How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (32 page)

I know you can dismiss this letter as maternal meddling, and you’d be justified. But it seemed the right time to put this down on paper just as we are about to leave to see the Taj Mahal, that monument to love. And because it’s a glorious day, beauty and color and smells and spices assault our every sense, and I want you to have this. The beauty, the joy of life, the love. I know you can—with a little motherly prod.

We’ll be back in Cambridge in a week. Bearing exotic spices, saris for Abby and Lavinia, a charming miniature of a bicycle race over the hills of Calcutta for you.

With love always, your mother

For a long time I sit on the love seat. I take off my shoes. I hug my knees to my chin. I read the letter two more times. I look across the room half expecting to see my mother and Henrietta sitting there, saris on their laps, exotic spices at their feet. But I see only the sleeping man, whose newspaper has now slid to the floor. No matter. I feel their presence. They’re still in the stands cheering us on. Their words are alive.
These
words are a gift. I picture them arm in arm in front of the Taj Mahal. Figures you might dismiss as dull, as nondescript. But beneath the drab gray sparkle souls as romantic as Romeo and Juliet, as Robert and Elizabeth. With wisdom earned from a never-ending journey of self-discovery.
I have at last now discovered true joy. Pure ecstasy,
my mother’s postcard had said. I hold Henrietta’s pages close to my heart.

All at once, there’s a commotion. I turn. Wedding guests are skipping down the stairs and out the front door. The ex–fraternity brothers are throwing rice at Lavinia and John. The tastefully suited businesswomen clutch the floral centerpieces they’ve liberated from the wedding tables; they jump up and down. The lumbering geriatric contingent takes up the rear. Someone drops a champagne glass.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. “You read it?” Ned asks.

I nod. I pass the letter back to him. My carefully made-up eyes fill. Ned grabs me.

Right there in front of everybody, in front of his sister and his father’s colleagues, in front of Ph.D.s and CEOs and M.B.A.s, in front of his new brother-in-law and his old neighbors, in front of the caterer and half the staff of the Harvard Faculty Club, he gives me the kind of kiss a groom gives a bride, the kind of kiss her own groom never gave Lavinia.

S
eventeen

N
ed calls me from the road. “I’m in Hartford,” he announces. I look at my watch. “Then you’ll be here in an hour and a half.”

“Not quite. Add another hour. I need to make a stop along the way.”

“Oh,” I say. I want to ask who, what, when, where, and why—the questions any good J-school student would learn in the first week of the first term. I don’t. I’m working on the trust thing. Which is hard, considering my past experiences.

Ned understands. “All will be revealed when I see you. I’ll tell you everything.”

I skip around the living room. I actually dance cheek-to-cheek with the phone, like some hokey Hollywood musical star. In two and a half hours Ned will be ringing my bell. Ned will be walking up my stairs…

After Lavinia’s wedding, Ned had to leave immediately for New York. To clear out his side of the apartment, to take care of his bills, to pack up his books.

“Are you renting a U-Haul?” I asked. I was standing on the steps of the Faculty Club, pulling rice out of my hair, rubbing my kiss-stung lips. Everyone had left except Professor Lowenthal, who was waiting inside the doors for his driver to pick him up.

Ned laughed. “I don’t think I’ll even begin to fill the old ’87 Volvo wagon.”

“You’re kidding! You still have it? It’s still running?”

“Better than ever. And I can park it on the streets of New York with no worry about theft.” He shook his head. “It may be dented and rusted, missing a few knobs, but it’s still there.”

I smiled. I had fond memories of the Potters’ stately tank; the two-family trips, the car pools. I used to stare longingly at the back of Ned’s neck from the cargo area where Lavinia and I had staked out our girlie giggling territory. We could play crazy eights, wave at tailgating drivers, stick our feet flat against the rear window and admire our sparkly pearl-polished toenails. I wonder if the car still bears the remains of a vinyl purse I left in it one hot summer day. The purse melted and fused onto the backseat, a fried egg of purple and pink polka dots.
Your spoor,
Ned once called it.
For weeks that smell was terrible,
he used to tease.
It was hard not to be reminded of you, such a stench every time I opened the driver’s door
.

I cradle the receiver. “Any fights?” I ask now. “Any disputes over property?”

“Are you trawling for clients for Mary Agnes Finch?”

“I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone.
Almost
anyone,” I correct.

“It was an amiable parting. Most of the stuff was Juliet’s anyway. She hardly wanted my bicycle paraphernalia. Or my books. She was glad to see the back of me.”

No gladder than I to see the front of him. I hear whooshing cars. The blast of a horn. The revving of an engine.

“I’d better watch the road. Abby, I’ll be there soon.” The phone breaks into static—not crackling enough, even so, to disguise his “I can’t wait.”

I sit back on the sofa and admire my spanking-clean apartment. Ned’s moving in. No, he didn’t ask. It was my idea. I swear. He was going to bunk with a friend while he looked for a place to live.

“I think I can make room in my closet for a few mechanic’s uniforms,” I told him.

“You’re sure?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sure,” I said. I didn’t add, Never surer of anything in my life, though that’s how I felt. Far be it from Abigail Elizabeth Randolph to tempt fate.

In the usual way that what you most want to happen takes forever, I tried to fill the days waiting for Ned to wind up his life in New York. I pulled those clean and ironed sheets so tight, tucked those corners into such perfect little hospital envelopes, even the most exacting marine sergeant would find nothing to grouse about. I arranged the heap of glossy bike magazines on Ned’s side of the bed—
Asphalt, Ride, Bicycling
. I bought them yesterday at the kiosk in Harvard Square. “What a bundle,” the man commiserated, dividing them into two bags so I wouldn’t lose my balance on the way home. I held a bag in each hand like the scales of justice. Contrary to Gladstone’s quote, however, in my case, justice was delayed but not denied. I tested the weight. I hefted my load. I pictured the colonial oxen yoke hanging on the wall just as you entered Objects of Desire. I thought of burdens: the burdens of the past, the balancing acts of the present, the different ways people managed to lighten such loads throughout history. “Are you a bike lover?” the man asked.

“No, my boyfriend,” I said. I must admit it gave me a thrill to roll that word off my tongue. “My boyfriend,” I said again, savoring the syllables.

“Too bad.” The man winked. “All the good ones are taken, I guess.”

At last, after the eternity in which I could have read
War and Peace,
watched all six seasons of
Sex and the City,
knitted a scarf and matching mittens, and mastered the French subjunctive, my bell rings.

I would have fallen into his arms right then and there except for the large package he holds out in front of him. The way he’s carrying it, it could be the nine-month stomach of a pregnant woman about to deliver twins. I remember, what now seems like centuries ago, my own toting of the chamber pot. Ned puts his box down. We manage a few soulful kisses, tongues and lips and bodies pressed so hard together you’d expect black and blue bruises to rise on all the squished flesh-to-flesh parts. We can’t get around to doing anything else because the Volvo, three bikes lashed to its rack, Ned’s worldly goods stacked inside, is double-parked on Cambridge Street. “I’ll just be a minute,” Ned says.

“I’m going with you.” I grab his elbow. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

We untie the bikes and chain them to the water-heater pipes in the communal basement. We lug a laundry bag of clothes, a couple of cartons of books and CDs, toolboxes, Ned’s computer. It only takes four arms and two trips up my three flights of stairs. “Is that all?” I ask, incredulous. I think of the first day of my freshman year at college. How many times had my mother and I driven the five blocks from my house to my tiny two-person dormitory room, the car so crammed with my stuff that its back end nearly dragged along the street? Not even taking into consideration that half my clothes remained stored at home on a seasonal need-to-use basis.

Ned smiles. He looks around my neat but still cabinet-of-curiosities, house-of-a-collector, object-stuffed space. “Jack Sprat and his wife,” he pronounces.

Though abstractly I know what he means, in reality the only word I can focus on is
wife
. But because I’ve adjusted my personal twelve-step program into a made-to-order one step at a time, I turn my attention to something else. To the box now sitting in the middle of my living room floor. I point. “What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s for you. Actually for us,” he amends. “We’ll have joint custody.”

A phrase that for a second turns me to ice, its negative repercussions all too fresh in mind and heart, not to mention pocketbook.

Ned shakes his head. His voice is gentle. “Don’t worry. I don’t anticipate any disputes.” He hands me his Swiss army knife, its box cutter already flipped out. “Open it,” Ned orders. “It’s the reason I was late.”

I slice the knife through the tape. I scoop away the packing: crumpled paper from scribbled-on yellow legal pads, shredded pages from journals awash in op. cit.s, and ibid.s, recycled sections of the
New York Times Book Review
.

“Ned!” I cry out.

What I see tucked in the box, a treasure buried in its treasure chest, is Professor and Mrs. Chauncey Coolidge Thayer’s pale blue china soup tureen. “Ned!” I shout again. “I don’t believe it!” Gently I lift it from the box. Gently I place it on the table. I touch the dancing cupids. I trace the outline of birds and butterflies. I stroke the picturesque ruins next to the gushing waterfalls. I gape at Ned.

“They wanted us to have it,” Ned explains, his voice the sort of hush-in-the-cathedral whisper you’d use to contemplate a sacred artifact.

Now is the time for a who, what, when, where, why J-school interrogation, but I am speechless. I run my hand over the fine china, over the classic contours of the tureen the just-married Thayers bought together in Italy. On their honeymoon.

Ned reads my mind. “Do you remember, they got this in Italy on their honeymoon?”

I nod my head. Tears prick my eyes.

“They called me up. They’ve sold their apartment; they’re moving into an assisted-living home. They wanted us to have the tureen. They emphasized particularly that it was for both of us.
For you and your lovely Abigail,
were Mrs. Thayer’s exact words.” He pauses. “Mrs. Thayer said her husband was so grateful. Of course I told her that her thanks was more than enough, that I got more pleasure from those trips than Professor Thayer ever could. I told her I couldn’t possibly…”

Go on, I nod.

“But she said her husband spoke often of that trip to St. Barnaby’s, of how the both of us had come for sherry afterward. How we were so much in love.” He stops. “I went there for tea, to pick it up.”

“And how are they? Are they okay?”

“Remarkable. Chauncey just turned ninety. Mrs. Thayer is still on her bicycle. I promised to come to make some modifications. I promised I’d bring you. They’re excited about their new apartment; they’re going to turn it into something quite modern this time, they told me. Mrs. Thayer’s already found a source for old Marimekko upholstery.”

I touch the tureen. “Ned…” I begin.

“I know,” he says.

We’re both quiet for a while. It’s a comfortable silence. What hovers unsaid between us is eloquent enough. Perhaps we were always on the same wavelength, even when our synapses sparked off onto anomalous detours. I lift the lid of the tureen. I move my face closer. I can almost smell the traces of thousands of lovingly prepared thin consommés, thick chowders, hearty soups. I set the lid back. Maybe I went into the antiques business because of the power of objects, their ability to connote so many things, the inanimate made animate by memory, feeling, history. Or maybe I chose my profession simply because of the way a piece of porcelain, a plaster cast, a well-used, well-cherished tool can act as a touchstone for love.

I rub my finger over a chubby cupid. I look up at Ned. “I remember bringing the cocktail things into the kitchen and seeing this there,” I say now. “Mrs. Thayer was talking about her honeymoon in Italy. She said that more than sixty years later, every time she served a lobster bisque in this tureen, she remembered how happy she’d been. She said it was her madeleine.”

“It could be ours, too,” Ned suggests. He walks over to me. He takes my hand.

I squeeze his fingers. “What a day.” I sigh.

He pulls me toward my impeccably made bed. “It’s not over yet.” He grins.

Here’s where I draw a curtain. Please forgive a digression right at the good part, but I’ll explain. I once went to a reading at the Harvard Bookstore—not
that
reading, which, as you already know, I boycotted, but the reading of someone I was slightly friendly with at college. She had just published her first novel. She talked about how hard it was to write a sex scene. “There are only so many places body parts can go, only so many positions two bodies can contort themselves into,” she said. “The English language is far too limited. How many words do we have for pounding hearts, heated flesh, exchange of fluids?” She gazed out at us. “How do you find a way to describe passion, a way that’s really fresh?”