They pulled the tarp off the hole. The casket was up on some contraption that looked like a hospital gurney, and they maneuvered that around all the floral wreaths and right up to the hole. I turned away. I didn’t want to see the next step.
I stared hard at the rubbled bark of the maple tree a foot away. I listened to the soft Spanish of the gravediggers, and the hum of the bees, and the squeak of the gurney as it collapsed. Then I turned back to see. It was my duty. Maybe, as the ex-widow, I couldn’t hold the luncheon, and I couldn’t answer the condolence cards. But I could stand watch as he was lowered into the grave.
The men, intent upon levering the casket straight in the hole, ignored me until I made my reluctant way past the heaped flowers. Then they stuck their shovels in the dirt and looked at me.
I wonder what they thought when they saw this black-clad lady sneaking up after everyone else was gone. Well, I can guess. They grinned and exchanged a few words in rapid Spanish. They must be thinking, what a weird fella this one, to step out on that hotsy-totsy young wife with a middle-aged mistress.
From the looming mound, I picked up a clod of dirt. “May I?”
They were from an older culture, accustomed to the rituals of death, and they could hardly be shocked by this. I held the dirt over the casket and said a silent prayer.
There’s nothing like Indiana topsoil. It’s black and rich, bursting with life. I felt something moist slither across my finger. Life. A worm. I gasped and dropped the clod. It hit the shining casket, and the worm came free, and after a moment’s reconnoitering moved towards the dirt walls of the grave.
It was sick, it was grotesque . . . it was death.
By the grove of trees was a bench, and I dropped onto it, and for the first time since Don died I could cry. Then I found a wet-wipe in my purse and washed my face and hands, stained with tears and grave dirt and worm slime. If there was a trashcan nearby, it was cleverly disguised as a marble monument, so I wrapped the wipe in its foil and stuck it back in my purse.
I was fairly presentable when Mike Warren arrived. “Here,” he said, letting me take the bag that he’d been clutching between his pinkie and his ring finger. The ring finger was bare, I couldn’t help but notice, with a stripe of pale where a ring once was. What was the etiquette? Did a widower strip off his wedding ring right away, or wait till he felt single? Did he toss it into the river, as I had done with my ring the day after the divorce?
He sat down next to me and handed over three messy little packages. It was strange, sitting on the bench, surrounded by gravestones and the sounds of shovels as we ate tacos.
Oh, I knew what he was doing. I’d taken a couple of psych courses in grad school. He left me so I could have my own little ritual of farewell; now he was offering me hot sauce so the whole death thing was demystified. It was just part of life, like eating. And a cemetery was a pleasant place for a picnic.
I decided, maybe maliciously, to demystify him. “Is your wife buried here?”
I failed. He licked a smear of sour cream off the corner of his mouth before he replied, “No. Laurie wanted cremation. And she made us fly to Grand Cayman to scatter the ashes.”
“Maybe she wanted you to spend time together saying goodbye.”
“I suppose. At the time—it was right before Beth’s prom and graduation—I thought she wanted to cause maximum trouble so I’d realize what it would be like being a single dad.”
I decided to speak frankly. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with a shrink? “You sound jaded by the whole thing.”
He crushed the wrappers into a ball. “She was two years dying. I was pretty well tired of everything by that point.”
So maybe, during the time he counseled us, his wife—that laughing redhead on the Ferris wheel—was dying. Okay, I let go of most of my residual antagonism towards him. I mean, he’d been brutally blunt with me, and maybe he paid too close attention to Don’s panegyrics about the spiritual wonders of sex with Wanda, and he didn’t save my marriage when I’d specifically asked him to. But I guess that he’d shown up at all had to be counted in his favor.
I reached into the bag and found a single turnover, and after a moment’s hesitation, offered it to him. “So was it depressing, to be mourning in the Caribbean?”
“Not really.” He didn’t hesitate before he took the dessert, and I felt a bit of that antagonism return. Bad enough that men got to rule the world; did they have to metabolize so well too? He said, “We had a ceremony on the beach and scattered the ashes. Then we went to the hotel bar and had those drinks with the pineapples and cherries and parasols, and we felt better. Especially Beth—she was only eighteen, and it was the first time she’d been to a bar.” Thoughtfully, he added, “As far as I know.”
I took the other apple turnover, vowing I’d walk an extra ten minutes later, which would use up a big five percent of the calories. “It sounds more helpful than this.” I gestured at the manicured lawn, the rows of headstones, the formality of it all.
“I find myself wanting a stone after all. To have someplace to go on her birthday. The girls say we should go back to Cayman, but a headstone would be cheaper. What do you think?”
The question seemed casual, but I wasn’t used to being casual with this man. We’d had that weirdly one-sided intimate therapeutic relationship, which didn’t include him asking me for advice. “I don’t know how much a headstone would cost, being only the ex-widow, so I can’t help you there.”
“Ex-widow? That’s a new term. Very modern.”
“I’m thinking of writing some Hallmark sympathy cards for women like me. Other ex-widows. You know, you can choose condolences or congratulations, depending on the situation.”
I tossed that off blithely, between us buddies, but he was back to shrink mode. No utterance is inconsequential for a shrink. “Which do you choose? Condolences or congratulations?”
Blitheness fled. “He’s my son’s father. How could I be glad?” I added, “The urge to hire a hit man doesn’t last long, I guess.” I don’t know why the inner bitch had become outer suddenly. A form of armor, I guess. But he’d see right through it, right?
Well, he ignored it. Just as well. He got busy stuffing trash into the bags. “How about we walk to the top of the hill?”
I got up, glad that I’d become a power-walker so that the prospect of that steep hill posed me no anxiety. “It’s sort of coincidental that you’re here. The last time I saw Don, he said he was thinking of consulting you again.”
Mike Warren stopped with one empty cup halfway crushed into the bag. “He told you that?”
“Maybe he was worried I’d object, though I didn’t.”
“I never expected that he would consider further counseling.”
“Why? Because he was so resistant?”
He said nothing as he walked to the pickup truck and tossed the bag into the detritus in the back, then started up the hill.
Annoyed, I charged after him. “You said he was narcissistic.”
“I might have said he was exhibiting signs of narcissism. It is the personality condition of choice for mid-life men.”
“Really?” I inquired. “What about you?”
“Me?” He sounded as if he never analyzed his own personality, and maybe he never had. Maybe shrinks these days steer clear of uncovering their own neuroses. “I’m the old-fashioned type. I prefer to think of myself as merely egocentric.”
“That’s probably a sign of narcissism. Preferring to think, rather than actually thinking.” It was just a quip, but he glanced back, and I recognized that glint in his eye. He thought that I was amusing. Hmmm. I didn’t know whether I liked that. But at least he paused for a moment so I could catch up with him.
“Narcissicists are resistant to therapy. You said that. I took notes,” I said.
“No wonder he was s
o reluctant to participate in the sessions. I can imagine what use you made of those notes.”
The heat rose in my face, and I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see the flush. He was right. I’d read my notes back to Don after the sessions, trying to get him to see that he’d gone a little bit nuts there, as certified by a certified expert. Don took to dictating his own remembrances of the session into a micro-recorder and playing them back to me. Those were the days. “At any rate, he planned to consult you again.”
“For what? Depression?”
“Heck, no. More marriage counseling. Or more bad news broadcasting. He wanted you to tell Wanda that contrary to her expectation, the prenuptial agreement was going to stick.”
“Wanda? That’s the second wife?”
“Yeah. The official widow. She was by the grave. I’m sure you saw her. Black hat, bleached hair.”
“Are you sure it is bleached?”
I managed not to snort. Men are so naive. They think women actually come in platinum. “It’s the archetype. All trophy wives are bleached blondes.”
He said mildly, “I don’t remember you in the role of cynic.”
Disorientation again. Was I playing a role? Or being myself? And what self was that? The Brave New Self? The Bitter Old Self? The Disillusioned In-between Self? And what business of his was it anyway? Just because he’d seen me at my most vulnerable didn’t give him a right to judge. “Divorce does that. All that idealism about steadfast love and forgiveness and virtue rewarded. Well, I don’t rely on those anymore.”
“You still believe in them, however.”
With the end of the climb in sight, he’d speeded up. I picked my careful way up the last few steps. I didn’t know I had it in me. When I got my breath back, I said, “I wouldn’t want to put it to another test, that’s all I know.” I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’d lost, or surrendered, since I saw him last. “Anyway, it was Wanda he wanted you to persuade this time.”
“Did he say anything specific about how he felt? Did—” He shot me a quick glance. “Did he seem anxious about it? Depressed?”
Depression again. I considered this, then reluctantly shook my head. “No. He always made light of things. But I could tell it bothered him, that she was making trouble about the prenup.”
“Does that please you? That they were having trouble?”
I started to justify myself, and then stopped. What was I doing? Mike Warren wasn’t counseling me. His neutrally-voiced, diabolically-barbed queries didn’t require an answer. How easily I slipped into his trap, if it was a trap and not just the way he dealt with the general population as well as his clients.
After all, though I barely knew him, Mike Warren knew all sorts of things about me. He knew about my anxiety about money, and my fear of my mother’s disapproval, and any number of the other tiny neuroses that added up to me. It was too easy to slide into confidences with him, telling him things that I wouldn’t tell my best friend, because the good doctor had already heard (if he remembered) much worse. And there was something about his questions—so neutral, and so sharp—that made me talk just to justify and defend and explain.
But he knew Don, if only from the counseling year, and he was trained to be helpful. And he must care, or he never would have come to the funeral. Maybe, I thought, brightening, he was feeling guilty about ruining Don’s final year by failing to persuade him to stick with me.
I almost felt that he had some destination in mind, somewhere he could take me where I’d understand. Or maybe he wanted me to see what I didn’t want to see. I remember that as a favorite tactic of his, using that scythe-like tone to cut through my illusions and reveal reality. Reality as he saw it, anyway.
I locked my gaze onto a convenient marble monument, tricked up to look like a mini-Greek temple. I said, “It doesn’t matter now. Whether they had decided to come to see you or not, because . . . because it didn’t happen.”
“Do you think death renders intentions moot then?”
At least this seemed more philosophical than psychological. “Well, whatever plans they had are irrelevant. Don’s plan to call you, Wanda’s plan to renege on the prenup. None of it matters. We have to live our lives in denial of the possibility of imminent death.”
“Makes sense to me. We can count on living through most days,” he said reasonably. “So we’ll need some other excuse why we didn’t follow through on our plans, won’t we? Unless death is . . . part of our plans.”
“Part of our plans? Well, maybe long-term. But sudden death is something we can’t count on, or count against.”
“I would not stop for death, so death kindly stopped for me.” An anomaly for sure—a man who looked as remote as the doctor did, quoting poetry. Dickinson, no less.
I nodded. “Right. We hurtle through life, but there’s the brutal fact of mortality.”
“Keep this up, and you can have your own midlife crisis. And you can call me about it.”
I thought that might be a joke, a shrink-type joke, but since he said it in that same casual voice, I couldn’t tell. “I imagine a lot of people at the funeral were contemplating mortality.”
“That’s one of the purposes of funerals, ministers would say. But you can’t get obsessed about it—can’t start worrying about dying—or you won’t get anything done.”
I wondered if he’d been doing a lot of that obsessing since his wife had died. Now the conversation felt different to me, as if he’d stopped playing shrink and started being a real person. “I have to worry now, because my son has only one parent left.”
“All the more reason to live. Eat right, wear your seatbelt, stay out of dark places.”
“I already do all that.” Boy, did I sound boring. “So did Don, for that matter.” Suddenly, I had a vision of Don in a dark construction lot, splayed on the pavement. My breath caught.
“Did he?” Dr. Warren didn’t wait for an answer. He just started back down the hill.
I trailed after him. All this philosophizing must be boring to him now. He must be through the “why?” stage of mourning and into the “why not?” To tell the truth, I wasn’t sure I had the same rights as he did, to question, to deny, to rail against death. My marriage to Don had been dead for more than a year. Much more than a year, Don would say. But there was some insatiable cancerous cell in my brain that always thought about Don, even after he left me, that speculated about him and argued with him and worried about him. Now that he was truly gone, maybe that cell would wither away . . . but not yet. Not while the image of him in my house that last day was still clear in my mind.
“It surprised me when he asked me for your number. He said he’d forgotten. I guess we’re all good at forgetting uncomfortable things.”
He didn’t take offense at being categorized as among the uncomfortable. “That’s odd. I just got a brochure from him last month, advertising office space in that new building on the other bank.”
He didn’t have to say it, and neither did I. Don would never see that building occupied by Netmore executives and medical offices. Quickly, to get past that latest awkward realization, I said, “Are you looking for a new office?”
“They’re putting an exit ramp down in my parking lot. All the buildings are coming down. But I didn’t see the point of exchanging one soulless modern office for another, especially one without free parking for my clients.”
“Yeah, nothing disrupts a therapy session more than a client nervous about the parking meter expiring.” I mulled this over as we trudged between the lanes of gravestones. “So if he had you on his mailing list, why did he have to ask me for your number?”
His steps slowed, and he hesitated. “Maybe he wanted to make you part of it. Maybe he was giving you notice to wait for him.”
I forced a laugh. “Right. Don was desperately seeking the one he threw away. Thanks, but
no thanks.”
He studied me so long that it got uncomfortable. “That’s a good attitude. No need to over-analyze now.”
“No need to analyze at all, because nothing more will happen.”
He nodded and started off towards his car.
I hung back, staring at the mound of dirt that now covered Don. I wanted something . . . something more. I wanted more meaning to all this. I wanted there to be a reason the last two years, and this last week, had happened.
Chapter Three
THAT EVENING, Tommy fell asleep watching TV, sprawled across the couch in that uncaring adolescent way. The boy-energy was crackling like static electricity. He would sleep heavily like this, then wake in the morning ready to eat everything in the refrigerator and burn off all those calories just vibrating. I stood there in the doorway and saw him. My son.
We used to do this when Tommy was little. On our way up to bed, we’d look in on him, Don just behind me. We’d marvel at what we had created, just like every other parent in the world. Now Don would never see him grow up. Unfinished business. An unfinished life.
I went to my office and studied the faxed request that Tommy or his representative attend the reading of Don’s will on Monday. Should I make Tommy go? Yet another parenting question. There’d been so many these last years, and several times I’d guessed wrong, so I had little confidence left in my instincts.
Too agitated to sleep, I drew a bath and took the cordless phone with me. Once I’d sunk into the suds, Dr. Warren’s casual suggestion to call came back to me. He was a shrink. More important, he’d shepherded his own girls through a parental death. He would know. But did I want him to know that I didn’t know?
Finally, I dialed information. His home phone was unlisted—I guess that was to foil his psycho clients—and anyway, it was too late for conversation. So I dialed his office number, thinking to leave a message on the machine.
But he answered on the second ring. “Mike Warren.”
I was so surprised I had to swallow before I spoke. “I was going to leave you a message. It never occurred to me that you’d be at your office this time of night.”
Until Death Page 3
