Luck

by Joan Barfoot

  Nora laughs. “I certainly did. I can’t say she’s warmed to me over the years. But at least she knows, so that’s done.”

  “Do you want to talk about some of the details? There are some questions about music we’d like played, and Hendrik—the funeral home guy—says he’ll do his best to find whatever we want, or we could take music with us tomorrow. He has a minister he uses, too, somebody sort of non-denominational, is that okay?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “He wanted to know if anybody else would be speaking. He says I can phone him later about that sort of thing if we want. Then I guess we’ll have a few days afterwards to pick out the, uh, the urn, and decide what we want done with it.”

  Nora notices another slippage: that Sophie speaks of we, not of you. As with sorting through Philip’s possessions, Nora will have to decide at some point which incidents and expressions and moments to carry with her for the next twenty, thirty, forty years. This may require an enquiry into at least a few facts, just so she doesn’t go forward wrong-headed. Only, not yet.

  “Hendrik says relatives or friends often say a few personal words. Will you want to, do you think?”

  “Me? Heavens, no.” The thought of having to be coherent about Philip, for one thing; but also, what business is it of anyone’s how Nora feels about him, and what sort of man she saw him to be? “Would you?”

  “No,” Sophie says sadly, “me neither.”

  They do not ask Beth. And yet of the three of them, she might be the most eloquent. For sure, she’s the most experienced when it comes to speaking in public. Also, it’d be easiest for her because she was unattached to Philip, and might bring some joy to the proceedings by pointing out the way to the future, the happy side of events.

  “Max might, I suppose,” Nora says. “He was fond of Philip, I think.” One more thing to be unexpectedly uncertain about. This is exhausting. “Oh, God, I’m so tired. I can’t think. Why can’t I wake up?”

  “I’ll make tea, shall I?” Beth asks brightly, and the other two roll their eyes, but nod, and then bend, heads together, over the forms, and start talking about music of all things.

  “Tom Waits,” Nora suggests.

  “Tom Petty,” Sophie counters. Mysteriously this causes them to giggle again over “some Tom, anyway,” and who laughs about funerals? Not Beth, who is very seriously trying to come up with some combination, quite tricky, to promote energy and tranquillity and letting go of history and being awake to new prospects—all that in one teapot?

  This comradely moment is broken, Beth’s concentration is disrupted, they all jump, at the unlikely sound of the doorbell. Opening the door has sometimes been an unpleasant business, but here’s something they’ve forgotten about the place: kindness and old customs. That there are some good people, generous or courteous ones.

  When Sophie answers, with Nora hovering behind in the hallway, there’s a boy on the doorstep, maybe ten or eleven years old, dark-haired and chunky, holding a cake box which he thrusts into Sophie’s hands. “This is for you. My mum says to tell you she’s sorry.” His mother must be the woman out on the sidewalk—bravely or cravenly offering up her plump son, however watchfully, to dubious appetites.

  “Why, thank you,” Sophie says, and, “What’s your name?” but the boy is already off the porch, down the walk, out the gate. “Thank you,” Sophie calls more loudly, waving to the woman, who waves back in a You’re welcome gesture.

  Back in the kitchen they open the box to find a carrot cake, it looks like, or banana, iced in white. “I’ll be damned,” Nora says. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve seen the mother around, but I don’t know who she is.” They are as astonished as if this were the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The story of yet another, very recent painting, as it happens, a late addition to the series, not yet seen by anyone beyond the house, not even Max. In this one, Beth-bones are stripped nearly bare on a platter, her fishhead-eyes glassy, tattered baguette clenched in her fish-jaws, multicoloured thin fabric fingers reaching ravenously in from the edges. A grim piece, although it didn’t start, and wasn’t actually intended, that way.

  More miracles. Sophie answers the second time the doorbell rings too. Nora still hangs back, wary, and Beth has at last gone upstairs to shower away the effects of her lengthy, unlikely walk. Her tea was fine, they’ve certainly tasted far worse, but Nora and Sophie have now opened a bottle of wine.

  This time it’s a casserole, its bearer Joy Geffen, who runs the only fabric store for miles. Both Nora and Sophie are familiar with her, and Nora moves to the door beside Sophie. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Joy says. “And I’m sorry about being so late to bring something over. I didn’t hear till this morning, and this is the first moment I’ve had. I hope you like macaroni and tuna?” Comfort food. This is like the old days, when Nora and Philip moved in and people showed up bearing whatever—cakes, casseroles, advice, information—they thought might be useful to newcomers.

  No advice now, though, just food. “Thank you, Joy, this is kind of you.” So it is. Nora is remarkably touched, she’s afraid she suddenly has tears in her eyes, how excessive.

  “It’s nothing, really. I’m sorry, that’s all. I just made extra of what we’re having for dinner. I hope you like it, we always do.”

  “We’ll get the dish back to you as soon as we can.”

  “No hurry, no hurry,” and like the boy and his mother, Joy is gone, and Nora promptly loses some, although not all, of her gratitude. Because the question remains: where was Joy Geffen when she was needed? Where was her voice, and all the other voices, of the appalled, the offended, the upstanding citizens who would tell those self-righteous thugs and lunatics to go home and mind their own philistine business? Who would say, This is not us, and does not represent our community or our views or our behaviour or, for that matter, our faith. Nora does not recall Joy Geffen doing anything beyond continuing to sell her the fabrics and needles and threads she continued to order.

  The third person to appear is the wife of one of Philip’s poker pals. Susannah and Dave Hamilton are a few years older than Nora and Philip, early fifties, both lawyers although with separate practices. “We have enough trouble figuring out who does what at home,” Dave said back when the four of them had occasional dinners. “We’d be a disaster if we tried working together.”

  Philip said if he were ever charged with a crime—what crime did he have in mind?—he’d hire Dave to defend him; whereas if he and Nora were ever talking divorce, his aim would be to get to Susannah’s office before Nora could. Another joke, of sorts. Philip said, “He’s sharp, she’s cutthroat, that’s a good range of talent.”

  Susannah phoned Nora several times during the mess. “I feel so bad, let me know if there’s some way I can help.” Philip reported that Dave offered to be “right on top of it” in the event of actionable libel or slander. Was it unreasonable to wish, again, for defenders at the actual gate, to feel anything less was inadequate to the cause?

  “Dave and I,” says this woman on the doorstep with the grave, round face, mop of curly grey hair, small angular body, “we are just devastated. Dave’s running late in court today or he’d be here to say so as well, but we’ll be at the service. Tomorrow afternoon, isn’t it? But I didn’t want to wait till then to tell you how upset and sorry we are, and I figured yesterday was too soon to bother you. Anyway, there’s nothing sensible to do, is there? I couldn’t think of anything but food, so I picked up pasta salad, and here’s a box of cookies. Also bought, I’m afraid.”

  The box says the cookies come from Mavis’s Old Town Bakeshop. Oh dear. But there are no more rules, all bets must be off. “Thank you, Susannah. It’s all very strange.”

  Susannah nods. “It must be. So sudden, and he always looked the picture of health and vitality. His heart?”

  “Yes.” In a way.

  “Is there anything I can do? Call anyone, organize anything, get something you need?”

 
“No, we’re fine, thanks. Sophie’s taken care of the arrangements.”

  “Well, you call if you think of something. I have to go back to the office for two or three hours, and then I’ll be home, so either place, just phone. And otherwise we’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Nora nods. Susannah and Dave seem to be good at offering help as long as somebody specifies what form help should take. Left to themselves they come up with vague offers of legal advice, pasta salad and cookies.

  She is too harsh. People offer what’s within their characters and definitions to offer, and that’s that. “Thank you,” Nora repeats, and smiles at Susannah because she has, actually, located a morsel of gratitude. “If I think of anything, I’ll be in touch.” She won’t, but there’s something to be said for ordinary customs and courtesies, she can see that.

  When they close the door Sophie says, “Isn’t that great? Now we don’t have to worry about having food in the house. Is anybody else hungry yet?” Sophie has her own customs, all of which, in response to either happy situations or sad ones, evidently involve eating. Nora rather admires Sophie’s frank appetites, although would prefer to suppose they apply only to food, which they may or may not.

  At dinner even Beth nibbles at the casserole and the pasta salad, then has a sliver of cake and two—two!—giant chocolate chip cookies. She is oddly jumpy, gives off an impression of something thrumming under her skin, but maybe that’s just the sugary effects of dessert.

  In a way, although not in a literal way, this feels like their last supper. It’s not that Philip is here among them, but by dinner-time tomorrow he will be entirely, heartbreakingly, thoroughly gone. A handful of dust. “Oh,” Nora says into the middle of silence. Sophie is gazing out the kitchen window into the backyard, remote and presumably absorbed in her own thoughts. Beth wriggles like a child in her chair. Whatever is the matter with her? Philip never liked her. “I have no time for women who drift,” was one way he put it.

  He wouldn’t like Nora much at the moment, then, would he?

  They’ve made a minor mess, the three of them, with crumbs and casserole debris, bits of icing and cake that tumbled from the server en route to their plates. All from the offerings of townspeople bold enough to come to the door with their kindness and old customs. Goodness, generosity, thoughtfulness, courtesy, maybe affection for Philip, maybe respect. Maybe shame, maybe guilt—too bad it’s too late to know, and really too late to care.

  Twelve

  And so winds down the long second day of Philip Lawrence’s remarkable absence; an absence now recognizably final, no more imagining he’s just out for a few hours or gone for a couple of days, no more sensing his presence either dispersed through the universe or overhead and observing.

  Second days tend to be given over to practical arrangements—funeral plans, flower orders, ministerial consultations—and the less diverting but onerous burdens of coming to grips. Absorbing new information. In another sort of household, survivors might turn to each other, hold each other up, join in mutual grief and consolation. In this household, not so. On the second day they have turned away from each other instead, into their own notions, memories, and even some hopes.

  Tonight Nora is back in her own bed. Well, for one thing she is disinclined to ask any more favours of Beth, whose fervency about granting those favours has made Nora, perhaps for no good reason, uneasy. Anyway, she has to learn sometime to be alone in this room. A couple of nights ago she made the mistake of sleeping with her back turned to Philip. Now, too late, she lies facing the flattened space he formerly occupied. If she stares long enough, will flatness come to seem normal, or will she always be conjuring Philip’s bulky shape in the night, and would that be comforting or go on being a hard, heavy, constant lump of sorrow? She faces, too, a bewildering kind of solitariness that contains no breathing except her own after so many years of mutual inhalings, exhalings.

  This is crushingly, silently, lonely.

  Still, is it shameful that while shocked and unconsoled, she is no longer quite surprised? At some point today the empty spaces—Philip’s chair at the table, his place on the sofa, silences rather than voice, laughter, footsteps—have grown less startling. It does seem to be the case that the quality of Nora’s disbelief has become smoother, rounder, less knife-like.

  On her second day of widowhood she has had a frenzy of sorting Philip’s possessions and drawing sketch after sketch of them. She has been reminded, yes, that there are a few people outside these walls who perform right, or at least appropriate, acts, and as a result she, Sophie and Beth have some decent food in the house. After dinner, Beth made a pot of tea, naturally, and Nora and Sophie killed another bottle of wine. Nora heard more about the funeral home as Sophie saw it today, and the fellow who runs it, whom Sophie seems charmed by, given that in a low-key, low-voiced way it must be his job to be charming. Sophie remarked that the funeral home is not unlike this house, in that it is large and high-ceilinged and old, and that she thought Philip would have liked Hendrik Anderson’s own living quarters within it; but whatever was she doing in the man’s apartment?

  All this has occurred in its unfolding way, but if Nora were going to illustrate and summarize the day with colour and texture, the resulting canvas would be wholly flat black. No shiny glimmers, no glossy hint of a way to see through or lighten it, just a huge, blank, bleak, wall-sized painting, neither absorbing energy nor casting it.

  This is unbearable, but there’s no way around bearing it anyway.

  Beth is just down the hall, back in her own bed. She should be sleepy after that long walk and, by her standards, an unusually full meal, but instead she is wide awake and alert. Her skin, well creamed, smells like flowers. It also seems to her that there’s some hint of Nora remaining on the pillowcase, in the air of the room.

  Yesterday’s orgy of toast, tonight’s casserole and cake and those enormous chocolate chip cookies—they went down like butter. Maybe that’s why Sophie eats—because of things bubbling up that need tamping down, drowning under the weight of pastas, cookies and cakes. Beth runs her hands up her body and feels her hipbones protruding, her collarbones jutting like the wings of a plane. She is still beautiful. In a way it’s Philip who makes her prospects possible, although he wouldn’t have intended to do her this favour. Do unintended outcomes count? Not a good question.

  Amazingly, she is hungry again. After the others are asleep, she can creep back downstairs to the kitchen and quietly forage through the leftovers. And then there’s tomorrow. Is this anything like how Nora feels all the time, seeing pictures, building them up, decorating them and filling them in? Won’t Nora be surprised! This is almost intolerably exciting. Maybe that’s what’s making Beth hungry.

  Patience, patience. Even if Nora’s just down the hall, it’s best to wait for the happy, right time, when it comes. Beth will know when that is. Possibly tomorrow, when surely it will be time for everybody to perk up and start to look to the future.

  And Sophie?

  What about her? She doesn’t matter, she’ll be out of the picture, just poof.

  Sophie’s bed, where Phil rarely was and never slept, is soft in the centre, her body having made its deeper and deeper cocooning impression over four years. Except in deepest winter, when cold winds can whistle through walls and window-frames that aren’t nearly as solid as they appear, Sophie sleeps naked because it’s enough to be sunk into this mattress without pyjamas or nightgown touching off more painful sparks on her electrical skin. A condition soothed by that human salve, Phil.

  Hard to say exactly when today Phil’s attention wandered off. Maybe while she was talking to Hendrik Anderson—Phil might have found theoretical discussions of death tedious when he was in the midst of the thing itself. He might have wanted to pipe up to change the arrangements, or correct misapprehensions about eternity, and drifted off frustrated and bored when he could not do any of that. So where is he now? Still out there somewhere, maybe saying, Oh, no, and Are they forgetting? and putting his hands
over his eyes? Does he have hands, does he have eyes?

  These are not answerable questions.

  In Sophie’s mind, he has hands. This is her accomplishment on the second day of his absence: if she closes her eyes she can see each line, ridge and callus. If she concentrates hard she can feel each one, too. A certain light of anticipation has recently kept her aloft. Now what will she do? Still, she may be soft, collapsed at last in the embrace of her bed, but there’s also a hardness that builds up around death; like Phil’s calluses, the frictions of repeated mortality create a padding of toughness, given time.

  Has there been enough time?

  Thoughts are often exaggerated and dark in the night. Spirits sink hard. That’s why people all over the world—even Phil—are most vulnerable to death in these hours. Even in the refugee camp this was true. Tomorrow’s going to be a long, hard, strange day, and Sophie ought to be getting some sleep, but there are risks to that, too.

  What does Sophie dream of when she dreams badly? What causes her to rear up, waking the household, sending her to the wicker sofa on the front porch a couple of months ago with a glass of sedative wine, to be joined by a man she’d wakened, with a sedative six-pack of beer?

  The nightmare part is sharp and precise: the sudden, unshakeable grip of narrow bones on her wrist. But around that moment there is, like smoke or ill-will, a surrounding story that is so known and smelled, seen and felt that it scarcely needs telling, and therefore, in the nightmare, is scarcely told.

  It was, as Nick promised (and what has happened to Nick, has he by any chance had his heart broken, his purposes defeated, his aims injured as well? Given all that can happen to a person in a relatively short time, it’s entirely possible that by now he’s a dark-haired, wiry, keen-eyed stockbroker; an unrevolutionary insurance agent concerned with risk-avoidance rather than risk; a dutiful suburban father of two), anyway, it was as he said it would be, a two-year package of time. A package Sophie tries to keep unexamined and wrapped, except for the habit of pointing out, irritatingly as she is well aware but can’t help herself, the gentle and beneficent sway of this place and time compared with the vicious, unearned cruelties of other places and times.