For Love (12 page)

She remembered the slow mock-medical exam he’d performed on her once, in a hotel in Cleveland – his stylized professional distance, her increasing frantic arousal. He’d still
had all his clothes on when they made love that time, in a position he said was recommended by the AMA.

One day, driving, picturing him, she was suddenly aware of tears streaming down her cheeks, into her open mouth.

Finally they met for lunch and an afternoon at their hotel. Everything seemed the same. They sat in the bar. He had seltzer and she had wine, and they laughed and talked about what they’d
been doing at work, about the children. She told him about Ryan’s dyeing his hair green, the running spots all over the bathroom walls. He told her that Megan had gotten her period, that
he’d had to help her with it.

‘Same idea,’ she said.

‘Not even in the ballpark, madam.’ He shook his head. ‘In the great Olympics of parenting, it’s gold to your, maybe, lead.’

They didn’t speak of Evelyn. When Lottie had asked about her on the telephone, he had said, ‘It’s very bad. She’ll live, but it’s very, very bad.’ They went
upstairs and made love, twice. Lottie didn’t come, and when he was finished the second time, Jack moved down between her legs and lapped and stroked her gently until, with an act of fierce
concentration, she managed a small, shuddering convulsion.

Afterward they showered and dressed together, talking in a desultory way. Lottie was unbearably tense, but she tried to imitate Jack’s rhythm, his relaxed tenderness with her. He walked
her to her car, leaned over the open window, and touched her cheek as he said goodbye.

‘Two weeks okay?’ he asked. ‘Life is still nutty for us.’

She smiled. ‘It’s fine.’

As soon as he turned and walked away, cutting into the crowd, she rolled her window up and was shaken by ragged sobs. She bent over, as though she were looking for something on the floor of the
car, and kept her head down until she was calm again.

In the next weeks, she called his home repeatedly, and hung up when one of the children or the housekeeper answered. It was during this period, too, that she began driving down his alley,
looking up at the room that would later be her own study. She was so absentminded and irritable at home that Ryan asked her one night, ‘Is this that menopause thing you’re
having?’

She’d gotten control of herself after that, in front of Ryan and her friends anyway. She’d always been in control when she was with Jack. And slowly the most intense of the feelings
seemed to pass. But still, several times a year up until Evelyn’s death, she would feel so shaken on leaving him, or so abruptly in need of him in the midst of something she was doing, that
she’d drive to his office at the end of a day and double-park across the street just to watch him set out for home – a tall, skinny gray-haired man, his head bent down, his hands in his
pockets, his topcoat open and swinging from side to side behind him in even the coldest weather. Or she would make the slow drive again, down the alley behind his house, her headlights off. As
though she were some criminal, she thought. A housebreaker. A
homewrecker
.

And the first time she was alone in the house after they were married – her house now too, just as she’d dreamed – she had gone through Jack’s things, looking for a sign,
any sign, that he might have some parallel feelings about her. And found none, not a thing, unless you counted the reviews of her books he’d clipped and tucked inside the covers.

Instead, to her dismay, she found a box full of photographs of Evelyn and letters they’d written to each other. She forced herself not to read the letters, though she couldn’t help
taking in phrases, words: ‘so shaken, to my roots,’ ‘all my thoughts, my dreams, of you,’ ‘darling, darling Jack.’ She allowed herself the photographs. And then
was sorry she had. Most of them were fairly standard snapshots: Evelyn with the children on a beach somewhere; Evelyn in the background at Christmas, wearing a bathrobe, at some big party,
balancing a plate of food while she talked. But several stayed with her long after she’d closed the box and slid it back on Jack’s high shelf in the closet. One of Evelyn in a
wide-brimmed black hat, sitting at a table covered with half-filled glasses somewhere clearly in Europe, laughing. She was big and dark and very beautiful. And one of her staring intensely into the
camera, her eyes nearly out of focus with feeling, her hair in disarray, her shoulders and one large breast bare while she nursed what was clearly a newborn on the other.

In the days and weeks following, whenever one of the images rose in Lottie’s mind and her world lurched sideways, she would chant internally,
You deserve what you feel, you deserve what
you feel
.

Now Lottie hunched over the table in her room, Idalba’s room, looking at her papers under the bright light. In the deep stillness of the sleeping house, the refrigerator
began to whir, and Lottie stopped for a moment to identify the sound and then went on reading. She was writing a series of articles on emotions, and the distortion of medical terms used in
discussing them popularly. She had started thinking she’d simply write an essay about the process of grief, wanting to understand Jack, what he was going through. She’d read a wealth of
self-help books, some trashy, some serious, about the subject. But all of them infuriated her with what she saw as prescriptive, shallow accounts of the ‘healthy stages’ of the feelings
involved. She had begun to seek examples of sick and healing extravagance in literature and biography. She discovered, for instance, that Flaubert, devastated by his mother’s death, had asked
a maid to wear an old dress of hers; that he would burst into tears at the sight of her moving around the house. She wrote about this. She wrote about the nineteenth-century preoccupation with
séances, she wrote about people wearing jewelry made from the bones, the hair of the dead. She described voodoo ceremonies in which people had intercourse with the dead, a culture in which
they disinterred the dead annually for celebratory reunions. She talked about the comfort available in what was taboo, in what was extreme. She closed with a paragraph gently chiding the fear
behind the particularly American need to normalize emotion by using medical language to describe it.

None of this helped her with Jack, of course, with his private, understated sorrow. But it did bring a very nice fee from an elegant woman’s magazine that often published Lottie’s
work. And another editor said yes, they would be interested in a series on various emotions. It was this series Lottie had begun to jot down ideas for now. Love and hate, to start with, she
thought. Then fear. Anger. Jealousy.

She was looking now at her notes on love. Bader, whom Idalba had forbidden entrance to her room, lay on the threshold with his paws crossed under his chin. Under the glare of her white lamp, her
ideas seemed sketchy and inadequate. She had just begun to read the psychologizing literature and had been struck with the consistency of opinion on things. Romantic love was obsessive and childish
and couldn’t last. Mature love was trusting, friendly, more relaxed. Part of the function of marriage, sociologically speaking, was to transform one into the other.

Over the past weeks, Lottie had begun to feel that doing this reading and making these notes had reawakened in her all those feelings about Jack she thought she’d suppressed. She had
started to cry one night recently after they’d made love – their sorrowful grownup love – wanting back the feelings they’d had before they lived together, before Evelyn died
Megan had been at a sleepover, and Lottie took the opportunity to be as histrionic as she wished, weeping, accusing Jack of having withdrawn from her.

That in itself repulsed him; he wasn’t used to this kind of thing, especially not from her. He had put on his bathrobe and left the room. She had washed her face and followed him to the
kitchen, determined to stay calm, but also to make him hear what she had to say. She stood in the middle of the room, barefoot and only wearing one of his T-shirts, her face swollen, her hair
snarled after sex, and started in again.

He was standing at the sink holding a glass of water, and he looked over at her coldly. ‘I simply don’t know what you mean or want, Lottie,’ he said. ‘This’ –
he swung the glass toward her – ‘seems adolescent to me. It’s like some holdover from your single life.’

Lottie was stung, furious at the smugness in this. She felt a pure rage at him, who’d lived so safely, utterly sealed off from emotion by his wife’s illness for years. It made her
want to rub his nose in the disorder of her sexual life before him, of most people’s lives
out there
, as she thought of it.

‘How dare you lecture me?’ she shrilled. ‘You had to have your kind of marriage – sad, and full of patience and kindness. But don’t pretend you know what it has to
be for other people. What it is.’

He turned and looked at her. His voice was sharp. ‘I know it doesn’t have to be melodramatic. That’s not what marriage is about.’

‘This is
our
marriage,’ she said. ‘How would you know more than I do what it’s about, you asshole?’

They looked at each other, both full of the wish to injure, to hurt. ‘Do you hear how you sound?’ he said. ‘How ugly you sound? If you were Megan, I’d send you to your
room.’

‘How inconvenient for you that you can’t. That you have to listen to someone for once.’

‘I don’t. I don’t have to listen to this . . . garbage.’

He started from the room, and she grabbed his arm. Something gave, stitches popped audibly in his sleeve. They stopped. Lottie was aware of a pang of confused feeling having to do with his size
– how much smaller she was than he, like a child – and with how badly she was behaving. She thought, suddenly, of her reading about love, and she was swept with a sense of the absurdity
of their argument, even of their dilemma.

They stood still, looking at each other for a moment. One of his eyelids was pulsing erratically with fatigue. She wanted to end this, somehow. She stepped back and said, in a little
girl’s voice, ‘You’re not the boss of what love is.’

If they hadn’t both raised children, if they hadn’t both been middle-aged, it might not have worked. But his face opened in relief, his shoulders dropped, and he laughed. Half an
hour or so later, when they were side by side in bed in the dark, he spoke suddenly, intensely, as though they’d been in steady conversation all along: ‘We can get through this, Lottie.
I know we can. It’s just time. Just give me some time.’

Lottie was dizzy with sleepiness, but she reached over in response and touched his shoulder.

She turned the desk lamp off and got up and went to the window. It was almost five, and the sky was turning a papery white. The rectangular backyard was deep, black with
shadow. Jack had told her Evelyn had had a flower garden, which he’d tried to keep up for a few years after her first stroke, so she could sit in her wheelchair and look out over it; but that
it had slowly become overgrown and weed-choked, and finally he’d had a yardman tear everything out and plant yew bushes. He said Evelyn didn’t notice at that point.

Lottie thought of Evelyn looking blindly out on the yard; she thought of herself driving down the alley, looking in with all her frantic passion. Bader yelped suddenly, painfully, from his exile
on the threshold, and she looked over at him. He tilted his head, he moaned in love.

‘Yes, just like that,’ she said, and laughed out loud.

In the weeks before Lottie left, she and Jack were, if anything, even more careful with each other than they’d been. Sometimes Lottie had the sense of herself being an
invalid in Jack’s eyes, he was so solicitous with her.
This is the way he must have treated Evelyn
, she thought. And then she’d wonder again whether the problem might not be more
Jack’s than her own. Whether he simply didn’t remember how to have a wife who took up room, who was whole and wanted something from him. At other times, though, when she had to stop
herself from picking up the telephone to call his office in the middle of the day, or felt herself yearning for him in the night, even though he was lying next to her, she was aware of how easily
she could slip again into her crazy, shameful desperation.

The morning they packed the car, the air was clear and cool. It felt like a fall day in New England, and Lottie sang of distance as she carried things out to the driveway: ‘. . . across
the wide Missooou-ri.’ She was familiar from her free-lance days with the rising excitement in herself. She’d driven off to do research or an interview often enough with the same eager
heart.

Bader followed her on her trips in and out. The last time in, she went to the kitchen to say goodbye to Megan, who was still in her shorty nightgown, having breakfast. She looked up at Lottie,
startled. She had cut her hair recently, in a kind of elongated flattop, which she kept in vertical spikes in the daytime with gel. Now it was matted from sleep. It looked artificial, like a cheap
toupee made of some clumped synthetic fiber.

‘God, you’re leaving so soon?’ she asked, as though she’d been unconscious of the bustle of preparation around her for the last hour or more. Then she stood up and
crossed to Lottie. Awkwardly and with her eyes swung to a far corner of the room, she pressed herself momentarily into Lottie’s arms. Lottie could feel the girl’s small high breasts,
could smell her sweet breath – she’d been eating pancakes with maple syrup. This was the first time Megan had voluntarily embraced her stepmother, and Lottie found herself suddenly
tearful. When Megan stepped back, which she did very quickly, Lottie turned away too, so the girl couldn’t see her face. At the doorway, though, she stopped. ‘Have a good month,
Meggie,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah, like I
can
with summer school breathing down my neck.’

‘Well, maybe you can manage a good moment or two, though,’ Lottie said.

‘Yeah. Well, you too,’ Megan said, and sat down again at the table, where the funnies were spread out next to her plate.

When Lottie came outside, Jack was hauling Bader out of the front seat of the car. The back seat was full of her bags and boxes of books. She’d put her computer in the trunk.