The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “Are they based on stuff?” she asked. “This one looks like, from the Odyssey, you know, that island with the pigs. And there was another like Hansel and Gretel, a trail of bread crumbs in the woods?”

  “They are from books, some of them, if that’s what you mean. A lot he just did from his imagination.”

  “He was an artist.”

  “Postal worker.”

  “Serious?” She turned.

  He nodded.

  She turned back to the boxes. “Oh. Jordie, how long ago did he die?”

  “In January. It’s Gordie, actually.”

  “Oh, God!” She swiveled to him again, covering her mouth. “Sorry!”

  “It’s all right. He’d been sick awhile.”

  “No, I mean—yes, I’m sorry about—but I mean, I’ve been calling you the wrong thing all this time?”

  “That’s okay.” He coughed. “I should check the bath.”

  After Ebie had been bathed and toweled, they went out on the tiny balcony and ate peanut butter crackers and sour pickles, the best Gordie could muster from the derelict cupboards and fridge.“Is this a joke?” Jess asked when he first brought forth the food, and he thought she was riding him about such poor offerings. But she laid a hand on her stomach, on what he now recognized as a meaningful protrusion, and he recalled the cliché: the pregnant woman’s craving for pickles and ice cream, and he wished he’d intended the wit.

  Ebie lay at their feet, her drying fur redolent of doggie shampoo and sunshine and also, faintly, something gamier: salty and dark. Jess sat in Will’s old chair and used Ebie’s hindquarters as a footrest. She ate like a farmhand, ravenously, steadily, one peanut butter cracker after another, and then polished off the pickles, and Gordie began to fear he’d run out of food before she ran out of room. But at last she’d settled back in her chair, hands folded over her small bulge, and tipped her face to the sky.

  Gordie took advantage of her eyes being closed to study her. He couldn’t decide whether she was pretty or not. He was trying to think what his dad would say if he came home to find Gordie out here with a girl. He’d be glad, relieved of the great worry he’d been too tactful ever to voice. “Well done,” he’d say. “Yer a sly one, then, eh?”

  “Do I have food on my face?” she said, eyes still closed.

  “No.”

  “Then why are you staring at me?”

  He turned away, leaned his arms against the railing and looked out over the other buildings in the complex, the other cars, each parked in its numbered space.

  “No, really.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just was.”

  Before he took her home she asked to look at his dad’s boxes again.This time he looked, too, rediscovering a few old favorites: Peter Rabbit hiding in Farmer MacGregor’s garden; a candy shop whose peppermint sticks were red and white embroidery floss, twisted together and stiffened with glue. A newsstand with stacks of newspapers that had been painstakingly folded from real pieces of newsprint.

  “What will you do with them?” asked Jess.

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking that was a question.”

  “It is,” she said. “It is a question. These should be somewhere people can see them.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  He wanted to know why she had come back here, what about him seemed worthy of her interest.

  “What?” she asked again.

  “Do you really think they’re good?”

  “I think they’re heartbreaking.”

  She moved to the last shelf on the end. Gordie moved with her. Newer stuff. He looked over her shoulder and saw the last box his dad had ever made, the one begun a year ago, after that final surgery. How faithfully his dad had copied the scene from the photo album: the table all laid out, just as in the picture. Gordie saw his dad’s fingers, blocky and hairless (even the coarse hairs on the back of his hands having bowed to chemo), the knuckles densely whorled, the nails thickened and discolored from the drugs, yet clean and trimmed, as ever. He saw his dad’s hands working the tip of a pencil over the play dough, molding the icing, raising icing roses as if by sleight of hand along the rim of the tiny cake.

  “Can I help?” he’d asked. He’d never helped in the past, never asked to.

  And “No,” his dad had said. Just like that.

  But then had added gruffly, “You can’t, because I’m making this one for you.” And that had never happened before either.

  Gordie’d swallowed hard, and made his escape from the sudden welter of feeling building up in the small room by going off to walk Ebie.

  Now, looking together with Jess into the one box that was above all his, wondering whether it was worth telling her so, he saw something he’d never spotted before. Something different about the wedding cake, a tiny detail he could swear hadn’t been there when his dad finished the box last spring and presented it to him. He must have added this bit later. When, and why? And why silently?

  In the center of the balsawood table, atop the antimacassar tablecloth and the silver-dollar platter and the three-tiered wedding cake that rested upon it, two tiny figures stood. Two painstakingly painted grains of rice. A groom and a groom.

  4.

  John pulled into the driveway at two-thirty, wishing it really were the start of the weekend. It was Friday, yes, but the only reason he was home so early was that he had to be back at work again in a few hours; For Colored Girls was opening that night.The set he’d designed was spare: a dozen flats painted to look like graffitied segments of a brick wall. Behind them, a cyclorama, lit with different colored gels over the course of the play, from rosy-yellow to celestial blue. It had come off without a hitch and he was pleased with it. No finishing touches remained to be added, nor did he anticipate any last-minute repairs, but he always made a point of being on hand for opening night.

  Usually on opening night he’d stay through curtain, too, out of respect for the actors, but he thought he might duck out earlier this evening. He had a nagging feeling he’d been neglecting something at home. Their lives this past year had not been very happy, but they had been steady, predictably chugging along. Now he had the sense of changes afoot, changes he did not quite grasp or see. He was aware, mostly, of a sharp longing for family, never mind that they’d all had supper together every night since Jess had arrived. Perhaps the feeling had to do with Jess, the way her presence bespoke his failings. Or served to remind him that all children grow up and leave home. Or served to remind him that not all children grow up, forcing comparison with the baby they’d lost and his dreadful, thin scrap of life. Or maybe the feeling had nothing whatever to do with Jess; maybe it was all to do with Ricky.

  For the arrival of Jess had also, coincidentally or not, heralded the renewal after long absence of what John thought of wryly as “marital relations.” Why wryly? Why wasn’t he simply glad? He sat there in the driveway, in the truck, motor off, keys in hand, mulling over these past nights.

  It had begun after their talk with Jess, that Friday night—or really, it had been the small hours of Saturday by the time Ricky’s fingers slipped through the unstitched slit of his boxers. In the milkiness of the streetlamp she made patterns on his skin, drew lace on him with her nails, unhurried, agonizingly light, until he could not not say through his teeth, “Harder,” and then she tugged his boxers down. Lowered her face to the damp curling hair between his legs and rubbed her cheek and jaw bones hard against him like a cat. Later, she rose to straddle him, her face luminous and distant as an antique silver-print. She did not smile, not even with her eyes.

  Each night since had seen a repetition. A new iteration. Theme and variation. It was not so much a renewal of their marital relations as a reinvention of them. He should have been ecstatic, should have been delirious. Well, he was. Was anyway swept away, overcome by the tidal force of the thing—even now, in the truck, he’d grown aroused inside his jeans.The ferocity of their sex had no history he
could think of; the source of its ruthlessness he did not understand. This lovemaking felt punishing, retributive.

  Yesterday morning, going to the bathroom, John had discovered a bite-shaped bruise at the top of his thigh. Its provenance took a second to dawn on him, and when it did he became light-headed. He felt awed by the maroon ellipse on his skin, awash in unfamiliar tenderness. Unfamiliar because it was directed toward himself, a feeling for his own vulnerability. It occurred to him, in a bizarre rush of association, that if Ricky were in some fatal accident, injured beyond recognition, the mark on his thigh could be used to identify her, a kind of dental record. That night he showed her what she’d done. He turned on the bedside light, knelt over her, one knee on either side of her waist, and, grasping the back of her head, steered her face to the spot. She made no expression of remorse. She touched the bruise with her thumb. Grazed it with her lips, salved it with her tongue. But within moments she’d abandoned this posture, her fingers digging into him from behind, her teeth pressed to his front. He winced, and, with a speed that surprised him, pressed her back against the pillow, kneed her legs apart.

  John did not know what to make of any of it. He was fascinated and repulsed by what had been brought forth in him. For so long Ricky had related to him as obtuse, wanting, incapable of not letting her down. Now suddenly she needed him, demanded him—but that was not the whole of it: it was this specific version of him she demanded. Inarticulate, brutish.

  John got out of the car. The day was mild for mid-April—hard to believe that only two weeks ago bits of snow still lingered. Going up the steps to the porch, he bent to retrieve a mug, presumably left by Jess. Hours ago, from the look of it: an inch of cold coffee sloshed in the bottom, and its walls were coated with milk scum. It was the alphabet mug Paul had made in second grade. John dumped the liquid over the railing and held the empty mug by its lopsided handle—he could picture sevenyear-old Paul sculpting it with slack-jawed concentration, the gumdrop-tip of his tongue protruding—as he pushed through the door.

  “Hello!” he called. “Hello?”

  Paul was due home from school in a matter of minutes; Biscuit not for a half-hour. It was Jess’s response he listened for.The afternoon sun slanted through the diamond-shaped window on the second-floor landing, draping a column of light across the stairs: dust motes and hush. She was out, then. When she got home he’d speak to her. She simply could not stay vaguely on this way, all open-ended, hapless fate, all whichever-way-the-wind-blows and time-will-tell. Last night at supper Ricky had come down on Paul for asking Jess point-blank when she was leaving, but John had thought the question legitimate, if not, perhaps, felicitously phrased. If her parents really had kicked her out, he supposed they would have to make a place for her here, as Ricky kept insisting. One way or the other, he wanted it said, acknowledged.

  And why did Ricky keep insisting? He couldn’t work it out. But then, it had been a long time since he’d felt he understood what Ricky desired. Nearly a year had passed since the revelation of her second infidelity, but his memory of that night remained sharp: the way he’d lurched home late, after having slept off most but not all of the tequila on the love seat in his office, and pressed her to divulge the secret she’d been keeping, the secret whose content he had not come close to guessing, but of whose existence he had finally become convinced—or at any rate had become freed, perhaps by drunkenness, to posit. The way she’d proven him right and shocked him at the same time. Really shocked him, with a truth he’d never have imagined.The way he’d finished out that night on the den couch, not sleeping at all but staring into the dark, which had a textured, binding quality, like a cheesecloth in which were caught many wild thoughts like so much flotsam and jetsam: thoughts of her workplace affair before they married, thoughts of her holding on to their short-lived baby in the big pink hospital chair. Thoughts of the crib he’d put together, alone, on a Sunday afternoon, whistling, Allen wrench in hand, screws strewn across the floor.

  He no longer remembered how many nights he’d spent on the couch last spring—four? five? a dozen?—or what exactly had precipitated his return to their bed, only that it had been nothing transformative, no sweet, relief-filled instance of reconciliation. A certain atmosphere of normalcy was hard to avoid, frankly, in a family where the kids needed their reading logs signed, the laundry needed folding, the fridge restocking, the plants watering. Daily business, if not a balm, was at least a broth in which they’d been swept up and eddied along. His hurt and anger had gotten pulled into the current, as had Ricky’s, apparently: had become just a regular part of the larger brew.

  It was tempting to trust her again. He wanted to give himself over to her reanimation these past few weeks, her general move toward good cheer, her excitement over Jess’s baby, her unexpected fervor in bed. But John could not, quite. Why? He put a hand on the newel post, touched the alphabet mug to his forehead. He thought of the night of the baby’s conception, a night all too easy to pinpoint in the sea of touchless nights stretching in either direction from it. That night, he recalled, had held the brief whiff of renewal. Their hands, their bodies, knew painfully well what to do, as if to mock the small coolness that had come to mark their waking hours.Their hands, their bodies, seemed to belie their daylight moods and gestures, to flout what they’d become, to insist, Here is the root of your marriage, undiminished, unchanged . He had been roused that night by her touch, had woken aflame to his own erection in her hand, and had turned to her, already responsive, before he’d had sufficient time to register surprise. The baby had been conceived in the slippery sweat of nostalgia, and the truth was that John had spent the next several months wishing its existence away. Perhaps it was not Ricky he was now afraid to trust.

  He lowered himself heavily onto the stairs. And why had Jess come? Could she be trusted when she said she sought nothing from them? She must want something. Whatever it was, he had little doubt he owed it. He wished she would say what it was, wished he could give it and be done. He pictured her, his eldest child, not well known to him: her eyes, first, behind their glasses: serene, modest, the eyes of a fawn, a novitiate—and then her thickening abdomen. Was she beginning to show? He tried not to notice, tried actively to avoid studying the size and condition of whatever small swell was visible: evidence at once inarguable and unfathomable of a more experienced life.

  Another image came to him, one he hadn’t thought of in many, many years: day-old Jess. Still in the hospital, swaddled in a receiving blanket, her face a bit compressed still from the trials of birth. Her eyes had looked to him Inuit, dark and almondshaped; her cheeks had been broad, her chin a little nub, and her hair—he remembered thinking, with a private, triumphant thrill, that she’d got his hair!—had been profuse: black, curly, so silkyfine it looked damp.

  A nurse had handed her to him. He had been amazed at how light and yet dense she was, and when, in her sleep, in his arms, she had moved slightly, shifting—with such authority—the unimaginably complex muscular-skeletal system within the tight package of her bindings, he had been overcome by pride and gratitude and fear, because only in that moment did it truly hit him that she was a real person, her own person. He’d been nineteen, and in awe.

  Deena hadn’t wanted him to hold the baby at all. Or that is what she’d claimed from where she’d sat propped up in the hospital bed, her long wavy hair gathered back in a giant banana clip, her eyes looking oddly naked without their usual black liner, their fringe of mascara. She’d worn a Hofstra sweatshirt over her johnny, and had tiny red dots under both eyes: burst blood vessels from pushing, she’d informed him, piquishly, when he inquired.

  “You look like you’ve been in the ring,” he’d said, hoping for a smile.

  She’d stared at him, whether annoyed, confused, or simply exhausted he did not know.

  “The boxing ring.” He mimed a one-two.

  They’d started dating in college the previous July. Both their discovery of and interest in each other had been abetted, no dou
bt, by the scanty summertime population in the dorms. Deena, going into her senior year, had stayed on campus because she was a rampant overachiever who’d enrolled in some kind of academic enrichment program virtually every summer since junior high; John, entering his sophomore year, because he was given free on-campus housing with his job working as an admissions rep.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Deena had said doubtfully when John, hovering near the threshold of her hospital room, asked to hold their daughter. “What do you think, Ma?” She’d turned to Mrs. Levin, sitting in the visitor’s chair refolding three infinitesimal outfits she’d just held up to show Deena. On the floor beside her sat an enormous Saks Fifth Avenue shopping bag; there was a sight gag, John thought, in the relative proportions: the reverse of the clown car at the circus.

  “Of course he should hold his baby,” Mrs. Levin said, shrugging her heavy shoulders and pursing her lips, although not looking at either of them, but only at the impossibly small, pinkand-white terry-cloth sleep suit she dangled by the shoulders. “Why shouldn’t a father hold his own baby?”

  And John had felt a shot of hope, not because she’d come to his defense (he felt fairly certain her verdict was unrelated to any warm feelings toward him) but because Mrs. Levin was so palpably annoyed with them both, he felt it might serve as a reminder to Deena that she and he were really allies, at least in this sense. They were not getting married, as the Levins wished them to do (never mind that John wasn’t Jewish, never mind, the Levins said, that they were both still in college, both still kids, both, for that matter, idiots: a baby needed a mother and a father).

  The thing is, John would have stepped up. Or caved in. Either way: he would have wed. It was Deena who’d held firm in saying no. Deena, two years older than John, had managed to attend her commencement less than a month earlier, huge under her black gown, squinting migraine-ishly against the slamming metallic sunshine, shifting her weight from foot to foot long after the end of “Pomp and Circumstance,” all through the part of the ceremony when the graduates stood waiting to receive their diplomas, supporting the weight of her bulge with fingers laced tightly together beneath it. It was she who’d put the kibosh on their getting married. She who’d said categorically it would be a mistake. A disaster. The worst thing they could do. So that even as John had felt relieved—even, to be fair, as he’d privately acknowledged she was right—he’d felt snubbed. Diminished.