Bathing the Lion (7 page)

Edmonds frowned. Who were they talking about?
It all sounded pretty damned familiar.

The husband started to mumble something but she cut it off with a rushed “Ssh—he’s coming. He just got on.”

Edmonds looked up and saw an ordinary old man moving slowly toward them. On reaching the couple, he stopped and smiled. “Good morning, you two; ready for a little walking?”

“Good morning, Ken. Yeah, we’re ready to go.”

Ken smiled and moved on.

A few minutes later Edmonds turned and looked for the old man. He was sitting alone reading a newspaper on the long bench seat at the very back of the bus. Edmonds stood up, walked to the end of the aisle, and sat down next to him.

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all; it’ll be nice having some company on this ride. I’m Ken Alford.” He put out his right hand.

“William Edmonds.”

Both men gave good strong shakes.

“Is it Bill or William?”

“Either—it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay, Bill. Would you like to share some breakfast?” Out of his coat pockets Ken pulled a cheese Danish wrapped in glistening plastic and a small red and white carton of chocolate milk. Edmonds gestured thanks but no thanks. Alford nodded, opened the milk, and took a swig. Carefully capping it again, he put it down on the seat between his legs. With his teeth he tore open the plastic around the pastry and took a big bite. It was clear he really liked what he was eating because he kept closing his eyes and making mmh-
mmh!
sounds deep in his throat.

Edmonds smiled. Ken looked and sounded like one of those actors on a television commercial loving some new breakfast food or chocolate bar that was being promoted.

“This is the first time I’ve seen you on here, Bill.”

“Yes, it’s my first trip.”

“Well, some of them are good and some are boring, but there’s always one or two worthwhile things to see.”

A few moments later the front door hissed shut and the bus pulled slowly away from the curb. A few people here and there clapped.

“I lost my wife last year and that’s when I started going on them. She didn’t like to travel much, not even day trips, so we stayed pretty close to home. Then when she got sick…” Ken’s voice remained steady and unemotional.

In contrast, Edmonds couldn’t talk about his dead wife without tearing up or his voice catching in his throat every single time.

“Are you married, Bill?”

Edmonds looked at his hands. “My wife died too. Recently.”

“Ahh, it’s tough. I’m sorry for you.” But Ken didn’t sound sorry at all—if anything he sounded sort of … buoyant. “Hold on—I want to show you something.” Stuffing the rest of the pastry into his mouth, he brushed the crumbs off his hands and reached into another pocket. This time he brought out a very sleek, quite beautiful folding knife. “Look at this—it’s my Vedran
Ć
orluka.” He held the knife out for Edmonds to take, but the other man only stared at him.

“Why do you call it that? Vedran
Ć
orluka is a professional soccer player.”

Ken grinned and snapped his fingers. “Right! You’re a soccer fan too. Excellent. Yes,
Ć
orluka plays for the Croatian national team. But I call it that for a specific reason. This was the last Christmas present my wife gave me. I like pocketknives; I have a collection. But this one—well, you can see how especially nice it is. Nancy had it custom-made by a master craftsman in Montana. I liked it a lot when she gave it to me, but only after she died did I really start paying attention to it.”

“Paying attention? What do you mean?”

“I went a little crazy after my wife died, Bill. We were married thirty-seven years and most of them were damned good. Did you have a good marriage?”

Edmonds nodded.

“Then you know what I’m talking about. Vedran
Ć
orluka was Nancy’s favorite player. She didn’t know beans about soccer, but just liked his name; she liked to say it. Whenever I was watching a game on TV, she always came in at some point and asked if
Vedran
Ć
orluka
was playing today.

“So that’s why I named my knife after him. It was her last present and he was her favorite player: a perfect match. I always carry it now, no matter where I’m going or what I’m doing. When I get really depressed I just grip it tight in my pocket. It usually makes me feel a little better. It’s my ground stone and makes some of the sadness go away.”

“A really nice story, Ken. Can I see it again?” Edmonds took the knife and examined it closely. It was a fine-looking object. But he was distracted by what Alford was saying now.

“We don’t pay enough attention to things in our lives, Bill. We know that, but we still don’t do it. Only after something’s over, or someone’s dead, or we’ve lost them, or it’s just too damned late do we realize we’ve been speed-reading life or people and missing all the great details.

“After my Nancy died, I decided to go back over everything we shared—the things we owned, the memories I had of her, the memories other people had of her.… But this time I gave it every bit of my attention. You know, I
re-viewed
it a hundred percent, like never before. It made such a difference, Bill!

“I can’t be with my wife any longer because she’s gone. But I can
know
her better than ever before—better than when she was alive. Whenever I pay really close attention to the details, I learn more about her all the time. I discover things I never knew or even thought about. It puts Nancy in a whole new light—like somehow I’m just meeting her for the first time.

“Sure it’s a substitute for the real thing, but it’s all I’ve got left of her. It’s the best I can do.” Ken took Vedran out of Edmonds’s hands and said, “A couple of months ago I wrote the knife maker and asked if he had kept Nancy’s letter ordering this. He returned it to me and I have it framed above my desk at home.

“See how beautifully the blade is carved? It’s got perfect balance too. This kind of precision work has to be done by hand. All the best things in life are handmade, Bill: knife blades, bread, clocks, loving someone…”

*   *   *

When Edmonds got home later he sat down on the couch in the living room while still in his coat and looked around at the place for a long time. Where was his Vedran? What could he carry in his pocket that would always make him feel his wife’s presence?

What was the last present she had given
him
before she died? And what was the last one he had given her? Ashamed, he could not remember either gift. But was it really important? If you live together with someone for six thousand days, so much is shared. Does it matter if you can’t remember every little thing?

With this in mind, Edmonds walked around their house. When he saw something unfamiliar—a book or a porcelain figure, a knickknack—he picked it up and tried not to put it down again until he could recall where the object came from, who had bought or given it, the circumstances, and how it came to become part of their lives.

There were many things—the blue and white porcelain music box from Amsterdam, the ball made of hematite her sister had given them, and the elephant carved out of amber he’d brought his wife from Poland. Had she liked it? Frustrated, he couldn’t remember. It was kind of a kitschy object, but nice in its way. He stared at the small tawny animal while trying to remember the details,
any
details about the day he’d given it to her or what she’d said about it. But he could not remember even one thing.

There were so many blanks; his memory of their life was full of black holes. He reviled himself for having forgotten so much about his wife and their years together. How could it be? How could he have been so careless? How could he have let so many precious particulars slip through the cracks? Memories of a genuinely happy life shared were the only real treasure Time permitted you to keep.

And what a deep personal insult to her memory to have forgotten so much! He lived in a house furnished with belongings that had decorated and enhanced their life. But now he could not remember where too many of them came from or why they were even there.

Humbled and dismayed, over the next days William Edmonds moved around his house like a tourist visiting a famous museum for the first time, only his guidebook was his flawed memories. Whenever he drew a blank looking at something, he studied the various objects until either their significance emerged or he realized his recollection of them was gone forever. He put all of those “dead” items in one corner of the living room and tried to avoid looking at them because every time he did, he despaired. He planned to move them all into a closet and not think about them until he had sorted through what he
did
know.

When a week had passed, a whole week, he called Ken Alford and asked one question. The two men had had a fine day on the bus hanging around together and talking about their lives. At the end of it they’d exchanged telephone numbers. Now after Alford answered the phone, Edmonds identified himself and got right to the point. “Ken, what if I can’t find my Vedran? What if there’s not a single thing I can hold on to and feel better because I know she’s still in it, like your knife?”

“Oh, it’s there, Bill; somewhere in your house, your life, or your memory, the Vedran is there. You just haven’t found it yet. Sometimes it takes a while.” The old man’s voice sounded confident.

Edmonds lowered his head to his chest and pressed the receiver tightly to his ear. “But just the opposite’s been happening, Ken: the more I look for it, the more I discover I don’t remember. I don’t remember
so much
 … it’s terrible. It feels like whole chunks of my brain have been cut out. In my own home I’m surrounded by things I neither recognize nor remember! But all of them were obviously part of our life together.” Edmonds heard his voice at the end of the sentence and it sounded scared. He
was
scared.

Alford was silent a while but eventually said, “Maybe the first half of our life is meant for living, and the second half is for remembering—or trying to. When you consider it that way, both of us were wrong to waste time missing our wives so much after they died. Because mourning does no good: it only makes you feel helpless and lost.

“What we
should
do instead is try to remember and then savor whatever details we’re able to dredge up from our past. This is possible and each time you do it you feel good because it brings something more of them back to you; like you’re rebuilding them from scratch.” Ken suddenly laughed. “It’s a little bit like making your own Frankenstein version of your wife out of what you still remember about her.” He chuckled again. “I’m being facetious, Bill, but you know what I mean. It’s one of the reasons why I always keep the knife in my pocket: touching it reminds me to stop regretting and keep trying to remember.”

While listening to Ken speak, Edmonds held the ocher-colored elephant and turned it over and over in his hand. He wanted it to speak too. He wanted it to recount exactly what happened the day he gave it to his wife. What
had
she said? What was she wearing? As Ken Alford talked, Edmonds closed his fingers around the elephant and silently mouthed the words, “Tell me.”

*   *   *

Josephine appeared for the first time after his bus ride with Ken Alford. Edmonds had followed Alford’s advice and tried finding his lost wife and their life together in everything he did. It was like an Easter egg hunt. In the most unlikely places he rediscovered memories or things about Lola he’d forgotten or knew that he knew. One afternoon while retrieving a jar of mango chutney off a shelf in the refrigerator, the sight of the thick brown condiment unloosed memories of the way she’d spread chutney on the bologna and Laughing Cow cheese sandwiches she often made them for lunch. While eating, she would wiggle one leg under the table like a fidgety child. She often did that—it was her unconscious way of showing she liked whatever it was she was eating. The leg wiggling—how could he have forgotten it?

Or once around Christmastime while walking down the street early in the morning, he’d looked up and seen a long white airplane contrail across the dawning sky. He suddenly remembered Lola loved contrails, and seeing this one brought her immediately to mind. Then Edmonds shifted his eyes a little to the left and on the balcony of an apartment was a small squat Christmas tree full of blinking white lights. It was exactly the same kind of tree and lights she would set up in their living room year after year. Edmonds was indifferent to the holidays but his sentimental Italian wife loved everything about them. A contrail and a Christmas tree in the sky at the same time? Suddenly he felt like she was very close and talking loudly to him, saying hello there, Pulcino—remember these things?

The little girl appeared an hour after he’d seen the Christmas tree on the balcony. Edmonds was having breakfast at the diner five doors down from Kaspar Benn’s store. He ate breakfast there every day and always ordered the same thing: fried eggs, bacon, a plain donut, and hash brown potatoes. Two cups of coffee and the check, please.

While chewing a piece of bacon, he saw the girl enter the place holding a small plastic Christmas tree in her left hand. She walked to his booth and without asking permission sat down across from him. She put the tree on the red Formica table.

Neither of them spoke. Edmonds’s eyes drifted between the shabby little tree, the room, and the girl while waiting for her to say something. She was nothing special to look at. She was pie-faced, and her expressionless eyes appeared to be green. Her lips were thin and pale. Was she smiling? He couldn’t really tell. Her ears stuck out from her head a bit. She looked seven or eight years old. She wore a brown parka half opened and a red sweater beneath it that matched the color of the table.

“This is for you.” She slid the little tree toward him. The branches and tiny ornaments shivered as it moved.