by Joan Barfoot
And no wonder she wished she’d told someone about being summoned by Lily and Max. She hadn’t, for fear of creating an occasion for mournful, intolerable pity, but now she had an occasion for celebration and no one at hand. She spun happily into a coffee shop a few doors from the gallery, clutching her news to herself—and whose familiar face was that at a window table, glancing up?
“Lynn?”
“Nora?”
Lynn, yes. Long-lost and, to be honest, mainly forgotten high-school acquaintance. Still, how cheerful, running into anyone known. “Want to join me?” asked Lynn. “I’m just taking a break between classes.”
She was still in university, nearly finished a graduate degree in French literature. From high school Nora remembered a skinny girl with the slumpy sort of shoulders that went with being embarrassed by height. She played basketball. What else? Didn’t matter. Now she was slender rather than skinny, willowy rather than slumped. She’d been married for almost two years, and she and her husband had recently acquired a downtown rowhouse. “Oh my God, the mortgage, we’re petrified. But I’ll be teaching soon, and I’ll do that at least till we have kids, so we figure we’ll be okay.” She asked what Nora was doing. “That’s great,” she said, sadly failing, in Nora’s view, to grasp the splendour of Nora’s news.
Still, a sense of occasion and a benign sort of nostalgia caused them to make an appointment for lunch. Nora would meet Lynn at her recently acquired home. “You can meet Philip,” Lynn said, “before we go out.”
Happenstance, accident, random cause and effect.
Three days later Nora pressed the doorbell of a tiny white-stuccoed house attached in each direction up and down the block to other tiny white-stuccoed houses, and found herself facing a lean, grinning, nude man.
It is not necessarily the case that a man will be at his best undraped; some camouflage of chubby portion or dangly bit may be wise, at least for first impressions, but not with Philip. He stood in the doorway fully formed, golden and lithe. Nora stepped back briefly; then, irritated at being so transparently startled, stepped forward again. She did not fall into the trap, either, of looking only into his grey-tinged blue eyes, but allowed her gaze to roam, coolly taking in the square-planted feet, the calves and thighs curling with a moderate crop of dark hair—nothing actually furry or unfortunately bear-like, she noted—long arms, a hand still braced on the door, chest and stomach muscularly but not aggressively outlined, and of course his penis, pinky-purple and wavering, evidently undecided about whether to remain at rest or to rise to an occasion it could, it seemed, already sense.
“I’m here for Lynn,” she said.
“You must be Nora. I’m Philip.”
Lynn’s husband. Not for long.
Lynn, walking fast, click-click on little heels into the front hall, was fully dressed in forest-green linen trousers, matching blouse, golden bracelets. “Philip!” she cried. “Good God,” and turning to Nora she said, “Honestly, I just never know what he’s going to do next,” and there was a pride in her tone, a self-satisfaction that rendered Nora unsympathetic.
Nora and Lynn went off for their lunch; nothing monumentally life-altering happened as immediately as that. But something did happen and obviously they then failed to pursue their old loose, unnecessary acquaintanceship. They were all young. Domestic shufflings, while awkward, weren’t necessarily excruciating. Everyone involved still had plenty of future, no need to resent whole wasted decades. Naturally a certain array of emotions required display, there was the usual script to follow of injuries suffered, delight achieved. Lynn’s role, for instance, was to be bitter. “Betrayed,” she cried dramatically, and repeatedly, to many, many people, “by my husband and my friend.” As if Nora had been her only friend, as Philip was her only husband. As if Nora had really been her friend at all.
Philip said it was Nora’s assessing regard on the doorstep that first intrigued and appealed to him. “No flinching or blushing.” Later he was drawn by “your brightness, and that drive and desire you have. Also your tits.” As for answering the door naked, he said, “Well, you know what we’d been doing. Probably because I was trying to make Lynn run late. Or wanted her to stay home—one of those power-plays you won’t fall for. And maybe to embarrass her. And to test her old pal. And then there’s the fact I can just be kind of a pig.” His smile was winsome, designed to contradict his own words; or, if Nora failed to grasp that much, intended to humbly seek praise for his frankness.
The mark, one of the marks, of the stray: the conscious adorability, the obsequious, vulnerable, soft-belly exposure. Beth was a stray; Sophie too, in her way. Was Philip as well? Surely not.
He was large and beautiful and bold. Nora was small and optimistic and brutal. He said that when he married Lynn almost two years before he opened that door, “It didn’t quite feel right, but I didn’t know why. Now I do.’ And what can, or should, stand in the face of right feeling? Certainly not wrong feeling. So, goodbye Philip-and-Lynn.
Now, goodbye Philip.
Quite the abandoner he has been.
Is this swift transformation to rage normal when somebody dies? Because Nora is suddenly furious.
It has been her conviction that once over her own admittedly fierce hump of rage and betrayal, Lynn’s life went just fine. She remarried, an evidently compatible and clever man who does something financial. He has been more agreeable than Philip on the subject of children—it was contentious, Philip said, that he was firmly opposed while Lynn was so keen she spoke of babies as if they were already formed up inside her, hammering to get out. The sort of thing, it seemed to Nora, that should be discussed before marrying, although hardly her place to say so. Now Lynn has two triumphantly out-of-the-womb, into-the-world children who must be getting into their teens. She also not only has several degrees but teaches something or other to do with languages at university.
Sensibly, Nora asked Philip before they married, “Do you think it’s mutant that I seriously do not care to have kids? Can you foresee changing your mind? Because I can’t see changing mine.”
“No,” he said, “and no. Thank God,” and got himself a vasectomy. In so many matters, large and small, they were—well, soulmates would be excessive, and Nora opposes excess in most of its forms, but at least they were in general and on large issues highly compatible.
That particular choice was an easy one, although not everyone believes that. Why would they want children? They cared for what they each did, and for each other. Other people might rattle on about what a unique form of love children inspire, no doubt true, but there are other unique forms of love, and other constellations for purposeful lives. It was also noticeable that in the lives of others, children were rarely unmixed blessings. They were a good deal more than love, they were often enough heartbreak and wrong turns and decades of fretfulness, not only triumph. “We live as we choose,” Philip used to tell people, which could sound selfish but as he also said, “What’s wrong with that?” He meant they were smart enough to live according to their own natures, mutant or not.
“So we’re selfish and smug,” they could, and did, laugh.
Lynn was so young when Philip vanished on her, she had no end of fresh chances for her quite different desires. Nora’s hard heart was right; but now here’s a thought: is it proper to advise a first wife of her secondhand, out-of-date semi-widowhood?
Imagine, she and Lynn might discover sisterhood over Philip’s dead body. Reminisce. Contrast and compare. Lynn might also have tips on how to move on after Philip; because at the moment, Nora can’t make out a future. Life goes on? Yes, she supposes it has to, but how?
She puts a hand on her chest. Of course her heart is still thumping away in there all to itself. Selfish things, hearts. Focused entirely on their own survival.
What if Max and Lily hadn’t given Nora reason to celebrate? What if Nora hadn’t run into Lynn in that coffee shop, what if, in the mild spirit of mutual benevolence, they hadn’t made lunch plans, what if s
he hadn’t knocked on Lynn’s door? Here he is, that young man, with that young man’s grin, full of mischief—fucking Philip, how dare he? Nora’s hand slams back into the bare white wall behind her, hurting her fist. The house feels bursting with one pent-up thing and another—pain and grief and bewilderment coalescing and transforming to fury, sizzling and ripping its way through rooms, hearts and limbs, cracking off doorframes and walls, crashing into windows, ricocheting all around, a great storm erupting—fucking Philip, absolutely.
There must be thousands upon thousands of ameliorating, tender scenes of sweetness and thoughtfulness, of generosity and kindness. Nora’s just momentarily unplugged from most of her history. She can see perfectly well that beautiful young man at the door, and she can see perfectly well the quite different, middle-aged, marble-ized man on the pillow beside her this morning. What she can’t make out are the Philips in between, the progression that gradually and unmomentously transformed the first into the last.
Change is grief, grief is rage. Is that true?
And on the subject of change, grief and rage, what about Sophie, was there anything to that, given Sophie’s plush and available presence? As Nora’s mother said, a man who will break one promise will have little problem with two, and she was, in her small way, an expert. Nora has nothing like proof, only little pricklings sometimes, like last night as they played Scrabble and she saw Sophie and Philip glance at each other when Beth, typically simple-minded, threw down the word “lay.” Surely adults would not be exchanging looks over a dumb word like lay, too juvenile and unworthy, but still, sometimes recently there’s been something like a faint perfume in the air of a room containing both Sophie and Philip.
Why would it matter?
To stoke fury. To ward off more sorrow. To blame Philip further.
Given time and the right moment, Nora might have tackled Philip flat out. It’s been strangely more difficult to enquire of Sophie if she’s had designs, and moreover hands, on Nora’s husband. Having endured what she has, Sophie might consider Philip fair compensation. Perhaps there are also large price tags for Nora’s indulgences, and those rewards and costs may include the bodies, if not necessarily the lost hearts, of husbands. Now who will ever know what happened to Philip’s heart, besides that it’s very likely what blew up on him overnight. Over and over, again and again, moment after moment and hour after hour as Nora lies in Beth’s bed, there’s his first face, here’s his last one. What comes between?
On the day they’d planned, they would have been driving home by now from their lovely long lunch in the city with Max. Sophie would be considering dinner, Beth would be lounging about doing whatever it is she does when her limbs and expressions aren’t being turned in various useful directions. Once together around the table they would talk about each other’s days, Nora’s and Philip’s in particular, since theirs would have been more interesting than the others’. Later they might watch TV or read, chatting now and then about what they were watching or reading, or about other subjects altogether. Maybe they’d have a bottle or two of wine, or a couple of beers, or a glass or two of Scotch, except for Beth, who doesn’t drink. The evening would pass pleasantly anyway. Finally they would go to bed, just like last night, taking for granted they would all be waking up in the morning.
Instead, Nora is finally rising out of Beth’s bed and putting on her black pants and black blouse again, decking herself in the colour of mourning. She is middle-aged, she sees in Beth’s mirror, and she is pale.
Downstairs, where the other two are in the kitchen, Beth at the table, Sophie standing at the counter nearby, Nora resumes her own place in her own chair. There’s the fourth place. “I keep,” she says, “expecting him to walk through the door.” Kicking his boots off. Stretching, calling hello.
Sophie nods. “Yes. It’s very odd.”
If he did come through the door, wouldn’t Nora leap to embrace him! Everything could change back and be forgotten if he would just come through that door.
First, though, she would give him raging, blistering hell for giving her such a scare. She might even take a swing at his jaw, or at one of his big impervious arms. “I could kill him for this,” she says aloud, “I could just kill him.”
How startled Sophie and Beth look when Nora starts laughing. Then finds she can’t stop. Philip would have got it, he’d have laughed, but now Nora, forced by his absence into laughing, and for that matter crying, for two, has to do it all now, all by herself. She can imagine no end to the bleakness of this sudden division of two into one, but here she is, with Sophie and Beth and a big empty place at the table, and apparently it really doesn’t matter what she can imagine, or not.
Six
And so winds to a close the first day of Philip Lawrence’s permanent absence from earth. Whatever full-throttle rumbustiousness and confusions his life may have contained, and whatever enviable peacefulness accompanied his overnight passing, he has certainly disrupted the day, he has captured everybody’s attention.
A precarious kind of attention, however. Nora is fixated on two particular visions of him, and one of those is from just this morning. Sophie has kept herself busy, busy, busy, and otherwise seems mainly concerned with the loss of his skin, not much of substance. While Beth’s gaze is stuck on the sudden main chance. Is it normal to veer like this from furious at one extreme to dazzled at the other? And surely it can scarcely be typical, the absence of sad, lively, sentimental or vivid exchanges of tales and anecdotes about things Philip did, words he said, revealing bits of who he may have been—everything that ought to enter effortlessly and even insistently into conversations among the bereaved.
There are stages in these matters. Other people may not be quite so quick off the mark with, What does this mean tome? What have I lost? What happens now? but they get there, too. The order of things may not mean much.
Dinner is salad and omelettes filled with tiny leftover pieces of ham. Sophie has torn, chopped, ripped, cracked and sliced to put this together. “I’ve called everyone I could think of,” she tells Nora. “And they’ll all tell other people. So I hope everybody who should know finds out.”
“Thanks, Sophie. That must have been hard.”
“Yes, it was.”
“At least there’s no family to deal with.” Nora means parents, sisters, brothers, whose weight of grief might overwhelm her small arrangements. No parents, no children—no wonder she and Philip eventually added more voices to their little duet of a household.
“No. That’s a good thing.” Sophie, too, knows of his older brother who died when Phil was fifteen, speeding with five buddies on his twentieth birthday in his birthday gift, a new car; and about his parents, who died of separate kinds of cancer in their forties—a family custom, it seems, to wear out, or disappear, in that settled decade. “So you see,” Phil said, tracing Sophie’s nipples and smiling as if this were perfectly fine, “I’m alone in the world.”
Well, not entirely. There was Nora.
“Did you get hold of Max okay?”
“Yes. I guess he waited at the restaurant for an hour or so, then went home. That’s where I reached him.”
“Poor old guy, going out in this heat and then having to wait. I wish I’d remembered in time.”
“I don’t believe he’s concerned. Anyway, he knew it wasn’t on purpose, he’d figured out something was wrong. He said he’ll be here for the service, of course. Sooner if you’d like him to come.”
Would Nora like that? Not yet, not really. As long as it’s just the three of them, there’s something slightly normal and ordinary to hang on to; as if everything is still a mistake, or a dream, and capable of being undone. “Good omelette,” she says. Is it hard-hearted to be hungry again? She and Sophie both are, although as usual Beth only picks at her food.
Sophie and Nora wander to the living room when they’ve finished, while Beth stays behind to make tea. She’ll make something soothing tonight. Tomorrow’s soon enough to try a peppier brew, maybe one
promoting desire.
In the living room, as in the kitchen, as everywhere, Philip’s usual places leap out for their silence and emptiness. Nora huddles in her corner of the sofa, opposite what would be his corner, within easy reach. His zaftig Sophie settles into her usual wing chair, her flesh loosened by weariness, not temptation. When Beth enters, she hands around china cups, since proper teas, in her view, require proper china. People used to read tea leaves. Maybe they still do. Looking down into hers, Nora wonders what shapes and arrangements of leaves in a cup signify which future events or, more to the point now, what the meanings of past ones might be. “Do you think,” she asks Sophie, “I ought to call Lynn?”
“What? Who’s Lynn?”
“You know—his first wife. She ought to be interested, even if it’s only in an academic sort of way. She is an academic now, as a matter of fact. For all I know, she might care.”
“Oh, right, you knew her, you were friends.”
“Hardly friends. I knew her a little in high school, that’s about it. Philip had some odd ideas after the dust settled, though, and before we moved here. He said they wouldn’t have been married if they hadn’t cared for each other, and since she and I had known each other as well, he couldn’t see any good reason why we couldn’t smooth everything over by hanging out together sometimes. As if switching partners was only a sidestep, like a dance. He had the hardest time getting it through his head that never mind how bitter Lynn was, or that we weren’t proper friends in the first place, it would have been tasteless to socialize with someone whose husband I was happily sleeping with. Well, ex-husband by then. Can you imagine?”
Sophie cannot meet Nora’s eyes. “So what do you think?” and Sophie’s heart pauses until Nora adds, “Should I call her?”
