“Was it after your divorce that you got into real estate?”
“I got my license three years before. But I think partly I knew that things were falling apart—so who knows.”
“My wife and I were together for twenty-nine years.”
She sees that his eyes are welling up again and turns her attention elsewhere, to the ruby darkness of the wine, the cheese wheel, people in the alcove.
“Excuse me,” he says, and abruptly leaves the table.
She watches him move to the hallway where the restrooms are, his shoulders hunched, his gait unsteady and actually weaving a little. She takes another sip of the wine and decides that she doesn’t really like it much. It’s too heavy and leaves an unpleasant taste of something like cigar smoke. Perhaps five minutes pass. When Cindy comes by and offers to fill her glass, she puts the palm of her hand over the lip of it. Cindy nods and moves off. Two couples arrive, and then a party of seven, agents, she realizes, one of whom she knows slightly. A woman with a hurried manner that actually stems from anxiety about forgetfulness. She’s always referring to her iPhone. Eliza has quite liked her the few times they’ve met. The woman doesn’t see her, and Scott comes back to the table, holding a handkerchief to his nose. He wipes his face with it and puts it back. “I’m so sorry.”
Eliza shrugs. “People have to use the facilities.” She means this to reassure him.
“You’re sweet.”
Cindy brings their entrées. The small salad, and the rosettes, pasta-wrapped prosciutto with Fontina cheese in béchamel sauce. While they eat the salad quietly, more people come in. The agent at the other table sees Eliza and gets up to come over.
“Someone I know,” Eliza says, low.
He turns slightly.
And she realizes, to her horror, that she can’t remember the woman’s name. “Hello,” she says, standing, they embrace. Scott stands, too.
“You teach at Rhodes,” the woman says to him. “I took a survey of modern lit class from you—God, must be a dozen years ago. Of course you don’t remember me.”
“I remember,” Scott says.
“You gave me a B. And I was relieved, let me tell you. But come on. Surely you can’t remember a student from that long ago.”
He smiles, nodding. “No, I really do.”
“I was blond. And a lot skinnier.”
“Chloe, right?”
Delighted, she takes his hand with both of hers. “Wow. That’s amazing.” She lets go. “I remember your wife came to class and talked about that woman poet. Oh, what was her name. See? My memory’s terrible. Something—something about chess? Francesca something? I kept my notes.”
“You mean Elizabeth Bishop?”
“Bishop, that’s it. Sorry. Chess. God, what a stupe I am. Well, I remember I liked her, and I liked what she had to say, although I don’t know anything at all about poetry. Tell her I still think of her.”
“So do I,” he says, low, bowing his head slightly.
“Oh. Oh, God—I’m so sorry.”
“Well, nice to see you,” he says to her.
“Yes. Sorry, I really didn’t mean to interrupt.” She returns to her table and, looking back, waves to Eliza, who lifts her hand, and then lets it drop.
She sits down slowly and sees the stricken expression on his face as he settles into his chair and takes a bite of the pasta.
She takes a little of hers and has another swallow of the wine, concentrating on it. He puts his fork down and begins fumbling with his napkin, folding it and then opening it out and refolding it.
“Your wife taught English, too?” she manages.
“Sometimes. She didn’t like teaching. But she did her dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop, and she was trying to turn that into a—a commercially viable—” He stops. “A book for the general public.”
Eliza waits.
“But you know—she always—the family—the family always came first. And there was my book.”
“You were working on a book, too.”
“Not really. I liked to think I was. You know. I’d sit and try to write some sentences—but it was more of a pretense, really. I didn’t have the talent even if I’d had the patience, which I didn’t.” He seems now to have mastered himself, and he has more of the wine. Though he shakes his head, clearly going over everything inside. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I was off somewhere. We used to say, when one of us was daydreaming, ‘You’re way off in China.’ ”
“Oh,” Eliza says. “That’s—when the boys were small and were full of questions and I was tired of them or just plain tired, I’d turn it around by asking them how long it would take to build a bridge there.”
“To China.”
She nods happily. “It always stopped them. I mean they’d really start trying to think about it. A bridge across the ocean. I’d tell them I just didn’t know and I wish they could tell me.”
“That’s good. A good one.”
“Tell me about your book,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who wrote a book.”
“It was supposed to be a novel. I told people it was. But she—my wife, Shannon—she always took second place. Always put all of us first. And, you know, she did have talent.” On the last word, his voice breaks. He picks up the table napkin and puts it to his mouth. “God, I’m so sorry,” he mumbles through the balled-up cloth in his fist. Now he’s crying, sitting there with his hands together holding the napkin over his mouth, the tears streaming down his cheeks. “Forgive me.” The words are muffled.
“No,” Eliza says, quickly. “Of course not. I understand. I do.”
“Excuse me.” Again he’s up and lumbering toward the hallway to the restrooms.
She watches the others talk and laugh and eat and drink, people having a calm pleasurable evening meal in the quiet restaurant. One couple leaves, talking about thunderstorms. She thinks of weather as a subject.
Another several minutes later, he comes back. His eyes are red and still wet. He sits down and wipes his face with his handkerchief, blows his nose, then stuffs the handkerchief in his pants pocket and reaches for his table napkin. “I’m so sorry.”
She’s taken a bite of the pasta and has to wait a second. “It’s all right. Really, I know.”
“You think you can go on a little—have a little harmless companionship.”
“Of course. But it’ll be all right. You’ll be all right. You just have to let some more time pass.”
“I—well, I lied.” He sniffles, wipes his eyes again. He hasn’t really touched his meal.
“Your rosette al forno’s getting cold,” she says.
“It’s been almost three years.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s been gone two years and seven months.”
“Your wife.”
“Yes.” He sobs twice. The sound comes from him like a kind of barking, and now others are pausing and looking over at them. Chloe, at the other table, simply stares.
Eliza reaches across and touches his wrist. “There, now. Really. You’re gonna be fine.”
“Can you please forgive me,” he sobs. And once more he’s up, heading to the restrooms, coughing and crying.
Chloe comes over. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I wish there was,” Eliza says. “I wish there was something anybody could do.”
“And I brought it up. Brought her up.”
“We were already talking about her,” Eliza says. “Better go back, now.”
She waits there with the table napkin folded neatly in her lap, and her wine not quite finished, her pasta mostly uneaten. People leave. Others arrive. Finally he comes back, composed, moving with a kind of careful ponderous slowness. He sits down. “Some date.”
“It’s fine,” she says.
“I’m not hungry anymore. I feel a little sick, actually.”
She thinks of Cody and what she’ll tell him about this evening. It’ll be a story. But then she rejects the thought and reaches o
ver to touch Scott’s wrist again. “Have you talked to your daughters about this—this that you’re—going through.”
“Not really. I’ve had to show them strength, you know.”
“You should tell them about it.”
“I’m fifty-two and they want me to check into assisted living or something.” He sighs, and sits back. “I do feel better talking to you about it. No fun for you, though.”
“Well.”
“You know we fought a lot. We were passionate.” His voice breaks.
“I think I’d like to take a walk. Let’s settle up and go out and get some air.”
“That would be nice.” His eyes fill again.
“Let me buy the dinner,” she says.
“Oh, I wouldn’t—wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Well, do you mind if I wait outside while you take care of it?”
“All the way to China, right?”
“Don’t be silly.” She rises, drapes her purse over her arm, and moves to the door. “I’ll be right out here, okay?”
“I’m really so very sorry,” he says. “Forgive me?”
She smiles, waves this off, then steps out. The air’s chilly now, fragrant with the vapors from the kitchen. Heavy clouds mass where the sun’s fading to orange, with night-blue sky above it all. A storm’s coming. She folds her arms at her waist and faces the street, planning how she’ll let him know that she should go home. She imagines the plausible reasons for needing to be there, pictures the quiet ride to come. Chloe will probably talk about the whole thing, of course, and it may get back to Darnell and others in her office, and for them it will probably be a funny story. She herself might tell it as a joke on herself. Still, she finds herself feeling sorrowful now, and maybe she’ll see if he wants to have coffee or something, after all. Except that this would mean listening to him go on about past love, lost passion, and the haunting absences. She looks out at the highway, the far lowering sun, and catches herself thinking of a bridge all the way to China, and then of this man as someone at the end of a lonely journey across unimaginable distance.
IN THE MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS
Lately, after working, or trying to work, he visits the Museum of the Americas. He wanders in the South American wing and looks at the figures amid artifacts in the glassed-in cases. Time collapses. Cortez is a few miles away. He has been with those who pushed back the Toltecs, Zapotecs, Mayans. There is no wristwatch on his arm, and he tells time by the use of five tons of stone. In a display case, under glass, are bones, the blade of a knife. He can believe that his people live on floating islands and that they farm corn, beans, peppers, tobacco. The air is clearer. He has a dark young wife. His days are peaceful, and he knows what is expected. He’s taller, younger, stronger. Violent. He has no children. He’s bronze colored from the sun, and he can see the polished walls of Tenochtitlán in the distance. No one ever heard of a car. The clatter of the world, its weather and mechanical slaughter and devices, is somewhere far off. He doesn’t hear the noise of it anymore.
“Do you know where you are now?”
“William P. Howell. Fantasy writer. Divorced. Forty-eight. Wife living with someone else. Pregnant with his child. One afternoon I start over there, planning what I’ll say. I don’t know Alphonse Blum, a boy running after a ball, afraid of his father who is too strict. An imaginative boy worried about his pancreas, at nine years old. This bright child with the skinny legs and the dark skin. I have no sense of him lying awake at night imagining himself a superhero.”
“This is good. Go on.”
“William P. Howell. I make up other worlds. Peoples. Conflicts that have to do with saving all humankind, the whole unwitting world. Never hurt a soul.”
“Here. Wipe your eyes. Talk about yourself a little. It’s all right and it’s true.”
If he had a son, the son would also be dark. A boy with hair that shines with sunlight, down to his shoulders. He would be so strong, and fast. With the power of the solar winds. Change worlds.
“Go on. You never hurt a soul. Remember, you intended no harm.”
In his part of the city, the streets are crowded with others. Each life gathers and glides past him. He thinks of the great dedication of the pyramid temple in Tenochtitlán: the sacrifice of twenty thousand lives.
“When you can speak. You know…”
He has the museum. He walks in every day and waits for the faint but bearable condolence of the settling dust. It doesn’t matter what else there has been in a day—work, imagining the evil sorcerers, the dark alchemists, the battles with weapons fashioned from light, writing the sentences, going on each day, in the so-called healing process, the kindness of others (priests, friends, professional listeners like this one, the parents of the boy), the weight of his grief, the food he swallows, the blur of seeing all day, the music coming out of the walls where he fails to find the necessary reasons. He craves the museum.
“You had a moment’s inattention. A lapse. A man driving home at sundown. It’s been months now. And it wasn’t your fault. The police report says that he ran out between two cars.”
Doctors, counselors, the difficult forgiveness of two young people who can’t bring themselves to mean it, friends, women and men whose faces change when he walks in or turns to face them. No one knows quite how to put it away. Nothing in his work will put it away and the work was always designed to put it away, the whole weight of the inevitable and the terrible. The work was always leading to the fantastic victories, the triumph of love and innocence and beauty. He makes the false gestures of the form of expression he cannot bring himself to use now. The hours are filled writing lists, facts, dates, histories. The dead civilizations.
Others have told him what they can tell him. It could happen to anyone. He has friends who watch him now, and worry. He loves them. He can’t stand the thought of losing anyone at all. He doesn’t drive anymore. But in the Museum of the Americas, among the yellow pieces of temple wall and the shards of pottery and the depictions of Chapultepec, the anguish begins to change at last, begins to shift, like a lengthening of light.
When he was an American on a normal day with half the world hungry and the wars on the far continent, he did not feel the weight of the sky. The tonnage of the present. He can’t support it now. He hears the clatter of the bones slamming against metal. He sees the instruments of emergency and procedure. He looks at the whitened faces of the others and sees blood on the little finger of the boy’s small dark left hand, and then the door closes on it all. He sees it and he sees it and he sees it and he sees it.
“There’s more to say, isn’t there?”
“William P. Howell. My God.”
“Do you want some time?”
In the Museum of the Americas, there are stories of slaughter fixed and gone in time. The country was taken in blood. It’s all there, the guilty centuries.
“Do you want me to leave you alone?”
Please. He’ll make his own way out, avoiding eye contact, hurrying along like anyone else, in the brightness, the chaos and terror of the street.
WE BELONG TOGETHER
They’re half an hour late for lunch with Tina. Cathy’s driving. Cathy said she’d leave him if he lied to her about other women again, and now she’s leaving. It all came out this morning. He feels sick. She seems calm, determined, cold.
Early spring. The country’s crazy with color. Everything blooming, everything lush and fresh, the very air promising renewal and replenishment. The car radio is on low. The only sound. The presidential election has worn into its third year, and the air is full of exaggerated campaign talk, lies, and attacks. Empty promises. Nothing will change. Or else it will.
The restaurant where Tina waits is called Belle. It has a glass front and thirties retro décor. Tina’s stylish and statuesque, a vegetarian. She’s eating the salad she ordered. A basket of bread and a half carafe of Sancerre are on the table. You can see her in the window of the place. She waves to them and smiles.
Breskoff gets out of the car. All the promise of his twenties and early thirties has played out in a string of compromises. It hurts him that all the people he now works with are on their way elsewhere, believing, with good reason, that better things are ahead. He told Cathy in the beginning that if they had Tina’s friendship it could help him get ahead in the agency. Another lie. Tina went to another agency after one little year, but they’re all friends and he kept seeing her. They kept seeing her. She has come to their house for Thanksgiving. Several Thanksgivings. He isn’t going anywhere in the agency, which sells advertising to radio stations. Advertising. More lies.
Getting out of the car, he feels a sudden terror about this change: Cathy leaving him, ending things. His gorge rises. He watches her drive down the block. She’ll have the locks changed on all the doors of home. He looks at Tina in the window with her puzzled expression.
When he steps through the shadow in the entrance, he sees his own face in the reflection, pale as death. He goes into the men’s room and washes his face, gagging at the sink. When he comes out, she waves at him again, still looking puzzled, and troubled, too, now. He walks over to her and sits down. “She knows,” he says. “She’s leaving me.”
Tina stares.
“I guess it was always coming to this.”
“Oh, God,” she says. “That’s what’s going on.”
“This morning,” he tells her. “It’s why we were late.”
“What she must think of me.”
“No, it’s all me. Believe me.”
“There’s so much you don’t know about women. And I’m not even joking.”
“Well, it’s out. And over,” he says. And now he experiences a surprising sudden lifting inside. It’s almost elation. The thing is here at last and will settle in its own way, and they’ll go through it together. They’re free. It has just come to him, looking at the soft curve of her neck, that they are, in fact, free.
She takes a sip of the wine. Her hand shakes. He says: “I feel like my whole life is a series of broken promises. The whole world.” He’s very dramatic, controlling the panic. He knows she likes the drama and has always found him attractive in his despair. Despair has been their ethos. But he believes it, too, now, and feels it. “I’m—I was so tired of all the lies.”
Living in the Weather of the World Page 4
