Lisey’s Story (31 page)

When Scott
is
at home, he's in her eye a great deal more than she's used to, because he's not crawling off to the grim little room that's been designated his study to write stories. He
tries
to write them at first, but
by December his efforts have become sporadic and by February he's given up entirely. The man who can write in a Motel 6 with eight lanes of traffic pounding by outside and a frat party going on upstairs has come utterly and completely unstrappinzee. But he doesn't brood about it, not that she can see. Instead of writing he spends long, hilarious, and ultimately exhausting weekends with his wife. Often she drinks with him and gets drunk with him, because other than fuck him it's all she can think of to do. There are blue hungover Mondays when Lisey is actually glad to see him going out the door, although when ten PM comes and he's still not back, she's always perched by the living room window that looks out on the Ring Road, waiting anxiously for the leased Audi he drives, wondering where he is and who he's drinking with. How
much
he's drinking. There are Saturdays when he persuades her to play strenuous games of hide and seek with him in the big drafty house; he says it will keep them warm, at least, and he's right about that. Or they will chase each other, racing up and down stairs or pounding along the halls in their ridiculous
lederhosen
, laughing like a pair of dopey (not to mention horny) kids, yelling out their German buzzwords:
Achtung!
and
Jawohl!
and
Ich habe Kopfschmerzen!
and—most frequently—
Mein Gott!
More often than not these silly games end in sex. With booze or without it (but usually with), Scott always wants sex that winter and spring, and she believes that before they vacate the drafty house on the Bergen-strasse, they have done it in all the rooms, most of the bathrooms (including the one with the hideous laughing toilet), and even some of the closets. All that sex is one of the reasons that she never (well,
almost
never) worries that he's having an affair, in spite of the long hours he's gone, in spite of the hard drinking, in spite of the fact that he's not doing what he was
made
to do, which is to write stories.

But of course she's not doing what
she
was made to do, either, and there are times when that knowledge catches up to her. She can't say he lied to her, or even misdirected her; no, she can never say that. He only told her once, but that one time he was perfectly straight about it: there could be no kids. If she felt she had to have children—and he knew she came from a big family—then they couldn't get married. It would break his heart, but if that was how she felt, that was the way it would
have to be. He had told her that under the yum-yum tree, where they'd sat enclosed in the strange October snow. She only permits herself to remember that conversation during the lonely weekday afternoons in Bremen, when the sky always seems to be white and the hour none and the trucks rumble endlessly and the bed shakes beneath her. The bed that he bought and will later insist on having shipped back to America. Often she lies there with her arm over her eyes, thinking that this was a really
terrible
idea in spite of their laughing weekends and their passionate (sometimes febrile) lovemaking. They have done things in that love-making that she wouldn't have credited even six months ago, and Lisey knows these variations have little to do with love; they're about boredom, homesickness, booze, and the blues. His drinking, always heavy, has now begun to scare her. She sees the inevitable crash coming if he doesn't pull back. And the emptiness of her womb has begun to depress her. They made a deal, yeah, sure, but under the yum-yum tree she didn't fully understand that the years pass and time has weight. He may begin to write again when they get back to America, but what will
she
do?
He never lied to me
, she thinks as she lies on the Bremen bed with her arm over her eyes, but she sees a time—and not all that distant—when this fact will no longer satisfy, and the prospect frightens her. Sometimes she wishes she had never sat under that smucking willow with Scott Landon.

Sometimes she wishes she had never met him at all.

“That's not true,” she whispered to the shadowy barn, but she felt the deadweight of his study above her as a denial—all those books, all those stories, all that gone life. She didn't repent her marriage, but yes, sometimes she
did
wish she had never met her troubling and troublesome man. Had met someone else instead. A nice safe computer programmer, for instance, a fellow who made seventy thousand a year and would have given her three children. Two boys and a girl, one by now grown up and married, two still in school. But that was not the life she had found. Or the one that had found her.

Instead of turning immediately to the Bremen bed (that seemed too much, too soon), Lisey turned to her pathetic little excuse for an office, opened the door, and surveyed it. What had she meant to do in here while Scott wrote his stories upstairs? She couldn't remember, but knew what had drawn her here now: the answering machine. She looked at the red
1
glowing in the window with
UNPLAYED MESSAGES
printed beneath it, and wondered if she should call in Deputy Alston to listen. She decided not to. If it was Dooley, she could play it for him later.

Of course it's Dooley—who else?

She steeled herself for more threats delivered in that calm, superficially reasonable voice and pushed
PLAY
. A moment later a young woman named Emma was explaining the really
extraordinary
savings Lisey could enjoy by switching to MCI. Lisey killed this rapturous message in mid-flow, pushed
ERASE
, and thought:
So much for women's intuition.

She left the office laughing.

Lisey looked at the swaddled shape of the Bremen bed with neither sorrow nor nostalgia, although she supposed she and Scott had made love in it—or fucked, anyway; she couldn't remember how much actual
love
there had been during
SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY
—hundreds of times.
Hundreds?
Was that possible during a mere nine-month stretch, especially when there had been days, sometimes whole working weeks, when she didn't see him from the time he sleepwalked out the door at seven AM with his briefcase banging his knee to the time he shuffled back in, usually half-lit, at ten PM or quarter to eleven? Yes, she supposed it was, if you spent whole weekends having what Scott sometimes called “smuckaramas.” Why would she hold any affection for this silent sheeted monstrosity, no matter how many times they had bounced on it? She had better cause to hate it, because she understood in some way that wasn't intuitive but was rather the working of subconscious logic (
Lisey's smart as the devil, as long as she doesn't think about it
, she had once overheard Scott telling someone at a party, and hadn't known
whether to feel flattered or ashamed) that their marriage had almost broken in that bed. Never mind how nasty-fine the sex had been, or that he'd fucked her to effortless multiple orgasms and tossed her salad until she thought she might go out of her mind from the nerve-popping pleasure of it; never mind the place she'd found, the one she could touch before he came and sometimes he'd just shudder but sometimes he'd scream and that made her go goosebumps all over, even when he was deep inside her and as hot as . . . well, as hot as a suck-oven. She thought it was right the goddam thing should be shrouded like an enormous corpse, because—in her memory, at least—everything that had occurred between them there had been wrong and violent, one choke-hold shake after another on the throat of their marriage. Love? Make
love?
Maybe. Maybe a few times. Mostly what she remembered was one uglyfuck after another. Choke . . . and let go. Choke . . . and let go. And every time it took longer for the thing that was Scott-and-Lisey to breathe again. Finally they left Germany. They took the
QE2
back to New York from Southampton, and on the second day out she had come back from a walk on the deck and had paused outside their stateroom with her key in her hand, head tilted, listening. From inside had come the slow but steady click of his typewriter, and Lisey had smiled.

She wouldn't allow herself to believe it was all right, but standing outside that door and hearing his resumption, she had known it
could
be. And it was. When he told her he'd made arrangements to have what he called the Mein Gott Bed shipped stateside, she had said nothing, knowing they would never sleep in it or make love in it again. If Scott had suggested they do so—
Just vunce, liddle Leezie, for old dimes' zake!
—she would have refused. In fact, she would have told him to go smuck himself. If ever there was a haunted piece of furniture, it was this one.

She approached it, dropped onto her knees, swept back the hem of the dropcloth that covered it, and peered beneath. And there, in that musty, enclosed space where the smell of old chickenshit had come creeping back (
like a dog to its vomit
, she thought), was what she had been looking for.

There in the shadows was Good Ma Debusher's cedar box.

She had no more than entered her sunny kitchen with the cedar box clasped in her arms when the phone began to ring. She put the box on the table and answered with an absent hello, no longer fearing Jim Dooley's voice. If it was him, she would just tell him she had called the police and then hang up. She was currently too busy to be scared.

It was Darla, not Dooley, calling from the Greenlawn Visitors' Lounge, and Lisey wasn't exactly surprised to find that Darla had the guilts about calling Canty in Boston. And if it had been the other way around, Canty in Maine and Darla in Boston? Lisey thought it would have been about the same deal. She didn't know how much Canty and Darla still loved each other, but they still used each other the way drunks used the booze. When they were kids, Good Ma used to say that if Cantata caught the flu, Darlanna ran her fever.

Lisey tried to make all the right responses, just as she had earlier while on the phone with Canty, and for exactly the same reason: so she could get past this shite and go on with her business. She supposed she would come back to caring about her sisters later—she hoped so—but right now Darla's guilty conscience mattered as little to her as Amanda's gorked-out state. As little as Jim Dooley's current whereabouts, come to that, as long as he wasn't in the room with her, waving a knife.

No, she assured Darla, she hadn't been wrong to call Canty. Yes, she had been right to tell Canty to stay put down there in Boston. And yes indeed, Lisey would be up to visit Amanda later on that day.

“It's horrible,” Darla said, and in spite of her own preoccupation, Lisey heard the misery in Darla's voice. “
She's
horrible.” Then, immediately, in a rush: “I don't mean that, she's not, of course she's not, but it's horrible to
see
her. She only
sits
there, Lisey. The sun was hitting the side of her face when I was in, the morning sun, and her skin looks so gray and
old
 . . .”

“Take it easy, hon,” Lisey said, running the tips of her fingers over the smooth, lacquered surface of Good Ma's box. Even closed she could smell its sweetness. When she opened it, she would bend forward into that aroma and it would be like inhaling the past.

“They're feeding her through a tube,” Darla said. “They put it in and then take it out. If she doesn't start to eat on her own, I suppose they'll just leave it in all the time.” She gave a huge, watery sniff. “They're feeding her through a
tube
and she's already so
thin
and she won't
talk
and I spoke to a nurse who said sometimes they go on this way for
years
, sometimes they never come
back
, oh Lisey, I don't think I can
stand
it!”

Lisey smiled a little at this as her fingers moved to the hinges at the back of the box. It was a smile of relief. Here was Darla the Drama Queen, Darla the Diva, and that meant they were back on safe ground, two sisters with well-worn scripts in hand. At one end of the wire is Darla the Sensitive. Give her a hand, ladies and gentlemen. At the other end, Little Lisey, Small But Tough. Let's hear it for her.

“I'll be up this afternoon, Darla, and I'll have another talk with Dr. Alberness. They'll have a clearer picture of her condition by then—”

Darla, doubtful: “Do you really think so?”

Lisey, with no smucking idea: “Absolutely. And what
you
need is to go home and put your feet up. Maybe take a nap.”

Darla, in tones of dramatic proclamation: “Oh, Lisey, I could never sleep!”

Lisey didn't care if Darla ate, busted a joint, or took a shit in the begonias. She just wanted to get off the phone. “Well, you come on back,
honey, and take it easy for a little while, anyway. I have to get off the phone—I've got something in the oven.”

Darla was instantly delighted. “Oh, Lisey!
You?
” Lisey found this extremely annoying, as if she had never cooked anything more strenuous in her life than . . . well, Hamburger Helper. “Is it banana bread?”

“Close. Cranberry bread. I've got to go check it.”

“But you'll be coming to see Manda later, right?”

Lisey felt like screaming. Instead she said, “Right. This afternoon.”

“Well, then . . .” Doubt was back.
Convince me
, it said.
Stay on the phone another fifteen minutes or so and convince me.
“I guess I'll come on home.”