And He Told Good Stories
For example once he was at a cocktail party and he was maybe thirty-five and he said to the daughter of the host, a serious child of twelve or thirteen, they were both of them standing by the door that looked out on a moonlit beach, “Will you run away with me?” and the child answered without hesitating, “Just wait while I get my shawl.”
How could you not love a man who loved that story?
Married Men
Everybody (my sister is using the word loosely) goes out with one or two and then learns her lesson.
Not everybody, I say.
Not everybody what, my sister asks. Goes out with one or learns her lesson?
Both, I say. Especially learns her lesson. For that you need self-respect, which can be a long time coming.
Yep, my sister says. She is sewing. She is a quilter. She made a fifty-year anniversary quilt for our parents some years ago.
Anyway, I’ve been on both sides of that, I say, and both were awful.
What part of the equation stayed the same? she asks.
Um, I say, thinking she is about to accuse me of something. Like maybe I got my just deserts. What goes around comes around. Something like that.
The married man, she says.
Well, that’s true, I say.
The woman is always the other woman. Whichever end you’re on you’re the other woman. It’s a man’s world, she says. Or it used to be anyway. She bites off a piece of thread. Men got used to helping themselves.
Not all of them, I say.
Not all of them, she agrees.
I was nobody’s victim, I say.
We’re not talking victim here. We’re talking having your cake and eating it too and eating it too and eating it too.
Free to Give
But what does it all really mean, you stopped saying after our daughter was born. There was so much to do. The existential, the cosmic depression, ebbed a bit; it wasn’t your daily bread anymore. Then we were divorced and you had your daughter several nights a week. A child to make breakfast for. Lamb chops to buy. You had hems to mend (with a stapler) and hair to brush and shampoo to stock up on. Often on vacations my son stayed with you. You both lay on the big soft bed together, you tousling my son’s hair, talking about art. You both made art out of everything. Watermelon rind. Styrofoam. Broken clocks and chair legs. My son loved you and you loved my son. You loved my daughters. Now that nothing was expected of you, you were free to give.
Mortality
Many years later, much water under the bridge, the bridge itself having fallen into the water, my now-former second husband mentioned in passing that a certain woman had fallen ill, and he knew he should write her, but he was afraid she would write him back. And what could he say? He spoke of her as if she had been a mutual friend of ours. Although it had been years I felt an old flash of anger at her name. What could he say to her? he wanted to know. It was all so depressing, he went on, so terribly depressing. He stirred his tea. And with that gesture there were no sides anymore, no right and wrong. No How could she? I had children! How could he! We were only human.
We were all of us mortal.
PART TWO
Mortality
I Ate There Once
She never thought he’d get old this way. Never thought his defenses would come down one by one, dismantled, she realizes, by children. She imagines a split-rail fence coming apart over the years. He wasn’t wise, she understands now, he was depressed. They both had mistaken depression for wisdom. She has married again, the third time, and she sits up front with her new husband, the nicest man in the world. Her old husband sits in back, bundled in blankets, blowing his nose in his old red kerchief, wearing his brown hat. He has gotten so gentle. Especially since she has remarried. He treats her like a flower.
They have their own language. It isn’t secret, but it is their own. Certain sights carry weight for them. They remember everything. She once told him she remembered the exact moment when she knew it wouldn’t last. That they weren’t going to stay together, that their little vessel had not been made very well, that it had sprung too many leaks, and then in anger both of them had gouged holes in the bottom. Sink, damn you, they thought.
“I know when I knew it, but I didn’t say anything. We were standing under that tree,” she said. “I forget the name.”
“It was a mimosa,” he said. “The mimosa tree on the corner.”
Today they are driving upstate to see their daughter graduate. Her new husband is driving. She loves his kind profile, the way he keeps asking her former husband if he is warm enough. It was he who remembered the extra lap rug. They are like three old friends, companionable, everybody on their best behavior. They pass a sign for a Mexican restaurant, coming up on the right. It is the only place to eat on the parkway.
“I’ve always wondered what kind of place that is,” says her new husband, slowing down for a look as they approach. “Unlikely spot for a restaurant. The food must be terrible.” The restaurant, only barely visible through trees, vanishes behind them. As it happens, it was here that she and her second husband had eaten their wedding supper, twenty-five years ago. They were by themselves and had been married about an hour.
“I ate there once,” she says. Her expression doesn’t change. She doesn’t turn around.
“So did I,” says a voice from the back.
Her Second Husband’s
Lack of Beliefs
Long ago when they were first getting acquainted and he took her to St. Thomas they stood on the beach one night and he talked about rock pools and the origins of life and she thought and probably said, Oh goody, religion, you do believe in something, but he disabused her. Don’t try and make anything of it, he said. A rock pool is only a rock pool for me. Not God. But she did what she could with it just the same.
Bluefish and Her Father
One day on the beach the lifeguard blew his whistle. This was maybe twenty years ago. A large dark stain was moving through the waves, easily visible, as the ocean was the color of a cut cucumber that day, or a celery leaf, the very palest green. The stain was big, irregularly shaped. It moved; it stalled. It moved again, slowly. Everybody hurried out of the water and stood on the beach staring at the green wave and the darkness in it. Then a figure burst through the crowd and barreled out into the water, right in the middle of the dark place. It was her father. Come out of there, everybody screamed, it’s a school of bluefish! They’re feeding! But he already knew that. He was interested in swarms and schools of things. He was interested in bees and termites and ants. He wanted to see what it felt like, he explained later, to be among them.
The Horse Chestnut
The tree is so old that the huge branches swoop down along the ground for thirty feet before rising again with their weight of green. It is mossy underfoot, spread with the tiny blue flowers my father loved. “As big as a church” was how he described this tree, and he said he was certain it was haunted. He would sit beneath it in a white chair and think his thoughts. You couldn’t see him unless you stepped under the tree too. There’s a photograph of my father the biologist and my second husband the physicist peering at something up in the branches of this tree. They are shading their eyes. My father seems to be saying something, pointing something out. Was a child in the branches above? Was it the way the branches themselves grew out from the enormous trunk? They were intent. They wear the good-natured expressions of people used to having an excellent time with their minds. They got along despite their differences. My father believed in the genetically programmed desire human beings have to be useful. My second husband had no such worldview; he winged it, although he had his passions. What was on their minds that afternoon? There’s nobody to ask. Only the tree itself, getting ready to burst into bloom again this spring, willy-nilly.
An Elegant Theory
She and the kids were eating at the Moon Palace, the Chinese restaurant on 112th and Broadway where physicists from Columbia University used
to have their feasts and scratch their theories on the backs of napkins and matchbooks. Her daughter looked up from her moo-shu vegetables and with her chopsticks indicated a man whose iron-colored hair stuck five inches out from his head like a cloud of wires. “Too much science,” she said, a theory elegant in its simplicity.
Gone
Long ago she was traveling in Europe with her mother and father. Her mother had asked her to come along because her father’s health was frail. Sometimes before her mother came down from the hotel room for breakfast she and her father would sit at a table and say nothing. He didn’t speak to her. She tried little tidbits of conversation, but it was nothing doing. He barely looked at her, even though she was sitting right there. He picked up the paper and drank his black coffee. Maybe he was too depressed to talk. If she had it to do over, what would she say? Lighten up, Pop? Of course she doesn’t have it to do over because her father is dead and gone.
He would read the newspaper and drink his coffee and not speak. Then when her mother came down he would talk. Or not. As soon as her mother appeared she herself got the holy hell out of there. He wasn’t her husband after all. He was her father. She didn’t have to stay there forever.
Now and then she sees him on the city street. A stranger pushes his wheelchair. For just an instant her heart turns over. It is so hard to comprehend gone.
To Keep Him Company
The night my father fell and couldn’t get up and my mother couldn’t get him up not being strong enough and it was four in the morning, they didn’t want to disturb anyone at that hour by telephoning for help. So she lay down beside him on the floor and stayed with him until morning.
Eating Peanuts
When her father was dying and everybody was sleeping in the hospital all her third husband wanted to do was go home and he needed to and she said okay but she called him later when her father wasn’t expected to live through the night. I want you to be here, she said, with me, and he came, but she was surrounded by family anyway—eleven people in the small room. Her husband was hungry as he hadn’t eaten and it was one in the morning and he went out but all he could find was a can of peanuts which he ate over by the window, the can making that little pouf of escaping air as he opened the vacuum seal, and he stood munching away to keep body and soul together as quietly as he could while her father labored to die and all in all, although at first she was mad he was eating peanuts while her father died, in retrospect there was something very reassuring about the whole homely thing.
Skipping Stones
Her father had a collection of skipping stones. He kept them in a black plastic ashtray three inches in diameter, two inches high, with niches for six cigarettes. They stood on their edges from largest to smallest. They were always on his desk, wherever his desk happened to be at the moment. They must have survived a number of packings and unpackings. She doesn’t know when they were first gathered, or by whom. Maybe he found them all himself. Maybe children helped, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. She imagines a small figure running to him on the beach. “Here,” the child cries, handing him a smooth thin stone. “Yes,” says her father, putting down his book. “That’s a good one.” He speaks with a Chesterfield cigarette in his mouth. He tests the weight, the feel of the stone in his hand. He makes the sideways motion of skimming. “Perfect,” he says finally. “You going to keep it?” the child asks solemnly. Her father nods. This image seems quite clear to her. She likes to think this is a real memory, but she doesn’t know that she isn’t making it up.
Still, here are the stones. Someone chose each one. Maybe he collected them all himself. She likes that idea too. She likes to imagine him obsessed all one summer, head bent as he walked at the water’s edge, stooping to pick up one stone after another until he had enough, or his pockets could hold no more, or his mind moved on to something else. She thinks she can remember such a time, not so terribly long ago. But she can’t be sure. The only thing she is sure of is the beach, it is always the same beach at the end of the same road where they went as a family summer after summer. Much has changed, but the water still glitters in the distance at the end of that road, and his grandchildren are on that beach where she once played, and his great-grandchildren.
When he died, her father’s secretary wrapped each stone separately in a paper towel and sealed it with Scotch tape and sent them to her in a big manila envelope with the ashtray at the bottom. She didn’t open them. Sometimes she took one out and felt its shape through the paper and put it back again. She couldn’t open them. She wanted the moment to be right; she didn’t want to do this just anytime; she was waiting to feel in the exact center of something. Meanwhile, as long as she didn’t unwrap them, there was something of her father still to come.
In the end of course there was just the unexceptional afternoon she sat on the couch and unwrapped every single stone, unceremoniously dumping the paper on the floor while the small pile of stones grew on her lap. They were so ordinary, so beautiful—gray, blue-gray, mauve, black, taupe. The color of stone. The largest is three inches at its widest, the smallest a boomerang shape not much bigger than a peanut shell. She remembered skipping stones as a kid, how you can hear the tiny thud each jump makes, and you realize for the first time how taut is the surface of water, and it is magic that you have sent a stone to do this amazing thing, to skip six, seven times, almost like flying. She set them up in the ashtray as her father had.
As far as she knows her father collected nothing else. He had music, of course, and books, he had poems by heart and words he loved. He had favorite stories and people and moments, but he didn’t collect things for their thingness. The stones were the only things her father saved for themselves. They comfort her. Something she can hold in her hand.
Sufficient Information
One day she thought to herself, I can do this, I can live without a man. She had been doing this for almost twelve years. She was good at it. She preferred it to doomed love. She was tired of relationships whose greatest intimacy consisted of sitting up all night weeping while love died. But she thought, Well, I will give it this one last try, and she placed an ad in a certain bookish journal. If nothing comes of it, she thought, then I will live happily by myself. After all she had her kids and her grandchildren and her friends. Her life was full. When she began to get the answers there was one in particular that had very nice handwriting. It was firm and direct and it slanted upward, a sign of optimism. The letter read, in part, that he thought life went better by twos. In her ad she had specified a nice man, and he wrote that he thought he was nice, but that this wasn’t something you could say about yourself, not really. She took a deep breath and she called him up. He was broiling a piece of salmon when she called but dropped everything to talk. They met in the rain a few days later; they had a Chinese meal. They met again for supper. And again. Thirteen days later he asked her to marry him. Yes, she said, standing in the kitchen doorway. It was as simple as that.
Her Third Husband
The second time they saw each other he came to her house with two pounds of chopped meat, an onion, a slice of bread, a small can of V8, and a bottle of chili sauce. He asked if she had an egg and she said that she thought so somewhere. In his breast pocket he had a recipe for meat loaf and he laid it on her counter as he unpacked the ingredients. She examined it. It was his mother’s recipe, written in pen on a piece of loose-leaf paper: Billie’s Meat Loaf. She felt her heart stirring. He grated the onion. She had always chopped hers but said she thought grating was a terrific idea. Tears flowed from both their eyes and she turned on the oven fan and when that wasn’t enough she opened a window. He set the slice of bread in a bowl and poured the V8 on top. She watched everything he did, her hands behind her back. Her job was mashed potatoes and she could do this with both eyes closed. She had peeled them already and set them in the pan of cold water, a little salt in the water, the fire on low. Butter and cream were ready and her old masher with the wooden handle. They both liked frozen peas and tha
t took about five seconds to prepare. Now this is the best part, he said as he rolled up his sleeves and dug his hands in the bowl full of meat and bread and tomato juice and onion. She had already lit the oven—once his had exploded because he let the gas go too long while he hunted for a match. (He had told her that story the first time they met, four nights ago. He had come all the way up to her neighborhood. It was raining and he carried such a nice big umbrella. She herself couldn’t lay hands on an umbrella from one day to the next.) When he had shaped the meat loaf in the roasting pan he poured the whole bottle of chili sauce over the top. I use ketchup, she said, but the chili sauce is a very good idea. Nice for tang. Are you sure thirty minutes is enough? she asked. That’s an awful lot of meat loaf. But he didn’t want to leave it too long in the oven as he liked it very rare. They exchanged raw-meat stories. I’ve eaten raw meat all my life, she said, the first time I met my first son-in-law I was putting a dripping gobbet of raw flank steak into my mouth. He was afraid to shake my hand and I don’t blame him. She laughed heartily at the memory, reminding herself of the insect world and how it treats the husbands. He laughed too, but not uneasily because he also loved raw meat. (This was before salmonella.) You know, he said, when I first heard your laugh on the phone I thought you might weigh three hundred pounds. I hope you don’t mind my saying that. Then of course they kissed for a long time as she leaned back against the counter. It was very very nice. They were both middle-aged and free. His shirt was clean and blue, his jacket frayed and respectable. She was wearing several layers of things and found herself suddenly as pleased with her own shape as he was. At some point in the evening feeling especially joyous he said he had all kinds of funny thoughts in his mind. Like what, she asked. Oh, he said, it’s too embarrassing. Like what, she said. Oh well, sometimes when I’m walking down the street I wonder if there were a terrible drought would I be able to drop to my knees and lap dog urine. You know, to save my life? Isn’t that funny, she said, so do I! So do I!