A Place I've Never Been (5 page)

Just before spouse night ends, Kitty Mitsui announces that she and Mike Watkins and Ronni Holtzman will be going to Poncho's for margaritas and nachos. “It'll be a good time,” she says halfheartedly. But everyone knows she is fighting a losing battle. Since Mr. Theodorus died the after-group outings have lost their momentum.

Then, in the group's golden age, its giddy second childhood, in the reign of Mr. Theodorus, there was wild revelry, screaming laughter in the hospital parking lot, until finally Mrs. Leon, a Mormon, brought up her moral objections at group.

The next week Mr. Theodorus arrived with a rubber dog's snout tied over his nose. That was the end of Mrs. Leon, Claire reported afterwards to Arthur, her eyes gleaming. He smiled. It seemed that Claire's greatest ambition was to be fully accepted into that subgroup of the group which played charades until four in the morning, drank, and drove all night, one Thursday, to watch the sun rise over Echo Lake, where Kitty Mitsui had a cabin. Claire reported it all—the wind on her cheeks, the crispness of the air, the glory of the mountain sunrise. They built a fire and lay bundled together in sleeping bags, five of them, like Campfire Girls, she said.

Claire believed until the end that she was peripheral, barely accepted. She believed that Spiro and Kitty and the others were going out together without her, excluding her from the best, the most intimate gatherings. This was ironic, for as Arthur learned after her death, Claire was, if anything, the group's spiritual center; without her it fragmented. Mournful couples went home alone on spouse night, the healthy clinging testily to the sick. Then Mr. Theodorus died, and the group entered a period of adolescent turmoil. Furious explosions occurred; well-buried animosities were laid bare. For the first time the group included enemies, who sat as far across the table from each other as possible, avoiding each other's glances.

Arthur can't help but wonder sometimes if any of it was sexual; if Claire might have slept with one of the men. It's hard for him to imagine. Usually, when he tries to envision those post-group revels, or when he dreams about them, he sees only five bodies huddled in sleeping bags by a lake as dawn breaks. Sometimes he wakes up with itchy hands, and bursts into tears because he wasn't there.

When spouse night ends, Mrs. Theodorus says to Mrs. Jaroslavsky, “Doris, if you don't need it—well, I could sure use that spice cake. I have this important show judge coming over tomorrow.”

“Don't do me any favors,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says. She is grim-faced, puffy. Then, cautiously: “You really want it?”

“If you don't mind. This judge is very powerful, and God knows, I could never bake anything like that. All I have around are these horrible Black Forest things Spiro's brother sends over, with ten pounds of synthetic whipped cream.”

“Terrible, the things they call a cake,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says, as, smiling, she hands Mrs. Theodorus an aluminum-wrapped package.

They walk out to the parking lot together. “I know when I've outstayed my welcome,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky explains to Mrs. Theodorus and Arthur. “I know it's been too long. I feel I can talk about that with you two, since we're all in the same position. The rest of them, they're fickle. When Morry died, they couldn't have been nicer, they kept saying, ‘Doris, anything you want, anything you want.' Now they'd like to slap my face. And that Olivia. She gets my goat. Every day it's, ‘Stay as long as you need, Doris, anything you need, Doris,' but I know the score. She'd like to get rid of me too.” She blows out breath, resigned. “So this is it, Mrs. Jaroslavsky,” she says. “No more spouse night. The rest of the way you have to go it alone.”

“I know how you feel, Doris,” Arthur says. “The group's my last link to Claire. How can I leave them? Toward the end, sometimes I think, they knew her better than I did.”

“Oh, but they don't, don't you see?” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says. “That's just their illusion. They have each other for a year, maybe a little more. But what I have to remember, what I must remember, is I had Morry a lifetime.” She smiles, breathes deeply. “The wind feels wonderful, doesn't it?” she says, and turning from Arthur, opens her face to the sky, as if to absorb the starlight.

Across the parking lot Kitty Mitsui calls, “Hey, you guys want to come for a nightcap? Come on! It'll be fun!” She smiles too widely at them, as if she imagines that by sheer force of will she can muster the energy to bring the dead back to life.

Arthur smiles back. “No thanks,” he says. “You go ahead.”

“Suit yourself,” Kitty Mitsui says, “but you're missing a big blow-out.” She has four
with her, including Christa and Chuck. Clearly she is destined to become the group's perpetual cheerleader, unflagging in her determination to bring back the glory of the past with a few loudly-called-out cries. Poor Kitty Mitsui. The rest of them had lives, but she's thirty-two and unmarried. The group is her life, and it will be her doomed nostalgia.

Mrs. Jaroslavsky winces as Kitty's car roars off. “That smell,” she says. “That particular smell of burnt rubber. I remember it from Morry's room when he was dying. It must have been something in one of the machines. Now I smell it—and I can hardly keep myself standing up.” She looks at the ground, clearly cried out for an entire lifetime, and Arthur is suddenly grateful to have Mrs. Theodorus, grateful for the nights they may spend together in her dog-hair-covered bed. He will lie awake, listening for occasional yelps from the kennel.

“What you need,” Mrs. Theodorus says, “is a puppy,” and Mrs. Jaroslavsky's mouth opens into a wide smile. “My dear girl,” she says, “I'm allergic.” Her face, against the dark sky, expands into a comic vision of the moon, eager-eyed and white-faced.

When Claire died, Arthur arranged for her ashes to be scattered at sea. It was what she had wanted. Everyone in the group had decided what they wanted, “B vs. C,” or burial versus cremation, being one of the most popular discussion topics at the post-group gatherings. He and the children took the plastic vial of ashes out on a boat, which they had to share with another family—a staunch couple named MacGiver who had lost their son, and who resembled the protagonists of
American Gothic
. Arthur felt faintly embarrassed as the two families engaged in nervous small talk. The wind was too strong to go out to sea that day, the young captain informed them: the scattering would have to
take place in the bay. Arthur, as he figures it now, went crazy. “She said the ocean,” he kept repeating to the captain, who in turn kept explaining, calmly and compassionately, that the wind situation simply made it impossible for them to go to the ocean. “It's okay, Dad,” Arthur's daughters told him. “The bay's almost the ocean anyway.” But he was adamant. “I told her the ocean,” he kept saying. “I told her she'd be scattered over the ocean.” He clutched the vial to his chest, while the MacGivers discreetly did their own dumping, shaking the little plastic bag over the water as if it were a sand-filled towel. “Mister,” the captain said, “we're going to have to turn back soon.” It was getting to be dusk. Finally, miserably, Arthur said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and without even warning his children (Jane was in the bathroom at the time) dumped the vial over the side of the boat in a rage. The ashes swirled into the water like foam; the big chunks plopped and sank instantly. Nothing was left but a fine powder of ash, coating the inside of the bag, and in a moment of turmoil and indecision Arthur bent over and touched his tongue to the white crust, lapped it up. He was crying wildly. Dismayed, the MacGivers pretended to look the other way, pointing out to one another the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island, Alcatraz.

At Mrs. Theodorus's house, the puppy writhes on the floor, urinates, rolls onto her back. Her mother ignores her. “It's the hormonal change,” Mrs. Theodorus explains blithely. “After a few months, the mothers don't recognize their offspring anymore.”

“I think that's sad,” Arthur says, even though he doesn't quite believe it, and Mrs. Theodorus shrugs and pours out coffee. “In a sense, it's better,” she says. “They're spared the sensation of loss.”

She looks out at the grooming table, empty now, but still festooned with Alicia's
ribbons and silver cups and photographs of Mrs. Theodorus posed with her prize bitch. Across the room the remaining puppies lie with their mother in various states of repose. Only Arthur's puppy wags her tail, and stretches her legs behind herself, barely holding herself back from her uninterested mother.

“I think they slept together,” Mrs. Theodorus says.

For a moment Arthur thinks she is talking about the dogs. “All of them,” Eva goes on, and her voice is low. “That night they went to Echo Lake.”

“Eva,” he says, “why are you saying this?”

“Oh, I think it's pretty obvious,” she says. “You see, there were things I overheard—on the phone.”

Arthur is surprised at how panicked he feels, and tries to hide it. “What did you hear?” he asks finally—not wanting to sound too curious, though he is.

“I heard Spiro talking to a woman. A woman he was clearly … intimate with. I think it was Kitty. But then again, now that I think about it, it might just as well have been Claire.” She is quiet a moment. “It wasn't just the two of them, if you know what I mean. So I thought I would ask you if you knew anything—”

“I don't know anything,” Arthur says. He stares up at the ceiling. “And I don't want to know anything. I don't want to know another bloody thing about that group.”

“Don't sound so holier-than-thou, Arthur. The two of us aren't exactly being saintly in our loyalty to the memory of our lost loved ones. So what if Claire was sleeping with Spiro? So what if they were all sleeping together? Look at us.”

“Claire is in the water,” Arthur says. “Spiro is buried.”

“He wouldn't have had it any other way,” Mrs. Theodorus says.

They are again quiet. In the bright light of the kennel Arthur can see the portrait of Alicia that hangs over the table. Mouth open, red tongue hanging, the dog stares. Does anyone know how long it takes? Did Claire guess, that morning she woke up and said, “My hands are itching, Arthur. Were we near any poison oak last night?” All it took was three short weeks, and she was fighting to live. What did the group matter then? He was an egotist, a child, to think that his losing Claire to the group was anything even close to tragedy, to think his suffering came anywhere close to hers.

“Oh, Arthur,” Mrs. Theodorus says. “I shouldn't impose my weird ideas on you. Since Spiro died, I just don't know what I'm saying or thinking, or where I'm going. I could have read a lot into that conversation, I realize now. It was hard to make it all out. I just think that if I knew … maybe I wouldn't feel so lost.”

“Neither of us exactly feels found,” Arthur says. “Remember how that first night at group after Claire died, I almost hit Ronni Holtzman when she said she was sorry? What was I supposed to say to that? It's okay? Claire's not really dead? It wasn't your fault?”

“Oh, Arthur,” Mrs. Theodorus says. “I know how you feel.” But Arthur doesn't answer. To know how
Claire
felt—that is the knowledge he longs for: lying in that bed, skin cracked and bleeding, tubes in his kidneys, his lungs, his arms. That is what he wants, craves, lusts to know—that harsh condition by which Claire was taken from him. Isn't it the great lie of the living, after all, that grieving is worse, is anything near death?

Distantly he feels hands, lips on him. It is Eva, wanting, he supposes, to make love, and he obeys, allowing her to walk him into her bedroom. But in his mind he is still on that boat, clinging to the vial of Claire's ashes. “All right, already,” is what he thinks he shouted, when the captain said they would have to leave, and in fury he threw to the
water those ashes he had cradled in his arms, those ashes he had loved and lived with. His daughters, he is sure, still murmur together about “Dad's awful moment,” “Dad's terrible behavior,” but in truth he is still angry at how grief carped around on that boat, pretending to dignity. “Why did you have to embarrass us like that?” his daughter Jane said to him in the car—it was she who had been in the bathroom—and yet he knows he would do it again; he would throw those ashes over in graceless fury, again and again.

“Kiss me,” Eva says nervously. He takes her in his arms. Through the window, the moon illuminates Mr. Theodorus's supply of after-shave lotion, hair tonic, shoe polish—a row of dark bottles lined up carefully, like sentries, guarding the way in.

When I got the invitation to Diana's wedding—elegantly embossed, archaically formal (the ceremony, it stated, would take place at “twelve-thirty o'clock”)—the first thing I did was the
TV Guide
crossword puzzle. I was not so much surprised by Diana getting married as I was by her inviting me. What, I wondered, would motivate a person like Diana to ask her former lover, a woman she had lived with for a year and a month and whose heart she had suddenly and callously broken, to a celebration of her union with a man? It seems to me that that is asking for trouble.

I decided to call Leonore, who had been a close friend of Diana's and mine during the days when we were together, and who always seemed to have answers. “Leonore, Diana's getting married,” I said when she picked up the phone.

“If you ask me,” Leonore said, “she's wanted a man since day one. Remember that gay guy she tried to make it with? He said he wanted to change, have kids and all?” She paused ominously. “It's not him, is it?”

I looked at the invitation. “Mark Charles Cadwallader,” I said.

“Well, for his sake,” Leonore said, “I only hope he knows what he's getting into. As for Miss Diana, her doings are of no interest to me.”