“So shoot me.”
She cocked her thumb and aimed right between my eyes.
“Pow.”
I could see she wasn’t in a horrible mood.
She said, “Anyway, you’re here. I guess I don’t mind, Henry, but you’re always doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“What?” she laughed. “You preempt! Our supposed meeting next week, for starters. We had it all planned out, remember? What we’ve been talking about for the last month. Take it slow, gradual. Just like you said we should. I was heeding you.”
“I know.”
“Since I’ve been back you’re always calling just as I’m getting into bed, or stepping out of the shower, or just when I’ve locked the door behind me. I rush to the phone and then of course it’s you. Now I wait five seconds before bolting the lock. It’s crazy. You always want to talk when I can’t.”
“I know.”
“Well, please please please cut it out.”
“I’ll try.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “How is Jack? I think I truly miss Jack.”
“He’s fine. He misses you. He wants to hear about the islands. I want to hear about the islands.”
Her expression dimmed. I knew the time was wrong. The trip to the islands would be off limits. I was promising myself that I wouldn’t make it painful, whatever she told me. Anything.
But of course I knew that certain events must have occurred.
“How did Mitt sound?” she asked, sensing my silence.
“Great. Really great. It’s amazing.”
She shifted in the mass, sitting up. She said, “I haven’t listened to the tapes in a long time. I don’t think they would depress me anymore, but I know I still couldn’t do anything afterwards. I’d just stop moving for a few days.”
“He rings in your ears.”
“Maybe,” she answered, playing with the tiny pink flowerets at the base of her collar. “I keep remembering how I sat in the window with my feet hanging out and the tape machine between my legs. The volume on high so the people would look up. I didn’t mind looking a little suicidal.”
“You scared the shit out of me.”
She chuckled. “You only saw me on the weekends. You had a place to go at least. You could hide up there with Jack. You could do what you do. What you still do. Oh my god, do I not want to talk about that now.”
“Let’s not, then.”
She let her head fall over the back of the beanbag. “You know I listened to everybody about getting back to my life. Back to my life. As if. I even listened to my mother! You don’t know, but at school I worked those poor kids to the bone. I’d end up yelling all the time. They’d cry and cry. I kept telling myself they were just little grown-ups, that they could handle anything.”
“It got you through.”
“Sorry, but I was a low-down bitch.”
“No you weren’t.”
“Damn it, Henry!”
She got up. “Shit. I’m sorry. Do you want a drink? I’m having one.”
She went into the kitchen and came back with two low-balls of ice and a bottle of scotch. She poured for us. We were silent for a few minutes. She was drinking with both hands around her glass. She was going at it. As usual I was trying to keep up with her, wanting to get to the same page, and I was suddenly reminded of the fact that she always drank a little too much and that I never drank enough.
She finally said, “Where were we?”
“You were hurting.”
“There’s a phrase.”
“So was I,” I offered.
“You did a great job hiding it,” she said sharply. “I’m sorry, Henry, I don’t want to be no fun but I’m not going to let you step into the middle of my night and start revising our history. History is clear here. You were solemn and dignified. Remember? That’s who you were for about a year. The bowing, the white-glove bit. You’re the one who calmly explained to everyone how well we were doing. Of course I was the mad and stupid one. The crazy white lady in the attic.”
“I did what I could.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s right.”
“And I didn’t?”
So we’d traveled back to square one.
“I’m such a dope,” she said, taking a deep sip. “Say I’m a dope.”
“I’m a dope.”
“Good,” she said. She was rolling the glass against her cheek. “Why did I ever let you in tonight?”
“I guess you’re just kind and good.”
“I am not good,” Lelia said. “Ask Molly.”
“She hasn’t said anything to me.”
“Oh, so is she your spy now?”
“Sometimes.”
“Not all the time?”
I said, “Only when I’m really desperate.”
That seemed to soften her. She said, “I always knew Molly liked you better. I should have stayed with Mother. I’d be absolutely crazy, of course. I went to Boston last week. You probably know that, right? I should have stayed with Mother. But being there is like having another conscience knocking around. I hate what I hear but I listen. Why is it that when I’m up there I wear lipstick to breakfast and wrap up my used tampons in newspaper? It’s like I’m giving the garbageman a present. And I think she’s getting worse and worse. She’s so frightfully scared of everything and everyone but Lord knows she’s become the most awful snob on earth. I’ve begun to think those conditions are related. Of course, like everyone else, she completely adores you. She says you’re old-style charming, like back in 1957.”
“My kind didn’t exist for her then.”
“You should have. I think it’s a crush for life.”
“I’m her exotic,” I said. “Like a snow leopard. Except I’m not porcelain.”
“The things she doesn’t know,” Lelia said. She half-titled her glass, in truce. “But maybe she sees something.”
I made an act of toasting her mother, which made Lelia laugh. I said, “Has she gone outside at all?”
Lelia shrugged. “Does the sunroom count? Otherwise, no. She’s stopped seeing her therapist. After all these years she’s suddenly scared of him, and I’ll tell you the man looks like Walter Cronkite. Frankly, I don’t know what’s going to happen to her. The house smells like death. Perfume of old-lady-death. Lilacs and cat piss. I never thought my mother’s house would get to this. And she looks so old all of a sudden. What should I do, Henry? I’m sick.”
“What about Stew?” Stew was her father.
“His line’s always busy. She won’t call him, anyway. I think out of everything she’s definitely most afraid of Stew. In that way I guess I’m no different.”
I didn’t answer. I knew that I was afraid of him, too. And what it was about Lelia that I desired and feared came partly through his bloodline running through her, the openness and exuberance and all that hard focus she could sometimes call up. She got the drinking from him, too. Her father was one of those tall, angular, self-embalming types. All balls and liver. His kind predated the notion of alcoholism. Groton, Princeton, Harvard Business School. His neatly clipped silver hair and tailored suits and unmitigating stare of eyes and trim old body said it all over in simple, clear language: Chief Executive Officer. Do not fuck with this man.
He generally liked me, tended to treat me, I thought, as he might some rising young VP in his Boston-based holding company, alternatingly coddling and browbeating me. His talent didn’t necessarily reside in a wisdom for capital and markets but rather in an expert and unflinching opportunism, the hunch for the big kill. I could imagine him regarding a long shiny table of company directors with the savor of some poor bastard’s blood lolling like an unguent in the back of his mouth.
During the first year of our marriage Lelia and I went up for a month to his beach house in Maine, and I remember how he’d have a glass in hand all day and evening, a lead crystal tumbler of scotch and ice. He possessed a certain grace with the glass in his hand, the way he’d hold himself with it thrust toward the ocean like one man’s saving beacon, the dying yellow light hitting it from behind him and sparking the amber. He drank only scotch, only one brand, and when I went down once to the cellar to fetch us more booze I stumbled on dozens of empty case boxes of it, their sleeves flattened and the bottoms punched out, the cardboard neatly stacked about the cellar like hay piles as high as my thighs. I liked drinking with him partly because it was something I didn’t do with my father, who never learned to enjoy the taste of liquor or the casual slip of conversation that alcohol made possible between people who would never otherwise be friends.