Eleven Hours (11 page)

Asa said he understood now what adult love could be. Something where two people did not merge so completely that they had trouble figuring out where one ended and the other began, but rather the joining of two strong, separate beings, creating a future rather than trying, over and over, to redo the past.

“You're not afraid of us all continuing to be friends?” he asked, and Lore answered, Why should she be afraid? She adored Julia, and besides—so there!—she had been Julia's friend before she was his lover. If she had to choose, she teased, she might choose Julia over him. With whom did she go out more, to museums and to movies, for a good glass of wine (Asa was so cheap and so serious; he would rather spend the evening reading about hydroelectric dams)—with whom, to be blunt about it, did she laugh more? Julia, she told him. You better watch your step.

Lore halts and puts her hand against the wall. She has been moving too fast and has lost her breath. She had given Asa and Julia two months once she moved out. Julia would not be able to tolerate Asa's exclusive devotion, would start as always to chafe at his dependence on her. They would implode by the summer. But just before Thanksgiving, a friend saw them going into a movie on 23rd Street, clasping hands. Lore surprised herself, upon hearing this, by the melancholy she felt for them. What would become of them? Julia, with her dark moods, her terror of ever possessing what she wanted. Asa, with his longings for family life. Julia would never have children, she'd said it many times, and her therapists also advised against it. And now she, Lore, was the one who—though betrayed, though humiliated—would have a family, who had new life growing in her.

Whom did she miss more? Whom had she loved more, Asa or Julia? Or had she only been able to love them as a pair? “I've never really loved anyone,” Julia said, one unusually warm early-spring day as they sat in Central Park. Lore was shocked. Julia held a bag of broken Saltines, which she was sprinkling before the pigeons. She said she'd lived in New York City for twenty-nine years and she'd never fed the pigeons. Ever since she was little and had seen the movie
Mary Poppins
she'd wanted to feed them, like the old bag lady on the steps of St. Paul's, but no one in this city ever did. Well, she was going to feed them now. She held the bag out to Lore so she could join in. The dark, plump bodies swarmed toward them, shoving and pecking at each other, uttering strident cries.

“People are right,” Julia said. “They're disgusting.” A pigeon climbed onto her sneaker and she flung it away. “Ugh!”

“You love Asa,” Lore insisted. She was frightened. What did Julia mean, she didn't love anyone? Was she just having one of her days? Was this the first hint of a depression coming on? But Julia had seemed cheerful enough walking over to the park.

Julia turned to look at Lore seriously. “I don't know. I'm not sure I'm built for love.”

“I don't know what that means,” said Lore.

“That's why you're so great. You don't.” Julia nudged at another pigeon to keep it from attacking her ankle. “Maybe,” she said, staring at her skirt—it was striped, red and white, flared, Lore will never forget—“Maybe the closest I've ever come is with you.”

Lore swallowed a sweet lump in her throat. She was quiet for several minutes and finally she and Julia got up and walked on toward Bethesda Terrace. The next time they spoke it was about a painting Julia was working on, a technical problem she was trying to solve involving the use of a deep purple and an external source of light (but Julia almost never showed even Lore or Asa her paintings, and rarely finished them; they never pleased her).

That evening something odd happened. Lore began to ask herself if she really loved Asa as she'd believed. If even Julia did not love him, had never loved him, could what she felt possibly count as love? She ran through scenes of their days together, probing what had been behind her actions, the things she'd said to him: had it been real feeling or just habit, had she ever been faking? After twenty-four hours of this she was convinced she was developing one of those obsessive thought disorders, and she put a firm stop to it with a big glass of wine and an evening planted in front of
Law & Order
and
CSI
.

About what Julia had said—about maybe loving her—she could not think at all, it pierced her too nearly, too beautifully.

Of course it had all been bullshit. Julia and Asa had been sleeping together for two years by then. Julia had stared down at her skirt because she didn't have the gall to look into Lore's eyes when she was lying. She'd said what she'd said—about Asa, and her feelings for Lore—to generate those obsessive, doubting thoughts, to destabilize what Lore and Asa had.

But Lore knows that is not really it, or not all of it. She believes—she will always believe—that Julia did love her, that she looked down into her lap out of shyness. It is not something she will ever be able to prove, to herself or anyone else, but she can feel again the warmth of Julia's skin in the spring sunlight, the naturalness of their bodies on the bench together, the way Julia looked at her when she spoke about love, calm and serious and troubled all at once. Julia meant what she said about Lore, at that moment. She meant it again at other times without saying it. Lore can feel the wind brushing her hair, the shrieking of the pigeons, the sweat of her feet in the heavy socks she'd put on that morning, the fresh and mossy smell reaching them from the lake. Oh, God!

A tug in a different place, starting right under the belly button, pulling down like a stuck trapdoor. Lore breathes deeper and walks quickly to the next Women's she sees, darts inside. She lowers herself onto the toilet, shifting briefly to center her weight, and reminding herself of Franckline's instructions. Breathe down into the belly. Let the voice out. But the pressure has already disappeared. Lore waits expectantly; a minute passes, then another. Where did the pain go? She curses. Pain for nothing, panic for nothing. She wipes herself, in case, and uses the metal bar on the right of the toilet to pull herself up. When was the last contraction? It seems like ages ago. Why all this waiting, when things are supposed to keep speeding up? She wants the speed, the pain, the progress. She ties her gown.

Without quite meaning to, she has roamed far. She washes her hands, pulls open the heavy door. She must go back, back to room 7. Franckline's face swims up before her. Come get me, Franckline, she thinks. Come find me. Come help me, come make it all easier. She sees herself leaning on the tall woman's shoulder, making her way with frail supported steps. Oh, come off it, she scolds herself. She is a strong, healthy woman of thirty-one, willful and able. (The image of leaning on Franckline was absurd: in it she was elderly, fragile, in no way herself.) She dislikes these daydreams of weakness that occasionally come to her. She used to imagine doing what Julia did: staying in bed for days on end, neglecting to eat or wash. Asa used the word “times”—Julia was having one of her times. He also said
depression
, and once in a while he floated
bipolar
. All this was terrible, of course—Julia suffered—yet it was a freedom allowed to her, Lore thought, to surrender so completely. The café where she waitressed paid her when she worked and let it go when she didn't, Julia's father sent checks to tide her over, and her friends brought soups and conversation. The therapist she saw twice a week (also paid for by her father) spoke with her, if she could not get out of bed, by phone.

During these periods Lore and Asa came over after work, bringing expensive sorbet or some other easy-to-eat treat—it was a worry, trying to get food into Julia. Clementines she enjoyed sometimes. They sat and talked to her, and Julia asked about their work and even laughed. You wouldn't know something was so very wrong except that she would eat so little and not get out of bed. Her father, who came to sit with her, went out when they arrived, to smoke a cigarette. Later he'd tell them that the minute they left she turned her face into the pillow and became mute for the rest of the evening. They were dreamlike, those hours in Julia's room. The lights were either dimmed very low or put up so bright they hurt Lore's eyes. This would go on for weeks or even longer, until one day Julia would emerge like a shaky chick, go to work again, paint in her studio, cook a little something for the meals the three of them shared in Asa and Lore's apartment.

Lore walks faster; she is not weak, is not slow. She is strong, able. Reaching the room where the man smiled at her, she peers in, but it is empty now, just a parking lot of steel and chrome. A nurse bustles by, carrying a large muffin on a paper plate—a whiff of chocolate, which normally would appeal to Lore but now makes her throat rise. Thoughts of Asa and Julia are like this smell—rich, intrusive, nauseating. In the middle term of her pregnancy Lore was nearly free from them. She felt expansive and fit, her mind full of strategy; any hated images were flimsy and fell from her easily. She was busy drawing up budgets and preparing applications for summer positions that would supplement her income. The sister of a friend at P.S. 30 ran a home day-care center that would take Soleil at three months, when Lore's maternity leave would expire. If finances became too difficult, she would abandon the city, return to Lockport or one of the smaller towns upstate, even—why not?—Hobbes Corners. She knew now that where she'd come from was just as good in many ways as here, and what had seemed to her so entrancing about the city, so desirable—museums, clubs, offbeat films, parks and plazas filled with remarkable-looking people—no longer interested her, or at least she would have no time for them. Surely that was what had happened to her mother also, dancer or no dancer: some illusion had faded, her essential not-belonging had been revealed, and the details that Lore, as a child, had thought of as so humble—the hems on her school skirts, a freshly baked potato for dinner—had revealed to her mother their essential decency and even beauty.

She is back at the picture of the seashore. Julia's voice rises up:
Someone taught this Thomas Eddington person that rocks look like this and the ocean looks like that and that it's especially arty if you make it a wee bit unrealistic with some pink dashes in the water and yellow on the rocks
…

Enough
, Lore interrupts wearily. Again she spreads a hand on her belly. Defiantly, she celebrates the little flecks of humanity going about their business, the winsome sailboat, the melodramatically fading sun. She mentally deposits Thomas Eddington, 1993, in a large, disorderly room—a wooden shed on an old Vermont property, a cold wind coming in through the slats, the floor covered in drop cloths, meticulously dabbing on his colors of boats and sea, of sunbathers, of summer. He is pleased to be making summer during the winter. He is making summer as best he knows how. And that is honorable and fine, thinks Lore. (The nurse mysteriously changes direction, passes Lore again. That scent of chocolate: sludgy, sour.) It's a good picture after all, she decides. She doesn't care what Julia thinks, or Julia's mother, or the director of the fucking Metropolitan Museum. It has pleasant colors and evokes sensations of quiet, pleasant, lazy days. It reminds her—and strangely, memory slips in without a feeling of counterpressure, without distress—of summer days spent at the beach with Julia and Asa, or with Julia if Asa couldn't come, of the fierce heat against her face and the gulls trying to pick at the sandwiches they'd packed, and the cold waves bringing you back to life after you had baked yourself to a sweat. She was a poor swimmer, and Asa worked with her in the water, showing her how to coordinate her kicking and her breath. Julia called from the beach: “You can do it! Go! Go!” Lore was ashamed to be clumsy at something so rudimentary, something most children mastered by the time they were seven. But she slowly improved, and one Sunday Asa, in reward, bought her a boogie board and showed her how to use it. She swallowed salt water at first, and was slammed upside down on the beach more than once, but now she knew what to do when she went under and she didn't panic, just held her breath and waited for the world to right itself. Soon she got hooked on riding the waves, slick-feeling and fast under the board. Treading water and waiting for the biggest crests, jumping, feeling the triumph of having timed things just right, of being scooped up in the palm of the wave and enabled to fly. Next to her, on a different board, rode Asa or Julia, taking turns, allowing her to hog the new toy. Sometimes they shouted to her as they rode—“It's a good one!” or “Look at you, Supergirl!”—but Lore was too delighted to answer. Those seconds of speeding toward the shallows in a tunnel of rushing sound forged a solitude that was perfect and somehow sacred. At last she climbed with quivering legs onto the sand and threw herself back into her beach chair, spent. It seemed a great dream, to lie on the edge of a continent, looking out upon sun-dazzled, horizonless water. She expanded, stretched deep inside of herself, felt herself become pliable, capable of great acts of the heart. She might be more beautiful than she had imagined. She might be a heroine of some sort. She teased herself over these exaggerated notions but let them come and fill her with secret happiness.

Ahead, a burst of sound from an open room. A doctor—short, a little roundish, with dark hair, Indian perhaps, stands over a patient in a reclining chair, slightly smiling, but the patient, both of whose legs end at the knees, knees swaddled in thick white bandages, is laughing uproariously. And now mirth catches at the corners of the doctor's smile, and the smile breaks beneath it and the doctor begins to laugh, too, shoving his hands into the pockets of his white jacket, his body vibrating up and down.
Hoo-hoo!
the legless man laughs, a deep bass sound, and the doctor rumbles back
chuga chuga chuga!
his body trembling, and they go on trading their sounds back and forth, the doctor raising his right hand as if conducting the small orchestra they are making. The bubbles of this shared laughter enter Lore and make her shake a little too, smile and vibrate, as she passes, so that she conceals herself for a moment just past the door, trying to see in, trying to imbibe the effervescence a little longer.