Henry was quiet a moment, and then said, “You’re right. My legs feel fine.”
The truth was that Henry and I had grown so close that sometimes it was hard to know where one of us began and the other ended. We’d been together for so long that most of our memories were the same film, just different camera angles, and from years of playing the memories, even the camera angles were mostly blurred to one by this point.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” A woman beside me nodded toward the cake. She was older and smelled of gardenia perfume.
I nodded and, before I could utter a single critique, I slipped away. I’d missed my chance to design a cake that truly reflected Elysius and Daniel. I would have concentrated on the art in the house. The spare furnishings are supposed to allow someone to fix their attention on the art. I would have spent time in Daniel’s studio, taking in his work—the restless birds that seemed to beat just below the surface—and I would have talked to them about why they loved each other. That’s where I would have gone. I was this kind of cake designer—my thoughts always churning to the most ambitious interpretation. A cake to reflect abstract art? A cake with the restlessness of wings? A cake about saying yes to marriage after so many years? How would it be done? I felt the smallest inkling of desire—the step before wanting to create, the want to want to create.
As I drifted through the reception thinking this, I caught myself keeping an eye out for Henry. I did this often. It was one of the theories that I had for why I was always losing things. I was looking for Henry. He was lost and my mind was waiting for him to return; my eyes wanted to find him. I still saw him everywhere—his broad back in line at the movies, his hand reaching out to pay ahead of me in line at a drive-through. I’d see Henry walking along with some other family—holding hands with one of the kids or locking arms with the wife. But he would always turn into some other man—his hair too dark or too light, his nose too fine or too knotted—a stranger, no one I knew. For a while, each time this would happen, I’d feel betrayed, tricked. And, just as I’d learned not to linger in memories, I learned when to look away—just before the man glanced back, just before his face appeared in the window—and I learned how to have a peripheral husband—one still alive, when I could time it right.
At an event like this, my subconscious was even more determined to find him. On some level, I was sure that he wouldn’t miss an event this big, this important to Elysius and Daniel. Finally, I saw him from behind, talking to a bartender, slapping someone on the back … and I looked away.
When I did, I turned abruptly, almost bowling over Jack Nixon—Nix and/or Crook. He’d been poised to say hello, but I’d knocked his bottle of beer up against his chest. It was a full beer and some of it spilled onto his shoes—nice shoes, black leather with some stylish trim, squared off at the toe in a season when squared off at the toe was in.
“I’m Jack,” he said, but somehow I already knew this. He was the right age, alone, a little nervous, and he was handsome, by my mother’s definition, which is to say he was traditionally handsome. He had all the right features—a nice nose, gentle eyes, a tough jawline, closely cut hair. He wasn’t fat or skinny, tall or short.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Heidi.” I stuck out my hand, which seemed to make things worse. He smiled and shook my hand, and, in that moment, it hit me that my sister was right—my flirting skills had atrophied. And, to be honest, they never really were that pumped up to begin with. That’s one of the reasons I’d fallen for Henry so immediately—it hadn’t ever felt like flirting.
“I know that your sister is trying to turn this into a blind date,” he said. “I hate blind dates, and I just want you to know that there’s no pressure on my end.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. Was he trying to get out of it? “No pressure on my end either,” I said quickly, maybe too quickly. “I’m just being myself anyway.”
“Um, okay then,” he said, and he smiled graciously. “We can try to just mingle normally then, telling them that we’ve done our best. We were good sports.”
“I’m a very good sport,” I said. “I won sportsmanship awards in lieu of actual sports awards when I was younger. I lack basic eye–hand coordination.” I looked down at his shoes. “For example,” I said, “sorry about your shoes.”
“No,” he said, “it’s okay. I don’t mind being bumped into by a beautiful woman.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “A hypothetical beautiful woman,” I said, as if correcting him.
“A hypothetical beautiful woman or a real one,” he said.
“Well, then,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We have established that we’re good sports! We’ll just try to mingle normally.”
“Right,” he said.
And I walked away. A beautiful woman? I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I hadn’t felt beautiful in a very long time. In fact, I’d barely felt like a woman. I was a widow, a single mother. I decided to not think about it and to instead locate Abbot. How long had it been since the last time I spotted him? I stood on my tiptoes and looked through the crowd.
Finally I saw him in a pack of other kids his age. They were scurrying around a table in the back of the tent. The band started up just then, and this seemed to send them into a frenzy. Something about the drums, I thought, made them tribal. A few of the other kids had started to crawl around under people’s tables. And so Abbot was standing there, hands in his pockets, bouncing on his toes. He wouldn’t have interacted as intimately with the ground as the other kids did. As much as the kids on the ground seemed like unruly beasts, I wished Abbot would join them, or at least feel like he could if he wanted to.
I walked up to him. “Are you having fun?” I said. “You can let loose, you know.”
“You let loose,” he said.
“I’ll try if you try.”
He asked me to unclip his tie. All the other kids had long since abandoned theirs. I flipped up his collar and unhooked the metal clasp. He shrugged off his jacket and handed it to me. “Okay, I’ll try,” he said, and scuttled off.
Charlotte and I crisscrossed paths, as if on the same migratory loop. “Keep moving,” she said, “and you can avoid the attack of awkward conversation.”
“I don’t know how long I can last in these shoes,” I said.
“If a shark stops swimming, it dies,” she said. “Have you seen the clarinet player?” she asked. “He’s like a hundred and twenty-eight years old. I figure if he can make it through this wedding, then I can.”
I looked over at the wizened, bowed old man playing the clarinet, his cheeks taut with trapped air. “Impressive,” I said, and we glided on.
I looked up and saw Jack Nixon dancing with one of the bridesmaids. He looked over and saw me and gave a small wave. I pretended not to see him. I’m not sure why.
It was at events like this where the married women would eventually clump together. I could see such a group congregating around one of the tables in a far corner next to one of the air-conditioning fans. And as much as Elysius felt like conversations among women turn always to children, I had been aware, throughout my marriage and now, of how conversations among women will, inevitably, turn—as if by a will of their own—to husbands.
Disappointing husbands. Emotionally inarticulate husbands. Weary husbands. Crabby husbands. Demanding husbands. Thoughtless husbands. Late husbands. Unfaithful husbands. Messy husbands. Lazy husbands. Workaholic husbands. Cheap husbands. Bad-father husbands.
Not to mention those men who could never man up and become husbands, and their counterparts, ex-husbands.
The truth was, I’d always tried to avoid these groups, even when Henry was alive. Not even my fights with Henry were worth talking about. We would hurt each other from time to time, but what was hardest was when one of us had to tell the other we’d been hurt—we were so sure that it was unintended, and yet it wasn’t something we risked keeping quiet.
When we were first married, I tried to tell stories abo
ut our fights. My friends’ eyes would glaze over.
“Are you serious?” one of my friends said to me once. “Not to belittle your issues with your husband, but you don’t really have any. I mean, when you guys fight over where the can opener is, the can opener is just a can opener. It’s not some larger issue.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s fine,” my friend said. “Just so you know, it’s a little chafing to others.”
Henry and I agreed that, in general, it was the men’s faults—by and large. They were clumsy with affection, ill-equipped for conflict; they got angry when they needed to be sorry, lied when they should have opted for full disclosure, disclosed opinions they should have kept to themselves … etc., etc., etc.
“Talking sofas,” Henry said.
“And look at my sofa!” I said. “He learned to walk upright and not bifurcate his emotions!”
“I’m a non-bifurcated upright walking talking sofa. What can I say?”
Most of all, however, we knew we were shit-lucky, because in other environments, with other partners, we’d have said all of the wrong things, done all of the wrong things, made all of the same mistakes.
One time Elysius overheard me say at the end of a phone conversation with Henry, “I like you, too.”
And after I hung up, Elysius said, “Don’t do that in front of others.”
“What?”
“It’s one thing that you two love each other. What’s so offensive, though, is how much you like each other. It’s unbearable.”
Was it unbearable? I was aware that Henry and I had created one life together. And sometimes, if Henry was a little late or when we kissed each other goodbye before one of us took a trip, a small flash of fear would run through my body—something almost electric. What if this is the last time I see him? What if he dies? What if I die? We confessed that we’d each imagined wrecks of various sorts, but that we couldn’t see much beyond it. “What would your life be like without me?” I asked him.
And Henry, who usually had an answer for everything, didn’t know. He could only shrug. “What about me?” he asked.
“I don’t know how I’d survive it,” I said.
But then Henry died.
And here I found myself, inexplicably, surviving it.
What was unbearable now? How much I’d taken for granted and the fact that I had only seemed to want more.
I sat far away from the clutch of women, pushed my high heels off, and rubbed my aching feet together under the table. As if sensing that my guard was down, one of my aunties teetered over. Aunt Giselle was my grandmother’s youngest sister, now quite elderly. My own grandparents had died when my mother was young—one from cancer, the other a faulty heart. Aunt Giselle wore her hair in a thick gray bob and wore deep red lipstick. She’d come to visit her sister as a young woman and, once here, married an American botanist, who’d died young.
“How are things going with you?” she asked. She’d never lost her accent. It was still thick, her red lips puckering to speak.
“Oh, I’m doing fine. It was a beautiful ceremony.”
“Yes,” she said, in that bored way the French sometimes have. “Of course.”
“I heard that there was a fire,” I said.
“I heard this, too. The news has deranged your mother.”
“I think it’s the lack of information that’s upset her. No details.”
“Yes, maybe this is true,” she said. “But this house, it will not burn completely. The fires on the mountain in 1989, they came to the doorstep, but not a centimeter more.”
“I know that story, yes,” I said. I thought of how Henry had always loved the lore of the house. I’d told him all of the stories. He especially loved the story of my mother and sister and me getting lost in the swirl of the fluttering wings of Bath whites. He loved that my mother raised us to be French-proud. His father had been the type to wear KISS ME, I’M ITALIAN shirts on the beach and so we had this in common. My mother played Jacques Brel albums, read Babar books to us in French, had us put shoes out for Santa on Christmas Eve. She made us take French lessons with a strange woman who lived down the street and had parrots in cages. The parrots spoke French, too—dirty words that the old woman told us never to repeat. Henry had always wanted to go to his family’s hometown in Italy and to the house in Provence, but we either had no time or no money. If Henry was here, would he have insisted that we go and pay our respects?
“This house, it cannot burn,” Aunt Giselle told me. “It only desires something. It is being like a child. It wants attention.” I’d heard this kind of talk before among my mother’s relatives—the house as having a will of its own. The house’s mythology was not just my mother’s. It was passed down through the generations—how else could it have survived and thrived?—mostly down the line of women. Giselle had used the house herself when she was younger, my mother had told me. After her husband died, she lived there for a few years to “reinvent herself,” as my mother put it.
“I guess we all just want some attention now and then,” I said lightly.
“I know,” she said. “I am sorry about your husband.” She then fit her hand over mine. It was bony with thick knuckles, but soft. She had taken good care of her skin. “I suffered a loss young,” she told me. “The war took my first, but I went on. Back then, we all had to. We had no choice.”
“I didn’t know you were married before you came to the States,” I said.
She shook her head and smiled at me. “It wasn’t a marriage. It was a love. Some people get one and the other. Some people get both at the same time,” she said. “You understand.”
“I do,” I said, and then my throat felt tight; my cheeks flushed. I started coughing. I slipped my shoes back on, stood up, and walked away without excusing myself. I went on … we all had to. We had no choice. I walked quickly back in to Elysius’s house, my heels pushing divots into the earth. I moved through the caterer-clogged kitchen and into the bathroom.
I locked the door and looked in the mirror. I thought of my aunt. I was jealous of her. She was on the other side of it, looking back. I thought that I should have told her, right then, what I’d never told anyone. I’d heard about the traffic accident on the radio after I’d dropped Abbot off at school. I heard about the accident, that there were multiple fatalities, an oil tanker ablaze, and the backed-up traffic on the interstate, and I had one simple thought: I would take an alternate route.
That was it. I would take an alternate route. Worse, I felt lucky—not because I was alive and others were dead, but because I’d caught the update in time to avoid the exit ramp that would have landed me in the thick of it.
Later, after I’d been informed that Henry’s car had crashed, after I screamed and cried wildly and they fed me tranquilizers, I woke up in a dark room alone, and I remembered the radio reporter, the sky traffic update, and I thought of that woman I used to be, listening to the radio, passing the exit ramp, and I hated her more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my life. It was an accident, a fluke, but he could have been saved by another smaller accident and fluke. I could have saved him. I know I could have. What if I’d let him sleep in? What if I’d stepped into the shower with him that morning and delayed him? What if I’d simply called him to tell him that I loved him and he’d pulled over to talk?
And now, holding on to the bathroom sink, I felt that hatred again. Who was I then? Why didn’t I save him? Why did I let him go?
The thought of how much I loved him made my chest seize. Aunt Giselle had said, Some people get one and the other. Some people get both at the same time. Henry and I had both at the same time, a love and a marriage. I missed him with a deep ache, desperately. I loved his soul—it lit him up from within. And I loved his body—this physical shape that carried his soul, this body I never got to kiss goodbye, that I never saw again. Not even in my dreams about Henry, which were always strangely bureaucratic. He would be stepping out of a squad car being returned to me while some
voice-over narration explained that he wasn’t really dead. It was simply a clerical error. The dreams always ended before he reached me. He was gone. Gone. I used to beg to have him back, pleading God, but here now, I wanted simply to be allowed to touch his skin with the tips of my fingers. If I asked for just this one small thing, did I have more of a chance? Could I be allowed to have just that?
I was crying breathlessly now—quick, sharp sobs.
There was a knock at the door, a loud one, four hard pops of the knuckles. “It’s your mother.” She jiggled the knob. “Unlock the door.”
I drew in a breath, turned on the faucet. “Wait,” I said, but I wasn’t sure if I’d whispered it or shouted it.
“Let me in.”
I looked at my face in the mirror: dark eye-makeup pooled under my eyes, my lips looking bitten and chapped, my cheeks seemingly fevered.
My mother whispered, “Heidi, listen to me. Let me in.”
I touched the knob, then twisted it. The lock popped.
My mother opened the door, slipped in, and shut it behind her. She looked at me and opened her arms. I fell into them and she hugged me. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know. I know. It’s okay.” She held my hair in her fists.
“Abbot,” I whispered. “I have to go check on him.”
“He’s surrounded by family,” my mother said. “Take your time.”
I’d left a spot of mascara on the shoulder of her dress. I pointed it out. “Sorry,” I said.
“Who cares?” she said. “It’s just a dress.”
“Why are you here?” I asked, pulling a tissue from the box and wetting it. Had Aunt Giselle told her I was upset?
“I have an idea,” she said. “Your sister is upset because Daniel has an important conference call tomorrow morning. I was thinking that we could distract her. The three of us—just us girls—we could have a light brunch, here at the house—you, me, and Elysius. She would like it.”
“That’s the idea?” I was barely listening. “Brunch?” I was trying to wipe the makeup off my face but only managed to smear it more. This was how the world persisted. The heaviness of despair—how could it exist in the midst of mascara, zippers, brunches? It marched forward even when I was barely able to stand.
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted Page 6
