Lydia's Party: A Novel (7 page)

Jayne

Jayne was driving to Lydia’s house past a wasteland of strip malls—Vietnamese nail shops, currency exchanges, Chinese carry-out restaurants, vacuum cleaner repair shops. God, what an ugly neighborhood, she thought. Jayne was actually not going directly to Lydia’s house—not yet, anyway—but was on her way to visit Wally, her father-in-law, whose nursing home was roughly in the neighborhood. Usually Douglas went on Sundays but she’d offered to relieve him this week, since she’d be in “the provinces,” as they called the neighborhoods far from the lake.

Not that visiting Wally was a chore—Douglas was uncommonly devoted, and Jayne loved Wally, too—but the place smelled bad and the drive was unpleasant, through this dreary nonscape. Jayne preferred not to drive at all and seldom did—trains and cabs were her usual modes of transportation—but unless you transferred to a bus, which Jayne did not consider an option, there was no other way to get there from where they lived, on Lake Shore Drive. Although almost any place, compared to where they lived, was, well, unpleasant. Until his father had gotten too frail, Douglas had picked Wally up every other weekend and brought him back to their lovely home, so he could spend time with Little Walt, his grandson and namesake. He’d stay overnight, in his own room, on the twenty-sixth floor in their three-bedroom condominium, in the stunning building where they lived, where even the guest room had parquet floors and a view of the lake.

“Now look at that,” Wally would say, sitting on the couch while they made dinner, gazing out the window at the sailboats. They had one, too, but Wally preferred dry land.

•   •   •

She forgot how nice their place was, sometimes. Coming out here reminded her.

She’d brought Wally the usual bottle, plus some Hershey bars. For years she’d tried to convert him to better chocolate—expensive, dark, Belgian, with and without nuts—but one of the aides finally admitted he gave it away, to her. Hershey bars were what he longed for, she said. They reminded him of the army, K rations—a pleasant memory, apparently. As for the bottle, it was against the rules at the Baptist home, but Wally liked his midday “snort” and everyone liked Wally. As long as he didn’t flaunt it, they looked the other way.

Jayne was dying for a smoke. Something about going to see Wally, then her old friends, whom she loved but seldom saw—Elaine, Celia, Lydia especially—put her in the mood. She supposed it was the thought of passing time, reversals of fortune, all that, that unsettled her. Jayne was anything but sentimental, but driving through these neighborhoods made her a little sad. She’d moved on, why hadn’t Lydia?

She was thinking maybe when she got to Lydia’s she could bum a smoke from her, or from Celia, if one of them had started again. She couldn’t keep track of who was on and who was off. Lydia used to smoke like a fiend. She’d made it look so attractive they’d all wanted to do it, all that nervous turning of the head and flicking of the ash, all that picking of tobacco from her lipsticked lip. Men were crazy about it, lurching out of their seats to hold a match close to her mouth while she smiled at them, a little cross-eyed, through the flame. Or maybe men were just crazy about Lydia.

“Don’t you think she’s attractive?” Jayne had asked Douglas, early on when they were first going out. It wasn’t exactly what Jayne had meant. Of course she was. Maybe what she’d meant was
Do you think she’s beautiful?
Women discussed it—was she, wasn’t she?

Jayne waited to see what Douglas would say.

•   •   •

Thinking like an art historian, Jayne had always thought that what Lydia really was, was
intermittently
beautiful, like some painting in a dim niche in some church somewhere in Italy with one of those timed lights you could drop coins into—beautiful when lit, when attention was paid. Beauty happened to her sometimes, then flickered out. Usually it had to do with men. At the beginning, she’d lit up around Spence.

Jayne had gone to gallery openings with them—Lydia and Spence—in the old days, back when they were a new couple. Afterward they’d go to dinner, though Spence wouldn’t eat if he had a gig later. He’d played in a band then. What a pair they’d been, so attractive, well matched, dressed all in black, like the world’s cutest, hippest salt and pepper shakers. He’d been so handsome in those days—those chiseled features, his musician’s hands. They’d just fit, both of them with that jet-black hair. It wasn’t until they broke up that Jayne found out Lydia’s true color was medium brown. Jayne remembered the night they wore matching velvet coats.

Cute as they were, they’d brought out the worst in each other, too, Jayne thought. She supposed the marriage was doomed, really. Though when she saw how they both kept repeating versions of it after, with other less suitable partners, she wondered if they shouldn’t have just stayed together and fought it out.

•   •   •

“Very attractive,” Douglas said, finally. “But not my type.”

“Meaning?” Jayne said.

He’d put his hands on her. “I like this.”

“No, really.” Jayne knew he did. And she was glad, but she also knew there was more to it than breast size.

He’d shrugged, let go. “She’s one of those, you know.
Women
.” He’d flapped his big hands.

“Elucidate,” she’d said, pinning him down with a pillow. They’d been in bed.

“You know,” he said. “Addicted to the chase. Tragic. I don’t know.” He wouldn’t elaborate.

Jayne supposed Lydia had been flirting with him. She knew what he meant, though. He meant like his ex. Douglas had already been through one divorce when they got together—and a hellacious child custody battle—and he didn’t want any more of that. They’d both been ready to settle down. Work and raising Little Walt, his boy, part-time, were demanding enough, they both felt.

Over time she’d come to know how much he liked knowing she wasn’t going to leave.

•   •   •

She also knew how much he would have hated knowing she was going to smoke tonight. Which she was, she’d decided. Though if no one else was, she’d be out of luck. She should stop and buy a pack now, she thought, just to be safe. She could pull over at that bowling alley, right now. It looked like the sort of place that still had a machine.

She’d always preferred buying cigarettes from a machine. She liked the privacy of it, in a back hallway, usually, in some urine-stinking alcove near the men’s room where you could stand alone and think about what you were about to do.
Think about what you’ve done
, the teachers used to say when they’d done something bad. She liked the clandestine feeling, that guilty anticipation, then the sound, the good soft thump when the surprisingly hefty little pack dropped into the gutter at the bottom. The sound of relief, Jayne thought. You’d pull that big silver knob—there’d always be some resistance, that last second when you had a chance to change your mind—and then it would give, like a gear, and out they’d drop, attainable bliss, into the smooth silver groove. Then came the ritual opening, the thrilling crinkle of staticky cellophane, the folding back of the cardboard lid, the tearing of the foil and then, ah. That sweet burst of smell. Tobacco.

Douglas, who’d grown up near a reservation in Wisconsin and still had relatives there, though he didn’t want people to know that, once told her the Oshkosh considered tobacco sacred. It was the opposite around here—strictly déclassé. They were converting cigarette machines into art vending machines now. You put in a token and out came a little origami sculpture instead. There was one at the Cultural Center. Just the sight of it made Jayne want to light up.

•   •   •

She wouldn’t be thinking this way if someone hadn’t offered her a cigarette at the park this morning. She could still smell it on her fingers. She’d put the butt in her coat pocket and rubbed it now and then, then sniffed her fingertips. Now, alone in the car on her way to the Baptist home, she wanted another.

It had been a sin of opportunity, really, not one of volition. On weekends she walked Horatio to the park in the morning, and if no one was there she unclipped his leash and let him run. This morning he’d galloped ahead, crashing through the deep snow, checking for new smells. They were all the way across the field when he’d stopped and turned, then raced back to the entrance. Someone, thickly bundled in purple, approached. Jayne knew he hoped for another dog. She watched him go, feeling guilty. She and Douglas had left him alone while they worked long hours. Now he was old, still trying to make up for a puppyhood he’d never had.

Jayne trudged back through the snow, hoping the woman didn’t have some tiny dog inside her coat that she couldn’t set down for fear of Horatio, who only looked fierce.

•   •   •

Jayne smelled the cigarette before she saw it. The woman had taken off one of her big mittens and was wearing a thin leather glove on her smoking hand. She blew a mouthful of smoke and cold white air out of her pink lipsticked mouth. “Sorry,” she said, turning her head and blowing toward the street. Jayne smiled to show she didn’t mind. “Actually, I like it,” Jayne said. “I used to love to smoke.” She wanted the woman to know she didn’t disapprove.

The woman nodded. “No one knows I do this.” She raised her chin to blow more smoke. “Can’t, at home. Kids.” She rolled her eyes.

Jayne nodded. The woman was holding the cigarette behind her back. “Sorry,” she said again.

“Really,” Jayne said. “Don’t apologize. I love the smell. I miss it.”

“You want one?” the woman said.

The question came as a small shock. Did she? She hadn’t thought so, not especially, though it did smell divine. Except for the occasional communal lapse at a party, Jayne refrained, for Douglas’s sake. Douglas’s sister had died of lung cancer. He thought it was repulsive, a deal breaker, he’d called it. Besides, she’d never been a morning smoker. Her favorite time had been at night, after dinner, preferably with a glass of wine, sitting outside on her balcony in the summer, in that funky apartment she’d loved, flicking ashes over the railing. Or in a restaurant, with a man, pre-Douglas. What a pleasure that had been, after dinner in some outdoor place, on a summer evening just as the day began to cool, at a table on the street, watching the late commuters hustle past, the hungry-looking men in suits scanning women’s faces for an instant of illicit eye contact. Funny to think that such a simple pleasure was illegal now.

The woman waited for Jayne’s answer, tilting the pack in her direction, a pleasantly neutral expression on her face. She shook the pack slightly. One cigarette slid invitingly out.

Jayne felt touched, by the graciousness of the gesture. Just right, friendly but not pushy. Nicely anonymous. No names had been exchanged. If interrogated later, neither could say who the other was. The woman continued to hold the pack tilted toward Jayne, not looking at it.

“I never buy them,” the woman was saying. “I found these.” She tapped her cigarette once, as if in punctuation, and the ash fell off in the snow. “In the break room, at work.”

What little Jayne could see of the woman, between her hat and her scarf—a stripe of glossy brown forehead, flashing brown eyes, pink lipstick—smiled. Stuck to one of her straight white teeth was a single fleck of tobacco. She took another deep, thoughtful drag. “They’re not even my brand,” she said, exhaling.

“They’re mine,” Jayne said.

The woman crinkled her eyes at that. Like the devil, Jayne thought. Debonair. As if she already knew they were Jayne’s brand, and had conjured them, for her pleasure. This is how these things start, Jayne knew. Half of temptation was social obligation. At this point it seemed rude not to accept.

The woman shook the pack again as if reading Jayne’s thoughts.

“Thanks,” Jayne said.

•   •   •

Jayne placed the cool papery cylinder between her dry lips, the fruity smell twice as sharp in the cold. Even unlit it was delicious. The woman clicked her lighter and a flame sprang up close to Jayne’s face.

She inhaled cold and hot at the same time, feeling dizzy as the familiar poison spread. The women smiled at each other. Jayne had forgotten what a good, clubbish feeling this was, this sisterhood of nicotine.

They smoked in silence for a minute, focused on the pleasure.

“My husband doesn’t know I smoke,” the woman said, holding her cigarette up and addressing it as if it were a small person who ought to be included in the conversation. Jayne nodded.

“He won’t smell it?” she said. The woman made a smiling frown and shook her head. Then she patted Horatio, tossed her lipstick-stained butt into the snow, and turned back in the direction she’d come.

“Have a nice day,” she said, over her shoulder.

•   •   •

When Jayne got home she brushed her teeth. Now she pulled into the bowling alley parking lot.

Lydia: 3:00
P.M.

Lydia went upstairs, to her office, to get a fresh yellow tablet. She wanted to make a list of everything left to do, but as soon as she entered the room, its lulling chaos, the piles of out-of-order personal history, surrounded and sedated her. She sat down—just a minute’s rest, she thought—and looked at the little patch of desktop she’d cleared a few days earlier. The neat spot comprised only a few hundred square inches but seemed huge, an oasis of order amid the palimpsest of creative dead ends heaped around it.

Lydia merely had to reach her arms in any direction and stir paper to uncover years’ worth of false starts—half-read clippings, sketches for paintings, course proposals, notes for unfinished essays. Beneath that was other, harder-to-look-at stuff—letters, postcards, the dreaded and ever-present mementoes. What was one supposed to do with these things? The letters, especially, gave off residual sparks of the emotions they’d first aroused, and not only warmth. Guilt sometimes, or envy. Or that old standby, regret.

She’d been cleaning, or trying to, but she’d only made things worse. Every object, every slip of paper, called up a world of possibility within a world of too many possibilities. She didn’t know what to do with any of it so she set the paper down and picked up another. Not a single scrap was meaningless. Or rather, not a single scrap was any more meaningless than any other. She couldn’t throw out any of it or, if she did, she might as well throw it all out. What to do with a charmingly designed teabag wrapper from a trip to Wales, that had traveled back to Chicago in her blue jeans pocket and showed up when she went to do the wash? She’d stashed it in a drawer; now, enhanced by time, it reminded her of when she and Spence were happy. Or a ticket stub from a pleasant evening of outdoor music, or a subway map for a city she hadn’t been to in eleven years, or a stone from a beach in Wisconsin? She had friends who would put it all in labeled drawers, but they were a different sort of person than she was. To Lydia, that was tantamount to burial.

•   •   •

Burial. The thought brought her back to the present, the looming possibility that had made her think it was time to put things in order in the first place. She needed to organize her effects for those who would take over when she was gone, if such a thing happened, lest they throw it all away. Which she supposed is what would happen anyway. Probably the most decent thing to do would be to save them the trouble and throw it out herself, now, she thought. The rudeness of not doing so, of leaving someone else to confront this mess, made her feel embarrassed, but the thought that there were things here that someone might actually want had delayed the process.

If only she were more decisive, like Elaine, Lydia thought, recalling the ceremonial pitching of the blue books.

Lydia plucked a rubber-banded stack of years-old, unanswered Christmas cards from a pile and dropped it—bravely, decisively—into the wastebasket. There, that wasn’t so hard, she thought. She had been meaning to sort her things for some time now, years, honestly. But while she waffled, things kept piling up. Unread books, old letters, birthday cards. Recipes, to-do lists, photos of friends with their children or their beloved animals, photos of Maxine. It was all a depressing reminder of the passage of time, not to mention a reminder of her inability to place one thing in importance over another, a trait that had gotten her where she was today, she knew.

•   •   •

Lydia opened a drawer. Here, under a little packet of rubber bands, was a valentine from her mother, dead for thirteen years. She couldn’t throw it out now. Drawings, drifts of them, sat on the floor gathering dust. A cliché for a reason, she thought—it was literally true. Her drawings, which used to excite her, had gathered actual dust and made her sneeze.

Just last week she’d forced herself to start to sift through them. She’d spent Sunday afternoon with a pile on her lap and another pile on her drawing table, sorting them into more piles—good, bad, and indifferent—but there were so many other ways to see them that soon she had eight piles, then eleven, each a different category. Soon they covered the floor and she’d had to set little notes on each pile with the name of the category written across it—
Store. Recycle. More interesting sewn together with colored thread? Better as poems?
Shred!
She stopped altogether when she came to her Irreducible Truths.

She’d worked on them for the better part of a year, every morning at dawn, before she walked Maxine. For forty-five minutes a day, she’d written over and over on a single dated page. She’d set a kitchen timer and started at the top and when she got to the bottom she went back to the top and continued, until the page was torn and illegible and the time was up. At first she just wrote as if she were keeping an ordinary journal. The genius in that was that if Spence found it he wouldn’t be able to read it. But that soon came to feel meaningless, not only because the overwriting obliterated the text but in the way that all journals do, with their forced philosophy and endless fretting. Lydia wanted to move beyond that. She began to think of the writing as a meditation, written chanting. That’s when she came up with the idea of irreducible truths—writing one true thing over and over.

After that, every day, she wrote a new irreducible truth for a set amount of time. She wrote until her hand hurt and the words were illegible, until the pen tore through the paper. As she wrote she counted. Sometimes she wrote the Lord’s Prayer, or a verse from the Bible, or a line from a poem, or just something she thought was true. On the back of each dated page, written lightly in pencil, she recorded that day’s truth and the number of times she’d written it.
Animals are perfect. 78X. Be here now. 117X. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. 153X.
Now she had piles of what must be hundreds of them, all looking like gibberish. She’d imagined she was working toward a show, to which she planned to invite Norris, or at least toward enlightenment, but she’d had to stop. Her hand started to cramp.

•   •   •

Now it just looked crazy. And what did any of it amount to anyway, Lydia thought, looking around at her piles of dusty paper. Why had she wasted her time? What had once seemed meaningful was no longer. Lydia gathered up her Irreducible Truths and dumped them in the trash.