Maggie Brown & Others

by Peter Orner

  Both lawyers had spent the good part of two decades doing midlevel stuff. Drunk driving, assault, drugs, drugs, drugs. Occasionally either Dave or Arthur would take a murder or a rape case to trial, and when that happened the other would hold down his friend’s calendar until he got out from under the trial. Dave and Arthur were considered by their peers, and the judges they appeared before daily, as solid, if somewhat interchangeable, professionals on a small scale. They were lawyers. Not great lawyers, decent lawyers. They got paid. You could do a lot worse than Dave Pfeiffer or Arthur Blau. You want it free, call the public defenders.

  In June of the year the client took off like an eagle for a turkey sandwich in the sky, Arthur dropped dead of a coronary while jogging along the lakefront in Evanston. He’d just turned forty-nine. Dave couldn’t help but think it goes to show you about exercise. Arthur’s wife called Dave’s office from the hospital.

  “What can I say?” said a voice.

  “Pardon me?” Dave said.

  “What can I say?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Liz. Arthur Blau’s wife.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I’ll say.”

  At the hospital Dave took Liz aside and told her he’d take all of Arthur’s pending cases and explain the situation to his clients. “I’ll hold down the fort, collect all the fees, and take as many cases as I can. I’ll petition a judge to reassign the others, which under the circumstances shouldn’t—” She was tall, taller than Dave, and had a kind, bewildered face. High cheekbones. Dave had a sudden notion, where it came from he wasn’t exactly sure, that although she was especially bewildered at that moment, for her, bewilderment itself was a near-continual state. If ever there was something he understood. She wasn’t looking him in the eyes. It was as if she’d chosen to focus exclusively on his left ear in this difficult moment. Dave completely forgot whatever it was he was trying to say. He remembered that Arthur had once mentioned, offhand, that his wife was a therapist and that to her all defendants were innocent because whatever they’d been driven to do could be explained by the damage done to them in their childhoods. What had Arthur said she’d said? Fewer jails, more…what was it? Ice-skating rinks?

  “What are your plans?” Dave asked.

  “Plans?” she said.

  “I mean with the body.”

  “Oh. Yes,” she said. “The body. Years ago, Art said he’d rather be cremated than stuffed in a hole in Skokie.”

  She stopped. They stood in the crowded hall looking at each other. Nurses hustled by in sensible shoes. And Dave thought, There are people who are alive, and there are people who aren’t, and at no time in his life had this dividing line been so starkly defined.

  “Did he have it attested?” Dave asked.

  “What attested?” she said.

  “His desire to be cremated. Did he have it—”

  “He said it under his breath at my mother’s funeral.”

  “There’s no will?”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “How do I—”

  “I’ll check with the county clerk. Who’s the attorney?”

  “You. Arthur said you were—”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  She was clearly making this up, which struck Dave as—no other word for it, inappropriate as it was under the circumstances—joyous.

  “Is it what you want?” Dave asked.

  “What?” she said.

  “For him to be cremated.”

  “You’re asking me? I last saw the man at breakfast. He said the coffee tastes like plastic. He thought something might be wrong with the coffee maker. I said the coffee always tastes like plastic, you’re just noticing it now?”

  She looked at him differently this time. Her eyes opened slightly wider, and somewhere in there, he could have sworn, she was laughing, not happy laughing, but Jesus H. Christ laughing—

  “Cremated,” she said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Dave said.

  “Do they have viewings at such places? I mean before? The children will want to see him.”

  “Oh, the funeral home will—”

  “Yes, a funeral home. I’ve got to call a—I feel a little woozy.”

  “No! Consider it…” Resisting a gallant urge, he just trailed off.

  He thought of her—nearly a year he thought of her. He avoided the deli out of loyalty, as if the bellowing sandwich makers could see into the pit of his soul. But you stare at a phone enough, for that many mornings, that many afternoons, a certain point you pick it up.

  “Liz?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Dave Pfeiffer.”

  “Who?”

  “Attorney Dave—Arthur’s friend.”

  “Oh, Arthur’s friend.”

  “Right,” Dave said. “I just wanted to follow up. Check in. If there’s anything you need. Any loose ends I can attend to?”

  She was silent for what felt to Dave like a long time. He cupped his palm over the phone so she wouldn’t hear his breathing, which was now panting. He listened to her not answer. This was familiar turf. He’d always trusted silence. Hours could go by at home and he wouldn’t say a word. To his family he’d become a piece of furniture. At work, he spent much of his day listening to people. There are, Dave often told himself, glib lawyers and quiet lawyers. If there was any secret to Dave Pfeiffer’s limited success it had to do with his knowing when to keep his mouth shut. Judges rewarded him for it. And it instilled confidence in clients. When confronted with his placid face, they often spilled out the one thing they’d been holding back, the one thing he needed to know.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t think of anything I need.”

  So much for that. Dave, obliterating any semblance of strategy, shouted into the receiver: “Liz! I want to take you to dinner! Liz!”

  A beat, then two. She said she wasn’t in the mood to go out, but “Yes, dinner.” She hung up.

  A few baffled minutes later he called her back.

  “When?”

  “Tonight,” she said, and hung up again.

  His old friend had lived out in Evanston. He’d known this, of course, but he was unprepared for the opulence of the house. A large yellow-brick near mansion, big yawning windows. Only old money lived this close to the lake. Arthur never gave that off. Maybe it was hers? And hadn’t she had that look in the hospital? What look? Like she’d never lacked for anything, but since she had no idea what she wanted, the not-lacking had never been especially a boon. Dave remained motionless, rooted to the front walk. From every window there was a light. He wanted to turn and run the hell back to his car.

  The front door opened. “Oh,” she called out. “Flowers.”

  “Flowers?” He said it like the word made no sense. As if he wasn’t holding a cellophane-wrapped bouquet from the Dominick’s. He watched her watching him and thought of his flab, his rumpledness, his guilt, his unhappiness—his atrophied love for his wife, Ellen, who at this moment was probably at home reading, as she often did this time of day, near dusk, with the light off in the family room. Twilight, she called it. Dave would come into the room and try to turn on the lights.

  How can you see to read?

  The dark hasn’t caught up to my eyes.

  You always say that.

  Just let me be, Dave, would you?

  Helpless, he stood on the walk holding flowers. And yet later, after dinner, as she held the same hand that had held the flowers and gently led him up the carpeted stairs, it wasn’t just that it made sense, it was that it couldn’t have happened any other way, as if the two of them were enacting some strange and perfect ritual of grief. Each time she passed a light switch, she swatted it off. Room by room the house darkened. At dinner, they’d hardly spoken.

  “And the kids?” Dave asked.

  “Sleepovers,” she said.

  The bedroom was large as a hotel suite. Her fingers were slightly damp in his palm. They stood there, and that’s whe
n she began to talk to him. About where she was from, about how she’d met Arthur, about their years together, happy years, dull years, about how after his death she tried to immerse herself in work, how she took on more clients, how every day, for hours, she listened to people talk and talk.

  “Everyone’s so bottled up, you know? I’ll be sitting there in my office and listening to someone going on and on about their relationships—that’s mostly what people talk to me about, of course, their relationships. Such a ding-dong word. Why ‘ships’? Why not just ‘relations’? And I’ll think, It’s the talk that’s weighing them down. That if they could for once just get out from under it, they’d be cured—cured of what, who really knows—but at least they’d be a little lighter on their feet. The talk, though, just breeds more talk. I know I sound ridiculous. I’ve been doing this—what?—nearly twenty years? And suddenly, I think, it works, the talking, it works. Or at least it could work. If it weren’t so inexhaustible.”

  She sat on the bed and took her socks off.

  “Shouldn’t there be a point where you could truly drain yourself of it? But maybe talk is the only truly inexhaustible resource there is. And I get paid to—I’m giddy. But you know, your clients, they must talk a blue—”

  “Yes and no. My clients don’t talk so much about their relationships.”

  “Is something wrong?” she said.

  “I’m worried I’m crushing you.”

  “I’m not glass.”

  “Liz,” he said. “Liz.”

  “Don’t think I didn’t love him.”

  “Never would I think—”

  “Not all the time,” she said.

  “Who could?” And he heard himself groan with such unexpected pleasure that he apologized.

  “Don’t—” she said.

  Eventually, they slept. But it wasn’t really sleep. It was groggy murmuring, incoherent conversation, and squeezing. When Dave did get up, an hour before dawn, and groped around for his things, he could find only one shoe. Liz, he whispered, as if her name alone could help him find a renegade shoe in the pale dark.

  Padanaram

  You don’t talk it away.”

  “I’m not talking anything away,” he said. “I’m existing.”

  A doomed trick, to come back to a place they’d once been happy, as if the location truly had anything to do with it. But, she thought, it’s all we have, all we ever have, this possibility of return, which might be another word for faith, though faith is what she felt she no longer had much right to have—and look, here she was, faking it. Faking it was the only way she could keep the visions away. When you think there’s going to be great change and it doesn’t happen—what else is there to do but fake being who you once were? So here they’d returned, to this speck of a New England fishing village outside New Bedford.

  “The beach?” he said. “How about the little public beach that had those broken chairs? Remember?”

  And so they walked, silent, the three blocks to the ocean, and she was relieved to find the chairs gone. They sat on the grass, and he talked about real estate. How it always comes down to real estate. “They’ll ruin this place, too. They’ve half done it already. Fishing village? Are you kidding me? All I see are yachts.” He liked to rail against the rich—the looters!—and his hatred was as genuine and heartfelt as his desire for the money he could never seem to get ahold of, much less hoard. He made no attempt to square the contradiction. She loved him for his open-faced, full-throated hypocrisy. Hating what you wanted seemed perfectly natural to her. Now he was blaming the disappearance of the old broken chairs on the rich, how they were always trying to improve what didn’t need improving, thereby ruining everything they touched. For her part, though she didn’t say it out loud and was hardly listening to him anyway, the loss of the chairs signified a difference between last time and now, and she was grateful that the chairs at least respected this by making themselves scarce, removed by the malicious rich or not.

  “Would be nice,” he said, “to break some more chairs and leave them here.”

  She looked at the water, at the bobbing sailboats, at the thing that looked like a floating doghouse. That was here last time. She almost pointed it out to him but thought acknowledging it might make it vanish, or at least look different. An old boat with a little shingled roof moored out there in the bay beside the sailboats. It made no sense. She was grateful the broken chairs were gone while at the same time relieved the doghouse boat was still here. There you had it. You want it to be different; you want it to be the same. Of course, there was still time. The odds were against them now, or her, rather—she was forty-one—but of course there was still time. And what she’d gone through happened to other women every hour of every day. Nothing unique about it. She’d miscarried (what man came up with the terminology? missed connection, misadventure, swing and a miss!) once before, in her early thirties, and then she’d been relieved. Then, there’d been no grief whatsoever. Grief, she thought, is situational, like everything else. Location, location, location, she could hear him saying, except that now he was on to something else: where to have dinner. She half wanted him to notice the doghouse boat on his own, half didn’t. Is this the root of my problem? Chronic opposing wants? Yes, there’s still time, and yes, they’d try, but can’t a person mourn even when the reasons are lacking? There’s something so ruthless about optimism. The damp grass began to seep through her sundress. Later this same afternoon, at the little hotel next to the yacht club, they’ll undress, and their fucking will be a distraction, a welcome one. She always enjoyed hotel sex because to hell with the sheets. She always left a good tip on the night table. Now it also would allow her to express her rage at him—yes, at his talk, his constant, futile, unceasing river of talk—but at God, too, an entity, an idea, she hadn’t thought much about until now. Now she practically believed in a him. A great big man-sized eyeball in the sky watching your every move made sense. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

  He can’t make up his mind, either.

  The boats bobbed in the water, and the arm of shoreline sheltering the small bay curled inward.

  “You’re not in the mood for fish?” he said. “How come? Last time—”

  Later, at least, she’ll moan loud enough to scare the Sunday sailors.

  My Dead

  Her name was Beth. We didn’t know each other. We took her car and headed to Missouri from Chicago. I remember that by the time we’d gone a few miles south on the Stevenson, we’d already run out of things to say. But for some reason we both decided, without spelling it out, not to push it. Nothing was going to come of this, and it was all right just to let the silence be and listen to the radio. We were on our way to a séance she’d heard about from an old high-school friend. Beth had grown up in a small town southwest of St. Louis, and the séance was being held nearby, at an abandoned air-force base.

  A couple of years out of college, I was waiting tables at Ed Debevic’s. The shtick at Ed’s was to be rude to the customers. Tourists couldn’t get enough. They sure as hell didn’t come for the food. It was billed as an authentic Chicago experience. Eat an overcooked burger, get insulted. Hey, lardbutt, stuff more grub in that trap and your stomach’s gonna go kapow. And I’d say this stuff in exaggerated Chicagoese. Suburban born, I couldn’t pull it off. My tables came away disappointed that they hadn’t received the full-on Ed’s treatment. Also, I was a crap waiter to begin with. I’d forget waters, put orders through late, drop plates.

  Beth wasn’t a tourist. She’d come for lunch with a couple of girlfriends to celebrate her birthday. I said, “You’re my fifth old maid today. This is a restaurant, not a nursing home. I’m kidding.” On her way out she wrote her number on a napkin, handed it to me, and demanded, in front of her two friends, “Call me.” One nice thing about Ed’s was that it encouraged patrons to be uninhibited as well. That was the goofy religion of the place.

  A couple of nights later, over drinks at a bar on West Roscoe, she told me she
wasn’t the kind of person who ordered people to call her. Something about my face had said that I needed to be told what to do. And that’s when she told me about this séance near St. Louis. Did I want to check it out? If we left right away, we could probably make it. The fact that we both had work in the morning only made it more spontaneous and awesome. We headed out into the night, exalted, until, like I said, our conversation dried up before we were even out of the city. It was as if the intrepid adventure were already over, and now we just had a shitlong ride ahead of us, which we did.

  When I woke up, we were already past St. Louis, and Beth had turned off onto a narrow two-lane highway that cut through a forest. We drove another hour and a half before we reached the base. As per her friend’s instructions, we ditched the car beneath a stand of trees. Beth didn’t need any help climbing the fence. She practically leaped over it, and I had to sprint to catch up with her as she strode along the ghost streets, past rows of empty barracks.

  “What’s the hurry?” I said. “Everybody’s already dead.”

  No answer.

  When we got to hangar 32, the séance had already begun. About a dozen people were standing in a circle holding hands. At the center of the circle was a flowerpot. Two people unclasped their hands to allow Beth and me to join. A bearded guy in a black watch cap was mumbling with authority. I admit that at first I found the whole thing mesmerizing. Coming upon this group in the darkness of that enormous hangar, the man chanting, the single flame throwing shadows onto the corrugated walls. There was something weirdly sacred about it all, and I thought, Right, if you want to commune with the dead, of course what you have to do is drive across the night to Missouri.