“Let’s change the subject,” I said to Simon. “Tell me something funny.”
“That’s a tall order.”
“You’re a tall guy.”
He was silent for a moment. “OK, here’s something. Remember Benjamin, my ex? He’s madly in love with a dancer.”
“Oh, Simon. That’s hard.”
“A blond dancer. A blond dancer from
Denmark
. I’m like, if this is what you wanted all along what the fuck were you ever doing with me?”
“It’s not necessarily what he wanted all along. Maybe he really doesn’t know so he’s trying out some extremes.”
“That’s nice of you,” he said. There was a pause, and then he added, “I really miss you.”
I didn’t respond, and he cried, “Do you think I don’t mean it? I
really miss
you. You’re a big part of my life.”
I’d hardly thought of him since leaving, and I felt terrible. What was wrong with me? What kind of friend was I? “I’m sorry,” I said, and then I thought
sorry, sorry, sorry
, and felt worse still.
There was an awkward silence, and he said, “It’s not just me, you know—Lane was saying just yesterday that she wished you’d come back.”
“How is she?”
“Not so good,” he said. “Ever since Miss Wolf died she—”
“Miss Wolf died?” I said. “Oh my God, when?”
“You didn’t know? It must have been right after you left because it was a while ago, maybe a month.” He paused. “She had a heart attack. Three days in the hospital and that was it.”
“How awful,” I said. “Lane must be really upset. Was she with her when it happened?”
“She’d just left. She got home and there was a message on the machine from a nurse.”
I shook my head. I remembered how worried Lane had been when Miss Wolf had a cold. How she’d walked up the steps to the Plaza just behind Miss Wolf, her hands up and ready to help if Miss Wolf stumbled. “Is she there?” I said. “Can I talk to her?”
“After you promise to come back.”
“Simon.”
“All right,” he said, “but we
will
talk about this again. Hang on.”
The phone settled onto something hard, and as I stood there waiting I heard my mother moving around upstairs. Footsteps crossing her bedroom, the faint creak of her closet door. In a minute the water would go on in her bathroom. I was overcome suddenly by the knowledge that she made these same sounds whether anyone was present to hear them or not.
Lane came on the line, her voice faint and a little dull. She told me about Miss Wolf’s death, how for three days she’d sat there waiting for Miss Wolf to pull through.
I know
, I wanted to say, but of course I didn’t. I knew about waiting for Mike to pull through, but there was no telling how different it had been for Lane, a daughter or granddaughter figure, sitting there alone.
She was at loose ends, trying to decide on a next move. “Come visit me,” I said, and to my surprise she agreed to, the following week.
The next afternoon I learned that Mike had quit his computer job. He was tired of pretending it was more than just a way to feel useful. “I’m not useful,” he said, “and gathering data about fucking life expectancy rates isn’t going to change that, or how I feel about it.”
We were in the van together, on the way home from another visit to Harvey. We passed a car wash where Mike had worked one summer in high school, a line of blue and yellow pennants flapping in the breeze. I’d had a job just around the corner, at a drugstore that had since closed down, and I remembered walking over after work and watching while he drove people’s cars out of the chute and then dried them, both hands spinning blue rags.
I looked over at him, strapped into his wheelchair. His eyes drooped at the outside corners. Even his mustache drooped today, rimming the unhappy arc of his mouth.
“How’d your dad react?” I said.
“He was disappointed. Well, maybe not disappointed. He just—”
“Wants you to be happy?”
“I think he’d settle for a little less than that.”
We rode along in silence. It was a clear, green day, the shade trees knitting together for the summer ahead. Lilacs were in bloom, lush purple and satiny green, their thick, heady scent everywhere.
He said, “Mom, on the other hand, was all for it. ‘Why should you spend your time on something you hate when you don’t need the money, dear?’ She’d be perfectly content to have me be like that Tom guy.”
“Mike, she wouldn’t.” Tom was Harvey’s roommate, a C3 who’d never breathe without a ventilator.
“You know what I mean.”
I knew: Mrs. Mayer wanted Mike to count on her no matter what. She didn’t always see how hard it was that he had to.
“He’s a head on a pillow,” Mike blurted. “If that were me I’d rather be dead.”
I braked and turned to face him. “Mike.”
“I would.” He looked at me defiantly, and my first impulse was to look away, brush it off, bury it.
You didn’t say that
. But he had.
“Will you—” I hesitated. “Will you tell me more?” Immediately I felt my face fill with heat.
Tell me:
Kilroy’s phrase. What would Mike say? How would I react? I was nervous but forced myself to wait, to not fill the silence with words, and after a while he sighed and began to speak.
“I read somewhere that after something like this you spend your life either looking for a reason or looking for a cure. But you know what? There isn’t a reason and there isn’t a cure.
There just isn’t
. I went to this church thing a few times and it was crazy, it was like all these people were just dying to have me decide that God had a plan for me. Why would that make a difference? I think I stopped really believing in God around the
same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus, and if breaking my neck was supposed to help me start believing again, why on earth would that be a comforting idea? If you had half a brain it would make you really pissed off instead.” He shook his head. “Dave King says maybe the hardest challenge is having to live with suicidal thoughts, having to accept them as part of the whole damn package.” He stared at me. “Are you going to take me home or not?”
I took my foot off the brake and drove the rest of the way to the Mayers’. At the driveway I eased up the bump and stopped in front of the garage. I cut the engine. My heart was pounding. I said, “Do you have suicidal thoughts a lot?”
He looked at me and looked away. “I did. I mean, I still do, but not as much.”
“That must be—” I searched for what to say. “That must be hard.”
He sighed. “It’s exhausting. It’s like, you have these pictures in your mind, and you’re pulled toward them at the same time that you’re trying like hell to stay away from them.”
“Mike,” I said softly. “God.”
He looked away. After a while he said, “I’m ready to go in now,” and I climbed down from the van and went around to the other side, then stood waiting while the lift lowered him. I walked up the ramp behind him, his wheelchair humming. At the top we stopped. “Want to sit out here for a while?” I said. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thanks.”
Neither of us spoke. I leaned against the railing. Mrs. Mayer was in the kitchen, her shape as she moved around just visible through the clean windows.
“Mike Mayer has a morose spell,” he said, glancing at me and smiling a little. “He sits in his wheelchair and contemplates the back lawn.”
C
HAPTER
39
On the phone the night before Lane was due, I walked her through my dresser and closet, telling her what I wanted—this shirt, that skirt, those pants. When she asked if Kilroy knew I was getting her to bring me so much of my stuff, I said he didn’t. The fact was, he didn’t even know she was coming. I hadn’t talked to him in a week, nothing to say until it was clear what I was going to do. Seeing Lane at the airport the next day, a tiny shoulder bag of her stuff and a giant duffel of mine, what I was going to do suddenly seemed obvious, and I thought:
OK, then
. Eight months earlier I’d left Madison abruptly, on the spur of a moment, though one that had been coming for a long time. Now, these past weeks, I’d been swinging back and forth between staying here and going back—swinging without even thinking about it all that much because thinking couldn’t really help me choose as well as seeing could: my clothing, here. My life, here. Was this it?
Lane and I grinned at each other, awkward for a moment and then hugging hard. She wore a pair of chinos and a plain white T-shirt, like a little boy going to summer camp.
“It’s so good to see you!”
I bent over and hefted the duffel, then slung the long strap over my shoulder. I started toward the parking lot, but she didn’t follow.
“Carrie.”
I turned back.
“I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
She put two fingers to her mouth and blew against them. “Miss Wolf left me her letters.” She moved her hand away and I could see that she was biting the inside of her lower lip. “I haven’t told anyone in New York yet.”
I put the duffel bag down. “What do you mean, left you her letters?”
“To edit,” she said. “Into a book. The letters she got from people and copies of lots that she sent.”
Now I understood, and I understood the enormity of it. Simon had told me once that Miss Wolf had been a central figure in society—in several societies. What was his line? She knew everyone from Lionel Trilling to Grace Kelly.
“Are you going to do it?” I asked Lane.
She shook her head slowly. “I haven’t decided. It’s tempting, and if I don’t they’re supposed to be burned. But it’s not fair to put that decision on to me!” she cried. “It’s up to me to decide how she’s thought of from now on! If I don’t do it, she’s Monique Wolf, remember her, that writer from whenever it was. If I do she could end up being the flavor of the month or the year and people would have a completely different perspective on her. She could end up a hot literary topic.”
“I see what you mean,” I said. “You could, too.”
Lane’s pale face filled with color, and she looked down. “I know.” With the toe of her black Converse sneaker she traced a series of short lines, one after another. “You know what?” she said, looking up. “I’m not sure I want to go that deeply into her life. I’m not sure I want to get to know her that well.”
“You knew her really well.”
“I knew what I knew. Do I want that to change?” Suddenly tears streamed from her eyes, thin trails running down her cheeks. She stretched the neck of her T-shirt up to blot her face dry. “Isn’t this stupid?” she sobbed. “I can’t stop crying.”
“It’s not stupid, it’s normal.”
“I’m a wreck,” she said. “Your mother’ll think I’m a real nutcase.”
I shook my head and put my arm around her, her shoulder bony under my hand. “No she won’t,” I said. “And if she does, then you’ll just seem very familiar.”
In fact, my mother took to Lane right away. We lingered over dinner for nearly two hours that night, easily quadrupling my mother’s and my
average. My mother seemed
interested
in Lane, as if she wanted to figure something out: maybe me.
Lane thought she was wonderful. “She’s so low-key you don’t really think much is going on at first, and then boom, she comes up with these incredibly smart responses to things.” She was talking about something my mother had said about Miss Wolf’s death: that the writer in Lane had to mourn the loss of the writer in Miss Wolf just as much as the companion had to mourn the employer. “And the lesbian has to mourn the lesbian,” Lane said, and my mother cast me a curious glance.
Later, she went upstairs, while Lane and I stayed in the kitchen and made tea. Lane asked about Kilroy, and I told her about how our longdistance phone conversations had become impossible, about how torn I’d been feeling. And then more: about meeting his parents back in March, and the pall that seeing them had cast over him.
“It’s not even like he doesn’t like them,” I said. “It’s like he can’t.”
“You know,” Lane said, “I didn’t want to tell you this before, but remember how Maura felt like she recognized him from somewhere?”
I remembered Thanksgiving, Maura’s curious glances. I nodded.
“She realized why. His name is Fraser, right? One of the big honchos on Wall Street—and I mean
big
honchos—is a man named Morton Fraser. Is that his father’s name?”
Indeed it was. I thought of how we’d gone to the Empire State Building late on Thanksgiving night, and how, turning to look toward Wall Street, he’d asked, not quite casually,
What does Maura do?
As if, I understood now, he feared she’d made—or would make—the connection. But why did he care?
I told Lane about the note I’d read,
You must be thinking of the date as much as we are
. “What could it be?” I said. “The anniversary of something awful, I figure.”
She stared at me. “Why don’t you just ask him?”
I laced my fingers together, twisted my engagement ring around and then back. I’d caught Mike staring at it a few days earlier; when he saw that I’d noticed, he quickly looked away.
“I can’t,” I said.
“According to whose rules?”
“His.”
“Why do you play by his rules?”
I thought of the night at McClanahan’s when I asked about other women. The day at MOMA when I asked who I reminded him of. So many other times. “You know,” I said, “I didn’t entirely. It’s more like there were rules and I broke them and it didn’t matter.”
Lane looked at me carefully. “You’re using the past tense.”
I remembered the moment earlier in the day, at the airport, when I saw my duffel bag. Then I thought of Kilroy alone in New York—his slight frame disappearing around a corner, seen by no one—and my insides lurched. I was
still
swinging back and forth, though I imagined a moment would come when the swinging would change: no longer a movement between choices, but a movement into memory and regret, and back out again.
We slept late the next morning, Lane on my bedroom floor in a sleeping bag that hadn’t been used in at least ten years. The contents of the duffel were in piles on my desk, and after my shower I peeled pants and a shirt off the top and put them on, thrilled to have something new to wear.