Age (6 page)

And in a way, he had. Once, when I referred to her as a femme fatale, he said, no, that soiled old phrase, which reminded one of flashy art-nouveau women in monkey fur or grand courtesans riding the Bois in Klimt poses, would not describe what she was or did. ‘She knew how to attract men with the fatality already in them. Men about to brim over with success. Or just losing a religion. Or just finding one. Like me.’

Her pretexts were always reasonable and solidly grounded. So, any nurse would no doubt learn what Gertrude had promised she would. Would some one of Gertrude’s many former contacts provide—as payment for not having to meet again with Gertrude herself?

I of course have never met her. But among Rupert’s friends, the crowd into which I married, Sherm and Kit among them, she was a constant topic, often at parties to which she had not been invited, where there was the fear or expectation—that she might after all turn up. A rumor that she might, could make certain people—women too—uneasy enough to want to leave, yet too fascinated at the prospect of Gertrude to depart. Still, she must have, known where she wasn’t wanted, for she never came. But kept them guessing? ‘Yes, that was her quality,’ Rupert said. ‘No—I’m being unfair. Or rather, inaccurate. That was her—nature. You could never put a finger on her. On what she was or where at the moment she might be. Meanwhile, over some months—or years in my case—she might be in your flat, your bed, and of course your purse, though always openly—and possibly even at your place of work.’ Many people found Gertrude jobs, he said usually interesting ones, always performed faithfully if briefly. ‘The one place she could not care to be was in your heart.’ There had apparently never been any question of being in hers.

Yet though he lived with her for only a few years, it took double that number of years of living with me before he left off inadvertently referring to her as his wife. I understood. I wasn’t as wounded by that as he perhaps thought at the time, or even after so long, in front of Kit and Sherm. After all, I had had to excise Arturo, the long, long habit of him, if not the love.

When you marry early, romantically and wrongly, you may still keep the image of the affair, and of the girl that was you still centered there, but lose the image of the man to the life you live with him. I have seen this even more clearly in the women who stay married to those men. The old Italian women who were my mother’s friends in Bridgeport, for instance—who could cite every slightest stage of their one and only affair.
And then, on the following Sunday, there he was
, they said, their old eyes alight, and scarcely connecting that
he
with the broken-toothed husband playing bocce with my father on the lawn.

I called Rupert by Arturo’s name now and then, but as he became the girls’ father, only when it had something to do with them. And when the girls brought over snapshots of themselves with Arturo included I never learned to see him as that pudgy gentleman in striped trousers, whose fat, seraph smile was fended off with bank checks. What I saw, and still see, is the Arturo who the morning after I lost our baby said to me, aggrieved and balked of what I owed him: ‘Couldn’t you have held on to our little
commendatore
for just a little longer?’

Rupert once rousted out a few pictures of Gertrude. The earliest showed a girl neither pretty nor plain, even anonymously median, but confident. Then came a woman much the same physically, whose sureness has become meditative, perhaps on what she already had had and could look forward to. She wears her hair pliably enough for any era and looks as if she can pass through an occasion without dressing specially for it. ‘Gertrude was a type,’ Rupert said. ‘Pliable, yes—and unchangeable. But the recognition of that was up to you. And the effect of this could be deep. As if she were telling you, “I won’t last.” Not warning you. Only presenting the fact, silently. But with no sadness one could see.’

Her saga taught me something. Perhaps—to live too closely to love, and by it? Just as Arturo’s story helped Rupert to be a father, even of the lost son? We were what we were in part because of them. And wanted never to see them again.

So, when that buzzer sounded I said to myself—She means to see
us.
Now. Why?

And Rupert, who had just called her his wife, snapped back to being himself again, looking contrite. He doesn’t always know when he opts out like that, but he did this time. So once more she had affected both of us.

‘The MacNairs are in California,’ Rupert says to me, low. He has had my same thought.

The MacNairs have the flat above. And poor Wallace’s, below ours, is vacant, waiting for the settling of the estate. The gallery on the first floor is closed for the weekend. That leaves us, who haven’t ordered anything, far as I know, nor expect anyone really. Not even Kit and Sherm, who sit there as people do when bells ring in other people’s houses—bright-eyed but unconcerned.

‘We—are not a hospice,’ Rupert says. How bright-eyed she has made him, too. A man in command, with not a thread yet lost to him. In front of those two, I’m proud.

‘No one
is
, nowadays. Isn’t that the trouble?’ Sherm grumbles. ‘For all of us.’

This must be how Sherm talks when he gives an award, or gets one. Or at the White House.

‘She’s doing an extraordinary thing,’ he says.

She is. Which of our two spare rooms will she expect? By now Mr Quinn has admitted her and sounded the buzzer. Our small elevator takes long. Perhaps a wheelchair is being fitted in—or won’t fit in. I will not ask those two whether there is a chair.

‘I’m not sure I go along with it. For myself, I mean. But Sherm—’ Kit is in a state. Pink-lidded, trembling. Maybe she’s thinking of their spare room in New Hampshire—and summer to come.

How intolerant I am, I thought, about the dying; I should be ashamed. But was not.

‘The question is—just what does Gertrude think she’s doing? Aside from what she
is
doing,’ Rupert says, loudly for him. ‘With her the two were not always the same.’

And now I was jealous. That he should speak this intimate knowledge as if it were yesterday’s.

‘Excuse me—’ Kit says. ‘But are you two, like Sherm, a little hard of hearing? Because I thought I heard a bell.’

‘You did,’ Rupert says. ‘Our downstairs neighbor does it. The one who let you in. But the elevator gets stuck now and then. People sometimes walk up.’

‘And no,’ I say, ‘we aren’t deaf. Either of us.’

But that must be why Rupert raised his voice—for Sherm. And again I’m proud.

‘Though the house is a little moribund,’ he adds, smiling. And I think: How quick he is, after all.

‘Yes—’strordinary,’ Sherm says, ploughing on.

So this is how he must hide the deafness. By repetition. I always thought it was pomp. And in those days perhaps it was. Poor man, the eyepatch gives him monumentality enough. But now the remoteness is really closing in. On him too.

‘What is she doing, Sherm?’ I mouth it. ‘Precisely what?’

‘She wants to start a hospice here. And she wants to start—with us.’

‘With—us?’ Rupert says.

‘She wants to gather in all the dying—any who are—from our crowd.’

In the silence I stand up. I hear somebody walking up the stairs, very slowly.

‘Old school tie?’ The tip of Rupert’s nose has gone white. He too stands up. ‘I see. I think I see. And you’re her ambassador. You’ve come to nose out whether we are. Dying. I’ll save you the trouble, Sherm. You were always a lazy sonovabitch. We’re on notice, you might say. Gemma and I. But nothing more.’

Kit gives a high tee-hee. ‘Come along for the ride. Special rates.’ Then she bursts into tears.

‘Kit!’

She gives me a look. Clasping her abdomen. Oh Jesus. So that’s what the belly is. She’s wearing a bag.

There’s a knock at the door. Brushing past Rupert, I whisper: ‘It’s Kit he’s going along with it for.’ Then I take a deep breath, thirty-five years long, and open the door wide.

Mr Quinn is standing there. In my relief, I want to go on standing there opposite him, on and on, enumerating Mr Quinn with neighborly delight.

Even his everyday clothes have an air, the kind the young folks are looking for in the antique clothing shops. A short, faded French-blue overcoat with a pocket beret to match. The mechanic’s overalls—from early days as gofer to the racing drivers at Le Mans—in which he takes the garbage out. His little hawk-nosed wife wore a white tennis headband until the day she died. Like Suzanne Lenglen’s it was, the day Lenglen won the women’s singles. Mr Quinn played a match or two with Bill Tilden—‘before, of course, he turned professional.’ Rupert says they had the kind of sports-haunted youth on the Riviera that Sherm and the other midwestern literary émigrés never knew, but that both crowds were amateurs to the
nth.

Today Mr Quinn is wearing his Prince of Wales V-neck sweater, into which a canary silk ascot is tucked. If we ask him in, he will be dressed for it. No hard feelings if we do not. But just in case, he will be, carrying some bit of our mail that he has spotted as too serious to trust to our mailbox. Today’s, a long white envelope, is too big for it, and too square. In order to bring it he has walked up the stairs with his long, elegant stride. Above the ascot his slender cheeks are scarcely pink. I imagine that fed as he is on the well-chosen secondhand morsels I have seen him buying at the vegetable stalls and bread shop, even his breath is sweet. As sweet as the hope shining from his face.

Oh how I envy him, this gofer from the past. He is having an amateur old age.

‘Come in, come in—’ I cry. ‘Oh, you must. We are having a drink with friends you must meet. And they you.’

He’s not a man to make me work at overriding his demurs. And he can depend on me to cut them short.

I introduce him with a flourish. ‘Our neighbor—who let you in. He is sometimes kind enough to save us steps. And Sherm—Mr Quinn was your contemporary—in France.’

I can see that Sherm expects Mr Quinn might know his name. Such is not the case. Rupert, seeing this too, is calmed. We exchange what he calls
happital
glances. Happy marital. This little party will do well—at least for us. And will stave off the other one projected on us. Which is what a hospice too interrelated would be, wouldn’t it? A death party, with the friends we think we owe it to.

I know who we owe. ‘We’re out of Quincy, Mr Quinn. You’ll have to make do with Sancerre.’

After tennis, wine was once his interest. His wife had cousins with a vineyard in Beaune. He likes a thin glass. I bring him a rare one I have bought especially; he has taught me a lot, not all of it about wine. Rupert jokes that the day I buy Mr Quinn a bottle of Château Yquem he will sue the old boy for alienation of affection. Oh—I answer—to get to that brand will take us years and years, you’re safe. I doubt it, he says; I think the old boy is good for it, and we smile at each other, tentatively. Mr Quinn is ninety-two.

I see that Sherm and Quinn are weighing his position here. Not a super, then? They don’t have pensioners.

‘Mr Quinn is our mentor,’ I say. ‘On quite a lot of things.’

But Sherm is goggling at the white envelope that Rupert has quietly opened, instead of politely putting it aside. I feel his quiet behind me, held on to overlong. No one has to tell us two about body English. If either one of us tried to deceive the other with words, the body would tattle, like a child tugging its parent.

‘Is it from the city?’ I say. We are our own landlords, under a corporate name that Mr Quinn, when we acquired the house with him already a long-term tenant, did not discover was us. This allows us to give him certain benefices ‘by regulation’—a new stove, handgrips over the rebuilt bath—without imposing gratitude.

Rupert only shakes his head mutely, but Sherm, waving his hands wildly, intercepts, crying: ‘I know that letterhead. I saw the original of the first one given—that who was it got?’ He points a finger at Mr Quinn. ‘In the Newberry.’

Mr Quinn draws back, blinking, as if he may have brought the wrong mail. ‘Newberry? A vegetable?’

‘—Library,’ Sherm says in his deepest platform voice, and bends that ruffed white head of his, so ready and right for honors, to read that stiff testimonial.

Then he tries to get down on his knees, or on one of them. I swear it. Oh Rupert, when you come to read this, remember Sherm for me. That gouty knee-joint, which always thought it knew when and where to bend and to whom, got down on the floor to you—or tried. Didn’t make it. Not to where you were—and are, dead or alive. Never will.

I still didn’t know what was up. But I can savor it now.

How you then are whispering to me, naming one by one your faithful correspondents during the years of your supposed decline, each of whose letterheads I in turn know well enough. That thick paper, smelling of flax, from Italy. The one in crabby French handwriting but postmarked from Maine, a combo that always makes you laugh. The envelope from Paris, always thick with translations, which makes you mutter—They haven’t as many words as English, they have to go the long way round—but how he makes it seem short! And from Norway, the most cherished of all—ordinary pad-paper, lined in blue.

‘They sought me out—’ you’re saying, in the weakest voice I have ever heard from you, ‘they must have testified’—and again: ‘They sought me out.’

Kit is saying to Sherm: ‘You always know about prizes. How come you didn’t know about this?’

‘It’s not his territory.’

I shouldn’t have said it. The page you transferred from his fist to mine said it better.

Then Kit says in a stifled voice, ‘Excuse me,’ and totters toward the bathroom on her high heels. I follow, to ask if she needs help, though I can’t be sure one could, at what she might have to do. She says dully, ‘No. But I’ll use your perfume after, if you don’t mind. I forgot mine.’ Then she turns a terrible face on me. ‘He wants to put me away early. He thinks he’ll outlive me. But he won’t.’ Once inside the bathroom with the door shut, she opens it again. What a crooked smile she had then. ‘And for God’s sake, Gemma, pull your stockings up.’

When I get back, Sherm is interviewing himself, going over all the possibles that produced this event, weighing each country, each constituency—as you said later—in a hallowed voice that nobody’s listening to, and every now and then touching his eyepatch, as if it has somehow betrayed him.