Love Always

27

OF course Lucy never thought that she wouldn’t see Les Whitehall again. From the minute Myra DeVane told her he had written (eventually, she had forced herself to look at the letter), she had to acknowledge that it figured that he’d get in touch when a million things were happening, and she was least ready to deal with him.

The night before he called to say he was coming, she tried to think of good things about Les and the good times they had had. If she could be calm, she would not give in to temptation and ask him what he thought “Love Always” meant. She knew that even if she asked, she would not get the answer she wanted. He would be insincere, he would equivocate, he would lie. He would try to make her look needy and silly for asking. He would pretend — or maybe it would be true — that “Love Always” was a variation of “Yours truly.” The few times she had ever faced him down and won, he had pushed a self-destruct button: he never admitted that she was right; he began smoking or drinking — anything that didn’t require words — or turned and walked away.

It depressed her, sometimes, that since Les she had not had a new relationship with anyone. It had taken about fifteen years for Hildon to really seduce her, in spite of the fact that she had slept with him from the beginning, and now she did count on him, now she did share his philosophy that since you could get away with anything, it was necessary to start your own fun. They knew how to seduce each other so well, knew how to add to the other’s fantasies like children piling one hand on top of the other, over and over, bottom hand pulled out and slapped on top, until it became again the top hand. There was a lot of repetition in what they did. At first her shock had been genuine about Hildon’s redneck slumming, but then she had passed through that, and through amusement, into acceptance. It was just a routine: some people liked to shower after sex; some smoked a cigarette; some people liked music; some people liked the lights on; some people did it in boots with spurs. It seemed incestuous; they were so close and had known each other so long that Lucy couldn’t believe they weren’t related, but they were also attuned to each other’s fantasies in a way no family member would be; they knew not only the person, but the dreams and nightmares as well. They cared about each other so much that they knew to be careful. They knew what would hurt. They were too careful. It was too precise; a shrug, instead of passion. Anything goes, because even that won’t suffice.

Les said that he would be passing through Vermont and wanted to stop — that he had been calling her for days without success. He knew nothing about Jane’s death. He had never met Nicole, and didn’t know, of course, that she was at Lucy’s. Lucy liked the idea of letting him walk into a sad, complicated situation. Only when someone else observed it and said something did she pity herself, and that feeling was a relief. Let him walk into real life and not be able to do anything about it. Let him deal with some situation that wasn’t one he orchestrated in a classroom or took charge of by manipulating her. Of course there was nothing helpful he could say, and no way he could feel comfortable. As Piggy said — more often on the East Coast than on the West Coast, actually—“Welcome to L.A.”

That morning Lucy and Nicole had visited Nata Ballard, who would be Nicole’s ninth grade teacher in the fall. Piggy had arranged for a tutor for the time Nicole would spend in Los Angeles. In September, Nicole would be picked up by the school bus and driven two miles to school, where she would be a student with farmers’ kids and hippies’ oldest sons and daughters. The farmers’ kids would be named Mark and John and the hippies’ kids would be named Ezekiel and Beatrice (four-syllable version). Nicole thought all this was wonderful —“a rip,” as she said — and had returned to her reading of Main Street. Lucy tossed around the idea of telling her that Nata Ballard had spent a year in the convent and another year strung out on dope before she saw the light and moved to Vermont when she decided it rose over the Green Mountains, but decided against it; it would just be another story that made things tenuous and a bit ironic. She didn’t think Nicole needed more of that.

St. Francis had escaped the night before, but they found him before he got into trouble, Lucy driving with her leg shaking so hard it was difficult to apply even pressure to the accelerator, and Nicole screaming, “St. Francis! Here, baby!” out the window, as perplexed people in fields or sitting in lawn chairs looked up and stared at the car. Lucy had been too embarrassed to stop and ask if they had seen the dog. He was in a swamp, not far from the house, and Lucy was so glad to see him muddy instead of bloody that she didn’t even care about the damage to the back seat. Today they had gone to the hardware store and bought a lead, stakes, chains, and a wider, sturdier collar. St. Francis looked manacled. It was the sort of thing, Lucy realized, that she was going to have to explain to visitors.

Life was back to normal. That meant, for example, that in the afternoon, the Federal Express man, with whom Nicole had struck up quite a friendship, had brought a package of drawings of preliminary plans for the Stephanie Sykes doll. They looked like blueprints for the Taj Mahal, filled with numbers and incomprehensible notations — what might have been a transcription of a gorilla’s best thoughts, on acid, of how to navigate through a Skinner box. The figure on the top page looked more like a cross section of one of Piggy’s wife’s chambered shells than a human being. Piggy had gotten a duplicate package, and had called to say that under no circumstances was Nicole to sign the release form — it was obviously a deliberate ruse, to disguise the fact that Stephanie Sykes did not have tits. “What the hell does this mean?” Piggy screamed at Lucy, as if she were responsible. “Under the head …” She told him that she couldn’t make out a head. “At the top, at the goddamn top,” Piggy said. “What does this mean: 8 × 3—what are they doing, grafting Wilt Chamberlain’s cock onto her throat?”

Lucy wrote this week’s Cindi Coeur column:

Dear Cindi Coeur,

I am writing to ask advice about my double life. By day I am a management analyst. I wear silk blouses with floppy bows, gray skirts with a kick pleat, and tiny pearl earrings to suggest conventional femininity. I have taken care to be sure that my hair is shiny and that the leather of my briefcase is not. All day, I go to meetings, talk on the phone, and make graphs. My boyfriend does not know that I work. I have told him that because of all the drugs I take, I sleep all day. At night, Cindi, I am a waitress at his nightclub, Slash. The pearl earrings are replaced by Tampax that dangle from my ears, and my clothes suggest that I have just escaped being torn apart by wild animals. My problem is that while I want to stay with my boyfriend and get deeper into that world, he has been saying that he should sell the business, get married to me, and that we should move to the suburbs and have kids. Should I tell him that I am a more conventional person, already, than he thinks? Can honesty hurt the relationship? How would I get my kicks if we lived in suburbia?

Double Identity Dorothy

Dear Dot,

The child your boyfriend wants may go a long way toward reconciling your two personas. You may still wear many items from your workaday-world wardrobe, which the child will naturally pull, rip, and stain. Give in to your boyfriend. If things go wrong you can, like all mothers, blame both him and the child. Later, if you decide to resume either your business identity or to immerse yourself in punk, your husband will certainly understand why you were driven into such a retreat. Who is not driven into conventionality or total chaos by a child? By capitulating, you can’t lose. It is a short distance, really, from blouses with bows tied under your chin, which are the business world’s equivalent of the cowbell, to the self-congratulatory support group you will find with the ladies of La Leche. Good Luck!

In the backyard, while she had been in California, Don Severs had planted a willow tree. The limbs swooped low, the delicate green leaves blowing in the breeze; a dozen Mylar balloons in the shape of hearts were attached mid-branch, bobbing as the limbs swept from side to side.

She remembered two of her father’s gestures — things he had done to communicate through action rather than words. When Lucy and Jane had told him something he didn’t believe, he had looked them straight in the eye and tipped his head, making a cross over his heart with his first finger. When they did something particularly charming, he tapped his chest, over his heart, with his fingertip, then made a fist with that hand and slapped it into the palm of the other. It was like a catcher slapping a ball into his mitt. Maybe their father had even thought of that, subconsciously; that love was just another game, like baseball. A national sport.

Lucy had thought, from time to time, of trying to get in touch with him, but she always stopped herself: he had betrayed them, withdrawn, disappeared. Jane had kept in contact a little longer than she had. He and his new wife had at least two children, and a house in Maine and a house somewhere outside Boston. A girl Lucy once knew had sent her a picture from the Boston Globe a couple of summers ago, of Lucy’s father standing by a cart in Faneuil Hall, eating some new kind of gourmet hot dog. It was the first picture she had seen of him since he left: the daddy planting the garden, or carrying his daughters on each shoulder, or standing stiffly next to Mommy in evening attire was now a middle-aged man, smiling with a mouth full of food. The college classmate who sent the picture had circled his name and put a question mark in the margin. There could be no question; even if his name was common, he looked very much like Jane and Lucy. Because men’s fashions changed so little, it looked like he was wearing a pinstripe shirt that he had worn when he was their father. He was still her father, but Lucy did not know where he was. What would she tell him if she got in touch? That his daugher Jane, whom he had not known all of her adult life, was dead? She felt tears welling up. That was what always happened — only when she connected Jane’s death with something else that she was angry about did she feel herself about to cry.

Jane’s husband of a little more than a week was the real villain to all of them. He was still in a coma and there had been extensive brain damage, but the family refused to let the doctors take him off the respirator. Piggy, in one of the calls he had gotten from the man’s father, had offered not only to pull the plug, but then to wrap it around the man’s neck, tie it to his fender, and take him for a memorial ride along the same steep road he had plunged off of with Jane. The autopsy revealed that Jane had been two months pregnant. Piggy had told Lucy, but no one else. Lucy wouldn’t give her mother, who had said Jane was self-destructive, the satisfaction of knowing that. She had not told Nicole or anyone else. She preferred to think of it, herself, not as carelessness but as a sign of Jane’s faith in life. Lucy had not shown Jane’s letter to anyone, either. She read it every day, thinking bitterly that if Jane had not wanted to grow old, she had certainly gotten her way. In homage to Jane, Piggy had flown to Virginia to ride the Cyclone. After the funeral, Piggy had said to Lucy that he didn’t see how he’d get over it; every time the breeze blew, he thought of Jane. She liked the wind whether it was on the Cyclone or on a motorcycle — when it wasn’t there, she’d find some way to generate wind. She would not have liked the still, sunny day on which her funeral was held. The stiffly arranged floral displays that so many people sent, instead of the wild flowers that grew in the canyons, rustling in the breeze. Lucy remembered Nicole as an infant, sitting on her mother’s thigh, while Jane said to her, “How does the rain fall?” tapping her fingertips lightly on Nicole’s head. Saying, “How does the wind go?” as she puckered her lips and blew a slow stream of air at Nicole’s hairline, sending the wisps of baby hair away from her forehead.

They had learned to take their cues from Nicole. If she fell, they did not react until she reacted. Most of the time, if they didn’t rush forward, she would just pick herself up and go on. The baby took her cues from the adults; if they weren’t upset, she wasn’t upset. She would look, and with fear or dismay that they projected as a pleasant smile, they would say “Baby go boom!” or something to indicate that what had just happened was of slight importance and rather amusing.

Lucy went to the screen door and looked out. Nicole was on a beach towel, stretching left and right and left and right, listening to an exercise tape on her cassette player. They had talked a lot in California about Jane, and Jane’s death, but since they returned, Nicole didn’t want to talk about it. She wondered if she shouldn’t say things anyway; whether what she was doing now wasn’t just another version, and a potentially harmful one, of what the adults had all done by smiling when Nicole went boom as a baby. Then, of course, they could tell by the surface she fell on, or where she banged herself, or how long she stayed spread-eagled, how great the hurt might be. There didn’t seem any accurate way to predict now what Nicole was feeling. Obviously, when she exhibited bravado, she was only doing it to cover the hurt. Earlier in the day, on the phone, talking to Piggy, she had overheard Nicole saying, “Yeah, well, I don’t think she should have taken chances while I’m still a kid.” Piggy had bought postcards of the Cyclone; he took them out of his pocket and examined them as though they were a family snapshot. He put one in a frame on his desk — his equivalent of a splinter of the True Cross, sunk in a Lucite cube.

It was not until Les Whitehall’s car pulled into the drive that Lucy realized how many preconceived notions she had had about this visit. She thought that he would be driving the same car he had left in. But the big Pontiac was gone, replaced by a smaller, newer car. When he opened his door and closed it, it didn’t hurt her ears. She stood in the doorway, looking deliberately at the car instead of at Les. She had thought that the passenger door would swing open and a girl would step out. Les’s notion of being an adult was to do something slightly challenging, which would put anyone who commented in the position of seeming gauche or childish. Lucy had assumed that he would bring a woman with him for protection and dare her to say that it wasn’t perfectly adult behavior, which would be difficult because there was no ostensible reason why they couldn’t all be blandly sociable. No one cared about anyone else anymore, right? No woman. Les was walking toward the house. He caught sight of Nicole, who didn’t interrupt her stretching routine. He waved. She waved back. St. Francis barked wildly, but it was a hot day and he stopped after a minute, settling back into his deep gully beside the rhododendrons. Silver balloons that had been tied to Lucy’s willow tree by Don Severs bobbed on the tree. It must have seemed like an unusual scene to Les — it couldn’t have been what he expected, either. His first words, as he gestured behind him, were, “What’s all this?” She could tell, because he tried to appear casual, that he was scared. Something about the way he walked that she couldn’t explain let her know that he was nervous. He looked the same. She had expected him to change: gain weight, lose weight, grow a beard, longer hair, more of a tan — she had no exact image in mind, except that she had been sure he would come across the lawn with a woman at his side, and now there was no woman. It was painful to see him looking the same, as though he had just left briefly, to do an errand.

“Vermont,” she said. “Come in.”

“Who’s the kid?” he said.

“Oh, darling,” Lucy said, “Don’t you think she looks just like you?”

It didn’t get even half a smile. His mouth moved slightly. He looked past Lucy, as if he expected someone else to be present.

“Sit down,” she said. “You remember where the furniture is.”

She walked past him into the living room. Though she sat in the chairs every day, today she realized how low to the ground they were, forcing you to extend your legs if you wanted to sit without gazing over your kneecaps. The chairs had once been in her mother’s house. She had sat in one of them the day Nicole was christened and tumbled into her arms. Today Lucy had on shorts and a white shirt. She had given a lot of thought to what she wore, and had finally decided that what she chose would inevitably make the other woman uncomfortable: it was so casual that anyone else would appear overdressed. Now that there was no one else, she wished that she had put on something prettier so that Les would remember whom he had left.

Les was standing by the mantel, where the sketches of the Stephanie Sykes doll were propped up. St. Francis’ old collar was there. A glass vase — Waterford crystal, another hand-me-down from Rita — filled with black-eyed Susans. Lucy noticed that the stems were no longer in water.

“Lucy,” he said, “do you really hate me? There’s no point in my saying anything if all you feel toward me is hatred.”

“Did you think I’d be happy to see you?” Lucy said.

“You’re so unforgiving,” he said.

She could see the conversation that she was going to get bogged down in. She thought that even if what Les said was true, she was entitled to her feelings. She had not left him. She had not written Love Always, Lucy.

“We didn’t have a relationship,” he said. “I was a psychological study for you. You thought everything I did was duplicitous. That would drive anybody crazy. You couldn’t see that I was sincere.”

“You disappointed yourself, Les. That was your problem. Not that you disappointed me.”

“How did I disappoint myself?” he said. Before she could answer, he said, “Is it asking too much to try to find out whether we can have a reasonable discussion?”

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think we could. You never put yourself anywhere — or stay anywhere — where you’re not on top. When you weren’t voted most popular teacher, you exiled yourself to Vermont. When I tried to deal with you as a real person instead of idolizing you, you left.”

“You’re the one who thinks of everything in terms of power plays. I was trying to have a saner life, living in the country. I realize that I’m too exacting a teacher to please all the students who want to float through. I know why that turned out the way it did. I just underestimated how sick you were and how tied to Hildon you’ve always been. I brought that on myself by moving here and putting you under the influence of the person you’ve always wanted to have overwhelm you. I thought that you loved me, and it wouldn’t happen. You never cared about me the way you cared about him.”

“Les — it wasn’t my feeling about Hildon that made us move to Vermont. You insisted that we move to Vermont.”

“How many things did you ever do that I insisted on?”

“See? You’re talking about things in terms of who has the most power again.”

“You can really be awful,” he said. “Are you being awful because I left you and you still care about me?”

He walked across the room and settled himself into the sofa, crossed his legs, and smiled. “Got a new BMW. Handles great,” he said. “New girl. New car. New apartment. Just your all-American guy, the one you’ve always loved.”

She reached for the nearest thing and threw it. He caught her sunglasses before they hit him in the face. He looked at them. Then he put them on, and jutted out his chin the way Lucy did when she was angry. “So you’ve got a new car, Les,” he said. “Big deal. At least you’re doing what’s so important to you by appearing to be prosperous. And the women are a notion pretty much like cars to you, aren’t they? Turn one in, get another one. When you do these things, aren’t you embarrassed? Or can you really pretend, pretend so well that you convince yourself?”

Next, she threw a glass bowl. It hit the wall in back of him, missing him by at least three feet. The pansy that had been floating in it fell onto the sofa. Water streaked the wall. She started to cry.

“Just because I don’t get off on pessimism the way you and Hildon do doesn’t mean I’m Pollyanna. My optimism reassured you plenty of times. When you had the flu that first winter and you thought you were going to die. I was the one who told you you could work things out with your mother. Talk about me being in exile in Vermont. You couldn’t be near her. You barely knew how to talk to her on the phone before you met me. I told you you could get the job teaching art at the school. It wasn’t the great Hildon who …”

Lucy had stopped listening. She was biting her bottom lip, looking past him to the doorway, where Nicole was standing.

“It’s something awful,” Nicole said.

Les looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, shrugging. “Sorry I was yelling.”

Nicole looked at him, tears welling up in her eyes.

“People have got to care about each other to bother to yell, right?” he said.

“No,” Nicole said. “I never noticed that.” She walked toward Lucy. By the time she got to the chair, she was crying. “St. Francis ran down the road after a tractor,” she said. “I just had him off his lead for a minute, and he ran down the road and wouldn’t come back when I called him. You’ve got to drive me. Get the car, Lucy. Come on — we’ve got to get him.”

Lucy stood and looked around the room for the car keys. Nicole had put her hands over her mouth. It was what she had done when Lucy had to tell her that Piggy had called and that Jane was dead. She saw the keys on the corner of the mantel and ran out the door without saying anything to Les.

“What do you want to take crap from that guy for?” Nicole said through her tears as Lucy pushed the key into the ignition. She had left the windows down and the car was full of flies. They flew forward and sideways and Lucy and Nicole had to bat them away from their faces so they could see.

“You know, I’m in this with you now,” Nicole said, “and I don’t want you to sit around and take crap off some guy.”

“It’s complicated,” Lucy said. She was driving slowly, looking right and left for St. Francis. She hoped that Nicole would call for him, because she thought if she spoke, she would cry harder.

Nicole had already stopped crying. “St. Francis!” she called.

Only a little farther down the road, he heard her and shot up. He had been wriggling on his back, rolling in carrion. He gave a last mighty shake and ran toward the car.

To her surprise, Les was still at the house. He was sitting on the hood of his car, looking down the road, when they returned.

Nicole got out of the car and walked past him with St. Francis at her side without saying anything, like a princess and her consort cutting through a crowd. St. Francis stank and seemed a most ignoble escort. Nicole put him on his lead and began to talk to him earnestly.

“Who is she?” Les said.

“Jane’s daugher, Nicole,” Lucy said. “Jane is dead.”

He cocked his head. “What do you mean?” he said.

“She lives here now. Jane died. She married some jerk who put her on the back of his motorcycle and drove it off a cliff.”

“A car must have forced them off the road,” he said. His voice was very quiet. “Oh my God,” he said. “Jane’s dead?”

“I was in L.A. for the funeral when you were calling me.”

“She was on a motorcycle?” Les said.

Lucy nodded. Les was doing what she sometimes did herself. The incredulity was real, but the theory was silly: that if you could just repeat facts, stall for time, you might not have to hear the same ending to the story.