Lillian on Life

by Alison Jean Lester

  Later I’d go up and light a match, and flap and refold his towels, like Mary had taught me.

  I don’t know how I managed it, for those two years between their deaths, knowing that he was alone in Columbia, diapered, running the Cadillac through red lights, sorting through a dozen types of medication with his clumsy hands. It was a nightmare. There were times I wished he’d have a minor traffic accident to force the discussion again, but I scared myself doing that because he might hurt someone else in the process. I don’t think you can actually desire things in a specific degree. You can wish for an accident or no accident. You can’t wish for a minor loss of control, some damaged garbage cans and a dented fender. If he’d had a little accident like that, though, George Junior certainly would have been able to get him to be reasonable and give up the house and move in with me. Did he think it would be disloyal to Mother? I would have made him see that it wasn’t just an ending but also a beginning. And also a middle, actually. A more involved relationship with me—where’s the ending in that?

  Beginnings are crystal clear. Endings are too, once they’re final. It’s always difficult to tell what part of the middle you’re in, though. This morning I decided that if Michael walked into the kitchen and said he thought it best that we stop meeting like this, then it would be the beginning of the end. If he didn’t, that would mean we’re still at some unspecified part of the middle. He didn’t. It’s wonderful that he’s started coming back to New York regularly. There’s never been any mention of a plan to end his marriage. We don’t pretend to be in love. All the same, I think I’d like him here more often. I don’t mention it, though, since that might be the end, or the beginning of the end.

  Relationships don’t end when you stop seeing each other and talking to each other. I think you have a relationship—you as an individual have a relationship with someone—as long as the memory of him plucks a string on your heart. In the beginning of the end, that string is still very taut. Your body resonates and people can see the effect of hearing his name vibrate through you. Over time, the string gets looser, and plucking it has a weaker response. You avoid plucking, because the sound it makes is less and less beautiful as it goes slack. The relationship is over when thoughts of him don’t send your fingers out to the guitar at all.

  On Overflowing

  What month is it now? April? Oh God, I have to do my taxes. God. I was going to clear up my desk before now, so I’d be ready. Something happened. There was the board meeting. I had a brunch for my London and Paris colleagues. I stayed up late boiling and peeling and deviling dozens of eggs. Yes. It was such a great party. I can’t believe I ever left Europe. I thought I’d make some more deviled eggs this morning, so that if Michael walked in he’d see I wasn’t just waiting for him. But something happened. I did something else. Can’t remember what now.

  April. The pool will open in about ten weeks. That’s good. That’s really good. Feels like forever, but it’s some consolation. I swim my laps, and I sit in the sun, right in the sun, and I watch all the bizarre people come and go, different every time I’m there. Maybe there will be some more regulars like me this year, maybe a bachelor or two. I always wonder what it would take for that to happen. It seems to me the chances of a middle-aged bachelor joining the pool for the summer should be pretty high, but it hasn’t occurred. What would it take to improve those chances? What part of the cosmos needs a nudge? In the meantime I watch the people, and wonder why they feel comfortable in the bathing suits they’ve chosen. You won’t see me there in twenty years with my skin flowing like lava out of my suit. And you won’t see me there this year in a bikini. So many women don’t realize that a bikini often makes their bodies less attractive than their naked selves. The skin bunches and folds. I guess some women actually know this but don’t care. Which is worse, not realizing or not caring? I haven’t decided. I don’t know. Extra skin is awful.

  Extra feeling is awful too. It hangs out beyond the edges of the relationship. Edges are so sad. It seems that the edges should be the problem, but then I always end up feeling that the feelings are. But they’re not like lasagna noodles. You can’t just cut them off when they don’t fit in the pan you’ve chosen. I’m doing pretty well with Michael, keeping everything in the pan. It’s a small pan, with feelings to match. And the sex is fine. Not stunning. Fine. So it fits in the pan too.

  At least there’s a pan. At least there’s sex in it.

  I need it so much. Do most people pretend not to? I can’t lie down at night without feeling my body drag at me for it, like a child pulls on its mother’s arm when they pass a toy store. Strange that it’s okay if I lie on my side, but on my back it’s unavoidable. My breasts whisper against my nightie, my pubis wakes up, egged on by the bone it’s supposed to sleep on. This isn’t supposed to be happening at my age. I can’t get any reading done, and when I give in, I cry afterward. And now I want to have it again. I don’t know when Michael has to end this visit. I forget what he told me, if he told me. Every morning I let him sleep, and I know I should let him sleep, but I always wonder how he’d feel about me waking him up with a hot kiss. I hate that I can’t be sure. I hate the constant wondering. I feel like I’m dissolving. Or dispersing. I’m a dandelion and my fluff is gone, carried away on the slipstream of the people who’ve left. And now I’m just a stalk, pretending I’ve still got fluff, pretending that I’ll plant my seeds where I choose to when I choose to, but in reality it’s too late, they’ve already blown away, and they landed on Ted, and they haven’t come back.

  On the End

  I absolutely want more of this and less of that,” Ted said. He said it three times in about twelve hours. The first time, we were in a cab on our way out to dinner. I was tired, and was leaning my forehead against his so familiar but always shocking shoulder. “That” was Florence. His wife. The second time he said it we were in my bed. The third time was the following morning. I was in my nightie making coffee; he was in a bathrobe that he kept in my closet. Each time he said it he said it the same way, emphasizing the word absolutely. The first two times I didn’t say anything. The third time, though, I turned and looked at the big man I’d loved for nearly twelve years, and he was looking right back at me. “Absolutely?” He nodded. We’d been through this before, and of course the first handful of times I had thrown myself into his arms, and then we got bogged down in the details and weeks, months, years passed. This time I stayed where I was. The coffee started dripping. “How?”

  I couldn’t believe what I heard him saying. This time there wasn’t just feeling; this time there was a plan. He’d taken early retirement over a year before, you see, at sixty-three. They were still living in New York, but the paperwork was nearly all done for the apartment he’d bought for Florence in Vail, like she’d always wanted. She imagined they’d both be going, of course, but he’d tell her the truth, make her agree to go on her own. He’d stay in New York with me and the hell with the rest. “The hell with ’em,” he said. “Give me some coffee.”

  Then he went home and had a stroke.

  I learned secondhand, of course, nearly a week after the fact. Someone in the mailroom had finally thought to ask whether he might actually want the copies of Foreign Affairs that continued to arrive for him. They asked Olivia from reception to call. What if they’d asked me? Would I have been able to call? He left my apartment to go home and reveal his plans to Florence. That’s what I thought he had done. That’s why I believed I hadn’t heard from him. I couldn’t have called his home in the middle of that effort. Things were complicated. He needed time to make it work.

  Imagining that lasted a day or two. For several silent days after that I fought against the possibility—hulking silently like a boulder in the field I was cultivating, ready to ruin my plowshare—that once again he wasn’t going to follow through. And then I passed reception on my way to the toilet and Olivia said to me, “Lillian, have you heard about Mr. Bishop? Poor thing’s in the hospital. T
alked to his wife this morning.” And she rattled on, and I walked backward while I listened, hoping it looked like I was concerned but also that I really had to pee, and then I excused myself and turned and fled to the ladies’.

  Three more weeks passed. Someone told me he’d gone home from the hospital. A couple of people asked me if I knew anything, imagining that I’d have called to talk to get details from Florence, and I just said, “Nothing new to report, I’m afraid.” I chewed the top layer of skin off my lips. I ripped my cuticles to shreds.

  Oh, the excitement and the despair when he finally called! I had to calm down. I had so many questions, but he had trouble talking. I had to simplify.

  “Can you say ‘yes,’ Ted?” I asked.

  “Ya,” he said.

  “And ‘no’?”

  Pause. “Na.”

  So, closed questions would lead him to my door.

  “Are you at home?”

  “Ya.”

  “Can I meet you somewhere?”

  Pause. “Na.”

  “Can you come over sometime?”

  Pause. “Ya.”

  “This evening?”

  Pause. “Na.”

  “Sunday?”

  Pause. “Na.”

  “Monday?”

  “Ya.”

  “Evening?”

  “Na.”

  “Lunch?”

  “Ya.”

  I forgot and asked him how he’d come over, and his answer was a three-second nightmare, a record played backward, a raving, slobbering lunatic, and I interrupted, “Shall I send a cab for you?”

  Pause.

  “Ya. Ya.”

  I could feel his relief that I’d come up with a plan. I could feel it. I knew him that well.

  I took Monday off. Ted came to the door with a walker and when I opened the door he tried to pull his face upward into a smile, and he tried to say my name—I know that’s what he was trying to do, but it came out like a bark, just like it had on the phone. Bark, bark . . . bark. But it was Ted. It wasn’t winter but he came in a coat, and I took it off his bent body, undoing the buttons with a tenderness he would never have given me time for in the past. I guided him to his chair. Not where other men sit. I always put Ted at the head of the table. We sat down to boiled new potatoes, a fillet of sole, and a salad of endives. There was butter and lemon by our plates, and I started to cry. All the questions I wanted to ask, all the massive, massive backlog of desire and frustration welled up in my throat, hot as magma, then overflowed. He thumped my forearm with his big hand. I put my head on that hand and sobbed. I waited for the other hand to reach over and stroke my head like Poppa would have done, but Ted couldn’t manage it. The trip from the elevator to my door must have been an eternity. I looked up. “I wish you’d had them call me from downstairs,” I blurted. “I could have walked along the hall with you.” Ted snorted, like a bull. And he was right. You leave a man alone to do what he can. But he couldn’t cut his food, so I did. He had a system after that: He laid his left index finger along the edge of his plate, and pushed the mouthfuls I had cut up for him against it with the fork.

  I tried not to ask a lot of questions while we ate, because when he said “Ya” or “Na” the food fell about in his mouth, and out. When I could talk more calmly, I talked about the office. There was always gossip. I told him we had a journalist missing in Lithuania and he started barking again, and I’ll regret bringing that up for as long as I live. After a while he pushed his plate away and left his hands on the table, so I pushed my plate aside too and took his hands in mine. The bones were still big; the muscles weren’t wasted, but they had lost their electricity.

  “So,” I said, and couldn’t make more words come out. He waited. There was no “Spit it out, Lil,” no “Have we got all day?” None of it. “So is this the end?” I finally said. His bottom lip curled like a baby’s does before it cries. “Na,” he said definitively. I felt the same surge I had at our first embrace, his first phone call to my apartment, the first time he opened his hotel room door to me.

  “You’ll get better?”

  Pause.

  “Ya.”

  Then the second stroke.

  Florence nursed him, when it should have been me. I waited for the secondhand news of his progress, but he didn’t progress, where he was never supposed to live. He wasn’t supposed to need her anymore. Seventeen months later I received the secondhand news of his death.

  I blacked out. When I came to, the feeling of having nothing at all was so strong I thought I was twenty-three in Munich, new to everything, scared. I didn’t recognize my bedroom. Whose newspapers were those piled on that upholstered chair? Those catalogs on the floor? Whose taste was that? I struggled forward through time, toward myself and the bed and why I was on it. My heart cramped and I nearly blacked out again. You’d think I would have remembered Ted’s face and his growl and the way he flicked his wrist to check his watch, but it’s so embarrassing, all I could see was paper. Paper was flying, whirling all over my mind. Letters for him to sign, minutes, memos, interview transcripts, invoices, more minutes, credit card slips, and the fluttering pages of hotel guest books. I couldn’t stand it. At least this feeling got me up off the bed. I found my way to the kitchen. I knew that I had to make coffee. Coffee is an excellent stand-in for blood. I stared into the first mug until it was cold. The second one I drank, bitter, without sweetener. Then I just sat.

  I had to work. During the rest of that week, papers continued to whirl. I couldn’t nail them down. I was sure my colleagues were from another planet. The smallest tasks took ages. Then suddenly I found myself in my bedroom looking for a cigarette.

  George Junior and Judy and Zoë had come over to see me. I couldn’t keep them away any longer. I had stopped smoking cold turkey when Ted told me I tasted like the air in the subway. But now my little family was sitting in my apartment, concerned for me, with just a tinge of Now maybe she can sort herself out and get married emanating from George Junior and just a tinge of Poor Lillian, but thank God this is over, I never liked him coming out of Judy. Zoë’s eyes were like saucers, taking in her older-and-hardly-wisers. I knew I had some cigarettes. Someone had left them behind. The more I looked, the harder my heart beat. I couldn’t go back out to the living room without one. I found them behind the iron and pulled one out. I crossed through the living room to light it with the kitchen matches, the family watching as I went. Then I pulled a chair from the dining table over to where they were sitting—far enough away to keep the smoke out of their faces—sat down, crossed my legs, felt the impassivity of my face, concentrated on the cigarette, listening to the tiny crackle of burning paper as I inhaled, blowing away from their willing-to-do-what-was-needed faces, keeping ash off the skirt of my dress.

  I don’t remember what was said. Judy told me later that she had brought Zoë along to show her what grief looked like. Does it look like what it feels like? Grief on the outside: tall, middle-aged woman, dramatic eyebrows, excellent wool dress, excessively composed, unable to form sentences of more than three words. Grief on the inside: tall, middle-aged woman, imagining shaving her head, taking off the dress and the stockings, removing her breasts and folding them away in the underwear drawer with her bra, untangling her pubic hair and pulling it all out, dropping it from her bedroom window down nine floors into the dead space behind, drinking only water, never talking again, smoking until it’s all over.

  On What Happens Next

  I don’t think you have to know what happens next. I imagine all sorts of futures, but I’ve learned to swim with the tide, and to get out of the water when it’s really too dangerous, or flat and uninspiring. I stand on the shore, aching to feel it on my skin again, watching for changes in the surf. I keep champagne in the hall closet to celebrate when it’s time to dive back in.

  There was a weekend, it must be eight years or so ago now, w
hen one of my old beaux from London came through town—someone I had some fun with between John and Alec. Nothing serious. It was terrific to see him so many years later. He’d kept himself fit, I could feel it when we hugged at my door, could see it when he took off his sweater after our brunch of eggs Benedict. We followed the sun into the study, bringing the last of the champagne with us. When we both wanted more I said I had at least half a dozen in the closet. Neither of us cared that they wouldn’t be chilled. I went to get one and put another in the fridge. I remember the giddy walk from the closet to the kitchen, and how I laughed when I went back into the study. He’d taken the cushions off the sofa and had put them on the floor in the squares of sun thrown by the windows, and he was sitting on one, leaning back on the sofa in his shirt and socks. I laughed and handed him the dusty bottle. While he untwisted the cage, I straddled his lap. We kissed as he turned the cork, little bit by little bit. “I remember you,” I said against his lips. “Oh yeah?” he said, and I felt his smile expose his teeth. “You and your anticipation games,” I said. I felt his arms tighten as he gave the cork its final twist. I was ready for anything. Anything, except for that listless little pop.