Free For Love by Sue Miller Page A

his coffee cup in a dismissive gesture. ‘You can’t imagine.’
    Now Lottie looks around again at the elements Cam has chosen for himself. It astonishes her, actually, his life, his friends, his ease in a world so different from the one they grew up in.
It’s a little like the life she lived with Derek, full of talk of books, of music and art. In her case – in Derek’s case – there was all the academic gossip too, another
form of office politics. But it seems to Lottie that she and Cam have both reached for a life as different from the one they grew up in as they could. In fact, they’ve both tried to create in
their own lives a world like that of the people who lived at the fancy end of Farmington Street.
    Lottie, of course, never stooped feeling like an impostor in it, like someone having to scramble too hard just to stay two steps behind. She knows this is part of the reason she’s chosen,
finally, to write about medical issues – to work with doctors, whose intelligence is much more foreign to her but also by and large more concrete, less intimidating. But Cam, it seems, is at
home in this life, this world.
    There’s a photograph on his shelf of a dinner party in this room. Ten or twelve people are sitting around Cam’s table, their faces blurred and happy in the long exposure, the candles
floating in their midst like so many small full moons. Abruptly she remembers the night she and Derek had Clive Leahy to dinner – a poet, a translator, and an old mentor of Derek’s.
She’d worked so hard – they had candles too, candles and wine – and she made some Julia Child dish that took her nearly all day. She grimaces at the memory. At dinner she was
struggling to keep up with the literary references, the talk about people whose names she should have recognized but didn’t. After one particularly ignorant question on her part, Clive smiled
forgivingly at her and patted her hand. He had a sweet face, round and red and shiny in the candlelight – Santa Clausy, Lottie had felt.
    ‘Derek told me about this,’ he said.
    ‘About what?’ she asked. Derek was out of the room, changing the music.
    ‘How bright you were, but that there’d be these . . . lacunae with you.’
    Lottie felt slapped: at Derek’s betrayal, at Clive’s apparent unconsciousness of his insult to her. The blood rose to her cheeks, she hoped not visibly. She managed to say,
‘Well, it was kind of him to forewarn you, wasn’t it?’ before Derek came back in, his finger held up in the air to silence them so they could listen to an aria he’d chosen
for them. Callas, she remembered,
La Traviata
: how life was just a fleeting joy.
    Lottie picks up a photograph of her parents from Cameron’s ledge. They are young in it, laughing at each other under a rose arbor somewhere. Her mother’s hair is brutally permed, but
still she’s pretty: the dark, dark lipstick against her white skin, the short flared skirt, and chunky high heels tipping her forward in a potbellied, sensual way. Her father is in
shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled back. His tie is straight and fiercely knotted at his neck. He has Cameron’s thick dark hair – though Cam, of course, has gone almost completely gray
now.
    Looking more closely, Lottie sees the shape of a house beyond the roses, the windows in a familiar pattern. She puts her finger on the photograph and traces the configuration. Then she sees:
this is the house behind her mother’s. This is their own backyard! She traces the flower beds. A wooden rail stands behind them where now there’s the neighbor’s stockade fence to
take away his view of their weedy decrepit lot. But the flowers! Who was the gardener? Her father, before he went to jail? Her mother, before she took to drink and television? Lottie looks hard at
the blurred jumble of blossoms behind the laughing couple, above them, looks at her father’s face, a face she barely remembers. Can Cam remember them this way? she wonders. Can