Epilogue (18 page)

And then there is my granddaughter. Here love rises, irrational love, reasonless love. It turns me pink and makes me wish that H. were there to see the child do only what all children do but bring me wonder without end. The child uses a marker on a paper, moves it in almost a circle, a doll is dropped from the back of a chair, a tower of blocks grows by my feet. I would sweep the child into my arms and hold her in my lap. But the child is a moving child, not a lap child, at least not at this moment. I watch.

When I come home, the subways running again, I slide into my chair and open my e-mail. My correspondent has sent me a very long article about peace in the Middle East. It is about the eternal treachery of Arabs and the vile prem-ises of the Muslim religion. I do not agree. I do not like this view. But I assume that because this man knows I am

Jewish he is bending over, perhaps too far, to protect my interests as he perceives them. I take the article as an offer-ing of friendship. I am far more moderate in my views and hopeful of reconciliations that may not come but must still be hoped for, if sanity is to be maintained.

The question arises again: am I capable of a new love? Or is it gone, that willingness to open my mind to another, even more alarming, to let the hand of another go between my thighs or rest lightly on my breasts? I lie down on my couch and listen to Ray Charles. I am old but he was blind and that didn’t stop him. He would understand my moment of unreasonable, unsubstantiated optimism.

• • •

The form comes from the monument makers. There is a sketch of the stone with H.’s name on it. Under his name and his date of birth and his date of death I have told them to put the words
HUSBAND
,
FATHER
,
GRANDFATHER AND PHY
-

SICIAN
. The words are there on the design, on the right side of the tablet. On the left there is a blank space, for my name and any additional words my children will choose. The ground under my side of the stone is still undisturbed. Perhaps I will take a course at the Museum of Natural History and find out the names of the strata of earth, the mineral and rock that lie beneath. I am supposed to approve the sketch and sign the bottom of the page. Also I am to include a very substantial check. I stare at the blank space. I am cowering like Scrooge on the visitation of Christmas Fu-ture. Only no behavior change, no reform of my bad character, no effort to improve my mortal soul can affect the sentence. I consider telling the children what words I want

carved onto my side of the stone. But they would be angry at my morbid thought. I’ll let them make up their own words; after all I won’t know or care. Being dead grants someone else the final word.

So I sign the form and place it in the envelope provided and put the stamp on the corner. One of these days I will even mail it.

• • •

I go with a couple I have known for many years to a fine Indian restaurant. The walls are covered in red velvet. We walk in under the drapes of brightly patterned tent with golden tassels binding up the fabric. We drink, we talk, we order food. Strange food, hot and spicy and sweet and cool to the lips, tikkas, tandoori lamb and chicken, naans, raitas, samosas. Old friends, we talk about people we know, we talk about the president of the United States. We pause to think of the war so far away. We talk about our children, what they are doing. We talk about our exercise classes. They talk about trips they are going to take to faraway places. I am enjoying this meal, these friends, this evening. When I return to my apartment and turn on the light and listen to the cat purring his usual welcome, I am not surprised that I am alone in the apartment. I look directly into the mirror and see my face. For the first time in months I do not turn my eyes away. Perhaps it’s the wine but perhaps not.

• • •

Islands of ice on the Hudson River and above them a heavy fog hangs. The water and the sky are the same color and impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Over

on the other side I can barely distinguish the high hills that line the shore and the apartment houses that stand there with their multileveled parking garages and their small terraces. I have dinner with two friends after a movie. He has had thyroid cancer, she has had breast cancer. They both seem well and we discuss the covenant with God, and how to maintain it in the absence of faith. We discuss how it was possible for her parents, loyal Communists until the day they died, to have excused the Gulag and the purges and the famines and the murders of so many. “Hope,” my friend explains. She loved her mother and her father. “Lunacy,” says her husband, and I agree. We leave the restaurant and find a coating of white snow on the street outside. My friends hail a passing taxi and disappear, two heads together in the backseat. Snow is falling. I open my mouth to let the f lakes fall on my tongue. This is not a dignified thing for a woman of my age to be doing. A man passes wrapped in scarves. He looks at me startled. I close my mouth.

Once, forty-six years ago in a snowstorm I had walked many blocks alone in deep drifts to the hospital to give birth to my first child. I was in my first marriage. I was twenty-four. I was carrying a typewriter back from the repair shop when my water broke. This is a memory that will disappear the instant I die, as my neurons will quickly shrivel and the synapses turn to dry proteins. It has no significance outside my brain. But now it fills my mind, the leaping forward of my life as my first child was placed in my arms, as I stood in the hospital room looking out the window at the park covered with white mounds of snow, the window streaked with blurred f lakes, the ground pockmarked with the boot steps of passersby.

• • •

When I am alone all day, have gone nowhere, have spoken to no one, after it turns dark I remember the way it was when I was a child and I had a sickness. I was prone to ear infections, coughs and the usual disasters of childhood. My mother was afraid to enter a sick child’s room. She was afraid of germs and of doing something wrong that might harm the child. She would stand at the door and wave good-bye to me in the morning and good-night in the evening. The nanny who attended to such needs would bring me lunch on a tray and medicine when it was time but did not stay to play a game of cards or teach me how to knit. Sometimes, being sick, I would sleep, curled up, my head on the pillows. Sometimes I would play with whatever interested me at the moment. But mostly I read, and I read. My mother would send books into the room with the maid who lived in the little room in our apartment next to the cook’s behind the pantry. The days had a particular length, like no other days. The hours moved slowly. My pajamas became stained with food. My hair was tangled. I lingered over the last pages of the last book I had. What would I do when they were all read? How would the time pass? The evening darkness meant supper on a tray would soon arrive.

Now sometimes that comes back to me: the same sensation, the same slowness of time, the same unmarked hours. H. is not returning in the evening. I talk to a friend on the phone. I call one of my daughters. I try to read. I write. Still the time is sluggish, the shadows persistent and unfriendly.

NOW I A M RECEIVING E-M AILS AT THE R ATE OF THREE A DAY

from my new Albany friend from Match.com. He sends me more soup recipes. He sends me a photograph of himself and four or five other children age around seven or eight. I look in the child’s eyes. The boy is wearing suspenders. There are a few girls in the photograph. They wear the f lower print dresses of another era. Their hair is curled and pinned with bows. He sends me another photograph of himself, now grown, standing on a scrubby mound with brush about his feet and a low-rising mountain in the bleak distance. He has a long rif le over his shoulder and an army coat that comes down to his ankles and a cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. The photograph is labeled in bold letters,
KOREA
. That is the way we make our men. There is an arrogance in his posture. I like that. I am interested in that and in the size of him, as if no wind could knock him down. Several hours later another photograph appears on my computer. This one is of a man about thirty or is it forty, in profile, smoking, and the smoke rises upwards as if the photo were taken in a jazz club, or at a party, or in the midst of a conversation about the meaning of life. Ah, he is trying to seduce me with an old photo of the way he was once. This is ridiculous. But effective. After all we are not suddenly seventy—or rather our seventy is an accumulation of all the other ways we were, our five-year-old selves became our ten-year-old selves and so on and on and if we unpack our souls the whole album appears and every

moment is a part of the following moment and we are all a continuum that includes all the ways we were that we have forgotten. Anyway that is my excuse for staring and staring at this photograph that does not lead me directly to the man who is e-mailing me, but is tantalizing nevertheless.

• • •

Perhaps we should talk on the phone, he says in an e-mail. We agree on a time, a day later.

He has sent me some strange e-mails. He seems to be on the Web gathering pieces from right-wing commen-tators. He sends me an article claiming that the weapons of mass destruction were in Iraq but that the delay at the United Nations allowed Saddam Hussein to take them all into Syria for safekeeping. A few hours later I receive another e-mail, on the inadequacy of the public school system and the need for vouchers and choice. I am not willing to argue about that. It is followed by an article against affirmative action. Which is followed by a piece on the bell curve and the lack of intrinsic intelligence in African-Americans. This is disturbing. I do not respond. “Why,” his next e-mail says, “are you not debating me? Why are you not coming up with counterarguments?” I answer, “Do you want a debating partner or a friendship?” He responds with a report on his trip to the nearby market, which has foods from all over the world on its shelves. He tells me he can cook a fine chicken Marabella. I think of it, this big man, with his almost-beagle dog waiting in the car, which is parked in a large lot at the mall. I see him in the aisles pushing his cart, gathering his spices together.

I think of walking alongside him on this shopping trip. I don’t bother to read the entire next e-mail that arrives. It is about the implacable hatred expressed in the Koran and the basic evil that underlies all Muslim thought. I’ve heard this before. I am suddenly exhausted. Has my blood pressure dropped to a dangerous low?

I ignore his e-mail about the Koran. I don’t bother to tell him what cruel and immoral deeds can be found in our very own Bible. I don’t want to fight. I have something else in mind. He sends me an e-mail about the lack of patrio-tism among members of the Democratic Party. I send him back an e-mail and tell him I’m going to the movies with friends. Within moments he sends me an e-mail that says the
New York Times
prints only lies about Republicans and slants the news away from the truth. I don’t answer. I have my winter coat on, my scarf is around my neck. I will be late if I don’t leave immediately.

I turn off my computer.

• • •

How important are world events between a man and a woman? I suppose it depends on how passionate the two partners are about their political convictions. I am not in-different or even cool. I am not a woman who normally can leave it alone and turn the conversation to the children or the school situation, or the economic news. I am more like a dog who must dig up every bone in the garden and gnaw it again and again, leaving the f lower bed uprooted and worms crawling across every surface. But I tell myself that people have reasons for their beliefs. Perhaps his fierce ones are a sign of caring, not a sign of a fondness for au-

thority and a respect for guns learned in childhood, a very different childhood than mine. I remind myself that I have known contributors to the campaign to exile snowmobiles from national parks who are cruel to their daughters and leave their wives on the equivalent of an ice f loe in the Antarctic.

• • •

I lose my leather gloves. I always lose my gloves. Each win-ter I promise myself one pair only and each winter I need more. I stop in a store on Broadway to replace the lost pair. I have a moment of financial panic. I can’t do this. I can’t just buy gloves as if money were infinite, could be wasted on a whim because I am careless and distracted. I look at the gloves on the glass counter, smooth, soft gloves. I could just as easily have thrown away twenty-dollar bills as lost my gloves. People work hard for their money. I am ashamed of myself. When H. was alive I let him worry about waste and prudence and caution. I laughed at him for his miserly, Depression-born ways. But now I have lost the silver spoon I was born with. Now I have to be responsible.

But not that responsible. I can afford another pair of gloves. I will be able to pay the bills even if I lose my coat, my scarf, my boots and need to replace them all. This is a game I am playing with myself. Money is not the real subject. The poverty I fear is the poverty of soul that is mine. I buy the gloves. I promise myself to take good care of them. I forgive myself for the fact that I am not always clear on where the pain is coming from and what to do to stem its onslaught.