You Are the Love of My Life Read online

  “What are you saying to me?” she asked.

  “I was talking about the hypothalamus,” he said.

  “I mean what else?” she said.

  Her stomach tightened the way it sometimes did with Reuben. The kitchen turned claustrophobic with expectation. She got up and turned on the water for tea.

  “Do you think we’re friends?” she asked, her back to the stove. “Becoming friends?”

  She wasn’t sure what was going on with her, whether the restlessness she felt, adolescent, awkward in its discomfort, was an attraction between them. Or had nothing to do with August. She had no initiation in the rites of love affairs. Reuben was the only man she had ever desired.

  What silent message might she be sending to August Russ these mornings together, herself uncertain. Was it simply that she wanted Reuben to know she was desirable to someone else, or was it possible that August did desire her. Or was this restlessness simply a translation of lingering hope and her own longing.

  “We’re certainly becoming friends,” he said, shuffling through his papers.

  When the telephone rang in the kitchen, Lucy picked up quickly, thinking it was Reuben calling. A Thursday after ten, already he was late getting to the office.

  But the principal of Lafayette Elementary was on the line to say that Maggie’s permission slip to go to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History had not been signed by her parent, rather by Mrs. Mallory, and was that agreeable to Lucy.

  “Otherwise Maggie will not be allowed to go on the field trip.”

  “How did that happen?” Lucy asked.

  “I don’t know how it happened, Ms. Painter. I only know that the permission slip was unsigned and Maggie said you had forgotten and Zee Mallory, who was with Maggie, signed it for you.”

  Lucy’s knees gave and she leaned against the wall.

  “I didn’t actually see the permission slip,” Lucy said, hoping she wasn’t reflecting poorly on Maggie, but she hadn’t seen it that she remembered. Or had she? Had it been left on the kitchen table for her to sign and in the confusion of a new house and Reuben and the general anxiety reflected in her twice-misplaced keys and wallet and even her winter coat left at the library in the middle of a storm, she had forgotten as well to sign the permission slip.

  “The buses are loading now. All I need from you is an okay that Mrs. Mallory’s signature is sufficient permission. This is protocol, Ms. Painter.”

  “I understand.”

  “I know you’re new to the D.C. public schools but permission slips are very important,” she said. “It might be a good idea for you to check Maggie’s book bag every evening until you’ve established a routine.”

  “I’ll look into that,” Lucy said coolly.

  She hung up the phone and put her head against the back door, tears thick in her throat.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Something happened, Lucy. You’re white as a ghost.”

  “Zee Mallory signed Maggie’s permission slip to go to the Smithsonian.”

  August shook his head.

  “But nothing awful happened, right?”

  “Something awful did happen,” Lucy said, slipping into her coat to pick up Felix. “Zee Mallory is appropriating my daughter.”

  BY THE TIME Lucy got home from play school with a sleeping Felix, August had made bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches on wheat toast.

  “Hot chocolate?” he asked.

  “I love hot chocolate.”

  She carried Felix upstairs, putting him down in his own bed.

  “I just wanted to finish our conversation,” he said. “So I made lunch.”

  “Your conversation!” Lucy sat down to lunch. “Sometimes it’s a miracle we understand each other.”

  “You and me?”

  “All people, even you and me.”

  “I don’t particularly want to be understood.”

  “Maybe I don’t either.”

  But she was pleased that August felt at home in her house, that he cooked for her, serving sandwiches on plates with a napkin and hot chocolate with marshmallows melting in the heated milk.

  “I like it that you’re here,” she said, “just doing normal things that people do who live together. And then you go home.”

  He laughed.

  “You’ve never lived with someone?” he asked.

  “My children but they’re my children.”

  “What about their father?” He reached behind him and got a paring knife out of the drawer to cut up a pear.

  “I never lived with him.”

  “Does he, the father, matter to you?” he asked. “I was thinking recently that I loved my wife—I believe I loved my wife but she didn’t matter as much . . .” He hesitated. “I suppose as much as she should have.”

  “He matters,” Lucy said, disarmed by August’s curious honesty. “More than he should.”

  “Well these mornings here at your house are perfect for me,” he said. “I come, you listen, sort of listen but enough to make me happy, and then I go home.”

  “And what’s for you at home?”

  “Myself, of course,” he said, looking at her, his blue eyes grave under the heavy-lens glasses. “I am for me at home.”

  “That’s enough for you?”

  “Plenty.”

  His face softened. She imagined his lips on hers. He would lean across, any moment now, he would lean across and kiss her.

  And he did lean across the table, stretched his arms, his hands touching hers but with a purpose that did not include romance.

  “We are in a lost time. You know that.”

  “You mean now?”

  “Now. 1973. Exactly.” He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. “So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we’ve drawn back into our shells, wondering what have we done and what do we believe? And is there any purpose to our lives?”

  “I don’t think in generalities,” Lucy said. “I think about Vermillion, my three-toed sloth, but not sloths. Not sloths as a group.”

  He smiled at her.

  “You are a funny girl, you know,” he said. “I suppose I do think in generalities, but if I were to give shame, for example, a specific story so you’d understand what I mean by it, I’d talk about myself. That’s the starting point always, isn’t it?”

  “What story would you tell?” Lucy asked.

  He laughed. “I said if I were to tell you a story . . . but I’m not. Among other things . . .” he started, and got up then, put his plate in the sink, finished the rest of his hot chocolate. “I seem to have left the introduction to the book on my desk at home,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  “What other things?” she asked as he was leaving.

  “Other things?”

  “You said among other things.”

  “Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “Two minutes. Don’t go away.”

  ZEE MALLORY WAS on the porch of her house with the electrician when August came out of the front door of Lucy’s house and crossed the lawn to his own. She wondered was it possible August visited Lucy more frequently and used the back door, and the fact that he visited at all was somehow crushing that morning after Adam’s accident.

  She paid the electrician, closed the door, and called Lane, who would be home and mildly depressed, as she tended to be by nature and always around noon.

  Coffee and donuts were still on the kitchen counter untouched. No one in her group had come for coffee that morning.

  “Laney!” Zee said when she heard Lane’s weary voice. “I’m loaded with donuts and coffee and nobody showed up today. Do you think it was because of Adam?”

  “I think . . .” Lane hesitated. “I think I’ll come over and have one donut, no more.”

  They sat on Zee’s front porc
h, in jeans and boots and sweaters, their arms around their knees.

  “Nobody knew exactly what to say about the accident,” Lane said. “Adam’s so funny and warm when we have our parties that his temper surprised me.”

  “He’s a litigator.”

  “I know.”

  “He likes to fight,” Zee said.

  “I suppose that makes you lucky. I wish Will fought.” Lane took a second donut. “Or talked. I dream about August Russ.”

  “August?” Zee shrugged. “It looks very much as though he’s fallen for Lucy.”

  “For Lucy?”

  “I see him there morning after morning at least in the last week and a half—he walks across the yard and must walk right in the door as if she’s unlocked it for him.”

  “I can’t imagine him in a relationship.”

  “But he was married after all and Lucy’s available and next door and he’s single.”

  Lane laughed and leaned her shoulder into Zee’s.

  “Oh, Zee, so are we available!”

  “Not me, Laney. I love Adam. Even when he goes through these dark tunnels, I know he’ll come out on the other side. It’s marriage, right?”

  “Marriage?”

  “Well . . . that’s my general understanding about marriage.”

  “I was pregnant,” Lane said.

  “You never told me that.”

  “With Maeve, and Will was seeing another girl at Northwestern, just beginning to see her since we’d broken up a couple of weeks before. And there I was single and told him about the baby, and being a man of probity, he married me. Or we married. However you want to look at it.”

  “Oh, Laney, you make it sound so empty.”

  “It’s lonely.”

  Zee leaned her back against the steps, her hand on Lane Sewall’s knee.

  “I’m so sorry, Lane.”

  “Not worth being sorry about and I’m a whiner. You know that.” She hugged Zee around the shoulders. “And you’re my best friend.”

  Zee watched Lane walk home, her coat open blowing behind her.

  She was pleased with Lane’s confessions about her marriage although the pleasure she took in the misfortunes of others disturbed her.

  Lane wasn’t her best friend. No one was. Even when Zee was very young, she had never had such a friend, only the illusion of shared connections, she thought.

  As she got up from the steps to go inside, she noticed that August was on his way back to Lucy Painter’s.

  “Busy day?” she called out.

  “Pretty busy,” he waved, hurrying up Lucy’s front steps.

  Zee watched as he went in the house. Then she went back inside and put her coat over the banister and slipped down to the floor where Blue was sleeping, leaning against his fleshy belly, her hand resting on his fur.

  LUCY WAS JUST cleaning up after lunch when August returned with a folder which he opened on the kitchen table, rubbing his hands together as if he were preparing to give a lecture, anxiously, she thought later after he had left.

  “I don’t want you to think that the reason I didn’t get tenure at the University of Pennsylvania had anything to do with the quality of this book,” he said.

  “Oh I don’t,” Lucy said. “I don’t even think about that at all.”

  “I was asked to leave Penn for personal reasons.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” Lucy said. “I’m happy to listen and very interested,” she added, worried she might have hurt his feelings.

  “Actually,” he began, looking over his half glasses across the table at Lucy, “I don’t know whether to tell you this but I will because it’s on my mind and usually I say what’s on my mind, whether or not it’s a good idea.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Remember the first time I came over in the middle of the night?”

  “I couldn’t forget.”

  “And I said I had an interest in this house.”

  “Yes, you walked right in without knocking,” she said lightly, hoping to intercept what felt like rising tension in the room.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that a man died in the basement of your house?”

  “No,” she said quickly, her throat constricting. “No, no one has told me that.”

  “Well he did. A long time ago, in 1951. I didn’t know about this house when Anna and I bought our house next door but I already knew about the man who died here. At the time of his death, he had a national reputation as President Truman’s most trusted advisor and he happens to be one of the ten biographical sketches in my book.”

  LATE THAT NIGHT, after Felix and Maggie were sleeping, after Lucy had written and torn up a long letter to Reuben about August’s book, fearful the letter would be opened by his personal assistant, she stood in her bedroom window and watched August at the long table in his dining room. He was typing, a glass of wine beside the typewriter, his broad hands flying across the keys.

  For hours now, her heart had been beating irregularly. And this was nerves, she told herself, not a heart attack but an impossible wish that in August’s research he would never discover that Lucy was the daughter of the man who had died in her basement.

  She wondered would August be back as usual the next morning after Maggie left for school and what would he have to say then, what would he ask her and what would she reply.

  She would lie certainly. She knew how to do that.

  Seven

  REUBEN CALLED LATE the night of March 15 to say he had reason to come to Washington. He had acquired a scientist for George Barnes Books who lived in Washington and was writing a book on genetic engineering, and after Reuben met with the writer at lunch on Monday, he would be able to slip away, maybe for as long as two days, to spend with Lucy.

  “And the kids,” he said. “I cannot wait.”

  It was after midnight when Lucy replaced the receiver on its cradle, which, late as it was, meant Reuben must have left the apartment with Elaine and Nell sleeping and gone to his office just to call.

  She couldn’t fall back to sleep, tossing and turning so Felix, snuggled beside her, tossed too. Finally she got up, tiptoed downstairs, and made a batch of sugar cookies from the recipe of her French grandmother whom she had never met. She was still up when Felix scrambled out of bed and came downstairs.

  “Uncle Reuben is coming to visit us,” she told him, giving him a cookie.

  “Uncle Reuben, uncle Reuben. Maggie . . . guess what?”

  And he flew upstairs, waking his sister.

  “True story?” Maggie asked when she came down still in her pajamas.

  “He is. He’ll be here on Monday.”

  “I can’t believe it, Mama. I thought we wouldn’t get to see him until he took us to the beach.”

  “I knew he would come,” Felix said. “We are his favorites. His very favorites in the world.”

  Sometimes Lucy felt badly for Nell. Surely Reuben’s heart was with Maggie with her thick red hair like his, her brown eyes wide-set but dark like his, her strong mind and fierce spirit. Reuben had even said himself that Nell was wimpy. His word wimpy, and who wouldn’t be with Elaine commanding her young life.

  “His favorites in the whole world?” Felix asked.

  “In the whole world.”

  When Zee knocked on the door to invite Lucy to coffee with the other members of the group of friends, Maggie answered the door and told her about Uncle Reuben coming to Washington, pointing out his picture on the Brooklyn Bridge to the left of the front door.

  “His name is Reuben Frank,” Maggie said.

  “Your mother’s brother?”

  “He’s our uncle, but not by blood,” she said as she used to tell her friends in the Village. “He’s our uncle by choice.”

  “How lucky to choose the one you want,” Zee said, heading into the kitchen where Lucy was making oatmeal. “Fun for you. An old friend from New York City?”

  “My editor,” Lucy said.

  “Very attractive,” Zee said. �
�I just came to ask you to come over for coffee if you can.”

  “I can’t,” Lucy said. “Not this morning.”

  She had no intention of crossing the street to Zee’s front porch for that morning. The women in the neighborhood assumed an intimacy, even passing on the street on the way to the post office or the market, as if they knew Lucy in ways she didn’t know herself. There was something unsettling about their almost religious sense of community.

  “Do you hate Zee?” Maggie asked, taking a cookie.

  “Of course not.”

  “That’s how you act and all she wants is to be friends. She’s that kind of person.”

  “Friendly,” Felix said.

  “I’m sure she’s friendly,” Lucy said, setting the yellow bowls with Cream of Wheat and brown sugar on the table. “And I don’t hate anyone, Maggie. None of us in this house hates.”

  She wasn’t going to talk about Zee Mallory, not this morning when her heart was trembling with happiness that Reuben was coming to see her.

  When Maggie left for school—Lucy checked to make sure that she was walking with Maeve, looking out the dining room window as Maggie crossed Witchita Avenue and headed down the street with Maeve Sewall, their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  “Uncle Reuben will love our new house, Mama,” Felix said. “Maybe he can stay until Christmas.”

  “Christmas is months away, Felix,” she said, kissing the top of his head, kissing her own hand, testing the softness of her lips on skin.

  Reuben’s voice had been pure joy—that’s how it played in her ear—he was coming to see her, he could hardly wait, he could taste her lips, he could feel the heat of her body against him.

  It was the constancy of nights without Reuben that had been difficult. Not that Lucy was accustomed to him in her bed, but he had been with her at least two nights a week for years really, and though he stayed all night only occasionally, needing to go home since his excuse to Elaine was that he was working late or seeing an author or having dinner with another editor, it was the nights he stayed that she missed.

  “It’s Uncle Reuben on the phone,” Felix called from the kitchen. “He is coming. He says he really is coming.”

  Lucy took the phone from his hands.

  “Reuben?”