She turned to him twice, later, when they lay reading in bed. His clothes were in a pile next to the bed where they read. The rustle of pages, four hands brushing and holding paper; she bent her knees to nuzzle his with hers. When he looked at her kindly, she could not say I love you. He stubbed out his cigarette.
“More happy love!” she recalled, when they kissed, but she could not, that night, cross the Rubicon: I love you too, James. Maybe tomorrow.
She slept in after he left to write. She and Rosie went downstairs to make breakfast and found a note on the kitchen table, beneath the vase of white tea roses. She and Rosie read it together. He had typed it on the typewriter in the study, and it looked, as did all his notes, to have been transcribed by e e Cummings.
little mother of all the russias: i
will be working on the book all
night, aided by nasally administered medications. will call you tonight i love
you. ‘i
want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees’:
neruda.
“Don’t you just love James so much?”
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
“So do I. I think you should marry him.”
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes.”
“What shall we have for breakfast?”
“Hot dogs.”
“Is that what you want?” Rosie nodded. “Okay, I’ll make you some.”
“So are you going to marry him or not?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t known each other that long.”
“But he’s perfect.” No, he’s not. He talks too much, smokes too much, quotes too much. “And he can fix things, too.”
“If I married him because he can fix things, I’d be using him. And I don’t want to use him.” Don’t want to have to break up...
“Wull, I do.”
Love fills and creates the blackest voids. The day with its promise of night loomed before her, waiting to be killed. It was this pining obsession she disliked so much about love, he on her mind every second, all the while, suspecting that he was concentrating on his book, with periodic—and brief—fond thoughts of her.
Every car that drove down Willow was James, and every second the phone might ring but didn’t. She read the newspaper, twice. Reagan, Begin, Russia—shit! She wrote Rae a long funny letter, urging her on: Weave. Play. Get over you-know-who. Keep going and don’t look back. May God restore your glorious gift of sight. She planted snapdragons, sweet peas for Christmas, and listened to an opera on the radio at four while cleaning the downstairs, went to the phone several times to call James but didn’t, and to call Grace and Charles Adderly but didn’t. Waiting for the day to be over, she read on the porch in the sun until six, when Rosie and Sharon arrived for dinner.
The girls disappeared into Rosie’s room while Elizabeth fried mushrooms to go on their steaks. Bach and the smell of butter frying soothed her, and she poured herself an Irish whiskey. She must somehow learn to concentrate: when she wasn’t with James, she must learn to focus on whatever she was doing—reading, gardening, cleaning, cooking—but even as she thought this the rhythms and smells and therapy of cooking escaped her. I will call him tonight and take the plunge. I will learn to accept him as he is, so we will be lovers and allies. I will throw away the bottle in the study tomorrow, and, mutatis mutandis, we will live here together with Rosie. I will grow up, and younger, again. Commitment and compromise go hand in hand, like brother and sister.
***
“Click.” Just when Elizabeth thought that getting through the evening would be as precipitous as that delay long ago in the Boston airport, Rosie and Sharon appeared in the kitchen, bran-dishing empty soap boxes, with lenses drawn on and shutters cut out. “Click.” Sharon pulled a drawing out of the box, of Elizabeth in the kitchen at the stove, stirring and smiling.
“God, you draw well, Sharon.”
“Click.” Rosie handed her a drawing of James and Rosie out in the rose garden, playing Monkey in the Middle with his dog Leon and a Frisbee.
“Rosie! This is wonderful. We’ll send some to Rae.”
“Click.” Rae at her loom. “Click.” Sharon standing on her head, horizontal motion line suggesting a cartwheel.
“You two knock me out.”
“One more, one more!” Rosie said, backing away slowly in a crouch. “Click.” Elizabeth and James’s heads on the pillows in Elizabeth’s room, under the covers. Rosie had James’s fluffy hair just right, and a heart in a caption balloon above Elizabeth’s head.
The little girls giggled hysterically and tore out of the kitchen to compose themselves before dinner.
Everything is going to be fine, remember? Just relax. He will call.
It was quarter to ten when she tucked the girls into Rosie’s bed. Everything was going to be fine. He was probably working as hard as he could, trying to finish so he could knock off and surprise her by coming over. The speed or coke or whatever he had would keep him up all night: he would be missing her by now.
She poured some Bushmills into a glass decorated with a drawing of Cruella de Vil and ten dalmatians, drank it pacing in the living room. She put Ry Cooder on the stereo to drown out the Cruella de Vil theme song playing in her mind and put another log on the fire. She sat down stiffly on the couch and studied the part in Cruella’s half-black, half-white hair. Unless, after he called, he planned to come over, she was not going to say I love you tonight. Too bad for you, James; if only you’d called at a reasonable hour, I would have told you. But if you call in the next—oh, God, this is becoming “A Telephone Call.”
This is not progress, she thought. I am almost forty and am anxiously waiting for my goddamn boyfriend to call. She saw herself lying in a hospital bed, weak but beautiful, surrounded by James and Rae and Rosie. She tried not to think about James. A memory blip of him flashed through her mind, and she blocked it by silently singing Cruella de Vil. No, this is not progress, she thought. I should call him. Maybe he’s dead! Maybe he’s had a heart attack like his dear old dad, or maybe he’s—no, not in bed with another.... Progress would be to have faith. She got up and poured another shot of whiskey into the glass.
By eleven she felt the fierce disappointment of a fifteen-year-old girl at her parents’ house who has been stood up by a boy, or the five-year-old whose goldfish has died. She went to the phone but sat back down. He said he will call, and he will. Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil. Fuck progress. Tonight, I want to wallow, in the calculated shallowness that allows men not to make that three-minute phone call which would better the woman’s world for a while. But finally, when the phone rang, she smiled, stood up unsteadily, and lurched toward the phone.
Eyes shining, heart pounding, she answered with a note of incipient boredom.
It was Grace Adderly, calling to say she was sorry to be calling so late.
Crushed, Elizabeth said, “Oh, it’s all right. God, I haven’t seen you two for ages.”
“Well, we’re just fine, and we miss you. I’ve been thinking about you all day, wondering if everything was all right. I know it’s late, but you’re often up till all hours.”
“Everything’s just fine, Grace.” Except for, you see, I’m cracking up. “I’m just lying in the living room, watching the fire and reading.”
“We want you to come visit us soon, in the city! We miss you and Rosie.”
“Hello, Elizabeth,” Charles called from somewhere nearby.
“Did you hear him? He said hello.”
“Hello! Gee, we both miss you too.”
“Why don’t you come for dinner soon?”
Oh, God, I’ve really got to hang up now, I know I haven’t seen you for months, but you see my boyfriend is supposed to call, just to say hello, and I haven’t seen him for over fifteen hours.
“Well, we’d love to, as soon as I get my car fixed.”
“Oh, is it on the blink again?”
“Yes. Again.” Not really, but if I come to the city, I
’ll have to drive home after all that wine or, even worse, stay the night.
How many times had James tried to call since she’d been on the phone with Grace? Rae, waiting for Brian....
“Well, little Walter went and had babies on us.” Elizabeth grimaced, tightened her fist in frustration. “You know little Walter, don’t you, the tiger-stripe with a knot on his tail?”
“Two tacos and a fur hat,” said Charles in the background.
“Charles! That’s a horrible thing to say about a little cat. Shame on you.” She began to tell Elizabeth about the nice movers who had dropped the dishwasher on Walter’s tail but Elizabeth cut her off.
“Oh, Grace, it’s good to hear your voice. Why don’t Rosie and I come in for lunch next weekend?”
“Lovely. Which day?”
“I’ll give you a call in the next few days, when I have a better idea of how long the car will take.”
Finally Grace hung up.
At midnight, she called his house. No one answered. That was odd, because he couldn’t disconnect his phone, could only take it off the hook, in which case she would be getting a busy signal. He must not be home. He had lied, then. Unless he was on his way over here. What if he’s in someone else’s bed? Golf balls.
That just can’t be. He is in love with you. Don’t worry. Think of all the disasters which never happened outside your mind. She poured some more Bushmills and stretched out on the couch, old and lonely and duped, waiting for him to arrive. Her loneliness triggered off the memory of twenty-some years ago, when she had awoken one night, well past one, to the sound of a piano and had tiptoed in her flannel nightgown to the top of the stairs, where she could hear her mother playing and singing softly, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” sad as possible, twice in a row.
She exhorted herself to have faith. She imagined marrying him, imagined the family of three they would be, imagined softly scratching his downy back with her nails. She got up and called.
“Hello?” said a woman, before the phone was slammed down, and for just a few moments Elizabeth lost her mind. She wanted to die.
She hated him more than she had hated anyone else. She gulped at her drink, just hanging on. Steady, old girl; good riddance. Better now than after a marriage. She wanted to light into him so vehemently that he would sink to his knees with his hands on his ears, as if she were sounding a drum-busting high note. She splashed whiskey out of the glass, her hand was shaking so hard. I hope you never sell anything else that you write. Rosie and I weren’t enough? Asshole! We were the best thing that ever happened to you. She lurched, with fire in her eyes, up the stairs, to her room, holding the bottle, loaded for bear.
At two she passed out, crying, and when she awoke, just before dawn, she wished she could have died somehow, without deserting Rosie.
CHAPTER 15
Rosie and Sharon played that morning in the murky green stream that ran down a cleft in the ridge and ended in a stagnant pond filled with moss and minnows, willows, frogs, cattails, dragonflies, rushes, and water skeeters. They took off their shoes and stepped into the knee-deep water; Rosie, in baggy red shorts, walked upstream, with Sharon behind her, chewing on a reed, speaking in frog. Green frogs, brown frogs, blackish-red salamanders: they were brave when it came to slimy things, caught and freed dozens. They fought a duel midstream with cattails, then stripped off the brown fuzz and carried the rods to use as spears if the need arose. The stream was the Amazon, and they were its first explorers.
They screamed, giggling, when their tennis shoes, tied at the laces and draped over their shoulders, thumped against their backs—giant leeches, poison-tipped spears. They pointed out monkeys and snakes that hung from the branches beside the water, caught a glimpse of cannibals with bones in their noses and a big pot of boiling water and onions—there, behind that boulder—stepped over sleeping alligators, and stared into the bushes for the gleaming gold eyes of jaguars, or of deadly spiders with jeweled bodies, as black and bright as a witch doctor’s mask.
The tropical sun beat down on their backs until, finally, hunger drove them back to the mouth of the mighty river.
“We should have brought a lunch.”
“No kidding.”
“I’m starving to death.”
“So am I.”
“We could collect acorns, and make some mush....”
“There’s tuna fish at my house.”
“Is your dad home?”
“Yeah.”
“Is your mom home?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s go there. There’s always money in your dad’s easy chair.”
“But if we went to your house, we could get your allowance.”
“Well. Maybe we should go to your house for lunch, get the money from the chair, then go to my house and get my allowance. Then we can go get some candy.”
“Okay. But I have to be home at three. I have a violin lesson.”
“Okay,” said Rosie, and they set off for the Thackery home.
Mrs. Thackery made them tuna fish on Wonder Bread and pink lemonade. Rosie adored her.
The girls got the giggles soon after lunch, and Mrs. Thackery asked them nicely to go outside to play.
“YOU’VE GOT FIVE MINUTES TO GET OUT OF THIS HOUSE,” Mr. Thackery bellowed from his study up-
stairs.
“We’re going to go to Rosie’s.”
“All right, my darling. But be home by two thirty, for—”
“FOUR MINUTES THIRTY SECONDS.” Rosie looked around anxiously, half seeing the Beast upstairs, in his lair, covered with scales and hair.
“Give me a kiss, my darlings.” Rosie kissed her soft sweet neck, awkwardly, below the chin.
“TICK TICK TICK!”
Meanwhile, back on Willow, Elizabeth grieved. Her sense of loss and hate wiped out the weeks of happy memories. Her pride was mortally wounded, and a river of jealous, revengeful, and humiliating thoughts occupied her mind. Now she felt certain that he had been with the woman who’d answered his phone, the first time. But she wasn’t going to confront him. She thought that it would secretly please him for her to be livid about another woman; he might successfully use it as material. So she took the phone off the hook for the day. When she finally had to face him, she would keep her voice level and let him know that she had cut him off at the root.
She took a quick walk into town to take her mind off the telephone and tried to believe that James was no big loss. Willow was lush and bright, and neighbors looked up from their gardens to wave as she strode past imperiously. These people seemed to take pride in her now, pride in her elegant clothes and looks, as the children in Rosie’s class took pride in Rosie’s genius: it added certain elevation to their movie. She was silent and friendly, returned waves, nodded as her father once had, with a quiet snort of smily nervousness. Mavis Lee’s mother sat weeding a begonia bed, with a can of beer beside her on the earth, wearing a finely woven straw bonnet which had eyelets around the brim through which the sun cast a necklace of tiny light beads on her aged brown chest. When Mavis Lee’s mother looked up to toast Elizabeth, the necklace fell across her face.
Beer—she would get some beer, and garden, she would wear a hat for shade: everything was going to be fine. It wasn’t the end of the world. The end of the world would be to lose Rosie.
What would Rae say? That everything that happened was supposed to happen, and happened for the best, no matter how disastrous it seemed. You would see this later, farther down the road. Rae would say that God hadn’t meant for Elizabeth and James to be together forever, because He had someone else in the wings for her, who didn’t smoke or write or fuck other women.
Walking home with a six-pack of ale and some groceries, her throat ached, her stomach flushed, and the hot red rash flared up behind her eyes. Back home, in the kitchen, she opened an ale to fight back the tears, and her stomach was empty except for coffee and steamed milk. The thought of surviving the next few days—probably, in fact, the next few weeks?
??filled her with a towering, discouraged agony. She was hopeless, would never be wholly happy again. But the ale lifted her spirits, and a jolt of hatred came to save the day. She opened another ale, at about the time the girls stepped out of the Amazon, and took it out to the garden.
As she gathered sweet williams and snapdragons, she swore she would not honor him with a scornful confrontation, but hostile dialogue spun through her mind, and her lips moved as she bent over the pansies. She caught herself, looked around to see if anyone was watching her go mad, and, finding no one, willed herself to relax. She drank the ale with a vengeance as she watered the morning glories, tried to concentrate on the white pinstripes radiating from their china-blue centers. She talked to herself again, out loud, muttering insults, caught herself, and stopped.
The man was a joke, not worth this misery. She ran through the List again—the smoking, the height, the shirts, the dog, the pretentious quotes, his repellent chewing—and the treachery.
The bright garden blurred for a moment as she stood up with an armful of flowers. He had ripped her off, betrayed her, and she could never trust him again.
She walked fairly steadily to the kitchen and arranged the flowers in three crystal vases, took one to the living room, one to her night table, and one to Rosie’s room. She put them on the chest of drawers and stared at the giant panda Madonna, thought first of Rosie in her arms, and then of the times she had held James that way, and then of the times she had felt him hold her with the sad composure of the panda Madonna, and couldn’t stand the pain.
Halfway through another ale, she felt that she could breathe again. She went back out to the garden and sat down beside a flower bed. Her house and garden and child were stunning; everything was going to be okay. This too, she thought, shall pass. She sat admiring her long thin legs, zeroed in on the gypsy-red toenails, cut to the red blossoms of the ginger root, cut to the beautiful white Victorian under a bright blue sky, cut to the woman with sun on her fine black hair, leisurely drinking a beer in her garden, calm, a woman to envy.