Real Life (20 page)

“It was my little fling with masochism,” he said. “That woman is a barracuda. I guess I hoped her self-confidence would be catching, that I could latch on to some of it by some kind of literary osmosis. And then of course she was so goddamn sexy.” This surprised Dorrie, who considered Margo dumpy and dowdy, though she remembered how easily she had captivated the divine Charles. “Sex makes strange bedfellows,” Alex said.

Another time he told her, “I can't stand gorgeous women.” It was an opinion he expressed often, but the first time he said it they were in bed together, and Dorrie gathered the covers around herself and said, “Thanks a lot.”

“Oh, hell, Dorrie,” he said, and pulled the covers away to kiss her neck. “You know what I mean. I'm not saying you're not a good-looking woman. I like the way you look. If I didn't, would you be here in my bed?”

“I don't know. People are weird.” She turned her back to him and inspected the room: the digital clock radio on the floor by the daybed, a plastic laundry basket in the corner full of folded underwear, a six-pack containing four empty bottles and two full ones. Nothing superfluous, except the sun coming in through uncurtained windows to reveal the fact that there was no dust, anywhere: his neatness, she knew, was fanatical. “Maybe you're having another fling with masochism,” she said. She watched the square red numerals on the clock flashing the seconds by. Dorrie hated it, considered it a useless electronic miracle, all that technology just to let you know that you were older by one second, two, another, another … Alex was surprised at her attitude; he said precision was a positive thing, it was always good to have things exact, to know where you were. The clock beamed at her, 5:14:07, 5:14:08. She said, “Maybe ugly women turn you on.”

“Well, they don't. Neither do gorgeous women. But you do.” He ran a fingernail down her back. “You should know that by now.”

She relaxed, sighed, turned around to him and smiled. It was absurd to be hurt by his words. At least she had a man she liked, was beginning to love, enjoyed spending all those lost seconds with. She shouldn't expect flattery as well. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I have a thing about my looks.”

“Your looks?” He leaned over her and retrieved his wire reading glasses from under the bed, put them on, and stared at her. “What's wrong with your looks? God, the things our society does to women. Dorrie! You're a fine figure of a woman. You're damned attractive. Look, neither of us is going to be offered a modeling contract. I'm no beauty, God knows. But we're nice-looking people, Dorrie. And you look awfully good to me. I think we make a handsome couple.” He took off his glasses again and pulled her close to him, and with her head against his chest she listened to the marching sound of his heartbeats, and believed that he meant what he said. “You have a thing about your looks,” he went on. “Well, quit having it, will you? It's ridiculous.” He let her go and pulled the tops off the two remaining beers.

But it was something she thought about. He wouldn't tell her she was beautiful; he would only tell her the truth. Teddy used to murmur to her sometimes, always in bed, that she was beautiful, and his insincerity made her uneasy, but so did Alex's tepid adjectives: attractive, nice looking—handsome, for heaven's sake! Whenever she looked in the mirror, all that hot summer when she and Alex were falling in love, she thought of those adjectives and mourned: she was nearly forty years old, and she would never get a crack at it, would never know what it was to be beautiful. It seemed an enormous deprivation.

And yet she was happy. How could she have forgotten, and undervalued, and pretended not to want, the joy and comfort and excitement of having a lover? It was as if she had emerged from a dark place into not only light but bright color and brilliant music and lush tropical warmth. He asked her why she had never married, and instead of acting on her first impulse, which was to tell him that she'd never been asked, she said, “I'm not the type. I don't know why, but I've always known I wouldn't get married. Even when my mother used to talk about it as a given, I think I knew that it wasn't going to happen to me.” This was true: the sense that the peculiar and vivid apartness that had been with her all her life encompassed a kind of absolute solitude unrelievable by husband or children—though she had never articulated this belief before, and had barely been aware that she held it. She was no longer sure she did, but she didn't say that, either.

“I think children do have intuitions,” Alex said. “Not about the details, but in general I believe they can imagine their lives at a very early age and be right about them.” He looked reflective, perhaps recalling some early intuition of failure.

She said, “Maybe I just had the wrong attitude. Maybe I made it come true.”

“But you've been in love?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“You seem doubtful.”

“It's just that it always ended badly.”

He put his hand over hers. “Don't think about endings.”

There must be no one on earth easier to be with than Alex Willick. In spite of the vast tangled life that she sensed sticking close behind him like his shadow—wife, children, divorce, knotty relationships, capricious muse, foreign childhood, footloose travels—he seemed to her a restful presence. After the first excitement, in fact—those first passionate weeks spent mostly in bed—what she found in him, and treasured, was comfort and repose. She was as peaceful and at ease in his presence as she was snug in her house at night with a storm ranting outside. His insubstantiality made no demands on her.

And he loved her. She had never been so sure of love before—not from Mark, certainly not from Teddy, maybe not even from her parents. It wasn't true at all that she was the pursuer, he the pursued. He couldn't seem to get enough of her, and her great delight was to wake beside him in the morning, after the nights they spent together, and find him gazing at her with a besotted smile on his face. He loved her in odd, original ways. He liked to move his lips delicately over her wrists and the soft insides of her arms, and press his tongue against her skin. He liked to stop in the middle of lovemaking and lie with her, joined together, talking, drinking beer; sometimes half the afternoon slipped by before they resumed. He called her “love,” sounding English. He gave her presents: a woolly stuffed sheep standing on spindly black legs, a jar of honey from Scotland, a silver frame containing a picture of his sneakers. He told her she had saved him from despair, had cured his writer's block, had restored his youth. His devotion astounded her; it buoyed her up and kept her from her own melancholy, which had been, before, such a part of her life she had scarcely taken notice of it—like a long allergy for which a cure had just been found. When she wasn't with him, the thought of him sometimes rose in her mind, hot and clear and overwhelming, bringing tears to her eyes. If loving her saved Alex, his love for her turned Dorrie's life around and gave it meaning beyond the safety of her potter's wheel.

Her work suffered. As the affair progressed it became a favorite thing of Alex's to drive down to her place in the afternoons and go for a swim in the pond, and then sit out on the deck in the shade writing in a large spiral notebook while Dorrie worked at the wheel. Sometimes he came in and read aloud to her what he wrote—long, rambling, disconnected portions of a novel that seemed to her full of rare insights and studded with his special gift for the brilliant image, the
mot juste
. She saw traces in the manuscript of parts of his life and personality that were known to her, and hints of the things he kept secret—though these might have been fictional. She didn't know. “If only it went somewhere,” he said when she praised him. “If only it added up to something. But at least I'm writing,” he always ended up. His relief at the breaking of his writer's block was enormous. “I feel like someone in a fairy tale—one of those paralyzed princesses who has to be awakened with a kiss.”

“You don't kiss like a paralyzed princess,” she said to him.

His presence there distracted her. She would work a while, but then they would begin to talk, and she would turn from her table or her wheel, get cold beer from the refrigerator, sit with Alex in the shade. They talked about their childhoods, people they knew, Alex's writing, her attitudes toward her work. It seemed years since she had had anyone to talk to, except Rachel—years since she had been that close to a man. “I think you're the first man I've ever been able to be honest with,” she told him.

“That's a great compliment,” he said. “It's true too. You can tell me anything, and I'll keep adoring you, no matter what it is. Try me.”

She didn't mean to, but one day she told him she used to plan the killing of her brother, a fact she had forgotten. She remembered it one afternoon in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They were standing in front of a Cézanne, a painting of a row of cottages down a wooded lane—red roofs and blue, and the road winding out of sight, out of the picture. As she looked at it, her head began to ache, a pinpoint of pain that tapped behind her temples until she remembered.
Phinny
, she thought, and the tiny needle of pain became a hammer.

“We used to have a reproduction of this.” She needed to talk, and to hear Alex's voice in reply. “My mother was a great one for art reproductions. We had
Guernica
in the dining room. Can you imagine trying to eat in front of all that suffering?” She was trying to speak lightly, as if the story she was about to tell were a funny one, but she knew from the way he looked at her—suddenly giving her his full attention, not looking at the painting at all—that she must be failing. She went on. “This one hung in the upstairs hall. The light from the window used to shine on the glass, so you had to stand very close to see it.”

“I'm glad to know your parents liked it,” Alex said. His voice was even and soothing. “It's one of my favorites.”

“This is so odd,” she said. It was as clear as anything, as if it had appeared out of her headache, as if the pounding in her head were a slide projector: that sunny hall at the top of the stairs, the foreign-looking roofs and trees smaller, and under glass. “To see it here.” She stared at the painting, and it went out of focus, doubled itself; the crescent-shaped road became two, the little woods a major forest.

She hung tight to Alex's arm. He looked down at her steadily. “Are you all right?”

“I'm having a Proustian experience,” she said, trying to laugh. “But not a very nice one.”

“What, love?”

“I remember—I just remember this now, I haven't thought about it in years, twenty-five years, thirty—” She stopped. It wasn't something she wanted to tell, and yet she knew, instinctively, that by telling it to Alex she would exorcise it. There was Alex, the beautiful painting, the silent gallery, a bright afternoon outside: nothing to fear. “I stood in front of this painting one day, I must have been ten or eleven, and planned how I would kill my brother.”

“Ah, Dorrie.” He moved as if to put an arm around her. “It's normal to think things like that. Kids are naturally bloodthirsty little devils.”

“I don't think this was natural, Alex,” she said, standing stiffly, clutching his arm. “I don't remember exactly what he had done to make me hate him so much; there was always something. He wrecked my tenth birthday party, I remember that—terrorizing all the little girls I invited, squirting them with his squirt gun, running through the house yelling dirty words—God, even at seven, he knew all of them. Maybe it was around that time, I don't know. Anyway, I stood in front of that painting, and I thought about how I would get the weed killer out of the garage, the stuff my father used on the lawn, and I would put it into a glass of root beer because I figured you could never see it or taste it in root beer, and I would get Phinny playing ball or chasing me or something, get him all tired out and hot and thirsty, and then I'd go in and get him this glass of root beer, and take it to him down by the creek where we sometimes played. Phinny used to catch tadpoles there and watch them flop on the dirt until they died.”

“Dorrie.”

“They used to get dried out, and turn from black to brown, these little brown husks like seeds, and after a couple of weeks in the sun they would crumble like powder in your hands.”

“Dorrie.”

“He did worse things than that, Alex. He was a very curious child. He always wanted to see what would happen. Usually something horrible happened. Oh, God, Alex, there were a million things, a million horror stories. He never quit, he never just let things be. I was full of fantasies of deliverance—car crashes and fires and kidnappings. Anything, just so he would be gone. I suppose the weed killer in the root beer was the worst.”

Alex frowned. When he drew his brows together he looked worn out and old, older than he was. They sat down on a wooden bench. She would have liked to stroke his face, smooth out the lines between her fingers, make him smile. She was sorry she had brought up this unpleasant subject.

“Okay,” Alex said. “So you thought about murdering him.”

“Do you want to hear the details?”

“I want to hear whatever you want to tell me.”

“All right.” She took a deep breath. “So I would bring him the root beer and he would drink it and—I didn't know what would happen, except that he would die, somehow. I didn't think about the actual process; I just imagined him not moving, sort of going to sleep, and then I would drag him to the water and put him in it face down so it would look like he had drowned.”

“Dorrie.”

She looked up at him: his grave, gray gentle face, his knowing eyes. “And that's all. Except that once I worked it out I thought about it all the time. I'd go up in the hall and look at this painting and think how life would be peaceful with him gone. It would be like that little town in the painting, with the neat white houses, the road turning off. Green and peaceful. No Phinny.”