Most of them had lost spouses. The two women who flanked Edward, Claire Broido and Lucy James, were both recent widows whose husbands had succumbed, respectively, to a damaged heart and a major stroke. A third woman’s husband had committed suicide. And the wife of the other man, Charlie Ryan, had died of lung cancer. But one of the women, who appeared to be in her early sixties, was mourning the loss of her aged mother, and another the death of her only child, an eleven-year-old boy.
When it was Charlie Ryan’s turn to speak, he said, bitterly, “She didn’t even smoke!” A murmur rippled through the room. There was a collective sense of outrage, in addition to the pall of sorrow, and Amy Weitz asked Charlie if it might be easier if there was someone or something to blame.
Charlie admitted that it probably would be, and Edward silently agreed. If you didn’t believe in God, for instance, you couldn’t rail against his injustice or his mysterious ways. Without faith or the tobacco industry, there was just nature and chance and everyone growing seasick in the same rocky boat. There was, in the end, only the mandate of biology. As he warned his new students, year after year, while they fiddled with their pens and looked out the window: everything that lives dies. But he didn’t say any of that now. He just listened as the others told their torturous stories.
The almost elderly, unmarried orphan had always lived with her mother. And what could she say about a ninety-year-old woman who had died? That she was crippled by arthritis and nearly blind. That she had once been a dancer and had greatly loved her daughter, Helene, who was now clearly bereft. The mother of the dead child leaned over and patted her hand.
Then it was Edward’s turn. He repeated his name and said, “I was married for almost twenty years. My wife’s name was Beatrice—Bee. She died of pancreatic cancer.” It sounded, to his own ears, like a paid death notice, with an eye to the cost per word. But he couldn’t talk about Bee in more intimate terms here. Even if he were so inclined, it might take twenty more years to describe her, to convey a compendium of moments in their life together. And he wasn’t petitioning for anyone’s sympathy, anyway. He’d had lots of that from people close to him, and it was like a mild analgesic salve applied to a critical wound.
He was surprised by how few tears were shed at this gathering of the newly bereaved. He had feared outbursts of weeping and keening, an epidemic of despair. Maybe, like him, they were all cried out. Even Gabby Lazard, the dead boy’s mother, was able to tell what happened without falling apart, although her eyes glistened while she spoke and others sniffled and blew their noses.
It was an accident, Gabby said. Her boy, Ethan, had been playing outdoors with a couple of his friends in their wooded suburban neighborhood. They were chasing one another around some trees when Ethan tripped and was impaled on the sharp arm of a fallen branch. His femoral artery had been punctured and he’d bled to death while the other boys ran to get help.
“Fucking trees!” Charlie Ryan blurted. “Pardon my French,” he added softly, with a nod toward the women.
Fucking trees, indeed, Edward thought, and fucking cancer, too. After Bee died, he’d smashed dishes and kicked the stuffing out of her beloved chintz chair. But he’d had the chair repaired, and he found that anger, one of the five purportedly necessary stages of grief, only left him spent and shamefaced. What were the other stages? He could only remember two of them now: bargaining and acceptance, neither of which he’d experienced.
As if she had been reading his mind, Amy said, “Anger is one of the five stages of grief Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about. You all might want to take a look at her book, if you haven’t already. Or read Sherwin Nuland.”
Like a dutiful, eager student, Helene took out a pad and pencil and made notes. Edward had read Nuland’s book How We Die several years before, mostly out of intellectual curiosity. What still stuck in his mind was a single phrase: “The majority of people die peacefully.” Had he misremembered or taken it out of context? In any event, that notion may have helped some survivors find their own peace. It didn’t work for him. Nor did the word closure that a few of the mourners said they hoped to achieve. Edward believed that they thought of it as a door closing softly on their grief, but he was afraid it might shut out more than they’d bargained for, memories of love and pleasure as well as of loss.
The personal stories continued and expanded. Gabby told them that Ethan had been into Harry Potter, magic, and the band Green Day, and that her marriage had broken up after his death. In a way, she said, he had released her and her husband from a state of chronic unhappiness. The first signs of Oscar James’s stroke was a drooping eye and a slurred complaint about a bad haircut. Only days after his death did Lucy realize he’d been trying to tell her that he had a bad headache.
Judith Frank, the widow of the suicide, said that she’d missed some vital signs, too. After years of depression, her husband’s gloom had miraculously dissipated. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d become euphoric because he’d finally planned a way out. Claire Broido confessed that she had often secretly felt for Al’s pulse while he slept. She said that she’d buried two husbands in ten years. Charlie, the class clown, muttered, “Remind me not to marry you,” and there was actually a smattering of laughter.
No one spoke ill of the departed, who seemed to have all been good looking and generous to a fault, and Edward began to find some of the encomiums suspect. Didn’t any of the husbands have a short temper, or leave the toilet seat up, or kiss his wife’s best friend in the kitchen during a dinner party? Did Helene really never see her mother’s love as a stranglehold that had deprived her of an independent life? And surely Judith Frank had to recognize the punitive aspect of her husband’s suicide. The man had shot himself, at home, where she would be sure to find him. Even little Ethan must have committed some crime of childhood, like cruelty to an animal or bullying a classmate.
Which brought Edward to his own canonization of Bee, who’d had habits that irked him: the way she’d start reading something to him when he was trying to read, himself; the books she had always left lying open, facedown, sometimes cracking their spines; her enjoyment of some inane television shows. And what about her failed first marriage? He had only ever heard her side of that story.
Then, as if in another instance of telepathy, Charlie Ryan revealed that although his wife had never smoked, she often drank like a fish. And Lucy admitted that she and Oscar had been in marriage counseling because of his infidelity. Amy gently probed those sore spots, but sorrow and forgiveness seemed to triumph over disappointment and rage. Denial, Edward remembered, was another of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, but this easy absolution of the dead wasn’t what she’d meant. Maybe they got away with everything, he decided, simply because they’d gotten away.
Toward the end of the session, deathbed scenes were recalled—releasing a wave of withheld tears—and last words repeated, none worthy of anthology, but all precious to the teller. Bee had whispered, “Edward, wait,” which he didn’t share with the group. It might sound self-serving or like something he’d made up. And it was also what she’d sometimes said after sex when she wanted to keep him inside her. Instead, he told them that Luther Burbank’s final words were “I don’t feel good.”
The ninety minutes passed more quickly than Edward had expected. The bereavement group had formed a kind of cautious community, the way his students usually did at the beginning of a new term. And he mostly liked the people in the room. He envied their openness and admired the respect they showed one another. But he still felt pretty much the way he had coming in: reluctant and skeptical and, most of all, alone. He didn’t really see any point in coming back.
The Monster in the Basement
While Bee was still able to make sense, she’d told Edward many things: that she was afraid; that she wasn’t afraid; that she was too old to die young, it wasn’t even romantic; that she loved him; that she feared the darkness; that she feared the silence—but she wouldn’t be able to sense them, right? She didn’
t know which was scarier: the absence of consciousness forever, or the haunting possibility of eternal consciousness. Sometimes she came awake and spoke without opening her eyes, as if to try out the darkness. Once she said, “Am I dead yet?”
He readied himself for an outburst of anger that never happened. So he became angry for her and tried not to show it in her presence. It was a hazardous balancing act; they ought to give lessons in this, he thought. Whenever he could, he went down to the basement to vent, or just to tremble with fury and terror.
This was where Bee’s ex, Bruce, once had a woodworking shop, and Edward now had his home laboratory. There was a toilet and a slop sink down there, a metal cabinet for supplies, a small refrigerator for snacks and some of his specimens—“Now, don’t become absentminded, dear,” Bee used to say—and an old studio bed for naps or daydreaming.
Bruce’s weekend hobby had produced various small household items, like fish- and frog-shaped trivets and a box for the television remote controls. He had taken all of his tools with him when he left, but not the long table that Bee had found on one of her flea market jaunts, and bought for him from a vendor who was moving to Florida.
Edward had appropriated it for his lab equipment. Once in a while, when Julie and Nick were still in school, he’d invited them downstairs to do simple experiments, for homework or just for fun. They sprouted lima beans in damp cotton, and grew bread mold that they examined under the microscope, along with hairs plucked from their own heads. It was during these sessions that Nick first let down his guard and began to communicate with Edward. Julie, he remembered, had freaked out at the magnification of her split ends.
After the kids grew up and moved out, Bee offered Edward the use of one of their bedrooms as his lab, but he preferred the quiet and seclusion of the basement. “It’s more peaceful down there,” he’d told her. “It’s spookier, too,” she said. “I just hope some guy with a bolt through his neck doesn’t come thumping up the stairs one day.” But it was always only Edward, rubbing his eyes, looking for her company, for a drink or a cup of coffee.
One Sunday night a few weeks after the bereavement group meeting, he went down to the basement after supper, hoping he could lose himself in work for a little while. The dog whimpered at the top of the stairs, which he couldn’t manage anymore. Edward contemplated carrying him down, and then decided he’d think better on his own. He’d started an experiment just before Bee became ill, involving the growth of bacteria on a kitchen sponge. Although he’d lost track of the whole project, he saw that his samples had been preserved, and that his notes were still on the table.
But he couldn’t concentrate. Bingo had stopped whimpering, but his toenails clicked as he paced the kitchen, waiting for Edward’s return. And the house creaked and settled, like light, hesitant human footsteps above him, making him look upward for a moment. If only he believed in ghosts, or an afterlife, or anything besides the scientific evidence of decomposition. Despite the fears she’d expressed, Bee had chosen burial over cremation. “I don’t want you to be stuck with my ashes,” she’d told him, as if she were referring to a perpetual bad blind date. “And I don’t want to be scattered all over the place, either. It sounds so … restless.”
Now Edward lay down on the studio bed and closed his eyes. Why had he always associated silence with this part, his part, of the house? He’d turned on the dishwasher earlier, and water still gurgled through the pipes. The furnace kicked in and roared. And that subtle creaking continued from time to time. It was enough to wake the dead, he thought, and sat up in shock.
He took a package of cotton batting from the cabinet and tore off a couple of pieces. He rolled them into pellets and put them into his ears, pressing until he couldn’t hear anything, not even the tapping of his own fingers on the cabinet door. It was as if he’d gone totally deaf.
Then he turned off the light switch on the wall near the steps. It was a cloudy, moonless night—the high, shallow windows appeared black—and the room was pitched into utter darkness. He had to grope his way back to the bed, and although he’d thought he knew the place by heart, he stumbled against a corner of the long table. He could feel it tremble, and the petri dishes and flasks must have rattled. But he didn’t hear them any more than he heard the usual groan of the bedsprings as he lay down again.
For decades, in a unit on the senses, he’d shown classrooms of kids how their pupils contracted in brightness, and enlarged in the absence of light. They learned the role of vitamin A in night vision, the way the molecules in the rods inside their eyes split and then recombined. And how, after several minutes, they could begin to make out shapes and even details of their environment in the dark.
Now it was happening to him. There was the outline of the table, with its miniature skyline of test tubes and beakers. There were the skulking silhouettes of the furnace and the water heater, the dehumidifier in the shadowy distance. Edward pulled the folded blanket from the foot of the bed all the way up past his head, shutting his eyes once more, tighter this time.
Darkness and silence. But also consciousness, glorious consciousness, of darkness and silence, and of his own metabolism: the heat of his body beneath the blanket, his urgent pulse and anxious breathing. His eyelids fluttered behind their blindfold, and all of his muscles seemed to flex involuntarily; he was a veritable machine of motion. And his brain teemed with stored sounds and images. Bee!
Edward threw off the blanket and opened his eyes. While they readjusted, he pulled the cotton wads out of his ears and got up and stretched, easing a slight cramp in his left leg. His real bed was a lot more comfortable. The book he’d been reading earlier, on Darwin and Lincoln, was waiting on his night table. He looked at the luminous dial on his watch; the dishwasher would be ready to be emptied by now.
Then there were three sets of exams to go through and grade, the lesson plans to prepare for the following week. He was thirsty, as if he’d been running for miles. And he remembered that Sybil had left a message earlier: “Edward,” she’d said, “why in the world do you still have Bee’s voice on this thing?” He hadn’t called her back, but he knew that he had to change the outgoing message on his voice mail. He tidied up the remains of the abandoned experiment, and soon he was lumbering up the stairs, half monster, half human, returning to the noise and light of the living world.
Science Guy
“Professor, hey, I’m glad you’re home. I wanted to give you a heads-up about something.” It was Nick, on the telephone, as soon as Edward walked into the house after work.
“What’s going on?” Edward asked. His manner was carefully casual, but he felt a pang of foreboding. He’d suddenly remembered other phone calls from Nick, or about him—from school and once from the police—when he was a teenager and Bee and Edward were newly married. It was hard to believe how sullen and unapproachable the boy was back then, the way he’d always said “What” if you so much as glanced in his direction, a flat, belligerent statement rather than a question. Edward, having won Bee, but still courting the children, had come to his defense. “It’s only adolescence,” he assured Bee. “It’s boys. I was like that, too,” he said, although he hadn’t been. “He’ll outgrow it,” he ventured, without real certainty.
But Nick had outgrown it, whatever it was. He was a man now, married, and a highly paid software designer, tamed at last by maturity and the quicksilver magic of love, for Amanda, for his mother and sister and grandmother—even for Edward.
On the phone, Nick said, “It’s the girls. Man, I’m sorry, but they’ve taken this ad out about you.” Before Edward could respond, he went on. “I tried to stop them. I told them it was a stupid idea and they had no right …” Now he sounded like the younger Nick who was never at fault for anything, from skipped classes and failing grades to vandalized mailboxes and the stash of weed in his own smelly sneaker. But this wasn’t about Nick; apparently it was about Edward. Something to do with an ad.
“What ad?” Edward asked. “What are you talking a
bout?”
“That literary paper you subscribe to, The New York Review?”
“Of Books,” Edward finished lamely. “What about it?” But he already knew. Those personals that Bee had gleefully insisted on reading aloud to him, along with a running commentary. “Listen to this one. ‘Sensual, smart, stunning, sensitive.’ Oh, why do they always resort to alliteration? ‘Julia Roberts look-alike.’ In her dreams, maybe. And this one’s a music lover! Well, who doesn’t love music, besides the Taliban? ‘Searching for that special someone to share Bach, Brecht, and breakfast.’ When they’ll probably eat bagels, bacon, and brussels sprouts.”
Pretty, petite, passionate. Witty, wise, wonderful. Wasn’t anyone ordinary, a little flawed? Bee wanted to know. Homely and shy, with a stammer, perhaps, or a glass eye? “Well, who places those ads? And who answers them?” Edward once said, irritably, rattling his newspaper—once again he was trying to read while she read to him. “Why, lonely people, Edward, that’s who,” Bee said, in tones of gentle reproach, as if he’d been the one making fun of them.
Now his blood seemed to thicken and slow with dread. The “girls,” Amanda and Julie, had joined that furtive cabal of matchmakers: Sybil and her oddball cousin, Joy Feldman with her recent hints about online dating, all those phone calls from strangers streaming out of the woodwork. “What does it say?” he asked Nick.
“I’ve got the paper right here. Should I read it to you?”
“Do you mean it’s published already?”
“Well, yeah,” Nick said. Duh, Professor. “Manda showed it to me this morning. Believe me, I wish they’d listen to reason.”
Edward glanced at the mail he’d tossed onto the kitchen counter when he’d answered the phone, and there among the envelopes was that familiar thick, folded wedge. He and Bee had had an on-again, off-again subscription for years.
An Available Man Page 4
