Selected Stories (40 page)

That is, should she have stayed in the place where love is managed for you, not gone where you have to invent it, and reinvent it, and never know if these efforts will be enough?

D
UNCAN
spoke about his former girlfriends. Efficient Ruth, pert Judy, vivacious Diane, elegant Dolores, wifely Maxine. Lorraine the golden-haired, full-breasted beauty; Marian the multilingual; Caroline the neurotic; Rosalie who was wild and gypsylike; gifted, melancholy Louise; serene socialite Jane. What description would do now for Lydia? Lydia the poet. Morose, messy, unsatisfactory Lydia. The unsatisfactory poet.

One Sunday, when they were driving in the hills around Peterborough, he talked about the effects of Lorraine’s beauty. Perhaps the voluptuous countryside reminded him. It was almost like a joke, he said. It was almost silly. He stopped for gas in a little town and Lydia went across the street to a discount store that was open Sundays. She bought makeup in tubes off a rack. In the cold and dirty toilet of the gas station she attempted a transformation, slapping buff-colored liquid over her face and rubbing green paste on her eyelids.

“What have you done to your face?” he said when she came back to the car.

“Makeup. I put some makeup on so I’d look more cheerful.”

“You can see where the line stops, on your neck.”

At such times she felt strangled. It was frustration, she said to the doctor later. The gap between what she wanted and what she could get. She believed that Duncan’s love—love for her—was somewhere inside him, and that by gigantic efforts to please, or fits of distress which obliterated all those efforts, or tricks of indifference, she could claw or lure it out.

What gave her such an idea? He did. At least he indicated that he could love her, that they could be happy, if she could honor his privacy, make no demands upon him, and try to alter those things about
her person and behavior which he did not like. He listed these things precisely. Some were very intimate in nature and she howled with shame and covered her ears and begged him to take them back or to say no more.

“There is no way to have a discussion with you,” he said. He said he hated hysterics, emotional displays, beyond anything, yet she thought she saw a quiver of satisfaction, a deep thrill of relief, that ran through him when she finally broke under the weight of his calm and detailed objections.

“Could that be?” she said to the doctor. “Could it be that he wants a woman close but is so frightened of it he has to try to wreck her? Is that oversimplified?” she said anxiously.

“What about you?” said the doctor. “What do you want?”

“For him to love me?”

“Not for you to love him?”

She thought about Duncan’s apartment. There were no curtains; he was higher than the surrounding buildings. No attempt had been made to arrange things to make a setting; nothing was in relation to anything else. Various special requirements had been attended to. A certain sculpture was in a corner behind some filing cabinets because he liked to lie on the floor and look at it in shadow. Books were in piles beside the bed, which was crossways in the room in order to catch the breeze from the window. All disorder was actually order, carefully thought out and not to be interfered with. There was a beautiful little rug at the end of the hall, where he sat and listened to music. There was one great, ugly armchair, a masterpiece of engineering, with all its attachments for the head and limbs. Lydia asked about his guests—how were they accommodated? He replied that he did not have any. The apartment was for himself. He was a popular guest, witty and personable, but not a host, and this seemed reasonable to him, since social life was other people’s requirement and invention.

Lydia brought flowers, and there was nowhere to put them except in a jar on the floor by the bed. She brought presents from her trips to Toronto: records, books, cheese. She learned pathways around the apartment and found places where she could sit. She discouraged old friends, or any friends, from phoning or coming to see her, because
there was too much she couldn’t explain. They saw Duncan’s friends sometimes, and she was nervous with them, thinking they were adding her to a list, speculating. She didn’t like to see how much he gave them of that store of presents—anecdotes, parodies, flattering wit—which were also used to delight her. He could not bear dullness. She felt that he despised people who were not witty. You needed to be quick to keep up with him in conversation, you needed energy. Lydia saw herself as a dancer on her toes, trembling delicately all over, afraid of letting him down on the next turn.

“Do you mean you think I don’t love him?” she said to the doctor.

“How do you know you do?”

“Because I suffer so when he’s fed up with me. I want to be wiped off the earth. It’s true. I want to hide. I go out on the streets and every face I look at seems to despise me for my failure.”

“Your failure to make him love you.”

Now Lydia must accuse herself. Her self-absorption equals Duncan’s, but is more artfully concealed. She is in competition with him as to who can love best. She is in competition with all other women, even when it is ludicrous for her to be so. She cannot stand to hear them praised or know they are well remembered. Like many women of her generation, she has an idea of love which is ruinous but not serious in some way, not respectful. She is greedy. She talks intelligently and ironically and in this way covers up her indefensible expectations. The sacrifices she made with Duncan—in living arrangements, in the matter of friends, as well as in the rhythm of sex and the tone of conversations—were violations, committed not seriously but flagrantly. That is what was not respectful, that was what was indecent. She made him a present of such power, then complained relentlessly to herself and finally to him, that he had got it. She was out to defeat him.

That is what she says to the doctor. But is it the truth?

“The worst thing is not knowing what is true about any of this. I spend all my waking hours trying to figure out about him and me and I get nowhere. I make wishes. I even pray. I throw money into those wishing wells. I think that there’s something in him that’s an absolute holdout. There’s something in him that has to get rid of me, so he’ll find reasons. But he says that’s rubbish, he says if I could stop
overreacting we’d be happy. I have to think maybe he’s right, maybe it is all me.”

“When are you happy?”

“When he’s pleased with me. When he’s joking and enjoying himself. No. No. I’m never happy. What I am is relieved, it’s as if I’d overcome a challenge, it’s more triumphant than happy. But he can always pull the rug out.”

“So, why are you with somebody who can always pull the rug out?”

“Isn’t there always somebody? When I was married it was me. Do you think it helps to ask these questions? Suppose it’s just pride? I don’t want to be alone, I want everybody to think I’ve got such a desirable man? Suppose it’s the humiliation, I want to be humiliated? What good will it do me to know that?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think these conversations are fine when you’re mildly troubled and interested but not when you’re desperate.” “You’re desperate?”

She felt suddenly tired, almost too tired to speak. The room where she and the doctor were talking had a dark-blue carpet, blue-and-green-striped upholstery. There was a picture of boats and fishermen on the wall. Collusion somewhere, Lydia felt. Fake reassurance, provisional comfort, earnest deceptions.

“No.”

It seemed to her that she and Duncan were monsters with a lot of heads, in those days. Out of the mouth of one head could come insult and accusation, hot and cold, out of another false apologies and slimy pleas, out of another just such mealy, reasonable, true-and-false chat as she had practiced with the doctor. Not a mouth would open that had a useful thing to say, not a mouth would have the sense to shut up. At the same time she believed—though she didn’t know she believed it—that these monster heads with their cruel and silly and wasteful talk could all be drawn in again, could curl up and go to sleep. Never mind what they’d said; never mind. Then she and Duncan with hope and trust and blank memories could reintroduce themselves, they could pick up the undamaged delight with which they’d started, before they began to put each other to other uses.

When she had been in Toronto a day she tried to retrieve Duncan,
by phone, and found that he had acted quickly. He had changed to an unlisted number. He wrote to her, in care of her employer, that he would pack and send her things.

L
YDIA
had breakfast with Mr. Stanley. The telephone crew had eaten and gone off to work before daylight.

She asked Mr. Stanley about his visit with the woman who had known Willa Cather.

“Ah,” said Mr. Stanley, and wiped a corner of his mouth after a bite of poached egg. “She was a woman who used to run a little restaurant down by the dock. She was a good cook, she said. She must have been, because Willa and Edith used to get their dinners from her. She would send it up with her brother, in his car. But sometimes Willa would not be pleased with the dinner—perhaps it would not be quite what she wanted, or she would think it was not cooked as well as it might be—and she would send it back. She would ask for another dinner to be sent.” He smiled, and said in a confidential way, “Willa could be imperious. Oh, yes. She was not perfect. All people of great abilities are apt to be impatient in daily matters.”

Rubbish, Lydia wanted to say, she sounds a proper bitch.

Sometimes waking up was all right, and sometimes it was very bad. This morning she had wakened with the cold conviction of a mistake—something avoidable and irreparable.

“But sometimes she and Edith would come down to the café,” Mr. Stanley continued. “If they felt they wanted some company, they would have dinner there. On one of these occasions Willa had a long talk with the woman I was visiting. They talked for over an hour. The woman was considering marriage. She had to consider whether to make a marriage that she gave me to understand was something of a business proposition. Companionship. There was no question of romance, she and the gentleman were not young and foolish. Willa talked to her for over an hour. Of course she did not advise her directly to do one thing or the other, she talked to her in general terms very sensibly and kindly and the woman still remembers it vividly. I was happy to hear that but I was not surprised.”

“What would she know about it, anyway?” Lydia said.

Mr. Stanley lifted his eyes from his plate and looked at her in grieved amazement.

“Willa Cather lived with a woman,” Lydia said.

When Mr. Stanley answered he sounded flustered, and mildly upbraiding.

“They were devoted,” he said.

“She never lived with a man.”

“She knew things as an artist knows them. Not necessarily by experience.”

“But what if they don’t know them?” Lydia persisted. “What if they don’t?”

He went back to eating his egg as if he had not heard that. Finally he said, “The woman considered Willa’s conversation was very helpful to her.”

Lydia made a sound of doubtful assent. She knew she had been rude, even cruel. She knew she would have to apologize. She went to the sideboard and poured herself another cup of coffee.

The woman of the house came in from the kitchen.

“Is it keeping hot? I think I’ll have a cup too. Are you really going today? Sometimes I think I’d like to get on a boat and go too. It’s lovely here and I love it but you know how you get.”

They drank their coffee standing by the sideboard. Lydia did not want to go back to the table, but knew that she would have to. Mr. Stanley looked frail and solitary, with his narrow shoulders, his neat bald head, his brown checked sports jacket which was slightly too large. He took the trouble to be clean and tidy, and it must have been a trouble, with his eyesight. Of all people he did not deserve rudeness.

“Oh, I forgot,” the woman said.

She went into the kitchen and came back with a large brown-paper bag.

“Vincent left you this. He said you liked it. Do you?”

Lydia opened the bag and saw long, dark, ragged leaves of dulse, oily-looking even when dry.

“Well,” she said.

The woman laughed. “I know. You have to be born here to have the taste.”

“No, I do like it,” said Lydia. “I was getting to like it.”

“You must have made a hit.”

Lydia took the bag back to the table and showed it to Mr. Stanley. She tried a conciliatory joke.

“I wonder if Willa Cather ever ate dulse?”

“Dulse,” said Mr. Stanley thoughtfully. He reached into the bag and pulled out some leaves and looked at them. Lydia knew he was seeing what Willa Cather might have seen. “She would most certainly have known about it. She would have known.”

But was she lucky or was she not, and was it all right with that woman? How did she live? That was what Lydia wanted to say. Would Mr. Stanley have known what she was talking about? If she had asked how did Willa Cather live, would he not have replied that she did not have to find a way to live, as other people did, that she was Willa Cather?

What a lovely, durable shelter he had made for himself. He could carry it everywhere and nobody could interfere with it. The day may come when Lydia will count herself lucky to do the same. In the meantime, she’ll be up and down. “Up and down,” they used to say in her childhood, talking of the health of people who weren’t going to recover. “Ah. She’s up and down.”

Yet look how this present slyly warmed her, from a distance.