by Sally Koslow
She leans forward and traces the framed image shown in murky black and grayish white. “Is this modern art?” she asks.
“This is Luey’s little baby growing inside her,” I explain. “A picture from her ultrasound.” A year ago my mother knew the term.
“Why is the head so big? Does it have hydrocephalus?”
I will myself poise and a cool temper. She can remember that term but not what we talked about four minutes ago. “This is what a fetus looks like at six months.”
“Ugly?”
“Not to me,” I say. “Not to Luey.” She drops the photograph. “Would you like to rest?” I ask.
“No,” she snaps. “Do you think I’m an old lady who needs to nap?”
I do. Ten minutes feels like ten hours. “What did Maurice say in the letter Alice mentioned?”
“Who, pray tell, is Alice?”
It will be a long afternoon. “Excuse me for a moment,” I say, and leave the room. I return from the lounge with paper cups of tea. Fifteen minutes.
I pull out a copy of Ben’s letter. “I’d like your opinion, Mother, on a letter I found.” I’d like her to let me know if she believes what Ben has said, and then I will be glad if she will forget our conversation. Perception seems to ignite in her dark brown eyes. Please let that flame stay lit. “It’s from my husband,” I explain. “To another woman.”
“Ben’s lady friend? That bitch?”
Did all of The Oaks know? “I’m not sure she’s evil. Just another woman.”
Someone new, the last thing I could be.
“‘Darling.’ That’s what he calls her, ‘darling.’ But her name is Naomi.” I read the letter, choking twice . . . “He must have met her when he ran that marathon in Honolulu,” I add, and read down the most chilling words. “‘I can’t leave my first family.’” I brush away a tear to say, “He calls us his ‘first’ family. Does that mean the woman has a child? That there’s a second family?”
My mother is making eye contact with me, alert. “Go on.”
I read sentence after sentence, stopping at, “‘I dream that we could all live together.’ Isn’t that rich—‘we could all live together’? I wonder if I’d get to be number-one wife?”
“Keep going. I love this book.”
I skip to the bottom. Ben wasn’t exactly John Adams. “‘The net net . . .’ Can you believe he wrote ‘net net’ in a love letter?”
“Read!”
“‘I’ve thought of telling Georgia, of asking for her blessing or even to separate so you and I could be together, but that would break her heart and she’s my wife.’”
“He underlines this. See?” I show the letter to my mother. Her eyes have shuttered, but I continue aloud. There is comfort in reading, as if I am a child enjoying a fairy tale, not a horror story about ruination in a marriage. I wonder if Ben recopied and ever sent this letter. My mind goes blank when I try to imagine how Naomi might have felt if and when she got it—or might feel now. I have room for only my feelings, vast and malignant.
There is more, but I stop. I am lulled by mingled accents from the hall—Jamaican, Irish, Puerto Rican, Russian, and the patois of southern New Jersey. Ben’s letter has deepened the enigma.
Loyalty is a tight weave, a heathery tweed of which love is only one fiber, but in marriage loyalty can also be two people moving through life on parallel lines, never becoming one. Passion is a rocky EKG, but it’s a single line. I wish I knew Ben’s devotion to me was built as much on passion, a less dependable fabric than the feathers, angora, and satin of ball gowns and tuxedos. Passion is Sense and Sensibility and A Man and a Woman and also, I’d like to think, Ben Silver and Georgia Waltz, celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary fucking and making love and everything in between one entire rainy weekend at Casa Del Mar. We stopped and started and sipped Bellinis and listened to the Pacific knocking on the front door. Loyalty is a stately hymn. Passion is pheromones flying, shouting, I love you, I love you, round and round, forever.
I hear footsteps and open my eyes, half-expecting to see Ben. My brother is filling the doorway, wearing concern. “Stephan, I wasn’t expecting you,” I say.
“Nor I, you,” he offers over our mother’s snores. Despite her diminutive size, she rumbles like heavy machinery.
“I’m sorry I haven’t gotten here much,” I say, as I stand to hug. “I’ve fallen down on the job.”
“You have a full plate.” I enjoy the brief touch of our cheeks. His heavy beard is shaved to kid leather smoothness, like our father’s always was.
“Did you hear everything?”
“Enough.” After a minute or two, his voice goes soft. “Do the words make you feel better?” he asks.
“I’d feel better if Ben was alive and I never knew about this. I was happy not knowing.”
I’d like to turn back the clock to my own age of innocence. Stephan covers my hand with his. In my fifty years, I never remember a gesture this intimate and openhearted from the brother I wrote off as cold-blooded. This makes me want to cry, but he will be horrified by leaky, womanly emotion, so I shut my eyes tight against the tears.
“‘I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability,’” Stephan says, invoking his patron saint.
I smile up at him. “Ben was just a guy, flawed as any.”
“More flawed than most. We’re not all Bens.”
“Do you have any more choice material where that came from?” I have always liked this game Stephan plays.
He thinks a moment and comes up with, “‘In married life, three is company and two is none.’”
“You can’t possibly believe that.”
“Okay, I have it,” he says. “‘I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I say.’”
“That’s the most humble remark you’ve ever made. Too bad it’s not original.”
“Old Oscar doesn’t mind. We’re on excellent terms.”
I’d like to think Stephan and I might be, too. I take a breath and dare to ask, “Are you my mysterious benefactor?”
Those gray eyes frack into me. “If I were, it would make your life a bit tidier, wouldn’t it?”
“I doubt my life will ever be tidy. I’m aiming for content.”
“Of course it has occurred to me to give you money,” Stephan says, his voice low and measured. “If and when you truly need it, I will. I’m not going to let you starve or make you beg. But you aren’t quite at the end of your rope, so no, that check didn’t come from me—or Daniel, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Did my brother say “end of your rope” or “end of your hope”? As I sit in the dwindling light, I realize they are the same and I am not at the end of either.
“You don’t have to stick around, now that I’m here,” he offers. “You have the longer drive.”
I gather my things, stopping to show Stephan the newest family portrait. “Your great-niece or great-nephew,” I say.
“Looks just like Dad,” he says.
I kiss my sleeping mother good-bye, and Stephan escorts me to the lobby. “I don’t know where or how, but did you hear—Nicola found the necklace?” he says, as he pushes open the front door.
“I did.” Thank God. “I knew she would.”
“I have big plans for that girl,” Stephan says, then he kisses me on each cheek and sends me on my way.
I arrive home to an unkempt dog of no breed that the Westminster Kennel Club has ever recognized. He greets me like an intimate, jumping so we are nose to nose. The beast races to Luey and pants until she makes him beg for one of the fancy biscuits she buys in fifteen-pound sacks. I don’t want to imagine what part of a wooly sheep “lamb meal” comes from. Even less “chicken meal.” Not to be undone, a wagging Sadie shows up and begs for a biscuit, too, years of training undone.
; “What happened to ‘only dogs under thirty pounds’?” I ask Luey.
“I made an exception for Lester,” she says as the dog chomps, scattering crumbs on the kitchen floor. “He’s Peter’s.”
Proceed with caution: parental peril ahead, I warn myself. “I’m glad you and Peter are friends.”
“We were never friends,” she says, yet her composure tells me something connects them now other than a bridge between disappointment and distrust. “I agreed to take care of my buddy here til Peter gets back from his tour. I couldn’t stand to see Lester in a kennel.” At hearing his name, the dog attaches himself to Luey’s side. When she stops petting him, he starts sniffing Sadie, who graciously returns the favor, happy as any woman around here to have a suitor.
“How’s Nana?” she asks.
“She’s slipped some. Morris moved to Florida.”
“Why would he do that to her?”
“He didn’t have a choice. Family loyalty.”
“Ah, loyalty,” she says.
I see her weighing the good and bad of this notion. I applauded her yesterday when she told me of the derring-do she engineered to find Nicola’s necklace. As I heard the tale, I was sure she was as happy about this as Cola. I like who Louisa Silver-Waltz is becoming.
In the living room, she built a fire, using up the last of this winter’s supply of wood. Soon I’ll have to rustle up some new birch logs for the hearth. But now, I feed Ben’s letter to the flames.
47.
“Gridlock on twenty-seven,” Nat says from his cell phone. I break a sweat through my own gridlock.
Luey departed early this morning for Brooklyn, as nervous as I’ve seen her since she took a driving test. Early in the week I asked to accompany her to meet the couple she’d anointed, out of a field of forty-some candidates, as possible parents for the baby. She wisely refused, knowing I’d be wearing every feeling like a blinking emoticon.
I invited Nat to visit and told myself that for the next twenty-four hours I will think only of sex, which has put me in a born-again virgin state, wondering if I’ll be able to remember which parts go where. I am counting on my animal alter ego to wake from hibernation, though I’m unable to picture rapture, bodice ripping, or reckless endangerment. I’ve never been with a man other than my husband and hope my spinsterish equipment is still in working order. Birds do it, bees do it, even folks with old arthritic knees do it. Why not me? I don’t want to fall in love, necessarily. I just want to do it. I am afraid of what will happen when Nat and I make love, yet more afraid of what will happen if we don’t. I’m far too young for a life sentence of chastity.
“Can’t wait to see you,” says my knight-errant with his Zipcar steed. I picture my erudite Eros striding through the door armed with a wry grin and The New York Review of Books.
I say the same and hope my voice isn’t trembling.
I’m setting my expectations low, not vamping it up and answering the door in only a corset UPS’d from Victoria’s Secret. There was a sale at Target, however, a store I used to visit to load up only on detergent and paper towels, and I have invested in new underwear. Since the last time I shopped in a lingerie department—excuse me, intimate apparel, a term freighted with innuendo—reliable string bikinis have vanished. I wanted to Munch-scream as I hovered in front of the racks, sizing up the alternatives: commodious granny pants my own mother would reject, impermeable “shapewear” engineered by NASA, thongs only slightly bigger than their hangtags, and lacy boy shorts that would sit jauntily on my hips and leave my belly as exposed as a bowl of rice pudding. Butt or belly, butt or belly—which is the lesser evil? I considered going commando, then hedged my bets by picking one of each of the short-style in ecru and in navy blue. Black was too-too.
I’ve done all I can to prep my outer self for a man’s touch, thanks to a series of ablutions as long as childbirth. I’ve pedicured my feet in the fetching shade of Tart Deco, moisturized, waxed, exfoliated, and pumiced. Red wine awaits with cheese from the expensive section of the supermarket. Since a fifty-year-old woman is most flattered by male voices who might still think of her as young, I have set the mood by bringing out the sandpapery geezers—Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Barry White, and Kris Kristofferson. “Help me make it through the night”—or at least the afternoon.
If someone would coerce me into describing sex with Ben, I would have said that seduction improved over time and would pick words like sensual and playful, intuitive and tender. I’m not sure how much of the fulfillment came from him and how much from me. Can I be the same woman with another man? Was he different with Naomi? Stop that, Georgia, I tell myself. Today I’m hoping I will become another woman, as able to excite and satisfy as become excited and satisfied. Maybe I’ll need some new music.
“There’s my Georgia,” Nat says as he walks through the door and returns me to reality.
“There’s my Nat.” I wriggle my hands underneath his winter coat and thick turtleneck while Sadie and the lot greet him with the same boundless enthusiasm they might display if one of their beloveds returned from a tour in Afghanistan or a drive to the dump.
And then we kiss. “Now that’s a greeting,” he says as he drops his coat on the floor.
“No, this is,” I say, and wrap my arm around his waist as I lead him upstairs. Ben always ran first thing in the morning, “before he knew what hit him” and had a chance to change his mind. In this spirit, I’ve decided to take Nat immediately to my bedroom, and as I thank Ben for the pointer, tell him he can leave now. He’s not invited to this party.
“You’re like silk,” Nat says as he strokes me.
When a lover murmurs a cliché, what woman isn’t willing to consider it original and accurate? I have no language to return, or any wish to talk, only a caress here, a thrust there. The bedroom shades are half-drawn for maximal privacy and minimal cellulite exposure. When we start, I am overly aware of awkwardness—new sounds, new smell, new strokes—and I begin to doubt that making love in this bedroom will offer the home-field advantage I thought it might provide. But then I close my eyes and as Nat and I find our rhythm, I realize I am in no hurry to move away from this present perfect tense, our own rough draft of lovemaking grammar. He’s not an unblemished specimen and neither am I and it doesn’t matter. He’s had a wife—for eighteen years—and I’ve had a husband, but they are in the past, relegated to photo albums and, at least for me, a lobotomized portion of my brain. When we end, I turn and touch Nat’s face, glad to scratch this accomplishment off my list so we can do it again.
“How was your week?” he asks, exactly like a returning boyfriend might, as I fit myself into the V of his shoulder.
I don’t need to check the clock. “I’ll be hearing from Luey soon, hopefully. She met with a couple who want to adopt her baby.”
“I can’t imagine any of that—it must be hell—and I have a pretty good imagination.” He leers Groucho-like so I recognize the compliment.
I’ve tried not to lecture Luey on what she should and shouldn’t do, but I’m sure I’m about as transparent as a cellophane noodle. “This is almost the last situation in which I ever imagined my family,” I say to Nat. The last is Ben’s betrayal, because even if he didn’t leave me for Naomi, he considered it—and who’s to say if he had lived, he wouldn’t have changed his mind? And why am I thinking about this now, damnit, when I want to return to the moment of having made love to Nat? Mother trumps tigress, however, and my overriding concern is what Luey will do about her child. I do not want to lose my grandchild. I want her to keep the baby.
“You’re strong, Georgia,” he says. “One of the top fifty things I love about you.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“I’m already there.”
I had forgotten about the ancient art of postcoital conversation, where you need to display no wit to elicit a smile. After briefly drowsing under
the covers, twined around each other, we begin again, a little less minimalist—classic with an omnivorous twist or two.
After round two, I watch Nat sleep, taking note of how natural he looks sharing my bed, and how unlike Ben, who spread his long arms and legs over three-fourths of the mattress. Nat is compact and pulls me close, as if he wants to make sure I won’t leave. I shut my eyes and doze. When I wake, it is past six. Nat is still here, and not just here but comfortably asleep.
I tiptoe downstairs. Luey has come and gone. A note says she’s meeting her friend Marc for dinner. I am tempted to call Luey, and am proud as I resist. I will need to wait longer for the big reveal.
The cheese and wine remain where I left them. I pour myself a glass while I sort the mail Luey’s brought in and left on the table. Two plant catalogs, gas and electric bills, a Brown alumni bulletin, and a letter from Westchester Hills, the woodland cemetery where Ben is buried a stone’s throw from George and Ira Gershwin, Tony Randall, and a mausoleum full of Guggenheims.
“Dear Ms. Silver-Waltz,” it begins. “In Jewish tradition it is customary for the grave marker to be put in place and an unveiling ceremony to be held no later than one year after the death. While many families wait until almost the full year has passed, an unveiling may be done sooner. In Israel, the stone is usually placed soon after the first thirty days of mourning. Please let us know your intentions on behalf of Benjamin T. Silver . . . .”
The kind sirs of Westchester Hills go on to suggest a variety of establishments where I, the bereaved consumer, might purchase a tasteful headstone. They suggest that it would be wise to place my order several months in advance of the unveiling and to begin considering an appropriate message.
On that score, Ben had something in mind. We stopped at a cemetery once in Southampton and he was taken by Jack Dempsey’s epitaph: A gentle man and a gentleman. I’m thinking more along the lines of, Husband—father—son—philanderer.
