When Pat came smiling across the big living room with both arms held out – “Oh, Michael” – he thought she looked remarkably good, better even than she’d looked as a girl. Given enough luck, enough money, and a good bone structure in the first place, some women seemed never to age.
With the pouring of first drinks they settled into a pleasant grouping of sofa and chairs, and the talk began to flow. All four of the Nelsons’ sons were “fine,” though all grown and gone from home now. The oldest boy was a source of particular pride to his father because he’d become a professional jazz drummer – “Never had any trouble getting his union card” – and two of the others were also doing exemplary things; but when Michael asked about Ted, the boy who was Laura’s age, both parents lowered their eyes and seemed to be searching for words.
“Well,” Pat said, “Ted’s had a few problems trying to – you know – trying to find himself. But he’s much more stable now.”
“Yeah, well, Laura went through a difficult time, too,” Michael told them. “She didn’t like Warrington, and then she kind of drifted for a while; but it didn’t take her long to get straightened out, and she’s done very well in Billings.”
Tom looked up with a kindly, puzzled expression. “Very well in what? In ‘Billings’?” He said that as though he thought “Billings,” like Accounts Payable or Data Processing or Personnel, might be a department of some clean and well-managed business office where the safe harbor of commercial employment had been found at last for a drifting girl.
“Billings State University, in Kansas,” Michael told him. “It’s an institution of higher learning, okay? You might say it’s sort of like Harvard or Yale only with prairies, and with a funny smell that comes off the stockyards every day. It’s where I make my fucking living.”
“Oh, I see. And Laura went to school out there, right?”
“Right,” Michael said, and now he was ashamed. The last thing he wanted to do, in this house, was to play the failed and exiled former neighbor.
“We never get to see Lucy anymore,” Pat said. “Never even hear from her. Do you know how she is? And do you know what it is she’s doing there in Cambridge?”
“Well, I don’t suppose she’s necessarily ‘doing’ anything,” he said. “She’s never had to earn money, you know. Never will.”
“Oh, well, of course I knew that,” Pat said impatiently, as if it had been boorish of him to point it out. “But she certainly did keep busy around here. For years. I’ve never seen such drive and energy – or such stamina. Anyway, if you see her when you’re up there, or talk to her, will you be sure to give her our love?”
And Michael promised he would. Then Pat went off to the kitchen “to see about supper,” so he followed Tom into the studio for a conversational stroll.
“Well, Lucy tried just about everything,” Tom said, and he hunched up the shoulders of his flight jacket to put his hands in his pants pockets as he walked, the way a real flyer might do in discussing a mission that hadn’t gone very well. “Everything in the art line, I mean, except music and dancing, and I guess you have to start those when you’re a whole lot younger. Tried acting; tried writing; tried painting. Really threw herself into each thing, too; worked hard as hell – only, the painting part of it turned out to be a little embarrassing for me.”
“Embarrassing how?”
“Well, because she asked me to criticize her pictures and there wasn’t anything I could say. I sort of improvised a little praise, but she didn’t fall for that. I could tell how disappointed she was and it made me feel lousy, but there wasn’t any way I could help.
“So then I started thinking back: Well, if she’s not a painter, maybe she wasn’t a writer, either, or an actress, either – and look, I know this may sound harsh, Mike, but there’s an awful lot of women running around trying things. Oh, you’ll find men doing it, too, but the men seem to have a few more options in their lives, or else they’re not all that dead-serious to begin with. It’s the women who can break your heart. And I mean they’re mostly good, bright, admirable girls – you can’t dismiss them as ‘silly’ or anything – and they keep on trying and trying until their brains get scrambled, or until they’re so tired they’re ready to drop. Sometimes you want to put your arms around a woman like that and say ‘Hey, listen, dear; take it easy, okay? What’s the big deal? Nobody ever said you had to do this.’ Ah, well, hell; that’s not exactly what I meant to say, but it’s close.”
“Oh, I think you put it very nicely,” Michael said.
All three of them seemed as eager to be finished with their light supper as if this were a party night: they wanted to get back into the living room, where there’d be brandy and coffee and another hour or two of talk – and all Pat Nelson wanted to talk about, apparently, was Lucy.
“Well, but the one thing I could never understand about her,” Pat said when she’d taken her place on the sofa again, “was her belief in psychiatry – her trust in it, her reliance on it. She seemed almost to make a religion out of it, so you’d feel that any disparaging or joking thing you might want to say would be a sacrilege. And I mean there were times when I could hardly keep from taking her and shaking her and saying ‘But you’re too bright for this, Lucy. You’re too smart and funny a person to be taken in by all this humorless Freudian rigamarole.’ ”
“Yeah,” Michael said.
“Oh, and wait. Wait.” Pat turned to her husband. “Who was the sort of schlocky, pop-psych man,” she inquired, “who made millions of dollars back in the fifties?”
“The How to Love guy, you mean,” Tom said helpfully, but it was left to Michael to supply the author’s name:
“Derek Fahr.”
“Right. Derek Fahr.” And Pat squirmed deeper into the sofa cushions. She seemed to be taking an almost voluptuous pleasure in whatever it was she had to tell about Lucy now, and Michael watched her with apprehension. But he had begun to feel a nice, brandy-flavored detachment, too – an immunity to these two old friends who might never have been friends at all – and so he was ready.
“Well,” she began, “Lucy came over here all breathless one afternoon – she looked radiant – and told us she’d just spent half an hour on the telephone with Derek Fahr. She said it had taken her days and days to get his phone number, and she said when she made the call she was so shy that all she could do at first was apologize to him, but he came on saying very pleasant, reassuring things in a nice voice. How did she describe his voice, Tom?”
“ ‘Mellow,’ I think.”
“Exactly. This very ‘mellow’ voice. And then he asked her what the problem was.
“Well, you know Lucy,” Pat said with a twinkling smile of old fondness. “She didn’t go into that part of it with us; she skipped that part. She’d always been a very reserved, private person. But she said she couldn’t get over the way he kept having these ‘incredibly rare, intuitive insights’ into everything she told him – and that’s just how she put it.
“Well, I may be making all this sound a little unkind,” Pat admitted, “and you have to realize she’d probably had a couple of drinks before she came over that day; still, what sticks in my mind is the way she summed it up for us. She said: ‘Derek Fahr taught me more about myself in half an hour than my own therapist has been able to do in eleven years.’ ”
Michael couldn’t tell whether he was expected to smile or frown or shake his head in sadness, but he didn’t want to make any of those responses, so all he did was come slightly forward in his chair and hide his mouth in his drink.
It was probably time to get back on the road. It wasn’t even easy to remember, now, why he’d made this stop in the first place. He guessed it was because he’d wanted to let Tom Nelson know he was still alive. And if the talk. had gone a little differently tonight, he might have seized on almost any conversational opening to tell Tom Nelson what the man at Boston University had said about the poem.
“… Are you sure you don’t want to stay over?” Pat was saying. “There?
??s plenty of room, and we’d love having you; then you could get a fresh start in the morning. Or you could stay through the afternoon, if you’d like; that way you could meet these wonderful new friends of ours from up the road. They’re sort of – celebrities, so it’s never easy to say their name without seeming to ‘drop’ it. The Ralph Morins; you know? Blues in the Night?”
“Oh. Well, as a matter of fact I know them. Only met him once, but I’ve known her a long time.”
“Really? Well then you must stay. Aren’t they nice? And isn’t she marvelous? Isn’t she an extraordinary creature?”
“She sure is.”
“It may sound silly to say,” Pat said, “but I think she has the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. And her whole manner: her poise, her carriage, her way of seeming to electrify everyone in the room the moment she walks in.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Oh, yeah, I agree. Funny thing: the first time I met her I knew I was sunk. I knew that in some dopey, half-assed way I’d be in love with her for life.”
“Oh, and so young,” she said. “So fresh and unspoiled.”
“Well,” he said in a tolerant, qualifying way, “not all that young. Not really young at all anymore, Pat; none of us are.
And she looked so baffled that he was baffled, too. Then she said “Oh. Oh, no. You must mean the much-hated first wife. I meant Emily Walker, you see. The actress.”
It took two or three seconds for Michael to sort out the information. Then he said “Where do you get ‘much-hated’?”
“Well, Ralph can barely refer to her without shuddering – that’s one way you can tell – and he’s described her once or twice as ‘drab.’ He told us the marriage had really been dead for years before he – you know – before he put a stop to it; and now she’s holding him up for some huge amount of money every month. She certainly doesn’t sound like much of a prize.”
“Well, okay; but has he ever happened to mention that she’s Paul Maitland’s sister?”
The Nelsons gave each other stunned, blank looks and turned quickly back to Michael; then Tom asked, rhetorically, if this wasn’t the damndest thing.
“Well, we were both terribly fond of the Maitlands,” Pat explained, “but you see we only knew them for a year or two before they moved away, so it’s hard to remember now if Paul ever even talked about his sister.”
“No, he talked about her, dear,” Tom said. “Talked quite a lot about her. He asked us over there to meet her once, when she and her kids were visiting, but we couldn’t make it that day. Only, the funny part is I always got the impression she was married to some plodding, small-time Philadelphia guy.” Then, after a moment’s reflection, he said “Son of a bitch.”
“Well,” Michael said, “sometimes it takes a while to get acquainted.”
They seemed to hover over his departure – getting his raincoat from the closet, turning on the porch lights for him, walking out into the driveway with him for the ritual handshake and the small, ritual kiss. It was as though both the Nelsons wanted to apologize but didn’t know what there was to apologize for. He could tell from their faces that they probably wouldn’t feel like themselves until he was gone.
It must have been an hour later, on the Boston turnpike, that the big yellow car swerved alarmingly in its lane. Fighting the wheel to bring it straight again, he heard his own voice speaking aloud in the emptiness, and in rage:
“Oh, and another thing. One more thing, Nelson. I think you’d better take off that flight jacket now, you hear me? Because if you don’t take off that flight jacket I’m gonna tear it off your fucking back, and then I’m gonna punch you right in the mouth.”
Chapter Eight
The only uncomfortable thing about Michael’s room at the Sheraton Commander Hotel, in Cambridge, was that it held a big full-length mirror. Frowning, smiling, slumped or standing straight, there was no way to escape the sight of a fifty-three-year-old man. When he came naked out of the shower it always took him by surprise – Hello, old man – and then there would be an urgent need to cover himself with clothes. What could be said for legs too weak to ride a bicycle? Where was the beauty in a ruined middleweight? When he talked on the phone, he found he couldn’t resist turning around now and then to take a look at the old man talking on the phone.
He called Sarah every day, whether there was anything new to tell her or not, and he looked forward to those calls as anxiously as if her voice might save his life.
On the fourth or fifth afternoon he began to dial the Kansas number before remembering he wasn’t supposed to call until after the longdistance rates went down at five o’clock: he’d made that mistake yesterday, and Sarah had mildly scolded him for the waste of money. So he sat waiting at the little cream-colored telephone table with nothing better to do than peek around his shoulder at the hunched, waiting old man.
After a while, and almost as if for no other purpose than to kill time, he took the city telephone book from its little shelf, thumbed the pages, and looked down the list of Davenports until he came to Lucy.
She sounded pleasantly surprised to hear he was in town – “Oh, I thought you’d be in Kansas” – but she hesitated for a second or two when he asked if she would have dinner with him tonight. Then she said “Well, yes; why not? That might be nice. How about seven o’clock?”
And when they’d hung up he was glad he’d obeyed the impulse to call her. It might be nice. If they could manage to be courteous and careful with each other, he might find ways of talking that would settle things he’d wanted to know about her for years.
Then his watch told him it would be all right to call Kansas now, and in a minute he was talking to Sarah again.
“… Still nothing to report on the apartment situation, I’m afraid,” he told her.
“Well, I hardly expected there would be,” she said. “You’ve only been there a few days.”
“I must’ve seen a dozen real-estate agents, but none of them have anything much to offer. And aside from that, you see, a lot of my time so far’s been taken up with college business; getting the job settled.”
“Sure. Well, that’s all right. There’s no hurry.”
“Oh, and I met the boss today. You know? The guy that wrote the nice letter? Funny thing: I expected him to be an older man – I always think people who praise my stuff are going to be older than me – but he’s only about thirty-five. Very nice, though; very welcoming.”
“Well,” she said. “Good.”
“So I guess most of my readers’ll be younger than me from now on; probably have been for years. If I have any readers left at all, that is.”
“Well,” she said, “of course you do,” and the tiredness in her voice let him know that he’d required that kind of reassurance from her too often in the past.
“Anyway, I’ll be able to spend the rest of this week looking for a place, and all of next week; then if nothing’s turned up in the city I’ll start trying the suburbs.”
“Okay. But really, there isn’t any pressure about this. Why don’t you just let it take however – you know – however long it takes. I’m perfectly comfortable here.”
“I know you are,” he said, and the phone was beginning to feel moist and slick in his hand. “I know you are. But I’m not. In fact I’m a little desperate, Sarah. I want to get you up here before I—”
“Before you what?”
“Before I lose you. Or maybe I’ve lost you already.”
And he couldn’t believe how long the silence went on. Then she said “That’s a funny way of putting it, don’t you think? Does a person ‘lose’ another person? Is that really what happens?”
“You’re damn right it’s what happens. You bet your sweet ass it’s what happens.”
“Well, but wouldn’t that imply a state of ownership to begin with? And how would that make any sense? I think I’d prefer to believe that everybody’s essentially alone,” she said, “and so our first responsibility is always to ourselves. We have to make
our own lives as best we can.”
“Yeah, well, now, look: I don’t know what the hell you’ve been reading, Sarah, but I’m not going to take any more of this feminist horseshit, is that clear? If you want to talk jargon you’d better find some boy of your own age. I’m too old for it. I’ve been around too long and I know too much. I know too much. Now. There’s one more point I’d like to make in this delightful little talk. Will you listen?”
“Certainly.”
But he had to wait for his heart and his lungs to slow down before he could speak again.
“It wasn’t really very long ago,” he began, in an almost theatrically quiet voice, “that you told me you thought we were made for each other.”
“Yes, I remember saying that,” she said. “And the moment I’d said it I knew you’d be reminding me of it, sooner or later.”
This time the silence was deep enough to drown in.
“Shit,” he said. “Oh, shit.”
“Well, in any case, this question of Boston will probably have to wait awhile,” she told him, “because I think I’ll take Jimmy to Pennsylvania and spend a few weeks with my parents.”
“Oh, shit. How many weeks?”
“I don’t know; two weeks, maybe three. I need some time by myself, Michael; that’s the whole point.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, okay, and how’s this for a scenario? Spend three weeks in Pennsylvania, then get on another plane and doze and float your way out to Marin County, California.”
“What county?”
“Oh, come on. You know. Everybody knows. It’s the sexiest place in America. It’s where all the young single mothers go to meet men. You’ll have a wonderful time there. You’ll be able to open your legs for a different man every Saturday night. You’ll be able to—”
“I’m not listening to this,” Sarah said, “and I don’t want to talk anymore. I’d rather not hang up the phone on you, Michael, but I will, unless you hang up first.”
“Okay; I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Wow. Wow. This was almost too much.