by Jenna Blum
“That’s it,” said Dr. Gorgeous. “I knew I’d met him before. Far out! I loved that place.” He mashed out his cigarette in the hallway ashtray. “He might consider doing something else for a while. Even retiring early. That’s a high-stress environment for a cardiac patient.”
“I see,” said June. “We’ll figure it out.”
Dr. Gorgeous held out his Pall Malls again, but she shook her head. “Is there anything else you want to ask me?” he said.
“No, thank you, Doctor, you’ve been very helpful. Oh—you mentioned diet?”
“High fiber, low fat, no cholesterol. I’ll have the nurse send you home with a care sheet.” Dr. Gorgeous smiled. “No more cream puffs.”
“No, I guess not.”
“God, I loved those,” he said. “With that chocolate fondue on the side!” He shook his head. “Of course, Ms. Rashkin, the most important factor in your husband’s recovery is the love of his family. But I can’t imagine that’ll be any trouble. Not with a peach like you at home.”
He winked, lit another cigarette, and ambled off down the hall.
* * *
June stayed with Peter until that evening, when a nurse told her it would be better for them both if June went home to get some rest. Peter had slept most of the afternoon anyway, except when the staff came in to check his vitals. When June kissed him and whispered she would be back tomorrow, his eyelids barely flickered.
In Glenwood, the house was dark, with the waiting air that precedes a thunderstorm. It was too quiet without Elsbeth, the hum of the refrigerator and AC and the tick of the stove clock the only noises. June switched on the kitchen overhead and beheld Elsbeth’s rabbit-encircled mug, the mismatched Tupperware lids, and Peter’s coffee cup in the sink from their last morning here. They seemed like archaeological relics. June flicked the light back off and went upstairs.
In the master bedroom, she kicked off her sneakers. The bed, the pillow, was redolent of Peter: his skin, his hair gel, spicy and sweet. June intended only to nap, then to get up and call Helen, check on Elsbeth—Elsbeth did not as a rule like sleepovers, claiming other people’s houses smelled funny. June also needed to update Sol. She closed her eyes, and the next thing she knew it was morning.
And somebody was pressing the doorbell, alternating the chimes with the front-door knocker. June jolted up and sat stupidly on the side of the bed. Was it Helen? Had Helen been trying to bring Elsbeth back all morning? Now June remembered, or seemed to remember, the phone ringing earlier, and ringing and ringing. Had something happened to Pete? She ran downstairs.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she called.
But once again it was Gregg at the door.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” said June. She was suddenly aware of her physical being for the first time in days: her morning breath, her crazy hair. She was still wearing—what was she wearing? The T-shirt and bell-bottoms she’d grabbed the dawn she’d put Elsbeth in the car. How many days ago was that—two, three?
Gregg handed her a white paper bag, in which was a Danish and a takeout coffee.
“May I come in?” he said.
June stepped back, and he came into the foyer. He was wearing jeans too, the first time, besides his suit trousers, that June had ever seen Gregg in anything but shorts. She realized the air was cooler, damp—it must have stormed in the night.
Gregg stood formally in the middle of the rug. “How is he?” he asked.
“Stable,” said June. “How did you know?”
“I called the restaurant,” said Gregg, and June must have made some noise or expression of alarm because he said, “Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them who I was. I was just worried because I couldn’t reach you, I’d been calling and calling and nobody at the club had seen you, so finally I tried the Claremont. And the hostess told me you were in New York with your husband because he’d had a heart attack.”
“Oh,” said June.
Her legs suddenly felt jellified, and she sat on the window seat. Gregg sat next to her and helped her take the lid off the coffee. It was sweet, light, and strong.
“I didn’t think you took sugar,” he said, “but the guy just put it in.”
“It’s good. Thank you.” June sipped, then pinched off a bit of Danish. Cherry, with frosting. Gregg put his elbows on his big knees and looked down.
“So I came,” he said, “to say good-bye.”
June’s stomach lurched. She set the coffee on the rug. “You’re going already?”
“June. It’s September.”
June looked across the foyer at the windows going up the staircase. Beyond them it was raining, drops wending down the glass. “I guess it is.”
“Tell me the truth,” said Gregg. “You were never going to leave him, were you?”
“No, that’s not true,” said June. “I was. You gave me the courage to do it. You woke me up.”
Gregg grunted. He reached out an arm and hugged June as if they were two pals sitting on a park bench, and then suddenly her head was on his shoulder and they were both crying.
“June, June,” he said. “I don’t think I can stand this.”
“I know,” she said. “But you can.”
“Can you?”
“I’ll have to.”
Gregg wiped June’s cheeks with his big thumbs. “Your face is all better,” he said, “your beautiful beautiful face,” and he kissed her. They clung and kissed and cried and hugged until June’s nose was so stuffed she could barely breathe.
“Will you write to me?”
Gregg swiped his wrist over his eyes. “I don’t think I should.”
“Will you send me a postcard with absolutely nothing on it? Every once in a while, so I know you’re okay?”
“That,” he said, “I can do.”
Gregg stood and pulled June to her feet. She stepped toward him one last time and laid her head on his heart.
“Nice purple shirt,” she said, muffled.
His voice was a rumble against her cheek. “I thought Elsbeth would like it. Say good-bye to her for me, would you? Tell her keep swinging the racquet low to high.”
June trailed him disconsolately to the door, then onto the porch. They were still holding hands. The orange Pinto was at the curb, packed to the roof with bags and cartons. Slumped in the passenger’s seat like a person was a duffel: pvt sant, 3rd inf, she saw stenciled on its side.
Gregg bent his head to kiss her once more, very gently. June felt the flick of his tongue, and then his mouth was gone. “You’re the only girl I never had to stoop to kiss,” he said. “You know how much I loved that?”
He stepped back and pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“Please go quickly,” she said.
“I will.”
“Good luck out there, Gregg Santorelli,” June said.
“You too, June Bouquet Rashkin.”
He jogged down the steps and along the brick walk to his car. June watched with her hand on her throat. She turned and went into the house before she could see him get in and drive away, so her last sight of Gregg Santorelli was of him standing next to his Pinto in his purple shirt, one big arm raised in farewell.
* * *
Dr. Gorgeous was as good as his word, and Peter was discharged from Mount Sinai a week after he’d gone in, once an angioplasty and another EKG showed that no further procedures—at that time—were necessary. June went to pick Peter up in his Volvo; it was roomier than her Dodge, and she thought he might be more comfortable. A nurse wheeled Peter down to the curb in a chair despite his protests that he was quite able to walk, thank you. He had lost weight, the shirt and slacks June had brought for him sagging on his shoulders and waist, and had also grown a beard. It was more white than blond and made him look, June thought, like an ambassador or visiting dignitary, somebody worthy of being treated with the utmost respect.
She settled Peter in the master bedroom, which she had stocked with the plants, cards, bestsellers, food baskets, and
magazines people had dropped off for him, including a Penthouse the Claremont kitchen staff had sent as a joke—ha ha, June had thought, tucking it into the bedside stack of Gourmet, Time, and Bon Appetit!, very funny. The house was full of flowers. June spread the mohair blanket Ruth had loomed on the foot of Peter’s bed; she switched on the bedside lamp. The season had turned, the weather continuing cool and rainy, and although June knew they would see another episode of Indian summer, hazy days when the temperatures soared back into the eighties, she had turned the air conditioner off.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” she asked Peter, who was propped against three pillows in new blue pajamas and making a rueful face.
“Not a thing,” he said. “You have thoroughly spoiled me.” He looked around the room. “It is rather like being at one’s own funeral, except not dead.”
“Thank God for that,” said June. “I’ll just go check on Elsbeth.”
“June?”
“Yes?”
“Stay a minute.” Peter tapped the bed by his knee.
June crossed the room and sat next to him. She reached into her dungarees pocket for her cigarettes, then remembered she wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere in the house anymore—per Dr. Gorgeous’s orders.
“Are we all right?” Peter said.
“Sure, Pete. We’re fine.”
Peter was smiling at June over his bifocals, head lowered, in that wry, self-deprecating way that he thought looked bullish—which it did, but it also meant, June knew, he was seeking forgiveness.
“That business we spoke of earlier, in the hospital and before I went in—”
“I told you, forget it. I have.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
Peter watched her, the smile fading now. Rain trickled down the window next to the bed, making shadows on his face. He was no longer the ghastly no-color he had been in the hospital, as translucent as if he were his own ghost, but his skin was still tinged the bluish white of the skimmed milk he disdained, claiming it tasted like water. June knew she had to be careful with Peter. He could not be upset. And yet she did not look away. She met her husband’s inquiring gaze and held it, and she felt as if she were traveling an emotional umbilicus into him, arcing into what it must be like to be Peter, lying in this bed, helpless in this room; to be Peter in his kitchen, measuring, tasting, content; to be young Peter arriving in this country, an unwilling immigrant, pushed this way and that by shoving, muscular crowds who had been born here, finding his way and place among them nonetheless. And to be even younger Peter than that: working in a kitchen in a Berlin hotel, spotting across it a girl more junior than he. But one who was unafraid; maybe she had put out her tongue at him; maybe he had tried that night to take her hand. Closing after hours, volunteering to stay late and sweep up the scraps, do the dirty work of scrubbing up the greasy fat and blood and lug out the rubbish so he could have the chance to be alone with her, to kiss her, to walk her home. Maybe that first hasty coupling had been in the supply cellar or on Chef’s butcher-block table. And then the miracle of it, discovering she felt the same about him as he did about her; the joy like a shout in the heart, the invincibility, so that defying the parents was a wisp to be pushed aside. The whole world with its ugly politics and stupid brutality was something to be ignored, in that exuberance of love found and returned and doubled, so that by the time Peter and Masha had married and formed their own family, created two more bodies out of their two, it was too late. Too late. June knew about the echocardiogram and the angioplasty, the clogged arteries, the muscle weakened by malnutrition and age—but she also understood that Dr. Gorgeous, for all his scientific knowledge, was wrong. Peter’s heart had been broken long ago.
“June?” he said. “What is it? Your face . . .”
“Nothing,” June said. She would be damned if she’d cry in front of Peter. She would not. She stood and patted his leg.
“I’m just glad to have you home,” she said. “I’ll bring you some toast.”
And after a brief listen at Elsbeth’s door to ensure she was content with her snacks and albums, downstairs June went. But she did not stop in the kitchen, didn’t put bread in the toaster or straighten up the breakfast dishes or even pause to fit another piece into the puzzle Ida had sent Peter for his convalescence, a thousand-part jigsaw called “The American Dream” that June had been working on night after sleepless night here at this table, cigarettes piling in the ashtray. It was multi-image, barns and horses and flags and sunsets, but what June had been thinking of while she searched for the right pieces, tried this one here and that one there, was how it was like a marriage, the accretion of details, of small joys and sorrows and catchphrases and hurts and rituals all adding up to a bigger picture eventually, even if it was impossible to see, while doing it, how it all fit.
June walked out through the backyard, beneath the great dripping trees, wishing she had brought a sweater. Behind the garage was a willow with roots forming a natural seat at its base, its fronds weeping into the brook. It was a private space; nobody used it except Elsbeth, in summer, to dam the water with rocks and catch minnows. June had sometimes fantasized about making love with Gregg back here. Now she never would. She sat in the willow seat and fished her cigarette pack out of her pocket, and something pricked her finger.
She drew it out. The pin, the little navy-blue disc with the cartoon man proudly proclaiming “I Ate a Whole LaLaPaLooza!” June lit a cigarette and sat with the pin, flipping it over and over in her palm. Suddenly she threw it into the water.
Instantly she regretted it; dropping her cigarette, she scrambled down the bank and jumped in. She clambered around in the shallow water, soaking her sneakers and dungarees, twisting her ankles, slipping on the mossy rocks. The pin was nowhere to be found; the current might have already carried it downstream, or more likely the silt June had stirred up had obscured it. June bent and dug, turning over rocks, sinking her fingers into the muck, once falling on her ass with a great splash. But the pin was gone. She hauled herself, using the roots of the tree, up the slippery bank.
Back in the willow seat, she put her face in her slimy, algae-smelling hands and cried. These fits of grief had been coming over her since Gregg’s departure a week ago, ugly and raw, more like vomiting than weeping. June’s only consolation was that she had been able to conceal them from Elsbeth and, now, Peter. But back here June could sob as noisily as she wanted, and she did, gasping and moaning. “What am I going to do?” she asked. “What am I going to do?”
Finally June was cried out. She found a cigarette that was only half wet and broke it in two to smoke it, exhaling over the brook. The water ran on, dark and shining, pockmarked by rain. The willow rustled overhead. What could June do? Only what she had been doing—except more. This afternoon, for instance, she would go back inside. Wash her face. Tidy up the kitchen. Cook something low-fat and cholesterol-free for dinner—skinless chicken breasts and broccoli. Sit with Peter, watch TV with him and Elsbeth—June had moved the television into Peter’s room. Bathe Elsbeth. Read her a chapter of Charlotte’s Web. Tuck her into bed. Do dishes. Fold laundry. Work on the puzzle until she grew sleepy or did not. Do it all again tomorrow. This week Elsbeth would start kindergarten; there were labels to be sewn into clothes, pencils to be put into a case, crusts to cut off sandwiches. Her daughter’s hand to hold on the way to school.
And beyond this, once Elsbeth was settled, once a sitter could be hired for afternoons when Peter needed rest, there were the want ads. This was not what June had hoped for, not the way she would have wished it to happen in a hundred years—but it had happened nonetheless: Peter could not work. June didn’t know what she qualified for, catalog shoots or a secretary in a decorating firm or even, eventually, interior design school, but she would find out. She would make it happen. She had to. She would keep on truckin’, keep on keeping on, and if there was one thing she knew for sure, it was this: no matter what happened next, with Peter or with Elsbeth o
r to June herself, June would be in charge of her own life. She would never depend on another man, ever again.
III
Elsbeth, 1985
What’s your definition of dirty, baby? What do you consider pornography?
—George Michael
12
Synesthesia
It was the last Saturday of the month, which meant the Rashkins had to visit Elsbeth’s Papa Sol and Nana Ruth in Larchmont, which in turn meant they were all in a foul mood. Elsbeth’s mother, June, a real estate agent who specialized in “home facelifts,” redecorating houses to sell them for more money, was cranky because she had to take a valuable weekend day away from her clients. Elsbeth’s dad, Peter, who once upon a time had been tense about the Saturday visits for a similar reason—they had removed him from his restaurant, the Claremont—now disliked them because they disrupted his schedule of sleeping all day and testing recipes for his cookbook by night. Elsbeth herself dreaded going to Larchmont because of (a) her parents; (b) her grandparents—although Sol and Ruth weren’t her grandparents, really, they were her dad’s cousins or something, but they doted upon Elsbeth as if she were a toddler still in diapers instead of almost sixteen—and (c) the battle between June and Elsbeth over what Elsbeth was going to wear. When Elsbeth was little, the issue had been moot: Elsbeth had to dress for Larchmont in frocks Ruth sent, of taffeta or scratchy lace, quite unlike her usual and preferred OshKosh overalls or shorts. But now, as with every time Elsbeth left the house, she had to try to sneak her sartorial choices past her mother.
This morning, for instance: “Oh no no no no no,” said June, when she caught Elsbeth darting across the kitchen in a hot pink T-shirt, lace capri leggings, and a white rhinestone belt. “That outfit is all wrong for you; that waistband hits you just at the wrong place, and the belt emphasizes your double stomach.” “That’s your opinion, Mother,” said Elsbeth, whereupon June said, “That’s right, and I’m the expert. Go upstairs and put something else on.” “No,” said Elsbeth. “Yes,” said June. “I categorically refuse,” said Elsbeth, and June said, “Fine, have it your way, but no phone for a month,” and Elsbeth said, “You are hateful,” and June said, “I’m just trying to help you, darling.” As Elsbeth stomped out, making the dishes rattle in the cupboards, June had called, “And don’t trample, like an elephant. Wear my new dress—it’s on the back of my closet door.”
