Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction (23 page)

“Don’t you look fat and happy,” her mother said.

Macy sat down.

“Surprised?”

“I’m surprised,” Macy said. It had been her plan that no one in her real life, meaning Neil and Neil’s family, would ever meet her mother.

“I bet. Well, I thought it was time you and your old mother had a chat.”

It didn’t take very long. Macy called her mother “Betty,” which was her given name, and Betty called Macy “Joanie,” which was hers. Macy’s mother accused Macy of running away and Macy said that if she hadn’t run away she’d be a fucked-up coke addict like her mother or worse. Betty said she had done her best and Macy stood up at that point. She said, Don’t tell me that. Macy’s mother said that they should let bygones be bygones, that she’d dumped Brad’s mean, sorry ass anyway, years ago, and see how Joanie had turned out fine. She said she was on her way to Miami and if Joanie could spare her some traveling money, she’d get right into her car. Macy had four hundred dollars she’d put aside from housekeeping money and three hundred she’d gotten as a bonus from her company, another hundred she got for a winter coat she’d returned, and twenty bucks that she’d found in Neil’s pants when she took them to the laundry. She’d put it all in an envelope before she got in her car to drive to the Crab Cake and she handed the envelope to her mother, who counted it.

“That’s all I have,” Macy said. “We’re not millionaires.”

Her mother was cheerful, the way she always was when things were not as good as she hoped, but not as bad as they could be.

“You weren’t hard to find,” her mother said.

“I wasn’t hiding,” Macy said, and her mother smiled and put out her cigarette.

“Well, good. Then you won’t mind if I come around again, when I’m passing through.”

“You come to my house and I’ll shoot you myself. I’ll say you snuck in and I shot you in self-defense, thinking you were a burglar. And I will cry my heart out to have killed my own poor, crazy mother, who should have been locked up in the first place.”

Macy’s mother stood up.

“Aren’t you a kidder. It’s okay, you lie dormy, and so will I. Good luck,” her mother said, and Macy watched her drive off in a dusty blue station wagon.

*  *  *

A handsome black woman walked past The Cup’s big front window.

“Looks like Nellie,” Ray said.

“Nellie of the coconut cake,” Macy said.

Ray shook his head. “My wife can be a bitch.”

Macy said, “I can’t argue with you.”

Macy and Neil had met at his parents’ house. It felt like a houseful of people to Macy, who had lived with one person or none, most of her life. Neil’s sister, Jennifer, had brought Macy home with her after they ran into each other their senior year, at the Philadelphia Flower Show. (Just come home with me for the weekend, Jennifer had said. My parents will love you.) Neil was older than Jennifer and Macy by a couple of years and finishing law school; their cousin Howard, who lived in the maid’s room because he couldn’t face the real world after his time in Afghanistan, was making drinks for everyone.

Jennifer said, “This is Macy. You’ll love her.”

Neil squeezed Macy’s hand and looked her right in the eye and she could feel herself blushing. Eleanor Watrous served chicken fricassee with dumplings and glazed carrots and a separate plate of bitter green salad with a disk of goat cheese in the middle. For dessert, Jennifer carried in a gigantic and snowy and objectively beautiful coconut cake.

Macy said, “My goodness, that’s gorgeous.”

Mrs. Watrous waved her hand toward the kitchen and said that Nellie was gifted. (That’s the housekeeper, Neil said quietly. She cooks when my mother wants to impress people.) “I’ll have Nellie wrap some up for you,” Mrs. Watrous said, so that everyone could just picture Macy in her windowless room, sitting on her twin bed, unwrapping the slice of cake for a snack or for breakfast. Macy let her napkin slide to the floor so she could get a grip on herself. Neil’s hand came crab-walking across the rug, toward Macy’s napkin. He stroked her ankle and then he picked up the napkin and put it in her lap.

After coffee, Mr. Watrous had said, Let’s adjourn and Neil and Cousin Howard followed him into the study. The door to the study was not closed, and Macy sat in the chair nearest the door.

“Cute girl, Jennifer’s little friend,” Neil’s father said.

“She’s hot,” Cousin Howard said, and then he picked up a magazine and started fanning himself.

“Christ, Howard,” Mr. Watrous said. “How’s law school, Neil?”

“Okay,” Neil said.

“Getting any offers?”

“A few.”

“Stay out of the pigpen,” Mr. Watrous said.

Cousin Howard said, “Soo-eee. Here, piggy, piggy, piggy,” and Mr. Watrous said, “For the love of Jesus,” and the men came back into the living room. Neil sat down on the arm of Macy’s chair and patted her hair.

Sunday afternoon, he drove Macy and Jennifer to the train station. He told his sister to go get the tickets and behind her, he kissed Macy, his narrow lips opening like a flower. He smelled of cinnamon and smoke.

The next time Macy and Neil visited the Watrouses, they were a couple.

Mrs. Watrous asked Macy to help set the table, just to see if she knew where the glasses went and in what order. Macy laid glasses down over knives, water, white, and red, exactly as Emily Post recommended, and Neil’s mother glanced over and said, as if it wasn’t a test at all, Oh, who cares, really? These days, you could put a jug and four bowls on the table, couldn’t you? Let’s move to the patio. Macy drank three glasses of water, she was so nervous, and after Neil’s father had asked about her parents and Macy had said that they were dead and that her only relatives were an aunt and uncle in Des Moines, they moved on to Macy’s favorite classes. Everything went pretty well until Macy took a green olive out of the bowl next to her. It stuck to the roof of her mouth, its tip digging into the soft part at the back. She choked until she spat out the jalapeño pepper the olive was stuffed with, crying and swearing, Goddammit, oh,
motherfucker
, and Neil jumped up to get her water. Mr. Watrous said those olives were going to kill someone and Mrs. Watrous said that he’d eaten about fifteen of them so far. Finally, Macy took the glass of water from Neil and, in her relief, relaxed her arm and pushed the olive bowl onto the stone floor. Mrs. Watrous walked to the kitchen for a thick dishcloth and Nellie the cook came in behind her with a dustpan and the glass shards were disappeared. When Mrs. Watrous came back, Macy said, My God, I am
so
sorry. And Mrs. Watrous said, It’s all right. If I were the Queen of England, I’d have to throw another Baccarat bowl on the floor, just to make you feel at ease.

Macy was silent for the rest of dinner.

That’s what I get, she thought. You listen and you listen and you copy their ways and who fucking knew that that bat, that blond bat in a Lilly Pulitzer sheath with her fucking family retainers, who knew I’d break her fucking Baccarat. Macy lived in a boardinghouse a mile from campus and cleaned all the rooms in the house on Saturdays for a break on her rent. On weekends she went to parties and had people drop her off at a trolley stop. She didn’t have people over. She didn’t go on vacation with other people’s families. The girls Macy hung around with, girls like Jennifer and her friends, thought Macy lived with rich, strict relatives. They’d never seen a boardinghouse or a carpet sweeper or a shared bathroom. They didn’t make their meals on a hot plate in their room, unless they were doing it for fun, and they didn’t read Emily Post and Miss Manners like the Old and the New Testament.

Macy brought her lunch to campus every day and she ate in the handicapped-access bathroom. Afterward, she sat in the Student Center to socialize, and when the other girls ate two slices of whole-wheat pizza or a big bowl of soba noodles or a roast-beef sandwich, Macy smiled like Pietsie Cortland, who also didn’t eat, for more normal reasons. Pietsie was Macy’s favorite. Macy loved everything about Pietsie, including her name, which was so fancy, Macy wanted to take her aside and say, Good for you. (When they did get into the question of background, Pietsie said, Isn’t it awful—it’s for Van Piet, my middle name. You know, old name,
no
money, not a pot to piss in, and Macy heard the
ping
of real crystal.) Macy avoided anyone who seemed remotely interested in her family. Interesting was not good.

“It’s okay,” Neil had said on the way back to his apartment. “My mother has a strong personality. It’ll be okay.”

Macy looked down at her hands, twisting in her lap.

“It’ll be okay,” Neil said, “because I love you. Ha,” he said, when she stared at him. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No,” Macy said, and she put her head on his shoulder and cried a little, at the thought of being loved by Neil Watrous, who was apparently without serious fault.

Neil pulled over and they kissed and then they drove to his apartment. They ran up the stairs, and by the time Neil had unlocked the door, Macy had her shoes and her blouse off and she flung herself on top of him, kissing his floppy brown hair and his big ears and the nicks where he’d cut himself shaving. They landed on his sofa. He kissed her stomach and her armpits. He ran his tongue from her ankle to her ear and they bit each other at every round and yielding spot. At one point, they found themselves with their heads hanging off the bed, their bare feet making dark, damp prints all the way up his wall.

“I was made to love you,” Neil said. He sang the whole Stevie Wonder song, naked, with his head touching the floor.

“And I you,” Macy said.

*  *  *

The summer before she’d met Neil, even though she was pretty sure that what she was looking for was not creative expression but something more like the makeover to end all makeovers, Macy had spent a week on scholarship at a writers’ conference. She looked at the men and women around her and thought, We’re like the people at Lourdes or the ones who go to the mud baths of that disgusting town with the sulfurous pools that everyone dunks themselves in, except we’ve brought our poems and short stories and inexpressible wishes, instead of scrofula and dermatitis.

She smoked like a chimney and wrote about whatever came into her head, but only for a few pages and then she ran out of steam. She wrote about the man who sat next to her in the workshop, a seventy-five-year-old engineer from Salt Lake City, trying desperately to come out of the closet after sixty years and a wife, two kids, and six grandchildren. The engineer invited Macy out for a drink after class and they found a small table at a bad restaurant. He put his hand on Macy’s and said, Dear, I love men. I know, Macy said. Everyone in their workshop knew; the engineer wrote about thighs like steel girders and asses like ball bearings and biceps like pistons. It’s fine, Macy said. I love them, too. The engineer said, Women, I mean their private parts, make me want to vomit. Present company excepted, of course. Well, then you’re making the right choice, Macy said. She swallowed her vodka gimlet and went to another reading. She went to every reading and performance that was scheduled and she went late, in hopes of finding a seat next to a good-looking man, or even just a nice man, and she stood in line to have books signed by people she thought were complete idiots, just to improve the odds. She wrote down a few other things that happened at the writers’ conference, in a lavender suede notebook, and then she threw the notebook into the dumpster.

The day after he and Macy had had their tête-à-tête in the coffee shop, Ray stopped in on his way home.

“I hope I’m not keeping you,” Ray said.

Randeane smiled and said he wasn’t and she poured his coffee.

“Randeane,” Ray said. “That’s sort of a Southern name, isn’t it?”

“Left-wing Jewish father, hence the Jewfro”—she ran her fingers through her curly hair—“and white-trash Pentecostal mother, hence the Randeane and the inability to finish my thesis. Yourself?”

Ray said that his parents weren’t that interesting. English peddlers on his father’s side, Norwegian farmers on his mother’s, and really not much to them.

“Well, take some scones home. I’ll just have to toss them tomorrow and I will be goddamned fuck-fried if I’m going to stay up and make bread pudding all night.”

“Absolutely not. Someone must be waiting up for you,” Ray said, and he thought that although it was difficult to imagine dying of embarrassment at his age, it wasn’t impossible.

“Not really,” Randeane said, and she handed him a shopping bag of scones.

Neil had come to Ray a few weeks after the coconut cake dinner and told his father that he planned to ask Macy to marry him. Ray meant to say, Congratulations, but he heard himself say that although people of his generation married for life, he, personally, thought it was one of the worst and stupidest ideas ever foisted on mankind, second only to Jesus died for our sins, which was just ridiculous. Neil looked at him, a little cow-eyed, and Ray meant to shut up but instead he said, Everyone who gets divorced feels betrayed, whichever side you’re on. But what’s worse—everyone who gets married feels betrayed. The other person will let you down, son—they can’t help it. We are all basically selfish beasts, and also, your wife will love your children more than she will ever love you. You’re just the hod carrier, kid. You know what your mother says: You promised to love me for better or worse, Ray Watrous.

Neil said, “I understand, Dad. I mean, I do.” He put his hand on Ray’s shoulder and Ray was sorry he’d opened his mouth. “It’s a little different for me and Macy. It’s just different for us.”

“I’m sure it is,” Ray said. “She’s a lovely girl. Let’s not keep our brides waiting.”

A lot of Ray’s friends called their wives their brides. Ray referred to Ellie that way once, in The Cup, saying, “I’ll bring some of these bagels home to my bride,” and Randeane flinched.

“That’s an awful expression,” she said. “It’s like you keep her in a closet with a white dress and veil. Your very own Miss Havisham.”

“Not at all,” Ray said. “It shows I still think of her the way I did when we were first married. It’s flattering.”