It was different for Robert, who felt himself settling into marriage like a traveler without provisions. Sleeping with Lila in the first year of their marriage, he often thought: How can I use this moment? What can it teach me?
But finally he let himself be persuaded that he had come under the power of love, and that he was helpless.
Robert and Lila had a baby that was stillborn. It must not be thought of as a tragedy, friends told them; it was nature’s way of weeding out the imperfect. They left soon afterward for three weeks in England because they were persuaded that a change of scene would do them good. The flight was very long, but smooth. Fresh Canadian blueberries were served on the plane, and all the passengers piled off, smiling at each other with blue teeth. “We should get in touch with Nigel and Jane,” said Lila with her blue mouth.
But when they tried to find them in the telephone book, they discovered they weren’t listed. There was nothing to be done. The Christmas cards had carried no return address, only a London postmark, and so Robert and Lila were forced to admit defeat. Both of them were more disappointed than they said.
The year before, Nigel had written: “Our garden gives us great pleasure.” Lila had felt envious and wished she had a garden to give her pleasure.
Both Lila and Robert liked to stay in bed on Sunday morning and make love, but occasionally, four or five times a year, they went to church. There was pleasure to be had in passing through a set of wide oak doors into the calm carpeted Protestant sanctuary, and they enjoyed singing the familiar old hymns, Robert for their simple melodies and Lila for their shapely words which seemed to meet in the final verse like a circle completed. “Reclothe me in my rightful mind,” was a phrase she loved, but was puzzled by. What was her rightful mind? All autumn she’d wondered.
At Christmas, the card from England came zipping through the mail slot with the message, “An exceptional winter. Our pond has frozen over completely, and Jane has taken up ice skating, North-American style.”
Robert read the message over several times. Each inky letter was crisply formed and the Ts were crossed with merry little banners. “How can they have a pond if they live in London?” he asked. He was thinking about Jane, imagining her whirling and dashing to and fro in a sky-blue skating costume and showing a pronounced roundness of thigh.
“Do you have any recollection at all of what Nigel looked like?” Lila asked Robert once, but Robert couldn’t remember anything about him except that he had looked respectable and solid, and not much older than himself. Neither of them could remember Jane at all.
Lila took a job teaching in a French school, but quit six weeks later when she discovered she was pregnant. Twin boys were born. They were exquisite, lively and responsive, following with their quick little eyes the faces of their parents, the turning blades of a butterfly mobile and bright lights of all kinds. Robert and Lila carried them into the big chilly Protestant church one rainy Sunday and had them officially christened. The little house they rented filled up overnight with the smell of talcum powder and oats cooking; Robert became an improbable night visitor who smelled dark and cold in his overcoat. From across the ocean come the message: “Summer found us back in Normandy, reliving old memories.”
“Where does the time go?” Robert said one morning in a voice that was less a lament than a cry of accomplishment. It seemed to him a good thing for time to pass quickly. He wondered sometimes, when he went off in the mornings, especially in the winter, if work wasn’t just a way of coping with time. He also wondered, without jealousy or malice, what kind of salary Nigel pulled down.
They were surprised at how quickly routines and habits accrued. Patterns, rhythms, ways of doing things—they evolved without a need for conscious decision. The labor of the household split itself, not equitably, perhaps, but neatly. Robert ruled over the garage and the cement-linked kingdom of the basement, keeping an ear permanently cocked for the murmuring of machinery and for its occasional small failures. For Lila there was the house, the children, the bills and the correspondence. The task of writing Christmas cards fell mainly to her. One year she sat down at Grandfather Westfield’s roll-top desk and wrote 175 cards. So many friends, so many acquaintances! Still she paused, lifted her head and melodramatically said to herself, “I am a lonely woman.” She wished once again that she knew Nigel and Jane’s address so she could send them a snap of the boys and ask them if they had any children—she suspected they didn’t, in which case she would like to write them a few words of comfort, perhaps counsel patience.
Nigel had written that year about the coal strike, about a fortnight he and Jane had spent in Scotland, about the flooding of a river near their house.
Eight people were seated around a table. There were candles, Lila had made a salmon mousse and surrounded it with cucumber slices and, after that, there was a leg of lamb, wild rice and fresh asparagus. Robert walked around the table and poured wine. The conversation had taken a curious turn, with each couple recounting the story of their honeymoon. Some of the stories were touched-up sexual burlesques—the red wine brought a slice of the ribald to the table—and some were confused, unedited accounts of misunderstandings or revelations.
Robert and Lila described their month in France, and Robert, making a fine story of it, told the others about the check they had cashed for an English stranger who now sends them Christmas cards.
“And I’ve saved every single one of them,” Lila said.
This surprised Robert, who was proud to be married to a woman who was not a collector of trivia. Lila sent him a wide, apologetic smile across the roasted lamb and a shrug that said: Isn’t it absurd, the things we do.
“You took a real chance,” someone at the table remarked. “You could have lost the whole bundle.”
Robert nodded, agreeing. He thought again as he had thought before, how generous, open and trusting he and Lila must have been in those days. It was an image he cherished, the two of them, lost in their innocence and in each other.
Lila went to visit her mother one day and they had a quarrel. The argument was over something of no importance, a photograph Lila had misplaced. They both apologized afterward, but Lila cried on her way out to the parking lot, and a man stopped her and said, “Pardon me. You seem to be in distress. May I help you.”
He had a kind, anonymous face. Lila told him she was upset because she had quarreled with someone. The man understood her to mean she had quarreled with a lover, and that was what Lila intended him to understand.
He walked her to her car, held her arm for a moment and said a few kind words. Things would look different in the morning. Things had a way of blowing over. Misunderstandings were inevitable, but sometimes they yielded a deeper sense of the other person.
Lila drove home in that state of benign suspension which can occur when a complete stranger surprises one by an act of intimacy. She felt not only rescued, but deserving of rescue.
Often, she thought how it would be possible to tell Nigel things she could never tell Robert. He would never drum his fingers on the table or interrupt or correct her. He would be patient, attentive and filled with a tender regard for women.
She seldom thought about him concretely, but an impression of him beat at the back of her head, a pocket watch ticking against a silky lining. “Jane has made a splendid recovery,” he wrote rather mysteriously at Christmas.
“A wonderful year,” Lila wrote to friends at Christmas. “The children are growing so fast.”
When she wrote such things, she wondered what happened to all the other parts of her life that could not be satisfyingly annotated. She tried at first to rescue them with a series of graceful, old-fashioned observations, but she soon became tired and discouraged and suspected herself of telling lies.
Robert and Lila acquired a cat, which ran up a tree in a nearby park and refused to come down. “He’ll come down when he’s good and hungry,” Lila assured her children, but several days passed and still the cat refused to descend. At lengt
h, Robert dipped a broomstick into a tin of tuna fish and, standing on a ladder, managed to coax the cat down by waving this fragrant wand before his stubborn nose.
A photographer for a Toronto newspaper happened to be standing not ten feet away, and he snapped a picture of Robert in the act of rescue. The picture and story were picked up by a wire service as a human-interest piece a few days later—this was during a quiet spell between elections and hijackings—and appeared on the inside pages of newspapers across the continent. Robert was amazed. He was, he realized, mildly famous, perhaps as famous as he would ever be again. It was not the kind of fame he had imagined for himself and, in fact, he was a little ashamed of the whole episode. Friends phoned from distant cities and congratulated him on his act of heroism. “Yes,” Lila said with expansive good humor, “I am indeed married to the illustrious cat rescuer.”
Robert couldn’t help wondering if the picture had been published in the English dailies, and if Jane had seen it. It might have made her laugh. Jane, Jane. He imagined she was a woman who laughed easily. “Jane and I are both in excellent spirits,” a recent Christmas greeting had reported.
Whenever Lila went into a café or restaurant, she slipped the little packets of sugar into her purse, even though she and Robert no longer used sugar. They had grown health-conscious. Robert swam laps twice a week at the sports club he joined, and he was making an effort to cut down on martinis. All this dieting and exercise had stripped away his flesh so that when they made love Lila felt his hip bones grinding on hers. She believed she should feel healthier than she did, what with all the expensive, fresh vegetables she carried home and cooked in the special little steamer Robert had brought back from San Francisco.
She wondered if Jane had to watch her figure as carefully as she herself did. She wondered if Jane were attractive. Sometimes, she saw women on the street, women who had a look of Englishness about them, someone wearing a simple linen dress or with straight graying hair. If these women wore perfume, it was something grassy. They were determinedly cheerful; they put a smiling face on everything, keeping life joyful, keeping it puffing along, keeping away from its dark edges. They swallowed their disappointments as though to do so was part of a primordial bargain.
“Jane and I are seriously considering a walking tour of the Hebrides next year,” Nigel had written.
Robert applied for a year off in order to do some research on the immune system, but almost from the start things went badly. The data he required accumulated slowly and yielded little that was specific. He learned too late that someone else, someone younger and with a larger grant, was on the same track at Stanford. He insisted on being given computer time in order to correlate his findings, and then discovered he was painfully, helplessly inept at using a computer. He began drifting to his club in the early afternoons to swim laps, or sometimes he drank in the bar and told Lila that he swam laps. His disappointment, his difficulty, his lies, his drunkenness, his life sliding away from him down a long blind chute, made him decide that the time had come to buy a house.
The house was expensive, ten rooms of glass and dark-stained wood cunningly perched on the side of a ravine, but it saved his life, or so he said at the time. He and Lila and the boys moved in at the end of November. As always, when they moved, Lila made careful, tactful, heroic efforts to have their mail forwarded. She looked forward to the barrage of Christmas greetings. Nigel and Jane’s card came from the Hebrides that year, just a short note saying, “We made it at last. The birds are magnificent.”
Lila had the use of her mother’s summer cottage in Muskoka, and she and Robert and the children liked to spend four or five weeks there every summer. There was a particular nightgown she wore at the lake. It was altogether different from her city nightgowns, which were long, sliplike things in shiny materials and in colors such as ivory or melon or plum. The cottage nightgown was white cotton printed with quite large red poppies. There was a ruffle at the neck and another at the feet. On a bigger woman, it would have been comic; it was large, loose, a balloon of a garment.
Robert couldn’t imagine where it had come from. It was difficult to think of someone as elegant as Lila actually going out to buy such a thing. She kept it in an old drawer at the cottage, and one summer they arrived and found that a family of mice had built a nest in its flower-strewn folds. The children ran screaming.
“Throw it away,” Robert told her.
But she had washed it in the lake with strong detergent and dried it in the sun. “As good as new,” she said after she mended one small hole.
For a week the children called it her mouse gown and refused to touch it.
But Robert loved her in it. How he loved her! The wet, lakey smell was in her hair all summer long, and on her skin. She was his shining girl again, easy and ardent and restored to innocence.
Summer was one thing, but for most of the year Lila and Robert lived in a country too cold for park benches or alfresco dining or cuddling on yachts or unzipping the spirit. They suffered a climate more suitable for sobering insights, for guilt, for the entrenchment of broad streams of angst and darkness.
England, too, was a cold country, yet Nigel wrote: “We’ve had a cheerless autumn and no summer to speak of, but as long as Jane and I have our books and a good fire, we can’t complain.”
Just as heavy drinkers gather at parties to condemn others for overindulgence, so Lila lovingly gathered stories of wrecked marriages and nervous breakdowns—as though an accumulation of statistics might guard her sanity and her marriage, as if the sheer weight of disaster would prevent the daily erosion of what she had once called her happiness. She wailed, loudly and frequently, about the numbers of her friends who popped Valium or let their marriages slide into boredom. “I’ll go crazy if I hear about one more divorce.” She said this mournfully, but with a sly edge of triumph. Her friends’ children were taking drugs or running away from home. She could weep, she told Robert, when she looked around and saw the wreckage of human lives.
But she didn’t weep. She was, if anything, reaffirmed by disaster. “I ran into Bess Carrier downtown,” she told Robert, “and she looked about sixty, completely washed out, devastated. You wouldn’t have known her. It was heartbreaking. I get so depressed sometimes. There must be something we can do for her.”
Robert knew it would come to nothing, Lila’s plans to take Bess Carrier out for lunch or send her flowers or invite her around for a drink. Lila’s charity seldom got past the point of corpse-counting these days; it seemed to take most of her time.
No one escaped her outraged pity—except perhaps Nigel and Jane. They were safe, across the ocean, locked into their seasonal rhythms, consumed by their various passions. They were taking Portuguese lessons, they had written. And growing orchids.
Lila loved parties, and she and Robert went to a great many. But when they drove home past lighted houses and streets full of parked cars, she was tormented by the parties she had missed, assuming, as a matter of course, that these briefly glimpsed gatherings glittered with a brighter and kinder light. She imagined rooms fragrant with woodsmoke and fine food—and talk that was both grave and charming. Who could guess what her imagination had cost her over the years?
The same plunging sense of loss struck her each year when she opened the Christmas greeting from Nigel and Jane. Elsewhere, these cards said to her, people were able to live lives of deep trust. How had it happened—that others were able to inhabit their lives with such grace and composure?
“He probably sends out thousands of these things,” Robert once said to Lila, who was deeply offended. “He must be a bit off his rocker. He must be a real nut.”
It was the month of July. Robert bundled the boys into the station wagon and they drove across the country, camping, climbing in the mountains, cooking eggs and coffee over an open fire, breathing fresh air. Lila went to Rome on a tour with a group from the art gallery. While she was gone, her mother died of heart failure on the platform of the College Street subway
station. The moment she collapsed, her straw hat flying into the air, was the same moment when Lila stood in the nave of St. Peter’s, looked up into its magisterial vaulting and felt that she had asked too much of life. Like Nigel and Jane, she must try to find a simpler way of being: playing word games at the kitchen table, being attentive to changes in the weather, taking an interest in local history, or perhaps collecting seashells on a beach, taking each one into her hand and minutely examining its color and pattern.
A snowy day. Lila was at home. There was a fire, a pot of Earl Grey and Beethoven being monumentally unpleasant on the record player. She turned the music off and was rewarded by a blow of silence. In the whole of the long afternoon there was not one interruption, not even a phone call. At seven, Robert arrived home and the peace was broken by this peaceful man.
A snowy day. Robert was up at seven. Granola in a bowl given to him by his wife. She was lost in a dream. He would like to have surprised her by saying something startling, but he was convinced, prematurely as it turned out, that certain rhythms of speech had left him forever. He knew this just as he knew that he was unlikely ever again to kiss the inner elbow of a woman and behave foolishly.
A snowy day. Nigel wrote: “We are wrapped in a glorious blizzard, an extraordinary North Pole of a day. Jane and I send good wishes. May you have peace, joy and blessings of every kind.”
Loss of faith came at inappropriate times, settling on the brain like a coat of deadly lacquer. Lila thought of her dead baby. Robert thought of his abandoned research. But, luckily, seasonal tasks kept the demons down—the porch to open and clean, the storm windows to see to, the leaves. Robert and Lila always gave a party for the staff in the fall. After the fall party, there were the Christmas things to be done. The children were doing well in school. Soon it would be summer.