The Age of Grief (3 page)

“How is Bryan, anyway? Are you in love yet?”

“We’ve agreed not to say. He’s very compelling, though. Especially at six a.m., when I think he’s asleep, and he grabs my foot as I’m sneaking out of bed. I thought I was going to jump right out of my skin.”

“Do you talk?”

“Nonstop.”

There is a pause here, where Frannie might mention her conversational history with Philip, but instead she rolls over and closes her eyes. Florence presses ahead. “I actually spoke to him, Philip I mean. I said hello, he said hello, Bryan said hello.” She looks at Frannie. Nothing. “He’s so boyish-looking. From a distance he looks about eighteen, and getting younger. That’s another thing about Bryan. Being prematurely grizzled makes him look very wise. Are you asleep?”

Frannie shakes her head and slips her hand into the bowl. “Mmmmm,” she says.

“Do you ever miss him?” This is so bold that Florence blushes.

Frannie shrugs. “How’s Bryan’s work going?” Bryan’s work is to figure out how many ways the hospital can use the computer it has just purchased.

“Terrifically,” says Florence. “Now they’re thinking of renting time to the county and making a profit on the purchase.”

“But they bought it with county money.”

“The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Florence sighs. “You know, you always turn the conversation over to me, and I always rise to the bait.”

“More strawberries?” Frannie holds out the bowl, and Florence gives up. They talk about a movie Frannie wants to go to, then about the seven-pound twins Florence saw the previous week. Florence begins to think of Bryan and to wonder what time it is. The champagne in the bottom of the crystal bowl is flat. Just then Frannie says, “I hate the way Philip and I admired ourselves all the time.”

Florence picks up the napkins and the champagne cork and the wrappings from the loaf of bread, and then it is time to depart.

“Well, I don’t think life has passed
me
by.” Florence, in her bathrobe, strikes a pose on the stairs. Bryan looks up from his book, elaborately distracted. Florence lifts her chin. Lately, they have been debating whether life has passed Bryan by.

“No, bitch,” he says, just containing a smile. “Life hasn’t passed you by.” Florence exhibits an ostentatious bit of calf. “You were standing in the road, and it ran you right over!” Florence laughs and runs up the steps. At the top, she hits the light switch, plunging Bryan into darkness, then she throws herself diagonally across the bed.

When Bryan comes in, she is pretending to be asleep. He walks around the bed. “I’m so comfortable,” she groans. “You’ll have to sleep on the floor.” She stretches out her arms. “There’s no room.”

“I see a spot,” he says. She can hear the smile in his voice, and she feels her body contract with the tension of imminent laughter. Then he launches himself diagonally across her. The weight of his body is delightful: for a moment they are still, and she seems to feel the muffled beat of his heart. Then they are laughing and floundering across one another. They have been laughing all evening, and this laughter, Florence knows, will bloom smoothly into lovemaking. “I love you,” he says. He has said it often lately.

“Do you mind if I reciprocate at once?”

“Not at all.”

“I love you, too.”

“Ah.” They snuggle down and pull up the covers.

Just when Florence thinks it is about to begin, when
her skin seems to rise to meet the palm of his hand, he squeezes her closely and says, “Speaking of love.”

“Please do.”

“Your friend seems to have a new one.”

“Which friend?” Florence’s eyes are closed, and she is trying to guess where his hands are, where they will alight.

“Frannie,” he says.

Florence opens her eyes and sits up. “Oh, really?” she says. “Who?” And then, in a less casual tone, “She didn’t tell me.”

“A woman in the art school, I think.”

“Which part do you think?”

“What?”

“What’s questionable, love, art school, or woman?”

“Art school.”

“Oh.”

“I thought you’d be glad. They look very happy. I saw them having tea this afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry I told you.”

“Don’t be.”

“Come here. Please. We’ve had such a good time tonight.”

“We really have.” She kisses him on the nose and smiles, but in the end they settle into bed without making love. Florence says, “I think if we hadn’t had such a good time tonight then I wouldn’t be able to imagine their every moment together.” But she says it quietly, knowing that Bryan has fallen asleep.

She’d intended to drop in at Frannie’s the next morning, a Saturday, on her way to the store, but now that seems like
she’d be rushing by for the details. She doesn’t know what she would say, all she can think of are challenges and accusations.

She stops on the way home, leaving Bryan’s car at the end of the block. No one is around, and she sees that Frannie’s belongings are in the street—the plant stand, two boxes of books; clothes in a large pile seem especially vulnerable. Florence looks around for Frannie’s winter coat to throw over them, but she can’t find it. While she is standing there, Frannie’s car pulls up. The other woman is with her, and Frannie’s “Hello!” is wildly exuberant. Florence attributes this to the presence of the other woman.

Frannie introduces them. The woman’s name, Helen Meardon, is certainly conservative, even old-fashioned, and her thighs are too fat. Otherwise she is very pretty. Florence listens for Helen Meardon to say, “I’ve heard so much about you,” but she does not, in fact, smile again after the introduction, although her inspection of Florence, whose clothes are a mess and whose hair is dirty, is frank and lengthy. Helen Meardon is a person of style. “I didn’t know you were moving,” Florence says heartily, thinking of a recent evening together.

“Darling! It’s very sudden. The house is terrific! Remember where we went for strawberries? Helen’s just put in the most beautiful red enameled wood-burning stove. It’s practically her place, she moved in so long ago, and the rent hasn’t been raised in years, so it should cost next to nothing to live there.”

“That’s great.”

“You’ll have to come over as soon as you can.”

“I’m so surprised.”

Helen Meardon is moving away, toward the apartment
building. She exchanges with Florence a suspicious sidelong glance before passing her and climbing the porch steps.

“Maybe I will come over,” asserts Florence.

“Or we could have lunch together downtown.”

“Can I help you move? I’ve got Bryan’s car.”

“We can handle it, I think,” announces Helen from the porch. “We’re nearly finished.” She goes into the building.

“Helen’s terribly shy,” says Frannie, looking after her.

“You must be good friends with her to be moving in.”

“We met almost my first week on the job last fall. Sometimes I feel like I’ve known her since kindergarten, and sometimes I feel like we’ve just met.”

“Mmm.”

“Frannie! What about this?” Helen is holding an object up at the window screen. Frannie turns to squint at it.

“I better go. Bryan will be expecting his lunch,” Florence says.

Frannie smiles at her.

“Not that I’ll make it for him, I mean. I’m not his slave, of course. I just went to the store.”

Frannie continues to smile. “He’s a nice man.”

“I think we’re in love now.”

“You told me that last week.”

“Yes, right.” It is impossible to leave. At length, Florence simply turns away and runs down the street to the car. She imagines Frannie and Helen meeting in the doorway of the empty apartment, the same height, kissing.

Florence is drawn outside by the odors of cut grass and privet. Bryan should be coming soon to take her swimming. It is a glorious day, and Philip is snipping his hedge, his back to her, his progress slow and neat. The grass he has mown is
already bagged and sitting on the curb. Before going back inside, Florence watches him for a minute. She hasn’t spoken to him since her spring antagonism. Now she fears that she has found out the secret of his marriage, and he would know by looking at her.

He sets down his shears and wipes his face in his shirt. When she turns to go inside, he calls to her, “What do you think, Florence, shall I trim it into birds and perfect spheres?”

“What is that called again?”

“Topiary. How’s the baby business?”

“Bouncing. How are you?”

“Sorry not to see you more often. And this is your slow season.”

“I haven’t been home much, I’ll admit.”

“Ah, love.” He speaks with only ordinary irony.

“I’ve been around enough to hear a lot of thumps and bangings across the way. Are you haunted over there?”

“Only by the spirit of remodeling. I took out the kitchen bar and put down new linoleum, and let’s see, put in some new windows and repainted a little.”

“My goodness!”

“Would you like to see it?”

He has also had a new sofa re-covered in a pattern of green leaves and lemons. The place is even more spacious now than before, if that is possible. Philip’s furniture, director’s chairs and yellow canvas deck chairs, recalls the ocean. His floors recall sandy beaches. Nothing recalls Frannie, and Florence feels suddenly calmer. He has brought his desk downstairs and set it up where he can survey his solitary realm. There is an air of satisfaction about the furnishings and their arrangement, as if they have spread themselves this way and that, unhindered. “I should have come over sooner,”
Florence says, not remembering till then that she wasn’t invited to come over. Still, she feels that she has missed the transformation itself, and having missed it, she will never know what it was that has been transformed. “You know how nosy I am,” she adds.

But Philip has gone to the kitchen window. “Look over there. See that little building? I bought that at a farm sale for thirty dollars. It’s an old chicken house. Sound, though. I’m insulating it, and putting down a tile floor, then I’m going to install a Franklin stove and run lights out there and make it into my study. No phone, no nothing. Grapes growing all over it, a couple of easy chairs, a nice rug.”

“You’ve got all this space to yourself right here!”

He glances at her, amused that she hasn’t gotten the point, and shrugs. “The spirit of remodeling is pretty persistent, you know.”

“It’s so different from the way it was,” she says, because Philip’s cool realm oddly invites confidences in a way that Frannie’s hospitality did not, “and it’s not that I don’t like it. It’s refreshing. But I loved the rusty-red sofa, and all the chairs drawn up around the coffee table. That kitchen bar was so ugly—awful nineteen fifties modernizing—but it really made the place cozy.” Philip is looking at her quizzically. “Don’t you think it was nice to just sit around in the evening with most of the lights off and drink brandy and talk? I loved it! Especially when it rained or snowed those times, and even my apartment seemed too far away. Didn’t you like it?”

“Our friendship was very pleasant.”

“I didn’t feel like just your friend. I felt like your child or your sister, or something. Should I be embarrassed? Those nights seemed so self-contained.”

“Frannie mooning over Helen, me mooning over Frannie.”
He speaks with a teasing edge. “I don’t think we were very kind to you, Florence.”

“Weren’t you? I thought you were.” Florence swallows bitterly.

“We needed someone else to talk to, about unimportant things.”

Florence turns away quickly and peers energetically out the window.

“We needed you, Florence; it was nice to have you fall in love with us, and admire us. It was a relief to talk about something else besides the central issue. Do you understand what I mean?”

“No one was happy but me?” She looks at him again and he shakes his head.

The smile that lingers on his boyish face is betrayed by that small gesture, disappears. Florence lets his serious gaze hold her until he releases her with another smile.

Bryan pulls up next door and gets out of the car. Florence does not move. “Is that the secret of marriage?” she asks.

“One of them.”

Bryan takes off his sunglasses and throws them on the seat, then steps around the car.

“What’s another one?”

“Maybe that all the secrets are never disclosed.”

“And another?”

“That it’s worth finding out for yourself.”

Bryan raises his finger to her doorbell. She shouts, “Here I am! Bryan, I’m over here!”

C
areening toward Lily Stith in a green Ford Torino were Kevin and Nancy Humboldt. Once more they gave up trying to talk reasonably; once more they sighed simultaneous but unsympathetic sighs; once more each resolved to stare only at the unrolling highway.

At the same moment, Lily was squeezing her mop into her bucket. Then she straightened up and looked out the window, eager for their arrival. She hadn’t seen them in two years, not since having won a prestigious prize for her poems.

She was remarkably well made, with golden skin, lit by the late-afternoon sun, delicately defined muscles swelling over slender bones, a cloud of dark hair, a hollow at the base of her neck for some jewel. She was so beautiful that you could not help attributing to her all of your favorite virtues. To Lily her beauty seemed a senseless thing, since it gained her nothing in the way of passion, release, kinship, or intimacy. Now she was looking forward, with resolve, to making the Humboldts confess really and truly what was wrong with her—why, in fact, no one was in love with her.

A few minutes later they pulled up to the curb. Nancy
climbed the apartment steps bearing presents—a jar of dill pickles she had made herself, pictures of common friends, a cap knitted of rainbow colors for the winter. Lily put it on in spite of the heat. The rich colors lit up Lily’s tanned face and flashing teeth. Almost involuntarily Nancy exclaimed, “You look better than ever!” Lily laughed and said, “But look at you! Your hair is below your hips now!” Nancy pirouetted and went inside before Kevin came up. He, too, looked remarkable, Lily thought, with his forty-eight-inch chest on his five-foot-nine-inch frame. Kevin kissed her cheek, but she could see he was trying to imagine where Nancy had gone; his eyes slid instantly past Lily and only manners brought them back. He patted her twice on the shoulder when she cried, “I’ve been looking for you since noon!” He said, “I always forget how far it is across Ohio,” and stepped into the house.