The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  “For the indigent architects’ charity ball.”

  “Hey, it’s all relative,” said Robert. “It’s not a McCain fund-raiser, right?” He stood and waved at their waitress. “I’m getting this. Sorry I have to split.” He packed up his computer and notebook, pulled on his puffy orange coat.

  Robert thanked Celestino and asked if they could get together again. “Are you staying on the same schedule at Mrs. Connaughton’s?”

  Celestino said he would leave a message with Robert’s grandfather if anything changed. Awkwardly, they shook hands.

  He finished his beer and reached for his coat.

  “One more for the road?” said Arturo. “On me.”

  Celestino was quiet, still. If the next words to emerge from his mouth were in Spanish, they would mean one thing; in English, another. Or perhaps he was wrong. Maybe, as his mother believed, everything was written by God in some great gilded book. Maybe the choices he made were futile.

  “You don’t want to go with your friend?” Celestino said.

  “I like it here, where it’s warm. Don’t you?” Arturo wore a knowing smile. The girls must go wild for this one. He had a rich boy’s teeth: white and evenly spaced. His eyes were the deep brown of the coffee beans that had paid his way through life, his black hair slick as a bird’s wing.

  Arturo signaled the waitress. As if reading Celestino’s mind, she came to their table at once. The boy ordered two beers.

  “Why does your friend call you a cynic?” asked Celestino.

  “Because I don’t take yes for an answer.” Arturo smirked. “Something like that.”

  Oh, a clever one, thought Celestino. Young, naïve, and trying to be anything else. As the waitress set the beers on their table, he realized that she had not asked to see the boys’ cards, to check their age.

  Arturo pulled a glass toward his side of the table but did not drink right away. “So. Your connection with Harvard. That’s bizarre, man.”

  Celestino felt his heart quicken. “The widow—Señora Lartigue—she taught there, too. French.”

  “Not my subject. Never heard of her. But in the Fogg, there’s a collection named for her husband. Pre-Columbian. Some of it must come from that dig.”

  “They had two children who are grown up now. Etienne the son, Isabelle the daughter. They were kind to me.”

  “But you lost touch, huh?”

  “I wonder where they are.” Celestino felt as if the boy’s gaze would puncture his armor at any moment. Did it matter?

  “So Google them,” said Arturo. Almost at once, he laughed. “Yeah, like you’ve got free computer access. Sorry. But hey.” He reached down and squirmed around until he pulled out a cell phone. It was a bright metallic red and, like Loud’s phone, had a full screen without keys. Turo punched at the screen with his thumbs. “So. Isabelle with two l’s—or … well, bingo. Isn’t the Web like something just plain unholy?”

  Arturo held the phone toward Celestino. “This her?”

  Her name stood out on the screen, in clear celestial blue. “The Stigma of Parental Renown: Growing Up in the Shadow of an Esteemed or Notorious Parent.” Panel Discussion with Ph.D. candidates … Dept. of Psychology, William James Hall 765, Harvard University. December 3, 4:00 p.m.

  “Apple fallen not far from the tree,” said Arturo. “What do you know.” He withdrew his phone and tapped its surface a few more times, absorbing information he did not share. Then he turned his sly gaze on Celestino. “Dude, from the look on your face, you’ve done more than wonder about this woman.”

  If Celestino had met Isabelle in his village rather than her city, his little sisters, or younger cousins, would have gone with them to the movie they saw the first time they went out together alone. But of course, there were no movie theaters in his village: a handful of televisions by the time he left for good, but nothing so grand as a cinema.

  It was two months after Celestino had arrived in Cambridge the second time, to begin college. Isabelle, who was in her last year of high school, had suggested they walk into Harvard Square to see The Perfect Storm. Afterward, they went to Brigham’s for ice cream.

  “Gosh, this is so old-fashioned,” Isabelle had said, licking chocolate sauce off the stem of her spoon. “I feel like I’m living in the nineteen-fifties. A picture show and a hot-fudge sundae. I always have fun with you, Celestino. A kind of fun I have with no one else. You don’t have any ‘attitude.’ ”

  “Attitude?”

  “You know what I mean. Like you’re going to own the world one day; that’s how almost everyone I know behaves. Though you—maybe you will, and not all those Brooks Brothers princelings I’m stuck with all day at school. I freak out when I realize that I’m expected to end up with one of those guys.”

  “You will end up with someone like your father.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” she’d said. “You know just a sliver of my father. God, if egos were houses, he’d be Versailles.”

  Celestino did not acknowledge this remark. She apologized and put her hand on his. “My father must be a saint to you, and I guess he should be. He’s just so”—she’d laughed in her birdlike, carefree fashion—“French.”

  “Your mother, she is French also.”

  “And how. But me—I mean, more than Etienne—I’ve been raised here. So the French stuff—the twisted xenophobic-but-totally-magnanimous thing? Like they’re cultural ambassadors at large. Know what I mean? It is such a façade.”

  He asked her what xenophobic meant. She paused before answering. “It means that you’re threatened by things or people that are foreign.” The look on her face was a challenge; what did he think of that?

  He decided that she meant her parents were rich people who fought their own prejudice against the poor. Could you hold the prejudice against them if they were trying to change it?

  Before he could find the words, Isabelle began talking about the movie again. “I am going to have nightmares about drowning,” she said. “Someone told me the book describes exactly what it’s like to drown.” She shuddered. “I’ll happily miss out on that.”

  Celestino had confessed to her, then, that he did not know how to swim.

  “Oh my God, I am so going to teach you!” she’d said, and she’d grabbed his hand. “My parents have friends with the most outrageously awesome pool, right here in Cambridge.”

  In a way, Celestino and Isabelle had known each other for three years already. The first time he had come to live with her family, when he was fifteen, they had not spent much time alone together. For one thing, he had been overwhelmed by schoolwork. And back then, she had seemed like a creature of another species. He had seen her as an ocelot or a puma cub, moving deftly through her world, free to be playful, fearful of nothing. Celestino, by contrast, had felt his way through that world too cautiously for play, confident of nothing. Three years later, he still felt the weight of her worldliness, but now he was taller (if only by an inch), more fluent in the customs of his wildcat companion, more aware of how she used those customs to hold his attention.

  Isabelle had gone to a private school a few blocks from her house. On many afternoons, other girls followed her home, draping themselves around the green table in that huge, lovely kitchen. If Celestino was upstairs at work, he would hear them enter the house like a flight of raucous parrots. He might go quietly downstairs to the kitchen on the pretense of getting a drink or a few crackers—but he would leave quickly, wanting only to catch a glimpse of these girls from around the edge of a cupboard door. They moved as if their bodies were entirely liquid, limbs curled impossibly around the furniture, their silky sweaters and scarves flung here and there, even their big furry boots in the winter. Their toenails were painted, black or green or midnight purple, never red or pink.

  When they shut themselves in Isabelle’s room, he could hear their conversation through the wall, almost always about the boys they wanted to stalk—or elude. They sounded predatory, sly—again, cats at home in a jungle—and he did
not seek to know them (though he heard them ask questions about him, tease Isabelle about her “live-in stud”). But when he had Isabelle to himself, she was … easy to be with. And then, more quickly than he had ever dreamed, too easy—though it would be fairer to say that they had been equally easy. No one had been the seducer, no one the seduced.

  Once they had discovered that they enjoyed each other’s bodies as much as they enjoyed going to movies, walking by the Charles and talking (of course, Isabelle did by far most of the talking), it wasn’t hard to be together for the long velvet hours of the night. That she did teach him to swim, as she’d promised, in that outrageously awesome pool, gave an even greater logic to the need for their physical closeness.

  Isabelle would wait for the light to go out under her parents’ bedroom door. Celestino became so alert that, from Etienne’s old room at the far end of the hall, he would hear the tiny snap of Señora Lartigue turning off her lamp. In a few minutes, he would see his bedroom door open, in the dark.…

  But they did not risk using either of their beds, since their rooms were on the same floor where Isabelle’s parents slept. They would creep to the third floor, up the carpeted stairs to the room where Celestino had stayed during his first visit there. It was now a cold, sparsely furnished guest room. They kept a large beach towel rolled tightly beneath the small bed. Isabelle would spread it across the bed and they would fall there, or throw each other down, holding in their laughter like breath underwater, nearly drowning under the necessity for quiet, but happier than they’d ever been before. So they told each other often, in the hours they had to be careful to stay awake before slipping downstairs again, to their respective beds, shivering in the cold sheets.

  At breakfast, in the hectic rush to get out the door to their different schools, Isabelle and Celestino would play a secret game. The first to break down and catch the other’s eye would be the submissive one, at least to begin with, when they returned, hours and hours later, to the small bed in the small room just under the roof of the house, the room where Celestino had first felt the yearning to live forever in this place, not the place where he had been born and once assumed he would always stay.

  8

  In early November, true to her Vassar-inflected word, Mistress Lorelei deployed a squadron of surprisingly efficient teenage girls to strafe my house with dust cloths, sponge mops, tubes of polish, and aerosol cans of cleaning fluids so potent as to drive me off to the Narwhal every day for a solid week. (Norval grew weary of my whining.)

  One afternoon, arriving home just before dark, I beheld quite the apparition: out on the frozen lawn, four of these girls, each grasping a corner of my living room rug, vigorously snapping it up and down. In my headlights, the cloud of dust rising into the air looking positively atomic. The girls, unimpressed, chewed their gum placidly, wires twisting from their ears to the music pods tucked in the pockets of their very tight jeans. One of the more unsettling side effects of my resurrected sexuality was a sudden, inappropriately visceral appreciation for female anatomy even in its early bloom.

  I had allowed Laurel into my house with extreme reluctance; she, in turn, suppressed her disapproval. (“Percy, are those exquisite black sconces by any chance brass?”) We decided that the tour, in my house, would be restricted to the first floor. Chez Lorelei, visitors would be able to follow a path—restricted by velvet ropes—reaching even up the ladderlike stairs to her third floor, where they might ogle and coo at the quaint furnishings of an ersatz nursery and stroke the original brickwork of a well-built colonial chimney.

  Sarah watched me endure the scrub-down with devilish amusement. She was drinking tea in my kitchen the afternoon two oil paintings were carted away for cleaning. (This I had agreed to pay for, and it would not be cheap.) “Percy, you look like someone just stripped off all your clothes and shoved you onstage with Larry King.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  She laughed her laugh of astonishment. “A lion trainer with Barnum and Bailey.”

  “Some media character I’m supposed to worship.”

  “Worship? Depends on your religion.”

  I recalled a song, from a musical, that for a time Poppy would sing to herself in idle moments. It’s a song about what happens when you marry: how everything’s different yet nothing’s changed. I told her the song was incorrect; that my life, had we not married, would be to the life we shared as any one continent is to another. A world apart.

  This song, or what I vaguely remembered of it, came back to me often last fall. For as much as everything around me was shifting shape, from the barn to the beech tree to the placement of my furniture, the further these alterations progressed, the more I felt like myself, this man in this body in this time. Strangely, it was Sarah, more than anyone or anything else, who underscored this feeling.

  Sarah made me feel younger—the lovemaking, yes, but in equal part the conversations and jests that we shared, the increase in laughter alone—and at the same time so much older. I found myself aching and cramping in anatomical niches and gullies that my running and swimming routines had never explored. I cramped up in less definable ways as well. After staying overnight in Packard twice, I had to inform Sarah that I wasn’t comfortable there and knew I never would be. The sheer space of the loft, its very loftiness, confounded me when I awoke in the middle of the night. I remained forcefully alert with an unfamiliar agoraphobia, perturbed by the shadows cast on the industrial ceiling, far too high above me. I felt like a child who worries that goblins lurk in his closet. En route to the bathroom in the middle of that second night, groping about for the switch, I tripped over Rico’s tricycle. Sarah, a hearty (and often noisy) sleeper, was not roused by the commotion. I sat on the cold concrete floor in my undershorts, wincing and gasping as I clutched my battered shin, unsure whether or not I wished she would come to my aid.

  So the younger, randier Percy and the older, ossifying Percy were constantly forced to meet in the middle, so deliberate in their dance that I knew, as I’d never known before (or had refused to know), exactly where I stood on the meandering road of my life. Does this sound pompous? Too bad. It was true. I looked upon my daughters and grandchildren from a new, more precisely calibrated angle, as if I could literally see them in distinct generations following mine, as if we stood on a tiered stage.

  In this scheme, Poppy now stood so much farther behind me, genuinely lost to me once and for all, out of sight beyond a dozen bends in the road. To be alone with myself whenever I faced this loss was nigh unbearable. At such moments, I welcomed the incursion of the cleaning squads or the mothers babbling beneath my back porch or the teachers emptying the tree house for winter, waving coyly through the window in my study as they relayed little chairs and tables down the ladder and off to the barn.

  “I dreamed that I married a Muslim cabdriver. He had very bad teeth but a beautiful smile. He told me he could make a wonderful lamb stew. And then we were in his house, and he was making it, and it was in fact amazing. I can almost remember the taste.”

  “Please tell me this qualifies as a nightmare,” I said.

  We were sharing a shower, as we always did after a rare overnight visit. I stood behind Sarah, soaping her lovely back. Her wet hair enveloped her shoulders like a slippery pelt. It smelled of grapefruit, the scent of the shampoo she kept in my bathroom.

  “No, not at all. I had this generalized happy feeling about the guy, even though I was also thinking that maybe he wasn’t too literate—that did worry me, vaguely—and there was this nagging sense I had about a complication I couldn’t put my finger on.”

  “Which would be me.”

  “No. Rico.”

  The sun angling through the bathroom window had spotlit the line of mildew where the edge of the tub met the tile wall. The disadvantage to having my first floor stripped and polished to a fare-thee-well was that the second floor now looked horrendously grimy. A well-greased slope, this business of renewal. I was thinking idly and self-righteously abo
ut the parallels to plastic surgery as I slipped my arms beneath Sarah’s and began to soap her breasts. She giggled and bent slightly forward, but she did not turn around or pull my hands away.

  How I loved, even obsessed over, Sarah’s breasts. Poppy, against the prevailing trend of our time, had nursed both daughters. I’d suffered no anxieties—no “hang-ups” as we liked to say back then—about sharing, though one male friend, after a few drinks, confided that I would feel differently if my babies had been boys. Indeed, I loved Poppy’s breasts more than ever after she weaned Clover. I loved the purple veins newly and sharply etched on her fair skin and would trace them with the tip of my tongue. Her breasts seemed fuller to me, more welcoming, as if they were live beings that took their own pleasures separately from those I wanted to lavish on my wife. But the second round of nursing, Trudy’s turn (so soon after Clover’s), left them depleted. They felt, to my hands and mouth, as if they’d been hollowed out, paid their biological dues.

  Sarah’s breasts, like the rest of her body, felt unvanquished, almost virginal in their resilience. Privately, I thought of her breasts as warrior breasts. I was careful never to hint at any comparisons, though I wonder if she knew how inevitable they were, even as they began to obscure my memories of Poppy.

  As I savored them there in the shower, she was silent for a moment. Then she said, “It must be the residue of a cab ride I had in Boston yesterday.” She pressed her bottom into the alcove beneath my stubborn belly. “Sometimes I think dreams come from a place in your brain like that filter in the dryer. Fuzz from your day accumulates there. Because now I remember looking at this guy’s mug shot on his license. He was handsome in this wind-beaten way, but he must’ve been twenty years younger, because when I looked in the rearview mirror, the face I saw was so much more … collapsed. His hair gone gray. Oh my God, I thought, he’s been doing this job for his whole adult life, probably for his kids. I tried to guess his nationality from his name. Lots of consonants, z’s and y’s.” She knew she was teasing me with her casual monologue, that the more words she doled out as she pressed against me, the fewer I’d have at my service.