Lillian on Life (6 page)

J
ohn, for example. My first beau in London after my transfer there. The relationship lasted less than two years, but I had to try so hard in that short time that it felt like much longer.

He had an unusually sweet singing voice, and favored Italian art songs and Henry Purcell. Particularly Purcell in the morning, and particularly the charming one that goes,
“If music be the food of love sing on, sing on, sing on, sing on till I am fill'd, am fill'd with joy.”
His voice rang like bells against the bathroom tile.

Food is the food of love, though, not music. I've known that ever since Mary spoiled me with snacks between meals. Ever since Laszlo came up the stairs with his arms around a bag of groceries before throwing his arms around me instead. So when it came to interacting with John's two little children, I cooked.

When I arrived in Munich I couldn't boil an egg, and in Paris I bought pâté and cheese and salad and bread and that was dinner. London requires one to cook, so I took myself to Le Cordon Bleu and studied under the very severe
Monsieur Hervé, who was totally unromantic in his approach to cooking. As a result we joked among ourselves that he was either Belgian or more likely Swiss rather than French. He taught us the many ways to present the glory of the egg. He enlightened us on other topics as well, of course, but for some reason the egg represented the most meaningful part of my Cordon Bleu education. Maybe because until then it had always been a simple breakfast with salt and pepper, a garnish, or a last resort when the cupboard was otherwise bare. Over a few weeks it became a showstopper.

There was a party one night at the Highgate home of one of John's journalist friends. John picked me up at my apartment on his way there. Checked shirt and cuff links, as usual. It was a Friday night, and he had the children as he did every other weekend, so we brought them along. I put them to bed in a guest room and read them
Goodnight Moon
. That book was impossible to find in London, so I'd asked George Junior to send a copy over. I felt extremely glamorous in my silk and pearls, feminine and good, sitting in the guest room of an elegant London home reading to a pair of pretty children. When I returned to the living room the air was full of cigar smoke and the conversation was being dominated by a square-headed American gesticulating with the cut-crystal tumbler of Scotch in his fist. “Oh
good, you're back,” he said, and I felt a blast of hot prickles on my skin. “You can help us muddle something out.”

“Well, I'll try,” I said, perching on the arm of John's chair for moral support.

“You must have some of the inside poop on the USSR.”

I said I wasn't very close to the source. I was secretary to the bureau chief at a weekly magazine in London, not a journalist in Berlin. Everyone was looking at me and my heart was pounding wildly.

“Lots in the magazine about Khrushchev lately,” he said, trying to prompt me.

“Well,” I said.

“Aha! I
knew
it,” the guy said, bringing his drink down on the arm of his chair and leaving a splash of Scotch on the fabric.

“Knew what?” I asked, then wanted to kick myself for sounding thick.

“Khrushchev's days are numbered.”

“I only said ‘Well.'
”

“You hesitated.”

“I suppose anything's possible,” John said, in a way that was slightly mocking.

“Oh no, you mark my words, John,” the man said. “This is how they function.”

“Excuse me,” I said, getting up, and hoped they imagined that I needed the restroom. I went back to the guest room, where the children were sleeping, and closed the door behind me. Once I had sat down in the dark at the foot of one of the beds and had stopped hearing the sea in my ears, I was able to listen to the two of them breathing. My eyes adjusted to the dark. Marcus, the seven-year-old, breathed evenly in the bed I was sitting on. Mariana was dreaming energetically in the other. She would have been four then. I was calming down, but now I was worried about how to go back out to the party. I couldn't answer that question. I could only sit there and worry.

Eventually the door opened and John looked in. He could see me in the triangle of light from the hall. I was too embarrassed to look at him.

“Would you like to go home, Lillian?”

I nodded.

“Would you like to go home to
my
home, Lillian?”

Now I looked at him. I'd never stayed the night when his kids were with him before. Tears of love and relief came to my eyes, but I knew better than to throw my arms around him. True gentlemen are so often maladroit, and mustn't be toppled over. I just nodded again, and he nodded back. “I'll get your coat,” he said.

When we got to John's and had transferred the children from our shoulders to their beds, all I wanted to do was cook. I was so happy. Dinner had been a strange bachelor effort, and we were both hungry, and John had eggs in the fridge.

After I had moved in completely and was cooking regularly, John became more and more frustrated with my attention to detail. “Oh, just make them some
toast
, for God's sake, Lillian! They're
hungry
!” he'd hiss at me while I was mashing young carrots into new potatoes or salting and rinsing cucumber spears to be wrapped in ham. “Why are you being so
tasteful
?” he cried once. “Children
have
no taste!”

“But they love what I cook,” I bleated back.

“Anyone would love it if they'd been waiting for hours to have it on their plate,” he said with his hands on his narrow hips. But the idea of opening a can of baked beans for them for speed's sake made my stomach lurch. To please John I'd sometimes give them canned tomato soup, but I'd console myself by making the croutons from scratch.

That night, though, after leaving the party early, coming home to John's with the children for the first time, I took all the time I wanted assembling a beautiful improvised frittata and a tomato vinaigrette. I remember holding
each egg in my hand before I broke it into the bowl, appreciating its perfection. No other food offers that feeling of peace before you cook it, no other shell or rind so delicately protects so many options. I cooked slowly, and John waited quietly, and we sat and looked at each other across our plates and glasses and ate the love I'd made.

L
iving with John was like that Robert Frost poem about whether the world will end in fire or in ice and which is worse. He was so cold sometimes. He would go for days without speaking. He never seemed to have trouble finding the words for his foreign policy column, but speaking to me was often beyond him. I thought this was deep. To stupid me, it was part of his elegance.

It's so painful to be a disappointment when you're trying your best all the time. I never came home from work and merely put my feet up. I never went out without dressing carefully. I stayed up until all hours to get the dishes clean after an evening. I ran all over town for birthday gifts for the children, and he'd say, “Why do you waste your time like that, Lillian? Don't you have better things to do?” Men tell you they say things like this because they love you. So do mothers. That this doesn't feel like love to you surprises them.

As does your infidelity.

It all started with tango music in a restaurant. It made me feel sexy, but our chat over dinner was incredibly banal.
I tried to keep the energy up, but John was desultory. He was so intelligent, but this was a period during which he didn't want to talk about work. The evening was odd from the start. The walls were green. The music writhed into my blood like a hot oiled snake. I looked at John's neat hair, his shining cuff links, the beautiful mole at the corner of his mouth. The conversation was little better than gossip. I'm sure at some point I wondered deep down how long such a ridiculous dinner could possibly last. Then I heard a clattering of cutlery and felt the breeze as a large man rushed over to John from somewhere behind me. He made an effort to hide his face from me as he announced, “You are having dinner with the most, most beautiful woman in the world.” Then he left the restaurant, but I had recognized his hands, his hair. Laszlo. Laszlo was in London. I was in London. John was ice. When Laszlo put two and two together and called the London bureau, I was ready to be found. I agreed to meet him for tea in the afternoon.

The tables in the tea shop were tiny, and after he indented both my cheeks with his velvet lips and left my skin tingling from the swipe of surrounding stubble, we sat, and our long legs interlocked under the table. I scooted my chair back and crossed my legs, but he stayed right where he was for a long moment. Then he leaned forward with his elbows
on the table, and said, “Oh my God, Lillian, your
beautiful
nostrils
.” When a man says something like this, you either suddenly remember an important meeting or you stay where you are in the heat of his curly-fringed eyes and indulge the idea of allowing him to enjoy your body.

The following weekend John took the children to see his parents. It was Easter. Laszlo and I heard church bells all morning. They made me sing.
“‘Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St. Clement's.”
In his current mood, John wouldn't have laughed. Then again, I wouldn't have sung. When John got quiet, I got quiet. It was contagious.
“‘You owe me five farthings,' say the bells of St. Martin's.”
Laszlo guffawed and rubbed his stiff morning beard into my neck, and pushed me on my side to continue down my back, and scraped my inner thighs mercilessly, giggling and licking and then ripping me in two.

John didn't have much of an eye for changes in physical detail. Once I said to him, during tea with the children, “I think I'll go back to my old hairstyle.” John said, “Which was . . . what?” Little Mariana said, “Can I come too?” So John didn't notice the abrasions. He did, however, get home earlier than I did a few weeks later to pack for a trip to Brussels and open a steamy letter from Laszlo. I was closing the front door saying, “Hiya, honey,” as he walked toward
me down the front hall. His eyes were rimmed in red. I asked him what was wrong and he took the sleeve of my jacket between two of his fingers as if I were something foul he'd found on the carpet. He led me into the kitchen, where Laszlo's letter was open on the table. Florid writing, impossible not to recognize. I didn't need to read it. The atmosphere around John was electric. He was visibly shaking with a shock and humiliation that inflamed my pity.

“Are you going to make some important decisions here or am I going to have to make them for you?” he asked.

“No,” I said, straightening up. “I will.” I felt great with Laszlo, but of course I didn't feel
good
.

“Okay then,” he said, and went to Brussels.

Our living room was quite long, with doors that opened onto the tiny garden spanning the long wall. A four-seater couch faced the windows, and a love seat sat at a right angle to it under the window at the end. I was doing a crossword on the love seat when John came back from his trip. He hadn't called at all while he was away, and I didn't get up, just looked up from the paper. It's a terrible moment for any woman when her man, hitherto clean-cut, professionally respected, runs his hands through his hair and leaves it sticking up like a child after a nap. Then it gets worse. He
starts talking. “Why not me, Lillian? Those things he wrote that you did together. Why not me?”

There's a place in Saint John on the eastern coast of Canada I once went to from Vassar. It's called Reversing Falls. A river flows into the Bay of Fundy there, but the tide comes in so forcefully that it pushes the river back up its course. There's a deep churning and mingling, but the tide wins for a while. This was me. I wanted to leave the room, but I didn't.

One of the most useful things I've learned in my life is that I can have an out-of-body experience when I need to. It's incredibly silly to me when people find it amazing, proof of life after death et cetera, that some people have watched themselves being operated on, particularly after a near-fatal accident. Has no one ever made the connection between them and victims of abuse? Incest victims leave their bodies and float around elsewhere so the body being assaulted is just flesh and bone, not spirit. Is there a greater sense of abuse than being sliced open and reorganized with few guarantees of success? Of course people in surgery leave their bodies and hang around near the ceiling. Of
course
.

Some people will say that to improve my relationship with John I could simply have answered his question. But
that's kicking a man when he's down. And he might have been able to talk about his feelings then too. That would have been too much. Just the hair sticking up and the new wrinkles around the eyes were already more than I could bear.

I didn't say anything for a while. My mind was frozen. My heart was frozen, except for the pity. The pity, and the part that had suddenly awakened to its power. Its ability to crack a cold man.

He waited. I cleared my throat, which seemed to release him, and he sat. Maybe he thought I was preparing to speak.

Pity is disgusting, above all when mistaken for love. When I put my hand on his thigh and slid it toward him with uncharacteristic firmness, most of me screamed in revolt and flew to the other end of the room. Sirens blared in my head until I was deaf. The room telescoped. The couple on the couch shrank. John was left alone on his back, staring unblinking and breathless, completely powerless, into the eyes of a reptile.

I don't want to think about this anymore.

But it's a useful skill, being able to leave your body when you need to.