The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  A dozen times that afternoon he’d thought about canceling. When Ricky got home from work wearing that brave, effortful smile she wore nearly all the time now and went on tiptoe to rub her nose against his beard. Again when Paul, without being asked, helped him wheel the garbage out to the curb. Again when Jess and Biscuit, standing in front of the living room sofa, folded the laundry together, singing, “There’s a Hole in the Bucket,” over and over and with great feeling, Jess taking the part of Henry and Biscuit the part of Liza. But then he and Ricky had fought while doing the dishes after supper, and she’d accused him—this was new—of not wanting the baby. She claimed she’d been right not to trust him, right to have withheld news of the diagnosis, and while he knew her logic was wrong—had tried explaining to her why it was wrong, why her presumption constituted the very core of their problem, that by not trusting him to respond as she might have wished, she’d robbed them of the chance to find out, together, how he would, in fact, have responded—still, her accusation stung more than she possibly could have known.

  And now he sat on Madeleine’s gray velvet couch, in her unexpectedly appealing, unexpectedly self-possessed, uncloying little house, and she was leaning forward and asking him something as if for the second time. “. . . if he spoke Italian?” she said. “Your Mr. Joiner?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you know whether he spoke Italian?”

  “Oh—no. Not my Mr. Joiner, anyway. Never met him. How come?”

  “Because of the way he spelled the name of the song. Did you happen to notice?”

  He had no idea what she meant.

  “I’ll show you,” said Madeleine, rising. “They’re right up here.” She picked up her drink. He took his and followed her to the tiny hall.

  How absurd, he was thinking. Come up and see my etchings. Was this really how it happened, how people had affairs; was it really so clichéd? In disappointment and excitement he swallowed the rest of his drink as they mounted the stairs. These were narrow and creaky and slanted drastically to the left. They led directly into a room with low sloping ceilings; only in the very middle could he stand up straight. A skylight showed milky clouds in a purple sky, its pane rattling slightly with a draft. Madeleine switched on the light. It was her studio, he saw, a candyshop mess of fabric and ribbon, artificial flowers and pots of beads, jars of buttons, silks dyed vibrant hues. In one corner a dress model. In another, an ironing board and two sewing machines, one modern, one antique.The walls were papered with costume sketches, some of them watercolored, and pictures torn from magazines or books. John was aware of an urge to lap up these details thirstily, even lasciviously; aware, too, that the urge stemmed as much from his lust for art as for eros. He could see through a dark doorway what must be the bedroom, but knew the room where he already stood was her most intimate space.

  On a high drafting table under the skylight sat Will Joiner’s boxes. Madeleine switched on a gooseneck lamp and angled it toward the smaller, magician’s box. She pointed an eggplantcolored fingernail to where a slim wooden plaque, fixed with tiny gold screws to the front of the stage, bore the words O SOLO MIO. “See that?”

  “Yeah. I hadn’t before.”

  “It’s the song, you know, that plays on the little music box.” She sang a line, badly, then gave an embarrassed smile. “Well, you know. Only it’s supposed to be ‘O Sole Mio,’ S-O-L-E, the sun. The way he’s got it—I confess I wouldn’t have caught it; Piers is the one who pointed it out—it’s something like ‘My Loneliness,’ or ‘O Lonely Me.’ You have to wonder,” she said, turning to look at him, “if it was intentional. Or just a misspelling, a coincidence.” Her gaze flitted to and fro between his eyes in the unnerving, too-searching manner of a soap star. “What do you think?” She reached behind the box and turned the tiny handle, as languorously as earlier she’d traced the rim of her glass. The song ticked forth like seconds on a clock, one plucked metal note after another. Onstage the magician, in all his faceless wire melancholy, sawed. The lady lay rigid beneath the movement, a hollow, horizontal twining of unprotesting silver.

  John watched, mesmerized, trying to work it out—not just the answer to the question, which seemed bigger, somehow, than Madeleine realized, as if her words were code for things beyond this room (they reminded him of something, what?); but trying to puzzle out, too, what the question itself revealed, not simply about Gordie’s dad, but about him and Madeleine and this rickety charmer of a house with the wintry-eyed cat downstairs; about Biscuit’s fire and Paul’s black eye; about Jess’s baby and Jess as a baby. Madeleine turned and turned the tiny handle. The song continued to come and it came to him then, what the words reminded him of. Intention or mistake. It was Ricky’s Or Game. Funny that Ricky, the quant, would play such a game, a game that demanded all things be stripped of quantifiable worth, a game in which all answers were permitted and no reasons begged or offered. Sun or lonely? he could hear her asking, just as clearly as if she’d said it aloud. And then: We have to decide, her voice in his mind as distinct as if she’d somehow come into the room, crept up these crooked stairs behind him and spoken, quietly but with great force of truth, her face lovely and worried and tilted toward his, awaiting his reply.

  3.

  Since Baptiste’s mother and sister had come to Nyack, the ban on his going home straight after school had been lifted.

  “Yo, what was that anyway?” Paul finally asked. “The knife thing?”

  “It happened to my Grann,” Baptiste explained.

  “Someone broke in with a knife?”

  “A machete. They killed her son.”

  “Your father?”

  “My uncle. A long time ago, man. Before she moved to this country. Gimme one, okay?”

  Paul shook a Swedish Fish into Baptiste’s upturned palm. They were walking home through the apple orchard, backpacks slogging heavily against their shoulders, the fallen petals of apple blossoms littering the ground like snow. Nothing had turned out like Paul would’ve thought. He’d figured when he went back to school after his suspension, things would be worse than ever, kids ignoring him, pretending not to notice, then whispering behind his back about the state of his face and how it had gotten that way. The story would be circulated, embellished, cemented; the bruises would act as visual confirmation of a status he’d so far been only provisionally assigned. For five days at home—the weekend plus the three days of his suspension—he had writhed in a kind of private agony, all contained in his gut. He’d had no appetite, hardly been able to eat anything, and shat when he did, all water and nerves.

  Most of that Monday and Tuesday he’d done nothing but lie on his bed, drawing with Winsor & Newton Black Indian ink, which got all over his fingers and sheets, or just contemplating cracks in the ceiling, devising ways he wouldn’t have to go back. Homeschooling, but both his parents worked. Private school, but the money, plus wouldn’t those kids be even worse than public? Play hooky for the rest of the year and hope his parents just confused him with Biscuit. Ha ha. Come down with an illness, something serious, childhood cancer. The Ronald McDonald House. Make a Wish. Simpler yet, die. And he spent long minutes tenderly, solemnly spinning out the idea of his nonexistence, imagining it so deeply that he brought himself to tears, finally, with the thought of his mother’s agony. The aftereffects of indulging in such a fantasy included shame as well as refreshment, and when he rose from his bed he felt fragile, as though his limbs were spun glass—although maybe that was just because he hadn’t been eating.

  Baptiste had been suspended, too, but it was not so bad for him, thought Paul, because of his mother and sister having newly arrived. In a way, for Baptiste, it was perfect. Paul pictured the reunion: all smiles, hugs, and tears. Staying up late, everyone speaking hungrily, listening hungrily, every exchange in rapidfire Creole, the fact of its taking place in another language automatically imbuing the reunion with the quality of being beyond Paul’s reach, even beyond the reach of what he could imagine. After three days of tormenti
ng himself with the certainty that Baptiste would drop him, had dropped him, on Tuesday Paul steeled himself to make the call: he tried the Lecomptes’ house once, two times, three, five, ten: no answer. He tried all day and into the night. Nothing. Obviously Baptiste was screening. Paul wrote a text, last resort—I JUST WANTED TO SAY THANKS FOR FIGHTING KENNY THAT WAS COOL. IF YOU DONT WANT TO HANG OUT I GET THAT BUT DONT THINK WHAT THEY SAID IS TRUE. ITS A LIE EXCEPT IF THEY SAY IT ABOUT THEMSELVES RIGHT? HA HA—and in self-loathing, deleted it without sending.

  The next day he’d tried phoning again. This time Baptiste picked right up.

  “Man, how you doing?” As if nothing was wrong.

  “A’ight. How ’bout you?”

  “A’ight. Chillin’.”

  “So how’s your mom, your sister, everything?”

  “Good. Crazy. Every Haitian person in like, New York, has been over to pay respects.Yesterday we had to go to Brooklyn to see like thirty of my aunts. I ate so much food.”

  “So what are you doing today? You want to like, hang?”

  “Can’t. I got to show my mom and sister stuff, you know.”

  “Okay, well . . .”

  “Yo, how’s your face?”

  “Oh, it’s okay. Whatever. So I’ll see you in school, I guess.”

  In fact, the bruising on Paul’s face was approaching its dramatic peak. The killer thing about the length of the suspension was that although the swelling had gone down, just in time for his return to school the subdural blood that had pooled under his eye achieved its richest shade of burgundy, flecked with darker spots, like dregs. It was as if the principal had timed it for maximum humiliation. Paul’s parents offered to let him stay home a few more days, and Jess offered to apply some concealer, but in the end Paul decided just to deal. The waiting, he figured, the lying there studying the cracks on his ceiling, fantasizing about the horrible things people would say and listening to his intestines lament, all of this had to be worse than finding out for real how it was going to be.

  And it had turned out to be so much better than he’d thought. He wasn’t exactly greeted like a hero or anything, but whatever story had gone around school in his absence had worked somehow in his favor. Guys who’d all but stopped acknowledging him in the sixth grade nodded at him in the hall and passed him the ball in gym. Girls who’d never acknowledged him at all asked to borrow lunch tickets and see the drawings in his notebook. It was plain strange. Paul didn’t dislike the change, but his classmates’ inconstancy made him wonder whether he’d overvalued their esteem in the first place, and he was that much more appreciative of Baptiste’s friendship. More, he felt less tentative about it, or felt it to be less tenuous than he’d thought. In any case, where once he wouldn’t have dared ask about the knife and his Grann, or anything much about life in Haiti and what Baptiste remembered of it, now he did and Baptiste did not seem to mind.

  “So, what happened, exactly?” Paul asked, as they crossed the overpass into town. “It was like a robbery gone bad?” He realized not only how long he’d been working to make himself small, but how this had imposed limits on what he knew of his friend. Now he shook a few more Swedish Fish from the package into each of their palms and listened to Baptiste explain about the Tonton Macoutes.

  HE THOUGHT AT first the house was empty, but then he heard sounds, strumming, coming from upstairs. He let his backpack slide heavily from his arms and then went up to see, following the sounds to the open doorway of his parents’ room. Jess sat cross-legged on the oval rag rug, leaning against the foot of the bed and plucking away at his mother’s mandolin. She looked up as he filled the doorway and smiled at him without breaking her song.

  “Who said you could use that?”

  “Hello to you, too.”

  He came in and sat on the rug opposite her, crossing his legs like hers, only this had become, in the past year or so, difficult for him to do; he had to use his hands. Her fingers sprang over the frets and darted among the strings with easy authority. Who knew? The music was dancerly and American. It made him think of overalls and chickens. When she came to the end of the song she looked up and made a little ta-da gesture with one hand.

  Paul put his hands together twice, soundlessly: an ironic gesture of clapping.

  “Is she giving that to you?” he asked, having suddenly realized, without knowing how, that this was the case.

  Jess looked down and plucked at a few notes. “Yeah.”

  “Cool.” He did not think it was cool. His father had given it to his mother for her birthday. “Can I see it?” He held out his hand.

  “You see with your eyes,” she said, but self-mockingly, and passed it to him by the neck.

  Paul plucked the open strings, fingered the mother-of-pearl inlays, turned it over and ran a hand along the bowl-shaped back.The thing was shaped like a giant fig. It was kind of grand, and also kind of ridiculous in its grandeur, like a man in a silk cravat. He tried in vain to imagine his mother playing it, and felt suddenly embarrassed for his father. He handed it back. “Is it hard to learn?”

  Jess considered. “Like anything else.”

  “How many instruments can you play?”

  “Just guitar, really, and then I can kind of pick up other string instruments and scratch something out. Banjo, ukelele. Mandolin. Not well, though.”

  It sounded good enough. “Play something else.”

  She did. This tune was more courtly and slow; it made him think of Masterpiece Theatre. The bedroom was very dim; it had an eastern exposure and got no direct light in the afternoon. You could see out the window how the sun was shining brightly on the bridge, and this made the shadowy blue of the bedroom seem all the more out of place, or them out of place in it, like they were here at the wrong time. The bed was, as usual, neatly made. The small wicker wastebasket next to his mother’s dresser was overflowing with crumpled tissues, a few of which lay scattered on the floor. A few more adorned her bedside table like fat white flowers.

  His father had not slept here in two weeks. Paul, with his insomnia, had heard him going down the stairs well past midnight every night. Although he stayed up listening, some nights until three or four, he never heard him come back up again. There was more: he’d heard arguing in his parents’ room, the hissing sounds of whispered acrimony. He’d heard the door of the linen closet, which was right outside his bedroom, opening and shutting softly each night; heard the sound of cloth sliding on cloth, and the muted click of the old-fashioned latch, just before his father’s footsteps descended the stairs. Every morning when he woke, the house looked undisturbed, his parents’ bed already made, nothing out of place downstairs, all the couch cushions arranged as usual. But last night, while watching TV, he’d noticed something between the cushions. And even though he’d already known, it had still been a blow, pulling out his father’s actual sock.

  “Are you moving in with us?” asked Paul. He’d picked up on stirrings and vagaries about this, but both parents had professed to be in the dark when he’d asked them point-blank. He wondered what, if anything, Jess’s presence had to do with his parents’ discord. He wondered if she knew that his father had been sleeping downstairs, if she, too, like him and like his parents, was simply saying nothing about it. Maybe it wasn’t even that unusual. Maybe Jess’s own father sometimes slept on the couch. Maybe that went on in lots of families.

  “No.”

  “Haven’t you kind of, though?”

  She laughed. Then she put the mandolin away, packing it gently into its case and fastening the latches. “Don’t worry, I’m going.”

  “When?”

  “Are you so dying for me to leave?”

  He shrugged.

  “No, seriously.”

  And she was, it seemed, regarding him with great seriousness. It made him feel thrillingly old, adult. He shrugged again: “No.”

  For close to a minute neither said anything.

  Then he said, “Why’d you cut your hair?”

  “My hair?
Jeez. I don’t know. That’s what you’re thinking about?”

  He felt himself redden and looked down, started playing with the frayed ends of his jeans.

  Jess sprang up and went toward the hall.

  “Where’re you going?” He scrambled after.

  She darted into his room—there was play in her movement—looked around, grabbed his porkpie hat from the top of his dresser. She put it on. “This better?”

  “Gimme.” He made a grab but she held fast, squashing it to her own head with both hands.

  “My turn!” she insisted, with a mad little stamp. He backed off. And this was interesting: they were both looking at their reflections in the mirror above Paul’s dresser. He was the taller, by an inch.They were very changed from the girl and boy they’d been at Cabruda Lake, but here they were, the same two people after all, caught now in the same glass. Jess released the brim of the hat slowly, guardedly, her hands hovering in the vicinity in case Paul should try to snatch it. Her mouth was open, in ready position for a laugh, and she kept darting her eyes at him in the mirror. He’d look off in the other direction then and whistle an innocent tune.

  “Let’s see here . . .” she said, all singsong and goofy. She began perusing his dresser top, picking things up, putting them down. “Comb,” she enunciated, holding it up in the mirror and placing it down again carefully, as though an archaeological find. “Windup Martian. USB thingy. Deodorant. Acne spot treatment.”