Marry or Burn (26 page)

Cy listened to the dreams, passed over the ambitions. In the female, he drew back from anything smacking of organized progress. Not in his students: those he dutifully encouraged and recommended, taking care to leave them alone. For Cy was not just any campus Don Juan. He was not, and is not, a self-absorbed man, I know that if I think about it. Anyone can see it, in his eyes alight with interest. It is true that one of those eyes has its own message, seductively weary, all preliminaries out of the way. But he is a man who can be reduced to shamed tears, who wages war, every day, against himself. He went and got counseling but the counselor sent him away when she had an intimate dream about him. She drew the line at such a client, with his gift for listening to women, his liking for them. Her dream ended with his offering her a watermelon. “You are a man with whom I would want children,” she said when she terminated his sessions.

We were in the kitchen when he told me this, looking out the window at our neighbors loading their van to go skiing. They are a couple our age, with no children, always playing, like brother and sister. Cy rubbed behind his bad ear. “Oh God,” he said, and I knew he meant was he, Cy, to be someone like this jovial neighbor of ours with his sister-wife? Were there indeed to be no more of the sudden passions for him, always startling, unfamiliar in their demands, invigorating, redeeming? A danger that must be kept at bay in a marriage such as ours, out of whose soil such irregular geysers shoot, of ardor and shame and disbelieving rage, and—this one so familiar it is a comfort in itself—a demand on
both sides for the other's attention, every bit as much as for lofty things like forgiveness.

All the while I offered him wrongs in exchange for his, different in nature but substantial in themselves. For one thing I said unspeakable things about him, which got repeated. That isn't loyalty to one's husband as, say, my parents would have understood it. I would have said I did it out of loyalty to
us
, a double creature of some kind, an “it,” with its own exigencies. “Don't flatter yourself,” Kate said. “You're an oven of jealousy and spite.”

“Jealousy prolongs the course of love. Proust said so.”

 

MY FRIEND LYNNETTE was a writer. That is, she wanted to be a writer, a novelist. She was always taking leave from work for writing workshops, and corresponding with the people she got to know there. I met her when she came to fill in for the secretary who was having a baby, at the magazine where I was a copy editor.

If Lynnette read a book she had borrowed she said, “Well, that sure wasn't anything I would have figured. I liked it though,” as if I had given her horseradish to eat, and she set the book aside as having no bearing on her own undertaking and never referred to it again.

Lynnette had married young, the day before her high school graduation, in fact.

“Oh, God, you got up after your wedding night and you went to graduation?”

“Yep. It was a Saturday. We drove back in from the motel down the road. We had been there before, believe me! I remember we passed the 4-H fairgrounds coming in. Travis said to me, ‘Did you know three years ago I had the Reserve Champion cow?' I said, ‘Nope. Can't say I knew that.' We thought that was so funny. Not my father. No sir! Mama went and hid the .22.”

At that time Lynnette's father was a fairly respectable figure in Classic, with his own hardware store, far from his ingrown feuding clan's place up one of the hollers. He picked fights, though. But no matter what wrangles he got into in town, her mother chose the path of allegiance, refusing, in the firm polite country style, to utter a word about her husband when well-meaning neighbors gave her an opening.

“Of course you know what
he
thought when we called up from the Justice of the Peace. But you know what it is when somebody always backs you—my
mama
never thought I was pregnant. She knew I never would be. She dreamed it. She never told, but my aunt did.” Her mother had stood by her too, sneaking her own sewing machine to Lynnette as a wedding present. Now this old treadle Singer stood in the window of Lynnette's apartment, covered like an altar with a cross-stitched tablecloth that had been her mother's too; the shade had to be pulled down to keep the colored thread from fading.

Lynnette was an only child and she had that lack of doubt, that oddly inoffensive sense of the importance of what she did, that only children sometimes have, or mothers' favorites. I could see the mother she described, piecing out the skirts for the cheerleading squad when Lynnette made head cheerleader.

One day in the first year Lynnette and Travis were married, the phone rang. For some reason she didn't want to answer it. It hardly ever rang. It was on the kitchen floor—she and Travis had no furniture except a kitchen table with two chairs, a bed and the sewing machine—and she went over and sat down on the floor against the wall before she picked up the receiver. It was her father. Her mother had dropped dead. “I was
sick
.” Lynnette doubled over, telling me this, holding herself in her crossed arms. “Losing her. After I went and
left
her! I still hate myself. The only comfort I can get is I know how happy she was for me
and Travis. She never did have the
i
-dea my dad had, that we'd get over it if they just could pry us apart. Oh, I miss her every day.” She sighed. “But that with Travis, that was the one time I ever was in love. I'd say the same went for him. I don't know, though. He might have a wife by this time. Might have to. He could set some records, if you know what I mean.”

It wasn't that Travis, who could have gone to college on a football scholarship if he had wanted to, turned out a failure. He succeeded. When they came out to Seattle he made money almost without meaning to. Eventually he bought out the little business where his experience with tractors had gotten him a job as a forklift operator.

Not until after he was gone did Lynnette even reveal she was at work on a novel, of which Travis was the subject. Actually the subject was teenage love, physical love, from which Lynnette's writing style had boiled off everything physical, leaving as a residue the aftermath, in which a stilted girl and boy lay back and talked, in accents bearing no resemblance to Lynnette's, in motels and cars and woods and in gyms under the bleachers, in a landscape bare of any hill or mine or highway or bird or weather, in a year bearing nary a fingerprint of the time she was talking about, the very end of the 1950s. No trance of arousal in those woods, let alone poison ivy or ticks or even trees. No bitter postponement, no luxury of hidden flesh exposed, no shaming demand, insatiable and mutual, such as I knew, from our talks, she remembered. I knew before she said a word about it. Heat: that was what she had left out. I knew about that. Lust. Delirious lust, yet lust generous and mindful as it would not be again, all plaited and twined with the serious, loyal, future-ensuring intentions of high school couples.

I have never cared for those people who draw a distinction, who claim this is something other than love, in the young.

When I had teenagers I felt it again: the heat, the whole sealed
humid bower in faint mirage, rising around my own children as they stood in front of steamy mirrors getting ready to go out. The girls
.
Their brother did not get involved until he was safely adult; I am afraid we turned him away from it.

Of course Cy and I were not sixteen—though Lynnette let the comparison stand. I was a junior in college; Cy was a graduate student, involved with a faculty wife whose actions he couldn't answer for if she found out about me.

Lynnette and Travis were sixteen, and a year later they had locked the door on their idyll, they were outside it, they were married.

Lynnette said, “Lord, Travis never changed in twenty years! I mean I didn't want him to, really. He agreed in the end. The signs were there right along. I would dream I was his mother. Don't you laugh, Cyrus. We had to separate. I was never
myself
until I got by myself, ever.” Cy did laugh at the manuscript she gave us—read aloud it had the resistance of potatoes being mashed without any liquid—but he said, “She'll have to keep going until she gets to the end of it.” Lynnette was not that many years younger than Cy but he had settled into treating her like another daughter.

By this time she and I were riding to work together, which allowed me to hear the instructional tapes she played in her car. Some flat-voiced man saying, “You can't go wrong writing what you know.” Some woman saying, “You find out what you think”—no credit for the quote—“when you see what you say.”

“Don't get stuck on revisions.” These were writers, in some capacity. Not ones you would find in a bookstore. “Always go right back and begin to revise.” Lynnette didn't laugh at the discrepancies. “Always begin with the outline.” “Never depend on an outline.”

She would be steering with one hand and holding up the other
with the cigarette to silence my comments. At that time she wasn't at her best, she was looking frowzy. I have a snapshot of her in the office, flicking ash off a ribbed sweater matched to one of the flowered skirts we wore then. She made hers on the old Singer. Her mother must have reasoned that nothing going on in the room a young couple rented above the Rexall Drug would outlive the need for a sewing machine.

Lynnette was pale and uncombed; she had flyaway blond hair anyway, which she wore too long for anything but a ponytail, and bangs, and bitten fingernails. She was lugging around a rubber-banded pile of paper, the manuscript she could never finish—she had it in an old straw bag lined with gingham that she slapped into the back seat when I got in—and losing her voice from smoking, and having health problems. She had to go in for this test and that test, treadmills and scans, because of the high blood pressure that ran in her family. At the same time she always put a handful of salt in her cooking water, and chunks of sausage in the macaroni and cheese she made when she had us over for dinner.

Then suddenly, when she was still going to school and writing at night, when she was almost supporting herself at the magazine, Lynnette gave up on her novel and switched to art. And it turned out that she was an artist. She had been an artist all along.

“There's a closetful of sorry-looking paintings back home, oil paintings,” she said, modest as she had never been about her novel, “if my daddy didn't chuck 'em.”

She signed up for a printmaking course, where she learned how to add photographs and newsprint to her drawings, and to print them on fabric. Soon the back seat of her car was a jumble of taffeta and corduroy, pieces of quilt and dishtowels and rags. Parades, soup kitchens, Laundromats, ambulances, jail windows
would gradually show themselves in the pattern of florals and plaids. Close-ups of faces, Dumpsters, guns, exercise equipment. Her pieces had that crowded, freakish comedy you saw in a great deal of art then, sweetened a little by her own impulses.

“Who would have thought it?” Cy would say, inspecting what she had spread out on our table.

A woman was framing them for her, in exchange for sewing. Lynnette did alterations. Gradually, at first seemingly by chance, she was selling her work. She had shows; she was mentioned in the newspaper. “Little tapestries of urban decay,” the caption said. “Well, it's like the images are buried in the texture of the fabric,” she was quoted as saying. “I just sort of lift them out.” Somebody read that out loud in the office, and she stood up and bowed. “Hey, that stuff took me a lot of writing workshops.” When a private school hired her to teach eighth-grade art, we knew she was going to leave the magazine and she did, making a tearful speech at her farewell party. She cut her hair, and began the running that she continued for the rest of her life, and she met men. The men were secondary, to her.

Cy must have known that about Lynnette. He must have known something was not there in her, it had been lost with her marriage, the way she had had just the one doll, her mother's doll, and then gone on, left it behind. It might have been the same thing that made her an artist after all.

She hung her first show in a hallway behind a café. By her third she had signed with a gallery, and a critic from the East Coast happened to be in town and mentioned her opening in print when he got back home.

Lynnette was not blasé. “Feel this! I can hardly breathe!” she said to me at the opening, placing my hand on her chest. “I feel like I ought to drop something on the path so I can find my way back when they're through with me.”

“Back to what?” Cy said, in that way men sometimes have of inadvertently revealing that they view female life as a kind of fog in which only the most concrete acts can be made out. Black statues of ceremony or childbirth or ordeal. Icebergs of daring sin.

As he got older her husband Travis had found his pleasures in watching football, squirrel hunting in the fall, coaching other people's kids in soccer, and taking his employees out to a weekly, all-you-can-eat buffet. He did make quite a bit of money, and apparently he was free with it in the settlement, even though there were no children. Travis sold his company and went back to West Virginia. He had come out anyway thinking of the Northwest as a place to raise sons: cabins and bears and whitewater rivers.

“Travis thought this would be more like Alaska,” Lynnette explained. “When we said Washington State I guess we were thinking of Alaska. Or maybe Montana. I mean the backcountry. We both were, actually. What did we know? We were eighteen.”

The only time I met Travis was just before he left town. He was backing out of the hall closet. “Hot dog!” he said, holding up a whistle on a cord. He put out a big hand; the impression was of bulky sunburned fairness and the kind of unseeing patience that people's children sometimes turn on you when they are introduced. He had ruddy skin, the color of apple cider. “Don't worry none about it,” I heard Lynnette call from the porch when she ran out after him. Her old way of talking came back in times of crisis. Something of hers had gotten packed by mistake, in the U-Haul at the curb.