Luck (8 page)

That particular choice was an easy one, although not everyone believes that. Why would they want children? They cared for what they each did, and for each other. Other people might rattle on about what a unique form of love children inspire, no doubt true, but there are other unique forms of love, and other constellations for purposeful lives. It was also noticeable that in the lives of others, children were rarely unmixed blessings. They were a good deal more than love, they were often enough heartbreak and wrong turns and decades of fretfulness, not only triumph. “We live as we choose,” Philip used to tell people, which could sound selfish but as he also said, “What’s wrong with that?” He meant they were smart enough to live according to their own natures, mutant or not.

“So we’re selfish
and
smug,” they could, and did, laugh.

Lynn was so young when Philip vanished on her, she had no end of fresh chances for her quite different desires. Nora’s hard heart was right; but now here’s a thought: is it proper to advise a first wife of her secondhand, out-of-date semi-widowhood?

Imagine, she and Lynn might discover sisterhood over Philip’s dead body. Reminisce. Contrast and compare. Lynn might also have tips on how to move on after Philip; because at the moment, Nora can’t make out a future. Life goes on? Yes, she supposes it has to, but how?

She puts a hand on her chest. Of course her heart is still thumping away in there all to itself. Selfish things, hearts. Focused entirely on their own survival.

What if Max and Lily hadn’t given Nora reason to celebrate? What if Nora hadn’t run into Lynn in that coffee shop,
what if, in the mild spirit of mutual benevolence, they hadn’t made lunch plans, what if she hadn’t knocked on Lynn’s door? Here he is, that young man, with that young man’s grin, full of mischief—fucking Philip, how dare he? Nora’s hand slams back into the bare white wall behind her, hurting her fist. The house feels bursting with one pent-up thing and another—pain and grief and bewilderment coalescing and transforming to fury, sizzling and ripping its way through rooms, hearts and limbs, cracking off doorframes and walls, crashing into windows, ricocheting all around, a great storm erupting—fucking Philip, absolutely.

There must be thousands upon thousands of ameliorating, tender scenes of sweetness and thoughtfulness, of generosity and kindness. Nora’s just momentarily unplugged from most of her history. She can see perfectly well that beautiful young man at the door, and she can see perfectly well the quite different, middle-aged, marble-ized man on the pillow beside her this morning. What she can’t make out are the Philips in between, the progression that gradually and unmomentously transformed the first into the last.

Change is grief, grief is rage. Is that true?

And on the subject of change, grief and rage, what about Sophie, was there anything to that, given Sophie’s plush and available presence? As Nora’s mother said, a man who will break one promise will have little problem with two, and she was, in her small way, an expert. Nora has nothing like proof, only little pricklings sometimes, like last night as they played Scrabble and she saw Sophie and Philip glance at each other when Beth, typically simple-minded, threw down the word “lay.” Surely adults would not be exchanging looks over a dumb word like
lay
, too juvenile and unworthy, but still, sometimes recently there’s been
something like a faint perfume in the air of a room containing both Sophie and Philip.

Why would it matter?

To stoke fury. To ward off more sorrow. To blame Philip further.

Given time and the right moment, Nora might have tackled Philip flat out. It’s been strangely more difficult to enquire of Sophie if she’s had designs, and moreover hands, on Nora’s husband. Having endured what she has, Sophie might consider Philip fair compensation. Perhaps there are also large price tags for Nora’s indulgences, and those rewards and costs may include the bodies, if not necessarily the lost hearts, of husbands. Now who will ever know what happened to Philip’s heart, besides that it’s very likely what blew up on him overnight. Over and over, again and again, moment after moment and hour after hour as Nora lies in Beth’s bed, there’s his first face, here’s his last one. What comes between?

On the day they’d planned, they would have been driving home by now from their lovely long lunch in the city with Max. Sophie would be considering dinner, Beth would be lounging about doing whatever it is she does when her limbs and expressions aren’t being turned in various useful directions. Once together around the table they would talk about each other’s days, Nora’s and Philip’s in particular, since theirs would have been more interesting than the others’. Later they might watch TV or read, chatting now and then about what they were watching or reading, or about other subjects altogether. Maybe they’d have a bottle or two of wine, or a couple of beers, or a glass or two of Scotch, except for Beth, who doesn’t drink. The evening would pass pleasantly anyway. Finally they would go to bed, just like last night, taking for granted they would all be waking up in the morning.

Instead, Nora is finally rising out of Beth’s bed and putting on her black pants and black blouse again, decking herself in the colour of mourning. She is middle-aged, she sees in Beth’s mirror, and she is pale.

Downstairs, where the other two are in the kitchen, Beth at the table, Sophie standing at the counter nearby, Nora resumes her own place in her own chair. There’s the fourth place. “I keep,” she says, “expecting him to walk through the door.” Kicking his boots off. Stretching, calling hello.

Sophie nods. “Yes. It’s very odd.”

If he did come through the door, wouldn’t Nora leap to embrace him! Everything could change back and be forgotten if he would just come through that door.

First, though, she would give him raging, blistering hell for giving her such a scare. She might even take a swing at his jaw, or at one of his big impervious arms. “I could kill him for this,” she says aloud, “I could just kill him.”

How startled Sophie and Beth look when Nora starts laughing. Then finds she can’t stop. Philip would have got it, he’d have laughed, but now Nora, forced by his absence into laughing, and for that matter crying, for two, has to do it all now, all by herself. She can imagine no end to the bleakness of this sudden division of two into one, but here she is, with Sophie and Beth and a big empty place at the table, and apparently it really doesn’t matter what she can imagine, or not.

A
nd so winds to a close the first day of Philip Lawrence’s permanent absence from earth. Whatever full-throttle rumbustiousness and confusions his life may have contained, and whatever enviable peacefulness accompanied his overnight passing, he has certainly disrupted the day, he has captured everybody’s attention.

A precarious kind of attention, however. Nora is fixated on two particular visions of him, and one of those is from just this morning. Sophie has kept herself busy, busy, busy, and otherwise seems mainly concerned with the loss of his skin, not much of substance. While Beth’s gaze is stuck on the sudden main chance. Is it normal to veer like this from furious at one extreme to dazzled at the other? And surely it can scarcely be typical, the absence of sad, lively, sentimental or vivid exchanges of tales and anecdotes about things Philip did, words he said, revealing bits of who he may have been—everything that ought to enter effortlessly and even insistently into conversations among the bereaved.

There are stages in these matters. Other people may not be quite so quick off the mark with,
What does this mean to
me? What have I lost? What happens now?
but they get there, too. The order of things may not mean much.

Dinner is salad and omelettes filled with tiny leftover pieces of ham. Sophie has torn, chopped, ripped, cracked and sliced to put this together. “I’ve called everyone I could think of,” she tells Nora. “And they’ll all tell other people. So I hope everybody who should know finds out.”

“Thanks, Sophie. That must have been hard.”

“Yes, it was.”

“At least there’s no family to deal with.” Nora means parents, sisters, brothers, whose weight of grief might overwhelm her small arrangements. No parents, no children—no wonder she and Philip eventually added more voices to their little duet of a household.

“No. That’s a good thing.” Sophie, too, knows of his older brother who died when Phil was fifteen, speeding with five buddies on his twentieth birthday in his birthday gift, a new car; and about his parents, who died of separate kinds of cancer in their forties—a family custom, it seems, to wear out, or disappear, in that settled decade. “So you see,” Phil said, tracing Sophie’s nipples and smiling as if this were perfectly fine, “I’m alone in the world.”

Well, not entirely. There was Nora.

“Did you get hold of Max okay?”

“Yes. I guess he waited at the restaurant for an hour or so, then went home. That’s where I reached him.”

“Poor old guy, going out in this heat and then having to wait. I wish I’d remembered in time.”

“I don’t believe he’s concerned. Anyway, he knew it wasn’t on purpose, he’d figured out something was wrong. He said he’ll be here for the service, of course. Sooner if you’d like him to come.”

Would Nora like that? Not yet, not really. As long as it’s just the three of them, there’s something slightly normal and ordinary to hang on to; as if everything is still a mistake, or a dream, and capable of being undone. “Good omelette,” she says. Is it hard-hearted to be hungry again? She and Sophie both are, although as usual Beth only picks at her food.

Sophie and Nora wander to the living room when they’ve finished, while Beth stays behind to make tea. She’ll make something soothing tonight. Tomorrow’s soon enough to try a peppier brew, maybe one promoting desire.

In the living room, as in the kitchen, as everywhere, Philip’s usual places leap out for their silence and emptiness. Nora huddles in her corner of the sofa, opposite what would be his corner, within easy reach. His
zaftig
Sophie settles into her usual wing chair, her flesh loosened by weariness, not temptation. When Beth enters, she hands around china cups, since proper teas, in her view, require proper china. People used to read tea leaves. Maybe they still do. Looking down into hers, Nora wonders what shapes and arrangements of leaves in a cup signify which future events or, more to the point now, what the meanings of past ones might be. “Do you think,” she asks Sophie, “I ought to call Lynn?”

“What? Who’s Lynn?”

“You know—his first wife. She ought to be interested, even if it’s only in an academic sort of way. She is an academic now, as a matter of fact. For all I know, she might care.”

“Oh, right, you knew her, you were friends.”

“Hardly friends. I knew her a little in high school, that’s about it. Philip had some odd ideas after the dust settled, though, and before we moved here. He said they wouldn’t have been married if they hadn’t cared for each other, and since she and I had known each other as well, he couldn’t see
any good reason why we couldn’t smooth everything over by hanging out together sometimes. As if switching partners was only a sidestep, like a dance. He had the hardest time getting it through his head that never mind how bitter Lynn was, or that we weren’t proper friends in the first place, it would have been
tasteless
to socialize with someone whose husband I was happily sleeping with. Well, ex-husband by then. Can you imagine?”

Sophie cannot meet Nora’s eyes. “So what do you think?” and Sophie’s heart pauses until Nora adds, “Should I call her?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. You’d know better than I would.” Although it’s true Sophie is curious about his first wife, the only wife he was actually willing to leave.

“I suppose. I’ll think about it tomorrow. Probably even a short marriage should be acknowledged, if she wants it to be.”

Beth watches, she listens, she yawns although her day’s been far more exhilarating than distressing. The yawn is contagious. “I wonder, Beth,” Nora says, “if I could ask another big favour.”

“Of course.” Beth steps forward, reaching down to take Nora’s hand from the arm of the sofa into her own. “What can I do?”

After a moment Nora carefully removes her hand, places it around her teacup, intending to avoid offence but wanting to be free of those unnerving fingers. “I don’t want to sleep in that room tonight.” She can’t say
our room
now, or
my room
yet, so
that room
it must be. “I don’t actually want anyone sleeping there tonight. So could I borrow your bed again? It’d put you on the sofa, I’m afraid, but would that be all right?”

“Anything. Anything you want, you just have to ask.” More or less, Beth has said that before. She will say it as often as she needs to, until it sinks in. “I don’t mind the sofa at all.”

It’s a full sixteen busy hours since Nora let loose that scream. Each of them, even Beth, sees that going to bed will acknowledge the day’s events in a most final way; that turning lights out will be a more true farewell to Philip than anything has been so far.

Two of them are slow to give up, they move reluctantly.

Beth gathers an armful of sheets and a pillow and makes up the sofa for herself. Sophie and Nora take turns in the bathroom upstairs, then each closes a bedroom door behind her, click and click. What is left behind, in the silence and darkness?

For this house Philip made the pine kitchen table and the four pine kitchen chairs. He built his and Nora’s bed, empty tonight. He did not make the old wicker sofa out on the porch from which he raised Sophie a couple of months ago, on the remarkable night of one of her nightmares, but when he led her through the late spring dark warmth around the house to the private patch of grass out back, that was his workshop shielding them from view.

That big renovated former barn was one of the selling points when he and Nora were looking at properties here. Its long, high walls are stacked with many shapes and sizes and varieties of wood. Its many shelves hold fat patterned bolts of upholstery. There are tidy rows and containers of tools and glues and screws and decorator nails. There is a wide work-table, and a smaller one, both of them jumbled with projects doomed now to go uncompleted. There are baskets of scrap wood and scrap fabric which Nora customarily loots for materials useful to her. Sawdust floats in the air and is settled and lodged in cracks in the floor. There’s a mixture of smells: dust, wood, sharp chemicals. When anyone called him an artist or, as Beth did, asked if he was like Nora an artist, he laughed. “I design,” he would say, “and I build. I just love
wood.” So he did. Wood took shape in his hands in more governable and perhaps more beautiful and certainly less ambiguous ways than, say, any women were likely to.