Lucien worked his way through the state university as a pizza chef, setting log chokers, as a tool-pusher and, home in the summers, as a cowboy, a fencer and an irrigator. He was a valuable ranch hand and a superb horseman.
In his first year of college he dated two girls from his hometown, Emily and Suzanne. Under Emily he was going to be a rancher and a painter of sporting subjects on the order of Thomas Eakins. Under Suzanne he would grasp desperately at his deep testability, land himself among the upper percentiles and, having trained himself only generally, go off to Latin America for the United States Information Agency, spraying leaflets on the mestizo millions. He married Suzanne.
Emily loved a medical student the entire time she saw Lucien. Later that student became a doctor, and later she married him. Emily was a raving beauty with electrifying black eyes, and she had been seeing the doctor-to-be since she was in high school. Though they had passed each other in the high school’s corridors a thousand times, Emily had no idea who Lucien was. By way of compensation, she slept with him on their first meeting at college. Lucien fell so immediately in love, he hoped she was pregnant. She used to ask him where he had been all her life in such a vague way, he knew she didn’t mean it. He cooked her soufflés on the nights the doctor-to-be was studying, and she made love to him between classes or read to him from the hippie books that were just then hitting the ag schools. She made him make love to her when she talked to her parents on the phone. Lucien thought it was some kind of psychological experiment; in fact, she often referred to Lucien as a “volunteer.” Then one time the doctor-to-be nearly caught them together; Lucien hid in the closet, and Emily took great pains to seduce the doctor, who commented genially on her excited state. She positioned him clearly in view of the parted closet door and drove the swart medical candidate into a frenzy. When he left, Lucien made frantic love to her and Emily clawed great evil stripes in his back. He pretended to be pleased with these passionate badges; but he was barely able to put his shirt on. In blank confusion, he went into the kitchen to attempt a new soufflé. “What if he’d known I was here?” asked Lucien, thinking of the kind of violent treatment he might have received, the very kind Lee’s lieutenants would have dished out.
“He knew you were here,” said Emily. “He’s always known you were here.”
If Suzanne hadn’t been beautiful that year, she might very well have been mousy. Lucien seized upon her, in his battered state at the departure of Emily, for her prettiness. Suzanne was a brown-haired, brown-eyed beauty, one who had never traded on her looks but a girl in the last of the times when looks alone would do. This left her with the curiously easygoing nature of a twenty-year-old hectored by suitors. Lucien in those years was a combination of seersucker and tragedy, though an odd kind of tragedy: certainly at first glance not a real one, not the precipitous loss that draws every heart wheeling down, but rather one that grew in effect by never quite going away.
One sixties autumn, Suzanne’s genial survey of men ended. First to go was the Olympic gymnast, then the young ranch aristocrat majoring in classics at an eastern school. Right after that one the handsome orphan was dismissed, and finally the German racer. Left standing was Lucien, the curiously distracted, bookish sport who wouldn’t shut up about his old squeeze. “She left me,” Lucien wailed without shame. “Gone with a doctor who has hair on the back of his hands.” The beautiful Suzanne seduced him without complaint, courted him, cooked wonderful meals which he ate absently; and made his staring, vacant presence the envy of all who saw him with this peerless girl on his arm. “You’re very far away,” she said. “Aren’t you, Lucien?”
“Yup.”
In years to come, Lucien’s career, time and childbirth would tighten their grip on Suzanne’s life. She became tough and smart, and she stayed beautiful. Lucien remained distracted, effective mostly in bursts of irritation. He made dreadful paintings. Later it would not surprise her when he left. But he went on explaining by phone and by mail. He fell apart. Not unkindly, she began to refer to him as a plastered saint. For Suzanne, as for all those who start out on sound principles, life went on.
Suzanne never came to Lucien’s attention as deeply as Emily did. She was just as pretty but in a sunnier way. She took the position that this was a decent world for an honest player. And whenever she used her favorite remark, “It all comes out in the wash,” Lucien grew defensive, taking it as a reference to Emily.
Lucien and Suzanne were married on her father’s ranch on a big bend in the Shields River. Lucien’s work took him immediately to Surinam, where, napping in the afternoon on their comfortable veranda, Suzanne was bitten by a bat. Since it was unusual to be bitten in the daytime, she was subjected to a painful series of rabies shots into the lining of her stomach. She played even this down, really to keep Lucien from worrying: she was pregnant with James.
Five air-conditioned years went by in the backwater posts of Central America. One sweltering September, the three of them went on holiday to Nevis, where they lived for a week in the remodeled ruins of a slave-breeding farm. It was an extraordinary week for many reasons. They had both just learned that Emily had committed a crime so awful that neither Lucien nor Suzanne spoke of it. Anyway, Emily was the past.
In the evenings they listened to the reggae bands, consorted with the gracious local people and taught James to eat conch chowder and dig for slave beads in the beach. Lucien loved his little boy very much, but with the distraction that informed all his own young life. He took him walking the ruined English fortifications and down the dock at Charlestown, where the native shipwrights caulked the long-boomed sailing lighters with ringing hammers. One afternoon they sent James walking the beach with a Nevis girl hired for the day, a girl so black and literate and merry that she supplied Suzanne with another spell of blind optimism. Lucien and Suzanne examined the ancient barrel-roofed library, the stone municipal buildings. At length they found themselves in the small chapel that felt so ancient and English that the whole anomaly of the colonial adventure rang in the tropical afternoon. Lucien stood on the flagstone grave markers of the old planters and viewed the altar where Admiral Horatio Nelson had been married. Staring at Nelson’s disappearing signature in his rumpled seersucker, Lucien was suddenly poleaxed by what he saw as the lack of high romance in his life. It was one of the lowest and most paltry hours he would ever spend; and it nearly ruined him.
Their cottage was a stone building that the slaves had built. The sun had tired James, and he slept in an adjoining room. Each wall had a tall mullioned window that looked out over the rolling hills of Nevis and, well beyond, to the blue sea. There was a mosquito canopy for the bed, drawn out of the way, and treated coils of punk to be burned in the summer months. A bookcase contained a peculiar assortment of left-behind novels in various languages. It was a beautiful old room, and Suzanne already knew that something was wrong. Lucien wanted to put it all off; but the fact that James was sleeping constrained him to say something now. He told Suzanne he wasn’t going back to work. It made absolutely no sense for him to make any such statement, but he could not seem to do otherwise. Suzanne sat down with her hands in her lap. She was very tall, and that somehow made her isolation more clear. She was across the room and so very tall in the wooden chair.