Falling Together (5 page)

Love,

Cat

It didn’t sound like Cat. Will had thought this as soon as he’d read it. A flat, sparse e-mail from a girl (Will still thought “girl” when he thought of Cat) who was never either of those things. The Cat Will had known was effusive and playful, hardwired for flirting. “Buckets of love,” Cat would have written. “Aeons, oceans, and mountains of love forever and ever.” “I need you,” though, that sounded like Cat.

The e-mail was pinned next to a poem that Kara had given him, left for him to find there on the bulletin board, when they had first started dating. “I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke. Funny, Will had thought at the time, for his girlfriend to give him a love poem in the voice of a man worshipping a woman. “This is what I want,” the gift suggested. “Love me like this.”

Will liked the poem for its rhymes and because it didn’t praise the usual body parts—eyes, lips, et cetera—but the woman’s body in action, her specific way of moving or of holding still. After Kara had gone, moved out without ever having entirely moved in, Will had left the poem where it was. In his mind, it had never had all that much to do with Kara, who was pretty and smart, but not exactly graceful, a fact she freely acknowledged. Still, when the man in the poem asserts, parenthetically, more to himself than to anyone else, “(I measure time by how a body sways.),” Will had always known exactly what he meant.

“‘I’m sorry for everything,’” Cat had written in the e-mail.
Why should you be sorry?
Will thought, and looked out the window again to see, not Cat or Pen, but his mother, in the flesh and saluting the sun. Even though she had been this woman for almost five years, Will still felt amazed at the sight of her, sturdy, lean, and clear-eyed. She traced arcs in the air with her arms; her gray hair flashed. Abruptly, she broke her posture to wildly shoo a fly away, hands flapping, elbows stabbing the air. When she gave the retreating fly the finger, Will grinned.

He remembered the conversation they’d had on the first anniversary of her sobriety. They were celebrating at the summerhouse where his mother had lived year-round since the divorce. His sister, Tully, was upstairs napping with her new baby; his brother, Philip, and Tully’s husband, Max, had driven into town for lobsters, corn, tomatoes, and blueberry pies. Will had been working at his computer on the porch. He liked it out there, even though it was smotheringly hot and breezeless that day, the wind chimes hanging, listless, in the sticky air. His mother had come up behind him and pressed a cold glass of iced tea against the back of his neck. When he reached around for the glass, she’d given his hand a little slap.

“Talk to me,” she had ordered, “or no drink for you.”

Will had laughed, closed his laptop, jumped up, and pulled out a chair for her, into which she settled like a cat, tucking her feet underneath her, leaning forward, and eyeing him determinedly.

“Oh, man, what are you up to now?” Will said warily.

“I asked Philip and now I’m asking you.”

“Uh-oh.”

“It’s just this: I’ve done a lot of changing this past year, and I’m wondering how you feel about it all.”

Her eyes were hazel, like Will’s, coppery brown near the pupils, shading to amber and ending with rims of dark green, and they were looking at him with a combination of patience and insistence.
We will have this conversation,
the look said,
if it takes a hundred years
.

“Good,” answered Will. “I feel good.”

The eyes waited, unblinking.

“Proud of you,” he went on. “Relieved. Uh, happy at how happy you are. I’m glad you’re painting.”

“Thank you,” said his mother. “All very nice. What else?”

“Else?”

“Yup.”

He slapped his neck. “Mosquitoes.”

“William.”

“What was Philip’s answer?”

“William.”

Will thought for a few seconds, looking out at the wide lawn, the blue-purple hydrangeas and thick, leaning stands of black-eyed Susans, the blown-glass hummingbird feeders hanging from the trees, and, yards away, the vegetable garden looking like a tiny campground, with its stakes and bean teepees. He loved this place. It had been the setting for some intense family ugliness over the years, and this very porch was the spot where his friendship with Pen had ended, smashed to smithereens, but the place itself had stayed pure, calm and unstained. Will felt oddly glad for it, glad that its days of bearing witness to meanness or betrayal or to the icy, cutting conversations that had been his father’s specialty were over.

“Okay, how about this? Sometimes, I worry that you’ll change so much I won’t know you anymore,” he had said finally. “Some of those friends of yours, they’re nice, but they’re a little…”

“Humorless?” his mother offered. “Annoyingly earnest? Overly huggy?”

“Yeah, that,” said Will, laughing.

“Say more. What else worries you?”

“Apart from your maniacal insistence on openness and communication, you mean?”

“Yes.” She folded her hands and smiled innocently, waiting. “Apart from that.”

“All right, all right.” He thought for a few seconds, listening to the bees hum like tiny engines. “I’m getting used to the yoga and the vegetarianism. I can see the point of them. But the really hard-core New Age stuff makes me—” He searched for the right words (
itch uncontrollably, vomit, run like hell
), then gave up. “I want you to be happy, and you should do whatever it takes. I’ll adjust.”

“But from a purely selfish perspective…,” prompted his mother.

“You should get a job with the KGB. Seriously.”

“I believe the KGB was dissolved some time ago. As you were saying.”

Will picked a leaf of mint off the surface of his iced tea and chewed it.

“From a purely selfish perspective, I’d say that I just want to keep feeling like we speak the same language. And I want you to stay funny.”

His mother slapped the table and laughed. Then she leaned toward him and said, “How about this? Yoga, vegetarianism, and maybe just a bit of Buddhism. Tibetan. The joyful kind. But no crystals, personal gurus, or star charts.”

Will raised his eyebrows. “Goddesses?”

“Nope.”

“Vortices?”

“Don’t know what they are.”

“Wicca?”

“Never.”

“What’s your position on modern medicine?”

“All for it. Deal?”

“Deal.”

Now, out in his backyard, his mother finished her sun salutation, started walking toward the house, and then leaned forward, squinting, her hands on her knees. Will wondered what she was looking at. It was so much brighter outside than it was in his office; no way could she see him. Then she smiled and blew a kiss in his direction. Will was highly skeptical about things like sixth sense and intuition, but when it came to her kids, his mother could be downright uncanny. This hadn’t always been true, but it was true now. Even though he didn’t believe she could possibly see him do it, he waved.

She didn’t come straight to the office but went instead to the kitchen. Will heard her turn on the water, then clatter around, unscrewing the lids off the small, round metal canisters that held her loose tea leaves and herbs.

Will knew that she would come into his office in a few minutes, would lean against the doorjamb in her paint-streaked shirt, and tell him that she’d finished the last illustration for his new book. She had been close to finished last night, and he was pretty sure she had gotten up before sunrise that morning to paint. It amazed him, how little sleep she needed now, especially since one of the primary ways he remembered her from his childhood was as a long, sloped lump under sheets. He could see himself—he could transport himself into himself—at six, ten, fifteen, standing next to the guest-room bed or next to the couch in what she called her studio, even though she almost never used it for making art, staring at her and churning with worry and anger, his hands dangling, as full daylight sliced in around the drawn curtains.

Soon she would come in with her tea, say she had finished the painting for the book, and tomorrow or the next day, he would drive her to the airport and she would go back to the summerhouse. This visit had been her longest, almost four months. During the last book, she had come for three and had been staying in the guesthouse when Kara finally left him for good.

Having his mother, or anyone else, around to witness firsthand his getting dumped should have been a nightmare of humiliation and awkwardness, but it wasn’t. He remembered how she had waited a few days, staying nearly invisible and quiet as a cat, before weighing in on the breakup. Then all she’d done was tilt her head to one side and say, “I liked her.”

“She liked you, too,” said Will. It was true. Some women might have minded—might have
detested
—having their boyfriend’s mother living in the backyard, but Kara had repeatedly told him how much she loved it, even going so far as to ask her to eat dinner with them nearly every night, an invitation that, most of the time, his mother graciously refused. In fact, Kara seemed to have a crush on his mother, blushing in her presence, agreeing with her about the smallest things, asking her what kind of perfume she used (“Eau de paint” his mother had said, laughing). Once, Will had come home to find Kara wearing the cardigan his mother had left in their kitchen the night before. Will hadn’t completely understood this enthusiasm, but sincerely hoped—and almost believed—that it had nothing to do with what Kara had once referred to, with a complete and disturbing lack of irony, as his mother’s “pedigree.”

“I liked her,” his mother continued, “but, if I may be blunt, I didn’t think she would stay.”

“Why not?” Will had asked. Forty-eight hours earlier, he might have asked this defensively, but now he felt more exhausted than anything else. Besides, he was curious.

“The way she cleared out a separate shelf in the pantry for her own food, instead of mixing hers up with yours. I thought it was a bad sign.”

“Oh.”

“Also, she always seemed to be a little mad at you.”

Actually, Kara had seemed more than a little mad, a fact that Will had asked her about exactly five times during the nine months they were together. The first time, she had laughed it off. The second time, she had cried and apologized and blamed her anger on her own moodiness. The third time, Kara had yelled, thrown a magazine in his direction (it didn’t hit him), and slept in the guesthouse (his mother wasn’t staying in it at the time), but at four that morning, he’d woken up to her hands pulling up his T-shirt, her mouth on his chest. “Forgive me,” she’d murmured, and he had.

But then, just days later, when her anger came slashing toward him out of nowhere again, and he’d asked her about it, she had pressed her lips into a line, walked out of the room, walked back in, and said matter-of-factly, “You’re just a closed-off person. That’s your right, of course. But I’m passionate; I wear my heart on my sleeve. Sometimes, I get frustrated that you aren’t the same way.”

This had surprised Will because he had never considered himself closed-off. He wasn’t a secret keeper, for the most part; he disclosed. He expressed his feelings when it seemed important to express them. When he tried to explain these things to Kara, she had cut him off, tenderly, saying, “Please. I didn’t mean to put you in the position of having to defend yourself. You are who you are. I love you, and I value you, and I’m sorry,” which pretty much put an end to that conversation.

Then, one night, on their way out to a dinner party, he had kissed her and said, “I love you in that dress,” and she had pushed him backward with both hands, slapped the kitchen table, and snapped, “Well, that’s just great, Will. That’s just peachy,” shoved her handbag over her shoulder, and slammed her way out the front door. Will had stood in the kitchen, listening to the screen door creak on its hinges in the aftershock of her slamming, suddenly feeling his own anger nearby, crouching, like something misshapen and ugly in his peripheral vision.

He had looked down at the kitchen chair in front of him, a fragile thing, and gripped it to steady himself, even as the urge to lift it up over his head and hurl it against the wall rushed up from his hands, into his arms and shoulders.

He’d done the breathing, the visualizing, employed all the strategies he hadn’t had to use in years to calm himself down. Then he’d gone out to the car, where Kara sat in the passenger seat, opened the door, and said quietly, “Why are you so mad at me all the time? The real reason.”

Kara had stared straight ahead for a long time before looking up at him with sad, sad eyes and saying, “I lied.”

“What?”

“That time I said you were closed off, not passionate enough.”

Will knew all at once what she was going to say, the general gist of it, and he braced himself.

“You do wear your heart on your sleeve,” she told him in a hollow voice. “It’s right there. You just don’t love me as much as I love you.”

“Kara,” Will began, then stopped.

“You love me,” she clarified. “But only a little bit. Not enough.”

W
ILL
’
S MOTHER STOOD IN THE DOORWAY TO HIS OFFICE
.

“How’s the tea?” he asked.

“‘It tastes like licorice,’” his mother said, smiling. “‘That’s the way with everything.’” It was a Hemingway quotation, one Will had been hearing for as long as he could remember. Even though it made no sense for his mother to love Hemingway (Woolf maybe, Austen definitely, Hemingway no), she always had. She knew that particular story, every word, by heart, and could quote whole chapters from
The Sun Also Rises
. When Will had finally read those stories on his own—he’d been in tenth grade—it had made his stomach hurt to think about his mother feeling so at home with all those unhappy, disappointed, disconnected characters.