Lillian on Life Page 6

  He limped, but he did so as if he’d always limped and that was the normal way, when in fact he’d been wounded in the war, before most of our boys even had a chance to be. It was months and months before he was willing to tell me, actually. We could only snatch short moments alone for ages, but there was finally a trip, a hotel, a chance to sleep and wake up and see his skin against white sheets. I traced the scars on his thigh, just above his knee.

  “France?” I said, watching my fingers.

  His hair shushed against the pillow as he shook his head no. “Libya,” he said.

  “Were you there for long?”

  “Not long enough. Went in August, back home for Christmas. Nineteen forty.”

  My sleepy mind ticked over. “Nineteen forty?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But we didn’t enter the war until nineteen forty-one, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  I tipped my head back to look into his face, and he was smiling at me. “Speak,” I said. He just looked down at my hand on his knee. I pushed him with my body to shake the words out of him. “Speak,” I said. “Speak now, or forever hold your ears to block out the nagging.”

  When he decided to talk, he pulled me to him so that his chin rested on my head and my right ear was suctioned against his neck. It’s awkward to try and listen like that, with your neck twisted that far and only one ear available, but I didn’t dare move. That’s how he wanted to tell me, so that’s how I’d be told.

  “I enlisted with the British, before we entered the war,” he said. “Rifle battalion.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, but kept me held against him, so I figured he wasn’t finished. I tried to imagine what he was seeing. “Bayonets?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard to imagine. Like you were fighting in the Boer War, or something.”

  “They were very important.”

  “But you have to get so close to use them.”

  He nodded against my head. “You save ammunition, though.”

  “But what if they have guns? I mean, who can you actually get close to without being killed first?”

  “Sometimes you got close under cover of smoke. Sometimes you came across soldiers manning mortar, all spread out. I don’t know why they weren’t better armed.”

  “You stabbed them.”

  “If you could.”

  We were quiet for a moment. I felt like the room wasn’t attached to a hotel anymore. It was just our minds. It was the inside of our minds.

  “And did you stab people?”

  He nodded against my head and I felt him waiting, like he didn’t know how I’d feel about that, so I pulled him closer against me with the hand I’d been touching his scars with, the hand I wasn’t lying on. I wanted to press my lips against his neck, but that would mean pulling my head away a bit, and I didn’t want him to feel any separation between us at that moment, so I just waited. When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Did people stab you?”

  “No.”

  “So what got you in the leg?”

  “Shrapnel.”

  Now I nodded, and my ear popped away from his neck, which was a relief, and since we were talking about the wound I felt I could look at it again. I went up on one elbow and leaned over toward it. “Did they need to reset the bone?”

  “Yes, lots of it.”

  “And did they do that in Libya?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a field hospital?”

  “Those were in France. Ours were called desert hospitals.”

  I was about to ask another question, because it seemed that was what I had to do, but he said, “You know what I remember most vividly from that hospital? There were creases in the pillowcase. I was in pain when they brought me in. They’d bandaged me up before transporting me, but they hadn’t had anything to deaden that kind of pain, so I wasn’t clear in my head. I don’t remember who was holding the stretcher, anything like that, but when they lifted me up and I looked at the cot I’d be transferred to, even as they tipped me onto it, I noticed the creases in the pillowcase, and it was everything I could do not to cry. You get used to things being dusty and gritty and oily. You really do. But then when there’s something clean, something that’s been folded carefully, and unfolded carefully, and it’s there for your head, it’s like your heart, it’s like, I don’t know. I can’t describe it.”

  I wished he could. I wished I could have been the one to hear exactly what happened to his heart that day. But I didn’t push him.

  “Did you receive a Purple Heart?” I asked after a bit.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was with the British, remember?”

  “Oh yes. So did they give you anything, or just a clean pillowcase?”

  “The Military Cross.”

  “For being wounded?”

  He cleared his throat. “For gallantry, actually. I think it was ‘exemplary gallantry.’”

  I looked at his face again, and he shrugged. “No idea what for,” he said. “It came as a surprise.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “I still don’t believe you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I thought for a second. “Maybe they thought it was gallant that a Yank signed up to help.” I put on an English accent. “Jolly good show, soldier.”

  He laughed. “Maybe. Come here. I’ll show you a jolly good show.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said. “I’ll show you exemplary gallantry.”

  So you see? You see how right he was? You see how the design was just right? And how Willis and I weren’t just right? Willis bought me beautiful clothes and took me beautiful places, but he got angry and said crazy stuff and was embarrassing when behavior mattered. I tried to imagine marrying him, but the idea was ridiculous. He would have been fun at the reception but a nightmare at the ceremony.

  The transfer to London saved me. I remember packing, stuffing my suitcases with the clothes he’d given me. I even had to buy some webbing to tie them shut with. And then unpacking everything, and all of it looking so out of place in my dowdy little tenement.

  When he came over to England to ask me to reconsider, the familiarity I felt when I was with him paled in comparison to the relief I felt at having the Channel between us. Actually, the familiarity had simply paled, even without the comparison. It didn’t take long. When you’re in a relationship you mold yourself to it. You curve your body around it and you curve your mind around it, in order to maintain it. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re crippled until it’s too late.

  That’s not how I worded it to myself back then, of course. I was so unclear on things. But my heart was tender, and I knew that he chafed it.

  We had dinner when he came over to London, and he looked different to me. I knew all the clothes he was wearing, and his hair was still the same, neatly trimmed, lightly oiled, as always belying his interior volcano. But he was no longer someone I adapted to. I chattered about my new job for a while, fiddling with my bread, until he couldn’t stand it.

  “Your new boss handsome?” he finally asked.

  “Not especially,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and stretched a leg out to the side and looked at it.

  We didn’t talk or eat much after that. On the walk back to where I was staying it pained me so much that I had caused such a noisy man to fall silent. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, or on his heart. But of course I didn’t reach out to him. If you touch them, it means they are allowed to touch you, and if he had touched me I would have screamed.

  I was staying temporarily in what the English call a bedsit. It was on the second floor of a drab terrace house and had its own door at street level. I left Willis at the bottom of the stairs and turned at the t
op. He still had his hand on the door, keeping it open.

  “Sure?” he said, after a moment.

  I nodded. After another moment he let the door close and left.

  I don’t want that to happen with this kitchen. I don’t want that horrible, exhausting confusion of moving away from the old but being unclear about the new. I want to see a design, and I want to know, because in my experience the new has been an extremely mixed bag.

  On the Food of Love

  John, for example. My first beau in London after my transfer there. The relationship lasted less than two years, but I had to try so hard in that short time that it felt like much longer.

  He had an unusually sweet singing voice, and favored Italian art songs and Henry Purcell. Particularly Purcell in the morning, and particularly the charming one that goes, “If music be the food of love sing on, sing on, sing on, sing on till I am fill’d, am fill’d with joy.” His voice rang like bells against the bathroom tile.

  Food is the food of love, though, not music. I’ve known that ever since Mary spoiled me with snacks between meals. Ever since Laszlo came up the stairs with his arms around a bag of groceries before throwing his arms around me instead. So when it came to interacting with John’s two little children, I cooked.

  When I arrived in Munich I couldn’t boil an egg, and in Paris I bought pâté and cheese and salad and bread and that was dinner. London requires one to cook, so I took myself to Le Cordon Bleu and studied under the very severe Monsieur Hervé, who was totally unromantic in his approach to cooking. As a result we joked among ourselves that he was either Belgian or more likely Swiss rather than French. He taught us the many ways to present the glory of the egg. He enlightened us on other topics as well, of course, but for some reason the egg represented the most meaningful part of my Cordon Bleu education. Maybe because until then it had always been a simple breakfast with salt and pepper, a garnish, or a last resort when the cupboard was otherwise bare. Over a few weeks it became a showstopper.

  There was a party one night at the Highgate home of one of John’s journalist friends. John picked me up at my apartment on his way there. Checked shirt and cuff links, as usual. It was a Friday night, and he had the children as he did every other weekend, so we brought them along. I put them to bed in a guest room and read them Goodnight Moon. That book was impossible to find in London, so I’d asked George Junior to send a copy over. I felt extremely glamorous in my silk and pearls, feminine and good, sitting in the guest room of an elegant London home reading to a pair of pretty children. When I returned to the living room the air was full of cigar smoke and the conversation was being dominated by a square-headed American gesticulating with the cut-crystal tumbler of Scotch in his fist. “Oh good, you’re back,” he said, and I felt a blast of hot prickles on my skin. “You can help us muddle something out.”

  “Well, I’ll try,” I said, perching on the arm of John’s chair for moral support.

  “You must have some of the inside poop on the USSR.”

  I said I wasn’t very close to the source. I was secretary to the bureau chief at a weekly magazine in London, not a journalist in Berlin. Everyone was looking at me and my heart was pounding wildly.

  “Lots in the magazine about Khrushchev lately,” he said, trying to prompt me.

  “Well,” I said.

  “Aha! I knew it,” the guy said, bringing his drink down on the arm of his chair and leaving a splash of Scotch on the fabric.

  “Knew what?” I asked, then wanted to kick myself for sounding thick.

  “Khrushchev’s days are numbered.”

  “I only said ‘Well.’”

  “You hesitated.”

  “I suppose anything’s possible,” John said, in a way that was slightly mocking.

  “Oh no, you mark my words, John,” the man said. “This is how they function.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, getting up, and hoped they imagined that I needed the restroom. I went back to the guest room, where the children were sleeping, and closed the door behind me. Once I had sat down in the dark at the foot of one of the beds and had stopped hearing the sea in my ears, I was able to listen to the two of them breathing. My eyes adjusted to the dark. Marcus, the seven-year-old, breathed evenly in the bed I was sitting on. Mariana was dreaming energetically in the other. She would have been four then. I was calming down, but now I was worried about how to go back out to the party. I couldn’t answer that question. I could only sit there and worry.

  Eventually the door opened and John looked in. He could see me in the triangle of light from the hall. I was too embarrassed to look at him.

  “Would you like to go home, Lillian?”

  I nodded.

  “Would you like to go home to my home, Lillian?”

  Now I looked at him. I’d never stayed the night when his kids were with him before. Tears of love and relief came to my eyes, but I knew better than to throw my arms around him. True gentlemen are so often maladroit, and mustn’t be toppled over. I just nodded again, and he nodded back. “I’ll get your coat,” he said.

  When we got to John’s and had transferred the children from our shoulders to their beds, all I wanted to do was cook. I was so happy. Dinner had been a strange bachelor effort, and we were both hungry, and John had eggs in the fridge.

  After I had moved in completely and was cooking regularly, John became more and more frustrated with my attention to detail. “Oh, just make them some toast, for God’s sake, Lillian! They’re hungry!” he’d hiss at me while I was mashing young carrots into new potatoes or salting and rinsing cucumber spears to be wrapped in ham. “Why are you being so tasteful?” he cried once. “Children have no taste!”

  “But they love what I cook,” I bleated back.

  “Anyone would love it if they’d been waiting for hours to have it on their plate,” he said with his hands on his narrow hips. But the idea of opening a can of baked beans for them for speed’s sake made my stomach lurch. To please John I’d sometimes give them canned tomato soup, but I’d console myself by making the croutons from scratch.

  That night, though, after leaving the party early, coming home to John’s with the children for the first time, I took all the time I wanted assembling a beautiful improvised frittata and a tomato vinaigrette. I remember holding each egg in my hand before I broke it into the bowl, appreciating its perfection. No other food offers that feeling of peace before you cook it, no other shell or rind so delicately protects so many options. I cooked slowly, and John waited quietly, and we sat and looked at each other across our plates and glasses and ate the love I’d made.

  On Leaving in Order to Stay

  Living with John was like that Robert Frost poem about whether the world will end in fire or in ice and which is worse. He was so cold sometimes. He would go for days without speaking. He never seemed to have trouble finding the words for his foreign policy column, but speaking to me was often beyond him. I thought this was deep. To stupid me, it was part of his elegance.

  It’s so painful to be a disappointment when you’re trying your best all the time. I never came home from work and merely put my feet up. I never went out without dressing carefully. I stayed up until all hours to get the dishes clean after an evening. I ran all over town for birthday gifts for the children, and he’d say, “Why do you waste your time like that, Lillian? Don’t you have better things to do?” Men tell you they say things like this because they love you. So do mothers. That this doesn’t feel like love to you surprises them.

  As does your infidelity.

  It all started with tango music in a restaurant. It made me feel sexy, but our chat over dinner was incredibly banal. I tried to keep the energy up, but John was desultory. He was so intelligent, but this was a period during which he didn’t want to talk about work. The evening was odd from the start. The walls were green. The music writhed into my blood like a hot oiled snake. I looked a
t John’s neat hair, his shining cuff links, the beautiful mole at the corner of his mouth. The conversation was little better than gossip. I’m sure at some point I wondered deep down how long such a ridiculous dinner could possibly last. Then I heard a clattering of cutlery and felt the breeze as a large man rushed over to John from somewhere behind me. He made an effort to hide his face from me as he announced, “You are having dinner with the most, most beautiful woman in the world.” Then he left the restaurant, but I had recognized his hands, his hair. Laszlo. Laszlo was in London. I was in London. John was ice. When Laszlo put two and two together and called the London bureau, I was ready to be found. I agreed to meet him for tea in the afternoon.

  The tables in the tea shop were tiny, and after he indented both my cheeks with his velvet lips and left my skin tingling from the swipe of surrounding stubble, we sat, and our long legs interlocked under the table. I scooted my chair back and crossed my legs, but he stayed right where he was for a long moment. Then he leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and said, “Oh my God, Lillian, your beautiful nostrils.” When a man says something like this, you either suddenly remember an important meeting or you stay where you are in the heat of his curly-fringed eyes and indulge the idea of allowing him to enjoy your body.

  The following weekend John took the children to see his parents. It was Easter. Laszlo and I heard church bells all morning. They made me sing. “‘Oranges and lemons,’ say the bells of St. Clement’s.” In his current mood, John wouldn’t have laughed. Then again, I wouldn’t have sung. When John got quiet, I got quiet. It was contagious. “‘You owe me five farthings,’ say the bells of St. Martin’s.” Laszlo guffawed and rubbed his stiff morning beard into my neck, and pushed me on my side to continue down my back, and scraped my inner thighs mercilessly, giggling and licking and then ripping me in two.

  John didn’t have much of an eye for changes in physical detail. Once I said to him, during tea with the children, “I think I’ll go back to my old hairstyle.” John said, “Which was . . . what?” Little Mariana said, “Can I come too?” So John didn’t notice the abrasions. He did, however, get home earlier than I did a few weeks later to pack for a trip to Brussels and open a steamy letter from Laszlo. I was closing the front door saying, “Hiya, honey,” as he walked toward me down the front hall. His eyes were rimmed in red. I asked him what was wrong and he took the sleeve of my jacket between two of his fingers as if I were something foul he’d found on the carpet. He led me into the kitchen, where Laszlo’s letter was open on the table. Florid writing, impossible not to recognize. I didn’t need to read it. The atmosphere around John was electric. He was visibly shaking with a shock and humiliation that inflamed my pity.