The Age of Grief (7 page)

Set aside your modesty and think carefully what sort of man you are. Review your life. Look in the mirror if need be. To begin with, forty long (a graceful size) and thick curly hair (indeed, ringlets). Look into your eyes, Jeffrey. In all honesty, how much bluer could they be? And how much thinner and more arched your nose? And disfigurement. Where are the large pores? Is there the thread of a varicose vein? I know you have never worn glasses, had a pimple, used an Ace bandage. Even the soles of your feet are warm, not shockingly cold (take it from me), in the middle of the night.

I wanted to hear about your new pipe, that calabash you got in the city. But though you carefully explained, I still don’t know what meerschaum is. I just know how you take out your pipe and put it back in, how the tip of your tongue flicks out to lick the mouthpiece, how you bite down on it and draw back your lips to keep talking, how unconscious and competent you are in lighting the match and watching the bowl and sucking in the air. And you take it out and put it back in, out of your mouth and in. Why had we never talked about cherries and briers and clays and corncobs before?

Our aperitif conversation augured well, I thought. After pipes, you will remember, we moved on to the marriage of Eileen and Dave, her third, his second. I, the experienced one, derogated the institution and marveled at their attachment to it. You replied, “And if you can’t create your own
life-style in the twentieth century, what consolation is there?” I chattered about angst and apocalypse in the usual fashion. How were you to know my visions of blue bootees with pompoms, velvety baby necks, and minuscule toes? Nothing, you seemed to have said—and, more important, no one—is illegitimate at the latter end of human history.

Dinner was intended to relax you. I don’t like beef consommé, but I know you do, and you always want roast capon for the wine; Caesar salad and fresh croutons, your favorite, and infant peas sautéed with baby onions
aux fines herbes
, mine; the usual bread; a fresh tangerine ice (home- and hand-made, J., beaten every quarter hour all afternoon). The brownies perhaps were a bit obvious, great slabs of chocolate lathered with icing, walnut pieces scattered through like confetti, not a seed, not a stem, the dope ground into marijuana flour and disguised by a double dose of double Dutch. And then you said, “I can’t.”

“Maybe over coffee,” gnashing my teeth at my own vanity, my anxiety to impress you with my cooking, as if I had wanted marriage rather than motherhood. In my lap I held my hands because they wanted to touch you. You drank coffee. Did you notice the Jersey cream? I said, “Want a brownie?” I could tell by your smile that you wanted to please me. “In a while. Have a cup of coffee with me. I’ll get it.” And there was your round little butt passing sideways between my chair and the coffee table, nearly brushing my face. You would put a dollop of Kahlua in it, I seemed jumpy. Oh that I had bitten your left bun right then. “Thank you.” Do you remember how demurely I said thank you, smoothing the silk in my lap?

But Jeffrey, as adults we pretend that handsome is as handsome does. Really, you have done handsomely. Music,
for example, is only your hobby, and yet you play three instruments. Everyone agrees you are a masterful raconteur, and yet a temperate man (that last, indeed, was the greatest obstacle to my plot). You have a graceful and generous mind. What was the last spiteful comment you made? There are none within my memory. Your minor virtues are countless: you leave proper tips, you hang up your clothes, you are not too proud to take buses. This is just living, you would say, and yet all those thank-you notes add up. Not wishing to embarrass you, I will drop the subject, adding only that we both know what a remarkable child you were and that you have been steadily successful.

When the coffee cup was heavy in my hands, you sat down on the table and looked at me. “I’m concerned for you,” you said. I was flattered. When you leaned forward, you smelled like tobacco, wool, and skin. The bowls of your cobalt irises float well above the lower lids, and there is white in them like skeletons. I had never noticed that before. The pupils dilated. You do like me. It was time to take your face between my palms and gain your favors with one passionate, authoritative, skilled, yet vulnerable kiss. I said, “Harley is threatening to cut his throat again.” I hadn’t heard from Harley, but it’s a threat he offers preferred women every few months.

“When did he call?”

“My mother is dying.”

“Of what?”

“The police beat up my grandfather for passing out deaf-and-dumb cards.”

“Both your grandfathers are dead.”

“My sister anticipated a walk light, and a taxi ran over her feet.”

“What did you do today?”

“I washed DDT off infant peas and baby onions. What do you think of babies, Jeffrey?”

“They’re very flavorful.” This game we play when I want to inform you tactfully that I am strong enough for the urban nightmare. Your concern must have been assuaged; you removed to a chair beyond the table. We talked about the granular universe, as I remember.

“Please have a brownie?” My offer perhaps seemed tiresome. For me, I knew you would. I did, too. They tasted indescribably musty. I wanted to say, “It’s only the marijuana.” You were too polite to mention it. You must have felt hungry, because you had another. Then another. I wanted to ask, “And why do you prefer men, Jeffrey?” but I merely said, “You smell good,” and got up to clear the table. We had cleaned the chicken of every morsel of flesh. When I came back, you were asleep. Post nitrates, post Hitler, post strontium-90, I got a hand mirror out of my purse and held it before your nostrils. A healthy fog. Still, I was disappointed. You would indeed be staying the night, but in a near coma.

Woman, Jeffrey. Joy, by Jean Patou, a dollar a dab. Fragrant, smooth, rosy. Draped in fragrant (lavender), smooth (silk spun by the very worms themselves), and abundant tissues of robin’s egg and full-bodied burgundy. Woman standing in a draft in her tawny stockings regarding her erect nipples with her brown but really yellow eyes, her black hair shifted shinily forward in the light, her clean clean clean face, every pore purged. Let me tell you, J., that I, too, have fallen asleep
in media seductione
. But good heavens, he was not only a freshman given to wearing an orange and black stocking cap to bed on football weekends; he had three splinted
fingers and was there on a wrestling scholarship. I removed your shoes.

After finishing the dishes, dusting and wiping out the china cabinet, mopping the floors, washing the woodwork, replacing the light bulb in the front-hall closet and the one in the back pantry, Windexing the mirrors, sorting through all my makeup bottles and the medicine chest, and hemming up a new dress, I removed your jacket.

Frankly, Jeffrey, the building of model ships for nautical museums and private collections is nothing so much as honorable. You fashion every mahogany plank and rosewood mast, you overcast raw edges of sails, you braid the lines and lanyards, you tie the microscopic knots. Remember the time I nosed around your mullion-windowed shop?

“Of course I’ll tell you.”

“Is it with long tweezers, the way they do radium?”

The masts and sails nestled together on the deck like bat wings. You slid the hull gently, tightly, through the neck and positioned it on the floor of the bottle. “Pull this string.” I pulled. The masts stood up and the sails spread and the bottle filled with wind. Won’t you believe the lifelong importance of this mystery to me?

I disrobed. I brushed my teeth twice and flossed them. I plucked two hairs between my eyebrows. I washed my face with glycerine-rosewater soap. I brushed my hair a hundred strokes and poured peroxide into my ears and navel. I applied cups of water to my eyeballs. I gargled. I blew my nose. I emptied my bladder. I cleaned under my fingernails. I buttoned my cotton pajamas crotch to chin, then zipped myself into a turtleneck bathrobe and sat down on the bed. The only, though enormous, bed.

As if I had intended to all along, I walked up to you
in the living room, removed every stitch you had on, and threw it all down the air shaft in the hall. I was touched by the frayed waistband of your Munsingwears. When I came back you were shivering every so often, but still comatose. I turned up the heat and, for the time being, covered you with an antique quilt, rose of Sharon pattern, as one such as I, a woman, a cook, a believer in simple plants like yeast, might set the dough on to rise. I pulled on my mukluks, muffled my neck, and sat down with Roland Barthes.

But you (it) were (was) inescapable. Perfectly lubricated in your bendings and unbendings, eyes almost completely closed, with every manifestation of presence and yet gone, gone. I threw down the Barthes, yanked off the quilt, and took a good look. My eye, of course, flew at once to your penis for evidence of your inner life. But I dragged my gaze away. There wasn’t much of you to see, mostly skin not unlike my own. I fingered some of it. It pinched up elastically, resumed its shape, changed white to red to pink. I laid my cheek, my breast, my shoulder, my knee on various parts of you, to tune you in over unusual receivers. I smelled you. You smell like hollandaise for some reason. Experimentally, I applied lips and tongue to your penis. It grew to a firm, tasteful size, unblemished, stem and cap nicely differentiated. I let it wilt. I am not a necrophiliac. Like all of us raised with the Scientific Method, simply curious. I said, still robed, pajamaed, slippered, and muffled, picking Roland B. up off the carpet and smoothing wrinkled pages, “Jeffrey! I’ll put you to bed.” The first voice in hours, all night. You answered promptly. “Watch your fingers.”

“What?”

“Power drills are a dangerous business.” Thus your inner life inexorably proceeded, not exclusive of these hands with
which I stood you up, the sharp corner of the table around which I steered you, the toilet I placed you next to, but relegating all of our surroundings with no compromise. “Piss!” I ordered. “That’s easier said than done,” you said, already doing it, your eyes adamantly closed.

Man, unconscious, naked in my bathroom, warm skin in jeopardy of cold surfaces, porcelain and metallic. The fluorescent light whitening and fattening him, the muscles in his narrow bony feet (the little piggy that stayed home shorter than the one that went to market) tensing and relaxing as he loses and regains degrees of balance.

Your body. I guided it into the bedroom and set it up at the end of the bed. “Lie down, Jeffrey,” I said, poking the small of its back. It toppled onto the bed, face down. I covered it up, pink sheet, red thermal blanket, white quilt; under its cheek, a down pillow. I hung up my own clothes, climbed into bed with it, turned out the light. Black shades, navy curtains, it was dark. I did, as you can imagine, kiss it on the cheek, laid an amicable hand on its scapula. I thought again of Einstein. I fell asleep, and woke up disoriented, fucking. “Where am I?” I said. In response, you came. But way of explanation, I added, “It’s very dark.” You simply said, “Mary.” Truly that is my name, although the name of many. You used a very one-in-the-afternoon, fully conscious, what-shall-we-have-for-lunch sort of intonation. In the morning you were gone in a pair of my jeans and a sweat shirt.

It is January. I was glad to have kept your shoes. Since then, four weeks ago, where have you been? I do not accuse, I simply wish to know. That and where you intend to be, which will become increasingly important from now on.

K
irby Christianson is standing under the shower, fiddling with the hot-water spigot and thinking four apparently simultaneous thoughts: that there is never enough hot water in this apartment, that there was always plenty of hot water in Japan, that Mieko will be here in four days, and that he is unable to control Mieko’s expectations of him in any way. The thoughts of Mieko are accompanied by a feeling of anxiety as strong as the sensation of the hot water, and he would like the water to flow through him and wash it away. He turns from the shower head and bends backward, so that the stream can pour over his face.

When he shuts off the shower, the phone is ringing. A sense that it has been ringing for a long time—can a mechanical noise have a quality of desperation?—propels him naked and dripping into the living room. He picks up the phone and his caller, as he has suspected, is Mieko. Perhaps he is psychic; perhaps this is only a coincidence; or perhaps no one else has called him in the past week or so.

The connection has a crystalline clarity that tricks him into not allowing for the satellite delay. He is already annoyed
after the first hello. Mieko’s voice is sharp, high, very Japanese, although she speaks superb English. He says, “Hello, Mieko,” and he
sounds
annoyed, as if she calls him too much, although she has only called once to give him her airline information and once to change it. Uncannily attuned to the nuances of his voice, she says, “Oh, Kirby,” and falls silent.

Now there will be a flurry of tedious apologies, on both sides. He is tempted to hang up on her, call her back, and blame his telephone—faulty American technology. But he can’t be certain that she is at home. So he says, “Hello, Mieko? Hello, Mieko? Hello, Mieko?” more and more loudly, as if her voice were fading. His strategy works. She shouts, “Can you hear me, Kirby? I can hear you, Kirby.”

He holds the phone away from his ear. He says, “That’s better. Yes, I can hear you now.”

“Kirby, I cannot come. I cannot go through with my plan. My father has lung cancer, we learned this morning.”

He has never met the father, has seen the mother and the sister only from a distance, at a department store.

“Can you hear me, Kirby?”

“Yes, Mieko. I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. I have said to my mother that I am happy to stay with her. She is considerably relieved.”

“Can you come later, in the spring?”

“My lie was that this Melville seminar I was supposed to attend would be offered just this one time, which was why I had to go now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know that I am only giving up pleasure. I know that my father might die.”