Epilogue (15 page)

like of the color red, the sound of jazz or rock, or glasses tinkling in the evening. They were gray people. Lust had been left behind or so it seemed. Now she seemed pear-shaped, nun-like, long gray hair, no artifice at all, like a woman who had never known love, but she had, if only of the not-very-long-lived sort.

We talk, Y. and I, about children and grandchildren, about her father, about her work. She has a collection of stories about to be published. As I leave her an hour or so later I am lighter of heart. My friend has returned to me. I call and make a date for lunch. On the appointed day I call. She is surprised to hear from me. “Oh no, I couldn’t,” she says. “I ate some strawberries and broke out in hives yesterday.” I had heard that before, years before. It was something she told me when she broke a date a long time ago. Then I had believed it. “Oh, well,” I said, “call when you are better.” Weeks went by. I am eating dinner with my stepdaughter and children in a local Mexican restaurant. I see Y. passing by. She looks in the window and sees me. I start to wave. She rushes off, turning her face away. I am in a discount clothing store on Broadway and I see her several racks away. She sees me. She rushes behind a screen and I see her furtively making her way toward the revolving door. She has pulled her scarf up over her face.

I called her again and we made a time to meet at a neighborhood place. “Did you not want to see me?” I asked, and then, as the café lattes arrived at the table, she told me: “I have a friend already, one good friend. I like my television and my apartment and I feel safe there. I do not need more friends. I would be willing to see you once a year or perhaps twice, but that’s all.” She is frank and

abrupt. I had always admired this in her. She has no time for the usual formal bows or the common gestures in the dance of public f lirtation. But she is telling me to go away. But I don’t let it go. She is an odd person. I, in my depleted world, am now less. I had hoped for a return of our old friendship. Am I innocent in this matter? I remember that H. and I invited Y. five or six years running to our family Thanksgivings. Her children were then away at colleges in other parts of the country. My children were still at home. We also had a few friends at the table. H. cooked a huge turkey. Before the meal each person read a poem of his or her own choosing, including the smallest of children. Then one year as we were clearing the dishes,

Y. said to me that she thought I was using Thanksgiving as a way of showing off my family, to pose my family, in front of those who had less. She thought she had been invited to be an audience to a scene of assumed family happiness and success. Were those my motives? Not in my conscious mind, but how could I have been so thought-less as to imagine that she would want to share in our Thanksgiving when she had no husband and her children were away? Was there some element of gloating in this Thanksgiving invitation? In fact there may have been a competitive undercurrent to the friendship all along. We are both writers. She more amazing than I, but I too have published. Was envy in the mix of the friendship? Was I reaping what I had sowed?

On Broadway I see her. She is walking toward me. A heavy woman with wide hips, she is wrapped in a black shawl and carrying a big bag. There is a small dowager’s hump on her back. Her shoes are sensible, heavy. She

doesn’t see me at first. And then she does and she turns around and walks in the other direction. At the corner she moves quickly across to the other side of Broadway; her steps are hurried. She doesn’t wait for the light to change. Perhaps a car will hit her or an approaching bus.

What I do know is that I have my own raw and jagged edges. This is a short story of friendship on the rocks.

• • •

H. and I had an old friend, or almost friend, N. He has died in Missouri. He was determined to be a famous artist, a great writer. Unfortunately determination has nothing to do with the matter. He knocked on the door for years and finally became a writing teacher whose students loved him, because he was wild and passionate about words on the page, and because he was funny, Jewish-comic funny, and because his religion was literature. In this he was a very pious man.

He played the f lute medium-well. He played poker with us, and would have won more often if he wasn’t continu-ally telling stories about famous writers he knew or report-ing on conversations with ever-shifting agents and editors. Many things had happened to him in the last few years. He had heart trouble and prostate cancer and he walked with a cane and his voice was soft and blurred due to a stroke, but bravely he went on, out to dinner, to readings which he gave and parties where he sat in a corner and people leaned over to hear his words. His wife loved him. His granddaughter loved him. His students too.

He died after a heart operation in a Missouri hospital where he had contracted not one infection but three.

I go to my shelves and pick up his novels. The books are there but unread by most of the public. They have serious themes that were common in our mutual youths, art as the only meaning in life, alienation as common as pollen in the air and sex as distraction from death. The obscurity of his novels is unimportant. The work of the writer is to write and most of us will be forgotten faster than you can say “eternity” and stamp your foot three times.

Many friends will mourn him. I see more death coming toward me. H. was not the last to die on this earth, in my world, among my friends and my family. My entire cohort will march in a line right off the cliff: a parade of souls going, going, gone. This does not come as a surprise. However, in this instance misery does not love company. I would have preferred it if H.’s death could have spared N. and all the others.

• • •

I have gone online to Match.com. I have answered their questions truthfully. I have sent in a photo or rather I had a daughter send in a photo because the technology is a little beyond me. I wait for a response.

Two hours later I have several responses.

• • •

I am dreaming now and in each of my dreams H. appears. He is holding the spaniel that we had before the children went off to college. The spaniel went blind in his old age and the children had lost interest in him years before. The dog’s eyes were always filled with mucus, which I wiped with tis-sue again and again. I walked him three times a day. In my

dream H. is smiling at me, or is it the dog that is smiling? Sometimes when I am awake I think of H. standing by the stove, sitting in his football-watching chair, pulling on his raincoat, searching the closet f loor for his warm gloves. Last night we were together walking the streets of a city, maybe London. We are late for something. We are lost. Then H. turns down a side street and disappears. I don’t see him. I wake. I sit up suddenly. The cat jumps up. He was sleeping on my chest. My dreams are not nightmares, but they are not comforting either. I am always trying to get somewhere I cannot get, or open something I cannot open. I always knew that you couldn’t dream of the actual future or find portents of the days to come in last night’s sleep. But I didn’t know that you can’t change reality, not in an orderly meaningful way, in your sleep. That is a disappointment.

When I was a small child I was shy. I remember adults telling me to speak up. I remember the dread of a first day at school, a birthday party. But then the shyness passed. I managed in strange places with new people but now with H.’s death the shyness has returned. I am going to a party where I know a few of the guests but have barely met the hosts. There will be no challenges there. No one is going to say to me, who are you and what do you think you are doing here. No one is going to turn their back on me if I approach them. But an hour before I am to leave for the party I think perhaps I won’t go. It seems too much to enter a room with many people I have never seen before talking to each other. Why would anyone there want to open their circle to me? I could stay home and daydream. I could stay home and read. I could feel safe in my bed with my cat at my side. I could avoid the cold winter’s night.

But I know that only a coward would stay indoors. I know that hours spent in the company of others are usually good hours. I like parties. I like to talk to people. I cannot listen to the bashful voice within me that trembles a little as I pick out something to wear for the evening, put on my coat and scarf, and check for my keys and leave my house.

At the party I talk to strangers. I introduce myself and join the conversation. I am happy. I listen and I talk. Everyone is willing to talk to me. It is a room of sociologists and law professors. It is a room of politics and feminism and old f lirtations. The guests have stories, divorces, children who broke their hearts, love affairs that ended in disaster, books that were mocked, academic rewards denied, illnesses borne bravely. I don’t hear those stories but they run through the party like ribbons wrapping everyone in a gentle companionship.

• • •

I am on my way to meet a friend near Columbia University for lunch. I walk past St. Luke’s emergency room. I pause. It is noon. The last time I was there it was nearly midnight. H.’s body had been placed on a steel table. His jacket and shirt had been cut off his body. His glasses were by his feet. His face was sunken and shrunk. I kissed him on the lips. I knew from the feel of his lips that he was not there. The emergency room was almost deserted. The too-bright lights cast almost no shadows. The doctors—were there two or three?—hovered about. It comes back to me now, a kind of f lashback, an unwelcome intruder. I stand outside the doors and seem unable to move. I move.

• • •

One of the responses I receive on Match.com is from a fif-ty-six-year-old man. I e-mail him back. I say, “I am too old for you. But you seem terrific, you will be perfect for someone.” He e-mails me, “I like older women. My last girlfriend was seventy-four.” I consider this. I have a peculiar prefeminist reaction. There is something unholy about a man who wants a woman almost his mother’s age. It crosses some invisible boundary. Is he looking for a Simone Signo-ret? I do not reek of powder and smoke and perfume. I am not so worldly or wise. I do not seduce young men. Yes, an older man, a man who is protective of me, wiser in ways than me, bossy even, appeals. I recognize that I am out of date. My daughters do not care about the age of their men: way older, way younger, it has never mattered to them. But I am embedded in old-fashioned images. Fred Astaire was not a little boy to Ginger’s mommy. In the movie screen of my mind I do not see them leaping across my brain only to pause as Ginger ties Fred’s shoes. Humphrey Bogart was not Ingrid Bergman’s son. Audrey Hepburn was never old-er than anyone. I e-mail back. I repeat, I am too old for you. Then comes another e-mail, a handsome forty-five- year-old, an investment banker, with a house in the south of France and one in Delray Beach, Florida. I sigh. I am too old for him too, and even if that weren’t so, we are not from the same planet. It’s not just that he golfs and I don’t. He wants an older woman. He says so. I e-mail him back: thank you, but this wouldn’t work. He takes my word for it. A chicken can fall in love with a goat I’m sure. The lines are not so firm and there are no rules in romance but I am a product of my times. I don’t want to dominate and I don’t want to pretend I am something I am not.

In my mail I find another letter from my husband’s ex-wife. She has written it on her typewriter; the ribbon has faded so I can hardly read her missive. There are now no typewriter ribbons in the stores. Perhaps she could have found one on eBay. She sends back my check for half a month alimony and insists that because she was to be paid at the beginning of the month she is entitled to the full amount H. owed her for all of December. She wants it all despite the fact that he was not here to earn it. First I name-call, “Virago, witch, leech.” Then I notice I am more amused than angry. There is a nerviness in this; one almost has to respect the persistence, bow before the madness. I see a mind oblivious to all but its self. Next she will drag me into small-claims court. An adventure I suppose. I will not pay. If it is grieving widow against hostile divor-cée, I think I win. But this is shooting fish in a barrel. Has she turned me petty? Am I small-minded or justified in resistance to this claim, a last claim after a long life of para-sitical subsistence? It is amazing how many occasions arise in which decisions need to be made that call ethics into play. I hear this minor theme again and again as conscience knocks against will, even in so small a matter as half the alimony check.

I am my brother’s keeper. But am I my dead husband’s ex-wife’s keeper? That is the question.

• • •

I go to lunch with a man who has contacted me through Match.com. He lives on the Upper West Side as I do. He reads the same magazines as I do. He once lived in the same apartment building that I grew up in. His wife has died.

His photo is slightly blurred but he doesn’t look like an ax murderer. He was a science teacher and then went into his wife’s family business. His children went to the school some of my grandchildren now attend. He grew up in Brooklyn very near where H. lived.

When I arrive at the café where we have agreed to meet he is standing waiting for me. I see on his face a look of deep anxiety. Is he afraid I am an ax murderer? He is a small man and looks like Woody Allen with a bad cold. God knows what I look like to him. H. was in love as a teenager with Ingrid Bergman. He didn’t seem disappointed in me. The man I will call A. explains to me that he does not like to eat in public restaurants because of the potential germs and unclean kitchen conditions. He explains that he needs to wash his hands three times and his dishes three times each. He rhythmically turns his head from side to side as he speaks. Perhaps this is a tic of sorts or is he taking a quick glance at his side looking for someone wielding a knife? His fingers drum on the tabletop. His foot jiggles. I talk about myself. I ask him questions about his children and his wife. She died of lung cancer shortly after the family business was sold. They had planned many trips they never were able to take. He describes releasing her ashes in the Metropolitan Museum’s Egyptian wing, which had been one of his wife’s favorite places. He had slipped a packet of ashes into a small bag he strapped beneath his suit sleeve. When no one was looking he and his sons let the ashes out into the air. In the Egyptian wing there can be no other thoughts but thoughts of death and time and the human wish for eternal life. His intention was to honor his wife. However, I am now con-