The Last Kiss

by Leslie Brody

  I worked hard and fast all day while the newsroom tom-toms beat wildly about the mess. Reporters who had long mistrusted Scruffy were thrilled he’d finally been caught.

  In the late afternoon, though, I was puzzled to see all the top editors and layout people crowded into one small glass-walled office. Their faces looked solemn. Elliot was in there too, his arms folded tensely across his chest. I caught his eye and crooked my index finger at him to come out.

  “Don’t tell me they’re still dithering about whether to use his stories,” I said.

  “They’re trying to see if anything in them can be salvaged.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. Can you please tell them I want to talk to them?”

  There was barely room for me to stand.

  “We saw a reporter self-destruct here last night,” I told them, trembling. “Those stories have no credibility anymore. I can’t be part of a project or a paper that prints them.”

  I wasn’t bluffing. If those stories were printed, it would have been easy for the state to lay bare his bogus claims. Our professional reputations would have been ruined. Our mistake from the start was giving Scruffy the benefit of the doubt when he went off reporting on his own. He was a blowhard with a street-smart swagger, and we got conned. Elliot had told a supervisor about some misgivings early on, but they were dismissed. Scruffy was the top editor’s pet. Until that Friday.

  Finally the editors committed to killing Scruffy’s installment and swapping in mine. One thankful editor told me privately—and I agree—that they would have done the right thing eventually, but my ultimatum saved them precious time.

  Elliot and I went to my computer for a final comb-through of my stories.

  We sat down in two swivel chairs next to each other, knee to knee, looking at the same screen. The first thing Elliot did was tap out a message.

  “I am so proud to be working with you,” he wrote.

  I smiled, so proud to have him say so.

  He offered to drive me home that night—my car was in the shop for some reason—but I said no. In the heart-pounding intensity of the moment, and the deep relief of a crisis averted, I was afraid I might kiss him.

  Years went by. I had a breathtaking baby boy and savored time with my kids on a long maternity leave. But there were serious problems at home. My marriage was on the rocks. So was Elliot’s.

  Elliot and I used to have lunch a lot in the office cafeteria or a diner, and that continued after I got back from my leave. He had always had close women friends and as much as I liked him it seemed to me I was one of the crowd. Then one day he suggested a nicer destination than usual for lunch, an Italian place with white tablecloths and low lighting, and he ordered a vodka, then another, and then he took a deep breath and told me he wanted more than a friendship. I had been feeling much the same way but would never have dared to say so. I thought I’d always be admiring him from a certain distance. I don’t know how I replied to his admission. I was scared and thrilled and reluctant. I had a baby and a preschooler and a broken marriage to officially untangle through the long, arduous process of divorce. I was afraid to do anything that might throw dynamite on the path. But Elliot was so handsome and funny and caring and there was something magical about our attraction. At the end of that lunch he walked me across the parking lot to open my car door and he kissed me, a real kiss, deep and hungry and searching.

  I had never felt so wanted. But it was too soon. I got in my old green station wagon and slammed the door and drove off in a daze. I almost had an accident. He called the next day to take a walk in a park.

  “It’s a glorious day,” he said. “And we let a pretty big genie out of the bottle. We can’t just stuff him back in.”

  And so it began, with slow steps toward a kind of happiness I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to find.

  Courtship when you have children is a tricky thing. After some time had passed and I felt ready to have the kids get to know Elliot, food became a crucial ingredient in their introduction. One day he surprised us by knocking on our door early in the morning with a brown paper bag full of bagels. Back then he was living in a cheap apartment in Bloomfield while his separation got hammered into a divorce. He began to make a habit out of showing up for breakfast sometimes before speeding up the Garden State Parkway to pick up Max for school.

  “It’s the bagel man again,” my daughter Devon would say when she spotted Elliot through the window as he walked up our front steps.

  “That’s nice,” I’d reply, tickled and nervous as I opened the door to the clean fresh smell of his shaving cream. I wondered what my kids were making of all this. They seemed amused, curious and glad for the special treats. Sometimes he brought chocolate chip muffins. Alex, who couldn’t pronounce Elliot’s name, called him Oggie, as if it rhymed with “doggie.” We even painted a mug with the nickname so Elliot could have something of his own for coffee when he came over. We spelled it O-g-g-i, like the Italian word for “today.” In the present was where I wanted to be. The recent past with my first husband was so thorny and the future was so uncertain.

  One day Elliot brought each of my kids a set of huge red plastic costume lips that covered their own. They sat in their pajamas at breakfast with these fat red grins like demented clowns. It was just so goofy. They loved it, and I loved seeing them have so much fun with this man so full of enthusiasm. He brought so much life into our house.

  If Elliot couldn’t stop by, there would often be a bagel waiting on my desk when I got to work. Or a chocolate chip cookie. Or a foul ball snagged at a baseball game. Elliot got to his editing desk at 8:30 a.m., before almost anyone else, and thought nobody knew the source of these little gifts. Of course there were no such secrets. Reporters are professional gossips. It’s probably delusional for anyone in any office romance to think nobody knows.

  It wasn’t wise but he flirted by email.”Your shoulders look lovely today” he typed as soon as I took off my jacket on a hot morning and hung it on my chair. “How am I supposed to concentrate?”

  Feeling my cheeks flush I threw my jacket right back over my sleeveless top, covering the shoulders he had nuzzled just a few nights before. I was afraid he’d be fired for indiscreet behavior or abusing the company computer and kept telling him to stop, but he was recklessly romantic and ignored all my warnings. As much as I protested those notes, I ate them up. They made coming to work so exciting. His effusive messages were filled with comforting comments about articles I’d written, funny anecdotes about his kids and descriptions of places he wanted to take me, the ballet or a concert or a restaurant in New York. It was a relief when he got recruited to edit legal news at Bloomberg News in Manhattan. That put some professional distance between us.

  After we’d been seeing each other for a while Elliot brought his children over. I’d met them before when they visited the office but it was different under these circumstances. Through the window I watched Kate, with her long blond hair falling forward to shield her face, and Max, his shoulders hunched, shuffling up our front steps in single file, looking serious and unsure.

  “Hi,” I said with a smile when I opened the door.

  “Hi,” they said back. The air was stiff with awkward silence but we gritted our teeth and plastered on our smiles until we got to a dark movie theater where nobody had to talk. Getting to know them couldn’t be rushed.

  Elliot was in a hurry to get married, even have a baby. I wasn’t. I’d messed up a marriage before, was afraid I’d screw up again and thought the kids needed more time to get to know him. But he was impatient and determined. He hated feeling like an island, no longer head of the home where his kids lived in Hackensack and not officially part of mine in Montclair. At times we fought about our future. Slow down, I begged.

  But how could I resist a man so sweet he snuck into my house to vacuum and mop while I was on a ski trip with my children? A man who filled the house with pink and white roses to apologize for pushing me too fast? How many men are so qui
ck to say they’re sorry?

  “Hi,” Elliot wrote in a note to welcome me home. “If you notice nothing else, be sure and check the freezer. Bottom shelf. I’m sure you could use a treat. It’s your favorite. Nuts aplenty.”

  It was homemade butter pecan ice cream from Holsten’s, a local soda fountain that would one day be world famous as the set for the very last scene in The Sopranos.

  “There’s also apple juice, milk, chicken nuggets and some other stuff so you don’t have to rush out to the store first thing…. I hope you’ll accept my handiwork as a symbolic deposit to my vastly overdrawn account at the forgiveness bank…I hope you realize how hard I’m working still to win your love, your heart, to help you out in every way I’m able so you can be happy and strong and confident that beyond this difficult time, you and I will make a great pair. All that will be left is an amazing, life-giving love. You’ll see.”

  As I got to know Elliot’s kids I tried to be warm but not overbearing. To their great credit they were friendly back. On weekends we took whoever was willing on hikes or bowling or to baseball games. Devon saw Kate as the ultimate in cool with her layered tank tops, grownup books and edgy tastes in music. Alex worshiped Aaron, who was big and burly. To my distress and Alex’s pure delight, Aaron gave him wild piggyback rides and picked him up by his head. Sometimes they all clashed with Max, the introspective one in the very middle. Max thought I babied my kids too much. Probably so. But there’s one thing I did get right. I always had good food around. Everyone feels more at home in a casual kitchen. We had barbeques and brownies ad infinitum. Still, it would take many months for us to feel truly comfortable together. It would take years to feel like a family.

  ITALY

  June 2006

  Elliot was a good driver, but those steep, narrow, winding roads along the rocky Italian Riviera were frightening. Some snaked between high stone walls and came to T-intersections at angles so sharp you could see the cars careening towards you only when they flashed into dusty round mirrors hung at the corners.

  This trip marked our sixth wedding anniversary. Elliot said it was my present for putting up with all his “mishegas,” his favorite Yiddish word for crazy behavior and being an all-around handful. As wonderful as it was that he wanted to whisk me off on romantic escapades, those herky-jerky car rides to ancient ruins and seaside restaurants made my whole body tense, my hands poised to push away the dashboard if we crashed. We had rented a big clunky Volvo—all the zippy mini cars had stick shifts that I couldn’t handle—and sometimes it felt like sheer momentum would send us veering off a cliff.

  Things seemed safer in the Tuscan countryside, the roads more predictable. Our simple hotel in Siena sat right outside the Roman gate. Our room one flight up had only what it needed, an inviting bed covered in a fluffy white quilt, an antique wooden dresser with sticky drawers and a magnificent view of the rolling fields.

  “This must be the world’s most beautiful bathroom window,” Elliot announced with a satisfied sigh.

  Standing at the sink you could see the breakfast patio below with its clay pots of bright pink geraniums and tables with white linens set for two. Chirpy birds pecked at bread crumbs and fallen prosciutto. Looking farther into the distance, you could see misty fields and cypress trees in countless shades of green.

  “We could just spend the rest of our vacation in here,” he said with a smile. “Then you wouldn’t have to get in the car.”

  It sounded like fun to have lunch at a working vineyard, so we made reservations for the next day at the Verrazzano estate about an hour away. It had belonged to the family of the sixteenth century explorer who navigated New York Harbor. The very name suggested adventure.

  We set off in the morning, running late as usual due to one of Elliot’s luxurious soap-up-twice showers. We arrived just in time for a tour of the tangled grape vines, the giant oak barrels, and rows upon rows of bottles of red wine growing better with age. All delicious, you’ll see, the guide said with practiced charm, but don’t wait too long to drink it or it will turn to acid.

  His sales pitch grew more heated over lunch as tourists got tipsy and compliant at long wooden tables laden with local olives, heaping platters of roast pork and glasses of increasingly extravagant Chianti. Two couples sitting next to us were Persian doctors who had escaped Iran right before the 1979 revolution. They made for cosmopolitan company, a reminder of just how wide, open and colorful the world could be, so far from the narrow groove of deadlines, commutes, carpools and chores that threatened to consume us at home. Elliot was always an ardent defender of our sacred date night every Wednesday, and we savored our time alone on weekends when the kids were busy, but this was a whole new freedom, our longest getaway yet.

  Elliot was relaxed as he talked, laughed and squeezed my knee under my blue silk skirt. How handsome he is, I thought. How lucky we are. How great it will be to get back to our cushy white bed.

  The climax of the meal came when we tried the vineyard’s own balsamic vinegar. The guide said to chew a little piece of parmesan cheese and keep it in on your tongue. Then sip a drop of vinegar from a spoon. Mix it in your mouth. It tasted divinely rich, salty and tangy sweet like tamarind. They actually called it “love potion.” We wanted to bring some home.

  At the counter Elliot fumbled. He seemed dazed from wine and a touch of indigestion. That was the very first hint of what was to come.

  “You got the most expensive kind,” I blurted when I looked in the paper bag. It was fifty-six euros, or about eighty-two dollars then, for a tiny square bottle. “The big twelve euro version would be fine.”

  “That’s okay,” he said lightly. “We deserve it.”

  Elliot drove home slowly, taking in the late-day sun, his hand on my thigh, my hand on the back of his neck.

  “I love you so much,” he said. “I love that we can take this trip.”

  “I love you too. Thank you for all of this. It means so much to me that you put it all together.”

  A little while later, he winced. He shifted in his seat, loosened his belt with one hand and readjusted his jeans. He couldn’t get comfortable. He pulled into a gas station to find a bathroom and disappeared for a disquietingly long time. It was too bad, I thought, that he didn’t wait until we got back to our hotel bathroom with the fabulous view.

  The problem was too much rich food, we figured, but the sharp twinges in his abdomen didn’t go away. The next morning at breakfast, when Elliot asked the grandmotherly waitress for plain toast and rubbed his stomach with a sad grimace to signal he needed some medicine, she fluttered around with consternation.

  “Chamomile tea,” she insisted. “Make you better.”

  BE A GLADIATOR

  July 2006

  Elliot still felt odd pains when we got home. Easy fixes didn’t work, so he went to a gastroenterologist. Elliot hinted darkly that maybe it was cancer—his father and several uncles and aunts had died of it—but I thought he was being melodramatic. A suspicious swelling on a CT scan suggested he might be right, but then an MRI seemed to rule that out. The specialist ordered some other tests to be sure. It would take a few days for the results to come back.

  I was sitting at my messy desk one Thursday afternoon, deep in an assignment on the frenzied debate over early admissions policies at elite colleges, when my phone rang. It was Elliot, calling from the Bloomberg News room.

  “There’s a tumor,” he said.

  The concept of cancer didn’t sink in for me. Tumors can be benign, after all. His doctors still didn’t know the exact origin of the thing, so the possibility of something dire seemed too foggy, mysterious and unreal to take seriously.

  “The doctor said you can call him if you have any questions,” Elliot added.

  That caught my attention. Doctors don’t often volunteer for a sidebar with a patient’s wife. The receptionist got the doctor on the phone for me right away. I still didn’t utter the C-word. Neither did he.

  “Elliot’s very upset,” I said.
“Is he justified?”

  “He’s justified in being upset but not despondent,” the doctor answered, similarly vague.

  That was pretty much the entire conversation. My twenty-plus years as a reporter asking pointed questions evaporated right into the ether. I just didn’t want to know.

  Elliot was sent for an endoscopy—a tiny camera on a tube pushed way down his throat—to confirm the suspected diagnosis. The test didn’t show any clear masses, but the GI guy referred us to an oncologist anyway while scheduling another type of endoscopy. It felt like we were on a sinister and perplexing treasure hunt, with no good reward at the end.

  “What’s the matter with Elliot?” my kids kept asking.

  “We’re not exactly sure,” I said. “The doctors are trying to figure it out.”

  I found myself dressing a little sexier, cooking fancier I-love-you dinners as a distraction. I made grilled lamb chops with mushrooms sautéed in garlic and trout with ginger sauce, even though he wasn’t eating much and was barely drinking wine. He’d lost twelve pounds in six weeks and was looking even more alluring and fit than he had in years. Like most middle-aged men, he had wanted to drop a few.

  On the first Sunday in August, we took one of our precious trips for two to Lambertville, a cheery village of cobblestones, bistros and antique shops on the Delaware River. It was a stunning sunny day and we sat outside to have crab cakes and Caesar salad. It felt wistfully sentimental. I couldn’t help wondering if this would be our last semi-carefree romantic lunch. Hell might break loose at the oncologist’s office the next day. I tried to savor my last moments of ignorance.

  As always, we went to the Phoenix, a used bookstore. I hid in the back leafing through a book called 50 Essential Things to Do When the Doctor Says It’s Cancer. I didn’t want Elliot to see that, like him, I was giving in to the idea that this dreaded disease might really be the issue.