“Oh, I meant to ask, did you ever learn to use a speculum?”
“Yes. We had someone come in to teach us.”
“And?”
“Interesting.” She smiled gnomically, a bit like Evelyn. I could see I had forfeited the right to details. “Want to share a cab, Lydia, or are you staying?”
“No, I’ll get one later. The air is too good to leave.” I remembered the many nights when a cab would have been out of the question, and with that sense of time and change came a premonition that the Philosophy Study Group was over. Friends forever, very likely, but no more half-purposeful fooling with ideas. We would never be true believers. Things had fallen off too far—fruits, gems. Not ideas, but the intangibles of identity.
At the door Gaby said, “Wait.” Perhaps she had the same intimation of closure. “It was from Epictetus. We were talking about bear and forbear. When I was … you know.”
“Oh yes! That was years ago. It was Marcus Aurelius, but I can’t remember what any more.”
Nina went and knelt before a low shelf, stretched her arm directly to the book she wanted. What an efficient retrieval system! Perhaps her whole life was coded that way—given the topic and the year, could she lay her hands on anything? “Here. Find it.”
I found it. It made me suddenly very happy—one of those moments when the shards of life fit together like a prehistoric bowl, and the mind is flooded with contentment. “‘Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good, just as if the gold, or the emerald, or the purple, were always saying this, Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my color.’”
Gaby laughed, a laugh of concealment, not candor. “I’ve kept my color, all right.” Then she kissed us good night and was gone. We sat back on the pillows again. After a while I said, “So, Nina? How is it going with you?”
She leaned over, took the lacquered black box from the cabinet, and rolled a joint. She undid her hair and let it tumble down her back, smooth and thick. I thought of the man who used to brush it. She smiled slowly—it was almost seductive—and shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about love. I’m sick of love. He’s very much there, that’s all. And his wife is there too, and her diabetic comas. Let’s not talk about anything.” She passed me the joint. “What would you like to hear?”
“Wanda Landowska. Do you have any Scarlatti?”
She reached a hand out and found it immediately. We sat and smoked. The pungent smell was good accompaniment for the relentless, supple sound of the harpsichord. I could listen better than look. I studied Nina, wishing for Victor’s eyes. After all the years of the Philosophy Study Group I still wasn’t sure I understood how she saw the world. A scientist first, that I knew—her mind open to experiment, but her allegiance given only to evidence and proof. She had changed the least since college, except to become more talkative. The enormous change, the metamorphosis of Nancy into Nina, had taken place in school, right before my eyes, but I had been too inexperienced to know what I was seeing. I envisioned it now as a huge reconstruction project, where sometimes the shell of the old becomes the skeleton of the new; the dirty work is surrounded and hidden by makeshift wooden boards with tiny windows cut out to satisfy curious passers-by, but often the windows are too remote for the eyes of youngsters. Then it is unveiled, a suave modern building with a glassy facade, beautiful in its way but a trifle forbidding. She was wearing a loose and shiny black shirt with a gold chain given her by Sam, the civil rights lawyer. A noose. To his credit, though civil rights were no longer a glamorous or fashionable issue for whites, Sam persisted. For glamor, he had her. She sat with her knees drawn up. Listening? Or maybe working out some formula in her head. She narrowed her eyes, played with a bracelet, drew in the smoke so deeply I could see the muscles around her collarbone twitch. She had been home on three occasions in the sixteen years since college, and returned the first time looking frayed, and picked up a stranger in a bar. The only time, she told me. “I thought he might kill me and I didn’t even care. He was all right, though. I was lucky.” She didn’t go to see them again, but telephoned regularly, honoring her father and mother long-distance, sending money for a cataract operation, a new roof. The other two occasions were the funerals.
The music stopped and we looked at each other and smiled. “It’s peaceful here,” I said. “I could sit here all night, listening.”
She shrugged. “Stay if you like. I don’t sleep much anyway.”
“No.” There was a silence.
“It’s always been Victor, hasn’t it?” Her voice was low; it made the very air heavy.
“Yes.”
Then she smiled again, and I was grateful for this fine agility of hers. “Do you know, I still sometimes ask myself those Pythagorean questions at the end of the day. Can you believe it? A way of life and a salvation, Professor Boles said. In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done? A lot!” She laughed, head tossed back, eyes half closed. “The answers are interesting, but I don’t really care. I mean I can’t feel guilty about much any more.”
“I can just see you kneeling at your bedside, the way you used to say your prayers with your mother standing by.”
“Yes.”
I was high. My thoughts were swirling lazily, like the smoke. I saw our lives fulfilled and, in a way, over. We had arrived at who we were, emerald, lapis lazuli, and the rest would be simply acting out the roles of ourselves, creating scenes in which our natures and talents could unfurl, the way a playwright writes a part for a specific actress. There would be no more great changes, I thought. I saw myself continuing to play, with new groups forming and dissolving, and perhaps in a few years going on tour. I saw myself continuing to love Victor and to raise our four children, subject to their delights as well as their selfishness. It was a vision pleasantly boring. Perhaps my greatest problem would be boredom. Not surface boredom or dullness—not with four children—but the kind of profound and temperate boredom you can feel in the midst of activity, a placidity that comes with the relief of growing up and believing that nothing wonderful or terrible will ever happen to you again. Or rather, that things will happen, but you will be so ripe with experience as to be unable to feel wonder or terror, knowing that anything is possible and everything finally subsides.
That was what I thought, high and ignorant, in Nina’s purple apartment.
“I’d better go,” I said, “before I start staggering.”
“Yes, go.” There was a touch of approaching middle age in the slow way she stood up: she used to spring from the floor like a beanstalk. She rested her hand on my shoulder. “Who knows what exotic adventures might befall you, Lydia.”
“Thanks for everything.”
“Shall we go to the races soon? About two weeks? I’m hot, I can feel it.”
“Two weeks is fine.”
We kissed, hugged, and parted. She felt light and soft, for an instant sinking in my embrace. That must be the feeling men loved. I must ask, some night in bed.
PART II — THE END
Snow, 1981
“SOME SAY THE WORLD will end in fire, some say in ice.” For us it was both.
Cremation is in. It shows ecological awareness. A sophisticated approach to the nature of flesh and spirit. All values Victor and I subscribe to, in the abstract. But when it came right down to it, we couldn’t.
“Oh God, no,” I said, I forget to whom. Maybe Victor’s sister Lily. Our living room was so crowded with sagging bodies, and all of them, even Nina, seemed to be wearing bleak and ugly clothes. From the kitchen there came a minor racket—Gabrielle being useful but dropping things in her confusion.
“Burn me! Let them burn me!” Victor roared. He charged through space waving his arms, jostling people, knocking down a lamp and one of his own paintings, a small still life with seashells. The men had to quiet him. Don gave him a pill. He put it in his mouth obediently, but then he pursed his lips and spit it halfway across the room. Finally I took him out to the
park. I told him to run to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument and back a few times—I would wait on a bench. He ran like the wind. He is not particularly athletic—I hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack.
When we returned the scene was unchanged. Nina was still sitting on the couch with her arm around Althea, stiff and chalk-faced, and Phil was huddled alone on the floor against the wall, crying sullenly, with horrid wet croupy noises. I went to sit alone in the kitchen for a few minutes. George arrived, for once not the customary portrait of savoirfaire: beard unkempt, fly half-open, eyes filmed with terror. He was carrying three bottles of seltzer, those beautiful blue bottles with the chrome squirt tops that he had described so many times, and as he put them in the refrigerator he glanced at me sheepishly. “They’re not for you. I know you don’t like it. I thought maybe you could use it for the others.”
“Mm-hm.” I nodded.
He pulled a chair opposite mine so we were knee to knee like children about to play pat-a-cake; he took my hands as though he were about to say something formally condoling. Then he dropped his head onto my knees and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should be taking care of you.”
“Well, you will, later.” I sat very still, stroking his head on my knees. “It’s all right. I’m sure you will.”
When he stopped we went inside where neighbors, mostly old people, a few young gay couples, walked in and out carrying casseroles, bags of fruit and cookies. Patricia and Sam, the very young pair across the hall, came in one at a time, the other staying home with the new infant—embarrassed to appear with the infant. The old people came over to Victor and me and in Middle European accents said things like, “What can I say to you?” Victor sprawled in a chair, still breathing heavily. And all the while I had the mysterious throbbing in my left ankle—I couldn’t remember from what.
It is not true, of course, that my children are dead. Other people’s children now and then die, and how sorry we feel, we may even shed a tear. Not mine and Victor’s. We are among the fortunate people and we have worked strenuously for our good fortune. We have known hardship and overcome it; have been poor, cold, sick, and frustrated. We have seen our parents sicken and die much too soon. Oh, we have not exhausted the possibilities by far, but have endured our fair share without complaint. Is this the reward? This is America, too, remember. Our grandparents ran from atrocities to these benevolent shores, and fulfilled their part of the bargain. For our sakes, they came, for our safety. (Were we insufficiently grateful? We were born here—it never occurred to us to be grateful.) No, no bus carrying our children home in the dark from a long-awaited school ski trip, in the early stages of a snowstorm, would dare skid off the road to careen into a clump of bushes and fall fifteen feet with a crash of thudding metal and cracking glass, outside a town called Pinecrest where a few years ago we attended an absurd wedding. Even if they died instantly. Even if their bodies were barely licked by the flames of the exploded engine. Even if “they were not the only ones,” as the curly-haired policeman told me, and oh yes, I remember, that’s how I hurt my ankle—I fell when he told me, onto Alan’s skateboard, which fled down the hall away from the news. Even if some of the others were burned past all recognition, with nothing left except maybe a heart like the heart that remained of the steadfast tin soldier, which I had to read to Vivian every night for a month when she was eight, a heart that outlasted flames. Of all the possibilities for their young lives, this one possibility is out of the question. What is unthinkable is untrue. Some philosopher offered that little conundrum and we puzzled in the dorm, uncomprehending. Now I comprehend. This is unthinkable and I will not think it. God moves in mysterious ways—we know he leans toward the theatrical. Remember what he pulled on Abraham? Well, he demands that we stage this melodrama and we obey. But before long a stranger in a dapper pin-striped suit will appear—the angel—and announce that it was only a test. Wake up your kids and take them home. Amen.
Meanwhile we do have to stage it. Victor, with all his taste for ritual, was in no mood for piety, nor was I. Our conventional parents wouldn’t care: three dead, one senile, and for the first time I was glad—they could miss this. And envious. We confessed to each other, though, that we wanted to hear something reverberant, something with pretensions to cosmic meaning, intoned over the bodies of our children. We wanted to hear a voice ordained for the purpose say in ripe, firm cadences, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. … He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul … I will fear no evil … Well, of course fear no evil. What nonsense! What have they to fear now? Skidding buses? The dead can be fearless, and with good reason. Still, we wanted it.
“That would be good, if they said that.”
“Yes. Yes,” Victor answers. “That would be good.” This is hours later, two in the morning: we sit at the kitchen table drinking tepid water out of coffee mugs Gabrielle left out to drain. We can’t put anything else in our mouths. We told Althea and Phil they must try to sleep, and finally they went. But they never turned off their lights. In the dark hall, light slid from the cracks below their doors, and soon we heard Phil come out to knock on Althea’s door, and enter, and stay. I hope she let her younger brother curl up on her bed and held him in her arms while he cried. She always tells us she is a woman and we smile indulgently. I hope she is woman enough to do that. Victor, at the kitchen table, is still wearing his painting clothes—dabs of rich color on denim—but above the neck he is gray. His features look diminished and sunk in an expanse of skin with the sickly hue of dusty pewter. His hair, the sand color edging towards gray, is matted as though he has just risen from sleep. He looks defeated and homeless, a bum needing a shave. No beard any more—it was a passing thing. His voice is different, thick and hoarse, like an old man with phlegm. He wore it out shouting, the first twenty minutes. But when we find we are still so well suited, that we both harbor a desire so specific and so irrational, so futile—that is a slightly better moment. He closes his hand over mine on the kitchen table.
Don’t take on so, love. We’re only pretending. They’ll be back. That view—a thousand hours ago?—was not our last. Not possible. I cry only because I am supposed to, as the mother, and because even the pretense is enough to bring tears. Those bodies we saw and identified (three of us—Phil insisted on coming, there was no restraining him; Althea did as she was told, spared herself), those soft unmangled bodies (and who dared to touch my babies, take off their clothes, pull those coarse white sheets to their necks! They don’t even sleep that way! They like to sleep on their stomachs), bodies not too badly burned, only a little bit smudged (in a Heraclitan, generative fire, sowing a new world for fifty-seven parents), were not them at all. Pure artifice. Oh, they do these things so cleverly nowadays, but I was not fooled. Years of school mornings, all I had to do was stand over their still bodies and they woke. “If you just stare at a person who’s sleeping for long enough, they’ll wake up,” Vivie noticed.
We must go to bed now too. But as soon as we turn out the light I get waves of nausea and panic; the ceiling lowers, the walls approach, my throat closes, and so we lie for the few hours with a bedside light on. Eventually Victor falls asleep and I watch, as if by watching I might partake of his forgetfulness. His head is far back like someone proffering a throat to be slit. His mouth is open, the breath stale. The hairs on his chest are turning gray. His fine hands are dirty. His eyeballs are still, no dreams, and his brow is furrowed in pain; no, even asleep, he has not forgotten. Was it for this that he fell in love? My own body, which drew him and bore them, has been an instrument of ruin. I light a match and hold it close to my wrist, very close, just to know how it feels, but at the first real twinge of pain I shake it out. Coward. Children have known it. I wish this night would last forever. Bad as it is, it is better than what will come.
In the morning Nina calls—her tone soothing and low, perfect, only it does not soothe—to say she has spoken to a Reform rabbi who will conduct a brief and not very religious se
rvice including the Twenty-third Psalm. Nina has a wide acquaintance. How she persuaded him to alter the routine I will never find out. “Fine and dandy, just like sugar candy,” Nina’s parents made her say, with a curtsy, when grownups asked how she was. A woman who could survive that upbringing with her lifeblood still thickly warm can accomplish a great deal, even with a rabbi. Did she approach him in the harem outfits, the bangles? Surely not. Perish the thought. She approached him as a college professor and woman of impeccable and adaptable manners. She will take care of everything.
We considered having a few poems read. I remembered one I had liked in school: Ben Jonson on the death of a small child. The required survey of English literature, first half—I sat next to Steffie Baum, bright-eyed and bathed in a sexual afterglow. And so later in the morning, Phil saw me climbing on a chair to reach the top bookshelf where I kept old college books.
“What are you doing up there?” he asked, but without any surprise. Nothing would surprise him for some time. He was sitting on the floor against the wall, drinking a can of Schlitz, exactly his pose of yesterday, as if there had been no intervening night. Except his crying was silent. Crying into his beer.
“I’m getting down a book.”
He took another swig. Since when does he drink beer? Should a boy of fifteen drink beer at all? Maybe he will develop a drinking problem. Teenaged alcoholic: drowns his sorrows in beer first, then on to stronger stuff. Well at least he is not sneaky about it. At least he does it in his own home, in full view of his mother. Alan used to do a wicked imitation of a drunk flopping and flailing, not that he had ever seen one. He got it from movies and TV.
I climbed down with the book, careful not to rest any weight on the left ankle, and went over and knelt beside Phil. I smoothed his hair, wiped his cheeks with a crumpled tissue—liberties I would not usually take. “Let me make you something to eat. If you drink without eating you’ll get sick. How about a grilled cheese sandwich?”
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