The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  “Yes. It was.” Robert remained standing. Why was he pissed that she’d put on the ring? “So. You just happened to be, like, rifling through my drawers?”

  Clara explained about the laundry. “Wait till you see your T-shirt drawer,” she said proudly.

  “Color coded?” he joked. “Wouldn’t want the reds to compromise the blues. Too much at stake.” Still, he did not sit beside her on the bed. Pointedly, he emptied books from his backpack onto his desk. He turned around and said, “I’m hungry. Want some soup?”

  “You,” she said. “That’s what I want. You.”

  “Food first.” Robert leaned over to kiss her, but quickly. He left the room to go to the kitchen. He wasn’t really hungry. He wanted her to put back the ring without having to ask her. But in the kitchen, there she was again, sitting at the table, wearing the ring, polishing the stone with a corner of a sleeve. When had he last even looked at it, taken it out of the box? It was silver, the traditional clasped hands (Amish or something, Clover had told him), but between them nestled a small triangular garnet rather than a heart. It hadn’t occurred to the lovelorn young Robert, when he accepted the ring, that it was meant for a girl. For a week or two, he’d carried it on a key chain, deep in a pocket, because it was too large for his fingers, but he’d put it away when he decided that he didn’t want to risk losing it. He had also feared that his mother would find it, that she might tease him about it, that she might learn his secret.

  He pulled a wax carton of soup from the fridge and poured some into a saucepan. He put it on the stove to heat. When he turned around, there was Clara, twirling the ring on her finger, her smile self-conscious and bland.

  “So,” she said. “What if I wear it? Would you let me wear it? Just to borrow? Or am I being presumptuous?”

  “Well, yeah, if you want the truth, sort of.” He laughed, a pose.

  “Sort of what?”

  “Presumptuous. Your word, Clara. I mean, it’s this irrationally sentimental thing, okay?”

  “This is new. Your sentimental side.”

  “Well there you have it.” He turned around to stir the soup. “We should still be capable of surprising each other, right?”

  “It bothers you. That I found this ring and thought it was for me. Like I assume something about us you don’t.”

  Tiny bubbles encircled the soup where it met the edge of the pan. Robert stirred again.

  “Answer me, bobcat.”

  Robert looked at his girlfriend. It was one of those rare moments when, alone with her, he didn’t like what he was looking at. “This is so weird,” he said. “Like you find this old ring in my drawer and you think I’ve got some kind of … proposal in mind?”

  She gasped. “That is so unfair. I did not think anything of the kind.”

  “But so, then what? Like, if you wore this ring, we’d be … going steady? Like that?”

  Clara removed the ring, slow motion, meticulous, and set it down in the center of the kitchen table. “Wow, do you ever sound slippery right now.” She grimaced dramatically and folded her slender arms.

  As if to upstage her gesture, Robert spread his arms wide—but not with the intention of wrapping them around her. He ignored the soup that dripped from the wooden spoon in his right hand onto the linoleum floor. “I am yours, Clara. I’m not hooking up with random people. I’m not prowling online, friending the universe on frigging Facebook. I’m—wow, I’m defending myself! Why is that? I’m defending myself because you did an inventory of the stuff in my dresser? Does this make sense to you?”

  “ ‘Inventory’?” She whistled. “Okay, let’s inventory this. How you’ve spent so much of your free time out at your grandfather’s place building a tree house for a nursery school. I mean, you never even asked if I might like to help.”

  “You wanted to help? Come on, Clara.” But she had his number, in a way. The truth was, he’d enjoyed the time with Turo and Celestino—whom he was going to interview for his immigration paper—and even Ira, with his queeny wit. The four of them had laughed a lot, and they’d built this phenomenal thing together. The work, the energy, even the exhaustion—all of it had rocked. Clara hadn’t really crossed his mind while he was up that tree.

  And of course, if she had been with him, Robert would have had to deal with Granddad’s bizarre, inexplicable aversion to her, the way he acted like she was practically invisible.

  She said, “You’ve stood me up for that lecture series three times now.”

  “I didn’t stand you up. I called and said I couldn’t make it.”

  “Oh. Right. Forgive me.”

  Robert heard the hiss of soup boiling onto the stovetop. He turned around quickly and took the pot off the burner. He stirred it and poured some into a bowl. Joining Clara at the table, he knew he ought to reach across and take her hand, but he picked up his spoon and ate. Why didn’t he feel like making peace?

  The door had opened just then. Turo carried a large black plastic bucket, not books. He looked startled. “Hola,” he said, which was what he said by way of greeting whenever something or someone made him nervous.

  He took the bucket into his room and then joined them. Clara and Robert were silent. Turo went to the stove and asked if he could have the rest of the soup. Only when he sat down at the table did he catch their vibe.

  “Uh oh,” he said. “Have I landed in the dead zone?”

  “That’s not funny, Turo,” said Clara.

  Before Robert could remove it from the table, Turo saw the ring and picked it up. “Now this is a juicy clue.”

  Clara stood and stared at Robert, ignoring Turo. Robert only felt her stare; he focused on his soup, blowing on spoonfuls, drinking them down one by one.

  “You are such an asshole,” she said. But still she waited.

  “Hey, I’m sorry about what I said,” said Turo. He, too, stood.

  Clara told Turo to sit. Robert looked at neither of them. He continued eating his soup. He was a robotic consumer of soup. He thought, weirdly, of that saying Cat got your tongue? No, he thought, cat got nothing of mine.

  He heard her sob of dismay as she slammed the apartment door behind her.

  Turo said, “You going after her, man?”

  “No,” said Robert. “Story?”

  “Not now.”

  Turo drank his soup, set down the bowl, and went to the refrigerator. He pulled out containers of this and that. Did Robert want to share a salad? Fine, said Robert. He would now become a robotic consumer of salad. On top of being an asshole. She was right. But sometimes being an asshole had a kind of inevitability. He felt relieved of something. Guilty but relieved.

  Turo made their dinner with an antsy hip-hop glee. He left Robert to himself, reading at the table. After setting down bowls of salad and a plate of sliced bread, he pulled a copy of the Crimson from the recycling bin. They ate, and they read. Robert found childish comfort in the sound of their forks, their chewing and swallowing, the clunk of their glasses on the table, even the whisper of pages turning. But once Turo finished his food, he shoved the paper aside. “You are tied up in knots, my friend.” He waved a hand in front of Robert’s face. Robert looked up from his textbook. “And I have got just the solution.”

  How Robert had let himself be talked into driving out to Ledgely that night was, and wasn’t, a mystery to him. Mostly it had to do with the way he saw Turo, the way Turo’s passions drove him crazy yet held him in awe.

  Turo’s mother, unlike Robert’s, lived on the other side of the planet. Robert had never met her—or any of Turo’s four half siblings, all much older, also living distant lives unconnected to his. The story Turo had told, matter-of-factly, was this: His dad had owned several coffee plantations in Guatemala and Honduras. Turo confessed that there had once been rumors his father was involved in the drug trade as well; but if so, he’d never been caught. At seventy-four, the man had slipped silently away as he slept beside Turo’s mother, his second wife.

  Turo’s four half-sibli
ngs were the offspring of his father’s long, contentious marriage to a wealthy Guatemalan woman who had died of ovarian cancer when her husband was in his sixties. He had apparently mourned very little, said Turo, since he’d promptly set about to marry a good, pretty, docile woman, one who would say very little and never oppose his wishes. By this point, he traveled a great deal—between his properties for work, to Europe and South America for pleasure—and had no need for a wife with demands on his time or person. “Dude, you are looking at the son of a mail-order bride,” Turo had said over coffee (fair trade) at the Gato.

  Turo was nine when his mostly benevolent but mostly absent father had died. For all those years plus one, his mother had done her good, pretty, docile duty, as expected, yet she had also learned the language she was not to speak too often and, not incidentally, had secured the friendship of an excellent lawyer who spoke it far better than she and knew, furthermore, how to use it in matters of delicate family finance. So Turo’s mom, Maria Doria, did not need to be greedy (i.e., piss off the adult heirs from matrimonio numero uno) to claim a sizable settlement and leave the plantations behind her. She joined her sister, who’d married in similar fashion, way up north in Chicago. There, Maria Doria found a job selling jewelry in a store that catered to wealthy Latinas. She proved herself indispensable to the business while studying (and paying) her way to legal citizenship. She and Turo lived in a two-bedroom apartment overlooking Lake Michigan. Turo did well in school and won a scholarship to Exeter. Every Christmas, Maria Doria took her son and her sister to Manila, where she paid for her parents and siblings to share part of a very nice hotel.

  When Turo left Chicago for his final year of school in New Hampshire, his mother felt confident enough in her son’s future to sell the apartment and return to her country for good. According to Turo, she had a kindly older boyfriend and played a lot of golf. In the Philippines, she could live like a queen yet soothe her conscience by spreading the wealth. Her share of his father’s coffee fortune went a long way toward supporting relatives who hadn’t made a canny bargain like hers.

  “What a saga, you must be saying, right?” Turo had concluded, draining his coffee with a flourish and smiling like a man who’d won a prize. “Son of mail-order bride did good, huh?”

  After their sophomore year, while Robert worked in Maine, Turo had spent the summer in Manila, living with his mother and working for an American businessman who exported rattan furniture to European resorts. For three months, Robert had pictured his friend relaxing every evening on a high porch, a true veranda, surrounded by rattling palms, swooping parrots, the air electric with insects. Costa Rica: that’s what he was picturing.

  They’d e-mailed back and forth, but Turo said little about his job. He wrote about politics—American, the Hillary-Obama stuff—and sports. (Could they nail tickets at Fenway? Wasn’t there some influential family friend in Matlock who had a corporate box?) Nothing about school or girls; nothing about his mom or how weird it was to be halfway across the world. Maybe, for Turo, it wasn’t weird. Robert’s fairy-tale images of his friend, his privileged life abroad, never morphed into anything fixed or real. And Robert didn’t push it, the stuff he wished he understood better. Because he did know this: adamantly, defensively even, Turo saw himself as American. “I love my mom,” he once said, “but in terms of who or what I am, I might as well be an orphan. In a good way, an unencumbered way, don’t get me wrong. No pity. No way.” At such moments, so beguilingly, pugnaciously sure of himself, Turo flashed a smile that could have powered a small city.

  That was the smile with which he greeted Robert the evening after the insane outing to Ledgely. Through a long day’s agony of scientific drudgery, of prepping slides and peering through a microscope, of struggling mightily just to focus, Robert had suffered flashbacks of the dark woods, the steaming pool, the dead squirrel bobbing in the water. They had only deepened his anger and bewilderment at Turo—though maybe they’d also kept him awake.

  Yet all his resolve to blow Turo’s ego out of the water simply crumbled when he entered their apartment and felt his roommate’s charismatic glee. Without a word, he let Turo trade him a glass of purple wine for his backpack, then lead him, brotherly hand on shoulder, to the kitchen. The table was set for two. Candles flanked a pot of auburn chrysanthemums wrapped in orange foil.

  “What, is this a date?” said Robert. He had a sudden vision of Turo engineering a reconciliation with Clara. Would she jump out of the bathroom now, surprise him with apologetic kisses? He’d left his phone in his room that morning, refusing to deal with her panic. His own panic, over the surreal night before, was plenty. So now, if she were to emerge (he glanced at the door to the pantry), would that be better or worse than the face-off with Turo that he’d been rehearsing as he pushed his way against the wind across the Common and up Mass. Ave., weighed down by chemistry tomes.

  “A culinary peace offering, friend,” said Turo. “Off with that coat.”

  Robert set down the wine, took off his coat, and went to the bathroom to wash his hands and muster his will. Maybe this wasn’t a date, but it was clearly a seduction. Was that Astrud Gilberto?

  He sat on the side of the tub and said to the towel rack, “Jesus. Astrud Gilberto.” His brain was so fried that he felt like, if he didn’t state the realities here, literally announce them one by one, they just might turn out to be illusions. But he couldn’t beg off.

  So he entered the kitchen on the offensive. He picked up his wineglass, took a dramatic slug—Dutch courage, right? why Dutch, for God’s sake?—and said, “Dead squirrels, Turo? Dead squirrels? WTF, man, are we back in junior high? What next, you plan to fill a hangar at Logan with fart cushions and Limburger cheese?”

  “Sit,” said Turo, unfazed, “and we’ll talk.”

  Robert sat. Turo stood over a dish, hot from the oven. It smelled incredible. Somewhere along the colorful paths of his youth, Turo had learned to cook. Really cook. Robert had assumed that the impromptu gatherings their room had attracted throughout their year in Kirkland House would turn into kickass dinner parties once they had their own kitchen. But Turo claimed he no longer had time to hang around so much. No more long coffee jags at the Gato, pool games in common rooms, tossing or kicking balls by the river—at least not with Turo.

  This meal was a seduction all right: a spicy squash strudel with quinoa and jicama salad, spinach sautéed with garlic and lemon.

  “Here’s what you need to know,” Turo said when he finally sat down. “My life is completely serious now. I think yours could be, too. I’m not saying ditch your studies, man, although”—he paused to laugh—“in a way it wouldn’t matter. Believe me. You can make a joke of what we’re doing. The newspapers try, though would they bother to cover our actions if they didn’t know we’re dead on target? Forget the meek stuff. Recycling’s great, group showering, local eating, yeah yeah, all good. But it’s not dramatic enough to make a dent.”

  “Okay,” said Robert, “I get it, but what’s wrong with working from inside out, the bottom up? Did you hear about the organic lawn care they’re starting on campus? ‘Start small and grow it’—isn’t that what you’ve always said?”

  Turo shrugged. “I’ve outgrown small.”

  Robert watched Turo eat, his slim dark face flattered by the candlelight. If Robert were a girl, he’d have fallen hard for the guy long ago. Had he, in a warped way, chosen Turo over Clara? Or maybe he’d outgrown something, too: the playfulness of easier passions. Maybe he longed to trade up for something hard core, like Hemingway and all those ordinary guys who ran off to fight in that Spanish war.

  For dessert, Turo set two plates on the table: two perfect creamy flans, each shaped like a miniature fez, surrounded by a pool of amber syrup. “My mother taught me this,” he said. He lit a match and, one plate at a time, set the liquid gold on fire. The heat smelled richly, briefly, of sun-baked oranges. “Now eat,” he said when the flames died down.

  7

  Celestino took
a long shower, devoting extra care to the soil beneath his nails, the dust around his ears, the sweat trapped in the creases at the base of his throat. His hair seemed to be graying quickly now, and the skin beneath his jaw, sunburnt too many times, was beginning to resemble the hide of an iguana. The shower in his tiny bathroom was made of flimsy tin; toward the bottom, a hole had rusted through, long before he was the tenant. In summer, mildew gathered like moss around the gap. By late fall, because the bathroom was unheated, a cold draft poured through onto his ankles. No roaches, though; in New York, he’d never lived in a place without bugs.

  When he stepped out, he could see his breath. The steam had retreated to the ceiling, where it hovered like a miniature cloud.

  He dressed fast, in jeans and a plaid wool shirt he saved for special occasions—of which there were next to none. Make that none.

  To Celestino’s surprise, Robert seemed to know Lothian well. Well enough to suggest they meet at a place not far from where he lived. Celestino had passed the Big Oven many times; it served pizza that was cooked in a much bigger version of the oven in which his mother had baked tortillas and roasted chicken when he was a boy. People stood outside the window just to watch the cooks with their long wooden paddles, as if they were watching a play. Looking at the menu, you could see that people paid extra to have their pizza cooked like this.

  The air was cold enough for snow, yet so far the snow had held off. And so far, he had escaped leaf detail. The blowing, gathering, raking, and shredding of leaves was much of Loud’s business now. In Matlock, so thick with woods, the trees old and massive, leaves blew down in blizzards even if the snow did not.

  Loud had given Celestino the job of staking and wrapping, one by one, the hundreds of roses and shrubs in the walled garden behind Matlock’s oldest church. Celestino had helped care for this place in the summer. According to Loud, people paid a lot of money to be married there. The garden was shaped like a funnel, four terraces descending toward a ring of slender pillars and a fountain. In the center of the fountain, a naked woman made of marble poured water from an urn. A bronze plaque outside the wall told passers-by that this garden, called Rose Retreat, was a hundred and fifty years old. It had been abandoned, grown over with weeds, for nearly half of that time. Only a few years ago had Matlock’s history-minded citizens cleaned it up and replanted it just the way it had been designed. It made Celestino think of the dig, wonder if the garden had been buried under the earth. Had archaeologists worked here? The smooth skin of the marble woman bore the ghostly tracings of ivy. She had been wrapped tight in those vines, both smothered and protected. Her features had worn to a blurry version of whatever beauty she’d once possessed.