The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [11]
“Everyone has dateless spells, honey,” said Nancy, who’d had her first dateless spell after her marriage to Kevin. She had always attributed to Lily virginal devotion to her work. Nancy thought a famous prize certainly equaled a husband and three children. Love was like any activity, you had to put in the hours, but as usual Kevin was right there, so she didn’t say this and shifted with annoyance in her chair. “Really,” she snapped, “don’t worry about it.”
Kevin’s jaws widened in an enormous yawn. Lily jumped up to find clean towels, saying, “Does it seem odd to you?” Kevin went into the bathroom and Nancy went into the bedroom with her suitcase. Lily followed her. “I have no way of knowing,” she went on, but then she stopped. Nancy wasn’t really listening.
In the morning Nancy braided and wound up her hair while Lily made breakfast. Kevin was still asleep. Nancy had always had long, lovely hair, but Lily couldn’t remember her taking such pride in it as she was now, twisting and arranging it with broad, almost conceited motions. She fondled it, put it here and there. “It looks great in a long upswept braid,” she said. “And there’s a woman I go to who French-braids it. Then all the colors come out.”
“You’ve kept it in wonderful shape,” Lily said.
“My hair is my glory,” Nancy replied, and sat down to her eggs. She was not kidding.
When Kevin staggered from bedroom to bathroom an hour later, Nancy had gone out to survey the local shops. Kevin looked for her in every room of the apartment and then said, “Nancy’s not here?”
“She thought she’d have a look around.”
Kevin dropped into his seat at the table and put his head in his arms. A second later he exclaimed, “Oh, God!” Lily liked Kevin better this visit than she had before. His chest, which had always seemed to drag him aggressively into situations, had lost some of its influence. He was not as loud or blindingly self-confident as he had been playing football, sitting in the first row in class, then, later, barreling through business school, swimming two miles every day. Once, in a car, she had heard him mutter to her date, “I wouldn’t mind a good fight right now.” Thus it was with sympathy rather than astonishment that Lily realized he was weeping. He wiped his eyes on his T-shirt. “She’s going to leave me! When we get back to Vancouver, she’s going to leave me for another guy!”
“Is that what she said?”
“I know.”
“Did she say so?”
“I know.”
“Look, sit up a second and have this piece of toast.”
“He’s just a dumb cowboy. I know she’s sleeping with him.”
She put food in front of him and he began to eat it. After a few bites, though, he pushed it away and put his head down. He moaned into the cave of his arms. Lily said, “What?”
“She won’t sleep with me. She hasn’t since Thanksgiving. She never says where she’s going or when she’ll be back. She can’t stand me checking up on her.”
“Do you check up on her?”
“I call her at work sometimes. I just want to talk to her. She never wants to talk to me. I miss her!”
“What do Roger and Fred say?” Roger and Fred were friends from college who also lived in Vancouver, though no longer with Kevin and Nancy, as they had.
“They don’t understand.”
Lily nodded. Unlike Lily, Roger and Fred had wavered in their fondness for Nancy. Many times Nancy had been selfish about certain things, which were perhaps purely feminine things. She thought people should come to the table when dinner was hot in spite of just-opened beers and half-smoked cigarettes, or unfinished repair projects in the driveway. She had screamed, really screamed, about booted feet on her polished table. Roger and Fred especially found her too punctilious about manners, found her slightly shrill, and did not appreciate her sly wit or her generosity with food and lodging and presents (this liberality they attributed to Kevin, who was, actually, a famous tightwad). And they overlooked her capacity for work—her willing, organized, unsnobbish bringing home of the bacon while all the men were looking