A Week as Andrea Benstock

by Lawrence Block

  If indeed that was what it had been. It had been hard at the time to know what they were to each other and it was not much easier now. But if she and Cass were still spending their Thursdays together, or if they had never done so in the first place, he might have been a help to her now. He knew her so well, and he knew Mark so well, and if they could have a certain conversation, she and Cass …

  Or perhaps not. She kept doing that, creating roles for people in her personal mythology, secure in the knowledge that circumstances made it impossible for them to play the parts she assigned them. Winkie, her father, all the men who had ever touched fives with her.

  Her mother was saying something.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get that.”

  “I just said you’ll come in an hour or so?”

  “If not sooner.”

  “Dress warm.”

  “Yes, Mother dear.”

  It was generally agreed, and had been said repeatedly at the funeral and during the week of formal mourning which followed it, that David Kleinman had had a good death. He had remained active right up to the end. His first heart attack had served him as a warning, encouraging him to slow the pace of his life and savor his remaining days. At the same time it helped condition his family so that his second heart attack, which killed him, did not come as a complete shock.

  Certainly some of the comments on the quality of his death were inspired by the usual impulse to look and to speak on the bright side, but not a few of the men and women who said what a good death he had had did so with a touch of wistfulness in their speech. They were of an age to acknowledge the possibility of imminent death, some of them already suffering from the diseases which would ultimately kill them, and while it was never quite possible to envy the corpse at a funeral, life clearly being preferable to death, they would have welcomed assurance that their own deaths would be as easy.

  On the day he died, Andrea’s father finished his last dental appointment shortly after noon. He went home for lunch, napped afterward for perhaps an hour, then drove to Andrea’s house where he had a cup of coffee. Then he took his granddaughter for a ride. They drove around for over an hour, stopped for ice cream, then returned to the Benstock house.

  “I told Poppa David it’s my birthday next week and I’m gonna be five, and he says he won’t let me,” Robin announced. She was pretending anxiety but was clearly delighted with the notion of needing permission to be a year older.

  “I merely said I have never had a five-year-old granddaughter and wasn’t sure about the whole thing.”

  “He says I’ll have to be four for a whole nother year.”

  “I said maybe.”

  “Well, maybe you’re silly,” Robin said, and whooped with delight. “Silly, silly.”

  He returned to his own house, ate dinner with his wife at the usual hour. He helped her load the dishwasher. While it ran they sat with newspapers in the front room. First he read the Times while she read the Buffalo News. Then they traded. She was reading Clive Barnes’s review of a new English play when he said, “Syl?”

  She lowered the paper. His face looked drawn and his expression was one of puzzlement.

  “I don’t feel well,” he said.

  “What’s the matter? Stay right there, I’ll phone Irv Zucker.”

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing,” he said, and then he sat back in his chair and died. Her eyes were on him as it happened and she knew instantly what had happened. He was there and then he was not, he was gone.

  She had planned to leave the house when Lucinda arrived, but half an hour after the cleaning woman’s appearance she was still finding things to do in the house. At last she was in her car with the key in the ignition, and then she realized the one thing that she did have to do. She got out of the car and went back into the house and called her husband’s office.

  She said, “I was just leaving the house. I’m going to Mother’s.”

  “Yes, you said you probably would.”

  “She wants to go to the cemetery.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  She closed her eyes. She said, “I don’t see that it matters whether it’s a good idea or not.”

  “I just—”

  “It’s what she wants to do.”

  “You’ll go with her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well. How are you feeling?”

  “I am fine,” she said levelly.

  “Well.”

  She made herself take a breath and release it slowly. “The reason I called,” she said, “is to find out if you’ll be home for dinner.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you doing some kind of a number? I always call you if I’m not going to be able to make it for dinner.”

  “Well, I’m not going to be home for a while,” she said, “so it would be difficult for you to reach me, wouldn’t it? So I thought I would call and make sure, that’s all.”

  “That’s all.”

  “Certainly.”

  She heard him breathing into the phone. The previous fall a telephone pervert had taken to calling her for a period of several weeks, breathing into the phone in a similar way. He’d stopped when she learned not to panic but simply to hang up as soon as she recognized who it was. Mark’s breathing reminded her of those calls, and then he said, “Well, I’ll be home at the usual time, Andrea. You can rest easy.”

  I’m glad to hear that.”

  “I’ll see you then. In the meantime give your mother my love.”

  “I will.”

  She replaced the receiver and put her hand to her forehead. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had known better than to make that call. And she had gone ahead and made it, she had been unable to leave the house without making it.

  Stupid.

  It was hard to say precisely when she learned that he was having an affair. She came to know gradually sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that when she did suddenly realize that he was seeing somebody she realized simultaneously that she had known as much for some time, had known it without facing it.

  Her own reaction surprised her. She was far more upset than she could ever have imagined she might be. She was hurt, she was threatened, and more than anything else she was astonished. Perhaps the hardest thing for her to forgive him was his having turned out to be so different from her image of him. That was the true infidelity—he had been unfaithful all along by letting her perceive him incorrectly.

  Had he had other affairs before this one? And how long had this one been going on?

  And what happened now?

  When she decided that she had to talk to someone, she chose Eileen Fradin. The conversation had a frustrating beginning because Eileen kept marshaling arguments to convince her that she was mistaken, that Mark was faithful to her, that his infidelity was a creation of her own imagination. Andrea found herself in the position of lining up evidence to prove her own conclusion, all of which only served to reinforce her convictions. Eileen seemed to have an answer, however farfetched, for every point Andrea made, and for one wild moment she actually found herself wondering if it might be Eileen with whom Mark was having his affair. But that was clearly absurd.

  “Look, this is all beside the point,” she said finally. “I know what’s happening. He’s seeing somebody. I absolutely know this.”

  “The thing is you don’t have to know it.”

  “You mean close my eyes and it’ll go away? Maybe that works for ostriches but I don’t think it makes sense for people.”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so certain, do you? Because what good does it do you?” She was puzzled, and Eileen went on, “Look, men are different. They’re like little boys.”

  “Oh, come on. I’ve heard the song before.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Men can have sex and it won’t mean an
ything at all to them. For women it has to be emotional but not for them. Men do it for the good of their ego or because they just have this need to have different women. Variety. It all has a different meaning for them.”

  “The old double standard.”

  “Andrea, I’m not saying how things should be, just how they are. Can you imagine yourself going to bed with a man if you didn’t feel anything for him? Just because of a physical attraction? But for men this happens all the time, they think they’re not really men if they don’t do it.”

  She found herself keeping her conversational guard up from then on. Because she had gone to bed with men without feeling anything for them, had made love merely on the basis of physical attraction, had made unemotional love even when little real-physical attraction existed either. But there was no way she could say this to Eileen Fradin, and she would not want to say anything that might even hint as much to her.

  Once again she found herself feeling ambivalent toward Eileen, dismissing her as shallow and simple-minded while grudgingly admiring how well her mental processes were adapted to emotional survival. She entertained only those thoughts which were beneficial to her and swept all others resolutely aside.

  Did Roger Fradin cheat on her? Did she think he did? Did she worry that he did? Evidently, whatever the actual circumstances, whatever Eileen’s perception of them, she managed to think of other things, just as she suggested Andrea do.

  But of course Andrea could not do this.

  And how well, after all, did all of this really work for Eileen? She was unquestionably a good wife and mother, a precise housekeeper, an adequate if unimaginative cook. She dressed well and kept her figure and was always cheerful. Nevertheless, there were unsettling times when Andrea sensed that her friend was running and could not catch her breath. Eileen still looked younger than her years, but when you looked at her from certain angles you could see that, in a year or two, she would abruptly begin to look older than her years. The skull was beginning to show beneath the skin.

  And she was living on diet pills, joking openly enough about them, calling them her vitamins. But they were not vitamins. They were amphetamine, and Eileen took them daily as if on a permanent diet, her pill intake a constant whether or not she was watching what she ate. Her doctor prescribed the pills, and her druggist supplied them, and so it would never occur to Eileen to describe herself as a speed freak, if indeed she was familiar with the term in the first place.

  It was not that long a time between Andrea’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity and her father’s death. It was only a matter of a few weeks. But they were very intense and concentrated weeks during which that one central fact dominated her thinking and, subtly or blatantly, colored her dreams.

  There was no one with whom she could discuss it. After that first attempt she never raised the subject with Eileen, who for her part never referred to it again. Eileen was her closest friend, surely her most nearly intimate friend. Of the other women she knew reasonably well, the only one she might have discussed the matter with was Linda Gould, who had come back east and taken a flat in Amherst with her children. But Linda was Mark’s sister and that made the conversation impossible.

  There were other people she could have talked to, except that for one reason or another she could not, Her mother. Her father. Cass Drozdowski. John Riordan. Winkie.

  Mark.

  She had conversations with these people within the privacy of her private mind. And now and then she would think of someone else—a casual friend from school or from her New York days, a friend of her parents’, an English teacher at Bennett High School of whom she had not consciously thought in fifteen years. People she did not really know, people she had never really known, but people whom she found herself wishing she could cast in the role of confidante.

  Then the telephone rang early on a January evening and it suddenly ceased to matter who Mark was fucking, or how, or why, or for how long. Her father was dead. That was all that really mattered.

  The death and the funeral and the official and unofficial periods of mourning changed everything so completely that she thought the change would be permanent. The moment she learned of her father’s death, Mark’s involvement with someone else ceased to matter to her, and in ceasing to matter it was as if it ceased to exist. It was Mark who answered the telephone that night, Mark who was the first to know the awful knowledge, and as he turned to her, giving her a part of the news with his eyes before he gave her all of it in a handful of phrases, as he did this, he was transformed entirely into a man playing one role and one role only, that of her husband.

  And he had been very good. He was a strong man, such a strong man. She had recognized his strength the day she met him and had never since had cause to doubt it. That she kept finding evidence of his sensitivity and vulnerability never served to diminish his strength in her eyes.

  Strength was constantly called for then. During the public part of each day Andrea would be very strong and Mark would weld his strength to hers, giving it backbone, reinforcing it. Together they helped Andrea’s mother endure the ordeal. Each friend or relative who approached to offer sympathy constituted a small emotional crisis, and Sylvia Kleinman sat with her daughter on one side and her son on the other, squeezing their hands in hers, sometimes breaking down, sometimes not, but drawing from them something that helped, something that made it easier.

  She leaned on both of them, and together they kept her going. And then, when she was asleep with a sedative, Andrea’s aunt Estelle sleeping in Andrea’s old room to handle nocturnal emergencies, and when Mark and Andrea were in their own house with Robin asleep and no one else around, then it was Andrea’s turn to fall apart. She had been strong all day when her strength was required. Now she would buckle, and Mark would go on being a mensch, talking to her when she needed to hear words, listening to her when she had to babble on and on, pouring drinks into her because she needed something and wouldn’t take tranquilizers, and holding her when she needed to be held. She had a great need to be held.

  They did not speak of his infidelity. She was reasonably certain of that. On a couple of nights she had quite a bit to drink, enough so that her memory was spotty, but she had no reason to worry that she had said or done anything to indicate that she knew. And of course there was no need to speak of it, no need now to think of it, because of course it was over and would not be resumed.

  She did not like to permit herself to think of it in precisely those terms. That her father’s death might have brought her husband entirely back to her was as unsettling as it was a thoroughly persuasive hypothesis. She couldn’t think of it without seeing herself as having involuntarily sacrificed the one for the other, her father for her husband. She recognized the idea as nonsensical solipsism. She would not have done any such thing even if she could. Even so, her father’s death was a tragedy, and she did not like to think that any good could have issued from it.

  Nor was it long before she had no need to fight off the thought. Before very long he had taken up where he had left off. He was seeing her again, whoever she was. And Andrea knew it, and he knew that she knew. So even her guilt was taken away from her.

  At her mother’s house they sat in the front room with cups of strong black coffee. Her mother had been sitting in that room when Andrea drove up. As far as she knew, it was the first time her mother had purposely sat in that room since her father had died in it.

  She didn’t say anything to that effect, but her mother raised the subject. “This is the first I’ve been in this room since that night,” she said. “With other people in the house, that is.”

  “You’ve come in here alone?”

  “Oh, yes. Frequently. I make myself do certain things, Andrea.” And, when Andrea refused to ask about these certain things, “Sitting in that chair, for example. Sleeping on your father’s side of the bed.”

  “You’re torturing yourself.”

  “No. I know the difference, and I’m not interested in
torturing myself. When Mark volunteered to go through the drawers and closets and give the clothing to the Goodwill I didn’t give him an argument. That would have been, I would have had trouble doing it. But there are other things that a person has to do sooner or later, and rushing isn’t good but neither is putting it off. There’s a time when it’s better to get it over with, even if it hurts a little.” She considered this. “Even if it hurts more than a little,” she said.

  “I just don’t think you should overdo.”

  “No.”

  “Or make yourself unhappy.”

  “Not make. But I don’t see anything wrong with a person letting herself be unhappy. The sedatives Zucker gave me at the beginning served a purpose. They were necessary.”

  “Of course they were.”

  “And I still take a sleeping pill at night, a half a grain of Seconal, because there’s no point in lying awake nights. But the other things he gave me, the Librium and the antidepressants. You know, you can tranquilize yourself into a wide-awake coma with those things. Mildred Weingarten started on them when Harold had his operation. He had a prostate operation two years ago, it was completely successful, and he’s fine, and poor Mil has been stoned for the past two years. Of course she was at the funeral but you wouldn’t have noticed, but she always has this glassy look in her eyes and she’s so calm you want to take her pulse to make sure she’s still there. Do you remember that program, Jackie Kennedy showing off the White House? Mil has that same voice now. ’And this is the Rose Room, and that was President Lincoln’s desk.’ That breathless little-girl voice.”

  “You do voices so beautifully. Maybe that’s where Robin gets it from.”

  “I could always get a smile out of your father.” Sylvia Kleinman hesitated, but only for a moment. “I don’t want to be a zombie,” she said.

  “You couldn’t be a zombie if you tried.”