I shrugged, walked down the stairs, knowing it was ridiculous to think of farewell letters and revealing diaries. To think that when the two of us walked down the drive, through the chilled odor of daffodils and ocean salt, my mother would appear, the screen door slamming behind her.
The cottage seemed ready for new tenants, as if this month’s occupant had only to make one more trip from house to packed car before the Labor Day group could move in. There were two brown cartons on the sofa bed, a gift box in a plastic bag from Barnes and Noble on the table by the window. The bed, except for a faded blue comforter, was stripped; the armoire, except for a few hangers, was empty. The kitchen was spotlessly clean.
“Your mother took care of everything before she went to the hospital the last time,” Ward said, almost apologetically, as I searched the place. “She said everything you’d want, her good tea set, some photos, I don’t know what else, would be right here. Her silver set is in my safe-deposit box in town, but of course that’s yours too. And the rest of her savings.”
I looked at the cartons. She had used them to move here from Long Island. Our old address and this one were written on them. The masking tape that had sealed them then had been sliced open but not removed. The tops were now neatly folded over.
I turned to Ward. I remembered from my last trip here that he’d had to stoop a little in this room to keep his hair from brushing the ceiling. He was stooping now, but seemed, still in his dark-gray suit, much smaller.
“How long had she been sick?” I might have asked the same question the night he called, but I couldn’t remember the answer.
“I’m not sure,” he said hoarsely. “She barely talked about it until the very end. She went off for her treatments by herself, at first.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I looked at the room, the floor swept, the corduroy cushions smoothed and tucked, a neat pile of magazines on top of the TV. My mother had straightened the room, set out the cartons and the bag and gone to the hospital. It occurred to me that she’d been there when we last spoke, two weeks ago now, although I’d presumed she was here, or at Ward’s. It was Sunday, her usual day to call, and when I said she sounded tired, she told me she’d been sitting in front of the television all night, nodding off. We talked mostly about Joanne’s upcoming wedding and what I should serve at the shower.
“I can’t take this stuff back with me,” I said suddenly. “I have my suitcase. I won’t be able to manage everything by myself.”
Ward rushed forward and pushed the cartons back on the couch, as if they’d been leaning on me. “Don’t worry,” he said calmly. “You can leave them here as long as you like. It’s all right. I’ll hold them for you.”
I nodded like spoiled child.
“I won’t be renting this place again,” he said. “Come up in the summer. Bring your friends. You’re welcome to it. You can have it.”
His eyes grew red, and I knew this was the moment I should ask him. I heard myself urging me to ask him: Why didn’t she call me? Why didn’t she want me?
“The beach is right down the path,” he said, going to the window to point it out: an anxious realtor. “It’s lovely here in the summer. Bring your friends.”
I smiled. “Thank you. Maybe I’ll do that.”
We carried the cartons and the bag back to his house, and lined them up against the wall in his dining room. As he put on the casserole and made the salad, he told me what he knew about my mother’s illness, explaining the difference between chronic and acute, lymphocytic and granulocytic, describing what she wore to the hospital, what she ate there, what her doctor looked like, as if detail alone were sufficient, all I needed to know.
“Everyone said she was fortunate. She didn’t linger. But she always had her own way of doing things.” He was setting the table. He had not changed his suit, but had taken off the jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves. The hair on his arms was still thick and yellow, and I could tell by the way he moved around the kitchen, set out the place mats, folded the napkins, checked the oven and mixed the salad dressing, that he was used to doing those things, used to doing them for another, a woman.
Although I’d asked him twice if I could help, I was sure that I couldn’t.
“When things got bad, she simply said, ‘That’s enough.’ I stayed with her then because I knew she’d made up her mind.”
He put the salad on the table, slowly dished out the casserole.
As he sat down, I said, “I’m glad you were with her,” not sure I meant it, but wanting him to believe I did.
He shook his head. “I didn’t do any good.” He looked at me and I felt again what we shared: not a knowledge but an omission. “I wanted to call you,” he said. “She wouldn’t hear of it. It was as if she wanted to keep the whole thing to herself.”
And then he told me, not as if he were recalling it but cautiously inventing as he went along, that, at the end, she had called my father’s name. She had struggled up out of the illness and the drugs and all the years she’d been without him and said his name—clearly, stubbornly—said it and then pulled it back into herself with a breath so sharp and so deep that he had leaned closer, believing she would say more, but receiving only the shallow death rattle, a sound like an echo, a sound receding, its source already far away.
He looked at me, pursed his lips. “It surprised me,” he said. “I must say it surprised me. After everything. I mean, the way your father was.”
I could have asked him then, How was he, what stories had my mother told him? but I didn’t think of it. I thought only of how she had called his name. Of how, after everything, he alone had figured in the drama of her death.
Melodrama, I decided on the plane the next morning, calling his name on her deathbed when, after he died, she’d barely mentioned him, had kept no picture of him around the house. When it hadn’t even occurred to her to be buried at his side. When it wasn’t until she moved to Maine and met Ward that the pictures reappeared, and the old bedspread and the sweet stories of their first meeting.
Stories whose meanings, if they had meanings, were recited like prayer, silently, to herself.
Joanne and her parents met me at La Guardia. Her mother gathered me in her fleshy arms as soon as I stepped through the gate. She cried openly. Joanne patted my hair. On the way to the city, she and her father argued loudly about whether to take the Triboro or the Queensborough and when we got to my apartment, they bustled me inside with a plate of lasagne and a bucket of meatball soup. They left a mass card on my table and pleaded that I call them for anything, anytime, even just to talk. Mrs. Paletti sobbed again as they left and although Joanne rolled her eyes and said, “Ma!,” she too cried when she hugged me. Mr. Paletti rocked me like a tall baby.
At six, the phone began ringing, cautious voices asking how I was. I let them convince me I was fine and I returned to work early Monday morning. It proved to be an ordinary day.
Chapter 10
Kevin sends word through Bonnie that Elizabeth should come to his office. That a matter of utmost seriousness has to be discussed. Bonnie cracks her gum. “He wouldn’t even tell me what it was,” she says. “He is so weird sometimes.” She shakes her head. She has braided her hair, small, wiry braids secured with thick rubber bands, and each time she moves, they fall across her cheeks and spotted forehead like strangled worms. “He wouldn’t even talk to me. He just wrote down, ‘Go tell Elizabeth I must see her. A matter of utmost seriousness.’ He wouldn’t even talk to me.”
Elizabeth laughs. “That’s Kevin,” she says, but Bonnie continues to shake her head, disgusted. “Fucking weird,” she mutters, with a bitterness that Elizabeth thinks must be either typical or very rare in a twenty-year-old.
Kevin is bent over his drawing board, his thin legs wrapped around the base of the tall stool, his bowling shirt (Oddballs written in white thread across his back) taut between the two sharp lumps of his shoulder blades. She knows if she could see his face he’d be biting his lower lip, like a child with
a dull, unwieldly crayon.
“Give me a minute,” he mumbles without looking up. She stands behind him, studying the prints and color charts and elaborate pencil sketches he has hung on his wall. His cubicle is damper than her own office, infected by the draughts and cold concrete of the stockroom, and only about twice the size of his drawing board, but still she always likes it. No authors are allowed in here—the only outside visitors are the half-dozen freelance artists (interesting-looking women in long skirts and paint-spattered young men with lovely hands) who stop by every few weeks to drop off and pick up their assignments—and, by Kevin’s decree, nothing that happens in this room is allowed to be taken seriously. Kevin’s real life, he insists, is his own work, and Vista is only a place he comes to for comic relief.
Elizabeth admires him for this, for having such a well-defined “real life,” the life of an artist, although she often wonders why the admiration is mutual. They are known as particular allies around the office.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” he whispers, head still down. She looks over his shoulder and sees that he is perfecting a pen-and-ink sketch of a pretty woman looking into a series of progressively smaller mirrors, smiling. The title of the book, in fancy script just above the woman’s head is, Reflections of My Mind.
“I remember that one,” she says. “It’s pretty incoherent, isn’t it?”
Kevin blows on the drawing and then sits back, rubbing his thighs, grinning. “It’s not only incoherent,” he says. His pale skin glows beneath the web of freckles. His short, greased hair, meant to be stylish, is more butch than punk, more Dennis the Menace than David Bowie.
“It’s another secret masterpiece.” His eyebrows dance. “Can you see it?”
She laughs and bends down to look carefully at the sketch. Whenever Kevin gets fed up with an author or a book or Vista itself, he draws a jacket illustration that subtly reflects his disapproval. For a book called Lots of Laughs, he drew a jacket full of small, laughing clown faces, three of which, when the cover was viewed upside down, became screaming women with red tears running down their faces. (The book, called an exposé, was a series of cruel, intimate jokes about the author’s three former wives.) For another, a children’s book, he had drawn a long curving line of elephants joined trunk to tail, growing smaller and smaller and finally fading off into the distance, but not until one of the smallest, most distant elephants had shoved his trunk up the ass of the even smaller one in front of him. He’d had to use a magnifying glass to point this out to her and he said he’d done it because the book was heavily phallic (the elephants were always poking their trunks into tight places) and he thought the author looked like Anita Bryant. The title of the book was The Elephants Are Coming.
Elizabeth steps back from the illustration, pointing to the smaller mirror images of the smiling woman. “I bet you did something to those,” she says. “They look a little strange.”
Kevin laughs. “Ah, you know my style.” He reaches for the set of galleys beside him. “But let me show you why I did it. This woman is too much. Look what she wrote here.”
On the first page of the galleys, an ambitious copy editor had underlined three long sentences and written in the margin, “Au.: sense?” Under the question, the author had neatly printed, “Thank you. It’s a theory I’ve long held, and my mother lived her life according to it. It does make good sense.”
Elizabeth laughs. “That’s great.”
“But there’s more,” Kevin says, flipping through the galleys, reading: “ ‘Author: facts correct?’ And the woman writes, ‘That’s true, but facts alone aren’t enough. As I always tell my children, we need faith in God and all his wonders.’ ” He opens his mouth and lets out a single laugh, like a bubble bursting. “Is she too much?”
Elizabeth admits that she is and looks at the drawing again. “So what did you do?”
He glances over his shoulder and then turns back to her, whispering. “You know this is just between us. If Ned finds out he’ll have my nuts.”
She nods and Kevin reaches for the magnifying glass. “It’s another miniature,” he whispers, his breath smelling slightly of licorice. “See these smaller reflections?”
She looks carefully and gradually notices how the reflections of the pretty women slowly become more and more deranged-looking. It’s very subtle. The eyes become only slightly crossed, just a tip of the tongue shows through the teeth, the smile becomes a grimace, the hair a bit disheveled, the neck longer, thinner, as if it contained a scream.
She steps away. “Kevin, you’re out of your mind. She’ll see that.”
He frowns, looks at the drawing. “No she won’t,” he says slowly. “Look how pretty the first few reflections are. That’s all she’ll see. She’ll show the book to all her friends and say”—he bounces from side to side, makes his voice high—“ ‘There I am, aren’t I pretty?’ ” He smiles.
She leans to look at the drawing again, imagining the woman showing off her book, pointing to the pretty pictures and saying proudly, “There I am,” the terrible faces staring back.
“Look,” he says, touching her arm. “You’re too close to it. Move away.” She does and looks again. The faces seem fine.
“You’ve got to have a certain distance in these matters,” he says, raising his eyebrows. His smile breaks on the word, “Distance is very important in this place.”
She looks at him and he winks. “I get your meaning,” she says, smiling, although some part of her has just touched down at Heathrow and remembered the water is still running in the bathtub in New York. Some part of her is slapping a forehead and sinking into a seat. She wonders if her face (eyes crossed?) will appear in miniature somewhere on Tupper Daniels’ book jacket.
Kevin is smiling at his drawing. He blows on the sketch, gently flicks something from the far corner.
“Did Ann tell you about him?” she asks, feeling herself blushing. “About Tupper Daniels?” She thinks of adding, the one I’m having an affair with, but the word always makes her feel like a Connecticut housewife screwing her dentist.
Kevin looks up, squinting. “An author?”
Ann has told him nothing.
She laughs. “Never mind.” Looks at the sketch again. “Distance,” she says, with a determination that makes it sound like Onward!
He closes his eyes and nods. “Exactly. And mum’s the word.” She smiles. “As always.”
But distance, she thinks much later that day, must have been easier when she was on the Pill, when there wasn’t any touring of the scene the morning after. In college, when the Health Center was handing out the Pill more readily than aspirin, she could sleep with someone she didn’t particularly care for, and then, as soon as he was gone, never think about him again. She could treat her vagina like a hungover roommate: I don’t care what you did last night, I’m going to the library.
At least, that’s how she remembers it.
But these days, she must reach into herself the morning after, slide out the warm diaphragm, rinse off the white cream, the bit of mucus, hers or his. These days, she can’t help but think it’s appropriate to feel something, if only that vague Catholic guilt of temples violated, treasures dissipated, gifts lost.
A guilt she tries to assuage, no doubt, by promising herself love, next time it will be for love. The thud of love, love, love not unlike that of a fist against a breast, her own silent mea culpa.
Not unlike Bill’s name, invoked each time, as if he were a grace once earned. A plenary indulgence.
Tupper Daniels walks naked from her bathroom to her kitchen, his shoulders slightly slouched, his face a little dumb, like a man alone. He comes out of the kitchen with two bottles of beer.
She wonders if she even remembers what a plenary indulgence is.
“Think about bigamy,” Tupper says, handing her a cold green bottle and climbing back into the bed. “Polygamy. The concept.”
“All right.” She wonders if she hadn’t, in a way, been thinking about
it already.
“Think about what it implies: not a man who has affairs, who sleeps with his secretary or a mistress or some woman he met on the street or in a bar, but a man who loves and marries, loves and marries. A man who is, ironically, incapable of having an affair. A man who must always, always sanctify his love with marriage, who must establish a home for himself and any woman he loves and then must return to that home whenever he can. A man of great nobility, I think. A truly romantic, heroic character.”
He turns to adjust the pillows behind him, and then crosses his legs again, cupping his hand over his penis and moving it gently, the way an adolescent girl might absent-mindedly arrange her hair on her shoulders, nearly draping it. He rests the bottle on his thigh.
“Compared to him,” he goes on, “the monogamist is a bore. Without imagination or energy or passion. A coward whose loyalty is merely an excuse. He’s one of those men who considers sex a function and marriage a duty. Who wears a ball and chain or a noose around his neck to his own bachelor party, and believes in everything it symbolizes.”
He raises the bottle, drinks slowly. She wonders if he is speaking extemporaneously or again reciting from his book; if she should reply or merely cite the page number. She wonders if he’s testing her.
She lowers her eyes, as she might have to avoid being called on in school, and drinks too.
On her stereo, a woman is singing, “I-Want-Your-Love,” over and over, letting the emphasis fall on a different word each time, as if she can’t get it right. Her voice is whiny and passionless, full of a dull kind of longing.
“Did it surprise you?” he asks, “When you read the book and discovered that Beale, the bigamist, was actually portrayed as a good man, a hero? Did you feel some of your own values were being turned upside down?”
She pulls the bottle from her lips, swallows. “A little,” she says.
He nods, pleased. “Most people do. Bigamy equals villainy for most people, like the townspeople in the book. But you have to know how to look at it.” He presses his lips together. “When Bailey was found to be a bigamist, in Gallatin, everyone acted like he was the devil himself. But I said, ‘Hold on, he’s no villain, think about it.’ ” He pauses, thinking. “Of course, no one did. But I did.” He drops his voice and raises his colorless eyebrows. “I discovered,” he says, “that Bailey was the stuff of great literature.”
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