Alternate Side

by Anna Quindlen

  Afterward there was usually a light lunch.

  The Fisk family—son, mother, son, brother whom no one knew—gathered on either side of the fireplace in the living room, food laid out in the dining room. Alma Fenstermacher had proffered her caterer, and Nora felt vaguely embarrassed by the passing thought that the food was very good. She looked around for George. This was exactly the sort of event he would enjoy, gladhanding his way through the mourners, telling the ones he’d never met before how close he and Jack had been, talking to the ones who lived on the block about how worried he’d been about Jack’s health in the last couple of months, how ashen and haggard he’d been looking. Lowering his voice to a stage whisper to talk about “what happened—you know what I mean.”

  But he wasn’t there. Instead, at the Danish-modern table she ran into Betsy, who was eating salad greens with her fingers, dipping each leaf delicately into a small pool of balsamic vinaigrette on the plate.

  “It’s nice that you could get away,” Nora said.

  “I had to be here. When George said he couldn’t do it, just couldn’t face it, I told him I would come and offer condolences.”

  “He’s having a hard time?”

  “Terrible. And he says he doesn’t know what he’d do without Charlie. He says Charlie’s friendship has been a godsend.”

  “Really,” said Nora. Even to her it sounded like “Really???”

  “He’s been a rock for George.” Betsy put down her plate and took a phone from the pocket of her black cardigan. Then she took another from the pocket on the other side. “Excuse me, Nora,” she said.

  Nora had to admit to herself afterward that she went looking for Charlie then only to be snide, to say, Wait until you hear this one. You’re a rock. A godsend. In the den a clutch of men who looked like Jack’s partners were watching a Mets game on the flat screen. It must be that they didn’t know that that was the room in which Jack had died. One of them was even sitting in Jack’s recliner, which Nora was pretty sure was precisely where it had happened. From inside the closed door of the master bedroom Nora heard voices, and she knocked softly. Alma and Sherry were sitting side by side on the love seat under the window, a box of tissues between them. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Nora said.

  “No, come in,” Sherry said. “I just had to get away for a few minutes. I feel as though I’ve been on a treadmill. I never appreciated how exhausting constant concern could be.”

  “Exhausting,” said Alma, putting her hand over Sherry’s.

  “Some reporter finally knocked at the door this morning,” Sherry said. “It must be a slow news day. I was so afraid Andrew would hit him. Think of how that story would have sounded.”

  “That’s terrible,” Nora said, putting her hand over the one of Sherry’s that Alma wasn’t holding. Sherry started to cry. Alma patted one hand, so Nora patted the other.

  “Some young resident came out in the ER and told me he’d expired,” Sherry sobbed. “Who uses that word? It made him sound as though he were a carton of milk past his sell-by date. Expired. Who says expired?” Her nose was running onto her upper lip.

  “That’s dreadful,” Alma said.

  “Passed away,” Sherry said. “They could have said passed away.” She wiped her face, then looked down at the pinkish streaks of foundation on the ragged tissue. “Oh, no,” she said.

  Nora squeezed her hand. “It could be worse. George could be here.”

  Sherry gave a harsh laugh that sounded as though it were stuck somewhere in her chest. “He wrote me a long letter,” she said. “He talked about what a wonderful man Jack was and told some long story about how Jonathan had come here trick-or-treating one Halloween and Jack had invited him in and talked to him in a way that Jonathan would never forget.”

  “About what?” Nora said.

  “I have no idea. I’m not even sure it’s true. Every time Jack saw Jonathan, he called him ‘that little weasel,’ as far as I remember.”

  “That was Jack,” said Alma.

  “The other thing that’s exhausting about all this is that these people insist on evoking some mythical Jack who bears no resemblance to my husband. His partners made him sound like Mother Teresa, until one of them mentioned his golf game, when they all shut up and the one man turned purple. And one of the work wives was telling a long story about how a friend of hers had gotten over being a widow through yoga. I hate yoga.”

  “Agreed,” said Alma.

  “I’m sorry, Nora,” Sherry said. “I’ve been so mean to you the last few months, but I had no idea how to handle this situation. Which is ironic, given what I do for a living.”

  “I totally understood,” said Nora. Sherry lay back on a stack of pillows. “Is it bad form to take a nap in the middle of something like this?” she said.

  “Don’t worry,” said Alma, and she and Nora slipped out and closed the door. “I’m going to get all these people to go home,” Alma said, looking at her watch, and Nora was certain she would make it happen.

  “Has she taken something?” Nora said.

  “In her place, you or I would certainly do so,” Alma said, which Nora thought was true of her but not of Alma.

  As they came down the stairs Nora said, “I keep thinking of this mother from the kids’ school who was eaten up with guilt because she said she’d fantasized about her husband dying so often that when he did she felt as though she’d made it happen.”

  “Oh, goodness,” Alma said. “If all the women who fantasized about their husbands’ passings made them happen, there would be no men in the world. How were Rachel’s and Oliver’s graduations?”

  “Oh, you know. Sad. Hectic. Lots of crying girls, hugging one another.”

  “We haven’t yet reached the evolutionary point at which the boys cry?”

  “I didn’t see any,” Nora said. “But Ollie’s friends are all science and math guys. Maybe that explains it. I know Charlie told Jack’s sons that if Oliver wasn’t in Boston and Rachel wasn’t in Seattle they would be here, but that isn’t really true. They both really love Ricky. And they didn’t much like Jack before, anyhow.”

  “Well, we’re not here for Jack, are we?” Alma said. “We’re here for Sherry. And it’s after nine. I’m going to clear the room.” Nora watched her approach the Fisk sons and then made her own escape out the front door.

  “Where did you disappear to?” Nora asked Charlie when she got home. He was sitting in the living room in the dark and she began to turn on table lamps.

  “I was sitting out in their backyard,” he said. “I was out there last month with Jack. We had a cigar, talked a little about the case. I could tell he was feeling bad about what happened. I was sitting out there by myself tonight, thinking, One minute we were talking, and now it’s not even a month later and he’s gone. Just like that. He was really sorry about Ricky. I think that’s what killed him. It wasn’t the threat of a lawsuit. He just felt like a bad guy.”

  Nora sat on the couch, her knees nudging his. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but in some ways he was a bad guy.”

  “I don’t think so. He just got stuck in a situation and didn’t know how to get out of it. And I was sitting there thinking, In ten years I’ll be him. Circling the drain at work, so pissed off that someday I’ll hit some poor bastard with a three iron.”

  “It’s not true. You’re not that guy. You’ll never be that guy.” Nora put her hand on his back and rubbed it, the way she had with the kids when they were babies, fretful, teething. Charlie turned his head and looked at her. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve done to me in a long time,” he said.

  “Sorry, Charlie.” She said it because she used to say that as a joke, when they first got together, like the tuna ad from when they both were kids. But it didn’t seem funny now.

  “Come to bed,” she said.

  “You go ahead. I’m going to
sit here for a while. Just turn out the lights.” Nora waited for a moment. “Go ahead,” he said again.

  As she started up the stairs she heard Charlie say, “Nora?” It was so odd, to hear him use her proper name. For years it had been Bunny or Bun, as though Nora were a name for other people and he had claimed a singular name just for himself. She tried to remember the last time he had called her Nora. It was usually when he was angry, but he wasn’t angry now.

  When she turned she could see his big pale hand raised in the darkness, caught for an instant in the streetlight coming through the curtains. He waved it in a circle that seemed to take in the room, the house, the city outside. “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

  He never came to bed. She never fell asleep. And so the day was done, and another dawned.

  NORA NOLAN HAS MOVED.

  HOME: 601 West 100th Street, apartment 15B

  OFFICE: The Beverley Foundation, 60 West 125th Street, suite 1010

  She can be reached by email at

  nora.b.nolan@nbnolan.net

  or president@beverleyfoundation.org.

  Nora and Charlie soldiered on for months after Jack Fisk died, but that night in the living room something had broken, and it became clear by inches that it could not be mended. When one of you wanted one life, and the other wanted something completely different, there was a technical term for that: irreconcilable.

  Nora realized that she was familiar with three kinds of marriages: happy, miserable, and somewhere in between. Somehow the words Charlie spoke that June evening moved them from one column to another. They started to look around for middle ground and realized they’d been on parallel paths for so long that there wasn’t any. One minute you were two people who loved each other despite your differences. And then one morning you realized—granola for him, oatmeal for her, skim milk for him, full-fat for her, coffee for him, tea for her—that you were nothing but.

  “What do you think of couples’ counseling?” Nora had asked Sherry, who was sitting in the Greek diner on Broadway while real estate agents wandered her house to decide which clients might buy it.

  “I’ve never known anyone who stayed together because of it,” Sherry said. “Best case, it stops people from using tooth and claw on each other, which can mean it’s really worth it. Do you know someone who needs a referral?” Nora didn’t know what showed on her face, but Sherry put down a piece of rye toast and said, “Oh, no. Oh, goodness. Can I help?”

  Expired, she thought to herself, looking at Sherry and remembering that evening at the Fisk house. We’ve expired. Charlie drank more and slept less. When he was home, the place somehow seemed even emptier. Jack’s downfall and death had been like a dog whistle, sending Charlie a signal that only he could hear about his own existence.

  It was a happy event that finally did them in, which she supposed came as no surprise. She remembered once telling Christine that at weddings people decided either to break up or to take it to the next level. They had been at the wedding of friends from high school, at a big country club overlooking the sound, boat horns drowning out the string quartet, and Christine turned to her and said, “I’m going to dump Bradley in the morning.” Just like that. She remembered Charlie squeezing her hand during the vows. From this day forward, as long as you both shall live. Somehow when you’re saying those words, you never realize what a long time “as long as you both shall live” will amount to.

  Jenny had invited them to dinner at her apartment, although Jenny made it her business never to cook, early on saying it was a tool of the patriarchy and later insisting that with the takeout options in her neighborhood alone, it was simply foolish. “I think it’s to admire her new kitchen,” Nora told Charlie, the two of them sitting side by side in the back of a car like two strangers who left a party and realized at the curb that they had nearby destinations.

  The cabinets were beauties, sleek to the ceiling, a pine with a showy grain that had been stained to a pale shadow of its usual gold, even prettier than the sample Jenny had shown her. And there was not a takeout container to be seen. Jasper had made a chicken stew with dried fruit and shallots, and a loaf of sourdough bread. Apparently he had a sourdough starter that he had been toting from place to place with him for years. “It’s been his most enduring relationship,” Jenny said, smiling at Jasper, dipping her bread into the stew, at which point Nora noticed the rigged silver band on her left hand. Nora looked at Jenny, then at Jasper, then pointedly back at the ring.

  “I made an honest woman out of her,” Jasper said, shrugging.

  Jenny blushed. Nora had never, in all the years they were friends, seen Jenny blush.

  “What?” Charlie said with his mouth full. “What am I missing here?”

  The ring looked oddly familiar. “He made it out of a quarter,” Jenny said.

  “Doesn’t that count as defacing currency?” Charlie said.

  “Really, Charlie?” Nora said.

  “That was a stupid thing to say. Let me see.” Charlie put out his big hand, and Jenny dropped the ring into it. Charlie looked at Jasper and nodded. “That. Is. Cool,” he said, handing it back to Jenny. He and Nora looked at each other, and he nodded again, and they had a moment of understanding: We had this once, but no more. It reminded Nora of that moment at the symphony when there is a silence and, instead of the end of a movement, it means the end of the piece. She was grateful that Jenny was looking down at her ring and hadn’t seen.

  When they had paired off over port—“the guy knows wine,” Charlie said afterward—Jenny had said, ruefully, “He needed decent health insurance. You should have seen the premiums on his plan. And the deductible was a joke.”

  “Jen, it’s fine,” Nora said. “It’s great. I’m thrilled for you. I’m just a little surprised, is all. Just please don’t ever tell me he’s your best friend.”

  “Excuse me, but you’re my best friend. And does anybody actually say that except on television?” She looked down at the ring. “Who gets married for the first time at forty-eight? It’s ridiculous. Whatever you do, don’t give me a shower.”

  “I had a dream about a shower the other night, weirdly,” Nora said. “We were here, at your place, and there weren’t enough chairs, so we were all standing.”

  “That sounds right,” Jenny said.

  “And I realized I didn’t have a gift and I was kind of panicked about that, and then I realized that the shower was for me, that I was pregnant again. Which would be some kind of miracle.” And then, looking into her friend’s face, she saw a deadness, a darkness in her eyes, and automatically reached out her hand. “Jenny, honey,” Nora said. “You’re not—”

  “That would be a miracle, Nor,” Jenny said.

  “But is that…I’m sorry, I’m being ridiculously incoherent here…it’s just that…”

  “Calm down,” Jenny said. “It’s all fine. It’s just one of those things that I realize now I’ll never do. Never have, I guess.”

  “Like living in Paris.”

  “I could still live in Paris. But not that. I look at all of you and I don’t know, after all those years of thinking it wasn’t something I wanted, I wonder. But who has a baby at forty-eight? Movie stars. Besides, all this is way more than I thought I’d wind up with. No matter what, I really, really, really like being with him. That’s what it comes down to.”

  And that was the thing, Nora thought as she lay in bed that night, listening to Charlie moving around upstairs in the guest room, letting his shoes drop to the floor, running the water in the bathroom. You had to really, really, really like being with someone. Yet somehow that was a decision they were all expected to make when they were too young to know very much. They were expected to make all the important decisions then: what to do, where to live, who to live with. But anyone could tell you, looking at the setup dispassionately, that most people would be inca
pable of making good choices if they had to make that many choices at the same time, at that particular time of their lives. Jenny had waited. They had judged her and joked about her and cautioned her and advised her. But maybe she had been right. A younger Nora would have been appalled that her friend the Theodore Pierce Foster Professor of Anthropology was marrying a cabinetmaker with a sourdough fetish. A younger Charlie had said, “Your sister went to Duke so she could design leggings?” But in the car on the way home, sitting with the estrangement well of the center console between them, they had agreed that Jasper was a pleasure to be with, that Jenny seemed happier than ever before, that Rachel was doing so well working for Christine. The only thing wrong was the two of them. Their hands had brushed in the backseat and they had both edged closer to the windows, bright with the red of brake lights.

  They didn’t rush it. From the outside they seemed much as before. They took things in stages, but after a while it became clear that all the stages led to a single end point. One evening, when Nora thought Charlie was napping on the couch, he said, without opening his eyes, “I ran into Dave Bryant on the street yesterday. He’s doing a stint in London and he asked if I knew anyone who might want to sublet his place. I said I knew someone who would take it.”

  Charlie moved into the sublet on the East Side, partly furnished. Nora looked at places on the West Side but farther north, on the high floors of high-rise buildings. Ironically, one of the things Charlie had wanted so badly finally came to pass, although not as he had imagined. They agreed to sell the house, and as predicted, made a good deal of money. The windfall was less once divided in half, but a windfall it was. There was nothing else to argue about. The children were gainfully employed. The retirement accounts were already separate. Nora agreed to stay in the house until the new owners moved in. They each changed the beneficiaries on their life insurance to Oliver and Rachel. Someday, Jenny said, when Nora finally told her everything, Charlie’s second wife would be infuriated by that, and Charlie might try to change it. But not yet.