by Melissa Bank
“We’ll pick up a pair of stilettos on the way home,” he said.
I said, “I need to go back to Philadelphia.”
“Your mother’s there,” he said.
I told him that Henry had finally arrived, too.
“So, can’t you stay?”
“No,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said. “Not even one goddamned day?”
“My father’s about to die,” I said. “And you’re about to get better.” I asked him who I could get to help us out, and as I said it I realized how few friends Archie had.
“Call Mickey,” he said.
“Isn’t he kind of clownish for this situation?”
“This situation calls for a clown.” He hummed “Send in the Clowns.”
~
Mickey arrived, wearing cutoffs and yellow high-tops. He was unshaven, and his hair looked greasy. He bent down and kissed Archie’s cheek.
Archie made a face.
“I’m sorry I have to go,” I said.
Mickey said, “I’m going to steal some drugs,” and went into the hall.
I could see how hard it was for Archie to say, “Stay just a little longer?” and I took a later train back to Philadelphia.
XV
When Henry picked me up at the station, he told me that Dad was on a respirator now and heavily sedated. He was being kept alive, but that was it.
At the hospital, the respirator made a big inhale-exhale sound, breathing for my father.
I held his hand. But I couldn’t tell if he was still in there.
~
Henry called friends and relatives, and they started coming.
~
Once everyone had left, I sat in the chair beside my father’s bed again. I thought of Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis,” and how Gregor’s sister knew to feed him garbage once he’d become a cockroach.
I tried to explain to Henry that this was the transcendent act I wanted to do now.
He said, “Please don’t feed Dad garbage.”
“I don’t know what Dad wants me to do,” I said. “I just know I’m not doing it.” Henry took my hand and held it.
~
My father died later that night.
XVI
I called Archie at home. He said all the right things, but I didn’t really hear any of them. He asked when the funeral was, and I told him.
“Do you want me to come?” he said.
“No,” I said, “I’m fine,” as though answering the question he’d asked.
~
Sophie drove down. She stayed with me in my room, and scratched my back while I talked.
~
My mother’s mother didn’t come to our house until the funeral. She spoke to the caterers. She looked over the trays of meat and salads that would be served after the funeral when people would come back to the house. She clicked around the kitchen in her high heels and talked to my mother about who was coming and how many people and— Remember Dolores Greenspan? She called. I thought that maybe my grandmother couldn’t bring up my father. But then I realized that she was trying to help: make everything appear fine and sooner or later it would be. This was what she’d taught my mother.
~
My mother, Henry, and I got into the black limousine that had come to take us to the funeral. When a woman I didn’t recognize walked up the driveway, Henry said, “Who’s she?”
My mother said that she was a neighbor who’d offered to stay here during the funeral, when burglars might come, thinking the house would be empty. “Mrs. Caliphano,” she said to me.
The woman waved, and my mother nodded.
“She seems like a nice lady,” my brother said. “I hope they don’t tie her up.”
~
The night before Henry went back to Boston and I to New York, I told him that I hated to think that Dad was worrying about me when he died.
“He wasn’t worried,” Henry said.
“How do you know?”
“I was there when you called,” Henry said. “After he hung up, I said that I’d be happy to kill Archie if he wanted me to. And Dad said, ‘Thanks, but I think Jane can take care of herself.’”
XVII
Archie was kind and patient. He kept fresh flowers on the table. He somehow found soft-shell crabs for dinner, even though they were out of season. He drew a bath for me every evening when I came home from work. A tonic for the spirit, he said.
~
He invited Mickey to spend Labor Day weekend with us in the Berkshires, maybe hoping to break the spell of my grief.
Mickey told a lot of jokes, most of which were of the animals-sitting-around-talking variety, my favorite. He did little comedy bits: after lunch, he turned to me and in a twangy voice said, “I have weird thoughts sometimes. Do you think that’s weird?”
It hurt not to laugh. Finally, I asked him to give up on me for a while.
Sunday, when they went to play golf, I stayed behind at the house. I took the manuscript for Mickey’s new book out to the picnic table underneath the apple tree.
I adored Mickey. I thought he was sweet to try so hard to make me feel better. But he irked me that weekend as he never had before. The tiniest things bugged me—like, his not washing his cereal bowl or coffee mug. I even wondered if Archie had noticed—
and it bothered me, thinking he hadn’t.
Monday night, Archie called Mickey and me in from the meadow, saying, “You kids ready to go?” And I realized that what I’d been feeling that weekend was sibling rivalry.
XVIII
There’s a passageway connecting Port Authority to Times Square—the Eighth Avenue subways to the Seventh—and one morning when I looked up I saw a poem in the eaves, sequential like the Burma Shave billboards:
Overslept,
so tired.
If late,
get fired.
Why the worry?
Why the pain?
Go back home.
Do it again.
Something changed then. I saw my life in scale: it was just my life. It was not momentous, and only now did I recognize that it had once seemed so to me; that was while my father was watching.
I saw myself the way I’d seen the cleaning women in the building across the street. I was just one person in one window.
Nobody was watching, except me.
~
At the office, Mimi told me that there was another of Dorrie’s acquisitions that needed to be edited.
I stood at her desk, looking at the bulky manuscript. “Wow,” I said. “This is a long one.”
“The author’s been calling me and yesterday he called Richard,” she said, referring to the editorial director. “So it’s sort of a rush.”
I didn’t pick up the manuscript. I pinged the rubberband. “Did you look at it?” I asked, stalling.
She turned her head—not a no, not a yes. “Jane,” she said, “I can do it myself over the weekend. But it would be great if you could help out.”
It was hard turning down an opportunity to be great. When I did, I saw her delicate eyebrows go up.
~
At Tortilla Flats, Jamie introduced his current girlfriend, a waitress named Petal.
She had a little daisy tattoo on her ankle and seemed light and sweet and sure of herself in the particular way a very young woman can.
At our table, I asked Sophie if I was ever like that.
“Like what?” she said.
“Like Petal in any way,” I said.
She said, “You used to be twenty-two.”
“Jesus,” I said, “Jamie must be thirty-five.”
“Twisted,” she said, and got up to go the bathroom.
I looked around me. It was Thursday, a party night, and I could feel that bar-generated electricity—the buzz and spark of sex-to-be. Everyone appeared to be having a great time, flirting and drinking and half dancing to R and B, which I loved and never heard at Archie’s.
When Sophie returned, I said, “I
think being with Archie makes me feel older than I am.”
“You do live his way,” she said. “It’s an older person’s life.”
XIX
Archie was elated that I felt better.
On our way up to the Berkshires, he asked me to think about moving in with him.
I didn’t speak.
He forced a laugh and said, “I didn’t mean you had to start thinking about it right this minute.”
~
Saturday morning, I felt the way I had as a child, waking up in the summer and sensing what I could expect that day in the suburbs: the dry cleaner at the back door to drop off my father’s suits, the damp smell of the changing room at the public pool, the dusty shade in the garage.
Maybe Archie could sense it. He suggested we go to the swimming hole, a muddy pond he’d called the Butthole and had refused to go to in our last life. We swam in old sneakers.
On the way home, we stopped at the farm stand for vegetables and fruit. He made dinner and we had a picnic underneath the apple tree in back. He read Washington Square to me by flashlight.
When he got into bed and I smelled his aftershave, I said, “Can we just fool around for a while?”
“What does that mean?”
I couldn’t think how to say it without hurting him. “Not be so focused on The Problem.
You know,” I said, “less goal oriented.”
“Goal oriented?” he said. “What kind of talk is that? That’s like interact and lifestyle.”
He turned his back to me. “You know I hate that kind of talk.”
In the morning, he wouldn’t speak to me. I said, “You’re mad just because I used the expression goal oriented?”
He said, “I don’t like the way you talk to me.”
~
We drove back to New York in silence.
“Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,” I said finally.
He said, “What?”
I said, “I’m willing to play one of your stupid road games, if you want to.”
“I don’t feel much like playing one of my stupid road games,” he said. “But thanks.”
On the West Side Highway, he said, “What street are you on?” It didn’t seem strange to him that he didn’t know.
When he stopped at my building, I said, “I tried to talk to you about something important.”
He leaned over me and opened my car door.
I went upstairs into my apartment. It had that unlived-in feel. Dust on my aunt’s pictures. No diet root beer in the refrigerator.
I got a bottle of scotch from her liquor cabinet and one of her crystal glasses. I went out to the terrace. It was raining a little. After a few minutes, though, I heard voices coming from the terrace below mine; I saw a tall woman and a shorter man. I couldn’t make out words, but they seemed to be having an argument, and I didn’t want to hear it.
I went into my aunt’s study and sat at the desk where she’d written her novels. I thought I might write something myself. But I wound up just writing what I’d said to Archie and he’d said back.
I got into bed and turned off the light. Lying there, I felt like Archie had sent me to my room.
Then I heard my father’s voice saying his usual phrases:
Life is unfair, my love.
I can’t make the decision for you.
Don’t take the easy way out, Janie.
Then he was gone. The quiet sounded loud. I got dressed and walked to Seventh Avenue for a cab. I let myself into Archie’s.
Upstairs, I got into bed with him. He turned away from me. I put my arms around him.
“I’m here about the apartment,” I said. “You advertised for a roommate? A smoker who can’t name the capitals?”
“I can’t talk to you about our problem with sex,” he said. “I can hardly talk to myself about it.”
~
I asked him to tell me the truth about drinking, and he did.
He’d been drinking all along. He told me all the times he could remember. I went back over each one. Then I asked about other times when I’d sensed something was wrong, and went back over the years to the first time—when I’d gone over his house to tell him that Jamie and I had broken up.
This was how I’d felt finding out about my father; it was like getting the subtitles after the movie.
Archie tried to reassure me. He told me that he was not drinking now, and he swore to me that he wouldn’t again. He took Antabuse and kept the poker chip in his pocket.
But these had failed him before—or he’d failed them. He would drink again, I knew that. It was part of who he was.
XX
I asked Mimi to have lunch with me. At the restaurant, she told me I needed protein and suggested I order the liver or steak with a good cabernet.
When the waiter came to the table, I told him that I’d have the salmon.
“I’ll have the same,” she said.
She said that she’d come to this restaurant for lunch alone after her own father had died. “I just sat at the bar and ordered soup.” She told me that she was crying when an ex-boyfriend happened to walk in. “He sat down and put his arm around me,” she said.
“He seemed to think I was still upset about our breakup.”
I laughed, and she said, “Boys always think everything is about them.”
I thought, Whereas everything is really about you, Me-Me. But I understood her now as I hadn’t before. I understood that she needed to be told who she was. Just as I had.
She said that her father’s death had been the hardest thing in her life. “We are all children until our fathers die.”
I said, “I feel sort of like an adolescent again.”
She gave me a look of older-sister understanding.
“At work, I mean.” I said, “I’ve gone backward. If I keep going this way, I’ll be heading down to personnel soon to take a typing test.”
She started to disagree, but I stopped her. “I’ve become your assistant,” I said. “I used to be an associate editor.”
She said, “That’s still your title.”
“I need to be one, though,” I said. “I’m not asking for a promotion,” I said. “I’m telling you that I need to be un-demoted—or else I have to quit.”
Her face was even paler than usual, which I hadn’t thought possible. I could see the blue of a vein just under her eye. “You haven’t exactly proven yourself.”
“I know,” I said. “You’re right.”
“I have to think about this,” she said.
I told her I was letting her pick up the check, on the chance that I’d soon be unemployed.
~
“You’ve got balls,” Archie said.
“Could you put that some other way?” I said.
He said, “But what if she lets you quit?”
I told him I thought she would. “I don’t think I belong in publishing anyway.”
He looked at me as though I’d said I wanted to sleep with another man.
“It’s all about judging,” I said. “I’m not sure I’m the judge type. I might be more of the criminal type.”
“Judgment is power,” he said.
I said, “I thought knowledge was power.”
“Why are we talking like this?” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. But I told him that I didn’t think I wanted power. “I think I want freedom.”
He said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
I said, “You’re sinking to my level.”
~
Mimi let me resign. “I feel terrible about this,” she said. “Maybe I could help you find another job.”
“No,” I said. “I’m quitting publishing cold turkey.”
She said, “I feel the way I did when my first husband left me.”
This was a story I wanted to hear.
“He thought he was gay,” she said. “It wasn’t enough for him to leave me, he had to leave my whole sex.”
“Was he
gay?” I asked.
“Of course he was.”
I said, “But you said ‘he thought he was gay.’”
“I think you’re missing my point, Jane.”
We agreed that I would leave in two weeks.
~
I heard Archie turn the key in the door.
He kissed me and said, “What’s the matter?”
“Nada thing,” I said. “I was let quit.”
He said, “Oh, honey,” as though I’d made a terrible mistake.
“Don’t say it like that,” I said. “I’m about to embark on an exciting career as a temp.”
“No,” he said, and he snapped his fingers. “You’ll come work for me at K–-. And be a real associate editor.”
I said, “I could bring you up on charges for that.”
“What?”
“Work harassment in the sexual place.”
~
On my last day of work, I went by Mimi’s office to say goodbye. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” I said.
“Of course,” she said.
“How do you get your eyebrows so perfect?”
“Carmen,” she said, and she wrote down the number of her eyebrowist. Then she sprayed perfume on my wrists one last time, and I was out.
On the subway home, I got a little scared. I remembered the phrase career suicide. But then I thought, Goodbye, cruel job.
~
The following Monday, I went to the temp place. I aced my typing test. I soared through spelling and grammar. I went to the benefits department of a bank, where I typed numbers into a computer and answered the phone.
“Today was the first day of the rest of my life,” I told Archie when I got home. “It was okay. I think the second day of the rest of my life will be better.”
He tried to smile, but it was just a shape his mouth made.
While I was cooking dinner, I found Motown on the radio and danced around the kitchen.
“What is this?” he asked, as though he’d caught me reading a comic book.
I sang along to the music: “I’ll take you there.”
He said, “I live with a teenager.”
“Why are you so upset?” I asked him in bed.
