recognition of Molly's yearning disrupted the excitement and reward of talking to her daughter about love, and although Claire was silent she felt she was stammering. She rose and went to the kitchen for a demitasse, and in that movement performed only to regain the rhythm of their talk she at once saw clearly, even as she poured coffee into her small cup, that the look of desire she had caught in Molly's face was not a break from that rhythm at all, but was part of it. Remembering again herself as a girl, waiting for the time, the day, the moment when there would be an open pack in an empty room and she would take a cigarette into the woods behind their home. It had nothing to do with wanting to look grown up, as adults liked to say, perhaps needed to say. It was being a child, and children perceived everything in their homes, so Claire had seen, men wanted, the sensation smoking gave her parents. When she returned to the table to sit and face Molly she was afraid again, as she had been earlier when she overcame the urge to lie about men and women, and men and herself. But she was more afraid of yielding to her fear than of what she meant to tell Molly.