“I’ll be paid for my inconvenience,” Ms. Perry said, “but what you can’t pay me for is the insult of coming here and submitting myself to your eyes crawling on my body.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult.”
“That’s what it feels like to me.”
She then asked Mr. Elihu to disrobe.
“I?” he said, surprised. “What for?”
“I want to sketch you. Take your pants and shirt off.”
He said he had barely got rid of his winter underwear but she did not smile.
Mr. Elihu disrobed, ashamed of how he must look to her.
With quick strokes she sketched his form. He was not a bad-looking man but felt bad. When she had the sketch she dipped his brush into a blob of black pigment she had squeezed out of a tube and smeared his features, leaving a black mess.
He watched her hating him but said nothing.
Ms. Perry tossed the brush into a wastebasket and returned to the bathroom for her clothing.
The old man wrote out a check for her for the sum they had agreed on. He was ashamed to sign his name but he signed it and handed it to her. Ms. Perry slipped the check into her large purse and left.
He thought that in her way she was not a bad-looking woman though she lacked grace. The old man then asked himself, “Is there nothing more to my life than it is now? Is this all that is left to me?”
The answer seemed yes and he wept at how old he had so quickly become.
Afterwards he removed the towel over his canvas and tried to fill in her face, but he had already forgotten it.
1983
A Lost Grave
Hecht was a born late bloomer.
One night he woke hearing rain on his windows and thought of his young wife in her wet grave. This was something new, because he hadn’t thought of her in too many years to be comfortable about. He saw her in her uncovered grave, rivulets of water streaming in every direction, and Celia, whom he had married when they were of unequal ages, lying alone in the deepening wet. Not so much as a flower grew on her grave, though he could have sworn he had arranged perpetual care.
He stepped into his thoughts perhaps to cover her with a plastic sheet, and though he searched in the cemetery under dripping trees and among many wet plots, he was unable to locate her. The dream he was into offered no tombstone name, row, or plot number, and though he searched for hours, he had nothing to show for it but his wet self. The grave had taken off. How can you cover a woman who isn’t where she is supposed to be? That’s Celia.
The next morning, Hecht eventually got himself out of bed and into a subway train to Jamaica to see where she was buried. He hadn’t been to the cemetery in many years, no particular surprise to anybody considering past circumstances. Life with Celia wasn’t exactly predictable. Yet things change in a lifetime, or seem to. Hecht had lately been remembering his life more vividly, for whatever reason. After you hit sixty-five, some things that have two distinguishable sides seem to pick up another that complicates the picture as you look or count. Hecht counted.
Now, though Hecht had been more or less in business all his life, he kept few personal papers, and though he had riffled through a small pile of them that morning, he had found nothing to help him establish Celia’s present whereabouts; and after a random looking at gravestones for an hour he felt the need to call it off and spend another hour with a young secretary in the main office, who fruitlessly tapped his name and Celia’s into a computer and came up with a scramble of interment dates, grave plots and counterplots, that exasperated him.
“Look, my dear,” Hecht said to the flustered young secretary, “if that’s how far you can go on this machine, we have to find another way to go further, or I will run out of patience. This grave is lost territory as far as I am concerned, and we have to do something practical to find it.”
“What do you think I’m doing, if I might ask?”
“Whatever you are doing doesn’t seem to be much help. This computer is supposed to have a good mechanical memory, but it’s either out of order or rusty in its parts. I admit I didn’t bring any papers with me, but so far the only thing your computer has informed us is that it has nothing much to inform us.”
“It has informed us it is having trouble locating the information you want.”
“Which adds up to zero minus zero,” Hecht said. “I wish to remind you that a lost grave isn’t a missing wedding ring we are talking about. It is a lost cemetery plot of the lady who was once my wife that I wish to recover.”
The pretty young woman he was dealing with had a tight-lipped conversation with an unknown person, then the buzzer on her desk sounded and Hecht was given permission to go into the director’s office.
“Mr. Goodman will now see you.”
He resisted “Good for Mr. Goodman.” Hecht only nodded, and followed the young woman to an inner office. She knocked once and disappeared, as a friendly voice talked through the door.
“Come in, come in.”
“Why should I worry if it’s not my fault?” Hecht told himself.
Mr. Goodman pointed to a chair in front of his desk and Hecht was soon seated, watching him pour orange juice from a quart container into a small green glass.
“Will you join me in a sweet mouthful?” he asked, nodding at the container. “I usually take refreshment this time of the morning. It keeps me balanced.”
“Thanks,” said Hecht, meaning he had more serious problems. “Why I am here is that I am looking for my wife’s grave, so far with no success.” He cleared his throat, surprised at the emotion that had gathered there.
Mr. Goodman observed Hecht with interest.
“Your outside secretary couldn’t find it,” Hecht went on, regretting he hadn’t found the necessary documents that would identify the grave site. “Your young lady tried her computer in every combination but couldn’t produce anything. What was lost is still lost, in other words, a woman’s grave.”
“Lost is premature,” Goodman offered. “Displaced might be better. In my twenty-eight years in my present capacity, I don’t believe we have lost a single grave.”
The director tapped lightly on the keys of his desk computer, studied the screen with a squint, and shrugged. “I am afraid that we now draw a blank. The letter H volume of our ledgers that we used before we were computerized seems to be missing. I assure you this can’t be more than a temporary condition.”
“That’s what your young lady already informed me.”
“She’s not my young lady, she’s my secretarial assistant.”
“I stand corrected,” Hecht said. “This meant no offense.”
“Likewise,” said Goodman. “But we will go on looking. Could you kindly tell me, if you don’t mind, what was the status of your relationship to your wife at the time of her death?” He peered over half-moon glasses to check the computer reading.
“There was no status. We were separated. What has that got to do with her burial plot?”
“The reason I inquire is, I thought it might refresh your memory. For example, is this the correct cemetery, the one you are looking in—Mount Jereboam? Some people confuse us with Mount Hebron.”
“I guarantee you it was Mount Jereboam.”
Hecht, after a hesitant moment, gave these facts: “My wife wasn’t the most stable woman. She left me twice and disappeared for months. Although I took her back twice, we weren’t together at the time of her death. Once she threatened to take her life, though eventually she didn’t. In the end she died of a normal sickness, not cancer. This was years later, when we weren’t living together anymore, but I carried out her burial, to the best of my knowledge, in this exact cemetery. I also heard she had lived for a short time with some guy she met somewhere, but when she died, I was the one who buried her. Now I am sixty-five and lately I have had this urge to visit the grave of someone who lived with me when I was a young man. This is a grave which everybody now tells me they can’t locate.”
Goodman rose at h
is desk, a short man, five feet tall. “I will institute a careful research.”
“The quicker, the better,” Hecht replied. “I am still curious what happened to her grave.”
Goodman almost guffawed, but caught himself and thrust out his hand. “I will keep you well informed, don’t worry.”
Hecht left, irritated. On the train back to the city he thought of Celia and her various unhappinesses. He wished he had told Goodman she had spoiled his life.
That night it rained. To his surprise he found a wet spot on his pillow.
The next day Hecht again went to the graveyard. “What did I forget that I ought to remember?” he asked himself. Obviously the grave plot, row, and number. Though he sought it diligently he could not find it. Who can remember something he has once and for all put out of his mind? It’s like trying to grow beans out of a bag of birdseed.
“But I must be patient and I will find out. As time goes by I am bound to recall. When my memory says yes I won’t argue no.”
But weeks passed and Hecht still could not remember what he was trying to. “Maybe I have reached a dead end?”
Another month went by and at last the cemetery called him. It was Mr. Goodman, clearing his throat. Hecht pictured him at his desk sipping orange juice.
“Mr. Hecht?”
“The same.”
“This is Mr. Goodman. A happy Rosh Hashanah.”
“A happy Rosh Hashanah to you.”
“Mr. Hecht, I wish to report progress. Are you prepared for an insight?”
“You name it,” Hecht said.
“So let me use a better word. We have tracked your wife and it turns out she isn’t in the grave there where the computer couldn’t find her. To be frank, we found her in a grave with another gentleman.”
“What kind of gentleman? Who in God’s name is he? I am her legal husband.”
“This one, if you will pardon me, is the man who lived with your wife after she left you. They lived together on and off, so don’t blame yourself too much. After she died he got a court order, and they removed her to a different grave, where we also laid him after his death. The judge gave him the court order because he convinced him that he had loved her for many years.”
Hecht was embarrassed. “What are you talking about? How could he transfer her grave anywhere if it wasn’t his legal property? Her grave belonged to me. I paid cash for it.”
“That grave is still there,” Goodman explained, “but the names were mixed up. His name was Kaplan but the workmen buried her under Caplan. Your grave is still in the cemetery, though we had it under Kaplan and not Hecht. I apologize to you for this inconvenience but I think we now have got the mystery cleared up.”
“So thanks,” said Hecht. He felt he had lost a wife but was no longer a widower.
“Also,” Goodman reminded him, “don’t forget you gained an empty grave for future use. Nobody is there and you own the plot.”
Hecht said that was obviously true.
The story had astounded him. Yet whenever he thought of telling it to someone he knew, or had just met, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
1984
Zora’s Noise
Here’s this unhappy noise that upsets Zora.
She had once been Sarah. Dworkin, when he married her not long after the death of Ella, his first wife, had talked her into changing her name. She eventually forgave him. Now she felt she had always been Zora.
“Zora, we have to hurry.”
“I’m coming, for godsake. I am looking for my brown gloves.”
He was fifty-one, she ten years younger, an energetic, plump person with an engaging laugh and a tendency to diet unsuccessfully. She called him Dworky: an animated, reflective man, impassioned cellist—and, on inspiration, composer—with an arthritic left shoulder. He referred to it as “the shoulder I hurt when I fell in the cellar.” When she was angry with him, or feeling insecure, she called him Zworkin.
I hear something, whatever do I hear? Zora blew her nose and listened to her ear. Is my bad ear worse? If it isn’t, what are those nagging noises I’ve been hearing all spring? Because I listen, I hear. But what makes me listen?
The really bothersome noise had begun in April when the storm windows came off and the screens went up; yet it seemed to Zora she hadn’t become conscious of its relentless quality until June, after being two months on a diet that didn’t work. She was heavier than she cared to be. She had never had children and held that against herself too.
Zora settled on the day after her forty-first birthday, at the end of June, as the time when the noise began seriously to affect her. Maybe I wasn’t listening with both my ears up to then. I had my mind elsewhere. They say the universe exploded and we still hear the roar and hiss of all that gas. She asked Dworky about that, forgetting to notice —Oh, my God—that he was practicing his cello, a darkly varnished, mellow Montagnana, “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he had once said.
No response from him but an expression of despair: as though he had said, “I practice in the living room to keep you company, and the next thing I know you’re interfering with my music.” “Please pardon me,” Zora said.
“The cello,” he had defined it shortly after they met, “is an independent small Jewish animal.” And Zora had laughed as though her heart were broken. There were two streams to her laughter—a fullblown humorous response, plus something reserved. You expected one and maybe got the other. Sometimes you weren’t sure what she was laughing at, if laughing. Dworkin, as he seesawed his rosin-scented bow across the four steel strings, sometimes sang to his cello, and the cello throatily responded. Zora and Dworkin had met many years ago after a concert in L.A., the night he was the guest of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“My cello deepens me,” he had told her.
“In that case I’ll marry you both.”
That was how she had proposed, he told friends at their dinner table, and everyone laughed.
“Do you hear that grating, sickening sound?” she had asked as they were undressing late one summer’s night in their high-ceilinged bedroom. The wallpaper was Zora’s, spread through with white cosmos pasted over the thickly woven cerise paper selected by Ella many years ago when she and Dworkin had first moved into this spacious, comfortable house. “Do you like it?” he had asked Zora. “Love it.” She immediately had the upstairs sun deck built, and the French doors leading to it, giving her, she said, “access to the sky.”
“What sickening sound?” he asked.
“You don’t hear it?”
“Not as of right now.”
“Well, it isn’t exactly the music of the spheres,” Zora responded. She had in her twenties worked in a chemistry laboratory, though her other interests tended to be artistic.
Zora was plump, in high heels about Dworkin’s height; she had firm features and almost a contralto speaking voice. She had once, at his suggestion, taken singing lessons that hadn’t come to much. She was not very musical, though she loved to listen and had her own record collection. When they were first married she had worked in an art gallery in Stockbridge. They lived in Elmsville, a nearby town, in a clapboard house painted iron-gray, with marine-blue shutters. The colors were Zora’s own good colors. For Ella it had been a white house with black shutters. They were both effective with their colors.
Dworkin taught the cello to students in the vicinity and at a master class in the New England Conservatory of Music at Lenox. He had stopped concertizing a year after his fall in the cellar. Zora, who was not much tempted by travel, liked to have him home regularly. “It’s better for your arthritis. It’s better for me.”
She said, referring to the noise, “I would describe it as absolutely ongoing, with a wobbly, enervating, stinky kind of whine.”
That was in July. He honestly couldn’t hear it.
At night she woke in slow fear, intently listening.
“Suppose it goes on forever?” She felt herself shudder. It was an ugly thrumming sound sho
t through with a sickly whine. She listened into the distance, where it seemed to begin, and then slowly drew in her listening as though it were a line she had cast out; and now she listened closer to shore. Far or near, it amounted to the same thing. The invasive noise seemed to enter the house by way of their bedroom, even when the windows were tightly shut, as if it had seeped through the clapboard and the walls, and once or twice frighteningly seemed to metamorphose into a stranger sitting in the dark, breathing audibly and evenly, pausing between breaths.
In the near distance there was a rumble of light traffic, though she knew no traffic was going through town at this time of night. Maybe an occasional truck, changing gears. The nearer sound was Dworkin sleeping, breathing heavily, sometimes shifting into a snore.
“Dworky,” she said patiently, “snoring.” And Dworkin, with a rasping sigh of contrition, subsided. When she had first taken to waking him out of a sound sleep to break his snoring, he had resented it. “But your snore woke me out of sound sleep,” Zora said. “It isn’t as though I had planned to wake you up.” He saw the justice of her remark and permitted her to wake him if he was snoring. He would stir for a minute, break his galloping rumble, then more quietly slumber.
Anyway, if someone sat there, it wasn’t Dworkin making dream noises. This was a quiet presence, perhaps somebody in the Queen Anne chair by the long stained-glass window in their bedroom, Ella’s invention. Someone contemplating them as they slept? Zora rose on her elbow and peered in the dark. Nothing glowed or stank, laughed madly or assaulted her. And she was once more conscious of the unhappy sound she was contending with, a vibrato hum touched with a complaining, drawn-out wail that frightened her because it made her think of the past, perhaps her childhood oozing out of the dark. Zora felt she had had such a childhood.
The Complete Stories Page 73
