Sorrow. Mourning. Queenliness (a cupped hand oscillating from the window of a carriage). These might carry her through the motions, through the days. These she might claim, and would, and did. It was Friday. She threw out the empty pill bottles and showered and dressed and went downstairs. She did the dishes and took a walk and cut some pussy willow switches from the tree out back and put the cuttings into a pitcher of water, and then she went to the store and came home and made tomato soup and cornbread and did the laundry and after school she listened to Biscuit practice her recorder and she did geology flashcards with Paul and when John came home he found the three of them sitting on the living room rug having dragged out the old board game Sorry.When Ricky looked up at him with a shallow smile, and he returned it with a relieved, grateful one of his own, she knew she was unworthy of him, but not how to make it right.
5.
John.”
He set his teeth. He was getting used to hearing his name pronounced like that, in husky tones, dove-gray with pity.
“I just heard.”
The whole department had heard; it would have been hard to keep the news private. For one thing, his closest colleagues had all known his wife was expecting, so it had been necessary to break it to them when the sad news about her pregnancy emerged. Then he’d needed to tell the head of the theater department the specific date of the induction in order to get his classes covered. Furthermore, this being the theater department, communication flowed expertly while the practice of discretion was somewhat less well-developed. By the time he’d returned to work a week later, everyone from the campus police to his firstyear students seemed to have heard of his misfortune.
Not every response had been unwelcome. The department had sent a vase of white hyacinths to the hospital, and a simple potted gardenia bearing a card signed by the college president had arrived at the house. Charlotte from the costume shop had baked lemon bars, which she’d offered with a merciful absence of fanfare, and his department head had told him he could get his midterm grades in after the deadline. But as many responses had felt invasive. A bouquet of crimson roses, of all things, had appeared on his desk, the accompanying cloying note signed by his most grade-grubbing student. There’d been a dozen condolence cards, awful, glossy, pastel things with ornately scripted Bible verses and soft-focus pictures of lilies and angels, which John had opened and promptly thrown away. The topper was a pious letter, sent by the dean’s hopelessly well-meaning wife, announcing that a donation had been made in the Ryries’ name to the March of Dimes.
All in all, John was relieved when the expressions of sympathy began to peter out. It was certainly easier to work without having to dodge the bullets of people’s good intentions.The fact of his tragedy had seemed to foster in everyone around him a sudden, alarming presumption of intimacy.
As in the case of Madeleine now, belatedly shocked—she’d just returned from a conference in Denver—standing on the threshold of the scene shop, one hand clutching the door frame, the other having lit upon her artfully arranged décolleté blouse. Madeleine Berkowitz, associate professor of costume design, a perfectly respectable teacher and scholar who unfortunately undermined her own credibility by dressing on all occasions like a vamp. From the feet up, at this moment: ankle boots, patterned hose, a rust peau-de-soie miniskirt whose hue matched her mane of hair, a black blouse with plunging neckline and a heavy amber pendant nestled just at the point of her cleavage. At times her appearance provided a not unpleasant diversion or even comic relief, but right now, coupled with her desire to express bathetic condolences, it was the last thing John wanted to deal with.
“John,” she said, making his name somehow two syllables. “How are you?” She crossed to where he stood by the industrial sink.
“Doing well, doing well,” he answered briskly. “Thanks for asking.” He shoved the brushes he’d been holding—half a dozen scenic fitches and badger hair flats—into a can of Murphy Oil Soap and lukewarm water to soak, then wiped his hands on the front of his coveralls. It was nearly evening and he was exhausted. All day he’d been catching up on postponed student conferences in between working in the scene shop; the set for Twelfth Night was behind schedule.The more significant reason for his fatigue, however, was that he’d spent the past few nights on the couch, pleading insomnia. His voluntary banishment was less about insomnia, though, than a grab at dignity. It was a refusal to submit passively to Ricky’s indifference in bed. He didn’t fault her for mourning, but the coolness stung. Why wouldn’t she let herself be comforted by him? For that matter, why did she withhold comfort from him?
“I’m sorrier,” Madeleine continued, “than I can possibly say.”
“I know.” He tried to make this sound both appreciative and final.
Yet she pressed on, her tone swelling with concern: “So, how’s your wife?”
At this moment—John could have smooched him—Lance Oprisu called from the doorway,“Yo, John.You coming or what? Oh hey, Maddie.”
She pivoted toward him. A hand fluttered to rest on the amber pendant between her breasts. “Hello, Lance.”
“Uh, yeah,” said John. “Let me grab my, uh, coat.”
Lance was in his mid-twenties, with wire-rimmed glasses and a dirty-blond ponytail. He’d been hired as the theater’s technical director only this past fall, but he and John had already constructed three sets together, and in the act of shared labor a mutual, unvoiced affection had grown between them. He and John had not made plans to go anywhere, and even at this moment, as John snatched up his green army jacket and tossed Madeleine an apologetic grimace, he had no idea what Lance intended, other than the obvious and noble cause of rescuing him from this encounter.
Twelfth Night was Lance’s baby; John had offered it to him even before he’d known how difficult April would turn out to be. For being the first set Lance had ever designed for the Llewellyn-Price, it was admirable; John, for his part, had been glad to play first mate for a change. But work on construction was going slowly. Only a half-hour ago, they’d gotten the first coat of paint on the stage floor. Now, out in the hallway, Lance suggested they go get some dinner while it finished drying, then come back and put on a second.
“Good by me,” said John. “And thanks for that.” He tilted his head toward the scene shop.
The sky outside still held plenty of light, of the faded blue variety that always seemed it could linger in perpetuity—until that final moment when it was unceremoniously snuffed. John’s truck was blocked in so they took Lance’s Miata, a tight squeeze for John, but in its own way liberating, as it triggered memories of more carefree days. When he and Ricky first met he’d been carless, and they’d gone everywhere in her lame coupe, a Pontiac Fiero that was always breaking down, and in which he always felt uncomfortably compressed—and yet. It had been a sweet car, not least for the creative contortions it had induced them to resort to whenever they drove somewhere secluded and parked.
Lance drove fast, with the windows open an inch and the radio turned up loud. They went to Mero Mayor’s, a dive on Route 303 halfway between Congers and Nyack, where they sat at the bar and ordered enchiladas and margaritas, one for Lance, and, uncharacteristically, three for John, which he downed like limeade. They watched the game on the wall-mounted TV. John was a Yanks fan, Lance hated their guts, and they wrangled about this amiably as they drank.
“You done?” Lance asked at last, with a show of impatience. He leaned in ostentatiously to eye the meniscus of John’s glass, then rose from the bar stool. “Come on.”
“No, no, wait. I’m buying the next round.”
“Not for me, man.” But Lance sat back down.
John called for two shots of Cuervo—again not like him—and, upon failing to persuade Lance to have his, consumed both and declared, jabbing a finger festively toward the ceiling, “Otra más!”
“All right,” Lance said with some resolve, after John had nursed his second beer chaser for some fifteen minutes. He slapped the bar. “Come
on, we got work.”
“You know what I am? Honestly?”
“What?”
“Three sheets to the wind. Hey.” He slapped the bar, too. “Did you know that?”
Lance took John’s Corona and drained it. “No.”
“The sheets aren’t really the sheets. The sails. Did you know that? They’re ropes. They’re the ropes that tie down the other things, what do you call them?”
“What?”
“Sails! That’s not what the sheets are. Don’t ask me why. Now me, I’m saying, I’m three sheets to the wind.That’s three ropes, get it? The ropes that tie down the . . . shit. What are they? The things. You know what I’m trying to say.When the ropes go to the wind, the. Uh. The. The sails. Go flopping and the ship goes off course. Like a drunk.” Completing his thought with enormous satisfaction, John snatched up his empty bottle and tried for a drink.
“More like four, by my count,” Lance muttered drily.
“Actually”—John turned to contradict the younger man with pedagogical flair—“that’s wrong. Four’s unconscious.”
“We gotta go.” Lance pulled out some cash. “I have a floor to paint.”
“As do I.”
“I don’t know about that. I’m thinking I’ll drop you home first.”
“No, no. That’s crap.” John, too, pulled out several bills, which he placed on top of Lance’s, taking great care to line up the corners neatly, yet none to check their denominations. “Come on!” He clapped his hands together once, louder than he’d intended; all around Mero Mayor’s the customers, deeply unexcitable men all, glanced over.
Lance plucked John’s contribution—four crisp twenties—from the pile and stuffed the bills back in John’s coat pocket.
“Hey,” John discovered warmly, “you’re Antonio, and I’m Sebastian!” He was back in Twelfth Night, the shipwrecked sailor rescued by the sea captain.
Lance gave half a grin. He nodded thanks to the guy behind the bar and, with three fingers on John’s back, propelled him toward the exit.
The air had turned cold and dark; it seemed to bear down on them. It was ribboned by a quick, snipping wind as they made their way to the Miata.
“Your car’s no boat,” John observed forlornly as they reached it.
Lance unlocked the doors and got in.
“Not many people know about this place,” John declared, although now he was addressing no one. A car sped by, its engine noise rising, then fading. What he meant was that Ricky didn’t know about this place. He didn’t think so anyway. Mero Mayor was the sort of place he could imagine her driving by any number of times without actually seeing it. It was quintessentially male; nothing about it had been designed to appeal to women. A low white cement building, brown-roofed, hung with a string of yellow and red fiesta lights that managed to project an aura that was precisely the opposite of festive, and, at any given time of day, a handful of clunkers parked out front. On some level John liked it for this very reason, the fact that it was unknown to Ricky; but on another level this caused him anxiety, the thought that she had no idea—could have no idea—where to find him.
“Yo, Sebastian,” Lance prompted. John opened the door and tucked himself into the passenger seat, drawing up his knees and elbows, feeling his frame pressed tightly against the limits of his space. And as if the act of self-compression had triggered a wave of sadness, he felt himself suddenly fighting—not tears, certainly, but a dizzying melancholy, which welled and surged through him and then as suddenly ebbed. He worried that Lance must have noticed, as if the wave of sadness were an odor or a noise he’d emitted.
All this, and the quantity of alcohol he’d imbibed, made it several minutes before he realized they were driving toward Nyack, not Congers. “You can’t take me home, man.”
“You can’t operate machinery.”
“No machinery—we’re painting.”
“I’m not sure you can operate a paintbrush.”
John drew a breath. “Look,” he began. And sighed. He would not argue the point. Lance was probably right in principle, although John firmly believed—knew, actually—that he could, in fact, operate a paintbrush. But all right: he would be an acquiescent, a dignified drunk. “Look,” he said again. “Listen. I’m going to spend the night in my office.”
His declaration was less dramatic than it might have been, since pulling the occasional all-nighter was a part of the job. He kept in his office, for that reason, an old foam love seat that unfolded into a lumpy bed. His declaration was merely unorthodox. Given his current state. Given the fact that they both knew he would not be contributing to the work of set construction this night.
Lance made no sign of having heard him, but at the next turnout did a K-turn, let a few cars pass, and then pulled out again, crossing over to the far lane and heading back toward Congers.
“’Preciate it,” whispered John. “I think my wife’s having an affair.” The thought had not actually occurred to him; he was surprised to hear the words come out of his mouth. Did his drunkenness know something his sobriety did not?
She had done it before, adultery. Though maybe not technically, since they hadn’t been married. Though fuck technically. Infidelity was infidelity. His devastation could not have been greater had it happened post-wedding. The blow of discovery had been oddly somatic, like a two-by-four to the groin, and it was compounded by the awful banality of the sequence: suspicion, inquiry, denial, retreat; suspicion, inquiry, confession, disintegration of the known world. He remembered sooty tears, the sordid cliché of it, the mascara streaking her cheeks as she’d begged his forgiveness, not seeming to understand that this was a matter beyond his control. It made as much sense as begging for someone to love you. As though it were something you could choose.
When he explained that it wasn’t as simple as that, as simple as making a decision, she’d had the gall to try putting the affair in just those terms: as something she hadn’t actively decided upon, but that had “happened” of its own inviolable accord. The guy was some Wall Street coworker asshole; Ricky herself called him that. John never laid eyes on him and was glad. Ricky didn’t care for him, she said. It had been a “thing,” that’s all, the word she used to dismiss it, and John saw it in his mind as just that: a shiny, dangling, tangible thing, a piece of tinsel, maybe, and she a witless magpie who couldn’t help herself. The image didn’t help. She tried giving him some song about its inevitability, how she hadn’t even wanted it; how in a way she felt he, John, had expected it of her; how her actions had been predicated on his own self-serving perception of who she was. She was a maestro of crazy feminine logic, he had to give her that.
Lo and behold, in the end he found he did forgive her. That, too, a thing beyond his control, something he contrived neither to do nor to resist. He forgave her, loved her, married her, made a family with her, and still he was not certain he’d ever trusted her again. It was not trust he felt so much as faith he exercised. But maybe that was true of all marriage. “Fuck me if I know,” he said out loud. And then repeated, as though he needed to experience again how the words sounded, “My wife might be having an affair.”
“Dude.” Lance sighed. “Just to mention, you’re wasted.”
“That’s true,” John agreed. Then: “You think I’m wrong?”
“Look. What you and your wife have just been through must suck. I’m just saying you’ve probably got to be . . . delicate. You know? Give yourselves a break, some time, or some . . . I don’t know, just some fucking delicacy.”
It seemed an unlikely word, coming from Lance. Both words, actually. Fucking and delicate. In New York, their first apartment, he and Ricky’d lived above a delicatessen. Old school, Italian, sausages hanging from the ceiling, the whole bit. When she’d been pregnant with Paul, Ricky used to ram her bare feet in her rain boots and go down in pajamas to buy jars of stuffed peppers. Then she’d sit in bed and eat them, one after the other, putting a whole stuffed pepper in her mouth and working at it, lips gl
eaming with olive oil. He liked to watch her eat them and she ate them ostentatiously for him. Erotically, roguishly. Her mouth stuffed with the delicacy. In her delicate condition. Her indelicate condition, he had loved to watch, and she had loved it, loved him. What had happened to them? What had happened since then?
“Maybe you’re right,” said John. “Maybe she just doesn’t like me anymore.”
Lance did not reply. They turned in to the campus, wound around buildings and pulled up outside the theater. There he said, “You could crash with us.”
Us meant Lance and his fiancée, with whom, John knew, he shared an apartment in Haverstraw. John had never been to their place, but imagined it furnished sparsely, optimistically, in Ikea and Target. He had met the fiancée only once, at the faculty holiday party. He could not retrieve her name just now, but remembered having thought she must be a student. She was Brazilian, agreeable, and attractively plump, as though the extra weight were no more than a surplus of youth. The thought of encroaching on her innocent hearth, denting her affordable modular sofa with his tequila-sloshed bulk, horrified him.
“No, no,” John said. “Thanks.”
He did not expect Lance to try to persuade him, and when the younger man added, “Estrela would be okay with it,” he was touched and appalled. He felt an urge to seize Lance by the shoulders, to counsel him to be more doubting, less confident; to warn him of all the unseen dangers waiting to suck happiness out of life.
“You don’t know,” he heard himself propounding. He realized he was shaking his head from side to side in a manner that struck him, even in his current state, as comically equine. “You don’t know anything, man. I’m saying that because I care about—about you. I care about you guys.”
Lance smiled, nodded in the direction of the dashboard.
“Listen,” implored John. He understood that he was rambling but he had an imperative—this much was suddenly clear—to impart a single profundity. An epiphany. He clapped his hands together again, held them clasped. “Lis—Listen to what I’m telling you. If you don’t listen to anything else I say”—here he paused, momentarily distracted by the beguiling sound of elsisay—“Else. I. Say. Listen to this: don’t think you know—don’t give up your couch, man—don’t—your couch—” He’d lost the thread of the message, but not the vehemence; on that he retained a firmer grasp than ever. “I’m saying don’t ever offer your couch, man—hold on, hold on to your couch.”
The Grief of Others Page 12
