You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  The handsome man was so delighted to be out of the wood that he promised to give the very lonely girl whatever in the world she wanted to have.

  “I would like to have a baby girl since I live by myself in the wood except for my old calico cat.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ll see that you get one immediately.”

  And he did.

  He gave the very lonely girl a beautiful baby girl to be with her always so she would no longer be lonely, Lucy said. And that little girl was you.

  “Then the handsome man left on his horse?” Maggie asked.

  “He had to leave.”

  “Did he ever come back?” she asked.

  “That’s all of the story I know so far.”

  “I SHOULD HAVE told Maggie the truth?” Lucy said when Reuben stopped by that evening with ice cream and wine.

  “The truth. God no, Lucy,” Reuben said. “That would be devastating for all of us.”

  “Someday we’ll have to tell her the truth. You know that.”

  “Until I met you, I had low expectations and now . . . now,” he hesitated. “I am . . .” He put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. In love with you.”

  “So we go on like this day to day?”

  “Day to day for the moment. Someday we will tell her the truth and our lives will have to change.”

  Which was the unspoken arrangement Lucy made with Reuben. She felt a kind of power in it.

  HER MOTHER HAD told her that after her father died, a matter of weeks later, Lucy went blind. Shadows floating past her were all she saw.

  The doctors in Santa Fe could find nothing wrong. Psychosomatic, they said when she insisted she couldn’t see anything but these shadows. And there was every evidence that she could not.

  “Of course,” her mother had said, “. . . given what has happened to our lives.”

  The blindness lasted less than a month, but during those weeks, Lucy could go nowhere without her mother’s help. She would sit in a dining room chair, her feet curled over the rungs, and rest her head on her stacked fists, staring into space.

  “Would you like to go out to the garden?” her mother would ask, “or to a restaurant or to walk around the streets of Santa Fe?,” speaking to Lucy only in French after her father died, as if the English language had never existed between them, except on social occasions when others were around.

  “You loved to draw so I got paints and colored pencils and good art paper and put it on the dining room table. You’d run your fingers over the paper saying it felt like crisp cotton,” her mother said. “And finally you began to draw.”

  “So I could see?” Lucy had asked.

  “I suppose you could.”

  Lucy had a misty memory of blindness that might only have come from her mother’s telling. She remembered little at all of the year after her father died except the astonishing colors of the desert. The blindness must have come first before she saw the colors and she wondered did the radiance of the colors startle her to sight.

  She looked over at Maggie in the darkness lit by the lights from the passing cars, her expression inscrutable.

  When Maggie was born, Lucy fell in love.

  All through her pregnancy she had been frozen by the limitations of her affair with Reuben. Then Maggie came and Lucy could feel her body give way. She would stand over Maggie’s crib while she slept, watching and watching in case this miracle might stop breathing or disappear until in time she began to trust that Maggie was permanent and would not be taken from her.

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, LUCY had driven off the Beltway onto New York Avenue, and Maggie, half sleeping, sat up in her seat and stretched.

  “Are we there?”

  “We’re almost at the hotel.”

  She yawned, reaching into the bag of treats Lucy had packed, taking out a package of peanut butter crackers.

  “I was thinking . . .” Maggie hesitated. “Wondering whether you’re ever going to tell me about my father.”

  “What made you think that now?” Lucy asked, her stomach tightening.

  “Because I’m going to a new school on Monday in a new city and I don’t have a father to tell people about.”

  “Well . . .” Lucy was unprepared for the singular clarity of Maggie’s request.

  “What do you think I should say?” Maggie asked.

  “I think you should say that he lives in New York.”

  “And does he live in New York?”

  “He does.”

  Lucy pulled up to a stoplight, the traffic heavy in spite of the late hour, stalling for time. She was inclined to turn on the radio, to check the weather, anything that would give her time to construct a response.

  “Then you know who he is?” Maggie asked.

  Lucy’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, heat rising in her throat.

  Was Maggie suggesting that there could be more than one possibility for a father? Was she thinking that her mother was unable to identify the only possible man who could have been her father?

  “Of course I know who your father is.”

  Through the years, she had lied about things out of what felt like necessity, but the truth was important to Lucy. A kind of morality she’d constructed of private rules by which to abide as if she were her own society.

  Reuben Frank was the only man with whom she had ever slept, the only one she knew. She had been faithful to one man because she loved him. She wanted her daughter to know that.

  “Why won’t you tell me?” Maggie asked, her tone more curious than accusatory.

  “I will,” Lucy said. “But just not yet.”

  “Can you at least tell me something?” Maggie asked. “Just things about his life—what he looks like and where he lives and has he ever seen me?”

  “I can tell you he’s married to someone else.”

  Maggie fell silent. She pulled up the collar of her coat so it covered her chin and lips, up to her nose, her head sunk like a turtle’s into the collar.

  This news was not what Maggie wanted to hear.

  Glancing at her in the light from the streetlamp, Lucy wondered whether she should have said nothing, whether a little information about her father was more than Maggie really wished to know.

  By the time she had parked the U-Haul, registered at the hotel, taken the elevator to their room, carrying Felix and their overnight bag, she was too exhausted to undress, falling asleep fully clothed in her parka and wool hat and levis between Maggie, wide awake and silent, and Felix.

  Lucy had not seen the house at 3706 Witchita Avenue since she was twelve and she didn’t want to see it until it had been transformed into a house she’d never seen before. She chose the paint colors long-distance, deep orange, sienna, golden yellow, fuchsia, lavender, reminiscent of the desert flowers in Santa Fe. She had the old floors refinished in pale natural pine, installed new appliances, a new furnace, new hot water heater, and the attic, accessible through the closet door in her bedroom, opened to a studio she’d designed with skylights and dry wall and painted floors. The basement had been sprayed bone white, the cement floor spattered bright blue.

  She wanted the old house to feel uninhabited as if it had never been lived in before Lucy Painter and her family arrived.

  SHE WOKE IN darkness, the hotel curtains drawn, no sense of time, the children sleeping on either side of her.

  For a very long time she had believed Reuben even after it should have been clear he was not going to leave Elaine.

  He would tell Lucy she was his secret treasure, his passion, his one great love.

  “With you, I am whole,” Reuben would say on the weekends his wife was in Connecticut with Nell and her parents, on the occasional mornings before Felix was born or evenings when Elaine was working late in her midtown office where she was a literary agent.

  Lucy would slip out of her clothes, her cheeks flushed, her long hair covering his groin as she knelt beside him.

  “I belong to you,” she’d say to him.


  Which was true. Reuben Frank owned her secrets.

  Ownership is how she thought of it, as if his name were on the title to her house. She couldn’t leave him. He was the only person who knew her life.

  MAGGIE HAD BEEN eight when Felix was born. Lucy’s intemperate choice to have another child. An accident, she said to Reuben.

  “There are no accidents,” he said, but he didn’t chastise her. He didn’t even resist or insist that Lucy find a way to interrupt the pregnancy. He simply was what he had always been with her—accommodating, detached, and noncompliant.

  Lucy had persuaded herself that a boy would capture Reuben. He and Elaine would never have another child. Too much for Elaine, he’d told her, too expensive in New York.

  So there would be no boy except this one, this tiny bundle of pink flesh and black curly hair, his only son.

  But the baby Felix with his full lips and deep brown eyes did not become the magnet that Lucy had hoped he would be. As Nell got older, Elaine became demanding. She no longer went away to the country on weekends, pushing instead for a social life in the city with literary people, expanding her business. She made plans for Nell—ballet lessons and ice skating, French classes, Saturdays at the museums. She wanted Reuben to be an “equal partner”—his description or hers, Lucy was never sure.

  But she did know that somehow, sometime she had to bring herself to leave Reuben—the weekends of occasional leftovers stashed in the back of the fridge, furtive calls from restaurants in the city while he was out to dinner with Elaine and one of her clients, bunches of flowers and kisses, their bodies locked together by a stopwatch.

  THE HOUSE WAS a faded yellow shingle situated high over the street, small with a wide front porch, twenty-seven steps down to the sidewalk and surrounded by a brick wall which had been built to control erosion. Built at the turn of the century, it was probably the original farmhouse owning the surrounding land, before a developer arrived and Witchita Hills became a facsimile of the Middle West on the northern border of Washington where the District of Columbia crosses into Maryland. A subdivision really, a replication in spirit of the easy trust presumed of midwestern towns. Or so its residents, all transplants from other places, liked to assume, believing that in Witchita Hills, they had chosen the authenticity of middle-class life with proximity to power. A senator and his family lived on Des Moines Street next door to the head of the Washington bureau for the New York Times, the widow of a Supreme Court justice lived on Columbus Street and on Witchita Avenue, a young lawyer, Miles Robinson, who would be appointed in May to the office of special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, which so threatened Nixon’s presidency that he would eventually be forced to resign.

  SHE CLIMBED INTO the cab of the U-Haul and turned on the ignition.

  “Ready to roll?”

  “Nothing else to do,” Maggie said.

  “Is it a big house?” Felix asked.

  “Bigger than Sullivan Street,” Lucy said. “Big enough for us.”

  “Does it have a swimming pool?”

  “What do you think, Felix?”

  Felix giggled.

  “I think yes.”

  “It’s yellow and messy,” Maggie said. “I saw the pictures.”

  “Me too,” Felix said. “I saw the pictures first.”

  “It’s all cleaned up now,” Lucy said, handing Maggie the directions.

  North on Connecticut Avenue almost to the District line. When you get to EMILY’S secondhand books on your right and Café Moxie on your left, turn LEFT at Witchita and head up the hill to 3706 on the left. There is no sign indicating Witchita Hills.

  Driving north on Connecticut Avenue, past the shops in Chevy Chase, D.C., Witchita Hills sat on an actual hill, a cluster of houses gathered close together on small plots of land. A subdivision really with individual houses, more accidental in design than planned, and in the last year of Richard Nixon’s presidency with Watergate the most conspicuous of Washington’s monuments, Witchita Hills was self-consciously democratic and middle-class, a look of studied poverty about the place suggesting, or so it was assumed among the residents, a new intellectual freedom with responsibility born of the sixties.

  A kind of abandon in the way families kept their houses—unlocked doors, clutter in the yards, porches with toys and strollers, baseball bats and bicycles, the winter remains of bright and messy gardens where tomatoes and green beans and zucchini scrambled for space in garden plots often in the front yard.

  It had glitter in the way a place can take on its own aura for no particular reason. Which in this case had to do with community—a real place with real people was the word out on Wichita Hills. There was a post-sixties smugness about it—citizens with genuine social conscience in a time of national secrecy, openhearted citizens without judgments, an expectation that the families who lived there had a new moral superiority. One for All and All for One was the painted sign at the entrance to the community center on St. Louis Road.

  IN THE GRAY fog of an early morning, Lucy strained to see the signs on the shops. The cab of the U-Haul was airless. She turned off the heat.

  She had been feeling what she used to describe to Reuben as an out-of-body strangeness which came over her in waves and by surprise. Her mind would go blurry, her heart race with a rising fear of losing hold. She could imagine her own death as if it were in the present tense. It was like descriptions she had read of amnesia, as if she were shelved in the wrong aisle. Who was she and who were these children and where did they all belong?

  It wasn’t the first time this had happened since she’d made the decision to leave New York. Long before when she was young, she had learned to depend on her imagination to rescue her from the long days as an only child in a very quiet house.

  “Do you know the name of my new school?” Maggie was asking, but Lucy was concentrating on an idea that had come to her weeks ago when she saw the name sloth in an article in the Metro section of the newspaper about the Brooklyn Zoo. A three-toed sloth had been found dead hanging, as sloths do, by his tail from the branch of a tree. How odd it was and reassuring that the tail remained stiff enough to hold him swinging from the branch as if he were not really dead, only the appearance of it. Vermillion the Three-Toed Sloth, she would call the story. But in her story, the young male sloth would not die.

  Vermillion might have as his most salient quality, besides slowness, an obsession with Violet, who would be a swift, kenetic sort of creature, maybe a small bird, a cerulean bluebird, with the capacity to fly high above the trees, even above the tree line. She found herself wondering what obsession had to do with love and did Vermillion love Violet?

  She had never thought of Reuben as an obsession but perhaps he was. Maybe that was all he was.

  And if that were true, forgetting Reuben ought to be possible if she could find a substitute to hold his place, something substantial to fill her anxious mind until Reuben faded away.

  “Mama,” Felix was saying, “you aren’t telling Maggie the name of her school.”

  “Lafayette,” Lucy said quickly, “Lafayette Elementary. And next year you’ll go to junior high nearby.”

  “Unlikely,” Maggie said, putting her feet on the dashboard, turning up the heat. “Unlikely I’ll be living here next year.”

  The day was becoming darker, the traffic headed downtown had headlights on and Lucy couldn’t see any of the signs on the buildings until Maggie said, “Café Moxie,” pointing to a long green building on the left with red letters lit up, Café Moxie in loopy script, a martini glass at either end.

  Lucy put on her turn signal.

  There was only one way in and out of Witchita Hills and that was Witchita Avenue, easy to miss, to pass right by continuing north on Connecticut since there was no sign announcing the existence of a small utopia at the far northern end of the District of Columbia.

  “Is this place really called Witchita Hills?” Maggie asked.

  “It is,” Lucy said.

 
; “It sounds like the name of a cult.”

  As Lucy drove up Witchita Avenue, she noticed the lights were on in most of the houses and in the fog they shimmered, bleeding across the horizon. She saw her house at once, the yellow on the shingles more faded than it had seemed in photographs, the house higher from the street.

  She was just turning the steering wheel to the left to park behind the movers’ truck the real estate agent had promised would be there to help her unload, when she noticed across the street on the right, a cluster of people standing together, witnessing her arrival.

  “So here we are,” she said, a sudden sinking of spirit.

  “We have friends already waiting for us,” Felix said. “They are our friends, right, Mama?”

  “I hope they will be,” Lucy said, putting the truck in park, pulling up the brake.

  “Mama,” Maggie said combing her curly red hair quickly with her fingers, “take off that awful orange hat.”

  Three

  THE WOMEN GATHERED in front of the Mallorys’ house—bundled in coats and scarves, their mittened hands wrapped around mugs of cappuccino Zee Mallory had made from her new machine—were expecting Lucy Painter’s arrival.

  Her old farmhouse was the third on the left as the hill rose to the end of the avenue where Robin and Miles Robinson lived. From Lucy’s front porch, she would be able to hear the traffic on Connecticut Avenue, but only in the winter with the trees bare would it be possible to see it. Lane and Will Sewall lived across the street in a Sears Roebuck bungalow painted mustard yellow with brown trim, a 1970 Plexiglas addition to the living room. Two houses up from Lane and Will, the Mallorys, Adam and Zelda, called Zee, lived in the largest house in the neighborhood, five bedrooms, a big backyard that dipped into the woods, a wraparound front porch with white wicker furniture and dead spider plants left over from summer hanging from hooks above the railings. Next door to Lucy, August Russ, a young widower, lived alone in a bright blue house, similar to Lucy’s, copied from it years after the neighborhood began to grow into its name. Across from August, Josie Lerner, divorced with a young son, Rufus, kept a respectable, conventional home, no toys on the front porch, bicycles in the garage, shades on the windows, a red door repainted every year to a glossy sheen, the grass kept watered in the hot Washington summers, the leaves raked and used for mulch in the fall. At the top of the hill, Robin and Miles Robinson lived in a house they had renovated, taking pains gutting the late twenties arts and craft cottage so it looked less like a mushroom, more similar, as Miles would say, to “en plein air.”