Calamity and Other Stories (9 page)

Now that she has become—in everyone else’s view—old, she is simply seen as asexual, a bony, wrinkled creature with a cigarette-weakened voice and a brief helmet of gray hair, without physical passions. To Len, back when she was in her thirties, Eileen’s skinniness was youthful, her cropped hair radical, her smoker’s voice sexy. One day, toward the end of their time in the kibbutz, he said, “I’m going wherever you are.”

And so Eileen is forever indebted to Annie for those months of planting trees and eating cucumbers and tomatoes and plain yogurt.

“So—when’s the wedding?” Annie is asking.

“Who knows? They haven’t decided if they want to do it in San Francisco or back here.”

“Too bad old lady Rivlin kicked the bucket,” Annie says with a little cackle. “She would have finally gotten to see one of you folks tie the knot.” She pauses. “What do you think bothered her more: that you weren’t some sweet Midwestern girl, or that you were an unwed mother living in sin?”

Eileen has to smile privately. “I was just so far from anything she had ever imagined for her son.”

In his mother’s mind, everything had somehow become worse than it was; for years she had Len meeting Eileen at an ashram, a hippie commune, a cult.

“And now,” Annie says, “here you are, about to become a mother-in-law.” She nods her head so that her eyes look wicked. “Isn’t life grand?”

They were together three years before Mack was born. Len worked for a city planning department, while Eileen directed an after-school program in Arlington. Summer weekends they drove to the Catskills to stay in a cabin owned by the parents of Len’s friend Steven. There was a lake just small enough to swim across and still be able to make it back, and they spent hours swimming and floating on inflatable rafts that were always leaking. Eileen bought a little watertight plastic case that she clipped to her swimsuit and in which she kept her cigarettes and a lighter. She and Len would lie in privacy on the other side of the lake until they had had enough of a break from Steven’s parents, and then Eileen would smoke a cigarette to fortify her lungs for the swim back.

“Time for a toast,” she says now. “It’s ten years to the day that I scared all those doctors and didn’t die.”
Decided to keep living
is what she means. But Eileen has no taste for melodrama.

She raises her little mug of tea. Annie raises her beer to say, “And quit smoking. Cold turkey. No small feat.”

When Eileen returned from the hospital, Annie did all sorts of things to aid her nonsmoking campaign and keep her busy and distracted: peeled carrot sticks, chopped celery, bought her Tic Tacs and sugar-free chewing gum, told her, “You
have
to live,” as if expecting she wouldn’t. But Eileen had made up her mind, and though her body’s cravings were at first almost unbearable, quitting wasn’t at all as difficult as everyone had always made it out to be.

This is true, Eileen has noticed, for most things in life.

When she gave birth to Mack, when she was thirty-six, Len was beside her, holding her hand.

A few months later, Len began to get headaches. He had never been the sort to complain, and so neither of them worried until the black spots crept into his vision. He had already had the first surgery when, one night in bed, he took her hand and Eileen realized that his grasp felt different. Weak, that was it, as if something had been drained out of him. Eileen let go of his hand and sat up.

“What’s wrong?” Len asked, and it was the one and only instant in which Eileen did not tell him the truth—that she was, for the first time in her life, terrified.

A CAT scan revealed an image Eileen will never escape from: Len’s body riddled with tumors. They were everywhere, undeniable. Within a day he could barely lift his arms. Then it was his bowed legs that lay heavy and useless. Eileen made phone calls, brought Annie in from New York, asked friends to take charge of the baby, listened as Len’s voice faltered along with his thoughts. She sat beside him feeling as if she were in a play or a movie, trying to concentrate on her role, not fully understanding that this was real, yet perfectly aware of what she was not yet understanding. Len didn’t seem to understand, either. At times he spoke clearly, but never about what was happening. He mentioned repairs he meant to make in the apartment, a check he had forgotten to mail, a joke Steven had told him. Eileen held his hand, felt its strength fluctuate and diminish. Her mind kept trying to adjust, readjusting, while Len daily became someone new.

His mother had arrived. She sat on the other side of the hospital bed shaking her head, her mouth a tight twist of disapproval, as if Eileen were personally responsible for this disaster.

By then Len was talking nonsense. Two days later, he was dead. And so, for a while, the apartment was frequented by their friends, crying and asking questions and hugging Eileen while she, too, cried, and holding little Mack so Eileen could take breaks to shower and sob. Annie ran around sighing and cooking heavy meals.

“Thank God for Mack,” Eileen kept saying in those first few months, as she waded through days that seemed to be measured in something longer than time. The world itself was suddenly opaque, as if set apart from Eileen by a thick film, something she could almost touch. Only Mack, with his cheerful, clueless face and joyful eyes, pulled her like a towrope through slow, unending hours.

Even now Eileen is often amazed by what it means, for so many people, to keep living: to awake each morning startled by alarm clocks, to stir spirals into coffee and shove feet into shoes. She has puzzled over the fact of so much accumulated time spent licking stamps, moving trash from one place to another, storing summer clothes and unfolding winter ones. Kitchen sponges, magazine subscriptions, doctors’ appointments, birthday cards, nail clippers, checkbooks. When she chose to live, that day at the hospital ten years ago, she knew that her decision meant, as much as anything else, all of these things.

When everyone had left and she was alone with Mack and without Len—that was when Eileen felt a new kind of sadness. Sometimes it was an enormous hole in her stomach and sometimes it was a sharp twisting in her heart. Sometimes it was a sudden pulse that shot through her limbs and almost caused her to cry out. Always it was a heavy ache in her chest. Throughout the day she carried with her this ache. Eileen was thankful for it. She was thankful for what it meant: She was living. Not since falling in love, not since giving birth, had she felt so fully, physically, aware of being alive.

The owner’s wife has returned with their change, delivered to them on a little plastic tray. It also holds two mints wrapped in plastic. Eileen and Annie trade money back and forth, rise, tuck in their chairs, wish their hosts good night.

Outside, the sun is setting. Now that the clocks have been turned forward, the evenings are longer and the avenue has filled with people, mostly young, making the most of the season.

“You have a good weekend, Eileen.”

“You too kiddo.”

Eileen finds her bicycle and is still working the combination on her lock when Annie calls, “Just give me a ring if you need some buttons pushed!”

Eileen waves as Annie turns and continues toward her car. From behind, without the frills of her blouse, without her changing face, Annie could be anyone, at any point in time.

The spring air tastes sweet, and the little peppermint is almost spicy on Eileen’s tongue. Eileen pulls on her reflective vest and rolls up a pant cuff. She weaves in and out of traffic on her bicycle. Only in the past year has she begun wearing a helmet. It was a gift from Mack—a number of years ago, actually, but at first Eileen refused to wear it, like those hockey players back in the eighties who, while their teammates were forced to don the new standard-issue headgear, skated around vainly with their hair flapping, exempt from rules, older and tougher than everyone else.

A misty rain has started, the delicate, light-scented kind that only happens in springtime. It feels good on Eileen’s face. The moisture darkens the streets and sidewalk, and as the last of the sun slips away, the streetlights glow. With gratification, Eileen chews the last of her peppermint. The rain is coming down faster now. Sidewalks glisten.

It was raining the night they spent in Blois, the first stop on their trip to the Loire Valley. This was the one vacation she and Len took together, in August, three years after they met. The little restaurant where they ate was low-ceilinged and lit by nothing but candles. With the door of the restaurant’s entrance open, Eileen could see right onto the street, where puddles splattered and couples stopped for shelter in little cavelike doorways of stone. She and Len sat drinking red wine, their knees touching under the little table, warm and dry, their pleasure magnified by the fact of the wet, cold world just outside the door, so close they could smell it.

At her building, Eileen locks her bicycle and reflective vest behind the stairwell. She climbs the stairs to her apartment, unclicks two locks, flicks on a light, tosses the day’s mail onto a chair. In the bathroom she washes her face, then brushes her teeth briefly, though they never look quite clean and her gums always cause the dentist to make all sorts of worrisome comments.

That day in Blois, they had admired the cathedral and the old sundial and eaten avocado sandwiches at a park overlooking the Loire. But when they stepped out of the little restaurant into the rain that night, the scent that greeted them was of autumn: wet leaves, chilled clouds, gray air. On the way back to the hotel, they got lost and rain poured over them. Len said, “This town looks better wet.”

Eileen enters her bedroom, unbuttoning her damp shirt. Before pulling the window curtains shut, she looks out at the street. There is always someone there, no matter how late, no matter how foul the weather. Sometimes there are lovers walking hand in hand, sometimes a group of drunkards singing. Tonight Eileen sees a lone person trudging through puddles, laden with heavy bags.

She watches until the figure has passed, then unlaces her leather sneakers, pulls off her socks, her pants, her shirt. She tosses her underwear at the laundry bin and slips into the cotton nightgown that has been washed so many times it feels like the finest silk. She turns down the covers of her bed.

Even now Eileen sometimes dreams about Len. Most often these are regular, uneventful scenes in which he is flipping an omelet or singing a silly song. When she wakes up she thinks, for a few blurry seconds, that she is young and that Len is beside her. And then the hollow stab fills her stomach. But it is much duller and briefer than it was decades ago.

In the hotel, Eileen shocked the owner with a request for hot chocolate. He was closing the restaurant for the night and said so, frowning. But then, a few minutes later, he arrived at their room with two steaming cups on a wooden tray.

Eileen takes a sip of water from a plastic cup and climbs into bed, pleasingly tired from the long day and her ride home with the rain in her face. She still wonders what caused the man’s change of heart, wonders if he somehow divined the truth. They were on honeymoon. But they hadn’t told anyone.

Their room was a tiny L with pale, striped wallpaper and a dorm room’s simplicity: wooden desk, metal lamp, nondescript chair. The little strip of full-length mirror tacked to the door made Eileen look even skinnier than she was. The bed was small and firm, the down pillows round and extremely soft. From under his thick eyelashes, Len gave her his roguish look. It was one of the private things they had between them, one of the few things no one else knew.

The breeze stirs the window curtains and touches her lightly. Lying on her back, she lets her head weigh into the thin pillow and clasps her hands together, one over the other. Anyone looking in, seeing her lying there, might think her a corpse posed for a coffin. But against her palms Eileen feels her pulse slowly pumping. She feels the warmth of one hand in another.

Snapshots

This was Jean’s first summer in Oregon and she swore it would be her last. The air was too breezy, too mild. She liked weather to match her moods: overbearing heat, languid humidity, wild summer storms like they had back east. I had spent the summer trying to please her, and now that the temperature had made it to the eighties, I’d suggested we eat lunch out back. I was carrying a tray of sandwiches across our lawn—a hill of dry weeds, brown and stubbled as a hedgehog’s back. The grass crunched under my feet. Eli always cut it too short.

Jean was already comfortable on a cotton blanket, propped up on one arm, eating a nectarine. It was a perfect picture, her tan shoulders above the pale pink blanket, the sunrays stroking her sleek brown hair. I couldn’t see her eyes through her black sunglasses. I thought she was looking at me, and I smiled. But she was looking at our back porch. She said, “Jesus, Geoff. What an ugly house.”

She could talk that way because she didn’t own it. Eli did, and took painstakingly destructive care of it. In fact, he was in it that very moment, tampering with our toilet. He liked to stop by and let himself in. That day we had revealed to him, reluctantly, that the toilet was leaking. He was our landlord, after all. But Eli had a way of standing in front of broken appliances and scratching his head.

Jean had said under her breath, “Some people call the
plumber.
” But that wasn’t Eli’s style. He fancied himself a handyman even if no one else did. He would make surprise visits to install window shades or light fixtures, and after he left we would have to replace sockets with the proper bulbs, or take down the blinds and turn them around the way they were meant to be.

Jean would never forgive me for having rented a place full of jammed windows and faulty wiring. I didn’t let on what I had come to suspect—that Eli had constructed the entire house himself. On a shelf in the basement I’d found a well-ruffled manual,
The Weekend Carpenter Builds His Own Home.
I accepted the possibility that our living quarters were entirely the product of Eli’s handiwork. There were the too-steep stairs, the odd-shaped kitchen, the awkward little balcony that protruded from the face of the house like a large mole. We were surrounded by blunders. Cabinets and drawers opened into one another, and locks turned backward, but how was a prospective tenant to notice such quirks? I was too excited at the idea that Jean and I were actually moving in together; I’d never lived with a girlfriend before. I’d relocated to Oregon for a job I’d started in March, back when Jean was still finishing grad school, and so the house hadn’t had to pass muster with her. I was awed by the view of Mount Hood, by the sloping backyard, by the big rooms and low rent. Eli seemed dependable, and the view of the city, over the green hills of the Northwest, was spectacular.

Of course, being in the hills meant we had poor radio and TV reception. More precisely, we received the Christian station and nothing else. Jean was patient about this. She was comforted by the fact that we had never signed a lease or given any sort of deposit. Eli, and all of Oregon, it seemed, worked on an honor system.

On the first floor of the house, in a smaller apartment, lived a man named Stefan. Neither his nationality nor his line of work was clear, and this made Jean nervous. Sometimes she put her ear to the floorboards to try to listen in on his conversations. All she managed to pick up were the smells of what he cooked— ground beef, garlic, burnt toast. It seemed normal enough to me, but Jean was suspicious; large, muscular men occasionally came by to drive Stefan places. I hadn’t noticed them until Jean moved in.

She was twenty-five. We’d spent the past year long-distance, with me still in California and Jean in New York, where she had been invited to join a prestigious art program. Now was the first time in her life that she was no longer a student, and though she had complained about the university until the moment they handed her an M.F.A., she was suddenly sure that she didn’t belong anywhere else. She had no job. She was an artist, a painter, and though she had been a young star back east, nobody knew her out here. She convinced herself her work was no good, said she had to start from scratch. She spent hours each day on a project that she insisted would be better than anything she had ever done. That big piece of taut canvas was the one thing she cared about. She sat on the warped floor of the screened-in back porch mixing thick oil paints into glistening peaks, and then she would burst out with how bad it all was, how she couldn’t create in this weather, how there wasn’t enough sun, how the floor sloped.

But that Sunday she looked happy, lying on the pale pink blanket. This was the way it was meant to be, I thought, and for the first time all summer I felt that something good was in our grasp. Jean said, “What an ugly house,” and I wanted to show camaraderie. I looked at the lopsided porch, its thickly layered paint and splintered steps, and agreed. Jean said, as an afterthought, “Eli needs to raise the blade on the lawn mower.”

We ate the sandwiches and fed the crumbs to the dead grass. Jean laid her head in my lap. I massaged her scalp. I was still under the impression that I could somehow make her happy.

Later I sneaked into the garage and changed the blade on the lawn mower.

I came home from work to find Jean listening to the radio; she liked to laugh at the talk shows. I gave her a kiss while, in quick confident motions, she shucked ears of white corn. “You’ve got to listen to this shit,” she said.

A husband had called in to discuss how his wife had begun to read crime novels for hours every night, and how he suspected she was trying to avoid him. The radio announcer suggested he look to God for help and provided a sample prayer.

I said, “It’s also kind of sad.”

Jean kissed the back of my neck and pinched my rear. She was good at moves like that—fast, loving ones that came out of nowhere and that twenty seconds later you’d swear you must have imagined.

There was a knock on the kitchen door. Stefan was standing on the back porch among Jean’s canvases and supplies, eyeing her work skeptically.

The painting was there, the one she had so much hope for. It was a large canvas on which she made gradual additions of color so subtle that I at times couldn’t even tell what changes had been made. I felt useless that way. In the three years that we had been together, my competency as an appreciator of art had never seemed to matter, but now here was Jean, away from her New York art school friends and from the people she had known in California; I felt it my duty to encourage her.

Stefan nodded at the broad canvas politely when he saw me. Jean was putting a pot of water on to boil. I opened the flimsy wooden door and greeted Stefan. He always looked dapper, in a European way—his jeans ironed, his shoes leather and polished. I don’t think it had occurred to me that he was handsome. He said, in an unplaceable accent, “I was wondering if I could borrow your wife.”

“Excuse me?” I glanced at Jean, though we weren’t even married. She was still listening to the radio, laughing at someone’s problems.

“A knife,” Stefan said, patiently. “May I borrow one of your knives?”

Jean said, “Hi there, Stefan. Come on in.”

I told her, “Stefan just needs to borrow a knife.”

“Well, sure, though I don’t know how good any of them are. I mean, who knows when any of them were last sharpened.”

“What kind of a knife would you like?” I asked Stefan, hoping to intone that we had no qualms when it came to lending sharp implements to dubious neighbors.

“A big one would be preferable.”

“A big one,” repeated Jean. “Well, I’d say this is the biggest we’ve got.” She pulled a wide silver knife from the slanted wood block.

“That’s perfect,” said Stefan. “I appreciate it.”

Jean handed him the knife, and it’s that image that sticks in my mind, the way she passed it to him, blade down, with wavering prudence. It was as though, careful as she was with it, at any minute she might betray herself and do some sort of damage. She had a sudden frightened look, as if she too had just recognized that possibility in herself. I can still see Jean’s muscular arm outstretched. For a split second I truly believed the knife would never make it into Stefan’s grip. But Jean looked Stefan in the eye and handed it over. Stefan thanked us and said, “I’ll bring it right back.”

I was in a good mood, because I’d figured out Stefan’s profession. We’d just passed each other near the firm where I worked. When I asked what he was doing downtown, Stefan said, “I work here,” and pointed to the building behind him. “I’m a detective.”

The building was one of the older ones, with a respectable brick façade and a touch of grime. There was no signage to indicate its use, but Stefan was proud to talk about it. It was a bond company he worked for. He was a bounty hunter. He described how he tracked down people who had skipped bail and, opening the door of a car parked at the curb, took out a pair of handcuffs and a white bulletproof vest. I worried he might blow his cover, but I guess he didn’t have one.

That’s what I was thinking about on my way to meet Jean. She had found a job as a part-time graphic designer. It paid peanuts, and she alternately liked and hated it. Some nights we would meet at a small bar we liked, where the drinks were a little too strong.

When I walked in, I couldn’t find her. I sat on a less-than-clean bar stool and chatted with the bartender. He was new, and he talked the sort of never-ending babble that bartenders usually just listen to. A petite blonde woman came and sat on the stool next to me.

I was looking for a way out of the bartender’s soliloquy. He was going on about the various women who had done him wrong, and the blonde was nodding along, as if she knew exactly what he meant. “So you know how it is, do you?” I asked her. That was how it started, the blonde woman checking me out, me checking her out. It felt good to flirt. For a moment I feared Jean would see us—me leaning into the concave of the blonde woman’s body, the tips of her long hair grazing my arm. And then I realized that I wanted her to see.

She walked in briskly, so that I saw her easily from the corner of my eye. I touched the woman’s back, I don’t know why. Briefly, but long enough. Jean saw.

She didn’t stop short, catch herself mid-step, look shocked, or stare at the blonde woman. None of that. Jean just raised her eyebrows. Her eyelids slid down a bit over her dark eyes in that amused way they had. I doubt she’d remember, but it was the look she had given me when I asked her, in the crowded coffee shop the day we met, if I might join her at her table. That’s the picture I see in my mental scrapbook. That same skeptical look.

And I was proud when Jean walked up to us confidently and gave me an equally confident kiss. The blonde woman made herself invisible in a showy way and left the bar soon after. Jean refused to mention her, and instead we talked about good news: Jean’s work was being considered for an exhibit.

“In Miriam Choi’s gallery. She saw some of my stuff in New York last year, and she’s interested. She’s going to come over and have a look. I told her I was almost done with
Happy Family.
”

“What’s that?”

“My painting. The one you bump into every time you walk through the porch. It’s called
Happy Family.
I have to finish it. She’s going to try to review my stuff next month sometime. I’m so lucky she happened to go to my show last year.”

It was good to see Jean enthusiastic. The painting could bring that out in her, and I was sure that if it would just turn out the way she hoped, if she could just be pleased with the outcome, she would feel good about herself and we would be happy.

We sat at the bar relishing our mutual contentment. For about two hours we were having a good time, and for the next two hours we were still having a good time but in a fearful way, knowing it would have to end. We were determined not to let it. We kept eating bar food and drinking.

When it was time for the place to close, Jean said she didn’t want to go home. “Sometimes that house just gives me the creeps. For all I know, Eli’s there drilling holes or something.” Then she said, “Sometimes I just can’t bear walking into that house.” So I told her, “Fine, let’s not go home.”

We went to one of the parks, I don’t remember which one; there were a lot like that, with a basketball court, a baseball field, benches, homeless people, and restrooms that smelled. We made out on a bench. It must have been 3 a.m.

We slept there, under a tree in the park. It was chilly, and the grass was damp, and the tree roots were like knuckles in my side. Tucked into each other’s arms, we yawned at the night dew and shivered ourselves to sleep. In my dreams I saw Jean looking at me the way she had in the bar, the way she had on the day we met. When we woke up it was six, and people had already begun jogging and walking dogs. Jean didn’t complain when I suggested we go home.

I was chopping a large onion and having trouble; Stefan still had our big knife, and neither Jean nor I felt like asking him about it. A Styrofoam coffee cup, an empty doughnut box, and a sports magazine lay on the kitchen table. They weren’t ours. Somebody had been in our house. At first we’d assumed it was Eli, though there were no signs of immediate damage. We turned on faucets with caution, looked warily for nails underfoot. We’d briefly wondered if it had to do with Stefan, but he didn’t seem the doughnut-eating sort.

Though I’d told her all I knew about him, Jean still thought Stefan suspicious. She insisted she had heard odd noises coming from below—a sound like a dull saw going back and forth. She talked about it enough that I myself had begun to wonder: perhaps Stefan posed some sort of threat.

But for the moment we let Stefan off the hook, abandoned the investigation. We had other things on our minds. Jean had just finished throwing a tantrum—brief and fierce as a tropical storm. No specific reason, just the general state of our life together. Just my humming or putting a dish in the wrong cabinet could set her off. We were growing tired of each other, though at the time we wouldn’t have even considered that a possibility.