Age

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘You know, Gemma—’ he says.

  I know what he’s going to say.

  ‘—it’s an old story. But I love you. Imagine. A woman who fends off holy terror with a Nasalcrom—’

  Nasalcrom? I thought it was Afrinol.

  ‘—and refuses to learn her Social Security number. Why is that so endearing?’

  ‘I don’t find it so. Does love have to endear?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Be ugly, then. It won’t help.’

  ‘Nor would it you,’ I say. ‘Only you can’t be. And not only for me.’

  He’s never liked to be called handsome. When you’re an amateur cowpuncher—he told me early—then they think you’re only a stud. When you’re a poet—well, you had better be Yeats.

  I reach for his book. I don’t have to open it. Late Poems—that part. I will never be ugly there.

  ‘Collected,’ he says. ‘I half wish I hadn’t done that yet.’ Then he laughs. ‘What’s—yet.’

  I know what yet is. It’s like a coda. It contains all the themes, but is not the end. When the end comes, we will know that this night back here was yet. We will know its quality.

  I knew an old couple in Bridgeport—somebody’s grandparents who were brought over from Italy very late in their lives. Field work had made them monkey size, or they were mountain bred that way. Bent double too, and the necks crooked to one side, the man’s from right to left, the woman’s from left to right, maybe from working parallel rows in the fields. Lucky—we kids whispered—so at least Giuseppe could see Maria, and she him. We never thought that maybe the looking itself had done that.

  Anyway—one day they dropped—almost together. Him in the morning, in bed with his nose stiff as a bird’s, her by evening, in the same bed. There’s a coda for you. But they were from the old country. They knew how.

  I reach for the Benedrex inhaler. It’s for when I choke, sleeping with my head back—toward the terrors—instead of tucked toward him. Deviated septum, the doctor said, no sense operating at your age. And only curable otherwise by some blow to the head? I often fall asleep with the Benedrex in the hollow of my right hand. Brand names, little backbones of daily living.

  The inhaler is shaped like a phallus; I never noticed that before. In the hollow of the hand. I laugh then, but won’t tell Rupert why. In the end, of course, I will tell.

  ‘Have to have some secrets,’ I say. In such open loving as ours has been, yes, one forgets that. But why should this sensation come upon me now?

  He stares at me from his desk. He likes it to be in that corner. ‘Is that why—the almanac?’

  I hate that word. We must have got it from the Weather Channel, the only television we look at much. ‘No. Because it was our weather!’ bursts out of me. ‘And we were—only collecting it.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says after a minute. ‘I see.’ He knows there’s more to it. But he won’t ask.

  I am waiting. I want most for him to see for himself why we must give this up.

  Amazing that he doesn’t see—one simple fact. Perhaps because he’s so much more used to writing things down. And waiting for these to be read. ‘Posterity,’ he once said to Sherm, who had just boasted that he himself wrote for that ‘vast multitude’—‘posterity is one pair of eyes, bugged over a page.’

  Ah, that’s lonely, I think. Though buildings can turn lonely too. There’s one of mine, almost my first, made for commerce and at best a crowd-pleaser—what they used to call an arcade. But it had a brave roof. We passed it not long ago, in what used to be the outskirts of White Plains, now graphed with mall after mall. It was peeling and beshuttered, chipped like a plate.

  ‘Termites would have been better,’ Rupert said. ‘It’s only suffering from heartworm.’ Even the ‘For Sale’ sign had given up. But I remember every storekeeper in it, and the midday sound of its breezeways, that cash-register ching. A building is three-dimensional. Whatever becomes of it later, it starts out chock-a-block.

  Rupert is staring out the window at our blank wall.

  When I first asked him what he saw there he said—‘Virgin shadow. And people moving in it.’ The next time I asked, he said: ‘Square roots. Of experience. Or of potatoes. Not sure which.’

  Then it became a game to ask. Then that stopped. It’s his wall.

  Next to it is the dusty television set. Be careful—we were told when we got it—that thing takes hostages like crazy. But I know how to get any machine down; just don’t take too good care of it. Let it know it’s in my house. ‘Poor thing—’ Rupert sometimes says, watching it. ‘It thinks it’s history. Like all of us.’

  This is a night to relish. Both of us recording it, all our favorite thoughts honing in. Then why am I leaving here? Because I am. Or we are. The same as any old couple fleeing to Florida. The appointment in Samara remains the same.

  SHE’S CHEWING MY PEN, I’m sorry to see. It has already spattered on the sheet; of course that bed will absorb anything. I like this word processor of hers and am looking forward to polishing it up, so to speak; there must be some way of smartening up even a computer chip. It was she who suggested we swap. I’d forgotten how machines cheer me. En avant!

  Last entry, Gemma? As agreed. Or will I lie, and keep up my side of our story secretly, pretending to myself as well as to you—that it is as good to do as new poetry? For the last little lies have indeed surfaced, haven’t they? Like the acorns one kept in a pencil case as a boy—and throws out one attic day, as a man.

  What Gertrude’s lies to herself were I will never know. But I do not now believe, as I did once, that there were none. Two days after her death, a letter on the Plaza’s stationery came to me from Nurses McClellan and Bond. Although Mr Quinn would certainly have classed it as one for his special attention, he could not do so, having had a relapse.

  The nephew, while ‘a caring person,’ as he himself told us, proved also to be a hypochondriac of many nervous intentions kept simmering. His mother had been Mr Quinn’s twin—‘and also a very declarative person.’ Reared between those two stalwarts, his own powers of decision have obviously been done in. He runs a small editorial service of some sort and, like his uncle, is on Social Security. ‘About my uncle—’ he said, ‘anything you two say to do. Doctor recommends a nursing home where he can decline quietly,’ he said, twitching away from that, and from us.

  Gemma has dubbed him Quinling, adding that he clearly prefers to think that all the old couples in the world who live together like us are really brother and sister, possibly twins. ‘It thins the blood, to be only a nephew, even at seventy,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to decide about his uncle. He’ll sign for whatever, if we can get him to look us in the eyes. The poor man seems to live his whole life in bas-relief.’ It was he who had slipped the Plaza envelope under our door, Gemma being out at the time.

  For the past two weeks she has been back at the community board. I urged her there, though for a reason of my own I don’t want her to get in too deep.

  ‘They love me there,’ she says. ‘For being so lively. At my age. I’m practically a cult. With the young women especially … Rupert—how have we been living for so long, without any young people in our life? Worse than fusty. Deformed. You know—I look at them and I could almost cannibalize them. Those cheeks like fondant. Teeth like sharkbone. And the girls—sometimes I almost am the one I’m looking at. I know what she says to her hairbrush at night. Or how she puts on her stockings, musing at all that’s coming toward her. I feel that lazy vigor; I am it. Then I see—she’s not wearing stockings.’

  As for me, without sons, I have to think it’s still possible to be a man. Because of the infant Gemma lost—even so long ago and not mine—we don’t speak of that. Some secrets are mere silences.

  Get thee to the letter, Rupert.

  In it the Sisters thanked us, reported that they hoped to come back in order to establish a hospice in a building now undergoing purchase ‘in your town of Yonkers, New York.’ If they themselves were unable to return, other
s would be sent in their place, they said, adding: ‘It does not have to be us personally.’ Meanwhile we might like to know, before Gertrude’s estate lets us know formally, that Mrs Acker’s will was establishing several benefices at the Wandsworth hospice—and that one of them, to the value of total care for one dying person, would in her will be earmarked for our disposal, to be taken up at any time.

  I admired the grocery-list calm of that item: One Dying Person, underlined. Over the signatures Ada McClellan, Enid Bond.

  I neither admired nor condemned Gertrude for trying, even from the grave, to separate Gemma and me. As always, one accepted her, even at the party to which she could not come.

  And when, on the heels of that letter, a notice to me of the bequest came from the executors, as luck would have it, I was not at home.

  ‘Where were you?’ Gemma said, not quite idly. Does she suspect what I am up to? I can scarcely think not. ‘Look what’s come.’ She barely gave me time to look, as if I must already know. Maybe I had left the Sisters’ letter lying about? I honestly didn’t know. She and I are indeed so inextricable.

  ‘A benefice for one,’ she said, squinting at me. When she does that, the eyes return to their old Umbrian blue. She is not going to let Gertrude affect her in our own house. ‘And just in time. We’ll use it for dear old Quinn.’

  And so we shall. When we bring him the news it turns out he’s more than willing. ‘I always meant to go abroad again.’ He and his nephew will pool funds, so that Quinn can be escorted, which he will need. Nephew, who has never seen Europe, will travel across the Channel afterward, to see Paris.

  ‘As every younger man should,’ Quinn says, his long bathrobe neatly arranged over the footstool the visiting nurse has set up for him. The bathrobe—a relic of Munich ‘when one could still go there’—conceals the catheter he has to use, which is why Gemma is not allowed to visit him just now. But he is fondling a bunch of organic carrots she has sent him and is wearing the new ascot she has had me bring. I see that this seventy-two-year-old nephew of his quite acquiesces to being thought a youngish man; of course I have never heard Mr Quinn say the word ‘old.’

  Perhaps he will find the hospice’s custom of having the word ‘dying’ spoken aloud at least once a day a breach of taste, if not worse, but his manners will carry him—and them—through their joint ordeal. His world’s not perfect in any case. ‘I could wish,’ he says, ‘that they had such a hospice at—say—Deauville.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Gemma says. She has barged in anyway. ‘We shall see to your wine. And perhaps, when you’re up to it, they’ll take you to a match at Wimbledon.’ She will see to all this herself, she says. ‘For of course I’ll visit you. Very soon.’

  As we leave, she doesn’t look at me. Normally we take that elevator back upstairs, slow as it is, but I suggest we walk. Slow as we are.

  ‘Gemma?’ I find it hard to speak as I climb. ‘You’re not—ill?’

  ‘Never felt better in my life.’ She flashes me a side-long smile. ‘This part of my life.’

  I see that at the moment she is spryer than me. We used to be evenly matched. But these days we alternate.

  ‘Then what are you doing—messing with that charnel house in Wandsworth!’

  ‘I’m not. And it’s no charnel. Be fair to them. You only think so because of Gertrude.’ She mounts another step and looks down at me. ‘No—I’m flying to Saudi.’ She laughs with a catch in her throat. ‘Flying, yes. And to see Christina.’ Above me the light from our old hall fixture and the mother light that used to flood her face seem equally blended. ‘Have you forgotten Christina?’

  You of all people, her tone says. How the small resentments we were never sure of do rise now, in a sudden plague of all the minor boils and warts that middle age kept at bay. So she has harbored what she only once or twice twitted me with—that I was a little in love with my own stepdaughter? Yes, I’m dotty about her, I replied at the time. But only as a father.

  Under the steady glow of the hall light, my hand on the baluster, I believe that to be true. So I can answer lightly. ‘Do you know—I had. Forgotten. For the moment. But only as fathers do.’

  And she believes me. But on the landing she stops. ‘Now you tell me. What you’ve been up to. I’ve told you. What I.’

  So I tell her—if only part of it. ‘I’ve bought some land. Not far from where the farm used to be. Of course that’s all built over now, that near to town. But there was a patch—not too many miles north of it.’

  She smiles—and says softly: ‘Ducks?’ And when I answer: ‘River. Not lake,’ She nods. That is all, positively all. She is wonderful. I have the sense that at times like these, moving back and forth between innuendo commanded from a lifetime of dual experience, we are each other’s bootstraps. By which we shall lift and lift one another. And fall. But not do worse than—fall.

  HOW FAR CAN ONE see across a room—and when one is not in bed with the person opposite! Almost as far as one will see on the new farm, looking back on the old?

  I am getting dangerously fond of this processor, which can transcribe my thoughts faster than I can feel them. And digest them, to conclusions still ahead? I have an idea—or maybe it does—that give it a hint and it could absolve me of my secrets altogether.

  While Gemma over there holds my old Parker pen loose and absently in her hand. I used to have trouble finding the rubber tubes for it, the last of them discovered in a slice of a store way west on Fourteenth Street, whose owner sells parts for all superannuated desk material with as confidential an air as if he is a ‘fence’ for thieves. But not long ago I read that savvy Harvard Business School graduates are affecting pens like mine. It runs on ink.

  Gemma, I fancy, is afraid of it—and maybe rightly. If ever I’m unable to wield a pen except through her, would that old gutta-percha case let loose all the leftover in both of us, all the unsaid? Or celebrate that—and why not? But women, who initiate so many of the formalities, are as superstitious of them.

  Meanwhile, how busy she has been. Mr Quinn and his Quinling are gone. His apartment will be kept for him, for as long as he signifies, but to his delight, Gemma, who helped them pack, encouraged him to take his entire wardrobe, admiring the elegantly patterned jackets or yellowed white linens as they emerged. ‘You’ll need all those changes,’ she assured him. ‘I understand that the establishment is run as much as possible like a hotel. Actually they have a wine list. But you might be of some help to them there.’

  He gave her one of his wife’s headbands, lavender-spotted, which she wore to the airport. She is so thin now that any gewgaw becomes her. Loitering behind the wheelchair, as Nephew pushed and she trotted brightly alongside, I felt quite de trop, Gemma’s coy glance over her shoulder telling me that this was intended. Just before they embarked she handed the nephew a carefully wrapped sack from our good liquor store, saying, Once he’s installed, open this.’

  In the cab going home she rested her head on my shoulder. ‘Want to know what the bottle was?’

  I remembered my crack about suing the old boy for alienation of affection. ‘No need. Château Yquem.’

  Her chuckle will never tell me. I hoped it was that, for the sake of both Quinn and us. At our age it’s good to see sentiments come full circle, even repartee. And coyness is the parsley on the plate.

  When we came home we broke out a more ordinary bottle for ourselves, and ate well, but no coziness could hide a new quality in the silence of the house. There’s an intercom on which we can respond to the downstairs buzzer; there always was. But no one will now intercede for it or overrule it. The door down there will flap outward only for ourselves and unlock only to our key. Our tenant made no more noise than a mouse, but a home that knows it has a pet mouse is marked by a quiet that is different. Again it is the weekend, with all our tenants absent. Outside, the city cries and calls in a rhythm woven into the silence like in a tapestry. Inside, this floor-through that once rang with schoolgirls is like a fortress from which the se
ntries have departed. For the first time in all the years of our tenure here we are totally alone.

  Gemma too appears to be listening, staring at me as if it’s my turn to speak. I do.

  ‘Is it me you’re leaving? Or the house? Or us as we are?’ I know the answer perfectly well: All three of us. With the possible addition of herself alone, as well. As what people do flee—geographically?

  It seems she has already bought her plane ticket to Saudi.

  ‘I took the money I saved up for Francesca’s emergencies.’

  She always saved for those, pinching it from the few architectural assignments she still gets—as only fair to me, she would say, although all our other accounts are joint.

  Her left hand flumps open—in memoriam? The inhalator rolls away—no more need for it now? She’s scarcely mentioned the baby to come, or even Christina—are they merely a direction to go?

  ‘And do I follow you?’ I said.

  Her look is sidelong, then a full-throated stare, the breasts raised, shoulders contracted backward in an agony of acceptance, the same stance she gave me the night we met, from her bed. I know every cell of this woman, her indecisions and her certainties, yet I do not dare touch her. Age makes another person out of the dearest bride.

  But if this is coquetry, it’s the deepest flirtation of our lives.

  Why won’t she tell me why she really wants to give up this record of us? Which she had at first entered as engrossedly as I.

  Why doesn’t she ask me why I bought that land?

  Just so she dragged her right hand farther behind her in the bedclothes, all those years ago, and the flung hairbrush rolled from the bed and fell. Now the pen drops from that same hand into the bedclothes. Both hands are now empty, as back then. And now my arms should grip her waist, my head should be on her breasts.

  Instead, I am at her desk. She won’t have to tell me again, to stop the lovemaking. Across the length of a room come the changes, the deepest ones. I could feel this one in my own cells. No bones creaking, no blood ebbing. Just that slow jolt, repeated in the brain, when the carriage stops, has stopped.