Life Before Man (27 page)

She doesn’t especially want William looking at her from behind, but there’s nothing she can do to stop him. She gets out of bed, hooks her brassiere, and pulls her magenta slip on over her head. She chose it in the morning thinking something like this might happen.

“You’re damned sexy,” William says a little too heartily; that tone might preface a slap on the rump. “Full-bodied.”

Elizabeth shivers with irritation. Stupid; sometimes she’s very stupid.
Get your goddamn jockey shorts on and get out of my bed
. She smiles at him graciously over her shoulder, and the doorbell rings.

Ordinarily Elizabeth wouldn’t appear at the door half-dressed in the middle of the day. Neighbors talk, they talk to their children; someone may have seen William going in with her. But right now she wants to be out of the room.

“It’s probably the meter reader,” she says. She doesn’t know whether this is likely to be true. Since he started working at home,
Nate has always coped with such details. “I’ll just be a second.” She pulls on her blue dressing gown, ties the sash and heads down the stairs in her uncomfortably bare feet. The doorbell rings again as she unchains the door.

Auntie Muriel is standing on the front porch, looking with distaste at the peeling white rocker, the broken step, the neighbors’ tiny front lawns with their withered remnants of last summer’s gardens. She’s wearing a white velour hat shaped like an inverted potty and white gloves, as if on her way to Easter church, and a mink stole Elizabeth remembers from twenty-five years ago. Auntie Muriel does not throw things out or give them away.

Auntie Muriel has never before come to visit Elizabeth. She’s chosen to ignore the existence of Elizabeth’s disreputable address, as if Elizabeth doesn’t live in a house at all, but materializes in Auntie Muriel’s front hall at every visit and dematerializes again when leaving. But just because Auntie Muriel has never before done something is no reason to expect she will never do it. Elizabeth knows she shouldn’t be surprised –
who else? –
but she is. She feels her wind go, as if someone has rammed her in the solar plexus, and clutches the stomach of her dressing gown.

“I’ve come here,” Auntie Muriel says, with a slight pause before
here
, “because I felt I ought to tell you what I think about what you’ve done. Not that it will make any difference to you.” She walks forward and Elizabeth of necessity has to step back. Auntie Muriel, breathing mothballs and Bluegrass dusting power, marches into her living room.

“You’re sick,” Auntie Muriel says, looking not at Elizabeth but at her perfectly arranged room, which shrinks, which fades, which exudes dust under her glance. Illness would be the only excuse for having your dressing gown on in the middle of the day, and a poor one at that. “You don’t look well. I’m not surprised.” Auntie Muriel herself does not look particularly radiant. Elizabeth wonders briefly
if there’s something wrong with her, then dismisses the thought. Nothing is ever wrong with Auntie Muriel. She clumps around the room, inspecting the chairs and the sofa.

“Won’t you sit down?” Elizabeth says. She’s decided how she will handle this. Sweetness and light, reveal nothing.
Don’t let yourself be needled
. Auntie Muriel would like nothing better than to provoke her.

Auntie Muriel settles herself on the sofa but doesn’t take off her stole or gloves. She wheezes, or perhaps it’s a sigh, as if merely being in Elizabeth’s house is too much for her. Elizabeth remains standing.
Dominate her through height
. Not a hope.

“In my opinion,” Auntie Muriel says, “mothers of young children do not break up families for their own selfish gratification. I know a lot of people do it these days. But there is such a thing as immoral behavior and such a thing as common decency.”

Elizabeth cannot and will not admit to Auntie Muriel that Nate’s departure was not entirely her choice. Besides, if she says, “Nate left me,” she’ll hear that it was her fault. Husbands do not leave wives who behave properly. No doubt. “How did you hear about it?” she says.

“Janie Burroughs’ nephew Philip works at the Museum,” Auntie Muriel says. “Janie is an old friend of mine. We went to school together. I have my grandchildren to consider; I want them to have a decent home.”

Philip’s relationship to Janie Burroughs was something Elizabeth had forgotten during her witty, lighthearted resumé of her domestic situation at the lunch table last week. An incestuous city.

“Nate sees them on weekends,” she says weakly, and knows at once that she’s made a serious tactical blunder: she’s admitted there is something, if not wrong, at least deficient, about fathers not living at home. “They do have a decent home,” she says quickly.

“I doubt that,” says Auntie Muriel. “I doubt that very much.”

Elizabeth feels the ground sliding from beneath her feet. If she were only dressed, with no man in the bedroom, she’d be in a much better strategic position. She hopes William has the sense to stay put, but considering his general gormlessness she has no right to expect it. She thinks she can hear him splashing in the bathroom.

“I really feel,” says Elizabeth with dignity, “that Nate’s and my decisions are our own concern.”

Auntie Muriel ignores this. “I never approved of him,” she says. “You know that. But any father at all is better than none. You should understand that better than anyone.”

“Nate isn’t dead, you know,” Elizabeth says. A fist of heat rises, hovers in her chest. “He’s still very much alive and he adores the girls. But he happens to be living with another woman.”

“People of your generation do not understand the meaning of sacrifice,” Auntie Muriel says, but without vigor, as if the repetition of the thought has finally tired her. “I sacrificed myself for years.” She doesn’t say what for. It’s obvious she hasn’t heard a word Elizabeth has just said.

Elizabeth puts her hand against the pine sideboard to steady herself. She closes her eyes briefly; behind them is a network of elastic bands. With everyone else she can depend on some difference between surface and interior. Most people do imitations; she herself has been doing imitations for years. If there is some reason for it she can imitate a wife, a mother, an employee, a dutiful relative. The secret is to discover what the others are trying to imitate and then support them in their belief that they’ve done it well. Or the opposite:
I can see through you
. But Auntie Muriel doesn’t do imitations; either that or she is so completely an imitation that she has become genuine. She is her surface. Elizabeth can’t see through her because there is nothing and nowhere to see. She is opaque as a rock.

“I shall go to see Nathanael,” Auntie Muriel says. She and Nate’s mother are the only people who ever call him Nathanael.

Suddenly Elizabeth knows what Auntie Muriel has in mind. She’s going to go to Nate and offer to pay him. She’s willing to pay for an appearance of standard family life, even if it means misery. Which to her is standard family life; she’s never pretended to be happy. She’s going to pay him to come back, and Nate will think that Elizabeth has sent her.

Auntie Muriel, wearing a grey wool dress, is standing in the parlor beside the baby grand piano. Elizabeth, who is twelve, has just finished her piano lesson. The piano teacher, hopeless, pigeon chested Miss MacTavish, is in the front hall struggling into her navy blue trenchcoat, as she’s done every Tuesday for four years. Miss MacTavish is one of the advantages Auntie Muriel is always telling Elizabeth she’s being given. Auntie Muriel listens for the front door to close, smiling at Elizabeth, a disquieting smile.

“Uncle Teddy and I,” she says, “think that under the circumstances you and Caroline should call us something other than Auntie Muriel and Uncle Teddy.” She leans over, fingering Elizabeth’s sheet music.
Pictures at an Exhibition
.

Elizabeth is still sitting on the piano bench. She’s supposed to practice for half an hour after each lesson. She folds her hands in her lap and stares up at Auntie Muriel, keeping her face expressionless. She doesn’t know what’s coming, but she’s already learned that the best defense against Auntie Muriel is silence. She wears silence around her neck like garlic against vampires.
Sullen
, Auntie Muriel calls her.

“We have legally adopted you,” Auntie Muriel goes on, “and we feel you should call us Mother and Father.”

Elizabeth has no objection to calling Uncle Teddy Father. She can hardly remember her own father, and doesn’t much like what she can remember. He sometimes told jokes, she can remember that. Caroline hoards his sporadic Christmas cards; Elizabeth throws hers
out, no longer even bothering to check the postmarks to see where he’s drifted to now. But Auntie Muriel?
Mother?
Her flesh recoils.

“I already have a mother,” Elizabeth says politely.

“She signed the adoption papers,” Auntie Muriel says, with unconcealed triumph. “She seemed glad of the chance to get rid of the responsibility. Of course we paid her something.”

Elizabeth can’t remember how she responded to the news that her real mother had sold her to Auntie Muriel. She thinks she tried to shut the piano on Auntie Muriel’s hand; she’s forgotten whether or not she succeeded. It was the last time she ever let herself be goaded that far.

“Get out of my house,” Elizabeth finds herself saying, screaming. “Don’t come back, don’t come back!” With the release of her voice, blood surges through her head. “You moldy old bitch!” She longs to say
cunt
, she’s thought it often enough, but superstition holds her back. If she pronounces that ultimate magic word, surely Auntie Muriel will change into something else; will swell, blacken, bubble like burnt sugar, giving off deadly fumes.

Auntie Muriel, face set, heaves herself erect, and Elizabeth picks up the object nearest to her and throws it at the repulsive white hat. She misses, and one of her beautiful porcelain bowls shatters against the wall. But at last, at last, she has frightened Auntie Muriel, who is scuttling down the hall. The door opens, closes: a bang, satisfying, final as gunshot.

Elizabeth stamps her bare feet, exultant. Revolution! Auntie Muriel is as good as dead; she will never have to see her again. She does a small victorious dance around her pressback pine chair, hugging herself. She feels savage, she could eat a heart.

But when William comes downstairs, fully dressed and with his hair brushed, he finds her curled unmoving on the sofa.

“Who was that?” he says. “I figured I’d better stay upstairs.”

“Nobody really,” Elizabeth says. “My aunt.”

Nate would have comforted her, even now. William laughs, as if aunts are intrinsically funny. “It sounded like a bit of a fight,” he says.

“I threw a bowl at her,” Elizabeth says. “It was a good bowl.”

“You could try Crazy Glue,” William says practically. Elizabeth doesn’t consider this worth answering. Kayo’s bowl, which can never be duplicated. A bowlful of nothing.

L
esje, in a grubbier than usual lab coat, sits in the downstairs lab beside the corridor of wooden storage racks. She’s drinking a mug of instant coffee, which is all she intends to have for lunch. Ostensibly she’s sorting and labeling a tray of teeth, small pro-tomammal teeth from the Upper Cretaceous. She’s using a magnifying glass and a chart, though she knows these particular teeth backwards and forwards: the Museum has published a monograph on them which she helped to edit. But she’s having trouble concentrating. She’s sitting here instead of in her office because she wants someone to talk to her.

There are two technicians in the room. Theo is over by the sandblasting machine, digging away with a dental pick at a semi-embedded jawbone. In Mammalogy, where the bones are real, they don’t use dental picks. They have a freezer full of dead carcasses, camels, moose, bats, and when they’re ready to assemble the skeleton they strip most of the meat off and put the bones into the Bug Room, where carnivorous insects eat the shreds of flesh remaining. The Bug Room smells of rotting meat. Outside the door, several pictures of
naked women are Scotch-taped to filing cabinets. The technicians in that department work to rock and country music from the radio. Lesje wonders if solitary Theo would rather be there.

Gregor, the department’s artist, is applying daubs of clay to a bone, some sort of ornithopod femur, it looks like. Though Gregor probably doesn’t care that much what it is. His job is to make a mold of it, then take a plaster cast from the mold. Thus slowly and part by part, whole skeletons reproduce themselves. In the nineteenth century, Lesje knows, Andrew Carnegie cast and recast his own personal dinosaur,
Diplodocus carnegiei
, and presented the replicas to the crowned heads of Europe. No one can afford to do that any more; even if there were any crowned heads left.

Lesje tries to think of something to say to the technicians, not about
Diplodocus carnegiei
, that wouldn’t do it; some way of opening a conversation. But she doesn’t know what might interest them. They do their jobs and leave at five every night for their other lives, lives which she finds unfathomable. She knows though that the Museum is not essential to them the way it is to her. Gregor could just as easily be working in an art store, Theo could be cleaning cement from bricks or paint from old brass drawer handles. Perhaps they want to Scotch-tape pictures of naked women up in here, too.

Nevertheless, she very much wants one of them, either of them, to say, “Come out for a beer.” She would watch baseball games on television with them, eating potato chips and drinking from the bottle. She would hold their hands, roll on the carpet with them, make love as an afterthought, attaching no more meaning to that than to any other healthy exercise, a swim, a jog around the block. It would all be friendly and without any future. She wants actions, activities, with no significance and no hidden penalties.

She thinks with nostalgia of her life with William, which she sees now as having been simple-minded and joyously adolescent. The beauty of William was that she hadn’t seriously cared what
he thought about her. Once she wanted something less two-dimensional. Now she has it. It’s true that she didn’t love William, though she had no way of knowing this at the time. She loves Nate. She’s no longer sure she’s cut out for love.