Crossroads (31 page)

It was late the next evening when I settled down to write back to him. I'd just written his name on a piece of paper when the phone rang. No one calls Renee's house after eleven. I knew when Renee opened the door in her lime-green gown, pincurlers in her hair, and told me “It's for you” that it was Sean. And then she said, “I think it's that man you don't want to talk to.”

“Oh.” I reached for my robe. “It's all right. I'll talk to him. I'm sorry if the phone woke you.” I knew as I made my way down the landing and heard the wind rustling through the leaves that the season was going to change soon. I knew as I peered outside and saw for the first time the traces of orange and red on the edges of the leaves and the wind churning them
up that we were much closer to the end of summer than the middle of it. I tiptoed downstairs, trying to remember what time it was everywhere. In New York, California. Is it daytime in Florida and nighttime in Chicago? Are the flamingos asleep, with their heads tucked under their wings? The whole country felt like this tiny, knowable place, as if my hand grasping the bannister, and my other hand finding its way along the wall, were reaching from coast to coast.

“Debbie, it's me, Sean. I guess I woke everyone.”

A strange kind of peace came over me. “They go to bed early,” I replied. “I'm back in the corn belt.”

“Well, I'm sorry. God, I'm apologizing again.”

“Yes, you are.” I laughed. Nestling into the corner of a sofa, I listened into the phone. There was the sound of water, like a brook running through the cord. Or the Colorado River rushing past. But I knew it was the static from the Rocky Mountains between us. “You're still in California.”

“How did you know?”

I told him I could hear the hum of cameras behind him.

“How are you?”

I curled smaller into the sofa. It was so strange to hear his voice. “I'm fine,” I said. “I've missed you.”

His voice was soft. “I've missed you too. God, I can't believe how it got screwed up. I had to throw that woman out of my place. She didn't forward your letter. I didn't even know you were trying to reach me.”

“I'm cold,” I said. The central air conditioning came blasting out of a duct over my head.

“Right now? Get a blanket,” he said.

“It's long distance.”

“Get a blanket.” I went and got a blanket and came back to the phone. We made small talk for a while. Then he said, “I think we should see one another in person. I'm coming to New York in a few weeks and could stop over.” When he said that, I suddenly felt as if I couldn't wait five more minutes, let alone a
few weeks. I thought of hopping a plane to go to see him, but then I remembered he had left me in a lonely hotel in California and that it was perhaps best to proceed with caution.

We agreed he'd stop over in Chicago and said we'd talk before then. As we were hanging up, he added, “I still really care about you.” And I told him I still really cared about him.

When we hung up, I sat alone on the sofa for a long time, thinking about what I really wanted to do. Renee came downstairs and sat beside me in her lime-green gown, looking terribly married, terribly settled, terribly my stout older sister. “I don't know what I want to do,” I told her. “I've missed him a lot these past months, but now that I'm going to see him soon, I just don't know. I was starting to feel free again.”

She patted my hand. “You don't have to decide anything right now, do you? You can see him and see how you feel.”

“Oh, no,” I said, “that's much too sensible.”

“Come on,” she said, “I'll rub your back.” I turned around so that she could get to those tense muscles between the blades.

“He can stay in a hotel,” I said after a few minutes of reflection. “When he gets here.”

“No,” she said after a brief pause, “let him stay here.”

Renee kissed me good night and went upstairs. I watched her as she walked, watched the maternal sway of her enlarged hips in their lime-green smock. The same sister who had painted flowers on her cheeks and danced in the streets of San Francisco. She paused on the landing and turned around. “You going to be O.K.?” I nodded faintly. “Well, good night then.”

I sat alone for a few moments. The feeling was within me that I couldn't wait another minute, that I had to have him with me right then, right that moment, or never again. I thought of that night when Sean had led me back to my apartment to make love for the first time. I thought of the night at Earl and Sandy's when he made love to me under the crazy quilt. I thought of all those nights I'd wanted him and hadn't even known it, and now, when it was far away, when it was out
there but out of reach, when it was almost impossible, but not quite impossible. I still wanted it and that must say something about the way we desire.

 

I had worked a long hard week and was the last one to leave one Friday night. It was hot in the building and the air conditioning had been turned off earlier in the month. We were in the midst of Indian summer, that last burst of heat we get before winter sets in. I flicked off the lights and stared for a moment at the darkened drafting tables, the stools, the very spot where Jennie's back had arched over a drawing board. I thought of all the years spent playing beside the plants, the blueprint machine, the nude snapshots and pinups of girls thumbtacked to the bulletin board, where there was now a Sierra Club calendar. This was where it all began for me, and now in the dim twilight of a Friday evening I suddenly felt rather old, as if everything that was going to happen to me had already happened.

The corridor was hot and airless as I waited for the elevator. I pushed the button in sharp, impatient, staccato punches, even though I had nowhere in particular to go. At last the elevator arrived and the doors opened slowly. There were two or three aging Chicago Bears, gray-haired and paunchy, who probably did PR now for the team but who longed to make those great pass interceptions again. And then there was Sean.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him as he stepped off. I wasn't at all prepared. We did not embrace.

“You didn't get my message? I called this morning before I left. Your secretary, some crazy lady who gave me the third degree, said you were in meetings and she'd give you the message.”

I sighed. “That's Clarice. She's taken to deciding what messages I should get and which ones to skip.”

“Great secretary.” We both stood still in the hot corridor.
“Well, here I am and I'm not going to apologize for it. Do you want me to leave or go to a hotel or something?”

“No, no.” I shook my head. “Let's go back in. I'll call Renee and tell her you're here.”

We went back into my father's office, but not so much because I had to phone my sister as because I needed time to collect myself. Renee, after all, had plenty of instant mashed potatoes, frozen steaks, and frozen broccoli. She had closets full of clean washcloths. My sister is a woman prepared for an invasion. But I am less well prepared. Ask me if I like surprises and I'll say sure, every kid loves surprises. But then surprise me and I'll be annoyed with the inconvenience.

I had to go back to the quiet safety of the drafting room. I called Renee, who said, “Fine, fine. He called here for you. He said he had to leave for New York suddenly. I thought he'd reach you at work.”

I hung up. Sean was wandering around the office. I saw from the way he stood in a corner that he was sad, uncertain. He had flown through three time zones to find that I was totally unprepared to see him. We looked each other up and down. “Well,” I said, “Renee says it's fine. You look terrific. Jennie told me you'd shaved your beard.”

He ran his hand across his face. “It grew back.” He looked at me, critically, I thought. After all, he had just left Hollywood, and here I was in beige slacks, a wrinkled brown shirt, my auburn hair pulled back into a pony tail, red eyes, blotchy skin, sandals, and my feet, I thought shamefully, caked with city dirt.

He stood with a leg raised, resting on a stool, his hand fondling his beard. He gazed out the picture window at the skyline of the city of Chicago. An undifferentiated mass of gray buildings, blue-gray in the twilight, lights flickering on all over the city. It was almost seven o'clock on that early fall night, and Sean was a portrait of disappointment. “I should have called
and talked to you directly but I had to dash. This is some kind of a mistake. I can see that now. We just keep getting our signals crossed.”

I walked toward him and touched the back of his neck ever so gently. In the kind of single, swooping gesture directors spend many takes perfecting, he swung around, an arm catching me in the small of my back, and turned me at the same time. He pressed me against a drawing board and kissed me with as much tenderness and confidence as one could expect from two terrified people who had not seen one another in a while.

We were in the middle of that embrace when the door to the drafting room opened and Clarice walked in. At first she looked frightened, then enraged. Her blue hair was the color of the evening. “Oh,” she said, “I forgot the mail and was on my way home.” Her mouth was full of dental packing and she sounded as if it were stuffed with marbles. “So,” she said, “this is what you do when you say you're working late.” And she left the office in a huff.

The kids were all asleep in their respective beds when we returned to Downers Grove, and Renee had made up the couch in the living room for Sean. They liked him right away, and Eddie got him into a game of Ping-Pong in the basement. Sean, an expert, let Eddie beat the pants off him. Renee had left the broccoli soaking in hot water and it was limp, as if someone had clubbed it to death. She threw on the steaks and whispered in my ear, “Um, he's cute.”

After dinner she and Eddie discreetly wandered upstairs, expecting me to bed down with Sean on the sofa. Instead we just sat quietly, holding hands. “So,” he said, after a while, “I'm kind of at a loss for words.”

I nodded. “Me too. We'll talk tomorrow. There's no rush.”

Sean rubbed my hands in his and agreed there was no rush. I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “I think we shouldn't sleep together. I mean, not yet. Not tonight.” He kissed me back and
told me he thought that was a good idea. “We shouldn't rush into anything,” I went on and he kissed me again.

“Get some sleep.” Sean gave me a mock order. “I'll see you in the morning.”

I woke to the sound of a lawn mower, and then a Frisbee whizzed past my window. It was Saturday, and below me stretched the perfect Midwestern domestic scene. Help, the dog, was chasing Eddie, the dentist, as he mowed the lawn, his big ostrich bottom waddling by, and my nephew, Sam, was playing catch with Sean, who now appeared to me a little like the boy next door.

Sean wanted to see the city of Chicago, so, it being a weekend, I decided to take him around. We spent the morning at the Art Institute, then drove up to the Museum of Science and Industry. We rode down into the coal mine and journeyed in the submarine. We stumbled through Paul Bunyan's house and had our pictures taken in old Chicago. We watched with horror as Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the one Clarice was related to, kicked over the lantern that started the Chicago fire, and were elated when Bell Tel, through the wonders of telecommunication, saved the life of a little boy who'd swallowed a bottle of shoe polish. We looked in awe at the giant doll house of Mrs. Moore and with disgust at the bodies of embryos in bottles.

Then we entered the heart. That huge, pulsating, pumping thing whose auricles and ventricles one could walk through. We stood inside and gaped into the aorta, the vena cava, and listened to the endless, dum-dum, hypnotic beat. I have always loved this giant, pulsating heart. I am, after all, an expert in roads, and the heart is the perfect traffic pattern. I used to sit inside and listen for what seemed like hours as the beat beat and the blood pumped. It was there, inside the left ventricle, that my leg brushed against Sean's thigh and I felt something for him again, something of what I'd felt so many nights ago. Sean put his hand on my shoulder as we both listened. “I guess they must turn it off at night,” Sean said.

“Turn what off?”

“The recording. I don't imagine they keep it going all night.”

I was suddenly confused as Sean took my hand and led me toward the right ventricle. In my youth I came here with my class at school and we raced through as our impatient, fatigued mothers, envious of our energy, rocked on their sore feet, waiting for us to exhaust ourselves. I'm not certain why it never occurred to me in all those years that they would turn it off, that the steady sure beat was a mere recording, that it did not go on and on, into the long hours, alone in the night, in this museum, amidst submarines and fairy castles and bottled babies. It had never occurred to me that late at night this place was silent as a tomb, because for all those years I had pictured this darkened musem, this entire city, with only one sure thing, the heart that beat on and on, and not some mere recording of a heart that got switched off.

Sean put his arms around me. “Maybe they don't turn it off. Maybe they just let it go all night to keep the guards awake.” When he kissed me, he felt me grow tense in his arms. I was afraid and Sean sensed it. “I don't want to put any pressure on you,” he said. “It didn't work out the last time.”

I kissed him back, even though something made me want to run away. My life had once been simple and clear, and now I just didn't know. Later, as we drove through the city streets, heading back to Downers Grove at dusk, tired and sweaty from a day of sightseeing, I found myself fighting against the past. I had made this trip with another man at another time. I battled back memory the way the lion tamer battles to get the wild beasts back into their cages, when in truth they should be running free in the woods. But my father had given me the answer that night at my sister's barbecue. My life lives within me. Now I knew what he meant.