Free For Love by Sue Miller Page B

he remember
this garden? How difficult it is for her to think of this labored-over beauty in connection with anyone from her childhood.
    She sets the picture down and picks up the one next to it. It’s framed, of Cameron, perhaps ten years younger than he is now. He’s sitting in an Adirondack chair. He’s been
reading, but he’s looking up, frowning, at the interruption just before the picture was snapped. He’s shirtless and deeply tanned. The wildly curling hair on his chest is still black
and matlike. It must be the handsomest he’s ever been. Who was in his life then, to love him? To admire the beauty? To take this picture?
    She slowly walks the length of the ledge, picking the pictures up, looking. A costume party, with someone dressed as a number-two pencil, someone else as a carrot. A trio of stoned-looking
people on a couch, staring thickly at the camera. A pen-and-ink caricature of a professional-looking Cam with books falling out of his pockets, his pants legs. A framed poem in longhand about
memory. A postcard of Dizzy Gillespie blowing his horn, his cheeks inflated and gleaming. Ryan’s eighth-grade graduation photo – his hair far too long, a hostile and fraudulent smile on
his face. A shingle cottage in a light-flooded clearing in some New England woods. Cam and a long-haired woman, both on skis, both smiling, a blur of people moving in the snow behind them.
    What had Elizabeth made of all this? Hadn’t she, in fact, mentioned the apartment once to Lottie? Yes: she said – Lottie remembers this abruptly – that it made her feel
‘ineffably bourgeois.’
    Lottie steps across the room, aware of the smart slap, slap of her rubber sandals against her own heels in the silence. She has come to a decision. She picks up Elizabeth’s letter and
shoves it into her purse. Whatever is driving him to wherever he now is – walking the streets, drinking in some bar, taking a train, a plane, to anywhere else – whatever that is will
surely only be made worse by this letter. It does offer him the comfort of Jessica’s drunkenness, her own responsibility for part of what happened; but then it takes away everything else that
might still be keeping him going. And Lottie wants him to keep going. To keep going long enough to show up anyway – to come home to his apartment or to her or even to Elizabeth.
    On a pad of paper she finds on the kitchen counter, she writes him a note. She says she’s worried about him. That she has a letter to him from Elizabeth; she has several messages for him.
She asks him to call her or to come over. She tears off the top sheet and sets it down on the floor in front of the door, where she found Elizabeth’s letter. She weights it with
Cameron’s wallet and keys. Outside, she leaves Cameron’s door open and goes to the electric box at the head of the stairs. She reaches on top of it. The spare key slides under her
fingers and
pings!
on the floor. She replaces it. Elizabeth must have used it this morning to drop off her letter; Cameron will have it whenever he comes home. Lottie goes back and shuts the
door. She turns the knob, pushes against it to be sure it’s locked.
    On the way down the stairs, she hears a man’s voice from behind the door on the second floor. She thinks it’s the same voice that called up to her earlier. He’s speaking loudly
and steadily in an uninflected, litanic tone, as though he’s said this so many times before that by now he’s completely bored himself: ‘. . . so goddamned tired all the time when
all you fuckin do is sleep around here . . . never even out of the fuckin bed till nine, ten o’clock and you fuckin complain about it from the moment you’re up . . .’ Lottie stops
and listens for longer than she wants to. Something holds her. And she can still feel her heart pounding after she’s gotten out on the street – in fear? in anger? Some excitement that
she can’t label. She sits in the car for several minutes,