The Last Kiss

by Leslie Brody

  And so, as I watched Sadie explore the yellow sheets on Elliot’s side of the mattress—a place I have never ventured since he died—it surprised me to realize that I had even envisioned a far-off future with another man who might have an opinion about the rules for the dog. When I try to wrap my mind around that vision it escapes like a firefly. I still wear my wedding ring. I long to have my husband back, to sink into him at the end of the day. Yet as much as I miss Elliot, I do find it a relief to be released from his extreme needs for attention. I don’t have the energy to take on the constraining burdens of anyone else’s moods or schedules or children. So how can I even think, yet, about being part of a couple again? When I have pictured a first timid foray on an old-fashioned date, I have imagined Elliot watching from my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket, looking betrayed. “How can you do this?” he whispers. “What about me?”

  That’s my version of magical thinking. Joan Didion kept her late husband’s shoes around because she figured he would need them when he came back to her. I have no delusions that Elliot will walk through our front door. My controlling vision is one of Elliot watching me with possessive eyes, accusing me of disloyalty if I ever find myself interested in anyone new. Then I lash out at myself for suppressing my own needs yet again to please him. Even when he is a ghost.

  Once, at one of Alex’s baseball games the spring before Elliot died, I bumped into a man I knew from The Record long ago. He was good-looking, my age, a reporter at The Times who had recently been divorced. We caught up for a few minutes and then I scurried back to my seat, afraid Elliot might think I was flirting, laying the groundwork for some future romance when he was gone. It rattled me to recognize a do-you-think-he-might-be-interested tingle. It seemed there was a tiny voice deep inside, much meeker than Jiminy Cricket’s, suggesting it would be okay to find a man attractive someday.

  The possibility of finding love again is something Elliot and I couldn’t talk about when he was sick. I remember it coming up only once. I made it happen. I wanted to elicit his express permission that it would be okay, and understandable, if I ever ended up with someone else. Without such approval I would feel so guilty, so disloyal. It would feel like a betrayal.

  “What am I going to do without you?” I asked on a drizzly Sunday afternoon as we walked to the movies. “How am I going to manage on my own?”

  “You’ll probably be remarried in six months,” he teased, “and it will probably be to someone in my book group.”

  He dismissed the subject with a joking wave of his hand because it was too painful to entertain. It’s impossible to imagine having a connection with any man like the one I had with Elliot. I don’t even want that right now, but I would like to think that someday I would let myself be open to the idea. Who wants to wind up one of those crazy dog ladies who puts her poodle on dialysis and just marks time between bimonthly visits from grandchildren?

  I’m a hypocrite, though; if I died before Elliot, it would kill me to picture him touching another woman. (There’s that magical thinking again.) I would want him to put me and our marriage first forever. I would want him to be happy, but I would be jealous if he fell in love.

  A friend once laid out the rules for her husband. “If I die you can marry a new wife,” she said sportingly. “You just can’t sleep with her.”

  Friends tell me the natural healing power of time will eventually sort all this out. Even Elliot’s heartbroken mother has encouraged me to meet someone new. Six months after he died, I was on my way to a wedding—just to twist the knife deeper, it happened to be at our favorite getaway in the Berkshires, the Old Inn on the Green—when Helen called to wish me well.

  “And you know,” she added, “if some nice gentleman should ask you to dance, it wouldn’t be a crime.”

  “Thanks, Helen, I’m really not in the mood yet,” I said. “I’m not ready for any of that.”

  “You’re young,” she said. “I can’t have another son, but you have to make a life for yourself.”

  That was very sweet to say, but please. She lost her husband twenty years ago and still wears his wedding ring.

  So how long is long enough? When can you let go? A friend told me that when her mother died at a ripe age, the other women at the retirement community pounced on her father with their casseroles. He was one of the only men left and he still had a precious driver’s license. There was a protocol among those in the brisket brigade: “Two weeks is too early, four weeks is too late.”

  Four weeks. Unfathomable.

  Sometimes I look for clues in the newspaper. Here’s a clip of an interview with Joyce Carol Oates, who got engaged within a year of losing her husband. That seems awfully fast. Here’s a review of Love Happens, a Jennifer Aniston chick flick. The male lead is called “blocked” because he hasn’t had a relationship since his wife died three years ago. So three years is seen as too long?

  One thing is for sure, said a friend’s mother, a reluctant expert after being widowed three times. “As long as you have your husband’s ashes in your bedroom,” she advised with a knowing nod, “you will not go on a date.”

  I don’t want another man. I want Elliot back. He is not replaceable. Yet I don’t want to wake up alone for the rest of my life either. Someday I will want to roll over and feel a man’s warm strength. I will want to be spooned. Having tasted the joy of a rich marriage, I can’t help wanting such happiness again. Not yet, but some day.

  If I should ever marry again, I have a plan for my vows.

  “Till death do us part,” I’ll say. “Me first.”

  At least, for now, I have a dog next to me where my husband used to be. I let her stay that day she jumped onto the bed, and she joins me any time she wants. I listen to her breathing, so peacefully. Curled on Elliot’s pillow, she is adorable, unwitting proof of the enormous capacity of the human heart to keep making room for more.

  GRATITUDE

  Thanksgiving 2009

  These manila folders full of recipes have so many memories. There is no organization to them, they’re just thrown together in the order I found them or used them. I need some ideas about what to make for Thanksgiving, so I thumb through the yellowing, torn clips from newspapers and magazines and see evidence of so many dinners over the years. The Muscovy duck with cilantro, honey and pine nuts I made for a New Year’s Eve dinner for Elliot, for just the two of us. We had it with champagne by the fire, sitting on the floor with candles on the coffee table, all dressed up, but not for long. Here’s the recipe for sweet potato fries, “popular with the Pinsleys,” reads my note to myself. Here’s shrimp with lemon and capers. That one barely sounds familiar. When did I make that? So many things are lost, forgotten. That’s why I write down what people say, or take videos, or keep seashells. I need them to remember. What vast swaths of experience have I lost because I didn’t write them down?

  We are having Thanksgiving on Saturday, two days after the real one, so Devon and Alex can be with their dad and the Pinsleys can be with their mom, and I can have them together when they are all free. I order butterflied leg of lamb from the Italian butcher. I just started going to Rosario’s shop. He’s one of the few men in my life now who says he wants to please me.

  “It’s nice the way our group is growing,” Devon says while we get ready. She’s right. There will be ten of us, thanks to Kate’s boyfriend, Anthony; Aaron’s fiancé, Sallie, and Sallie’s sister, who is bringing her pint-sized mutt, Leroy Brown, a stray she found stranded on a golf course. Even without Elliot there will be more of us at the table.

  I suggest they all come in the mid-late afternoon, maybe 4:00 or 5:00?

  “We were thinking of pushing it earlier,” Aaron calls to say. “How about 1:00? Then we can take a walk and hang out before dinner.”

  “Great,” I say. “I was just going to be cooking and cleaning up.”

  “We’ll help you,” he says. It’s so touching they want more time with us. I had said late afternoon so they wouldn’t feel I was pressuring them
– Aaron and Sallie are in from Chicago for only a few days and like to catch up with friends, and the last thing I want to be is an obligatory chore. And here they are the ones stretching out our day.

  It is always a wonder to see how boisterous the Pinsleys are, even without their father here. We take the gentle mutt and our Sadie to the dog park, then come home and build a fire, and take videos of all the hubbub as everybody helps me bring up another table and chairs from the basement. I unfold a new gold tablecloth thinking maybe a change would be good but Elliot’s mother wants the crimson one that I have always brought out for holidays. It’s the one my mother used when I was little and it’s showing battle scars like the rest of us. Who knew Elliot’s mother would be as sentimental about it as I am? A year ago, when she needed to keep her hands busy while her son’s body was falling apart, she spent a day darning the tablecloth with tiny black stitches. Maybe she needed to see there was something she had the power to fix. She reminded me of Penelope in The Odyssey, who kept weaving to keep away suitors until her husband came back. As if, by bending over that deep red fabric, Helen could keep away the worst kind of loss.

  Aaron and Anthony have brought good wine. They are grownups now. They know to bring something to a dinner party. Aaron grills the lamb. He likes to be the man of the house. He does a beautiful job. It is charred on the outside but perfectly pink and juicy on the inside. It smells of garlic and rosemary and smoke. There are beets with goat cheese, and green beans roasted with radicchio, and saffron rice. We talk about when Max will graduate from college in May and what to do in Chicago when we fly out for Aaron and Sallie’s wedding. Everyone interrupts each other but nobody seems to mind. I go upstairs for a minute and I hear them, laughing and unruly. And I realize I’m upstairs in my bedroom with my husband, his ashes are right here with me in the dresser drawer. I pretend he is with me for real. We are a couple, and we are listening to our family having a good time, and we are so proud of what we have built. I try to believe this is a sane thing to do.

  Later, I am in bed, and I am tired, and I want to taste again how all this began. I open my box of Elliot’s letters and pull out the first ones from the days we started dating.

  “I think you entered my dreams for the first time,” he writes. “What I remember is the two of us, reading the Sunday Times together…I was sprawled out on the couch, my feet up on the coffee table, reading the arts and leisure section, and you were lying lengthwise, your head in my lap, reading the magazine. There was sunlight on your face and I was running my hand through your hair. That’s it. I suppose I could have told you that I grabbed you and ripped your clothes off and we rolled onto the floor and made wild love in a frenzy of passion. An appealing thought, but it didn’t happen that way. I’ve thought about that picture all weekend, and in some ways right now, the peacefulness makes it more appealing to me. I want to do simple things with you.”

  I love that vision, so tender and serene. And here is another one from before we married. This one makes me cry. It is so full of yearning for our future.

  “This relationship we have, it’s like a delicate living thing, something to be enjoyed and treasured and protected. I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize what we have because I want you in my life. I can’t imagine it without you. I don’t want to. What I want is to make you happy…

  “I want to learn all I can about you because that place where you are is the best place I’ve ever been. I want to see how we are together, how we can be, and how far we can go and just enjoy that, to play and have fun and make love and be in love …and for that Leslie, I will always be grateful.”

  Grateful, I think. And I am grateful too. I had him, and I am trying to trust that I will find a way to feel him with me still as the years wander on. We could have gone a lifetime without finding such a marriage. We were lucky. I know I am even now.

  “You have to make a new life for yourself,” his mother tells me again on the phone. I understand what she means. But I have a life, a good life. I have our family, I have friends, I have a satisfying job. And that is enough, for now.

  “If we are to live ourselves,” Didion wrote, “there comes a time when we must relinquish our dead.”

  That time will come, I suppose, and maybe I will be thankful for that too.

  But there is no rush. I am still pulled backward into memory, and that is something to cherish.

  EVEN NOW

  December 2009

  In Devon’s tenth grade art class, she was assigned to construct each member of our family in an abstract shape using white foam board. It touches me deeply that she included Elliot. It has been exactly one year since he died, and she still sees him as part of our home. Her three-dimensional design shows me and Elliot together as a parallelogram. Each of us is a triangular prism. Mine points up, supporting his. His points down and has a ghost’s hollow core, but we fit together perfectly. We hold up a rod with a spikey flower on top. That is Devon, and she is linked to a large circle; she says that ring represents Alex, Kate, Max and Aaron, forged together through hardship.

  I love that she sees us all together this way, and that she sees me and Elliot in such a balanced embrace, even now. I can learn from her vision. I am trying to find ways to feel him with me. And I do, sometimes. At night when I’m trying to fall asleep, I pretend his hand is on my hip.

  This morning I went to a Zumba class at the Y with my new friend Laurie. We sashayed and swung our hips to the hot beat of salsa music in the basketball court. One of Elliot’s best friends, Larry, happened to pass by the window; I could picture the two of them standing there, laughing as they kibbitized in the hallway on a break from their treadmills. They both had white towels around their necks to mop their sweat as they watched us kick and shimmy.

  “Can you dance like that for me at home?” Elliot would ask later. “I want a private performance.”

  He looks sexy and mischievous in my daydream. So different from how I pictured him soon after he died, trapped behind a glass wall, pounding to break through.

  And I realize, with happiness, I have seen a contented image of Elliot more often lately.

  Kate comes over one night with her boyfriend and Max. I had asked earlier in the week if she wanted to get together Tuesday, the anniversary of her father’s death, though I didn’t say those words. She said thanks, no, but she felt like making a brisket on Friday for Hannukah. Although we’d never celebrated the holiday before, it sounds like fun. So she braises the meat in her oven and brings it to my house. I put out the new gold tablecloth, saving our ancient maroon one for Christmas. Alex lights a menorah and mumbles “baruch atai adonai…” with Max the way Elliot had taught them. This feels like the start of a yearly ritual, proof we can start new traditions even as we remain loyal to the familiar ones of our past.

  Kate’s brisket is the best I’ve ever had, tender and savory. She puts onions and sage in the applesauce for her latkes. It makes me ache. Elliot would be so proud of his daughter. Of this dinner. If only he could be here.

  And then I decide I can see this differently. I can choose to be proud on his behalf. I can make myself envision him here with us. He would be beaming, and asking for seconds, maybe thirds.

  “Katie-Pie,” he’d say. “This is magnificent. Better than my grandmother’s.”

  Sometimes happiness is a choice.

  I am getting better at feeling this way.

  I think back to the summer. To everyone’s amazement my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, just seven months after Elliot’s death from the very same disease. I took Alex out to visit him in Sag Harbor for a few days. I made my dad melon ginger soup, soothing and light. He watched The Four Feathers with Alex to instill in him its respect for manhood, loyalty and honor. When Alex and I played basketball in the pool, I could feel my father feasting his eyes on us.

  We knew my dad was very sick but didn’t realize how soon the end would come. I had been promising all summer to take Alex to see the Mets in their new stadiu
m, so we got tickets for a Friday night game. We hugged my father goodbye. I could feel his sharp shoulder blades under his navy blue robe. I turned away and then went back to him for another hug and kiss.

  “One more for the road,” I said. Then I hid in a bathroom to dry my eyes.

  Alex and I drove to Citifield and got there at 5:00 p.m., two hours early. It began to pour. And pour. We ate pizza to kill time. Alex played a batting game, hit the target and dunked a guy on a platform into a vat of plastic balls. It kept pouring. Surely the game would be cancelled. An announcer called a rain delay. We waited some more. It was still pouring at 7:30. Then slowly it began to taper off. When men in uniforms trotted on to the field to peel back the tarp, the crowd erupted in a wild frenzy of cheers. We found our seats, wiped them off with sopping wet paper towels and sat down. In that instant the dark clouds parted, golden light sparkled off the greenest grass, and a giant Technicolor rainbow stretched clear across the heavens from one side of the stadium to the other. It was spectacular. Beyond breathtaking.

  That’s Elliot up there, I thought. He’s congratulating us for our persistence. We stuck it out, it’s game time, and he loves that we cared enough to stay despite the dismal odds. “That’s my girl,” he’s saying up there.

  I’ll never forget that sky. It reminded me of that night a million years ago, after we soldiered through that first awful day at Sloan-Kettering and then drove out to Shea for Alex’s tenth birthday. We just didn’t give up then either.

  Maybe this is what Elliot has taught me. To keep going. To feel his presence. Even after his death he helped me endure the loss of my father, just two days after that incredible rainbow. Because I had seen Elliot suffer, I knew in my bones that my father’s quick passage, only two weeks after his official diagnosis, was a gift. Because I knew how much Elliot would miss in our lives, I could appreciate how much it meant that my father got to see his daughters become mothers and his grandchildren become teenagers. My father had a rich adventure during his seventy-eight years on this earth, and I’m proud of the life he led.