The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  “It’s really cool,” Paul said, in a dazed, preoccupied way. Biscuit did this, too, spoke in the same vacuous cadence whenever watching TV. “They’re using a whole bunch of roach foggers in this abandoned building to see if it’ll explode. If it works it’ll be the biggest explosion they’ve ever had on MythBusters.”

  Ricky came around and sat beside him. Once, he’d wanted to tell her everything. How he’d gotten a triple in kickball; how polar bears steered with their back legs; how his friend Alexi had a wart on his pinkie but it went away; how he’d dreamed he was a red Lamborghini. He used to relate news from and about his life in so much detail that she had regularly tuned him out while he followed her around the house, chattering on. There had been a time when she’d felt worn out by his relentless attentions. She remembered all those nights—not even two years had elapsed since the last occurrence—when he’d appear in the doorway of her and John’s bedroom, the way he’d stand there, shoulders tensed, face red with the effort not to cry, telling them he couldn’t sleep, that something “didn’t feel right.” How weary she’d grown of this routine. She cringed to remember how she lost the ability to escort him back to bed without letting her annoyance show. How she’d made him feel guilty for troubling them, for failing to manage his worries, for being in some fundamental way deficient.Were these his memories, too?

  Once, he had not been able to get enough of her. She’d been his favorite audience, requisite witness to all he did and thought. Now, she was honored if he so much as volunteered a synopsis of a TV show.

  Ricky stole a sideways glance at his eye. If you didn’t know about the shiner, you wouldn’t notice anything, but she believed she could see the last cabbage-y green remnant littering the skin under his eye. She had to restrain herself from touching a finger to the spot, from touching her lips to it. She took stock of how his eyebrows had thickened, his nose and jaw become more prominent. His emergent wisps of mustache glowed clearly in the television’s unforgiving light. The Braille of his pimples was similarly, heartbreakingly pronounced. How little effort it took to picture him at nine, at four, at one: like a dandelion clock, slender and bright. Little towheaded Paul. Who was now neither little nor towheaded and did not want her touch. Who would not now come to her with his problems under any circumstances.

  John, after his initial enraged phone call with the principal, and then a second, more mollifying and illuminating conversation in the principal’s office on Monday, had taken Paul aside and spoken with him at length, obtaining confirmation of what the principal’s interviews with teachers had suggested: that their son had been the target of increasing verbal bullying for months. The incident in the apple orchard was apparently not an isolated event, but the culmination of escalating provocation. Although it did appear Paul had thrown the first punch, and the mandatory three-day suspension for fighting on school grounds still stood (the principal had said apologetically), the other boys were regarded as the main aggressors; in addition to suspension, they would have to do community service and attend a weekly lunchtime anti-bullying affinity group in the guidance office. “It’s great they give the bullies all that extra attention,” Ricky had said. “What about Paul?”

  “I don’t know,” John had replied. “Maybe you should have been the one to meet with the principal.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want to hear I’m right. I don’t want to hear you’re sorry.”

  That was what it kept coming down to these days. A measure of civility; a measure of practical communication around the household and the children. But the least trespass into the realm of their relationship and anger flared, or else he shut her down. She was not allowed to apologize anymore; he was tired of those words’ progression from her mouth. For weeks she’d thought in the most desperate terms of penance, wishing for a sequence of words she might recite, a splintered board on which to kneel, a hair shirt, good works. Alternatively, she’d rehash the proofs that John was not blameless: he had a daughter he barely knew; he exploited Ricky’s income so that he could work at a job he liked; he hadn’t wanted a third child in the first place; he wouldn’t have understood, had never understood. A wildly assembled list of his wrongs to balance her own.

  But life was not a balance sheet. Poor little quant. She’d known better, of course. Against her hopes, all along she’d known. It wasn’t a matter of tweaking the numbers to make the equation come out. It was not hers to control. Nor was it his to control. That was what John had kept trying to tell her. I’m not trying to not forgive you. That was the hopeless part.

  And yet this truth—that neither one of them could script what would happen—was also where hope resided. She’d realized it in the kitchen earlier that evening, and realized it again while standing in the park after her swim, looking at their little house aglow on the dark street. It was what she meant when she’d told John, just before he left, We have to decide. A fearsome prospect but a necessary one, and the only one that offered any possibility of sanity or happiness.

  “Here it comes,” said Paul. “Watch.” Ricky turned to the screen in time to see the explosion. A sliding door blew off the building. Flames roiled out. “Yes! Did you see that? Wait, they’ll show it again.”

  At the end of the segment she sent him to bed. He went compliantly, yawning, not without letting her put her arms around him first. The difference in their height had become negligible. Within the year, she realized, watching him trudge up the stairs, he would overtake her.

  She went to the kitchen, to the pantry, took down the old bottle of vodka, a holiday gift from someone in John’s department, and poured quite a lot of it into a jelly glass. Who was it, she wondered, John was seeing tonight? And why had he said “colleague” rather than the person’s name? She sat at the kitchen table and listened to the hum: the fluorescent light over the sink, or the fridge, or perhaps the very wires stretched arterially throughout the house behind the plaster. She laced her fingers around the jelly glass and drank it all in several gulps.

  The stove clock read 11:47 when she picked up the phone and dialed his cell. It rang a long time and went to voice mail. She broke the connection and hit redial. Same thing. She broke the connection again, dialed a different number. Again it rang several times.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Dad. It’s Ricky. Sorry to wake you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. We’re all okay. I just . . . I’m sorry, it’s really late. I shouldn’t have called.”

  “That’s all right. What is it?” His voice, gruff with sleep and the effort to speak quietly, conjured the image of her mother asleep beside him. Simply that—the thought of her mother there beside her father, her parents lying together as they had these past forty years, nested in their own warmth within the worn linens, on their old platform bed, neither fine nor shabby but exquisite in its familiarity, the very bed she’d stood beside as a child when she needed them in the night, the bed in which she’d lain between them when she had measles, when she had mumps, when her ear ached or fever raged or nightmares frightened her awake—the thought of them in this bed now flooded her with longing. She ran her thumbnail around the threaded rim of the jelly glass.

  “Well. I was just thinking about that story you used to tell? About the rabbi of—not Chelm. Something? The one with the ax . . .” She trailed off, catching her reflection in the top part of the Dutch door. It looked ghoulish, her eyes no more than hollow pits in a pale oval. She knew her father had wanted, had meant her to be like the rabbi in that story: selfless, ascendant, warming the houses of the sick, bringing cocoa to the wounded, all of it. “The thing is, I guess the thing I was wondering, Dad, is”—her voice was a beggar, scraping and tripping—“do you think I’m good? I mean, am I good?”

  “What’s that?” He was still working to cast off the wool of sleep. “You’re talking about a story? You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes. Sorry. Never mind—it’s okay.”

/>   “What is it, Erica?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Okay.”

  She pressed OFF and set down the phone, raised her eyes to her doppelgänger in the window. She gave a start: it had doubled. It hadn’t doubled; it was Biscuit, standing behind her in the kitchen doorway, her pale, troubled face an echo of Ricky’s own. Ricky swiveled around, conscious of the vodka bottle, ashamed of the jelly glass, her own breath. How long had Biscuit been standing there? Had she heard any of the conversation?

  Her daughter stumbled toward her, hair mussed, pajamas rumpled. “I think you’re good,” she said. “You are good.”

  “Biscuit, Biscuit. Why are you up?” Ricky drew her daughter onto her lap, rested her chin on Biscuit’s head and breathed: shampoo, girl sweat, sleep. The ticking clock. The darkness outside. “You should be in bed.”

  “You’re very good,” Biscuit insisted. A validation. An exhortation.

  “Shh, shhh.” Ricky almost brutally aware of her daughter’s weight, so dear upon her body.

  2.

  As I say, they’re not my field, but I showed them to Piers and he agrees they’re undeniably compelling.” Madeleine Berkowitz used her hand to transfer her heavy sorrel mane from the right shoulder to the left, with a commensurate adjustment to the tilt of her head. “I mean they’re naive, more folk art than anything. And yet.” She took a sip of her drink, a single-malt scotch and water on the rocks.

  John, without shifting his gaze from her face, drank from his, the same minus the water. He’d been surprised when she offered scotch, then less surprised when he saw that the bottle was unopened. It was both flattering and unsettling, the notion she might have purchased it in anticipation of his visit.

  They were at Madeleine’s place, a small bungalow in Grandview. He’d never been there before, and it was far more appealing than he’d imagined: unassuming, aged, listing.The downstairs comprised two crooked rooms of exposed brick and bulging plaster. Windows full of wavy glass panes that made the lights across the river wink on and off like stars. A cat, of course (he’d guessed as much), a gray Siamese with Popsicle-blue eyes that lifted its tail at him when he’d first arrived and then condescended to brush, disdainfully, against his ankles. (“He likes you,” Madeleine had pronounced.) The place was surprisingly—agreeably, to John’s taste—underfurnished. An enormous bunch of bare willow branches, stuck into a metal jug on the floor, reached up and across one wall of the tiny living room. Another wall was books and music; another, windows; the last cut diagonally by the staircase leading upstairs.

  Madeleine set her glass on the old steamer trunk that served as coffee table, and with one finger described a circle around the rim. “Piers thinks they have a kind of power, a sincerity.” Under the stained glass floor lamp, both the burnished leather of the trunk and the burning amber of the scotch were not unlike the color of her hair.

  “Is that right?” John was not proud to discover a twinge of jealousy: who was this Piers?

  Madeleine nodded. As if she knew what he was feeling, she added, “I think so, too.”

  She was speaking of Will Joiner’s box constructions. John had given them to her for her appraisal, or at any rate, given her the two Jess had brought back from Gordie’s a few weeks earlier, seeking John’s professional opinion.

  At first he’d demurred. “The world of fine arts, and what I do,” he’d told Jess, “are pretty much apples and oranges.”

  “But these are like sets, aren’t they?” she’d pressed, gesturing toward the boxes on the kitchen table. “I mean, what about all your models on the shelves by the washing machine?”

  John’s old set models, dating back to his repertory and off-Broadway years, had long resided unceremoniously in the cellar, collecting beards of dust and freckles of mildew. He had not thought of them in a long time and was gratified to hear her mention them, to know they had won her notice. But it made him uncomfortable, too, Jess referring so casually to these most obscure objects, located in the nether regions of their house.

  She’d been with the Ryries a mere fortnight at that point, and the effortlessness with which she fit in seemed to refute the prediction John had made last year, when Ricky was pregnant, that a fifth family member would strain their household. Jess had just . . . slipped in. Somehow, their small kitchen table accommodated her without feeling unpleasantly cramped. The extra demands on the upstairs bathroom occurred mostly when the rest of the family was at school or at work. Biscuit seemed unbothered by having to step over the air mattress every time she wanted access to her own bed, and although Paul had made an initial show of wariness, even he had settled into apparent comfort with having Jess around. She was . . . ingrained was the word that came to mind. She helped with dishes, folded wash, played Mancala with Biscuit out on the front porch, brought home treats from the bakery, watched Iron Chef with Paul in the den, and had long chats with Ricky at the kitchen table—mostly about pregnancy, it seemed to John, and impending motherhood; he could not imagine what this must be like for Ricky, a kind of torture, he would have thought, but he did not see how he could shield her from it when Ricky herself invited, even initiated, these talks.

  John alone was less than sanguine about all the apparent harmony. He could not escape the feeling that it was a subtle indictment. Anyone who fit in so naturally, so easily, must inherently belong; it seemed proof of her birthright, her due, of which she’d been robbed. He could not look at her without thinking of all the missing years. Not that she ever mentioned or even alluded to this. This made it almost worse: the fact that she hadn’t come to lay blame at his feet heightened his sense that he deserved it.

  So when she’d brought home Gordie’s father’s boxes and a request for help, it had come as something of a relief, and John found himself eager to be of service. Still, he told her regretfully, he wasn’t qualified to assess them. But there was someone in his department who’d once co-curated a costume exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design (a bit of trivia he found himself remembering even as he stood before Jess’s upturned, hopeful face). Madeleine knew people in the art world, he told Jess, hoping it was true—gallery owners, critics, that kind of thing. “I could ask her to take a look at them,” he offered. “If you think that’d be okay with Gordie.”

  Madeleine had, of course, been only too happy to assist in any way, John, any way at all. He’d brought them to work a few days later, delivered the boxes to her office and then braced himself for a ponderous, highly wrought, yet likely knowledgeable verdict. Madeleine had strolled around to the front of her desk and turned the boxes to face out so that she and John could study them together, side by side. Silent, frowning, alternately donning her Adrienne Vittadini eyeglasses and sliding them off and biting thoughtfully on an earpiece, she had considered each, at length, in turn.

  The larger of the two, a wooden milk crate that had been painted white inside and out, housed a polar world in which snow was represented by cotton and soap flake and sequin, and at whose center arose an ice castle made of shards of glass, its turrets frosted with what looked to be sugar or salt. A tiny red and gold oriflamme flew from the uppermost spire. Close inspection showed it to have been made out of a postage stamp. Fixed to the back wall of the crate was a gold metal sun. Closer inspection showed it to be a whistle, fitted into a slat in such a way that the mouthpiece was accessible from the other side. If you blew it, it gave the low warble of a mourning dove.

  The smaller, a cardboard shoe box whose exterior read “Smartfit Rugged Oxford 8.5,” was to John’s eye the more compelling. It held a stage (floorboards made of tongue depressors stained walnut brown, red velvet curtains, klieg lights made of film canisters painted silver) upon which a magician sawed a lady in two. It was at once crude and ingenious. Both the magician and the lady were sculpted of wire
, stark yet lyrical. Lyrical, John considered, in their starkness. A small music box had been duct-taped to the outside of the shoe box, and a length of fishing line had been rigged so that when the music box’s handle was cranked, the magician really “sawed” back and forth, while the steel comb struck the pins on the revolving cylinder to plink out a thin melody he could not place, something vaguely operatic.

  “They do have a certain power,” she’d said. “An integrity. Less Cornell, I’d say, than Finster-esque. Shades of Calder. Obviously, they’re highly representational.” The glasses went on and off again. “There is something . . .” She sipped in a breath and held it, tilting her head this way and that for many seconds before expelling it again. “Well, they’re mournful.”

  This had been so far from anything he might have expected her to say that John had looked at her in some surprise, without the faintly sardonic smile he usually reserved for interactions with Madeleine. She seemed not to notice but stood looking at the magician’s box, a whiff of theatrics in her posture, yes, but under this genuine feeling; he believed he could see it in the heaviness of her mouth, the slope of her shoulders. He’d never before sought her opinion, let alone her favor, and felt sharply uncomfortable now, in light of her ingenuous willingness to grant it, about the way he and Lance had always treated her as fair game, the butt of so many unarticulated jokes.

  Part of the implicit rationale for mocking Madeleine had always been her aggressively sexualized persona, the way she tried too hard, and the conclusion that she was therefore phony. Yet standing so close to her at that moment, seeing not just the bottle-red hair and the tight cashmere sweater but also the perimenopausal down on her cheek, the fine lines around her lips and eyes, the stray fleck of mascara on her lid, John realized he’d been wrong to construe phoniness. What was trying too hard but evidence of innocence, naïveté? He had been, in spite of himself, moved.

  When she’d asked whether she might borrow them, take them into the city to show a friend, he’d agreed. That had been over a week ago. This morning she told him she’d had a chance to get her friend’s opinion, and—well, it was très intéressant; the friend was eager to see more; Madeleine wanted to pass on his comments in more detail; when would John be free? They compared calendars; no luck. How about sometime after work, then? Why not—tonight? Her place? It made sense; that way he could retrieve the boxes. She jotted down her address; he said he’d call to let her know when he was on his way. It was all so quick and easy, accomplished as though it were nothing, or rather, were something they’d done a hundred times, like agreeing to a date for the next faculty meeting. He knew from the very casualness with which they’d set up the plan that it was not nothing.