Families and Survivors (13 page)

If he had said that, she would have shyly smiled and said yes—he knows her; he is sure of that. Louisa would at least sometimes like to be told what to do. (Andrew thinks that is a mistake that Michael makes with her.)

Or—he could have taken her in his car out Lombard Street, to one of the motels there.

By the time he gets home, he has worked out the mechanics of that possible afternoon in innumerable ways. It is depressingly clear that it was all his fault that nothing happened.

“Well, you’re looking pretty sassy tonight,” King says later—horrifyingly: this is a favorite phrase of Louisa’s father.

And then he says, “What happened? You run into some kind of an old friend downtown?”

How could he have known? “Oh, you saw us?”

“I haven’t been out of the house.” This is probably true; King almost never goes out except at night, and then, almost invisible, he roams. (He mentions gyms on Market Street; he does not mention hustling outside downtown hotels.) “I just guessed,” he says.

He is a witch, a warlock; she has always known this about him. She admits, “Yes, in fact I had lunch with an old friend.”

“Well, now, that’s all right; you don’t have to apologize.”

“I’m not.”

He has sprawled as usual across his couch, in his invariable clean white T-shirt. His eyes are large and luminous and tired. His mouth is tight.

Louisa sits, as always, uncomfortably forward on a stiff chair; she has thrown her coat across the couch, near King’s feet. Tonight the room looks strange to her, as King looks strange. (Why is she here?)

He says, “Well, I can’t exactly object to that. Matter of fact an old friend of mine blew into town, blew over to see me, if you don’t mind the expression.” He yawns, by way of emphasis, and then he watches Louisa.

She has a curious sense that he is lying; Bobbie was not there that afternoon, if indeed there is a Bobbie. In any case the old thrilling and addictive anxiety, usually stirred by any shadow of Bobbie, is missing now. Louisa simply looks at King (who is he?), and then she does what it is amazing that she has never done before: she picks up her coat and without a word she goes out the door.

This is not the end of it, not quite. King telephones, of course, and they act out a violent reconciliation.

This happens again.

And again.

By then it is late spring, a lovely May in which Louisa takes Maude on picnics, and long country drives to see the flowering trees. They spend afternoons at windy beaches that remind her of home, of beaches in Maryland and Virginia. It is an exceptional spring.

Louisa is working hard. Dozens of drawings, and she is thinking about drawing all the time.

(And she is on the verge of understanding that King and the others have been excuses for not leaving Michael.)

King decides to take his paintings (still unfinished) to
New York, in fact to move there. He insists that Louisa follow him—he is madly in love with her by now. And she agrees, wondering if this is what she will do.

He telephones, he writes. Once he simply arrives. He has flown back to see her, if only for an afternoon.

She tells him that it is over; she is through. Such simple (and final) knowledge; she is just not glad to see him.

But King is insanely perverse. He continues to telephone, even when she hangs up at the sound of his voice. And some uncanny instinct, some lingering sense of her, makes him always telephone in moments of crisis—Louisa’s crisis. He calls when she is waiting for a call from Bayard, who comes close to breaking her heart.

He calls just after she has learned that her mother has died.

He is a ghost, who for years will haunt her life.

Late night, Louisa’s bedroom. It is also Michael’s bedroom, but for the past two years he has been sleeping in his study. Working there, he would fall asleep over books or periodicals. Then, for a time, his practice was to get up and come to the bed where Louisa already was. If she was at home. She was often out: art classes, movies with friends. Things like that. Out, home late.

Louisa has persuaded Michael that she hates to be awakened in the middle of the night. Can’t go back to sleep.

But tonight—having freshly showered and shaved, brushed teeth—he goes into the still dark room. Wanting her.

They have not made love for—he can’t remember when. (Ten months—she could remember; she could have told him that.)

He sits on the bed, knowing she is not asleep, waiting for her to stop pretending that she is.

He touches her hand, at which she retracts it; she
pulls her knees up to her chest and clutches them, as she opens her eyes.

He touches her foot. “I want to make love to you, to kiss—.”

She pulls back the foot. “I think we should get a divorce.”

A harsh and unreal sentence, curiously loud. A sentence that continues to hang in the dark between them, with its own existence—or so Michael feels it.

Weakly he says, “What?”

“A divorce,” she repeats, as though making a reasonable demand. Expressing a choice.

Michael is suddenly aware that outside their windows (theirs?—hers?) a torrential rain has begun, lashing at the glass, creaking through the bones of the house. Playing for time—he is waiting for something, anything else to happen—he remarks on this. “It’s raining.”

“Yes.”

No help. Knowing how stupid he must sound, he says, “I can’t believe this is happening to us.”

She doesn’t answer, although he can feel her looking at him, and so he says something worse: “I thought in some ways we had a good marriage.”

She makes a short bitter sound. Then she says, “Christ, Michael.”

It occurs to him to say, Well, why not make love anyway? For once. What could it matter?

But even as these brave and uncharacteristic sentences form he realizes that he no longer wants to. Couldn’t, in fact, even if she did.

So that now there is simply the question of what else to say. And since there is nothing else, how to get out of the room. He begins to inch backward on the bed; then, aware that he is moving much too slowly, ridiculously, he suddenly
stands up. He dimly feels that the less that is said the better. The quickest, perhaps, forgotten.

He says, “Well, see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight.”

It is barely possible that she is crying. He can’t tell.

The next day is a clear soft warm April day. It is bright enough to make the previous night unreal, and all that day Michael tries to tell himself (amazing, how nearly he succeeds in believing) that the night before did not, in fact, occur. Louisa did not say what, in the midst of the midnight storm, he thought he heard her say.

Ironically, most of the patients whom he sees that day are people with marital problems. (Or perhaps this is what everyone has? They “come and go”—are not serious?)

“Doctor, we don’t communicate—.”

“Doctor, it’s been four years since we—.”

“Doctor, just what is the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist?”

(Michael hates this question; for one thing, he is so tired of it.)

“Wasserman, what the hell kind of a name is that,
if
you don’t mind my asking.”

“Doctor, my father never did—.”

“—and now it’s too late.”

When he gets home, Louisa and Maude have just got back from the park, and their faces are a little pink from the unusual sun. Especially Maude’s since she is fairer. They are both cheerful and slightly out of breath, having had a good afternoon.

Remembering the night before, and for a moment
quite sure that it was real—she
did
say that—Michael looks at Maude and feels a stabbing pain at the possibility of her loss. He goes over to her and strokes her fair hair. His own color hair. His child. “Honey, would you like me to read to you for a while?”

Louisa gives him an opaque look, but she says, “Terrific. I’ll get dinner.”

Chicken and rice. Asparagus. A green salad. Coconut cake (a bought one—Sara Lee). A dinner like any other.

Conversation, or lack of it, like any other. The two adults speak mainly to Maude. Michael for the first time notices this, and makes an attempt to talk to Louisa, to his wife. “I had a real old-fashioned anti-Semite of a patient today,” he begins, chuckling—she will like this story.

Maude interrupts. “Why are patients called ‘patients’?”

Interested, their attention caught, her parents stare at each other. Why, indeed, why patients? Odd that they had never thought of it.

Encouraged, Maude asks, “What do patients have to do with patience?”

Michael explains. “Both words are from the Latin root, the word for suffering, or enduring—.” But in the course of his explanation to Maude he has forgotten the story he meant to tell Louisa. Something about an anti-Semite, a patient? At that, a heavy vision of his mother intrudes on his mind, and he thinks of all that Louisa has suffered (and endured) at the hands of his parents. He sighs, unaware that he is imitating his mother’s heavy sighs.

That is how things are for a week or so: no more communication but, on the other hand, no less. And what Michael least wants to do is to push the issue.

Then one afternoon he comes home to find Louisa also just home, and all dressed up and very excited. “Really, terrific news,” she tells him. She is very pretty in her navy suit, sweater, and pearls—in her excitement. ‘I’ve got a job!”

“Honey, that’s great.” But his heart lurches sideways: what does this mean, a job?

She describes a small advertising agency in an old building in North Beach. “Of course at first I’ll just be doing layouts, comprehensives and the salary isn’t much—.”

She goes on for some time, animatedly, after Michael has stopped listening: he is too anxious to listen to what she says. What will it mean, her having a job?

Clearly she has thought of everything: arranged for Maude to stay with a friendly neighbor for a couple of hours after school, and since it is only a part-time job Louisa will be home at two. And next fall Maude will be in school till two. She is going to see about a cleaning lady.

Louisa starts work the next Monday. When Michael comes home, she is there, with Maude, her stockinged feet in bedroom slippers. “God, I’m really tired!” But from the kitchen comes the satisfying warm garlicky smell of a carefully prepared casserole.

She talks a lot at dinner. She is nervy, excited. Tired, but her eyes are lighter than they have been for years. (What does this mean?) Michael can hardly listen to anything that she is saying.

Spring.

Summer.

…

Nothing happens. Except that one day Michael notices that Louisa never goes anywhere at night any more, no more movies with friends. But he can’t remember how long she has not been doing this.

She gets a lot of special delivery letters from New York, but what could that possibly mean?

During the days of his most acute anxiety, some cruel quirk in Michael’s mind makes him think only of the best times with Louisa; the bad days are unavailable to his needful memory. The first time they screwed, in the attic of his parents’ house in Boston, with his parents right downstairs! Louisa in a black dress, very animated, at a party. Introducing Louisa to Dr. Sampson. Sampson’s face.

But slowly over the summer, Michael’s anxiety diminishes. The cold San Francisco summer seems to last, and nothing changes. Perhaps nothing is going to change. Louisa goes to work; she cheerfully complains that she is tired. She goes to bed early. They all go to bed early. Separately.

Then, early in September, Louisa tells Michael excitedly that on a sudden impulse she has called her old friend Kate. (“You remember Kate? She came down to see us for dinner, when I was pregnant.” He does, but not quite: someone sexy, something unpleasant.) Kate now lives in Berkeley; her husband is a surgeon—hearts. They have a house near Tahoe, and have invited Louisa for a week. Louisa and Maude. “I told them you couldn’t get away.” And so they go. (The agency is nice about letting Louisa take time off, with no pay.)

Michael does not like being alone; he finds it frightening, a silence full of echoes. He eats a lot—snacks, several meals a day. But he decides that he is really all right; it is temporary. His wife and daughter are away on a visit.

He thinks that the thing to do is to make a celebration of their return. Louisa has sometimes remarked that he is
“joyless”—his is not a festive sensibility. He is not Southern, with all their ceremonies and effusions.

He goes out to buy champagne, although at the last minute he cannot remember which one Louisa has said is best, Korbel or Almadén. (French champagne would be going too far, really; it would show desperation.) He decides on Almadén, but is sure that he has made the wrong decision. He remembers to put glasses in the refrigerator. He considers calling a baby-sitter, so that he can take Louisa out to dinner, but then is struck with a better idea; he will take them both out. Safer that way. A reunited family.

And they go to a family-style restaurant, brown Louisa and Maude and pale Michael, who feels fat; can he have gained weight in a week? (he has.) A French-Italian restaurant, where you get a lot to eat. On the walls are amateurish reproductions of famous paintings, but the effect is warm.

At first Maude and Louisa talk a lot. How cold the lake was. Water skiing—Louisa surprised herself by being good at it. “
Sort
of. But I must be feeling really confident these days.” She smiles. Sailing. Kate’s children. Busy David, the successful doctor. “Really repairing
hearts.
” Kate’s intense domesticity. “But she seems really happy doing all that, and the kids are nice. The youngest is named for me—I was touched.”

Then it all seems to fizzle down, their talk, and they might not have been away, Louisa and Maude. The three of them could be any tired family, out hopefully for dinner.

They go home.

Maude goes to bed.

With a sort of bravado Michael brings in the champagne. Chilled glasses on a tray. “I thought we ought to celebrate your coming home,” he says. “But I can’t remember if it was Korbel or Almadén we liked.”