Maybe, Clare thinks, when Isabel and David return, William will have migrated back to the armchair, reading something high-toned, and I will be resting, attractively, or reading, attractively. And when Charles comes back, he"ll find the four of us talking over drinks and eating the goat cheese and crackers that Isabel brought. He"ll join us. He"ll put his hand on my horrible hair, as if it is nice hair, and he"ll sit where William is sitting now.
It is such a golden picture, the five of them. The six of them-Clare pictures Nelson, too, sitting on the other side of her, in a clean shirt, holding a couple of the cookies she"d forgotten to put out for him before. The light shines on Charles"s lovely Nordic hair, a mix of blond and gray, as if the boy and the man will coexist forever, and Isabel is bringing out the best in everyone in her kindest, most encouraging way, as if all she has ever wanted is to help Clare make a nice party, and David tells his stories of Second Avenue, and there is nothing in them, not Great-Aunt Frieda, not the death of little cousin Renee, to make Clare cry, and William tells her that he will love her forever, that nothing has been lost, after all, and he mouths the words so that no one can hear him, but her, of course, and it is so beautiful, so drenched in the lush, streaming light of what is not, she closes her eyes to see it better and falls asleep.
William relaxes. There really is nothing more to do. He can just close his eyes, too. Clare"s hair fans out across his lap. Her hands press his to her chest. The objects in the room darken, until it is a black reef from couch to table to chair, and no one turns on the light. William and Clare sleep, as if it is a quiet night in their own home, as if they are lying naked and familiar in their own bed.
COMPa.s.sION AND MERCY.
For JOB
No power.
The roads were thick with pine branches and whole birch trees, the heavy boughs breaking off and landing on top of houses and cars and in front of driveways. The low, looping power lines coiled onto the road, and even from their bedroom window, Clare could see silver branches dangling in the icy wires. Highways were closed. Cla.s.ses were canceled. The phone didn"t work. The front steps were slippery as h.e.l.l.
William kept a fire going in the living room and Clare toasted rye bread on the end of fondue forks for breakfast, and in the early afternoon, they wrapped cheese sandwiches in tin foil and threw them into the embers for fifteen minutes. William was in charge of dinner and making hot water for Thai ginger soup-in-a-bowl. They used the snow bank at the kitchen door to chill the Chardonnay.
They read and played Scrabble and at four o"clock, when daylight dropped to a deep indigo, Clare lit two dozen candles and they got into their pile of quilts and pillows.
"All right," William said. "Let"s have it. You"re shipwrecked on a desert island. Who do you want to be with-me or Nelson Slater?"
"Oh my G.o.d," Clare says. "Nelson. Of course."
"Good choice. He did a great job with the firewood."
William kept the fire going all night. Every hour, he had to roll sideways and crouch and then steady himself and then pull himself up with his cane and then balance himself, and because Clare was watching and worried, he had to do it all with the appearance of ease. Clare lay in the dark and tried to move the blankets far to one side so they wouldn"t tangle William"s feet.
"You"re not actually helping," he said. "I know where the blankets are, so I can easily step over them. And then, of course, you move them."
"I feel bad," Clare said.
"I"m going to break something if you keep this up."
"Let me help," Clare said.
When the cold woke them, Clare handed William the logs. They talked about whether or not it was worth it to use the turkey carca.s.s for soup and if they could really make a decent soup in the fireplace. William said that people had cooked primarily in hearths until the late eighteenth century. William told Clare about his visit to his cardiologist and the possible levels of fitness William could achieve. ("A lot of men your age walk five miles a day," the doctor said. "My father-in-law got himself a personal trainer, and he"s eighty.") Clare said maybe they could walk to the diner on weekends. They talked about Clare"s sons, Adam and Danny, and their wives and the two grandchildren and they talked about William"s daughter, Emily, and her pregnancy and the awful man she"d married ("I"d rather she"d taken the veil," William said. "Little Sisters of Gehenna"). When the subject came up, William and Clare said nice things about the people they used to be married to.
It had taken William and Clare five years to end their marriages. William"s divorce lawyer was the sister of one of William"s old friends. She was William"s age, in a sharp black suit and improbably black hair and bloodred nails. Her only concession to age was black patent flats, and William was sure that most of her life, this woman had been stalking and killing wild game in stiletto heels.
"So," she said. "You"ve been married thirty-five years. Well, look, Dr. Langford-"
""Mister" is fine," William said. ""William" is fine."
""Bill"?" the woman said and William shook his head no and she smiled and made a note.
"Just kidding. It"s like this. Unless your wife is doing crack cocaine or having s.e.x with young girls and barnyard animals, what little you have will be split fifty-fifty."
"That"s fine, Mrs. Merrill," William said.
"Not really," the woman said. "Call me Louise. Your wife obviously got a lawyer long before you did. I got a fax today, a list of personal property your wife believes she"s ent.i.tled to. Oil paintings, a little jewelry, silverware."
"That"s fine. Whatever it is."
"It"s not fine. But let"s say you have no personal attachment to any of these items. And let"s say it"s all worth about twenty thousand dollars. Let"s have her give you twenty thousand dollars, and you give her the stuff. There"s no reason for us to just roll over and put our paws up in the air."
"Whatever she wants," William said. "You should know, I"m not having s.e.x with a graduate student. Or with p.o.r.n stars."
"I believe you," Mrs. Merrill said. "You may as well tell me-it"ll all come out in the wash. Who are you having s.e.x with?"
"Her name is Clare Wexler. She teaches. She"s a very fine teacher. She makes me laugh. She can be a difficult person," he said, beaming, as if he were detailing her beauty. "You"d like her." William wiped his eyes.
"All right," said Louise Merrill. "Let"s get you hitched before we"re all too old to enjoy it."
When they could finally marry, Clare called her sons.
Danny said, "You might want a prenup. I"m just saying."
Adam said, "Jeez, I thought Isabel was your friend."
William called Emily and she said, "How can you do this to me? I"m trying to get pregnant," and her husband, Kurt, had to take the phone because she was crying so hard. He said, "We"re trying not to take sides, you know."
Three days after the storm had pa.s.sed, cla.s.ses resumed, grimy cars filled slushy roads, and Clare called both of her sons to say they were essentially unharmed.
"What do you mean, "essentially"?" Danny said, and Clare said, "I mean my hair"s a mess and I lost at Scrabble seventeen times and William"s back hurts from sleeping near the fireplace. I mean, I"m absolutely and completely fine. I shouldn"t have said "essentially."
William laughed and shook his head when she hung up.
"They must know me by now," Clare said.
"I"m sure they do," William said, "but knowing and understanding are two different things. Vershtehen und eiklaren."
"Fancy talk," Clare said, and she kissed his neck and the bald top of his head and the little red dents behind his ears, which came from sixty-five years of wearing gla.s.ses. "I have to go to Baltimore tomorrow. Remember?"
"Of course," William said.
Clare knew he"d call her the next day to ask about dinner, about Thai food or Cuban or would she prefer scrambled eggs and salami and then when she said she was on her way to Baltimore, William would be, for just a quick minute, crushed and then crisp and English.
They spoke while Clare was on the train. William had unpacked his low-salt, low-fat lunch. ("Disgusting," he"d said. "Punitive.") Clare had gone over her notes for her talk on Jane Eyre ("In which I will reveal my awful, retrograde underpinnings") and they made their nighttime phone date for ten P.M., when William would be still at his desk at home and Clare would be in her bed at the University Club.
Clare called William every half hour from ten until midnight and then she told herself that he must have fallen asleep early. She called him at his university office, on his cell phone, and at home. She called him every fifteen minutes from seven A.M. until her talk and she began calling him again, at eleven, as soon as her talk was over. She begged off the faculty lunch and said that her husband wasn"t well and that she was needed at home; her voice shook and no one doubted her.
On the train, Clare wondered who to call. She couldn"t ask Emily, even though she lived six blocks away; she couldn"t ask a pregnant woman to go see if her father was all right. By the time she"d gotten Emily to understand what was required, and where the house key was hidden, and that there was no real cause for alarm, Emily would be sobbing and Clare would be trying not to scream at Emily to calm the f.u.c.k down. Isabel was the person to call, and Clare couldn"t call her. She could imagine Isabel saying, "Of course, Clare, leave it to me," and driving down from Boston to sort things out; she"d make the beds, she"d straighten the pictures, she"d gather all the overdue library books into a pile and stack them near the front door. She"d scold William for making them all worry and then she would call Clare back, to say that all broken things had been put right.
Clare couldn"t picture what might have happened to William. His face floated before her, his large, lovely face, his face when he was reading the paper, his face when he"d said to her, "I am sorry," and she"d thought, Oh, Christ, we"re breaking up again; I thought we"d go until April at least, and he"d said, "You are everything to me-I"m afraid we have to marry," and they cried so hard, they had to sit down on the bench outside the diner and wipe each other"s faces with napkins.
Clare saw that the man in the seat across from her was smiling uncertainly; she"d been saying William"s name. Clare walked to the little juncture between cars and called Margaret Slater, her former cleaning lady. There was no answer. Margaret"s grandson Nelson didn"t get home until three so Margaret might be running errands for another two hours. They pulled into Penn Station. If Margaret had a cell phone, Clare didn"t know the number. Clare called every half hour, home and then Margaret"s number, leaving messages and timing herself, reading a few pages of the paper between calls. G.o.ddammit, Margaret, she thought. You"re retired. Pick up the f.u.c.king phone.
Clare pulled into their driveway just as the sun was setting and Margaret pulled in right after her. Water still dripped from the gutters and the corners of the house and it would all freeze again at night.
"Oh, Clare," Margaret said, "I just got your messages. I was out of the house all day. I"m so sorry."
"It"s all right," Clare said, and they both looked up at the light in William"s window. "He probably unplugged the phone."
"They live to drive us crazy," Margaret said.
Clare scrabbled in the bottom of her bag for the house key, furiously tossing tissues and pens and Chap Sticks and quarters onto the walk, and thinking with every toss, What"s your hurry? This is your last moment of not knowing, stupid, slow down. But her hands moved fast, tearing the silk lining of the bag until she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a bra.s.s house key sitting in Margaret"s flat, lined palm. Clare wanted to sit down on the porch and wait for someone else to come. She opened the door and she wanted to turn around and close it behind her.
They should call his name, she thought. It"s what you do when you come into your house and you haven"t been able to reach your husband, you go, William, William, darling, I"m home, and then he pulls himself out of his green leather desk chair and comes to the top of the stairs, his hair standing straight up and his gla.s.ses on the end of his nose. He says, relief and annoyance clearly mixed together, Oh, darling, you didn"t call, I waited for your call. And then you say, I did call, I called all night, but the phone was off the hook, you had the phone off, and he says that he certainly did not and Margaret watches, bemused. She disapproved of the divorce (she all but said, I always thought Charles would leave you, not the other way around) but gave herself over on the wedding day, when she brought platters of deviled eggs and put Nelson in a navy-blue suit, and cried, shyly.
"Fulgent," William said after the ceremony, and he said it several times, a little drunk on Champagne. "Absolutely fulgent." It wouldn"t have mattered if no one had been there, but everyone except William"s sister had been, and they got in one elegant fox-trot before William"s ankle acted up. William will call down, "I"m so sorry we inconvenienced you, Mrs. Slater," and Margaret will shake her head fondly and go, and you drop your coat and bag in the hall and he comes down the stairs, slowly, careful with his ankle, and he makes tea to apologize for having scared the s.h.i.t out of you.
Margaret waited. As much as she wanted to help, it wasn"t her house or her husband and Clare had been in charge of their relationship for the last twenty years; this was not the moment to take the lead. Clare walked up the stairs and right into their bedroom, as if William had phoned ahead and told her what to expect. He was lying on the bed, shoes off and fully dressed, his hand on Jane Eyre, his eyes closed, and his reading gla.s.ses on his chest. (""He is not to them what he is to me,"" Jane thought. ""While I breathe and think I must love him."") Clare lay down next to him, murmuring, until Margaret put her hand on Clare"s shoulder and asked if she should call the hospital or someone.
"I have no idea," Clare said, lying on the bed beside William, staring at the ceiling. These things get done, Clare thought, whether you know what you"re doing or not. The hospital is called, the funeral home is contacted, the body is removed, with some difficulty, because he was a big man and the stairs are old and narrow. Your sons and daughters-in-law call everyone who needs to be called, including the terrible sister in England who sent them a note and a chipped vase, explaining that she could not bring herself to attend a wedding that so clearly should not be taking place.
Margaret comes back the next day and makes up one of the boys" bedrooms for you, just in case, but when your best friend flies in from Cleveland, you are lying in your own room, wrapped in William"s bathrobe, and you wear his robe and his undershirt while she sits across from you, her sensible shoes right beside William"s wing tips, and she helps you decide chapel or funeral home, lunch or brunch, booze or wine, and who will speak. Your sons and their wives and the babies come and it"s no more or less terrible to have them in the house. You move slowly and carefully, swimming through a deep but traversable river of s.h.i.t. You must not inhale, you must not stop, you must not stop for anything at all. Destroyed, untouchable, you can lie down on the other side when they"ve all gone home.
Clare was careful during the funeral. She didn"t listen to anything that was said. She saw Isabel sitting with Emily and Kurt, a little cl.u.s.ter of Langfords; Isabel wore a gray suit and held Emily"s hand and she left as soon as the service ended. At the house, Clare imagined Isabel beside her; she imagined herself encased in Isabel. Even in pajamas, suffering a bad cold, Isabel moved like a woman in beautiful silk. Clare made an effort to move that way. She thanked people in Isabel"s pleasant, governessy voice. Clare straightened Danny"s tie with Isabel"s hand and then wiped chocolate fingerprints off the back of a chair. Clare used Isabel to answer every question and to make plans to get together with people she had no intention of seeing. She hugged Emily the way Isabel would have, with a perfect degree of appreciation for Emily"s pregnant and furious state. Clare went upstairs and lay down on the big bed and cried into the big, tailored pillows William used for reading in bed. Clare held his reading gla.s.ses like a rosary. Clare walked over to the dresser and took out one of William"s big Irish linen handkerchiefs and blotted her face with it. (Clare and Isabel did their dressers the same way, William said: odds and ends in the top drawer, then underwear, then sweaters, then jeans and T-shirts and white socks. Clare put William"s almost empty bottle of Tabac in her underwear drawer.) She rearranged their two unlikely stuffed animals.
"Oh, rhino and p.e.c.k.e.r bird," William had said. That"s how he saw them, and two years ago Clare had found herself in front of a fancy toy store in Guilford on a spring afternoon and found herself buying a very expensive plush gray rhino and a velvety little brown-and-white bird and putting the pair on their bed that night.
"You"re not so tough," William had said.
"I was," Clare said. "You"ve ruined me."
Clare wanted to talk with Isabel about Emily; they used to talk about her all the time. Once, after William"s second heart attack, when William was still Isabel"s husband, Isabel and Clare were playing cards in William"s hospital room and Emily and Kurt had just gone off to get sandwiches and Clare had stumbled over something nice to say about Kurt, and Isabel slapped down her cards and said, "Say what you want. He"s dumb in that awful preppy way and a Republican and if he says, "No disrespect intended," one more time, I"m going to set him on fire." William said, "De gustibus non est disputandum," which he said about many things, and Isabel said, "That doesn"t help, darling."
Clare looked at William"s lapis cuff links and at the watch she"d given him when they were in the third act of their affair. "You can"t give me a watch," he"d said. "I already have a perfectly good one." Clare took his watch off his wrist, laid it on the asphalt, and drove over it, twice. "There," she"d said. "Terrible accident, you were so careless. You had to replace it." William took that beautiful watch she"d bought him out of the box and kissed her in the parking lot of a Marriott halfway between his home and hers. He"d worn it every day until last Thursday. Clare walked downstairs holding William"s jewelry, and when she pa.s.sed her sons pouring wine for people, she dropped the watch into Danny"s pocket. Adam turned to her and said, "Mom, do you want a few minutes alone?" and Clare realized the time upstairs had done her no good at all. She laid the lapis cuff links in Adam"s free hand. "William particularly wanted you to have these," she said, and Adam looked surprised-as well he might, Clare thought.
Clare took the semester off. She spent weeks in the public library, crying and wandering up and down the mystery section, looking for something she hadn"t read. A woman she didn"t know popped out from behind the stacks and handed her a little ivory pamphlet, the pages held together with a dark-blue silk ribbon. On the front it said, G.o.d NEVER GIVES US MORE THAN WE CAN BEAR. The woman ran off and Clare caught the eye of the librarian, who mouthed the words "ovarian cancer." Clare carried it with her to the parking lot and looked over her shoulder to make sure the woman was gone and then she tossed it in the trash.
After the library, Clare went to the coffeehouse or to the Turkish restaurant, where they knew how to treat widows. Every evening at six, men would spill out of the church across the street from the coffeehouse. A few would smoke in the vestibule and a few more would come in and order coffee and a couple of cookies and sit down to play chess. They were not like the chess players Clare had known.
One evening, one of the older men, with a tidy silver crew cut and pants yanked up a little too high, approached Clare. (William had dressed beautifully. Clare and Isabel used to talk about how beautifully he dressed; Clare said he dressed the way the Duke of Windsor would have if he"d been a hundred pounds heavier and not such a weenie and Isabel said, "That"s wonderful. May I tell him?") The man said gently, "Are you waiting for the meeting?"
Clare said, in her Isabel voice, that it was very kind of him to ask, but there was no meeting she was waiting for.
He said, "Well, I see you here a lot. I thought maybe you were trying to decide whether or not to go to the next meeting."
Clare said that she hadn"t made up her mind, which could have been true. She could just as soon have gone to an AA meeting as to a No Rest for the Weary meeting or a People Sick of Life meeting. And Clare did know something about drinking, she thought. Sometime after she and William had decided, for the thousandth time, that their affair was a terrible thing, that their love for their spouses was much greater than their love for each other, that William and Isabel were suited, just like Charles and Clare were suited, and that the William and Clare thing was nothing more than some odd summer lightning that would pa.s.s as soon as the season changed, Clare found herself having three gla.s.ses of wine every night. Her goal, every night, was to climb into bed early, exhausted and tipsy, and fall deeply asleep before she could say anything to Charles about William. It was her version of One Day at a Time, and it worked for two years, until she woke up one night, crying and saying William"s name into her pillow over and over again. Clare didn"t think that that was the kind of reckless behavior that interested the people across the street.
The man put "AA for the Older Alcoholic" in front of Clare and said, "You"re not alone."
Clare said, "That is so not true."
She kept the orange-and-gray pamphlet on her kitchen table for a few weeks, in case anyone dropped in, because it made her laugh, the whole idea. Her favorite part (she had several, especially the stoic recitation of ruined marriages, dead children, estranged children, alcoholic children, multiple car accidents-pedestrian and vehicular-forced resignations, outright firings, embezzlements, failed suicides, diabetic comas), her absolute favorite in the category of the telling detail, was an old woman carrying a fifth of vodka hidden in a skein of yarn. Clare finally put the pamphlet away so it wouldn"t worry Nelson when he came for Friday night dinner. Margaret Slater dropped him off at six and picked him up at eight-thirty, which gave her time for bingo and Nelson and Clare time to eat and play checkers or cribbage or Risk.
Nelson Slater didn"t know that William"s Sulka pajamas were still under Clare"s pillow, that the bedroom still smelled like his cologne (and that Clare had bought two large bottles of it and sprayed the room with it, every Sunday), that his wing tips and his homely black sneakers were in the bottom of the bedroom closet. He knew that William"s canes were still in the umbrella stand next to the front door and that the refrigerator was filled with William"s favorite foods (chicken-liver pate, cornichons, pickled beets, orange marmalade, and Zingerman"s bacon bread) and there were always two or three large Tupperware containers of William"s favorite dinners, which Clare made on Friday, when Nelson came over, and then divided in halves or quarters for the rest of the week. Nelson didn"t mind. He had known and loved Clare most of his young life, and he understood old-people craziness. His great-aunt believed that every event in the Bible actually happened and left behind physical evidence you could buy, like the splinter from Noah"s Ark she kept by her bed. His Cousin Chick sat on the back porch, shooting the heads off squirrels and chipmunks and reciting poetry. Nelson had known William Langford since he was five, and Nelson had gotten used to him. Mr. Langford was a big man with a big laugh and a big frown. He gave Nelson credit for who he was and what he did around the house and he paid Nelson, which Clare never remembered to do. (A man has to make a living, Mr. Langford had said one time, and Nelson did like that.) Nelson liked the Friday night dinners, and unless Clare started doing something really weird, like setting three places at the table, he"d keep coming over.
"Roast pork with apples and onions and a red wine sauce. And braised red cabbage. And Austrian apple cake. How"s that?"
Nelson shrugged. Clare was always a good cook, but almost no one knew it. When he was six years old and eating gingerbread in the Wexler kitchen one afternoon, Mr. Wexler came home early. He reached for a piece of the warm gingerbread and Nelson told him that Clare had just baked it and Wexler looked at him in surprise. "Mrs. Wexler doesn"t really cook," he said, and Nelson had gone on eating and thought, She does for me, Mister.
Clare put the pork and apples on Nelson"s plate and poured them both apple cider. When Nelson lifted the fork to his mouth and chewed and then sighed and smiled, happy to be loved and fed, Clare had to leave the kitchen for a minute.
After a year, everything was much the same. Clare fed Nelson on Friday nights, she taught half-time, she wept in the shower, and at the end of every day, she put on one of William"s b.u.t.ton-down shirts and a pair of his socks and settled down with a big book of William"s or an English mystery. When the phone rang, Clare jumped.
"Clare, how are you?"
"Good, Lauren. How are you? How"s Adam?"
Her daughter-in-law would not be deflected. She tried to get her husband to call his mother every Sunday night but when he didn"t (and Clare could just hear him, her sweet boy, pa.s.sive as granite: "She"s okay, Lauren. What do you want me to do about it?"), Lauren, who was properly brought up, made the call.
"We"d love for you to visit us, Clare."
I bet, Clare thought. "Oh, not until the semester ends, I can"t. But you all could come out here. Anytime."
"It really wouldn"t be suitable."
Clare said nothing.
"I mean, it just wouldn"t," Lauren said, polite and stubborn.
Clare felt sorry for her. Clare wouldn"t want herself for a mother-in-law, under the best of circ.u.mstances.
"I"d love to have you visit," Clare said. This wasn"t exactly true but she would certainly rather have them in her house than be someplace that had no William in it. "The boys" room is all set, with the bunk beds and your room, of course, for you and Adam. There"s plenty of room and I hear Cirque du Soleil will be here in a few weeks." Clare and Margaret will take Nelson, before he"s too old to be seen in public with two old ladies.
Lauren"s voice dropped. Clare knew she was walking from the living room, where she was watching TV and folding laundry, into a part of the house where Adam couldn"t hear her.
"It doesn"t matter how much room there is. Your house is like a mausoleum. How am I supposed to explain that to the boys, Clare? Am I supposed to say Grandma loved Grandpa William so much she keeps every single thing he ever owned or read or ate all around her?"
"I don"t mind if that"s what you want to tell them."
In fact, I"ll tell them myself, Little Miss Let"s-Call-a-Spade-a-Gardening-Implement, Clare thought, and she could hear William saying, "Darling, you are as clear and bright as vinegar but not everyone wants their pipes cleaned."
"I don"t want to tell them that. I want-really, we all want-for you just to begin to, oh, you know, just to get on with your life a little bit."