“You didn’t do it.”
“That doesn’t matter. When it felt like the end of the world for me, everything I did was dumb-ass and useless. Like weeping all day, like psychotherapy, like wanting to kill myself.”
“You were abandoned.”
“Yeah.”
“In a way it was like death.”
“In a way it was worse. Just tell me, would you give Jay life, would you let him live, if you had the power, if it was with another woman, with her children? Think about it. Where you could only see him on Sundays when he came for your kids?”
“Yes,” I said.
She looked at me, narrowing her eyes. “Do you have something to drink?” she asked.
We sat in the living room later, facing one another. “Did you really want to?” I asked.
She lifted her head and drained her glass. “Did I really want to what?”
“Did you really want to kill yourself?”
“Sure. Yes. I thought about it a lot. I looked at myself everywhere: in mirrors, upside down in spoons, in the handle of the refrigerator door, in subway windows. I saw that same sad swollen face every time I looked. Good-bye, I said to that face. So long. God, it was sadder than real life. I thought, Eddie will be sorry. Then sometimes I thought, he’ll be relieved.”
“Did you decide on a method?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Well, I once read that it’s really a serious intention if you decide on a method. That shows a genuine desire to carry it out.”
Isabel motioned to me for another drink. “Gas,” she said dreamily.
We were silent for a while, each with her own mind pictures. I saw Isabel dead in the false cheer of her kitchen with its frilly curtains and its shining pots and pans. It seemed terribly ironic to die deliberately in the very room designated for the nurturing of life, a room with eggs and oranges and milk in it. We drank for a while in silence and then I asked, “Why didn’t you do it?”
“Oh, not for the reasons you think. Not for the sake of the kids or because I saw suicide as a futile gesture or a disturbed act. It was the lousy value system that stopped me, the old material greed. I had a bad cold for a few days. I could hardly breathe anyway. I thought, fine, this is a good time. Why not? And sometimes when I looked at my reflection I held my breath for a long time until it burst out of me and I was wheezing and gasping. I thought that I was rehearsing. It was almost thrilling in a way, the anticipation. All day long in that old green bathrobe, shredding and balling up damp tissues in the pockets.
“Then a woman from some place I never heard of, some church or synagogue, I don’t even remember, called up and asked if I had any old clothes to donate. ‘My clothes?’ I asked. ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘That would be fine. Anything would be greatly appreciated.’ ‘What would you do with them?’ I asked her.
“She seemed surprised but she explained that the better things were distributed among poor families and that everything else was sold as rags with the proceeds going to good and charitable works.
“It was crazy. I thought of my gray dress. I thought of my yellow sweater with the iris embroidered on the pocket. I thought of some poor woman, illiterate, shoeless, bedraggled, wearing my brown coat with the beaver collar. ‘My things!’ I said. ‘My things!’ ‘Beg pardon?’ the woman said, ‘how’s that?’ and I hung up and got dressed and went to a movie.”
“My God,” I said. I looked into the bottom of my empty glass.
Izzy jumped forward and filled it, and then hers. She stared at me for a while. “I was always jealous of you,” she said.
“Me?”
“Because I wasn’t pretty. When we were kids. Because you had blond hair. Oh, how I wanted blond hair! And I was always such a horse.”
I remembered that Jay always thought of her as the antithesis of femininity with her shingled haircut and her big-muscled legs planted in that stolid stance. She reminded him of a gym instructor or a coach and he once said that he thought she carried a whistle in the canyon between those ballooning breasts. But I had known Isabel for a long time, back when her adolescent dreams of being only a wife and a mother seemed so simple and gently unambitious. After Eddie left, for a long time she was immobile and sad.
“A nice fat jelly-belly,” she said.
I lifted my hand in protest but she waved it away. “True, true,” she insisted. “But then when I saw her! I thought she would look like you, nice bones and all, small. I was romantic about her. But she looked like me!” She sighed. “You see, I’m the wrong one to come to for help. I talked about myself all day.”
I thought of all the things I didn’t know about her life, and yet she was my closest friend. Jay and I had closed ourselves off from other real intimacies. Our own friendship had always been enough. I leaned across the table and kissed Izzy’s cheek. “Listen,” I said. “Did you really go for therapy or did you just think about it?”
“Oh, I went all right,” she said. “I certainly went.”
I sat forward expectantly but she didn’t say anything else. “Well, did it help?”
“Not me. It certainly didn’t help me. You know me, Sandy. I’m just too hardheaded, too literal. I can’t even take the interpretation of dreams. If I dream of drowning, I believe that I’m dreaming of drowning. If my husband needed another woman, I couldn’t relate it to his childhood, to his mother. Who gives a damn about his mother? I didn’t want to know about his drives and his anxieties. I only wanted him to stop screwing around.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He wouldn’t go. That was the end of that.”
We sat quietly for a while, reflective, slumped in our seats.
“Sandy, I don’t know. Maybe it would help you to get through this. Maybe you should go.”
I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the sofa. “I’ll go to you,” I said. “Sit up and look a little Freudian.”
Izzy laughed. “What are you doing?”
“Shhhh. Quiet. I’ll tell you my life story.”
“I think you’re crazy.”
“Certainly. Zat’s vy I am here, Doctor.”
Izzy lit a cigarette. “Tell me about your childhood,” she said.
I shut my eyes and began to tell her. I told her first thoughts and first memories. I told her about my mother and my father and my first remembered image of the world. I forgot about the room we were in. I talked about death and love and anxiety and about all the hazards of being alive. I talked about awareness and denial and vanity and sorrow and happiness.
I talked and talked and the sun went out of the room and finally I looked up and saw that Isabel was asleep in her chair, one leg twisted under the other. She snored gently and her hands were opened palm up on the arms of the chair. I stood and tiptoed past her feeling slightly lightheaded but strangely refreshed.
12
JOSEPH WAS SLOUCHED ON the sofa with Paul between his knees. I was preparing to leave for the hospital when the telephone rang. It was Jay calling to speak to the children. Paul rushed to the phone. “Daddy? Me!” he said, with a smile of triumph. “I’m watching television with Joseph. Joseph!” he yelled.
“Shh,” I cautioned, trying to calm him with motions of my hand.
But Paul’s voice was strident, his color high. “I have a new truck,” he screamed. “I have Sugar Pops!”
I tapped Paul’s shoulder but he shrugged my hand away. “I’m watching cartoons, Daddy. I’m going to the park.”
I tapped him again. “Tell Daddy, I miss you,” I whispered.
“I miss you!” Paul shrieked in the same falsetto and I sighed. I called Harry from the bedroom. “Daddy is on the telephone. He wants to talk to you.”
Harry walked with slow deliberation. After a moment Paul relinquished the telephone. “Hello,” Harry said, and this time I could hear Jay’s voice filtered through the receiver.
“Fine,” Harry said. “Yes.” He sat down in a chair, resting his elbow on its arm. “Fine,” he said agai
n. “Okay.” He moved the telephone to his other hand.
I waved at him. “Tell Daddy about the movie.” I mouthed the words.
“Yes,” Harry said, into the phone. “I am.” I waved more wildly. I hissed, “Tell Daddy something. Tell him what you’ve been doing.” Harry wouldn’t look at me. Oh tell him, I thought. At least tell him that he is a good father. Tell him you will remember his face when last seen, that you love him, that you’re happy to be his product and his continuity.
But Harry held the telephone out to me. “Daddy wants to talk to you,” he said, and he went out of the room.
Yet later, at the hospital, Jay had a special radiance when he talked about the children. He spoke about his telephone conversation with them as if it had been witty and memorable. Then he asked me to buy them presents from him at the hospital gift shop.
Of all the places in the hospital, all the cold and clinical places that project mystery and fear, the gift shop filled me with the greatest sense of dread. Here is where we come eventually for solace, to the things in life, wrapped in gift paper. It is the same gift shop in every hospital in the world. There are the browsers, who touch things and put them down again with gloved hands, who wonder at the myriad offerings, at the possibility of their distraction, and at the same time uneasily consider that they may be overpriced. There are the stuffed animals, unpleasantly stiff and coarse to the touch, artificial flowers and plants imitating life in plastic pots. There are key chains and plaques with mottoes, inspirational books about friendship, love, and faith. There are games and puzzles and gifts specifically designed for hospital use, shaving mirrors from which my own face loomed, magnified, and oversized plumed pens, inscribed GET WELL SOON! I thought, here are the true ruins, and in despair I chose a stuffed giraffe for Paul and a kangaroo for Harry. I was waiting at the cash register to pay for them when a man said, “I’ve been thinking about you.”
I looked at him, puzzled, and he laughed. “Sandy?”
“Yes.”
He was a big man, ruddy, and with thick graying hair. “Do you remember me?” he asked. “In the parking lot?”
“Of course,” I said, looking for his name in my head. “Francis,” I said finally, with relief.
He squeezed my arm. “Good girl!” He looked down at the toys in my arms. “For your kids?”
“Yes,” remembering that cold night and the homely comfort of the station wagon and his voice.
“Well,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m visiting a buddy. Someone from the office. The same guy actually. I had to bring him some papers …”
I handed the stuffed animals and some money to the cashier and Francis waited until I had the packages. He walked out into the lobby with me, where children not permitted on the upper floors waited restlessly to be taken home. Families whispered their private news in corners. A woman was asleep in a molded chair, with two shopping bags held in the slack grip of her knees.
“I’m glad that I have this chance to thank you,” I said to Francis. “And you were right. Nobody can do anything to make it better. It’s just that now I can talk about it.”
“How long does he have?”
“Weeks. Maybe months. See, I can talk about it as if it isn’t true.”
“You have to protect yourself. You have to do something to get through it.”
“I don’t have to do anything. Things happen no matter what I do.”
“I know. You look thin. Are you eating? Do you take care of yourself?”
I felt uneasy, almost threatened by his concern. I shrugged. “I’m all right.”
“Could I buy you a cup of coffee? Could we sit down and talk for a while?”
It was not an unreasonable suggestion. Coffee. Facing a man across a table, someone healthy and stable and interested. But what was his interest? I looked up, trying to assess him, but his face had that same intense and friendly expression. He was giving, and asking for nothing back. Yet I felt the way I do with handsome and insistent salesmen. Drugged, mesmerized by the sales pitch. Afraid that I will weaken and buy something I don’t want, couldn’t possibly use, for the sake of the transaction itself. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m tired. My baby-sitter has to be in early on school nights. This is for the children from him—from Jay.” I raised the gift packages. “I want to give this to them tonight.”
Francis laughed. “You have a lot of reasons.”
“All true.”
“All true,” he echoed. He walked alongside me as I went out into the parking lot. His stride was long and athletic and I had to walk quickly to keep up with him. “You’re here every day,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“It becomes a way of life after a while,” he said. “My mother died of cancer. She died in slow motion and my father forgot what he had done with his days before she was sick.”
“I know.”
We had come to my car. “Don’t forget who you are,” he said, and I felt a great impatience to get away. Suddenly his sympathy was a burden, his friendly scrutiny painful.
He put his hand on the roof of the car and leaned toward me as I sat there. “If you need …” he began.
The salesman, confident, intimate, offering easy terms, no cost, no obligation. I put the key into the ignition. “No no,” I insisted, and I pressed my foot on the accelerator, drowning out the sound of his voice.
“… if you ever do,” I heard him say, and then I released the brake and drove away.
13
FOR THREE YEARS JAY had been compiling material for a photographic essay on life in the city. He worked on it slowly, with the pace of a natural process. He kept everything—the photographs he thought he would include, and a growing manuscript of captions—in a folder in a drawer in our bedroom. The script was simple and artless: the dialogue of the people in the photographs, the names and numbers of the streets. Jay said that even if he never published it, even if he didn’t finish it, the effort seemed to be the proper atonement for all the meaningless crap he recorded for television.
He would lay the prints out across the floor of the living room and try to arrange them in some sequence. It became a Sunday morning project and the children, in their pajamas, pretended to help. “Put this one here, Daddy.”
“Okay. Okay, honey, just wait a minute now.” He was distracted, and he hardly noticed them, but his hand reached out anyway, separate from his consciousness, and he rubbed their heads and tickled their feet. He studied his photographs the way Old World Jews would study the Talmud. They knew it by heart, but there was always a possibility of discovering something new, some hidden and revelatory meaning.
They’re large photographs and it was startling to walk by and be assaulted by those images. The city seen through Jay’s camera has an arrested look, as if motion has been artificially stopped, and then begun again the moment we look away. Of course he was mostly concerned with the people, with their faces, with the intricate composition in space of their figures on a city street. Half shutting my eyes, so that the lashes formed a veil to blur my vision, I looked through Jay’s folder, almost afraid now to encounter his perception of the world. But after a while I opened my eyes and looked at the photographs closely again, bringing into focus his credulousness, his concern, his tender insight. I turned the photos one after the other in a parade of evidence, and the people looked back from crumbling and elegant streets, surprised to find themselves there, in that very moment, for some mystical purpose, alive. And there was the dumb look of lean dogs crouching in city streets, tramps of the world, and the leavings of garbage and graffiti, and the idea of people suggested even in the empty geometry of city landscapes.
Yet he was never really satisfied with what he had done. Once, when I made a fuss over a new batch of prints, he said, “Yeah, but I don’t think it’s what I really want. I want to get inside …”
“My God, you’re a madman,” I said. “Jay, these are good!” I picked up a photograp
h of a black woman and her family eating their dinner at a small square table. She looked polished, as if she were made of some durable life-resistant wood. Yet the whole photograph had a dusty granular quality to it, as if it were very old and had nothing to do with these glittering, accelerated times. “Matthew Brady could have taken this,” I said.
Jay looked pleased then. “Do you think so, Sandy? That’s what I want to do, get across the idea of ongoing history. You know, we’re all old, young, dying, dead, resurrected.”
But it wasn’t really ever enough. For instance you can’t show poverty the easy way, with torn underwear hanging on frayed clotheslines. Conditions of the spirit are evasive, maybe even unphotographable.
I brought the folder and the cameras he had asked for to the hospital. Jay and Martin photographed one another, nurses who pretended petulance, other patients, and the view from the window of their room. When I came to visit again, Martin took my picture as I entered the room, and I worried later what face I had been wearing for posterity.
Martin looked through the folder over and over again. “God, this is beautiful stuff, Jay,” he said. “This is the way I always felt about the city, like as bad as it is, it’s the only place where you can live a real life. Do you know what I mean? Someday I’m going to do portraits, nothing else. Eyes kill me.”
Jay winked at me over Martin’s bent head.
When I was home again that night, I looked into the mirror at my own eyes. Did I expect to find in them some mystical continuation of our lives, or even a permanent reflection of what had already been? I stared, moving closer and closer, watching the starburst of yellow open around the pupils until my breath fogged the mirror.
14
FATIGUE WAS JAY’S MAIN COMPLAINT. He went to bed fatigued and he woke unrefreshed as if sleep had been an arduous labor. Dr. Block had said something vague to him about all those tests—something about metabolic disorder and low-grade infection. Jay was no fool—he wasn’t getting well, and yet he made no demands to know more. I believed then that he did know and that it was just a matter of acknowledgment, of giving consent and embracing terror.
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