Lillian on Life (12 page)

I
absolutely want more of this and less of that,” Ted said. He said it three times in about twelve hours. The first time, we were in a cab on our way out to dinner. I was tired, and was leaning my forehead against his so familiar but always shocking shoulder. “That” was Florence. His wife. The second time he said it we were in my bed. The third time was the following morning. I was in my nightie making coffee; he was in a bathrobe that he kept in my closet. Each time he said it he said it the same way, emphasizing the word
absolutely
. The first two times I didn't say anything. The third time, though, I turned and looked at the big man I'd loved for nearly twelve years, and he was looking right back at me. “Absolutely?” He nodded. We'd been through this before, and of course the first handful of times I had thrown myself into his arms, and then we got bogged down in the details and weeks, months, years passed. This time I stayed where I was. The coffee started dripping. “How?”

I couldn't believe what I heard him saying. This time there wasn't just feeling; this time there was a plan. He'd
taken early retirement over a year before, you see, at sixty-three. They were still living in New York, but the paperwork was nearly all done for the apartment he'd bought for Florence in Vail, like she'd always wanted. She imagined they'd both be going, of course, but he'd tell her the truth, make her agree to go on her own. He'd stay in New York with me and the hell with the rest. “The hell with 'em,” he said. “Give me some coffee.”

Then he went home and had a stroke.

I learned secondhand, of course, nearly a week after the fact. Someone in the mailroom had finally thought to ask whether he might actually want the copies of
Foreign Affairs
that continued to arrive for him. They asked Olivia from reception to call. What if they'd asked me? Would I have been able to call? He left my apartment to go home and reveal his plans to Florence. That's what I thought he had done. That's why I believed I hadn't heard from him. I couldn't have called his home in the middle of that effort. Things were complicated. He needed time to make it work.

Imagining that lasted a day or two. For several silent days after that I fought against the possibility—hulking silently like a boulder in the field I was cultivating, ready to ruin my plowshare—that once again he wasn't going to follow through. And then I passed reception on my way to the
toilet and Olivia said to me, “Lillian, have you heard about Mr. Bishop? Poor thing's in the hospital. Talked to his wife this morning.” And she rattled on, and I walked backward while I listened, hoping it looked like I was concerned but also that I really had to pee, and then I excused myself and turned and fled to the ladies'.

Three more weeks passed. Someone told me he'd gone home from the hospital. A couple of people asked me if I knew anything, imagining that I'd have called to talk to get details from Florence, and I just said, “Nothing new to report, I'm afraid.” I chewed the top layer of skin off my lips. I ripped my cuticles to shreds.

Oh, the excitement and the despair when he finally called! I had to calm down. I had so many questions, but he had trouble talking. I had to simplify.

“Can you say ‘yes,' Ted?” I asked.

“Ya,” he said.

“And ‘no'?”

Pause. “Na.”

So, closed questions would lead him to my door.

“Are you at home?”

“Ya.”

“Can I meet you somewhere?”

Pause. “Na.”

“Can you come over sometime?”

Pause. “Ya.”

“This evening?”

Pause. “Na.”

“Sunday?”

Pause. “Na.”

“Monday?”

“Ya.”

“Evening?”

“Na.”

“Lunch?”

“Ya.”

I forgot and asked him how he'd come over, and his answer was a three-second nightmare, a record played backward, a raving, slobbering lunatic, and I interrupted, “Shall I send a cab for you?”

Pause.

“Ya. Ya.”

I could feel his relief that I'd come up with a plan. I could feel it. I knew him that well.

I took Monday off. Ted came to the door with a walker and when I opened the door he tried to pull his face upward into a smile, and he tried to say my name—I know that's what he was trying to do, but it came out like a bark, just
like it had on the phone. Bark, bark . . . bark. But it was Ted. It wasn't winter but he came in a coat, and I took it off his bent body, undoing the buttons with a tenderness he would never have given me time for in the past. I guided him to his chair. Not where other men sit. I always put Ted at the head of the table. We sat down to boiled new potatoes, a fillet of sole, and a salad of endives. There was butter and lemon by our plates, and I started to cry. All the questions I wanted to ask, all the massive, massive backlog of desire and frustration welled up in my throat, hot as magma, then overflowed. He thumped my forearm with his big hand. I put my head on that hand and sobbed. I waited for the other hand to reach over and stroke my head like Poppa would have done, but Ted couldn't manage it. The trip from the elevator to my door must have been an eternity. I looked up. “I wish you'd had them call me from downstairs,” I blurted. “I could have walked along the hall with you.” Ted snorted, like a bull. And he was right. You leave a man alone to do what he can. But he couldn't cut his food, so I did. He had a system after that: He laid his left index finger along the edge of his plate, and pushed the mouthfuls I had cut up for him against it with the fork.

I tried not to ask a lot of questions while we ate, because when he said “Ya” or “Na” the food fell about in his mouth,
and out. When I could talk more calmly, I talked about the office. There was always gossip. I told him we had a journalist missing in Lithuania and he started barking again, and I'll regret bringing that up for as long as I live. After a while he pushed his plate away and left his hands on the table, so I pushed my plate aside too and took his hands in mine. The bones were still big; the muscles weren't wasted, but they had lost their electricity.

“So,” I said, and couldn't make more words come out. He waited. There was no “Spit it out, Lil,” no “Have we got all day?” None of it. “So is this the end?” I finally said. His bottom lip curled like a baby's does before it cries. “Na,” he said definitively. I felt the same surge I had at our first embrace, his first phone call to my apartment, the first time he opened his hotel room door to me.

“You'll get better?”

Pause.

“Ya.”

Then the second stroke.

Florence nursed him, when it should have been me. I waited for the secondhand news of his progress, but he didn't progress, where he was never supposed to live. He wasn't supposed to need her anymore. Seventeen months later I received the secondhand news of his death.

I blacked out. When I came to, the feeling of having nothing at all was so strong I thought I was twenty-three in Munich, new to everything, scared. I didn't recognize my bedroom. Whose newspapers were those piled on that upholstered chair? Those catalogs on the floor? Whose taste was that? I struggled forward through time, toward myself and the bed and why I was on it. My heart cramped and I nearly blacked out again. You'd think I would have remembered Ted's face and his growl and the way he flicked his wrist to check his watch, but it's so embarrassing, all I could see was paper. Paper was flying, whirling all over my mind. Letters for him to sign, minutes, memos, interview transcripts, invoices, more minutes, credit card slips, and the fluttering pages of hotel guest books. I couldn't stand it. At least this feeling got me up off the bed. I found my way to the kitchen. I knew that I had to make coffee. Coffee is an excellent stand-in for blood. I stared into the first mug until it was cold. The second one I drank, bitter, without sweetener. Then I just sat.

I had to work. During the rest of that week, papers continued to whirl. I couldn't nail them down. I was sure my colleagues were from another planet. The smallest tasks took ages. Then suddenly I found myself in my bedroom looking for a cigarette.

George Junior and Judy and Zoë had come over to see me. I couldn't keep them away any longer. I had stopped smoking cold turkey when Ted told me I tasted like the air in the subway. But now my little family was sitting in my apartment, concerned for me, with just a tinge of
Now maybe she can sort herself out and get married
emanating from George Junior and just a tinge of
Poor
Lillian, but thank God this is over, I never liked
him
coming out of Judy. Zoë's eyes were like saucers, taking in her older-and-hardly-wisers. I knew I had some cigarettes. Someone had left them behind. The more I looked, the harder my heart beat. I couldn't go back out to the living room without one. I found them behind the iron and pulled one out. I crossed through the living room to light it with the kitchen matches, the family watching as I went. Then I pulled a chair from the dining table over to where they were sitting—far enough away to keep the smoke out of their faces—sat down, crossed my legs, felt the impassivity of my face, concentrated on the cigarette, listening to the tiny crackle of burning paper as I inhaled, blowing away from their willing-to-do-what-was-needed faces, keeping ash off the skirt of my dress.

I don't remember what was said. Judy told me later that she had brought Zoë along to show her what grief looked like. Does it look like what it feels like? Grief on the outside:
tall, middle-aged woman, dramatic eyebrows, excellent wool dress, excessively composed, unable to form sentences of more than three words. Grief on the inside: tall, middle-aged woman, imagining shaving her head, taking off the dress and the stockings, removing her breasts and folding them away in the underwear drawer with her bra, untangling her pubic hair and pulling it all out, dropping it from her bedroom window down nine floors into the dead space behind, drinking only water, never talking again, smoking until it's all
over.

I
don't think you have to know what happens next. I imagine all sorts of futures, but I've learned to swim with the tide, and to get out of the water when it's really too dangerous, or flat and uninspiring. I stand on the shore, aching to feel it on my skin again, watching for changes in the surf. I keep champagne in the hall closet to celebrate when it's time to dive back in.

There was a weekend, it must be eight years or so ago now, when one of my old beaux from London came through town—someone I had some fun with between John and Alec. Nothing serious. It was terrific to see him so many years later. He'd kept himself fit, I could feel it when we hugged at my door, could see it when he took off his sweater after our brunch of eggs Benedict. We followed the sun into the study, bringing the last of the champagne with us. When we both wanted more I said I had at least half a dozen in the closet. Neither of us cared that they wouldn't be chilled. I went to get one and put another in the fridge. I remember the giddy walk from the closet to the kitchen, and how I laughed when I went back into the study. He'd
taken the cushions off the sofa and had put them on the floor in the squares of sun thrown by the windows, and he was sitting on one, leaning back on the sofa in his shirt and socks. I laughed and handed him the dusty bottle. While he untwisted the cage, I straddled his lap. We kissed as he turned the cork, little bit by little bit. “I remember you,” I said against his lips. “Oh yeah?” he said, and I felt his smile expose his teeth. “You and your anticipation games,” I said. I felt his arms tighten as he gave the cork its final twist. I was ready for anything. Anything, except for that listless little
pop
.

“Oh,” he said, and lifted the bottle to our noses. It smelled musty and bitter. “Gimme that,” I said, and got up to get the one in the fridge. That one was dead too. “I have more,” I said, but he said never mind, and we spent the rest of the day on the floor. At one point he was up on one elbow and he said, “There is a rule with champagne, you know. You have to drink it. You drink it, and you replenish it. Drink, replenish, drink, replenish. It's like love, Lillian.”

Fifteen years before I would have basked in his words, in the way he was stroking my hair, but suddenly I'd had enough of him. It seemed to me that he was making a veiled statement about Ted and me. I wanted to shout at him,
You
didn't know us! No one did! It was fresh.
It was
always
fresh!
But I was too polite to put up a fight. When you protest too much they give you a look that's even more condescending than their platitudes.

When Michael goes, whether he goes for good or not, I think I know another fellow who might visit. His name is Stanley. Terrible name, and he wears bow ties too, so I was ready not to enjoy his company, but he surprised me.

Judy had come to New York to attend a fund-raising dinner for the Friends of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and invited me along as her date. We found ourselves standing with drinks and cocktail napkins in front of a tall, deep-voiced man who said he loved art but not as much as books. He had a charming twinkle in his eye I felt like investigating, and he smelled good. I couldn't place the cologne, and I usually can. He inclined himself toward me, and toward Judy too, I suppose, as she was standing next to me, and said, “What is it you find yourself reading the most?” It was such a surprise question, which is my favorite kind, and I'm usually very good at answering, especially at dinner parties, but it took me a while this time, because I love so many types of books, all types of books, that I didn't know where to start, and then Judy jumped in.

“Lillian reads periodicals. She keeps very up to date.”

I could have wrung her neck. Even though the gentleman went on to ask me which newspapers I took and which magazines I favored, and on the surface we had a very pleasant conversation, I was so angry I found a way to get her alone when we were called to dinner.

“Why did you say that about the periodicals?” I asked her.

“Well, you do read them. You read them the most,” she said.

“I read lots of things,” I said. “In college they would always find me sleeping in the stacks because I couldn't stop reading.”

“That was forty years ago, Lillian. You get two fat papers every day now and you let them pile up in anticipation of a day when you'll actually get through more than a half a dozen pages.”

“Whenever it was, it was still me. I'm still that girl in the stacks, Judy,” I said, but I was speaking to her back. She went around to the other side of the table and sat down, opening up her napkin very primly, smiling at the men on either side of her and investigating the soufflé on her plate. The gentleman in the bow tie—Stanley—pulled out my
seat so I could sit, which was some sort of consolation. No one had pulled out Judy's chair.

Here's what I want you to learn from this: Never let someone answer a question for you. Jump in with anything at all to make sure that you're the one talking. Say, “That's an interesting question,” or “I'm glad you asked that question,” or “Oh goody! My favorite subject!” Say anything that will guarantee that you're in the conversation about yourself, and not out of it like a teenager standing next to her mother at a cocktail party.

You must tell your own story. Never let someone, even someone as familiar to you as your sister-in-law, think she knows you better than you know yourself. She only sees what you
do
; she doesn't see who you are inside. If I regret anything when I look back, it's how often I allowed people to think what they wanted to think. I should have stopped them short. I should have laughed at their assumptions. I should have hooted with laughter, “Hoo hoo hoo!” and followed with a twinkling, mischievous smile, just to throw them off, just to keep them guessing. The problem is, they watch what you do, who you love, how you cook, what you read and what you don't read, and they decide what it means, and sometimes you're not there to stop them, or you get the
timing wrong. I've always wondered why people look so much to action for meaning. When people tell you a story—something that happened to them, something important—don't ask them what they did. Ask them what they
wanted
to do. What they want to do is who they are. Actions are whispers compared to dreams.