Mother Daughter Widow Wife

by Robin Wasserman

  I waited for Sam outside the restaurant, a small Italian place on the edge of the city, where he could still feel reputably urban but I could find parking. It was too cold for November. It felt like I was cheating on my husband. Sam kissed me on the cheek, his lips chapped and cold. I let him lead me inside, pull out my chair, hand me a menu, order us a bottle of wine.

  Your husband is dead, I reminded myself. Your husband thought you were his trial to endure, and he likely thought it while inside another woman.

  When this proved insufficient, I reminded myself of the hair on his back and that year with the Viagra; the sound he made when he ate soup; the weird divot in his left thigh and the splotch of mole on his ass; his insistence on mixing raw onion into the burger patties, forgetting every time for eighteen fucking years that I hated the taste; his annual Father’s Day sulk and the obligation to assure him he was a good father, no space left in that day of fathers for the fact that I was, every year, one year longer without one; the lunch dates and doctors’ appointments and anniversaries and birthdays he left for me to remember, his brain too clogged with more important matters; the pee on the toilet seat; the lint in the dryer; the gall and shame of it, to find myself a sitcom wife, nagging sitcom husband about the pantry he’d failed to stock and the dishes he’d failed to wash, the fucking when I wasn’t in the mood; the hair in the drain and the spotty scalp from which it fled. I thought: remember that.

  We dipped breadsticks in olive oil. We sipped chardonnay, joked about the imminence of nuclear war. I tried to remember how dinner became date, who was meant to brush whose hand reaching for the bottle of wine. The candlelight made my ring sparkle. Its tiny diamond flared every time I reached for my glass—a little lighthouse, warning of what waited in the dark.

  We talked about entropy. Sam was studying what he called the discovery of time. Through the eighteenth century, he said, nature was assumed constant. Nature was defined by its constancy, and constancy by nature—the eternal heavens, the steady state equilibriums of physics and capitalism, the conservation of energy. Then the nineteenth century discovered progress and decay. They discovered the universe is a paradox, he said, held in place by two opposing forces: the tendency for things to stay as they are and the tendency for things to fall apart. It was the inevitability of decay that unsettled them—so profoundly, Sam argued, you could blame it for the end of the age of empire. The laws of physics were atemporal. It was unacceptable that life should be an arrow aimed forward in time.

  “ ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,’ ” I said, one of Benjamin’s favorite lines.

  “Lewis Carroll. Exactly.” Sam explained Carroll’s immersion in nineteenth-century science, his membership in the Society for Psychical Research, his engagement with the limits of enlightenment rationalism as the ground beneath it gave way.

  Shameful truth: I liked him best when he was explaining things to me. I always liked them best when they were explaining things to me.

  I told him about Alice.

  “You really don’t mind having her there?”

  “You mean, is it cutting into my busy daily schedule of sloth and nudism?”

  He blushed.

  I waved a breadstick in warning. “Stop imagining whatever it is you’re imagining.”

  He covered his red face with his hands, laughing. I tried to remember if this was how it worked. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t let anything touch you. You just keep going, you joke. Like some kind of mythological warrior.”

  You mean like the Tin Man, I thought. All shine, no heart. I smiled, tightly. “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

  I beamed mythological will at him: Ask a follow-up. Imagine for one second that not everything that looks easy actually is. Say, Elizabeth, I don’t ask you personal questions because it seems like you’re afraid to hear them, but how about just this once, you tell me if it hurts, and how much.

  See me, I thought, and it was dare and plea together.

  “I like your hair down,” he said. “You should wear it like that more often.”

  “I’ll take it under consideration.”

  “It makes you look younger.”

  “You say that like it’s a compliment.”

  He blushed again. When the bill came, he insisted on paying. He helped me with my coat, put his hand on the small of my back as we threaded through the crowd.

  Sam, I knew, went to the gym regularly. He willed his feet up the StairMaster by imagining his mind a nineteenth-century factory owner, his body its steam-driven pistons and pumps, the worker and also the work. I knew he’d had two serious girlfriends since we met, one who’d wanted to get married right up until the day Sam proposed, the other who had tenure in Chicago and was disinclined to give it up. I knew he mildly wanted to have children, and felt, at age forty-three, mildly haunted not by his own biological clock, but by the steady ticking that surrounded him. As if he were Captain Hook, every date’s womb a crocodile. There’s going to come a point, he’d once said, when even the younger women aren’t young enough. Then he’d apologized.

  I did not assume he’d been pining for me all these years; I simply thought he might want me if he could have me. I thought I wanted someone to want me, right up until we reached the parking lot and he took my hand.

  “Is this okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t know whether this was supposed to be… I mean. This was nice.”

  We’d reached my car. The widow books all said your life did not end with your marriage. His hand tightened on mine. Want him, I told my body, urged steam against pistons, pumps.

  I said, “I feel like I’m in high school.”

  “You look like someone waiting to be kissed.”

  I forced a laugh. “I wasn’t aware that was a facial expression.”

  “May I?”

  “What?”

  “Kiss you.”

  “Okay.”

  The strange pointlessness of a kiss. The slurp and smack of wet on wet. The passivity of parted lips, mashed tongue. Hands threaded through hair, knob of groin against thigh. Absurd pantomime of need. I staggered on jellied legs, let myself be supported by the car behind me, his arms around me. It could not be real, his enactment of felt, when I felt so much nothing.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” he whispered, and there, finally, a feeling, the requisite Joycean depth of desire, yes I said yes I will yes. I want to get out of here very much.

  * * *

  The human nose has 350 olfactory receptors, made up of ten million olfactory neurons—together composing 3 percent of the human genome. This endows us with the capability to detect one trillion smells. Unlike the mechanisms for sight, touch, and hearing, the olfactory bulb is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus: emotion and memory. There’s a theory that smell triggers emotions more powerful than any other sense. This is known as the Proust phenomenon, and remains unproven.

  Still, though, there was a brand of laundry detergent I found intolerable, because it smelled like his sheets had smelled the first night I spent at his house, a night I spent lying awake, unable to think about anything but the wife who had washed them. A whiff of pot behind the Wawa and I was back at the Pixies concert, Benjamin absurd in his souvenir T-shirt, absurdly old but making me feel so mercifully young, pretending, because it was my birthday and because he loved me, that he wasn’t in hell. A nameless perfume, floral and expensive—my face buried in a stranger’s mink coat, my ball gown shoved up to my waist, Benjamin’s tuxedo pants at his ankles, safely swaddled in the wool and fur of the coat check room, furtive groping and thrusting, Benjamin behind and then Benjamin on his knees, Benjamin trying to make it up to me because he’d introduced me as his dilettante wife, because he’d said I was a scientist first and then a writer and then who knows, fireman, tightrope artist, you know what Berlin says about the fox and the hedgehog, as if I was not standing there beside him
, smart enough to, yes, know what Berlin says about the fox and the hedgehog. Even coffee sometimes, brewed just strong enough to be the coffee he’d brew for me in the middle of the night, all those adrenaline-fueled nights toward the end of Augustine, writing till 3 a.m., till dawn, awake because my brain wouldn’t slow enough for sleep, not when she was so close, when I had almost pinned her to the page, and he would pout and sulk and it was the first time I’d ever seen him jealous, and I liked it. He begged: come to bed. I said it would be a shame to sleep now, after you’ve gone to all the trouble with the coffee. Benjamin longing, needy: I’m not saying we have to sleep.

  * * *

  The problem was my car. Sam shifted the passenger seat back an inch; long legs, longer than Benjamin’s. I wrapped my fingers around the gearshift, squeezed, Sam wrapped his around mine, did the same.

  Benjamin and I had not, of course, fucked in a car for a very long time. We were too old, or he was, and then I was, and we were married—and cars are not, we’d agreed even when it was necessity, conducive to anything but fetishized fucking.

  Sam’s fingers crawled up my forearm, shoulder, found neck, tender ticklish spot where hair met flesh and brain stem cerebellum, caressed.

  Benjamin, I found out, only after we were married, did not allow people to eat in his car. It was a compliment to me, he once said, that he’d been so open to the dripping and smearing of fluids.

  Sam said, I can’t believe this is actually happening. He raised my hand to his lips, said, you smell amazing.

  In a different parking lot once, I knelt in the back seat well and Benjamin phrenology’d my head, delicate hands feeling for imagined swells and contours as he hmm’d and ahh’d and noted that here was my propensity for criminal behavior, over here was a grand and rapacious wit, and here, he said, a knobby protrusion, indication of sexual deviance. Knobby protrusion, I said, alarmed, and he squeezed himself into the back seat, pants down, knobby protrusion arrowing toward its desired deviance.

  Sam turned my face toward his and kissed, said, now I’m the one who feels like we’re in high school. I pointed out that with six years between us we wouldn’t have overlapped in high school, and he laughed, said, unless I was hot for teacher. The car was a year and a half old, which I remembered because we’d bought it six months before Benjamin’s death, driving home all giddy bourgeois until a pothole blew out the left rear tire. We pulled over. We called AAA, because we were, as he called it, helpless intelligentsia. We waited. We listened to classical music. I played Tetris on my phone. He said, as I recall we were once better at making use of spare time in a vehicle. I said, we used to be more flexible. He said, I’m just saying, it’s tradition for a captain to christen his new ship—and which one of us, I said, is the captain here, and before you answer, consider the consequence of mutiny. Sam sucked on my fingers, one by one. My right hand, not the one with the ring. The first time, with Benjamin, at the train station, knowing, both of us, that it was the worst thing we could do. The car smelled faintly of Indian takeout; Sam tasted of garlic. I knew I was going to throw up and pushed him away, fumbled the door open and gasped in a bolt of cold air, and then I did, half-digested lasagna splashing on concrete, the sour pain of it good, real, deserved. Sam rubbed my back. Said, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  * * *

  Tactile memories are controlled by the haptic system, somehow; it’s understudied. Haptic memories decay in seconds, like the mental echo of a loud noise, or an after-image of the sun. The Atkinson-Schiffrin memory model maps the possibility of consolidating sensory register into a long-term store, but most of what we touch, we lose. I touched myself sometimes and tried to imagine the hands were his. Sometimes I stood beneath the skylight on the third-floor landing, waiting for the sun to pass overhead, because the touch of sun on skin was the same as it had been the first day I moved in. The surprise of it, a hole cut straight through the gloom, material evidence that he was willing to remake his life for me—his promise, in glass-framed sky, that if I hated living in the house, dark and old and someone else’s, we would leave. Kissing me in the sunbeam, a blizzard of dancing dust. It was all lost, the body’s memory of his lips, his fingers, his hair, his tongue, but the sun was constant, and warm.

  * * *

  I got home to find Alice waiting up for me, like a nervous mother. “So?”

  It was ridiculous, rehashing a date with a teenager. But I sat down. “Awful.”

  She made a cringing face.

  “Not awful, I mean.” Poor Sam, I thought, and wondered if he was still thinking of me, and how. “Perfectly fine. But…”

  “This is the first date you’ve gone on in, like, twenty years, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Not to mention the first date since…?”

  I nodded again, and swallowed down whatever was swelling in my throat. I refused to let her, of all people, comfort me.

  “Maybe you should give yourself a break? It’s kind of a big deal you even tried. It’s not like you can just switch it off, right? Missing him?”

  It was only hearing it from a teenager, framed as a stupidly naive impossibility, that I understood why the night felt like such a failure. I should have been able to switch it off. I’d stayed up two nights in a row, reading his emails, scouring them for details I didn’t want to know, trying to piece together what had happened in the lacunae between messages, what had passed between him and these girls in the flesh. It seemed only fair that rage supplant pain, and maybe what I had felt most as I read, beyond surprise and disappointment, was relief. Here was an excuse not to love him, or at least a reason to love him less. Here, finally, was a cure. It was plainly unacceptable, wanting him. Except I still wanted him.

  * * *

  I couldn’t remember the sound of his voice. There was video, of course—speeches, awards ceremonies, mostly, a handful of vacation clips. There were voice mails on my cell phone I couldn’t delete. But the way he sounded when it was just us, when we were alone together? That was gone.

  * * *

  I thanked Alice for waiting up. I excused myself, turned down the thermostat to the semifrigid level Benjamin had preferred, and went upstairs. It was easier to sleep beneath the weight of blankets, shivering against the cold. It was good to have concrete reason to shiver. Cold, Sam had explained once, during the dregs of some endless winter, is not a thing. It’s an absence, the emptiness left behind when heat leaves. Cold is a nothing we imagine into a something, simply by giving it a name.

  ALICE

  She was still herself enough to feel guilty for what she’d done. She’d cheated on Daniel, whom she supposedly loved. Cheated felt like too trivial a verb, the kind of trespass you’d make in a game of checkers or, worst-case scenario, a calculus class. It wasn’t the right word for what she’d done, which was allow someone to love her, then transform herself into someone who couldn’t love him back.

  After their first kiss, Daniel had pulled away for a moment, whispered, I can’t believe this is actually happening, and she had thought maybe now everything would be easy.

  She avoided him for several days, until she missed him too much not to call. She waited until it was dark, and very late. Alice dialed the number, tucked her blanket over her head. Eighteen hundred miles away, Daniel did the same. He told her about midterms, about missing his little brother’s first home run, about the boy in his hall who’d drunkenly mistaken his laundry hamper for a toilet, and she let the words blur into pure sound, the song of Daniel.

  She felt so alone.

  “Daniel.” She missed saying his name.

  “What is it?”

  She knew he could hear it in her voice, because he knew her, and it had been so long since anyone did. But she couldn’t tell him what it was, couldn’t tell him about Z and the things A had let him do to her. She couldn’t tell him that she couldn’t remember why it had seemed like such a good idea to come here, that she’d been so certain she wasn’t running away but now she felt like she’d run away and
couldn’t go home. She couldn’t tell him that she hated her mother for leaving and her father for being left. That she wanted her mother.

  She couldn’t tell him she didn’t love him anymore, because she wasn’t sure it was true, and she couldn’t tell him she’d done something she should never have done if she’d loved him, because then he would leave her, and she wasn’t ready to lose him.

  They said good night at 1 a.m. At two, still wide awake, she summoned an Uber.

  She was already crying by the time she reached Zach’s door. He opened it, bleary and boxered and not visibly displeased to see her. He gathered her into his arms, stroked her hair, rubbed her back, let her lie in his lap, wipe her nose on his boxers, performed reassurance and she tried to perform reassured.

  “You cry a lot. I may need to become the kind of guy who has tissues.”

  He thought she was the kind of girl who cried. He guided her to the bed and lay beside her, then adjusted his laptop so they could both see the screen.

  “Trust me, this will work.” He played them a YouTube video of a baby orangutan watching a man do a magic trick, then played it again. Alice watched it loop, mesmerized, soothed, until eventually she could breathe again. The pillows smelled mildewed. Zach smelled like burgers. The man put an apple into a bucket, made the apple disappear. The orangutan’s jaw dropped, the orangutan laughed so hard it toppled over. The man put the apple in the bucket. It disappeared. And again, and again. Somehow, she laughed.