Five Seasons (7 page)

But he also felt his lack of sleep now. “At least wash the dishes,” he told them. “I've done everything else.” And shutting the bedroom blinds, he lay down with the Friday papers and soon fell into a short but delicious sleep. When he awoke the house was quiet. The dimming, brackish light made him realize how short the days had grown.
The kitchen and the table were just as he had left them, with dirty dishes lying all about. The college student was reading in the living room, the soldier was embroidering in her bedroom, and the high school boy was contentedly doing his homework. Irritably Molkho went from room to room. “How could you have left the dishes like that when that was the one thing I asked you to do?” he asked, but they barely glanced up at him, as if he were a ghost. Why, it had all begun on just such an afternoon seven years ago, in early spring, when he and she had gone together to the doctor, who wrote them out an urgent referral for a biopsy. There was no hiding the grim truth from themselves, and he remembered how, on emerging from the office into the soft, balmy air that contrasted sharply with the sudden terror they were gripped by, he had felt less frightened by the illness than by his wife's fear of it, or perhaps by her anger. He had talked on and on while she walked silently beside him, trying to be logical, to point out all their options, to find comfort in the doctor's words, each one of which he had parsed like Holy Writ, though all the time, numbed and ashen, she said nothing. “Even if they have to remove a breast,” he said, “even if they do, we've caught it in time, it's still not the end of the world, it's not as if you were a fashion model. You can get along without it, and I can too, without them both in fact. It will just leave me more love for the rest of you.” That's what he had told her, calling on reserves of humor and imagination that he never knew existed, even though, absorbed in her own slow plodding, she was only half-listening and not even looking at him. It was only when they were already in the entrance of their old building and he paused by the mailbox to take out the letters and quickly tear open their envelopes that she looked at him angrily in the warm, enveloping dusk and said, breaking her silence, “Just remember, whatever happens I'm dying at home, nowhere else.” He smiled at her, a shiver running down him at what he knew was only her first salvo. Why, he started to protest, she shouldn't even think about dying! “No, promise me,” she interrupted earnestly, a look of desperation on her face, “promise me you'll pay whatever it costs, because I'm not dying anywhere else.” Again he tried humoring her, but this time she turned on him with her full, fearful strength, so that he said at once, “1 promise; of course, I do. How could you even imagine...”—a promise he would have to repeat a thousand times right up to the moment of her death. Grimly she climbed the stairs and waited for him to open the door for her. It was almost dark in the house. All three children were still in grade school. Quiet and strangely peaceful, they sat doing their homework together, knowing nothing but already guessing all.

A
MONTH AFTER HIS WIFE'S DEATH
, they all gathered again for the unveiling, the family and its many friends, some of whom had missed the funeral. Though it was a rainy day and they all had umbrellas, not a drop fell during the short ceremony. The mood was calm and peaceful; several of his wife's fellow schoolteachers spoke briefly but movingly, and there was a feeling of closeness among them all. The new tombstone stood in its place. Molkho was rather sorry that it had only his wife's name and the dates of her birth and death, but the children had said that anything else would be false and sentimental. To his surprise, the legal adviser from the office was there too, along with one of her coworkers, dressed in a smart suit and blue raincoat, an umbrella in one hand and a wreath of flowers in the other. He caught his breath, feeling himself turn red: she must have come to look over his family, he thought, and her appearance with the wreath—she, who hadn't known his wife and hardly even knew him—seemed to him as daring as a striptease. When the ceremony was over, he watched in amazement as she laid the wreath on the grave, and afterward, stopping to shake the hands of those present and say a few words to them with his tottering mother hanging on to him, he paused to thank her warmly too. “We're here on behalf of the whole office,” she said a bit uncomfortably, though looking straight at him, which touched Molkho, so that he almost choked with gratitude, unable to find the right words. “The office couldn't have chosen a better representative,” he said at last. “I thank you, I really do.” “Who was that?” his mother-in-law inquired in the car, nodding when he told her and saying, “Oh, yes. That widow from work.”

H
E KNEW THEN
that it was only a matter of time before they struck up a relationship. Was it perhaps too soon? he wondered. Was he ready for it? What would she expect of him physically? He hadn't made love to a woman in years. Might she be in too much of a rush? He made a few discreet inquiries, yet though his informants spoke freely and willingly, there was little new they had to tell him apart from the matter of her rank, for whereas he had always believed her to be a single civil service grade above him, he was now shocked to discover she was three. How, and by whom, had she managed to be promoted so quickly? Late one night, while out walking, he stopped by her house on the West Carmel, an unassuming building with only four apartments of a type built in the early 1960s. Noiselessly he stepped inside and scanned the names on the mailboxes to see who her neighbors were; none of them was familiar, though the fact that one was a doctor rather pleased him. Stepping back outside, he circled the building, noticing the old garbage cans and the neglected little garden and lawn; the house committee, it was evident, had been falling down on the job.

And yet he wished to put off seeing her again, which, as they worked in different departments, could easily be accomplished by his not venturing into the hallway or downstairs to the cafeteria, something he rarely would have done anyway, because ever since his wife's death the daily loaf of bread from the grocery was too much for them to finish at home, so that he had begun taking two large sandwiches to work, washing them down with coffee from a thermos. After all, he told himself, it's not as if I were in any hurry.

O
NLY NOW
that he had time on his hands did he realize how busy his wife's illness had kept him; how many hours he had put in every week talking to her or her visitors and dealing with all the endless problems, how on guard he had been day and night, how many difficult decisions had been left to him, how tense he had been made all the time by the Unknown that awaited him, mornings, evenings, at work, on the telephone, in his long talks with the doctors and the nurses. He was the male lead in a drama, strutting about on a stage with a big hospital bed in the center, whispering, shouting, crying, for she had reduced him to tears—yes, she had done that too. Wistful for those lost days, he thought of them with nostalgia. Now it was over with, the audience departed, the sets disassembled, the stage itself a pile of old boards; and bathed in a yellowing glow, time stretched out endlessly and wearily before him like a flat road. He came home from work each day, napped for a while, shopped at the little supermarket nearby, stopped in at the bank to check on his stocks or transfer funds from one account to another, and then took a short walk and came home to listen to music, the sound of which on his records and tapes seemed suddenly flat to him. One day his daughter brought home a Hebrew translation of
Pride and Prejudice,
and slowly he began to read about the adventures of the five Bennet sisters and to think, Why, I'm like Lizzy and Jane: it's time I was married off too. First, though, there had to be a way of arousing his lost desire, of assuring he would not be found wanting when the day arrived. Perhaps he should buy some pornographic magazines. Meanwhile, he leafed through them in the bookstores, staring with cold revulsion at the perfect, pinkish bodies they displayed.

I
N THE END
, when he began to look for her in the cafeteria, she was nowhere to be found; indeed, she had as much as vanished from the building. He would have to find a professional pretext to meet with her, he thought, since he needed a closer look to decide if she was or wasn't his type. Yet he mustn't let it seem unnatural. And he would have liked to obtain her personal file, too, if only to find out how old she was. True, women sometimes lied about their age, but such fibs were usually not great. Though he guessed she was in her forties, she might also be pushing fifty, might conceivably already have passed it. Even assuming that a young woman was not for him, that didn't mean he wanted an old one. I'm in no hurry, he told himself. Yet he kept returning to the cafeteria, where one day he spied her surrounded by some members of her staff. From behind, he felt sure that her short, straight auburn hair was dyed, for he had seen its coppery tint before, had even helped his wife mix a solution of it in the days before she wore a wig. A gray sky was visible through the window. She was saying something assertively, gesturing firmly with both hands, her face well chiseled despite its lines, her small, almost oriental eyes giving her a squirrelish look. Though he nodded as he passed her, she did not respond or seem to know who he was, which made him wonder whether she was nearsighted. It was odd, he thought, sipping his strong black coffee, that she should be too busy talking to recognize him. Just then, though, she caught sight of him and flashed him a smile ... and yet she went on talking. If she's been a widow for three years and has time, he thought, so do I. He could feel the strong coffee perking him up and worried that it might spoil his nap.

F
OR THERE WERE HABITS
from before his wife's death that were hard to break, such as his afternoon nap. Was it really worth the effort of taking it? Once he had needed that hour of sleep to be fresh for the sleepless night ahead, and his wife had made sure he had gotten it; in fact, it had been his favorite hour of the day, one in which, lying curled beneath a blanket in the quiet apartment, the afternoon light filtered by the blinds, even his wife's illness had seemed to him remote and unmenacing. Now, however, he sought in vain to recapture its sweet sensation; his naps grew progressively shorter, losing their inner tang, and after fifteen or twenty minutes of them he would wake up feeling cross. Not even leaving work early, at one o'clock, when he was at his most tired, could restore those lost sleeps to him.

The arrangement made with his department head that he could leave the office early by taking work home was still in force. Even after his wife's death, he had kept it up, for he had wanted to give the high school boy his lunch, the preparation of which was no easy matter, in light of the quantities of food in the refrigerator. The new housekeeper was hyperactive; no matter how clear his instructions, she simply kept cooking more and more. Besides, the boy was beginning to follow in her footsteps; opening all kinds of cans when he came home, he had taken to concocting private dishes of his own while ignoring the leftovers that were crying to be eaten and filling up the house in pots and pans. Sometimes, thinking while at work about the overflowing icebox at home, Molkho fell into a rage; reaching for the phone, he would shout at the housekeeper to stop her cooking at once and would hang up, leaving her out of sorts and hurt. Worse yet, his daughter was away at an officers' course and no longer came home from her base, making them one mouth less. Only now did Molkho realize how voraciously his wife had eaten, despite her illness. The refrigerator had never been too full while she was alive.

But it was his younger son who was the problem. If only he would stop his solo experiments! It was impossible to get the housekeeper to make what he liked, because the boy kept changing his tastes; yesterday's favorite was today's bugaboo, and so Molkho made a point of getting home in time to be in charge of promoting the leftovers. “Just tell me what you like,” he would plead for the tenth time with the long-haired boy in his blue uniform, who, besides being totally uncommunicative, was having a hard time at school, though Molkho hoped it was only a phase. “We have to finish what we started yesterday. I can't be expected to eat this for a whole week by myself,” he would say, dumping the cold potatoes back in the frying pan and trying to resuscitate the dry rice with a slab of margarine and some tomato sauce. Once his son brought home a lanky friend, and Molkho invited him to stay for lunch. The youngster wolfed down everything on his plate and even asked for seconds, and Molkho, who was waiting on both boys with an apron, was encouraged to see that his son ate more too. He asked the guest for his name and inquired about his parents, who, he was told, were often away. “Then why not have lunch with us more often,” he said.

H
IS YOUNGER SON
had always worried him. Several times in recent years he had barely escaped being left back a grade, and it was only because of the illness of his mother, who taught in the same school, that he had been given the benefit of the doubt. Often he answered his parents impatiently, even rudely and with unprovoked anger, getting up and stalking out into the rain in a short-sleeved shirt without a sweater. While he had always been more hostile to his mother and closer to his father, his antagonism now seemed transferred to Molkho, who had even thought of sending him to a psychologist, though his friends had counseled waiting until the boy was older. Moreover, now that they spent long hours alone together, Molkho discovered that his son was a heavy masturbator; sometimes, opening the door to his darkened room, he found him in bed on his stomach, his face buried in the pillow, pretending to be asleep. Poking through the laundry bin, Molkho came across wet underpants whose young, animal smell assailed him, and once, rummaging in his son's bed, he found beneath the mattress a photo of a nude, ripe-breasted, no longer young woman. His first reaction was to tear it up, yet on second thought he reflected, So what?