For Love (25 page)

‘And this is Jack!’ Elizabeth said eagerly, her hand extended. ‘I’ve heard so much about you!’

This was not true; Lottie had deliberately told her hardly anything; but Jack smiled warmly and let her hold his hand in both of hers as they shook. Lottie looked up at them. Jack and Elizabeth
were both tall, leggy, and they looked good together, much better than Cam and Elizabeth did; or than he and Lottie had in the mirror last night. Lottie had a friend who used how people looked
together as a gauge of their potential for success as a couple. She and Jack would flunk, Lottie thought now. She should give him to Elizabeth.

‘I knew Charlotte would try to keep you to herself,’ Elizabeth was saying. ‘So when I heard you were coming to Cameron’s for a drink, I wheedled an invitation.’

Cameron was fetching another glass from the cupboard above the kitchen counter. ‘It was beautifully done,’ he said. ‘I thought for a while she badly needed to be with
me.’ He came back across the room, holding out the glass, just as Elizabeth dropped into the butterfly chair. ‘You want wine,’ he said to her.

‘Of course!’ she cried. ‘Tons of wine! No, gallons!’ She laughed. ‘I need to catch up with all of you!’ She was wound even tighter than usual, Lottie saw.

Jack had sat down on the couch again, and Lottie leaned toward him a little. He spread his hand on her thigh, as though he felt her need for assurance. He was asking Elizabeth how long
she’d been in Boston, and she began to tell him an abbreviated version of the story she’d told Lottie at the beginning of the summer, the story Jack had already heard from Lottie. While
Elizabeth was speaking, Lottie looked at Jack’s hand on her leg, at the long flat fingers. She remembered once looking down at them spread across her own abdomen and asking him idly whether
he thought he might have Marfan syndrome. He’d snorted. ‘That’s about as likely a diagnosis,’ he’d said, moving his finger up to the whited dent in her breast,
‘as my concluding that this is the result of a broken heart.’

Lottie’s hand rose involuntarily to her breast now, and then quickly down.

Cameron’s eyes moved from Elizabeth’s face to Jack’s and Lottie’s as Elizabeth talked, assessing their response to her. She’s mine, she’s mine, they said:
what do you think?

They started to talk about the Democratic convention, held the week before, and Cam was being expert about Dukakis, his unlikeliness, his chances or lack thereof. The sun had moved directly
opposite Lottie now, and she had to squint to look at Elizabeth and Cameron, so she didn’t, for the most part. It made the conversation feel distant and unreal to her, as though she’d
taken a powerful drug. ‘I don’t know,’ Cam said. ‘Neil Diamond supplying the emotion. It seems a new low to me.’

Elizabeth began to reminisce about the politics of the sixties. She’d worked in the McCarthy campaign. ‘Remember? Get clean for Gene? I bought these little cotton blouses with Peter
Pan collars. I eschewed eye makeup. This, in context – well, in my life generally – was a macrosacrifice. I had a circle pin.’ She clasped her hands to her bosom. ‘Oh, I
behaved so beautifully! And all for naught, of course. But it just felt – well, you remember it, Cam – so cosmically important. And every march! Remember the one in Washington? Cam and
I went together,’ she explained to Lottie and Jack. ‘What a time!’ She shook her head, dazzled by her memories.

Lottie remembered the spring of ’68 too, hearing that King had been shot, that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, while Ryan careened and fluttered his way around inside her. She’d felt
she’d made a terrible mistake, that she shouldn’t be bringing a child into such a world.

‘I’m just enough older than you to see it differently,’ Jack said. ‘I think it was a terrible and divisive time. I had friends who literally lost their children for
years. Other friends who, it seems to me, compromised everything not to lose them.’

‘What do you mean?’ Elizabeth asked. She’d sat forward in her chair, and she was watching Jack’s face. Lottie turned to him too. The bright sun was in his eyes as well,
and he was squinting, seeming to look far into his past. He talked about parties in Hyde Park and Kenwood, parties where adult children, stoned, offered critiques of their parents’ lives, the
lives of their parents’ friends, while the parents themselves nodded, passionately agreed. ‘It was delusional, finally,’ Jack said. ‘I think those who crossed over thought
they could make themselves young again. They paid a high price later. But those who resisted, who argued with their kids, paid a high price too.’ He shook his head.

‘What was the price?’ Cam asked.

Jack’s shoulders rose. ‘They lost their children. Quite simply.’

‘No, I mean the price for those who – how did you put it? – “went along”?’

‘I think I said “crossed over.” And that varied. Sometimes they were just foolish for a while. Sometimes the foolishness became a permanent condition: I still see some of them
around, unable to let themselves become . . . well, elderly, which is what they are at this point, really. Sometimes they lost their marriages – good, stable marriages – for some brief
fling with what they saw, I suppose, as youth and passion.’

‘Why brief?’ Cam’s voice had a still, dangerous quality.

‘Why?’

‘Yes. Why isn’t it possible to conceive of someone really starting over, really discovering something that changes him, that makes a whole new universe of experience possible? Why
should that be beyond imagining, just because you’re a certain age?’

‘I’m not arguing it is.’

‘You seem to be.’

‘I’m not. I’m sorry if I sounded that way. I just meant . . .’ Jack looked at Lottie. She was watching him and Cameron. ‘Look, it was a wholesale promise that way,
the sixties. I think individual change is possible, can be permanent. But any . . . movement that promises we can all find happiness, any way – love, drugs, whatever – is just wrong.
People become what they are over time. There’s a kind of cumulative meaning to a life – don’t you think? – that isn’t so easy to sweep aside.’ He turned to
Lottie again. ‘It’s like what Lottie is working on, this impulse to prescribe emotion, emotional health. People don’t live that way. And if they try to, they lose something,
something central, I’d say. And the sixties, during that whole Vietnam era, that’s what people were trying to do.’

Whatever it was that had piqued Cam seemed to have been resolved. He had relaxed back in his chair. And Elizabeth, as though she’d sensed the tension too, began to chatter again –
about the war this time, about friends who resisted, friends who fabricated medical deferments, a few friends who went. ‘God, the endless moral arguments. Was it moral just to evade? Did you
have to take a stand? Were you sacrificing enough if you gave up everything to go to Canada?’ She shook her head. Her smooth hair swayed. ‘I actually ended a friendship because the man
cheated his way out,’ she said. ‘Got a doctor to say he’d been a heavy drug user and was therefore, I don’t know, psychologically unreliable, or something. When I think of
my own sense of superiority – I, with this much’ – she held her forefinger and thumb pressed together in front of her face – ‘to lose, of course.’

Jack cleared his throat. ‘Yes, my first wife and I had those discussions. She was passionately antiwar.’ Lottie knew this about Evelyn. ‘She couldn’t forgive me for my
lack of involvement. Which was a matter of degree, really, because I did agree with her, on one level. But I came from a different life, a small-town life. I had a younger brother who went, who
emerged from that same life and went, and what I was uncomfortable with was the venom that seemed to be directed toward those who bought in, as he did. We had some pretty lively discussions at
home.’ He grinned. ‘She could be pretty high-toned, morally, herself.’

Elizabeth laughed her high, excited laugh. They were all silent a few seconds in its wake, thinking, Lottie suspected, thoughts as disparate and self-involved as thoughts could be.

The Elizabeth slumped back and heaved a thorough sigh. And here came hers: ‘God, to say – so easily – “my first wife.” Will I ever reach such a stage?’

Lottie felt Jack’s fingers tighten momentarily. The equivalent of a flinch. She cleared her throat.

But Cameron was leaning forward and touching Elizabeth’s knee. He said, in a too intense voice, ‘Yes, you will.’

Lottie felt she was drowning; she didn’t know why she hadn’t been able to talk, but she didn’t want to listen anymore, either. She tapped Jack’s wristwatch through the
cuff of his shirt, their signal, and then she stood up, dusting bread crumbs off her pants. ‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said. ‘And then we’re going to have to go to dinner,
Jack.’

She stepped across the painted floor, her footsteps sounding thunderously loud to her. Once inside the bathroom, she could hear them begin to talk again, then she could hear other footsteps.
They were up, walking around, beginning to say goodbye. The casement window in the bathroom was open. When she sat on the toilet, she could see out, over the brick buildings to the Prudential Tower
and some other high-rises. She wished she could just step out the window and materialize outside on the street. ‘Step out the window and turn left,’ as Fats Waller said. She
didn’t want to have to pass back through Cameron’s living room, to make the chitchat necessary to get them out. She surprised herself in the mirror, she looked so composed. She felt
frazzled and adolescent.

When she went back out into the big room, though, she saw that Jack had done most of the work. The three others stood by the opened door to the hall, and when Jack heard her, he looked over and
held up her purse, to show her they were ready to go.

As they came outside, Lottie took his arm. ‘God,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

‘Yeah, what was it with you?’ he asked. ‘Why were you so silent?’

Lottie shrugged. After a minute she said, ‘I don’t know. I think I felt threatened by her with you around. I felt suddenly exactly as I had around her as a girl.’

‘Ridiculous Lottie,’ he said. ‘She’s a nice enough woman. But also a particular version of a pain in the ass, darling.’

Lottie laughed. ‘Well, how lovely to hear you say so.’

They were walking down a derelict street, in the direction of the fancier part of the South End. Across the street from them, there was a towering hill of dirt behind a chain-link fence. A fat
orange moon was rising from behind it in the still blue-domed sky. ‘This is a fine idea.’ Jack gestured. ‘Day and night simultaneously.’

As they walked along, Lottie began to sing ‘Night and Day.’ Her voice sounded little and breathless in the open air.

When she was finished, they walked in silence for a while. Lottie heard the rhythm of their steps together, hers a beat and a half to his one. Jack said, ‘It’s interesting to see you
and your brother together.’

‘Really? How?’

‘Oh, just to see how you’re alike, how you’re different.’

‘How are we alike?’

He put his hands in his pants pockets. His elbows winged back. He looked at Lottie intently. ‘You’re both terribly willful. Strong.’

Lottie was silent a moment, adjusting to this. Finally she said, ‘And the difference?’

He smiled, and his eyes seemed to lighten. ‘You wear it better, darling.’

Lottie laughed, then sobered and sighed. ‘Well, I sure hope this works out for him.’

He looked at her sharply. ‘Oh, come on, Lottie.’

‘What?’

‘You’re talking about Elizabeth and Cameron?’

‘Yes.’

He shook his head. ‘That’s not going to work out.’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘Because. It’s an infatuation, on her part. She’s biding her time, that’s all. She’s not, finally, going to be interested in the kind of life they could have
together. Believe me. I know her type.’

‘Her type!’ She was offended: on Elizabeth’s account, of all things. ‘What a thing to say, Jack.’ She thought of mentioning the scars, but didn’t.

‘Nonetheless,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I do.’

‘I won’t ask you how,’ Lottie said.

‘How what?’

‘What who?’

He laughed, and Lottie decided to laugh too, to drop it.

They came through Union Park, and Lottie pointed out the house she thought they’d used in filming
The Bostonians
. Their stride had slowed now. They stopped at a restaurant Cam had
recommended. It had big plate-glass windows on three sides; it seemed to sit out on the street. They unfolded their napkins and watched the waiter pour water into their glasses. They perused the
menu, ordered, had a bottle of wine brought over.

‘Not that we need it,’ Jack said, after the waiter had poured it.

‘I need it,’ Lottie said. ‘I want to get thoroughly wasted.’ She saw his face tighten, but decided to ignore it. Just then a black woman and a white woman walked by on
the street, holding hands. The black woman had intricate beaded braids dangling around her face. She was wearing clumsy-looking black leather boots, and frayed shorts, and a T-shirt that said,
‘How Dare You Assume I’m Straight.’ The white woman was coming from an office job. She had on a pastel suit with a straight, short skirt over pale, nurse-colored stockings.

‘Check it out,’ Lottie said. ‘Talk about your mix of class and race.’

‘To say nothing of hairdressers,’ he said.

‘And sense of chic,’ she offered. She sipped some wine. ‘Well, sisterhood is powerful.’

After a moment he said, ‘You and Elizabeth seem unlikely friends.’

‘Well, we’re not, of course. Friends.’

‘What would you call it, then?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘We have spent a fair amount of time together. But that just happened somehow. Proximity, I guess.’ She watched him for a minute.
Then she said, ‘How do you, in fact, know her type? Elizabeth’s, I mean.’

He looked out the window, then back at Lottie, frowning. ‘Evelyn, I suppose.’ He seemed reluctant.

‘Was Evelyn like
her
?’

‘In most ways, no, she wasn’t. She was steady and calm, almost reserved, I’d say, and Elizabeth is anything but. But they both have that patrician air, that smell of the upper
class.’ He smiled. ‘That sense of themselves. It’s hard to shake, growing up that way. And Elizabeth oozes it.’