The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  After supper, once the dishwater has heated up on the stove, Jess takes the flashlight and leads Paul and Biscuit, already in pajamas, down to the dock to brush their teeth in the lake for the last time this summer. John presses the length of his body against the back of Ricky’s, so that she’s pushed up against the enamel rim of the sink, where she stands doing dishes. He moves his lips along the back of her neck, touches his tongue to the glass bead of one earring, holds it between his teeth a moment, as he had wanted to do. He runs his hands along the front of her, murmurs, “After the kids are in bed you and I are going down to the dock.”

  “We can’t,” she says, even as she braces her soapy hands against the sink to press herself against him. “I promised Jess. Earlier. I’m taking her skinny-dipping. She’s never been.”

  “But I love you.” His lips graze the curve of her ear.

  She goes on tiptoe and turns sideways, rubs her face back and forth to nuzzle his beard. “Tomorrow,” she promises. “In our own bed.”

  Later, his oldest child and his wife get ready to go down the path to the dock. John has the Week in Review spread open on his lap, but he’s not reading; he’s looking at the embers dying in the woodstove and listening to them as they disrobe behind the curtain of the alcove where he and Ricky sleep. They are whispering so as not to wake Biscuit and Paul. Their clothes make small noises, the sound of zippers, of fabric brushing over skin.

  When they emerge sheathed in towels, both of them clutching their pajamas in small bundles against their chests, John catches only the ice cream gleam of their bare shoulders before fastening his eyes hard on the newspaper in his lap. The atmosphere of shy adventure emanates strongly, seductively, from them. So unsure of his position is he that when they whisper, “Bye,” he pretends not to hear, and glances only obliquely when Ricky adds, in a hoarser whisper, “We’re off.” He waves, nods, and turns the page as the screen door closes behind them.

  But before the slapping of their flip-flops fades, John casts aside the paper and hurries to the doorway. He catches the last of them as they disappear down the path, the moon lighting their way. His wife in the lead. His daughter, whose braid makes a single dark stripe down her back, following. He pictures, involuntarily, Ricky’s body under the towel. He knows it so well: the three little moles below her left breast, the way the right hip is slightly higher. John is riddled with longing and gratitude. The fullness with which Ricky has embraced Jess reveals a quality he would not have guessed of her. It’s shameful but true: he thought her smaller than this. He will never confess his crime; it isn’t something for which he can openly apologize. But he feels duly chastened. Every day henceforth he will atone silently, actively, he decides, for having underestimated his wife.

  Minutes after they have disappeared from view he continues to stand at the door, straining to hear the dock creak under their feet. Nothing. He thinks of the woman who drowned two days earlier—the very words seem improbable, strung together in error—but they are as correct as the woman’s death is real, and he thinks of this correctness, this realness, as something tangible, a liquid substance secreted into the lake in which she drowned and now spread evenly throughout it. How many others, he wonders, standing in this lonely way by the screen door, have died in the lake over the years, the millennia? How many have died on the land, in these woods, on the very spot where he stands? Also this: How many are dying right now, at this moment, the whole world over? For just a moment his mind is able to grasp it, the existence of a vast, invisible, yet utterly real community of the dying, and then, it follows, another composed of the suffering, and one of the ecstatic and one of the healing, and one of those in despair and one of those in wonder. Somewhere on this earth, too, there are others like him, others paused at this very moment in contemplation by an open doorway. For just a moment he is able to grasp the perfect truth of this. Then it is gone.

  And he perceives that it will always be this complicated, that life will always contain such quicksilver changes, that it is composed of quicksilver changes, those mercurial shifts between understanding and loss of understanding, longing and gratitude, imprecation and blessing. He stands close to the night, listening for a splash, and thinks he has never felt so unafflicted in all his life, so wholly unmarked by fear.

  PART FIVE

  This Year

  1.

  Adult lap swim ended at 9:45, or Ricky would’ve gone on indefinitely spanning the same twenty yards back and forth: freestyle, flip turn, breathe in, breathe out. Her swimming body was a kind of machine, uncomplicated by a multitude of human attributes. In the pool she was pared down to her unimpeachable essence, all muscle and method, and everything else was muffled: thought, sound, even vision, thanks to the chlorine blur. Swimming caps were required. Hers was white, and when she caught her reflection, smile-less, dripping, in the locker room mirror, she was reminded of her mother, and thought: so soon.

  She’d come in an effort to exhaust herself—she hadn’t been sleeping—but when she left the Y, going down the steps and turning onto Remsen Street with her swim bag over one shoulder, she felt damnably awake. The night air seized her head, her hair wet from the shower and combed flat to her scalp; the cold seemed to latch on, a thin hand steering her forcefully the two blocks home. She wondered whether she and John would have another session tonight, another tunneling nightmare discussion in which she attempted to talk their marriage into resuscitation, into wholeness. Their marriage was a broken body laid out on the bed between them, and she a fraud in a nurse’s uniform, trying to make the bones knit through any means she could think of: incantations; sugar pills; sheer, useless will.

  It had been this way for two weeks now, ever since Biscuit’s fire and Paul’s fistfight and suspension.

  John didn’t want her touching him. Each time she tried, he’d remove her hand, immediately but neutrally, without anger or force, as if his response were less emotional than neurological.

  “I can’t,” he’d say. Factually. He’d said it again last night, when, all out of words, at a loss for any other kind of persuasion, she’d tried once more, in spite of herself, placing a hand oh so carefully—on his knee, his knee.

  He’d lifted it off.

  “You won’t forgive me?” she’d croaked. But how many tears had she spilled these past weeks already? Too many for these to gain notice, let alone to move him. “Ever?”

  “I don’t know. How can I—? It’s not something I can know. I’m not trying to not forgive you.Tell me how.”

  These moments were cruelest, when he appeared to be offering her a chance, except she’d tried every answer she could think of and none of them was right. Last night she hadn’t been able to come up with anything new, and had only gaped back: dumb, beseeching. The tears had trembled but remained in her eyes as if they, too, were tired of the endless repetition.

  The problem was her crime was old. She’d admitted to it a year ago. She’d confessed, apologized, and they’d gone on—only now it turned out he’d never forgiven her, the whole thing had merely lain dormant. She’d tried to claim—No. She had claimed, for once, full responsibility for what she’d done, for how her lie had hurt them, harmed them, no excuses tendered.

  “But you’re wrong about my not having been home in a year, John. You’re wrong about that.” This had been earlier that same evening, arguing in the kitchen as they’d done dishes, because that was the nature of it now; it had overflowed the bedroom, overflowed any semblance of privacy. Even as domesticity carried them along in its current, the fight had come into the open. Another strange relief.

  “It hasn’t been only a year,” she’d gone on. “Or only two, or only three. And it hasn’t been only me. We haven’t been home to each other in . . . I don’t even know how long. I always think of that summer we went away with Jess, when she came with us, you know, as this golden time? But it wasn’t, even then. I don’t remember a time when we were living with you not as the forgiver and me the forgiven.”

  Th
e kids—all three of them, Jess included—had been in the den, watching TV, as they’d been doing far too much of lately, but it wasn’t to be helped; Ricky and John kept needing to have these talks. There was no arranging for them, no making a date to converse in private or finding a time when it would be convenient; the need for talk kept seeming to arrive, like weather: urgent and unassailable. They tried keeping their voices down, but this, too, was little to be controlled.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Ricky had gone on. “I know what you’re going to say now: that I fucked it up even before we married, with that thing, that stupid affair. And fine. Okay. I did fuck up, John. But if you were never going to get past it, you should never have married me. How dare you—oh God, John—how dare you marry me and not trust me? Where”—she’d drawn a rasping breath—“where did that ever leave us?”

  He’d dried his hands on the dish towel and turned to face her. “But, Ricky,” he’d said, and his voice was not so nice, “I was right not to trust you.”

  “But don’t you think you’re a little bit responsible? When you treat me as untrustworthy, when you see me as untrustworthy, what can you expect? It’s like, like, a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  He’d let out a short disgusted laugh. “That’s good.That’s convenient. You fuck some other guy, and then you blame me for not trusting you. And, oh yeah, the fact that I don’t trust you is what makes you go on being dishonest.”

  “No, John, no. This is part of your meanness.You always have the upper hand, don’t you? You thrive on being morally superior to me.” How was it that it felt like hell to say and hear these things, and yet was at the same time such an enormous relief? “Fine, then. Let’s turn that logic on you. I don’t tell you about the baby because I don’t trust you, because I don’t trust that you’ll let my decision be. And then what happens? I do tell you, and it turns out I was right not to trust you.”

  He’d stared at her, blinking.The kitchen light seemed to pulse above them. Or was it the refrigerator, pulsing in her ears? “What are you talking about?”

  “You said—God, I’ll remember this till I die—‘How compromised would it be?’ Remember, John? I was comforting you, you had your head on my stomach, and you looked up and you were thinking of the baby being disabled, if it lived, and you said, ‘How compromised would it be?’ You were horrified. You didn’t want it. It was so clear. You would have wanted me to have an abortion if I’d told you earlier. I was right not to trust you.”

  “No.” He’d shaken his head. His face, his beard, his eyes, his voice, all were very dark. The shadow of his bulk seemed to grow darker and the rest of the kitchen to fade almost to white. Ricky’d braced herself against the back of a chair.

  “No,” he’d said again. “It’s not the same.You don’t know what I would have said if you’d told me when you first found out. I don’t know what I would have said. That’s the—” He’d broken off, expelled a breath, grabbed her wrist, let it go. “That’s the point, Ricky. We don’t know.You didn’t give us a chance to find out. No, not me. Not: you didn’t give me a chance. You didn’t give us that chance.”

  The overhead light brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed. Her head felt queerly light. “Oh,” she’d said, her voice so dry it crept like crumbs. “I wasn’t thinking of it like that.”

  He’d nodded. She wished he would grab her wrist again now, but he didn’t. “That’s the problem.” He looked her in the eye after he said it.

  “John?” It had come to her suddenly, with a quick, flashbulb sort of pop. “This is better. Isn’t it? What we’re doing now?”

  But he’d only regarded her steadily. After a moment, said, “I don’t know.”

  THE Y WAS JUST two blocks from home. Ricky turned onto their street now and approached their house, then stopped several yards away.There were a few lights on downstairs, a few upstairs as well. Through the window at the far end of the porch, the bluish shifting light of the television in the den. She backed away, like a painter trying to get a clearer, more comprehensive view; she backed farther and farther until she was standing on the far side of Depew. And was surprised to find herself there. She did not have a particular idea about what she was doing. She had never come home before only to back off like this, and was conscious of feeling scarily free, unscripted. She was, she realized, seeing the house from the angle she’d first laid eyes on it, stepping out of the realtor’s car on that sweltering day eleven years earlier. The coup it had been, to obtain this house! The giddy, slightly illicit triumph of it—she remembered it feeling like that, as though they were getting something they did not entirely merit: scraping together the money for the down payment, accepting help from both John’s mother and her own parents, declaring their incomes, baring their credit histories, paying for the title search, signing the mortgage papers—all of it seeming to require more daring, more cheek, even, than had the act of getting married.

  Ricky retreated farther, walking into the very middle of the park, from which spot she again turned and regarded the house, her home, softly lit, sweetly inhabited, oblivious to her presence. From here it was not hard to imagine her exile, her rightful turning out, which would be a kind of death. And so she imagined dying, and felt again that shot of alarming liberation, and imagined in death keeping watch over the house, and in this state she was all benign, incapable of hurting or lying or failing anyone. She imagined being a soul only, a transparent birdlike thing, living in one of the trees in the park, watching the children, and John, as they came and went. Watching over them. Incapable of speech, touch, anything but bearing witness.

  Desolation swept through her, so real she nearly cried out.

  Down the hill she heard the sounds of young men playing basketball. Saw by the stone steps the red tips of cigarettes. Conversation lapped around the edges of the park, even this late on a cold spring night.Young people without jobs, old people without jobs, people wanting drugs, people selling drugs, people who were always leaving their used condoms and empty nip bottles in the bushes. Sometimes she felt annoyance toward such strangers, and sometimes she felt them as a threat, but not tonight. She imagined herself as a soul again, a kind of vague guardian figure, flickering and gray, bearing a great tray of cocoa, picking her way through the wet grass, picking her way among the wounded—for wasn’t the park full of the wounded, even the joyful ones, even those having a good time tonight—dispensing angelically the steaming cups.

  The sky was starless, moonless. Her eyes still stung from chlorine. She remembered a night long ago when she’d lain on the dock at Cabruda Lake, not with John but much longer ago, with her parents, her head in her mother’s lap, her father’s corduroy shirt spread over her legs. She remembered the Perseid shower, their patience, the meteors that never came. Or did come, sight unseen. Her father’s story about the Litvak, the rabbi with the ax and the rope. Her mother’s near-silent laugh.The water lap-lapping.

  “Hey, Ma, what up?” A hooded figure brushed by her, turning as he passed to check her out. It struck her as comical, being mistaken for a sexual entity when here she was imagining herself a transparent bird-thing, no body, all spirit. She took no offense but it was her cue to walk again, to move toward her house, from which she had not, after all, been expelled.

  JOHN MET HER in the front hall. He was putting on his jacket.

  “I’m going out,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

  “Of course.” She set down her swim bag. “Did something happen?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that . . . it’s late for you to be going out.”

  “I’m meeting a colleague for a beer. I was waiting for you to get home.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Biscuit and Jess are both in bed. Paul’s watching TV.”

  “Okay. Did you give him a time he has to go up?”

  “No.”

  He opened the door to leave.

  “John.”

  He stopped.

  “Abou
t what I said earlier. We need to decide.”

  He turned and looked at her. His eyes were cold, but perhaps not as cold as they had been of late. Perhaps they were mostly dim with exhaustion.

  “Do you know what I mean?” she said. “About what we’re going to do.We need to decide.”

  He looked at her the same way so long she supposed he wasn’t going to respond, but then he gave a nod. And was gone. Alone in the hallway, she worked her fingers through her damp hair, then let herself cradle her face.

  From the den came the sound of a muted explosion. Ricky wandered in. Paul, watching MythBusters, barely looked up. She stood by the couch, the saggy old thing that was, in some alternative version of events, to have been replaced by now with a bed for Jess. Instead, these past two weeks John had been creeping down to sleep on it each night and as stealthily evacuating it early each morning. The formal proposal Ricky had rehearsed was never delivered, just as the scraps of fancy lingerie were never unwrapped from their tissue paper parcels.The thought of both made her feel worn, now, and ill. She combed her fingers slowly through the tangles at Paul’s nape. Ever so slightly, he moved his head away, as she’d known he would; the shake-off had been part of his repertoire for at least a year now.