Ending

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Even my parents knew about her, although Mrs. Caspar didn’t patronize their shop. “That’s the whore of Babylon,” my mother said. A grim statement.

  My father smiled indulgently. He spiraled his finger around his ear. “Nuts,” he pronounced. “Harmless.”

  “She roams the streets,” my mother insisted.

  “Ah, she doesn’t do anything. Who would want her? She thinks she’s Elizabeth Taylor. She runs around like someone’s chasing her.” He shook his head and clucked his tongue. “She’s a sad case.”

  “Her husband is sad,” I said. “He’s always smiling.”

  “That’s sad?”

  “No, I mean always. A little desperate smile. He looks close to tears.”

  My mother folded her arms and shrugged. My father smiled. But what they said was common knowledge. Estrella Caspar went out alone at night. Mr. Caspar used to follow her, ducking in the shadows. But she spoke of other men who followed her, who flirted: butchers, taxi drivers, young sailors. She gave beauty and romantic advice freely to younger women in the elevator, in the laundry room. A blond streak, she advised. A darker eye-liner. She hurried from the building, eager to pursue the wonders of the night, and Mr. Caspar, with his sad little smile, a grimace really, waited for her to come home again.

  In the supermarket I stalked the aisles, filling the cart until Harry was unable to push it. I looked at the foods that were Jay’s favorites: the raisin cookies, tangerines in great golden pyramids, the marshmallows that we used to toast on forks over the gas jets.

  Paul called out the name of yet another sugarcoated breakfast cereal

  ‘That’s enough!” I said, in a voice so sharp that it forced his glance down. “You can’t fill yourself up on all that junk,” I added, trying to sound more reasonable, maternal. But he wouldn’t be fooled. He kicked his heels against the cart in an angry tattoo.

  At the checkout counter we came up behind Mr. Caspar, unloading his basket. Mrs. Caspar was a few feet away, talking to the store manager, who kept looking up uneasily, smiling and trying to back away. She held him with one red-tipped finger poised on his sleeve, and with the shrill insistence of her voice.

  Paul kicked harder, catching Mr. Caspar in the small of his back. “Don’t!” I cried and I grasped his ankle. “I’m sorry,” I said to Mr. Caspar, but he had turned, his face already arranged in that same smile. “Where is that other penny?” he asked. “Where did it go?”

  Paul, who had been prepared to weep, was caught, his eyes only shining with tears,

  “Here it is,” Mr. Caspar said triumphantly. He pinched Paul’s nose gently and a coin clinked into his palm.

  19

  AGAIN, THAT NIGHT SLEEP wouldn’t come, and I lay there, eyes opened to the rough white sky of the ceiling, and tried to work my magic. But I couldn’t evoke Jay this time, couldn’t bring the comfort of his presence to that room. I got out of bed and began to pace. If this kept up I would have to take something, ask Dr. Block for some pills to do the trick. You can’t depend on the imagination forever. You can’t depend on anything. I paced as if I was angry. I was angry, stomping across the floor at two in the morning wanting to bellow about injustice and loss. My heart banged in alarm and I was cold.

  I went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator, an old habit, but nothing offered solace, not milk or jello or fruit. I went to the children’s bedroom but once there I closed myself to the innocence of their sleep, to their beauty. So what, I thought. So what. I wanted Jay. I wanted him now and for all time. The news had a way of becoming fresh like that. My ears rang, my muscles jerked, as if I had just heard. Jay!

  Then, sitting in the stillness of the bedroom again, I thought of his photographs. They always seemed a part of Jay, the way one’s voice and language are. I looked through the family album, feeling spent with sorrow. Jay had taken hundreds of pictures of me before Harry was born and at night he had whispered encouragement to the fetus through the stretched skin of my belly. Then he took pictures of the baby himself, born into the world, recording a miracle instead of an ordinary and tragic human event. That was his main quality, the real essence of Jay, his hopefulness, that unswayable pleasure in living. That was why he was willing, even eager to have children, to work at a job he didn’t love, to live an ordinary and unpromising life. It was related to the way he touched everyone: me, the kids, his hands making contact with the proof of his convictions. See, it’s worth it. It’s worth everything.

  I closed the album and then I took a large box of prints from a closet, ones that he hadn’t had a chance to sort and select from for the book. I carried the box back to bed with me and there was a certain comfort even in its weight on my belly as I settled back against the pillows and opened it.

  I felt an immediate sense of relief. It was like finding a responsive face in a roomful of hostile strangers. Jay’s sensibility was there in his selection of subjects, and in the mood and composition of the photographs. They seemed both modern and ancient at once. People in tenements or cliff dwellers in lost cities. It didn’t really matter. What Jay tried to show was that all change is superficial if the human condition remains the same. He wasn’t sentimental either. Elderly people, terrible old ruins, managed to look tough and ironic. There was vanity in the whores and even a certain majesty to their pimps.

  But New York City is a bad place to take photographs of people and then just walk away. Everyone is suspicious. Who’s that guy anyway, and what does he want? Jay might have been with a finance company or the Narcotics Squad, or even the FBI. It’s not paranoid in those streets to believe a stranger is a private detective, a pornographer, a madman. Life is that precarious there, and you can see it in the photographs. Mothers sheltered their children with the wide protection of their arms. “Hey!” they protested to Jay and they cursed him and grabbed for the cameras.

  He suffered guilt because of it. He knew that he was an intruder, and yet he felt that it was important, that all the photographs would become evidence in his book, and he would present their case to the world at large. If he asked for permission, it was sometimes given, but then something was lost and the photos became portraits. People posed for him. They clowned, mugged, leered, smiled, crowded into range. “He wants to put me in a book. Hey, I’m, gonna be famous! Wait, let me comb my hair, don’t show my tooth where it came out. Do I have to smile? Take my sister, she’s real cute. Make her famous.”

  He wanted some of the pictures to be like that, he called them the “personality shots,” but he wanted something else too: the unrehearsed face of the community, the sense of a continuing life.

  Once he came home with a terrible bruise under his eye.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Don’t get excited. It was just a little scrap.”

  “A scrap! Do you mean a fight, Jay? Do you mean someone hit you?” I hovered, nervous and breathless with outrage. “Bastards,” I said, soaking a cloth in cold water.

  “Come on,” he said. “Take it easy. It was my own fault anyway.”

  “Your fault? How could it be your fault?”

  “Well, I invade their privacy, don’t I? It’s kind of a paternalistic thing I’m doing, isn’t it?”

  Why did he always take on guilt so easily? Why was he so damned fair and good? “Shit!” I said. “You’re an artist.”

  “Thanks for that, anyway,” he said, as I laid the wet cloth against his eye.

  It occurred to me now, in this lonely bed, that the key to everything that had happened was in his goodness. Goodness = vulnerability = weakness. I’m crazy, I thought, but some part of me still believed it. Had he been a little tougher, less good, then nothing, not even death would have challenged him. But he was an open place, just like his own father. They were felled saints who seemed to lie down gladly. Then how would I teach my own sons? To avoid the bogeyman, boys, you have to be the bogeyman. Hit back, hit first, for God’s sake, and go for the eyes. But maybe the saintliness was in them already, an insidious gen
etic strain, and it was too late. I’m crazy, I thought, I should be locked up. But I felt, in that tough surviving membrane of my heart, that it was true.

  “Jay,” I had said then, “I don’t want you to get killed in action. It’s not worth that.”

  “Ahh, it was only a little misunderstanding. A fellow’s mother. She was deaf. You know, she kept smiling and nodding. A real beauty, a monument. La Chaise couldn’t invent those forms. The son said I took advantage of her.”

  “But you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. But they’re the Indians and I’m the cowboy. Their disadvantage is historical.”

  “You go into rich neighborhoods too,” I said.

  “It’s not the same, sweetie. There’s hardly anybody in the streets there. Doormen, pekingese, fur coats going into taxis.”

  “But you’ll be fair,” I insisted. “You’ll show both sides of everything.”

  Jay laughed. “Your loyalty is a thing of beauty, Madam.”

  “Well,” I said, relaxing a little.

  “Listen, I was scared too. I thought he was going to go for the cameras.”

  “Cameras!” I scoffed.

  “Never mind. Love me, love my cameras, baby.”

  “Jay, don’t go back there by yourself anymore.”

  “Sandy …”

  “I mean it. It could have been worse.” I touched his face lightly near the bruise. “I’m scared.”

  “I’ll protect you,” Jay said.

  “And who’s going to protect you, kiddo?” I meant from himself, from his vulnerability.

  “You,” he said. “And Batman and Robin in there.” He gestured toward the other bedroom where the children were sleeping.

  “Oh ha ha.”

  “No, I mean it,” Jay said. “We’ll go out together, like a street gang. We’ll get matching jackets with our name on the backs. We’ll be the Avengers, okay?” He put his hand on my neck, cleared a space of hair, and bent forward to kiss it.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  But the next week, the children and I did go with him. It made sense. Who would be suspicious of a family, that unit from which most of us are sprung? We walked along the streets with Jay. I pushed Paul in a folding stroller and Harry ran ahead and then loitered, was alternately the lead and the tail of our procession. We might have been tourists dumb enough to have wandered into tough neighborhoods. But they let us alone. Nobody mugged or even taunted us. Hands came out for money and shadows in doorways took surprising forms. I saw all the sadness and all the beauty with Jay’s eyes, and with the eye of the camera.

  Before we went home again, Jay took a picture of the children and me in front of a graffiti-streaked wall. There’s a timelessness to that picture. I seem happy and very young, standing with my hands in my pockets. The children are in a blur of motion near the skirt of my coat and Harry is smiling for once, unaware of the camera. I look like a sane and decent woman. It’s the way Jay saw us, the way he knew me. What would I become when his loving perception of me was gone from this life? I took the picture out now and looked at it for reassurance.

  20

  IZZY SAID, “I’M TIRED of being alone. What’s so bad about the nuclear family?”

  Izzy said, “Sometimes on Sunday I pretend that Eddie still lives here. I think that Eddie pretends too.”

  Izzy said, “What do we have to lose? It’s good just to be touched.”

  I let her say everything and I didn’t answer.

  Then she said, “Let’s go, Sandy. It’s better than staring each other down. Come on, please come with me. Please.”

  So I sighed in that long series of sighs that had become an integral part of my breathing and I put on my coat and went to the encounter group with her. Somehow I expected something more athletic, a large gymnasium and people with their hands on their hips, waiting for a whistle to be blown. Play ball!

  But it was an ordinary room where someone had once lived. Furniture had been removed, but impressions had been left on the faded green carpet and I could imagine where the sofa had been and the tables and chairs. The people seemed to be patients waiting for attention at a free clinic. In the absence of furniture, they slouched and leaned against the walls. There were six men and seven women. Two of the women were twins, somewhere in their forties, dressed identically. They stayed near one another and I could see the remarkable details of their sameness, natural and assumed. They moved the same way and folded their arms and blinked too often. In the left corner of each curling mouth was an applied beauty spot in the shape of a star. I wondered if I would want to touch them. A man squatted at their feet: compact, wiry, with dark curly hair that emerged from the short sleeves of his green polo, from his small simian ears, from the dark tunnels of his nose. What if he touched me? There were two fat people, a man and a woman, with great pendulous rolls of flesh that trembled with every movement, that undulated on their bellies and their breasts. There was one handsome man, a boy actually, wearing sneakers and a mesh tank shirt through which his perfect skin glowed as if it had been oiled. I saw that Isabel was looking at him with deliberate speculation. I remembered dances, adolescent parties, and I almost leaned toward her and said, “He’s yours. You can have him.”

  The group whispered and eyed one another and occasionally a shrill cry of laughter burst from one or another of the twins. I wondered if our leader was among us now, or in some mysterious way would only be an unseen presence or a voice. Perhaps we were being watched and were expected to begin some sort of contact with each other.

  But the contact was only visual. An old man looked at me for a long time, and I saw the wasting of his flesh, the comical sag of his trousers, and the loose loop of the collar around his neck. Would I touch that skin?

  Izzy poked her elbow against my hip and she smirked. “Don’t blame me,” she said, out of the side of her mouth.

  “If I write to Mona about this, she’ll think she wrote to herself.”

  “It looks like her kind of crowd. Uh-oh, foxy grandpa has his eye on you, blondie.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, and I thought of Jay. What if he had been able to grow old like that, and his flesh became a loose sack on his body? And what about me?

  The first person I touched that night was myself. Furtively, with the offhand expression of a subway masher, I put my hand across my own waist, moved it over the familiar valley and forward toward the slight swelling of my belly. Solid and real and well known to me. I thought of all the new hands on Jay now, of his fragile bones, and the intimacy of those probing fingers. “I don’t feel so well,” I told Isabel. Just then our leader came into the room.

  At least she looked athletic. In her black leotards, she resembled a dancing teacher. She was very short and she had no-nonsense close-cropped gray hair. She went slowly across the room, speaking to each person in turn, and shaking hands. The room grew quiet as we strained to listen. But all she said was, “Good evening, I’m happy to meet you. Good evening, I’m glad you could come,” as if she were the hostess at a garden party. “How are you?” she said to me, and I found myself bracing my foot against the floor in case I would be thrown off balance. Then she moved to the center of the room. Raising her arms above her head she stretched, exaggerating the movements, yawning. “Oooooh,” she said. “That feels good. Why don’t you try it? No, come on, I mean really try it. Extend yourself, move that elastic body.”

  The fat woman lifted her arms slightly above her head and made a mewling sound.

  “That’s right,” the leader said. “Give a little and then a little more. Experience that stretch, experience the luxury of it.” Then she lay down on the floor and the dark hairy man immediately lay down beside her. A few people snickered. “What’s your name?” she demanded. “First name only.”

  He cleared his throat. “Ahem. Ahem. John. Johnny.”

  “Oh,” she said, rolling away from him. “That’s a good name. I want to experience that name. Say it with me, everyb
ody. Roll it around in your mouth. Joh-un, Joh-un-ny. Joh-un.”

  “Say, that’s my name too,” the fat man said. “Listen, you can call me Big John,” he said. Then he bent over, grunting, took off his shoes, and threw them into a corner.

  “Big John,” the leader said. “Come here, Big Joh-un.”

  Big John lay down beside her, smiling slyly at the fat woman, who still stood with her arms folded across her breasts.

  “Joh-un-ny,” we all chanted. “Big Joh-un.”

  A dark woman in sunglasses poked me. “What the shit is that supposed to mean?” I shrugged and she said, “I mean, what is it supposed to mean?”

  Then the leader told us all to take off our shoes and leave them against the wall. “Nobody wants to get hurt,” she said. She reached her hand out to one of the twins, who immediately attached herself to her sister, and the two of them joined the group on the floor.

  “What the hell,” said the woman in sunglasses, and she stretched out on her stomach, kicking her legs in the air. One by one we all lay down. The last one was the old man and we could hear the terrible snapping of his joints as he lowered himself. “Sidney Farber,” he said, from a supine position, extending his hand.

  “First names, first names,” said the leader.

  “Sid,” he said. “Call me Sid.”

  We hissed and writhed like snakes, experiencing Sid’s name.

  Then the twins demanded to know the leader’s name and she said that we were to call her Bunny, and we all chanted, “Bunny, Bunny, Bunny.”

  “That’s a soft name,” said a twin.

  “It’s a cuddly name,” said the other.

  “Ah, but do I feel soft?” Bunny demanded. “Come on, find out.” She rolled over onto her stomach and shut her eyes, looking like someone about to receive a rectal thermometer.