Middle Age (7 page)



J C O

was a matter of common knowledge that she and her friend Adam Berendt went hiking together, on ambitious treks. She wore shorts, trousers, slacks, jeans; often these were a size or two too large; and cable-knit sweaters that looked as if they were hand knit, but were not. In fact, Marina was not very domestic. When at last she couldn’t avoid it, and invited friends to dinner, the meal tended to be hastily prepared; often, she hauled it home from Chez Hélène, Salthill’s premiere food shop. (If Marina’s friends sighted Chez Hélène containers in her kitchen, they passed along the good news to one another: “We’re in luck tonight.”) Marina’s dread of domesticity had a darker side. She feared opening that vein, for what if she bled to death?

It was seven years before Adam’s death she’d been introduced to him by an older Salthill couple, the Hoffmanns. Fondly it would be recounted how at that meeting Adam Berendt had shaken the young red-haired woman’s hand and fixed her with his critical left eye and loudly, lavishly declared she was a contemporary Elizabeth I—“You know, the Hilliard portraits.” Impulsively Adam lifted Marina’s hand to kiss the knuckles, even as Marina, the abashed Rapunzel, stared at him in astonishment.

Who on earth is this man?

She’d avoided Adam for the remainder of the evening. The mere sight of him provoked a blush like a hemorrhage into her face.

But she’d been touched with pleasure, too. For she was a vain woman, at heart.
Marina Troy, Virgin Queen
.

In fact, the celebrated Hilliard portraits of Elizabeth I, which Marina sought out the next morning in her bookstore, depict a very pale, unsmiling, eyebrowless red-haired woman of indeterminate age, neither young nor old; her nose long and narrow, her eyes wary, vigilant. Except for the Queen’s excessively ornate attire, which exuded an air almost of madness, you couldn’t have guessed that this individual was a
woman, female
.

M  of these things, as a way of not thinking of Adam’s death. Upstairs in her crooked little woodframe house at the top of North Pearl Street beside the churchyard. She couldn’t hope to sleep just yet. It was only midnight. July fifth, and the maddening fireworks silenced at last. She’d been making telephone calls, and speaking quietly over the phone, and finally she’d asked other friends to make the rest of her calls for her; and now the phone receiver lay off the hook, utterly silent as if the cord had been cut.

Middle Age: A Romance



She’d embraced him, or tried to. Stroked his grimacing face. Kissed his discolored eyelids.
The body he’d become. Not Adam
.

A vigil for Adam. She’d rummaged through her bureau drawers, retrieved
the gift,
placing it quickly on a table; not examining the documents. She’d found snapshots of Adam and herself, and several charcoal sketches she’d made of him a few years before.
Evidence. He did exist. In my
life
. For some reason, one day she’d had an urge to sketch Adam, though she hadn’t picked up a charcoal stick in years. “My ugly mug?” Adam asked. “Hell, why?” He hadn’t really wanted to pose for Marina, sitting still in such a way was too passive for him, made him restless, but he’d given in, for Marina had prevailed upon him and he was a good-natured guy, a good sport. And maybe he’d been curious to see just how talented Marina was.

So Adam had posed for Marina, in the solarium at the rear of her house, and she’d tried, God how she’d tried to capture his likeness, his spirit; finally giving up, and putting the sketches away, though she hadn’t showed them to Adam, knowing he’d have laughed at them, and wanted to rip them up. She’d saved the sketches for they were a sign of their intimacy, hers and Adam’s; and of the highly intense, concentrated hour they’d spent on that January afternoon that would otherwise have dissolved into oblivion. (Except: Marina recalled how that evening she and Adam were officially involved in a public occasion at the Salthill Arts Council hall. An anonymous, presumably wealthy local donor had given the organization, in which Marina was an officer that year, a tall columnar sculpture in travertine marble and cherry wood, by the distinguished Ar-gentine sculpture Raul Farco, and the Arts Council had talked Adam into publicly presenting the sculpture, to an audience largely unfamiliar with Farco’s work. Adam professed to dislike events of this nature, yet, once on his feet, assured of his audience’s interest, he spoke with zest and enthusiasm, and was warmly applauded. He’d worn a bulky tweed green-heather sport coat, gray trousers that didn’t match, a midnight-blue shirt and a necktie of style and beauty, Marina suspected it must be a gift from a woman. But she wasn’t jealous.) Examining the sketches now, Marina was sharply disappointed. She had been half hoping, after the horror of Jones Point . . . But she’d failed to capture the man’s mysterious essence. You could identify this brute-looking character as Adam Berendt, but it wasn’t Adam Berendt; it was a dummy, a mannequin; a simulacrum of a middle-aged, stocky man with a creased face, balding head, and unnatural eyes, from which all youth, vigor, mystery had departed.
As in the morgue he’d

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J C O

lain inert. Both eyes now blind. Mouth partly open as if he had one more thing
to say—but what?

Marina picked up a charcoal stick and tried to correct Adam’s likeness.

Willing herself to remember Adam as he’d been in life. Not in death but
in life
. Standing before her, here in this room as he’d done in life. Smiling.

Reaching out to her. Was he teasing her? About what?
The hills are still
there, Marina!
But he’d laughed at her, too. He’d laughed at all of Salthill, yet without meanness. Marina began to tremble, seeing the man so clearly.

Hearing his voice. Yet, fumbling with the charcoal stick, as unable to express what she saw as a young child. “Oh, Adam.” It was true: by any crite-ria, he’d had an ugly mug. His skin had looked singed, and his nose had been broken, and there was a startlingly white barbed-wire scar through his right eyebrow. Yet, why wasn’t he ugly? On the contrary, Adam seemed to Marina beautiful . . .

In Plato’s
Phaedo
Socrates assures us
Our soul is imperishable and immortal and existed before we were born
.

“Oh, Adam. Is this true? I don’t think this is true.”

It was :8 .. Marina’s hand faltered. The charcoal stick that had been so inept fell to the floor. The drawings were crude, hopeless. The man had gone. Adam had departed. How to endure this night? Marina should have torn up the drawings, these testaments to her loss, but even this act of defiance was beyond her.



How death enters life. And life is altered
. She knew that Roger Cavanagh, who was Adam’s lawyer, and had been his friend, would call her soon, and within minutes of her replacing the phone on the hook, cautiously, with dread, the phone rang, and it was Roger. Instructing her to please come to his office in town, if she was free. He had private, urgent business with her. “Is it—Adam’s will?” Marina asked, and Roger said, “Yes. Adam’s will.”

Marina had wakened in a state of suspended emotion. She’d slept poorly the previous night. Struggling not to drown as
Thwaite Thwaite
entered her dreams with nightmare logic.
Thwaite
that was a foul licorice substance pushing down her throat. In an overly bright daylight she moved like a sleepwalker. Or like a woman suffering a classic hangover.

Thinking how, under normal circumstances, she’d have been irritated with
Middle Age: A Romance



Roger Cavanagh, so absorbed in his lawyer-mode that he hadn’t even commiserated with Marina about Adam’s death.

Roger Cavanagh, whose wife had divorced him, and won custody of their daughter. How often Marina had been seated beside this man, at Salthill dinner parties, as if, somehow, in their friends’ eyes, Marina and Roger must be “fated”; yet neither seemed to feel much for the other except wariness, a vague sexual unease. Roger rarely came into the Salthill Bookstore. He was a man who acknowledged almost boastfully that he

“hadn’t time” for serious reading; newspapers, TV, and professional jour-nals were all he “had time” for. How Adam had tolerated him, Marina couldn’t imagine. Roger put her in mind of sharp, dark things: shark fins, spikes of wrought-iron fences, painful jolts in the darkness as you stumbled from bed. Years ago, he’d called her several times to ask her—what, Marina couldn’t recall. The essence of an unmarried man telephoning an unmarried woman in such circumstances must mean, to be blunt about it,
Will you have sex with me?
Marina laughed aloud, blindly coiling a braid around her head, not caring to observe herself very closely in the mirror.

Yes, a hangover! Why not think of grief that way.

A dog was barking somewhere close by. In the churchyard?

Apollo?

Adam had brought the dog to visit with Marina numerous times, could Apollo have found his way to
her?

But when Marina hurried from the house calling, “Apollo? Apollo?”

the barking had ceased.

She drove to Roger Cavanagh’s office on Shaker Square. And there was Roger waiting for her, on the front steps, smoking a cigarette. That air of barely restrained impatience. It was late morning, Sunday: Fourth of July weekend. The Square was empty. Roger’s firm, Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook owned one of the eighteenth-century brownstones, prime real estate at the heart of the “historic” village. Roger was known to be a reputable Salthill lawyer, capable, trustworthy, conservative.

Marina had never stepped inside one of the Shaker Square brownstones, which mostly housed lawyers; expensive lawyers; when she couldn’t avoid hiring a lawyer, she chose one with an office in an outlying district, or in a mall. As Marina approached, Roger frowned in greeting, glancing up and down the street as if in worry they might be observed, and urging her inside. “Please. Come in.” As soon as Marina did, Roger shut the door and locked it.

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J C O

The suite of offices was deserted, of course. Marina felt uneasy, alone here with Roger. And how unlike himself he looked: he’d shaved carelessly, leaving stubble, and a thinly bleeding scratch on his jaw; his dark hair that was usually impeccably styled and combed was disheveled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it. And his eyes were shadowed, more recessed than Marina recalled. “Terrible news,” Roger murmured.

“Unbelievable.” Yet he spoke curtly as if not wanting to waste breath. Or emotion. Where usually this man exuded an astringent-masculine scent of cologne, he smelled now frankly of his body. And he wore sports clothes, rumpled clothes. He, too, has had a bad night, Marina thought; feeling, for a moment, for this calculating man, a stab of tenderness.

“Adam, of all people. Who’d been so—” But Roger was only just talking, in that obligatory social way of people with something else, something far more crucial, on their minds, and scarcely knew what he said.

“—filled with life. Of all of us. Terrible news!” He was leading Marina briskly, with no ceremony, through the lavish suite, to his own large office at the rear; though it was a sunny midsummer morning, the plate glass windows’ thin-slatted blinds were tightly shut. On Roger’s desk, amid piles of documents, a plastic cup, very likely hot coffee; an ashtray and cigarette butts. Out of deference to Marina, who’d drawn back from his cigarette, Roger stubbed it out in the ashtray. He sniffed, made a snorting sound as if clearing his sinuses; shifted his shoulders inside his sports shirt; and asked Marina please to take a seat. Marina wondered what was so crucial, why she’d been called. Her eye moved restlessly about the office, which was furnished in expensive teak, black leather, chrome. There was a decorative paneling of glass brick setting off what Marina supposed was a private lavatory at the rear of the office; and this paneling reminded her of the Jones Point Medical Center morgue and what she’d seen there . . .

Marina murmured, “Yes. Terrible.”

Roger Cavanagh’s stylishly decorated office was a showcase to be admired, but damned if Marina would say the expected thing, the Salthill-social thing, nor would she embarrass Roger with an outburst of sorrow, grief, tears. She saw, on a teakwood cabinet, a sculpted brass figure about the size of a violin, with a smooth raised oval surface that suggested a human face in which dim protoplasmic features were only just crystallizing.

This was an old work of Adam Berendt’s from a series Marina thought beautiful though Adam had long since repudiated it, and had no pieces from that era in his studio or house.
Too arty and self-conscious—too
Middle Age: A Romance



Brancusi
, Adam had dismissed the brass pieces. Roger said, “He gave me that. He wouldn’t let me pay him for it even in trade.” There was an air of shame and frustration in this admission, though Marina didn’t know why.

Roger was leafing through documents on his desk, breathing harshly. Marina pretended to be interested in, and then became genuinely interested in, several framed photographs displayed on Roger’s big glass-topped desk. As if Roger Cavanagh meant to say,
You see? I’m a normal man
.
This is
what truly matters to me
. One of the photos was of a child of about eleven, evidently Roger’s daughter, an unsmiling little girl squinting in sunshine, oddly posed so that Marina surmised that another person, the ex-wife probably, had been scissored out of the scene; in another photograph, the girl was older, square-jawed and plain, with Roger’s small squinting eyes and thick coarse dark hair, now smiling tentatively; in the third and largest, the one that exuded the most hope, Roger and the girl, both in tennis whites, gripping racquets, were posed side by side squinting and smiling in front of a tennis net; the girl now looked to be about fourteen, almost as tall as her father. Marina said, “Your daughter?” and Roger said, without glancing at the photographs, “Yes.” He spread a bulky document of about twenty pages in front of Marina.
Last Will and Testament of Adam
Berendt
. The date was April of that year. Roger said, “Possibly you know, Adam has left most of his estate to charitable organizations. His house and land to the Rockland Historic Trust, and enough of an endowment to establish and maintain it as an arts center. Other endowments to environmental organizations, the ACLU and related liberal causes, the Rockland County Homeless Animal Shelter, and so forth, exactly what you’d expect of Adam. Apart from the property on the river, which might be worth a couple of million dollars, I doubt that Adam has much of an estate, but I could be surprised. Lawyers, like priests, are often surprised. Death brings out not usually the worst in us, nor even the best, but the muted, the secret; you get used to surprises, which aren’t invariably unpleasant. But you’ll be relieved to learn, Marina,” Roger said, glancing sidelong at her, with such a look of strain that Marina couldn’t comprehend how this could be relief, “that Adam didn’t leave sums of money or significant gifts to any individuals, including his closest friends, or any of his possessions except ‘random works of art’ as he calls them, to be disposed of as his ‘personal executor’—you—sees fit. I’m Adam’s estate executor, as you know.”