I Cannot Get You Close Enough (25 page)

“Just bring them to me. You don't mind doing that, do you?”

“You want me to mail them?”

“No. I want you to bring them to me yourself.”

Noel. Who could ever figure her out? My psychiatrist says she is living vicariously through all of us now that she can't live for herself. He says I should learn from that to live my own life and not expect others to create it for me. Which brings me to Alan. I suppose I have to try to justify that. I'm not perfect. I don't mind admitting I make mistakes.

I will focus on the day Alan arrived. I could see right off he and Crystal were through. He doesn't love her anymore. He got tired of waiting for her to divorce Manny and start supporting him. She stays married to Manny for Manny's money and Alan wants to marry her for her money, although she doesn't have much of her own. Besides, she's too old for Alan. He's my age.

I know all this sounds cynical, but so what? I will tell the truth, not some romantic version. Alan showed up and I was horny and as soon as he and Crystal got over their short honeymoon I got the hots for him.

That's the truth. It's wonderful to tell the truth. You can get sick from lies. You can get lies inside you like bacteria and they will kill you.

Alan arrived one afternoon, just as we were coming back from the beach. I had met him before, one terrible week in New Orleans after Francis Alter died, but we didn't like each other then. I thought he was a callow youth and I guess I will think so again. Anyway, the truth is I betrayed my friend. Alan got interested in me while Crystal was still interested in him and when he asked me, I went walking with him down by the sea.

“Come on down to the ocean with me,” he said. “I want to walk and Crystal won't go.”

“I have to help King with his homework,” she explained. “He has a class to make up that he missed when he was in the hospital.”

So Crystal stayed there and Alan and I walked down the paving stones and on down across the lawn that turns to sand and climbed over the stone wall. When he took my arm to help me over the wall I trembled. I know it was because I hadn't been laid in so long. Everyone in Seattle is afraid to do it with anyone. I can't even want to do it. All I think about is AIDS and chlamydia and yeast infections and ascending cystitis. Something I got the last time I made love. One night with an old boyfriend I've had for years. By morning I had this nasty little cystitis and had to take antibiotics for two weeks. Is it worth it? I'm beginning to doubt it. So why did I think Crystal's snotty social-climbing tennis player boyfriend would be any better? Because fucking isn't thinking. Fucking is desire and is ancient and born of danger and fraught with danger. My subconscious got a whiff of danger and wormed its way into the light by telling me that
Alan was my astral twin
. Is there no end to superstition and insanity? What day were you born? Alan says. July twenty-fifth, I answered, and he says, So was I. Eureka! Same day, same year.

“Crystal's too fragile to make love to,” he told me later. “She's ten years older than I am.”

“I know,” I said, perfidious. But that came later. On this first day, the day he touched me and I trembled, we just walked along beside the sea. We barely spoke. We wandered down across the sand dunes to the beach. It was overcast and gray. The surf was falling so lightly against the rocks, waiting, spinning. To remind us that the world is spinning and that we have no idea what we are doing here.

The surf touched the rocks in its insistent, sensuous way, and I walked next to Crystal's lover and thought of the poverty of my life, going out with rugby players and gallery owners and television people. At least Alan was from a good family. Or at least he knew how to pretend to be from a good family. Joe told me later he had called Alan's home in New York once and the mother answered the phone and she sounded very middle class. Anyway, Alan had gone to Princeton and had good manners and was down in New Orleans trying to make it in society. Climbing any ladder he could find. He had joined Grace Episcopal Church and was going to work in the fall for a wealthy Jewish importer. To be the liaison, he said, whatever that means.

“So you're broke until then?” I asked, trying to break the spell.

“No, I'm not broke. I just don't want to stay here on Crystal's hospitality all summer. We can go up to Canada and pick up some change and come back. It's my last summer before I settle down to the grind.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, looked out at the sea. I could see him in his suit and tie, being the liaison, working in the real world. Men are amazing, aren't they? Why do I always want to fuck them? Well, I had put this one on hold by talking about money. Whatever had happened when we crossed the wall had been ruined by my asking him if he was broke.

The next morning he was waiting for me on the porch when I got up. He was dressed and sitting on the top step looking out toward the sea. It couldn't have been later than eight o'clock. “You ready to go see the ocean?” he asked. I was wearing a dressing gown, holding a coffee cup. The dressing gown was white with pale blue flowers and a small ruffle down the front and along the hem. I was barefooted. I let the gown fall open so he could see my chemise. Then I tied it back together. I set the cup down on a colonnade. “Yes,” I said. “Let me get on some clothes. I'll be right back.”

When I came back Crystal was with him. “We're going walking,” he said. “Lydia and I are going to walk to town. Can we bring you anything?”

“It's four miles,” she said. She got up, looked at me. I had on white shorts and a T-shirt. I had on tennis shoes. I had on makeup. “Well, enjoy yourselves,” she added. Then she was gone. She turned and disappeared into the house. “Let's go,” I said. “I need to get some exercise.”

So Alan and I walked all the way down to the pier beside the bridge and we walked out on the pier and stood there, side by side with our hips touching, and talked about doing it. How we would do it, why we had a right to do it, if we should tell her we were going to do it.

Then we decided not to do it.

Until the next afternoon when Crystal took all the children into Tennant's Harbor to The Hangout. Traceleen was in the kitchen folding clothes and watching
Days of Our Lives
and Alan came into my room while I was dressing and we did it. I still can't believe I did it. It was the single dumbest thing I've ever done
in my life
and I still haven't figured out why I did it and I'm not sure I learned much from it but I did learn this. Our appetites are waiting.
Homo sapiens
will finally eat and finally get laid so McVey is right and I owe him an apology. No matter how particular I am or how picky or how much I think no one is good enough for me or how much I'm afraid of catching the tiniest little germ, when I get home I have got to find a lover. No matter how much trouble it is or how much time it takes from my work I will never again treat my body the way I treated it the year before I ended up in this nutzoid expedition to the state of Maine.

 

Afterward, we put our clothes back on and ignored each other. It was two days later before we met by accident in the yard and decided to go for another walk. We walked down to an old deserted gray house with swings in the yard and sat in the swings and talked about our childhoods. He didn't mention doing it and I didn't mention doing it. I began to think we didn't do it. Maybe I just think we did it.

On our way back we ran into King and Andria sitting on a rock beside the gardens with the flower clock. Andria had her knees tucked up around her breasts. King was talking and she was listening. That's the mating dance. In the mating dance the men talk and the women listen. Later, only the women talk.

“Hi there,” Andria said, as we drew near. “Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” Alan said.

“Come walk back with us,” I added.

“No. You go on.” This from King. He hates Alan. Also, he has started liking Manny
at last
. When Crystal first married Manny, I thought King might kill Manny. He cut down all the roses in Mrs. Weiss's garden during the ceremony. The worst morning of my life. Later, he cut off the tops of the Japanese magnolias Manny planted on the lawn. Then he broke up the marriage. Now he had relented on Manny and was going to decimate Alan. Only Alan was too smart for him.
Alan Dalton
, I can't believe I let myself get taken in by him. Still, he took my arm when we climbed the wall and I started trembling. It's all touch. Be careful who you let touch you, especially if you're far away from home or by an ocean. The ocean in Maine is so powerful and cold and gray. All night, every night all summer, while we were sleeping, the ocean was tugging on us, calling us back to our senses.

 

“How do you think it's working out with Andria being here?” I asked Crystal, later that morning. I had found her straightening out the silver in the dining room. Just like Noel to have antique silver in a summer house. She used to shop all the time at auctions and yard sales when she spent her summers here. The house is full of gorgeous linens and antiques, things she picked up over the years.

“I think Andria is just fine,” Crystal replied. She laid three embossed soup spoons on a red velvet cloth. She didn't look up.

“You aren't mad because I've been taking walks with Alan, are you?” I said. “I won't do it if you don't want me to.”

“I don't care what Alan Dalton does. I'm not in charge of his life.”

“I thought you still loved him.”

“Well, you thought wrong. You can do anything you like with Alan.” She stopped, looked straight at me, as if I hadn't been there the spring before when she was so much in love with him she was almost crazy. As if I hadn't driven around with her looking for his car outside of bars and sat for hours one night at Tyler's because she thought he was coming there. As if I hadn't lied to Manny the time we met him in Mandeville for the weekend.

“You don't love him anymore?”

“No. He's too unambitious. He's been out of law school for two and a half years and he still doesn't have a job. I'm not going to put up with any more of Alan's bullshit, Lydia. I don't know why he even came up here.”

“Crystal,” I began. She had gone back to sorting the silver. Not looking at me. It was dark in the room, the blinds were drawn. I wanted to open one but I went on. “Crystal, please don't start getting mad at me. I love you. I have come all the way across the United States to stay with you. I don't want anything to come between us.”

“I don't care what you and Alan do. Do you understand that? When are they leaving anyway?”

“They aren't sure.”

“Well, they have to be gone before Daniel gets here with his girls. There isn't going to be room for everyone.”

“Don't kick them out because of me. Crystal, please talk to me.” She had stopped what she was doing. She was glaring at the napkins. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the dark room staring down at the napkins and she was really mad at me. “I want Alan and his friend to leave by Friday morning, Lydia. That's that. Go on up to Canada with them if you want to. This is a family holiday.”

“All right,” I said. “Hold on. Okay.” I walked across the room and began to open the shades. The second one I touched tore off the roller and came crashing down upon a table covered with bric-a-brac. A hand-painted glass lampshade clattered to the floor but did not break.

“It didn't break,” I said.

“Well, goddammit,” Crystal said, and got up and picked up the lampshade and put it back up on the table. Then she picked up the broken window shade and rolled it up. “Ask Traceleen to come in here and bring a ladder,” she said. “We'll have to put this back up.”

 

Helen Abadie called that afternoon. If Noel had told me the exact truth to begin with I would have known what to say. If Noel had said, Lydia, I want you and Crystal to go up to Maine and get Anna's letters and hide them because I don't want Helen to get them, I would have said, Sure, I understand. Those are your letters and Helen doesn't have any right to them.

Instead Noel just tells me this very mysterious thing about getting Anna's letters so I think it's another of her made-up dramas and I don't take it seriously. Then Helen Abadie calls and I answer the phone.

“I want to come up there and bring Mike to meet you,” she says. “I've told him all about all of you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on up. I don't know how many rooms have decent beds. But the view is great. Come on.”

“We don't need much room,” Helen answered. “Just one room. Mike teaches at Harvard. You know that, don't you?”

“No,” I lied. “I don't know anything about it.” Of course everyone knew Helen had lost her mind and left her husband and five children to live in sin with her fellow literary executor, Mike something or other, in a shabby little apartment in Boston. She hadn't even gone back to Charlotte for her clothes. Poor old Spencer Abadie was down there running the family as best he could while his wife went crazy.

“Helen's coming Saturday,” I told Crystal. “Crystal, please stop being mad at me. Nobody's perfect. Jesus Christ.”

“I'm stopping being mad,” she answered. “I'm stopping as fast as I can.”

 

Everyone was mad at me for a while. I tied my hair back in a knot and stopped wearing makeup and tried to make up with them. I decided to start with Traceleen.

“Is Andria your sister's child?” I asked. I had found her in the breakfast room ironing Crystal Anne's clothes and watching
Ryan's Hope
on a little ten-inch TV she had brought with her from New Orleans.

“Sure is.”

“The oldest child?”

“Second to oldest. She's a peach, isn't she?”

“She's a beautiful girl. I hope she's having a good time. I'm sorry there isn't more for them to do.”