Rosie (16 page)

“He makes me feel happy all the time, just to think of him....”

“So why don't you just say you're in love with him?”

“God. I don't know.”

They lay reading in the window seat that evening, separately.
Rosie snuggled up beside her, absorbed in
Stuart Little,
and Elizabeth was trying to concentrate on an article in
Esquire.
Every so often she looked into her child's face, at the expression of quizzical nobility, at the baby finger crooked over her bottom lip; sometimes a look passed over Rosie's face, as if she were tasting something rare and delicious.

James was second on Rosie's God Bless list that night.

After tucking her in, Elizabeth returned to the window seat, resumed her reading, and found, in an article about high school, an answer to her unvoiced question: why she was so afraid to fall in love. A class of seniors were studying
Beowulf
in English, and the teacher could not get a discussion off the ground. All the kids were bored. Finally, a boy asked the question which was the answer to Elizabeth's. If Grendel was going to the mead hall all the time and devouring a bunch of men, why did men keep going back to the mead hall?

Elizabeth stared, smiling, at the ceiling.

Rae said, Be brave, be kind. Rae kept going back to the mead hall because it was there, and she needed it, and it was fun. Elizabeth sat upright. She would call James. James was wonderful. She liked him, loved him, trusted him, and wanted him. She was going to tell him now, tonight; she was going to throw her hat into the ring.

She walked, smiling, to the telephone, and dialed his number.

A woman with an English accent answered. “Hello?”

Elizabeth, bug-eyed, hung up. What? No! Yes. Her stomach buckled, and her knees grew weak, and she stormed the kitchen, electrified with jealousy and rage. She slooshed scotch in and out of a glass, lifted it to her mouth with shaking hands. Goddamn fucking asshole, I was right: Short Man syndrome, general male shittiness—why didn't you trust your intuition? He was all wrong from the start, it wasn't the smoking and shirts and the dog and the quotes that had put her off; it was an intuitive knowledge that he was not acceptable to her. Close call. Thank God she had never said I love you. Good riddance.

The phone rang, and she let it ring ten times. Finally she answered. “Yes?”

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “Did you just call?”

“Yeah. As a matter of fact.”

“Why did you hang up?”

“Guess.”

“Because
a woman
answered, and you thought it was someone I was schtupping, right? You're jealous, aren't you! Great! That means you love me. Lank and his girl friend are here tonight.”

Elizabeth didn't say anything, only suddenly felt foolish and distrustful.

“On my honor,” he said. She could tell he was smirking. Neither said anything for a moment. She heard a door close. “You was
jeal
-ous.” She smiled. “Oh,” he said, “I'm so happy. My heart soars like an eagle. You love me, don't you? Admit it.”

“Yes.”

“Can I come over and play?”

“Yes. James?”

“Yeah?”

“You swear to God that was Lank's girl friend? You didn't mention that she was English.”

“It slipped my mind.”

“But do you swear to God?”

“Yes.”

“And you weren't fucking her?”

“No. I wasn't fucking her.”

“And Lank is there?”

“Do you want to talk to him?”

“No. I trust you.”

“Good. I'll be there in an hour.” An angry blonde, ten years younger than Elizabeth, was glaring at him. He turned his palms upward, tried not to smile too broadly. “Elizabeth?”

“Jeez, I'm sorry, James,” she said. And sighed. “I just wanted to know.”

James arrived one drizzly evening with an envelope in the pocket of his jeans. “I got rejected at Putnam's,” he said when she opened the door. He was brooding; she looked consolingly at him, felt as she did when Rosie suffered—it made her so sad—but a small voice in her was relieved,
glad
he had been rejected. She led him to the living room and felt so sad for him that she even found his green zip-up sportshirt endearing.

“The editor there said it was stupid and badly written and boring and he hoped I would die.”

“Let me see.”

James scowled and retrieved the envelope huffily. He thrust it at her, as if daring her to read it. The letter read: “Thank you for letting me take a look at your work. I'm afraid it's not right for us at this time, as we already have two autobiographical novels by men on our upcoming list. My main problem with your writing is that the humor is overdone, it's too show-offy. But please let me see your next book, and good luck. You have a lot of talent.”

“Where's the part where he hopes you die?”

“You have to read between the lines.”

“I bet it's a wonderful book.”

“It's a piece of shit.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Yeah.”

Elizabeth went to the kitchen. There was a half-empty bottle of J&B in the cupboard, from which she poured two stiff shots (one was an inch stiffer until she took a big bracing sip). She carried them to the living room, sipping on hers as soon as he could see her; the sip legitimized the whiskey on her breath.

Elizabeth was up to many tricks these days. For instance, now there was always a pint of whiskey in the study closet in case she needed one or two supplementary sips, or in case James was not there for the night. Sometimes it made her remember the scene in
The Lost Weekend,
Ray Milland's second bottle of rye, hidden in the chandelier, its shadow on the ceiling, but she knew she was nowhere near as far gone. This second bottle business was just a phase, but her secret frightened her: a furtive aristocrat who pushed wrapped empty pints down deep in the garbage can. She was drinking too much in the terror that James would find out how much she needed to drink.

But though, granted, a long one, it was a phase, so it would end.

“Here you are.”

He exhaled and began to rave. He was having an episode.

Why would anyone care about his version of things? He had no talent, no story to tell. It would be discovered that he was not nearly so bright as his grades and banter suggested. He was going to have to get a job.

He was turning out like his father, was in fact becoming his father, and would consequently grow fat and bald and would need bypass surgery.

One of his molars was abscessed. He would need an expensive crown, and he was running out of money, and when the dentist did the root canal, the tooth would splinter and have to be picked piece by piece out of his gums. It would make
The Deer Hunter
look like child's play.

He had been under such financial and professional stress for so
long that he was probably riddled with cancer. Soon his moles would begin to change color; sores wouldn't heal.

Elizabeth brought him a salami and cheese sandwich.

He was incapable of truly loving another human being. He was a hoax. He was depressed and obsessed all the time. He was secretly so furious about so many things—his father, his height—that he couldn't go ahead and let himself feel furious, because it would destroy him; if he let any of the black slime out, a flash flood of terrifying emotional pain and insanity would ensue.

She rubbed his neck.

He was probably going to become impotent pretty soon.

She studied his face, watched him go from animated despair to a wide-eyed numbness, saw the gaze of a dead man in a movie, where you can't imagine how he can keep his eyes open and still for so long. She suspected that he felt like the knight in
The Seventh Seal.
She knew the feeling.

“What can I do to make you feel better?”

“You're doing it. Being with you is helping.” He picked up a burnt match, toyed with it, drew a charcoal line down the middle of his index finger.

“Do you want to go to bed?”

“I just want to sit here and brood.”

“Okay.”

“What if I never sell the book?”

“If you do sell it, you'll be faced with a brand new set of anxieties and doubts. About the reviews, and whether you have another book in you....”

“I don't want to die without having published a book.”

“But writing is its own reward. It makes you happy.”

“Yeah, because I think I'm good. But if it turns out that no one else does, I have to face facts and start over. I have no idea what I'd like to be if I can't be a writer.”

“One thing in your favor is that you work so hard. I think you're going to make it. You're brilliant, you're funny, and you're dedicated. You must put in forty hours a week. You know what Renata Adler said?”

“No.”

“That everybody likes to go around saying that writers write. But that, really, writers drink and sleep and talk on the phone, and that she had met very few writers who wrote at all.”

James smiled and lit a cigarette.

“So the odds are in your favor.”

“Oh, thanks, Elizabeth.” He hung his head.

“Now, let's take another drink up to bed.”

“I won't be able to get it up.”

“I don't care. You look like you feel like crying.”

“Men don't cry, Elizabeth.” He smiled at her.

A broad wedge of moonlight fell across Elizabeth's bed. She lay on top of him, fully clothed, and told him the story of Rae and her magic weight-loss shorts. He laughed but lapsed back into his brood, so she rolled off and lay watching him. Finally he unbuttoned her blue silk blouse, unhooked and removed her bra, and put his head in the crook of her shoulder.

She stroked his fuzzy hair, ran her fingernails up and down his downy back, and shifted so as to nurse him. He buried his head in her breasts for the longest time.

When they made love, she couldn't kiss him hard enough, would have chewed on his teeth if she could. They grew so slippery and wet together that she felt they were two hands, soaping each other in warm water.

Later, still and intertwined, they talked about nothing in particular. She knew how much better he felt, and it made her full and warm. She must be in love.

“Are you still awake?” she asked when his breathing grew soft.

“Yes,” he said drowsily. “I'm listening.”

She loved that he needed her. “James?” She felt him twitch.

“Vasco da Gama,” he said.

“What?”

“Don't take the pocket off.”

“Good night, James.”

Several days later, he took the Fergusons to a double bill in the city, at the Surf:
Ninotchka
first and then
I Never Sang for My Father.
Rosie fell in love with Garbo, and the three of them laughed their heads off.

“Wasn't Melvyn Douglas handsome?” James asked. “Yes.”

Rosie dozed off during
I Never Sang for My Father,
awoke with a jerk, tried to watch the movie but couldn't. She fell asleep again, with her chin on her chest, lurched back to consciousness, and finally gave up. Elizabeth put an arm around her shoulders, and Rosie slept against her chest.

James and Elizabeth held hands. Gene Hackman was terrific. Douglas, so tall and debonair in
Ninotchka,
was old and sick and tedious, had settled like the contents of a cereal box. Jesus. Could it really be the same person?

Toward the end, Elizabeth heard faint sniffling, detected a quivering of James's shoulders. She took her hand out of his and put her arm around his shoulders. He sniffed loudly while taking a deep breath, collecting himself. Rosie was snoring softly. Elizabeth, holding them both, felt like a father.

Rosie slept all the way home in the back seat of his car, with his corduroy coat folded up to make a pillow. He lifted and carried her into the house, did not see her eyelids flutter open in the hall and then close again, did not see her small drowsy smile, the smile of a cat that has just had cream.

He smelled like a father to Rosie, smelled like Sharon's, strong and clean. Marry Mama, marry me. Thinking she was asleep, he kissed her eyes. God Bless James, she prayed, and Mama, and Rae...

The next day, he asked Elizabeth if she wanted to read what he'd written so far.

Her heart stopped.

“Well, yeah. Sure.” What if it wasn't good—would he truly want, and could she give, criticism? She thought no, on both counts.

“I can give you all but the last chapter of the first part. And I'll be done with that in a week or so.”

“Well, for Pete's sake, I can wait a week.”

“It'll be scary for both of us. That's what'll make it exciting.”

“I know it's good. You work so hard, and you're so good with words.”

“The best lines in it are yours.”

“What?”

“I'm going to have to share the by-line with you.”

It pleased one part of her, the part that was proud to have thoughts worth recording—it wasn't theft, she had no use for them. But part of her worried that this was the reason, that James had an ulterior motive for loving her.

“Is there a kid in it?”

“Yes,” he said, “now there is; how did you know?”

“Will you get rid of me when my well runs dry?”

“You and I are inexhaustible.”

If so, she thought, then they might marry and live together for a long time, so she absolutely must gain control of her drinking. She must stop letting herself go down the tubes, must not be a slave to it. But how? She meant to, pretended to, even sometimes tried to, but she knew the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and she couldn't stand the reality that inner change was a journey of a thousand miles, one step at a time, like the Indian shuffle. She wanted to get quickly to wherever she was going, wanted to wake up already there. And on some nonconscious level she sensed that something in her had to play itself out—had to snap or hit rock bottom—before she would admit defeat, and change.

So when James proposed that they take “a bit” of acid, for the adventure of it, for the fun of it, and because he wanted to write a section on altered states of consciousness, she said yes. It was pushing her luck, utter lunacy, bad timing, she must be out of her mind. Or would be out of her mind, after the LSD. Which was an attractive prospect at certain moments, when her mind was a dulled battlefield, her worst and only enemy.

And if she could have foreseen the madness, foreseen the
horror, foreseen how it would hasten the inevitable and unavoidable day, she would still have said yes.

One bright blue August afternoon, when Rosie was going to sleep at Sharon's, they swallowed a weightless square of celluloid the size of a mica chip. Elizabeth felt great, beautiful and brave. It had been years since her last psychedelic adventure; six, to be exact, with Andrew in a cabin overlooking the Pacific Ocean—great fun, sex and laughter. James said that his friend had said it was the perfect light dose, and, as it turned out, it was.

They sat out on the porch swing half an hour later, waiting for the show to begin.

“Oh, well,” said James.

“Oh, well, what?”

“Nothing's happening.”

“Famous last words.”

“When will we be halfway to Barstow?”

“Soon.” She was only a little afraid:
adventure.

After a few minutes more, he said, “Still not a thing,” looked down at his shoe, and asked Elizabeth if she would brush the spiders off it. They laughed.
Booooooooooooom.

In a silent roar the world turns every color in the rainbow; Peter Maxian, kaleidoscopic and extravagant. The sky, garden, trees, and smoke from his cigarette are so beautiful and compelling that you have to laugh to have ever despaired: it is Heaven. She laughs.

His eyes are luminous green slats. Love for and trust in him purls in her blood. “I'm deliriously happy,” she says.

“So am I. You cannot imagine how beautiful you look.”

“It's the drugs.”

“No, it's not.”

“Well, so do you. Your eyes are so green right now that they're making your lashes green.” And so on for six hours. Elizabeth becomes sentimental about the orangeness of an orange, the perfection of smell and sight and—ahhhh—taste; James becomes weepy at the glory of jade green kiwi cartwheels against a
china-blue plate. Elizabeth, out loud, ponders the golden mean,
le juste milieu,
whether a human body is equidistant between the infinitesimally small and large, between quarks and stars. James, with much difficulty, manages to write this down in the notebook in his pocket, shows her the previous entry:
Merton, p.35, thesoul's structure. awareness, thought and love.
Awareness, thought and love. Elizabeth's mind is boggled with insight. So
that's
what the soul is, a life-changing revelation. She understands what they mean by
soul,
for the first time in her life; she
has
one. She considers, as she considered the orange, the Elizabethness of Elizabeth: images from the past, major incidents of pain and loss and mortification that she's carried around in her suitcase for all those years, come to her and she cries, thinking about her dead mother and father and husband; and she knows that every single thing that has ever happened to her parents and herself, and to James and his parents—backward in time like a geometric “St. Ives” progression—everything has happened to get her to this place, being with James and Rosie in a fine old house with a garden.

They make love in the sunlit bedroom, stoned out of their minds, requiring more trust than there are words for. The sensations are so intense and pleasurably disconcerting that it's like standing at the edge of the surf, as a child, with the tail end of waves rushing through the sand under and around her feet, water rushing toward shore and back to sea at the same time so that it feels like skiing through water and sand.