by Amy Bloom
“I think so,” I said.
“Will he lie down?”
I shrugged.
“Everyone’s got enough food. My God, you’d think they hadn’t eaten for days. Half of them don’t even fast, the trombeniks.”
I started picking up dirty plates and silverware, and Naomi patted me again.
“Tell him we’re done with the pasta. I’m serving the coffee now. He could lie down.”
“He’ll lie down when they go home.”
Naomi looked like she wanted to punch me in the face. “Fine. Then we’ll just send them all home. Good yontif, see you Friday night, they can just go home.”
I dragged Naomi into the kitchen.
“Jack, Naomi’s dying here. They’re eating the house-plants, for God’s sake. The bookshelves. Can’t we send these people home? She’s beat. You look a little pooped yourself.”
Jack smiled at Naomi, and she put her head on his shoulder.
“You’re full of shit. Naomi, are you tired?”
“I am, actually. I didn’t sleep last night.”
I am grateful for sunny days, and for good libraries and camel’s-hair brushes and Hirschel’s burnt umber, and I was very grateful to stand in their kitchen and bear the sight of Jack’s hand around Naomi’s fat waist and hear that Jack didn’t know how his wife slept.
We threw six plates of rugelach around and sent everyone home. I left in the middle of the last wave, after they promised they wouldn’t even try to clean up until the next day.
There was a message from my mother on my machine.
“Darling, are you home? No? All right. It’s me. Are you there? All right. Well, I lit a candle for Daddy and Grandpa. Your brother was very nice, he helped. It’s pouring here. I hope you’re not driving around unnecessarily. Are you there? Call me. I’ll be up until maybe eleven. Call me.”
My mother never, ever, fell asleep before two a.m., and then only in her living room armchair. She considered this behavior vulgar and neurotic, and so she pretended she went to sleep at a moderately late hour, in her own pretty, pillowed, queen-size bed, with a cup of tea and a ginger-snap, like a normal seventy-eight-year-old woman.
“Hi, Meme. I wasn’t driving around looking for an accident. I came right home from Jack and Naomi’s.” My mother had met them at an opening.
“Aren’t you funny. It happens to be terrible weather here. That Jack. Such a nice man. Is he feeling better?”
“He’s fine. He’s not really going to get better.”
“I know. You told me. Then I guess his wife will nurse him when he can’t manage?”
“I don’t know. That’s a long way off.”
“I’m sure it is. But when he can’t get about, I’m saying when he’s no longer independent, you’ll go and visit him. And Naomi. You know what I mean, darling. You’ll be a comfort to both of them then.”
I sometimes think that my mother’s true purpose in life, the thing that gives her days meaning and her heart ease, is her ability to torture me in a manner as ancient and genteelly elaborate as lace making.
“Let’s jump off that bridge when we come to it. So, you’re fine? Louis is fine? He’s okay?” I don’t know what fine would be for my brother. He’s not violent, he’s not drooling, he’s not walking into town buck naked, I guess he’s fine.
“We’re both in good health. We watched a program on Mozart. It was very well done.”
“That’s great.” I opened my mail and sorted it into junk, bills, and real letters. “Well, I’m pretty tired. I’m going to crawl into bed, I think.”
“Oh, me too. Good night, darling. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Meme. Happy Day of Atonement.”
I didn’t hear from Jack for five days. I called his house and got Jennifer.
“My dad’s taking it easy,” she said.
“Could you tell him—could you just bring the phone to him?”
I heard Jack say, “Thanks, Jellybean.” And then, “D.M.? I’m glad you called. It’s been a lousy couple of days. My legs are just Jell-O. And my brain’s turning to mush. Goodbye, substantia nigra.”
“I could bring over some soup. I could bring some rosemary balm. I could make some ginkgo tea.”
“I don’t think so. Naomi’s nursing up a storm. Anyway, you minister to me and cry your eyes out and Naomi will what? Make dinner for us both? I don’t think so.”
“Are you going to the auction on Sunday?” The synagogue was auctioning off the usual—tennis lessons, romantic getaways, kosher chocolates, and a small painting of mine.
“I’m not going anywhere soon. I’m not walking. Being the object of all that pity is not what I have in mind. I don’t want you to see me like this.”
“Jack, if I don’t see you like this and you’re down for a while, I won’t see you, period.”
“That’s right. That’s what I meant.”
I cry easily. Tears were all over the phone.
“You’re supposed to be brave,” he said.
“Fuck you. You be brave.”
“I have to go. Call me tomorrow to see how I’m doing.”
I called every few days and got Jennifer or Naomi, and they would hand the phone to Jack and we would have short, obvious conversations, and then he’d hand the phone back to his wife or his daughter and they’d hang up for him.
After two weeks Naomi called and invited me to visit.
“You’re so thin,” she said when she opened the door.
My thinness and the ugly little ghost face I saw in the mirror were the same as Naomi’s damp, puffy eyes and the faded dress pulling at her hips.
“I thought Jack would enjoy a visit, just to lift his spirits.” She didn’t look at me. “I didn’t say you were coming. Just go up and surprise him.”
I stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Jack? It’s me, Andrea. I’m coming up.”
He looked like himself, more or less. His face seemed a little loose, his mouth hanging heavier, his lips hardly moving as he spoke. The skin on his right hand was shiny and full, swollen with whatever flowed through him and pooled in each reddened fingertip.
“I can’t believe she called you.”
“Jack, she thought it would be nice for you. She thinks I am your most entertaining friend.”
“You are my only entertaining friend.”
I sat on the bed, stroking his hand, storing it up. This is my fingertip on the gold hairs on the back of his wrist. This is my fingertip on the protruding blue vein that runs from his ring finger to his wrist and up his beautiful forearm.
“If you cry, you gotta go.”
“I’m not.”
“D.M., I may want something from you.”
I put my hand under the sheet and laid it on his stomach. This is my palm on the line of brown curling hairs that grow like a spreading tree from his navel to his collarbone. This is the tip of my pinkie resting in the thick, springy hair above his cock, in which we discovered two silver strands last summer. His cock twitched against my fingertip. Jack smiled.
“You’re the last woman I will ever fuck. I think you are the last woman I will have fucked. You’re the end of the line.”
I was ready to step out of my jeans, lock the door, and straddle him.
“I had a very good time. D.M., I had a wonderful time with you. My last fun.”
Naomi stuck her head in. “Everything all right? More tea, Mr. Malone?”
“No, dear girl. We’re just having a wee chat.”
I never heard him sound so Irish. Naomi disappeared.
“Well, Erin go bragh.”
“You’ve got an ugly side to you,” he said, and he put one stiff hand to my face.
“I do. I am ugly sides all over lately.”
“When it gets bad,” he said, “I’ll need your help. I seem to have taken a sharp turn for the worse this time.”
I put my face on his stomach, which seemed just the same beautiful stomach, hard at the ribs and softer below, thick and sweet as always, no
wasting, no bloating.
“And when I’m worse yet, I’ll want to go.”
I saw Jack’s face smeared against the inside of a plastic bag.
“That’s a long way away. We all want you with us. Jennifer needs you, Naomi needs you, for as long as you’re still, you know, still able to be with them.”
Jack grabbed my hair and pulled my face to his.
“I didn’t ask you what they want. I didn’t ask you what you want. I can’t ask my wife. I know she needs me, I know she wants me until I can’t blink once for yes and twice for no. She wants me until I don’t know the difference. You have to do this for me.”
I put my hands over my ears, without even realizing it until Jack pulled them away.
“Darling Mistress, this is what I need you for. I can’t fuck you, I can’t have fun with you.” He smiled. “Not much fun, anyway. I can’t do the things with you that a man does with his mistress. There is just this one thing that only you can do for me.”
“Does Naomi know?”
“She’ll know what she needs to know. No one’s going to prosecute you or blame you. I’ve given it a lot of thought. You’ll help me and then you’ll go, and it will have been my will, my hand, my choice.”
I walked around the room. With a teenager and a sick man and no cleaning lady, Naomi’s house was tidier than mine on its best day.
“All right? Andrea? Yes?”
“What if I say no?”
“Then don’t come back at all. Why should I have you see me this way, see me worse than this, sweet merciful Jesus, see me dumb and dying, if you won’t save me? Otherwise you’re just another woman whose heart I’m breaking, whose life I’m destroying. I told you when I met you, baby, I already have a wife.”
Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Happiness.
Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Deliverance.
Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Merit.
Avinu Malkenu, inscribe us in the Book of Forgiveness.
Avinu Malkenu, answer us though we have no deeds to
plead our cause; save us with mercy and lovingkindness.
“You’re a hard man,”I said.
“I certainly hope so.”
I am waiting. I have cleaned my house. I paint. I listen.
The Story
You wouldn’t have known me a year ago.
A year ago I had a husband and my best friend was Margeann at the post office. In no time at all my husband had a final heart attack, I got a new best friend, and house prices tumbled in our part of Connecticut. Realtors’ signs came and went in front of the house down the road: from the elegant forest-green-and-white “For Sale by Owner,” nicely handmade to show that they were in no hurry and in no need, to the “Martha Brae Lewis and Company,” whose agents sold only very expensive houses and rode their horses in the middle of the day when there was nothing worthwhile on the market, and then down, down to the big national relocator company’s blue-and-white fiberboard sign practically shouting “Fire Sale, You Can Have This House for Less Than They Paid for It.” I have thought that I might have bought that house, rented out my small white farmhouse, and become a serious capitalist. My place was nothing special compared to the architect’s delight next door, but it did have Ethan’s big stained-glass windows, so beautiful sightseers drove right up our private road, parked by the birches, and begged to come in, just to stand there in the rays of purple and green light, to be charmed by twin redheaded mermaids flanking the front door, to run their fingers over the cobalt blue drops sprayed across the hall, bezel set into the plaster. They stood between the cantering cinnabar legs of the centaur in the middle of the kitchen wall and sighed. I always said, “Come in,” and after coffee and cookies they would order two windows or six, or one time, wild with real estate money, people from Gramercy Park ordered a dozen botanical panels for their new house in Madison, and Ethan always said, “Why do you do that?” I did it for company and for money, since I needed both and he didn’t care. If I didn’t make noise or talk to myself or comment aloud on the vagaries of life, our house rang with absolute silence, and when Ethan asked for the mail, or even when he made the effort to ask about my bad knee, not noticing that we last spoke two days before, it was worse than the quiet, and if I didn’t ask the New Yorkers for money, he’d just shuffle around in his moccasins, picking at his nails, until they made an insulting offer or got back in their cars.
Six months after Ethan died, I went just once to the Unitarian Widows Group, in which all the late husbands were much nicer than mine had been and even the angriest woman only said, “Goddamn his smoking,” and I thought, His smoking? Almost all that I liked about Ethan was his stained glass and his small wide hands and the fact that he was willing to marry little Plain Jane when I thought no one would, and willing to stay by me during my miscarriage-depression. That was such a bad time that I didn’t leave the house for two months and Ethan invited the New Yorkers in just to get me out of bed. All in all it seemed that if you didn’t hate your silent, moody husband after twenty years and he didn’t seem to hate you and your big blob of despair, you could call it a good marriage, no worse than others.
I have dead parents—the best kind, I think, at this stage of life—two sisters, whom I do love at a little distance, a garden that is as close to God as I need it to be, and a book group I’ve been in for fourteen years, which also serves as mastectomy hotline, menopause watch, and PFLAG. I don’t mind being alone, having been raised by hard-drinking, elderly parents, a German and a Swede, with whom I never had a fight or a moment’s pleasure, and so I took off for college at sixteen, with no idea of what to say to these girls with outerwear for every season and underwear that was nicer than my church clothes. Having made my own plain, dark way, and having been with plain, dark, but talented Ethan all that time, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by middle age, with yoga and gardening for my soul and system, and bookkeeping to pay the bills. Clearly, my whole life was excellent training for money managing of all kinds, and now I do the books for twenty people like Ethan, gifted and without a clear thought in their heads about how to organize their finances or feed their families, if they are lucky enough to have more than a modest profit to show for what they do.
I didn’t call my new neighbors the Golddust Twins. Margeann, our postmaster, called them that. She nicknamed all the New Yorkers and pre-read their magazines and kept the catalogues that most appealed to her. Tallblondgorgeous, she said. And gobs of money, she said. Such gobs of money, and he had a little sense but she had none, and they had a pretty little blond baby who would grow up to be hell on wheels if the mother didn’t stop giving her Coca-Cola at nine in the morning and everything else she asked for. And they surely needed a bookkeeper, Margeann said, because Dr. Mrs. Golddust was a psychiatrist and Mr. Golddust did something mysterious in the import and export of art. I could tell, just from that, that they did need me, the kind of bookkeeper and accountant and paid liar who could call black white and look you straight in the eye. I put my business card in their mailbox, which they (I assumed she) had covered in bits of fluorescent tile, making a rowdy little work of art, and they called me that night. She invited themselves over for coffee on Sunday morning.
“Oh my God, this house is gorgeous. Completely charming. And that stained glass. You are a genius, Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Baker? Not Ms.? May I call you Janet? This is unbelievable. Oh my God. And your garden. Unbelievable. Miranda, don’t touch the art. Let Mommy hold you up to the purple light. Like a fairy story.”
Sam smiled and put out his hand, which was my favorite kind of male hand, what I would call shapely peasant, reddish-brown hairs on the first joint of each finger and just a little ginger patch on the back. His hands must have been left over from early Irish farmers; the rest of him looked right out of a magazine.
“I know I’m carrying on, but I can’t help it. Sam darling, please take Miranda so Janet and I can just explore for two minutes.”
We stood in the c
entaurea, and she brushed her long fingers against their drooping blue fringe.
“Can I touch? I’m not much of a gardener. That card of yours was just a gift from God. Not just because of the bookkeeping, but because I wanted to meet you after I saw you in town. I don’t think you saw me. At the Dairy Mart.”
I had seen her, of course.
“Sam, Janet has forgiven me for being such a ditz. Let’s see if she’ll come help us out of our financial morass.”
Sam smiled, scooped Miranda up just before she smacked into the coffee table corner, and said that he would leave the two of us to it and that he didn’t use his old accountant anymore, so any help at all would be better than what he had currently. He pressed my hands together in his and put two files between them, hard red plastic with “MoBay Exports, Incorporated” embossed across the front, and a green paper folder with Dr. Sandra Saunders’ stationery sticking out of it. I sent them away with blueberry jam and a few begonia cuttings. Coming from New York, any simple thing you could do in a garden was wonderful to her.
Sandra said, “Could you possibly watch Miranda tomorrow? Around five? Just for a half hour? Sam has to go to the city. Miranda’s just fallen in love with you.”
After two tantrums, juice instead of Coke, stories instead of videos, and no to her organdy dress for playing in the sandbox, it was seven o’clock, then eight. I gave Miranda dinner and a bath, and I thought that she was, in fact, a very sweet child and that her mother, like mine, might mean well but seemed not to have what was called for. When Sandra came home, Miranda ran to her but looked out between her legs and blew me a kiss.
“Say ‘We love you, Janet,’” Sandra said.
“We love you, Jah-net.”
“Say ‘Please come tomorrow for drinks, Janet.’”
Miranda sighed. “Drinks, Jah-net,” she said indulgently.
I planted a small, square garden for Miranda near Sam’s studio, sweet william and campanula and Violet Queen asters and a little rosemary bonsai that she could put her tiny pink plastic babies around. Sandra was gone more than Sam was. He worked in the converted barn with computers and screens and two faxes and four phone lines, and every time I visited he brought me a cup of tea and admired our latest accomplishments.
