Luck (25 page)

Who on earth has been living here in this house?

Here on these tables are lined up Nora’s own paints and brushes, threads, needles and glues, around the walls are piled her own fabrics and canvases. Off to the right are her own easels, one medium-sized and one, especially Philip-built for her, magnificently enormous—how restful, and how luxuriously mournful it would be, to stay here alone, in this room all her own, for the rest of the day.

She can’t stay, of course. She has Sophie and Max waiting, a glass of wine to finish, sandwiches to eat, a funeral to survive—and then? Nothing as peculiar as what Beth proposed, that’s for sure, at least Nora will have saner prospects than that after she has performed her first duties in her new role as widow. There is Philip, care for and love of Philip, grief for Philip, all sorts of aspects of Philip to acknowledge today. She can worry and think about the rest of it later, but this is his day; so okay then, deep breath, and a firmer one, and another—that’s better, that’s manageable, and so here she must go, here she goes. Now.

T
wo women in black, plus one in pale yellow, march out the front door, cross the porch side by side, descend the steps, and make their way to the street and the limousine Hendrik Anderson has sent. Sophie walks in the middle, separating Nora from Beth so that a view of the group weights and tilts towards the two in black, leaving the one in yellow looking light and liable to fly upwards.

Max follows behind, joining them last in the car.

Does anyone enjoy going to funerals? Surely only those very remotely attached to the deceased, with their amiable curiosity, or sociability. Oh, and enemies, too, if only to assure themselves this truly is the final appearance of someone triumphantly outlived.

Philip didn’t have enemies. Well, maybe Lynn.

Or unquantifiable, indefinable Beth, who knows? They are all, especially Nora, surprised, even Beth is surprised, that she is among them, but here she is in her pale yellow dress and flat ballerina-style, twinkle-toed shoes and her brushed-out angel-hair, silently making known her intention to be a part of all this. What part, no one has enquired, but Nora has
taken care to place Sophie between Beth and herself on their way to the car, and inside it.

As buffer, Sophie is on the alert. Nora told her and Max only the skeleton of Beth’s proposition, but even so little sounded quite fantastic and mad. When Sophie stood from the kitchen table to go upstairs to shower and dress, Nora asked her to check on Beth. “I left her in my room. God knows what she’s doing. Do you mind?”

Sophie frowned. She thought she did mind. “I’ll see.”

“That’s different,” Nora said when Sophie was gone.

“That Sophie is not so much your employee, or that Beth shows herself to have larger desires than to be your material?”

Both, maybe. And both unpleasant, and somewhat critical, as if it’s Nora who comes up short here—this from Max? “Shit, I don’t know. Obviously I’m not very good at deciphering people.”

“Mysteries. People are bound to be unknown to each other in small or large part and therefore naturally surprising, don’t you think? Now. Tell me about Philip. And you. How you are doing.”

Nora began with the moment she turned in bed, the leap up, and the scream. “I keep thinking of me sleeping and him all alone. Struggling. I don’t know.” She waited for her voice to get strong again before telling of the others running into the bedroom, Beth in her nightie, Sophie with her flying robe and with all her red hair aflame. Max’s eyes sharpened, but he made no comment. “Thank you for being here, Max. You and Philip, you’re the two who always make sense of things, but not,” her breath caught again, “any more.”

“You may be surprised. I still hear Lily’s voice. Sometimes she comforts me, sometimes she makes me brave, sometimes she is just present, alongside me. Being Lily, she
gives me advice and good counsel.” Nora, although mourning Philip’s living voice, wasn’t sure she would want to hear him on and on for years into the future. “Let yourself grieve. This is not a time to be proud. Pay attention to Philip and who he was in your life, and later what you remember will be the joy of knowing you have experienced genuine sorrow.”

A convoluted sort of notion. And joy—such a deep, hearty word, when was the last time Nora felt anything like it? Nor could she imagine it in any sort of foreseeable future. If joy-lessness was what Max meant by genuine sorrow, that’s what she had. That and rust; she felt rusted nearly away the past couple of days by disbelief, and by desperation to undo events that could not be undone.

Proud? No, but she could at least carry herself proudly. “All I want to do is get safely through this day.”
Safely?
What could be safe? “On top of everything else, there’ll be people I don’t want to see. Who don’t deserve to be there.”

“And you are still a little angry that Philip wasn’t as angry with them as you.”

“Oh, Max, I’m angry about so much right now, it’s hard to tell.”

“Philip especially.”

“Yes! Off and on. How did you know?”

He shrugged again. “Lily. I was furious. Forty years, and then she left me, and I felt betrayed. That was wrong, but these things don’t have to be true to be real. Then in time I came to think Lily would be pleased that I cared so much I was furious.” A point of view, no doubt; yet when Lily died Max turned mirrors to walls and sat shiva, and at the end said, “I’ve done my best for her. I can rest.” It now sounded as if his rest wasn’t totally peaceful. If Lily still spoke.

“Yes,” said Nora, “I see.” Although she didn’t, really. Too much confusion today; as if the house itself had decided to go clattering and banging about, raising layers of distress and dislocation like dust.

“It would be foolish to tell you that you will recover, because in very many ways there is no recovery, only change. But there can be good surprises in good farewells, so you may feel as I did with Lily that something is completed by the end of this day. My only advice is, you should be attentive to your heart as it shifts.”

Whatever. “Thanks, Max.” She leaned across in her chair to let her head rest on his shoulder, and his arm reached around her again. She liked his voice, and his presence, and perhaps what he was saying would come clearer later, when she might have a larger perspective and context; for the moment it was nice enough, resting her head.

Upstairs Sophie did, in fact, poke her head into Nora’s room, out of obedient habit plus a wish on this of all days to do whatever she had to do as well as she could. Max had helped; a thorough weep had as well. She found Beth lying across the bed staring up at the ceiling, hands crossed over her belly. Melodramatic as ever. Shockingly full of shit. Sophie’s resolve grew very weak very quickly. “Get up, Beth, this isn’t your room. And get a grip. Phil’s dead, for heaven’s sake, people have other things than you on their minds.”

Beth was off the bed and onto her feet in such a singular swift motion that Sophie stepped back. The look! And the voice. “You’re not my mother,” Beth warned in a low, hard, scary tone. “Don’t tell me what to do. Don’t ever do that.”

Whoa. As Phil would say. Sophie turned right around—let Nora deal with the drawn-draped battiness inside her bedroom.

Although Nora hasn’t dealt with it, and now here they all are in a long black car being driven to, of all astonishing, outrageous events, Philip’s funeral. Time in the past couple of days has become more and more tangled, stretching and spiralling, twisting with far greater complexity than the dailiness of regular life suggests could be possible. Also, it exists on a pinpoint: only now. Nora looks out at the tidy lawns and contained, thriving gardens and blank doorways floating by as if she has not seen any of this before and knows nothing about it; as if it holds promise, and she is young and does too. But it is this moment, not that one. The car turns into a wide driveway, then under a portico where a plump man in a dark suit is waiting to open her door. Nora wishes these were times when veils still shrouded faces. She would like, not to hide exactly, but to keep herself private. The man’s hand reaches for hers as he helps her from the car, bowing slightly. “How do you do. I’m Hendrik Anderson. I am very sorry for your loss.” His voice is lighter than his body. “If there are ways I can be of service …” and he lets the sentence trail away. His next word, in brighter tone, is “Sophie.”

Sophie is awkward gaining the pavement, having been sitting in the centre, and being not exactly petite. By the time she’s on her feet, Hendrik steadying her, she is flushed. “It’s good to see you again,” he tells her. “May I say, if you don’t mind, you look splendid.” So she does. The dramatic effect of black suit, black stockings, brilliant springy red hair suits her remarkably. The snug fit of the suit doesn’t hurt either. Getting ready, she considered her appearance a sort of last gift, both spartan and lavish, to Phil.
There you go, then. You did more for me than you could have imagined, and now this is all I can do in return.

Something like that. Hendrik Anderson’s admiration is quite nice as well.

His guiding hand moves on to Beth, who emerges swaying and bending, graceful and hardy as a forsythia branch. No ungainly exit for her.

Whose eyes meet whose here? Not Nora’s and Beth’s; or Nora’s and Sophie’s either, Nora perhaps recognizing a posthumous, brilliantly red-haired, black-wrapped gift when she sees one. Beth’s and Sophie’s eyes do meet, in one brief hard look; Sophie’s and Hendrik’s in a warmer one that comes with an acknowledging nod. Max has made his own way from the car and takes Nora’s elbow. Hendrik fits himself between Sophie and Beth. In this formation they leave the side shelter and under bright hot August sunshine make their way around the corner of the funeral home towards its formal front entrance. One woman is red-haired, one is blonde, one is dark. None of them is very old, or very young. One has gratefully relaxed her fierce grip on virtue, one is becoming less beautiful, one is lost for visions but watchful. Hendrik, speaking up to include the full group, says, “There’s already quite a number of people here. I don’t know if any will want to speak—normally we would know details like that—but it should be a pleasant service.”

Pleasant service.
Nora’s eyes narrow, but since she’s walking ahead with Max, Hendrik Anderson doesn’t see this. Sophie admires how he’s trying to keep people soothed and benign. It’s not his fault the arrangements are haphazard, or the people on edge. Mourners must generally be on edge, but this is different. The three of them are not exactly like members of a real family bringing to a loved one’s funeral their disparate but predictable modes and levels of grief, their varying interests and very long memories.

Beth isn’t listening. She is watching Nora and Max walking ahead. Her eyes are, specifically, on Nora’s straight, stubborn, unloving spine.

“I’ve brought some music,” Sophie tells Hendrik, passing him a CD from her purse. “I’ve marked the song we’d like played at the end of the service. Is that okay?”

“That’s just fine. Thank you.” He doesn’t even look to see what it is. How calm he is when so much is uncertain and, for all he knows, tasteless.

More uncertainty: on the front steps stand a couple of strangers, the woman smoking, the man with his hands in the pockets of a dark suit. He is balding and blue-eyed and thin-lipped, and looks more irritable than mournful. She is wearing white sandals with bare legs and a pale blue cotton dress, belted with a narrow white leather strip that causes her hips to appear broader than they probably are. Her fingernails are painted bright red, with toenails to match. Her hair is chin-length and, yes, streaked honey-blonde. “Lynn,” says Nora too loudly, and holds Max’s arm harder.

Well, well.

Sophie looks curiously at this woman, this
Lynn
, as their small brigade moves up the walk, up the steps. Here is someone else Phil must have loved, however unsatisfactorily. A man of wide and various tastes, it seems; many compartments, or several stages. She is struck, regarding their tableau, this visual evidence of Phil’s experience, by what a small space she herself could have occupied. She had four years in the household, a couple of months in his hands, no time at all in his bed. Whereas with this woman for a few years, and then with Nora for many more, he accumulated hundreds, thousands, millions of words, touches, views, moods, adventures, every variety of embrace they desired in
any time and any place that they chose. With them he even had time and leisure for silence. Whatever he and Sophie knew of each other was comparatively an eyeblink. There are photographs tucked in envelopes in the sideboard back at the house of Phil as a ruddy, glinting kid with one cheerful parent or other; as a sullen, spotted adolescent standing off on his own, hands jammed in pockets; a few from those swift moments when a boy’s body shoots up, fills out, shoulders and features reshaping themselves into a different, grown creature, not finished, but with the mould clarified and beginning to set.

Soon after those photographs were taken, he would have met this smoking Lynn, and a few years after that, Nora.

The woman takes a deep drag and, after looking about briefly, tosses her cigarette into Hendrik’s shrubbery. “Lynn,” Nora says. “I didn’t know you smoked. You didn’t used to, did you?” A peculiar greeting to the woman whose husband she made off with nearly two decades ago, but Nora hasn’t thought of Lynn, that wounded bride, that righteous figure in their brief domestic melodrama, as someone with weaknesses. “Die bitch, die,” this woman screamed, not remotely weakly, from the street below Nora’s apartment.

“Nora,” Lynn says, not screaming now, nothing so hot, or even warm. She indicates the thin-lipped man. “This is my good second husband, Bill. Bill, this is, let’s see, my considerably less good first husband’s second wife.” He nods. No one shakes hands and, evidently a man of few words, or a grumpy one, or uncomfortable or timid, he doesn’t speak.

Lynn surely rehearsed that. Now it’s Nora’s more extemporaneous turn. “This is our friend Max, and this is Sophie, Philip’s and my assistant. And Beth, who has modelled for some of my work. Everyone,” and her voice also is level, but
sharp, “this is Lynn, my good first husband’s first wife, and her second, no doubt also excellent, husband Bill.”