Real Life (22 page)

“Did you ever think that that's what may be alienating him? You and me? Or can't you be Oedipal over an auntie?”

“I suppose I've been neglecting him. Maybe that's it. But you're right, Alex. I don't know him well enough to judge.”

She walked him out to his car. He had washed and waxed it that afternoon in her driveway—a newish little hatchback, absurdly small for him. She leaned in the window for a kiss. “I wish you could stay.”

“I'll see you in Boston on Tuesday. Right?”

“Yes, I have to deliver those pots.”

“And you'll stay over?”

She straightened up and made a face. “I guess that depends on my talk with Hugo.”

“Well, call me.” He took hold of her wrist and pulled her down to him again. “Don't forget that we postadolescents need coddling too.”

Hugo didn't get home until after dark. He knew, as he came across the lawn from the Verranos', that Dorrie was waiting for him. It wasn't only that she had turned on the backyard floodlight. He could feel her presence—her aura, Nina would call it—up there in the living room window, watching for him. He had taken to going directly to the garage loft when he came in at night, not even stopping in the house to brush his teeth before bed. Tonight as he stepped into the path of the light she called to him, and he gave a deep sigh that he hoped she heard and turned toward the house.

When he went upstairs she was there, in a nightgown and an old sweatshirt, curled up in the rocking chair. He leaned in the doorway of the living room with his hands stuck in his pockets and said, “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I guess I'll just say good night and get to bed,” he said. “I'm really tired.”

“I wondered if we could talk for a couple of minutes, Hugo.”

He had known it was coming. You couldn't live in the same house—or nearly in the same house—with someone for a week without talking. Or she couldn't, anyway. He wasn't having any trouble. It seemed an okay arrangement. “About what?” he said.

“Come in and sit down, for heaven's sake. I can't talk to you while you're slouching in the doorway like James Dean or someone.”

He didn't know who James Dean was. He came in and sat on the edge of the wing chair. “About what?”

“About your behavior,” she said. “Your rotten attitude lately. I'm sorry, I don't mean to be harsh, but I don't know what else to call it, Hugo.”

He could tell she was trying hard not to get mad at him, she was trying to be sympathetic and understanding. He didn't care. He felt his rotten attitude bubble up inside him like Coke shaken up in a bottle. One more shake and it would spill over. If he had an aura, it would be a dark, purplish black. “I don't know what you mean,” he said.

“Hugo, you never smile! you never talk to me! It's not only that you spend all your waking hours with Nina, but that's part of it too. And you never bring her over here. And you haven't been to see the Garners lately. They've been asking about you. And—” She paused, and sighed. “Well, everything. You know what I mean. There's obviously something the matter, Hugo. Aren't you happy here? I thought we were getting along pretty well until lately.”

He waited patiently through her speech, looking first at her, then down at his hands, then at a vase full of some kind of huge red flower. Probably a present from the weird paramour, flowers so big and bright and spiky they made his eyes hurt to look at them. When she was through talking, he said, “I think we get along fine. There's nothing wrong. Really.”

There was a silence. He inspected the flowers again, then a pile of old newspapers on the floor. The headlines he could read said
JOB SEEKERS GET SUPPORT OF SENATOR
and
WARM WEEKEND AHEAD FOR AREA.
Teen mother, he thought. Slain in drug dispute. Baby sleeps.

“Will you bring Nina over for a cookout one of these nights?”

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”

“When? Tomorrow?”

“I don't know. I'll have to ask Nina. She said something about going somewhere with her family, I think.”

“So you'll be home for supper.”

“I guess so. Sure.”

He thought if he had to sit across from her and eat dinner he would choke, or faint, or explode. He knew why he couldn't ask her, What happened to my mother? Is it true what I saw in that newspaper? Was that my mother? Not only because he had snooped and would have to admit it but because he knew the answers. And because he would have to blame them all—all his missing people: Rose and his father and his grandparents. It wasn't just Dorrie who lied, it was the whole bunch of them, almost everyone he had ever known. His teachers, even. They'd probably known. The Garners. When he thought about it all, it was like a wall crumbling. Had he seen it in some movie once? A vast wall made of stone that buckled at one end and then, bit by bit, slowly, methodically, collapsed into a heap of rubble. Teen mother. What did it mean? He had asked Nina. “My God, Hugo, it means your mother was a junkie.” What else? he had asked. “It looks like she was murdered. She was murdered by some dope dealer. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, Hugo.” He had never heard Nina swear so much before.

“Shall we cook hamburgers? Or what? What would you like?”

He looked away from the flowers and at his aunt. He would bubble over and explode any minute. “What would I like?”

“For dinner tomorrow night.” She was being so patient and nice, even though he was acting like James Dean and had a rotten attitude. Nice hamburgers. That would be nice. Mommy died in a nice car crash, Hugo. So sad, poor Mom.

“Oh,” he said. “Anything. That would be great.”

“Hugo?” He had to look at her again. “If something's bothering you, you can tell me. Really you can. I'm on your side, you know.” He didn't speak. She said, “Let me tell you something, Hugo. When you first came, I wasn't all that pleased about it. I felt I was being intruded on. I'd been alone for so many years, it was strange to have someone here. I know I wasn't always pleasant about it. I'm quite sure I was short with you plenty of times. And stiff, as you said. But I want to tell you something, Hugo. I like having you live here. And I'm sorry if I spent a couple of months being a bitch.”

“Oh, that's all right,” he said, and forced a smile. He doubted that it fooled her, but he didn't care. “I think I'll go out to bed now, if that's okay.”

“Just one more thing.”

“Sure.” He sat back down on the edge of the chair. Didn't she know he was going to explode? One more thing. Oh, yes, your mother was murdered, she was shot three times in the head, she was a junkie. “What is it?”

“I hope you and Alex will get to be friends, Hugo. He really likes you a lot, and we both hoped you'd be here this afternoon, so he could sort of get to know you a little. I—he and I are very fond of each other, Hugo, and I think it's important that you get to be friends. You know?”

“Sure,” he said, and stood up. “I think that would be great.”

She sighed, and frowned at him. “Well,” she said. “All right, Hugo, go to bed. You do look tired. I just—you'd tell me if anything was seriously wrong, wouldn't you?”

“Sure.”

“Remember what you said that first day?” She was smiling at him, being pals. “That I was your surrogate mother? Well, I am, you know. Legally. You can think of me that way if you want to.”

“Sure,” he said, “right,” and escaped down the stairs and out to the dock, where he sat looking into the water and letting the mosquitoes bite him until finally she turned off the floodlight and he didn't have any tears left and he didn't feel like exploding anymore.

6

It was an autumn full of sunny days. The bright leaves reflected in the pond made a selvage of color around the blue, and when they fell the water became thick with them, red and orange and then a dull faded brown that washed up to the shore. Every day, from her window, Dorrie could see more of the Garners' house and barn, more of the wooded hills at the horizon.

She was making new things. She had devised an elongated, nearly angular shape for a pitcher, and she made a dozen or more of them, working obsessively until the proportions pleased her. She was firing the kiln almost weekly, beginning to feel secure again with the rows of ghostly pots, unglazed and ready, lined up on the shelves of her studio. She devised a gray-green glaze with a spill of dark blue for the pitchers; the movie star came in again, bought one of the pitchers, and ordered a tea set to match. She was sorry Hugo missed him. He drove up this time in a silver sports car that could have been a Maserati, and with him was a young woman who looked about Hugo's age; her hair was crew cut and pale blue, and she wore a row of jeweled earrings in one ear and a long black feather dangling from the other.

While Hugo was in school, Daisy the kitten made herself at home in Dorrie's studio, pouncing with her tiny paws on the bits of crumpled paper Dorrie threw for her, curling up to sleep in a patch of sun on the table, meowing now and then to be let out the back door. Outside, she never went far. Dorrie would see her black shape stalking down the lawn, head down and tail low like a cat in the jungle, and then a few minutes later she would be asleep on the deck rail or meowing at the door again to come in. “I'm so glad you brought her home,” she said to Hugo. “She's awfully good company. I should have gotten a cat years ago.”

“Great,” Hugo said with a wan smile. “That's great.”

Hugo wasn't communicating any better—worse, maybe. Dorrie was trying to be home more, to be there especially when he arrived from school, and it was putting the strain she had expected on her relationship with Alex.

“I'm the one who needs you,” he complained. “He's a kid, with his whole life ahead of him. I'm an old geezer, this is my last chance.”

He was only half kidding, but she laughed at him anyway. “Teaching will keep you busy. All those adoring students.” He had been offered a one-night-a-week fiction-writing course at BU, an emergency opening created when a writer in residence committed suicide.

“The thought of teaching that poor bastard's course makes me sick,” Alex said. “One writer profiting from the troubles of another. I feel like a strikebreaker. I feel like dirt.”

“Don't make it complicated, Alex,” she begged him. She was beginning to see that always, at the borders of his perennial good humor, was a small besieging army of depression. “His suicide may have had nothing to do with his being a writer.”

“He hadn't published anything but book reviews in eight years. He was fifty-six years old, a former Guggenheim, trying to put two kids through college on his teaching pay. Do you know how little they pay someone without a Ph.D.? A Ph.D., for Christ's sake, to teach a bunch of teen-agers that writing is a lot harder than they think it is and that there are other kinds of books in the world than science fiction.”

He complained, but he was also honored—pleased that his book still had a reputation good enough to get him hired. He had taught before but not in years, and he took the course seriously.

“You won't miss me at all,” Dorrie told him. “We'll spend every weekend together but during the week you write your novel and read student papers and I'll tend to Hugo and make pots and try to keep the wolf from the door.”

All summer, she had been hopelessly behind in her work. She went through the Guilford show in a dream, understocked, and she was late with a commission, something that had never happened before. “That's how dull and regular my life was before I met you,” she told Alex. “I used to deliver everything early.” Now she needed time alone, and she remained firm: weekends only. But her firmness scared her; it made her wake up sweating in the night. Was it true, then, what Teddy had said, that deep in her soul, for whatever reason, she cared for nothing but working? That she was willing to risk Alex for the sake of a few casseroles and soup bowls? For she believed that it was a risk to hand him over to his students. She joked about them but she had no trouble picturing them, all female, all twenty-one and beautiful and brilliant, lined up outside his office door ready to be seduced over their short-story outlines.

“I'd be scared to death of creatures like that,” he said when she told him this fantasy. “Not only because they'd make me feel like somebody's grandpa but because they write. God, deliver me from writers. Give me a sexy sensible woman who makes pots.”

She tried to believe him, and tried not to be haunted by the fear that he would one day, in Teddy's scolding voice, call her a mug machine, a maker of empty vessels.

In only three months, in the passage of time from high summer to Indian summer, she had come to rely on her relationship with Alex, to accept it as something permanent and necessary in her life. The details of that permanence and necessity she didn't examine closely. When Rachel asked her about the possibility of marriage, she said, “We're both probably too old and set in our ways to get married,” realizing after she spoke that “probably” was her safety word, her tentative reach toward marriage to Alex. Immediately she put the thought from her. If she allowed herself to consider it, even lightly, even as a daring nibble at the edges of her mind, she had to whirl away from it as if from a glimpse of some alien paradise too bright and startling in its perfection for her to confront. She found herself looking at babies in supermarkets and on the street, and made herself concentrate not on their lovableness but on their snotty noses and stinking diapers and piercing whines. When she looked into Alex's face and tried to imagine a baby, she saw a wizened little thing with deep wrinkles and a long, unruly moustache. Out of a long habit of self-denial and low expectations, she told herself to forget it.

Rachel still didn't approve. She and Dorrie met for lunch at a restaurant halfway between Boston and East Latimer so that Rachel could repeat her various warnings. “Of course, he's a very charming man,” she said to Dorrie, her tone of voice implying some qualification of his charm that she was too polite to specify.