Epilogue (22 page)

problem, or a loss of a job or hip surgery. But off they go, keeping their secrets. It seems as if the element of pride, the need to appear successful in all circumstances, affects the ties that link me to my world. I know something is happening. It is hinted at, but it’s not explained. I suppose this is normal. We f lashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be f lashed and now in drearier days many stay indoors. Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other’s outstretched hand. I need that far more than I need to be admired. I am no longer interested in reputations, the reviews bad or good that have accumulated over the years, the social scene.

I am the tiniest of stars in the most distant of galax-ies, burned out. In part this is age, and not the kind of age where one becomes a tribal elder, bringing wisdom to the campfire. The other kind of age, where even the expensive benefit invitations with embossed fancy script, which I used to throw in the wastebasket, rarely arrive. I never properly appreciated the invitations to places I didn’t want to go.

• • •

I have certainly not entered my second childhood in the Shakespearean sense. But I do notice that echoes of old events rattle in my brain. I wonder if I am especially vulnerable to unhappiness when I am alone because so many hours of my childhood were spent waiting for an adult to come near. Is there some interior accounting where the loneliness becomes more unbearable because it has been borne too much, a straw-that-breaks-the-back theory? Or is this absurd? If my iceberg father had appreciated me more

would I miss H. less? I doubt it. Maybe if my father had admired me more I might have a better appreciation of my-self now that H. is not here to hold me up when my knees buckle. However, given my particular childhood, I might have become a gym teacher or a blackjack dealer in Vegas or a suburban golfer with an unrequited crush on the pro.

I couldn’t resist. I opened my e-mails. Someone has contacted me online. A widower. He wants fun, he says. His screen name is PlayingisGood. I read his profile. He lives in the suburbs. He is interested in all sports. He worked in business. He spends a lot of time at his gym. He is not my other half that Plato said was torn away at the beginning of time. I don’t answer.

L AST NIGHT I WAS AWAKE IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THE

morning. The lights on the Empire State were blurred in a haze but the red light blinking at the top of the radio tower was bright enough. The windows all around me were dark but there were lights in the large construction site a few blocks over. I could see the blue light of a large television a block away. Some insomniac was staring at a pixel screen. In Elizabethan literature sex is called “the little death,” but I wonder if it isn’t sleep that mimics death more accurately. It prepares us for our absence. It lets us practice being not. That is an excellent reason to avoid sleep.

Let me name my dead. H. first and foremost. H. the

one that matters above all the others. But before H. there was my mother who died so long ago. Her closet filled with cocktail party dresses, at least three ball gowns, a host of black suits and a shelf with hats and another with shoes with heels as high as they could be. She had lost the use of her arms by the time the brain tumor caused the final con-vulsions, so for the last month of her life the packs of Camel cigarettes she needed had been removed from the bedside. I saw her head turn looking for them, again and again. She died with her makeup on her sink, her brushes and rouges and creams for moisturizing skin on the mirrored surface of her dressing table. She died with mascara tubes half used, gels for errant curls, boxes of pins for the hair, and a repair kit for broken nails in the event that she was unable to get to the manicurist. A ruby ring rested beside the monogrammed handkerchiefs on the shelf under the table’s long organdy skirt. She died as her husband’s mistress waited for the telephone call announcing her death. She died with her sisters ready to take the valuables from her jewelry drawer. She died with her daughter’s life in chaos. She died too young. She never knew H. She would have showered him with stock certificates and ties from Saks Fifth Avenue. She would have been content with him. She would have complained that he had no capital. She would have worried about his disinterest in wealth. But she would have liked him. I know it.

Next my father died, having remarried. His mistress got him for her own in the end. On his deathbed he told his illegitimate son that he was his real father and left him all his money, which had been my mother’s money but never mind. My father died unreconciled to his own death. He

died without ever having played with his granddaughters. He died without wishing to bless or be blessed. “What was wrong with him?” I asked H. H. would not use the words of his profession on the people in his life. “Not a good man,” was all he said. I pushed him. “What would you label him, if he were your patient?” “He wasn’t,” said

H. “Was he narcissistic, paranoid, borderline, all of the above?” I asked. H. said I could call him any name I liked. I did not mourn him, although I was surprised that he had died, as if I had not believed that he was human, subject to the same ends as the rest of us.

Then a few years later my brother died of AIDS. I didn’t understand him, his passions or his moods, or his fierce dislikes or his insistence on the correct pronuncia-tion of foreign words or his hatred of H.’s profession or his contempt for athletes as well as those who liked the outdoors or animals or trees. I knew he didn’t like me, not my mathematical ignorance, not my inability to speak Italian or Arabic, not my lack of attention to classical music. I knew he thought I was without merit and talked too much. I knew he didn’t like my children. He pointed out their f laws frequently. But his illness was stunning in its details. It was beyond acceptance, beyond grace. He had sores in his throat and lesions on his skin and fungus grew in his left eye. He was right to rail at fate.

There was between us the childhood we shared, the names we both caught in the obituaries, Sonnenberg, Bern-stein, Cowan, canasta-playing friends of our mother’s, golf partners of our father. In faded photographs we each could identify the party guests at long-forgotten barbeques and birthday parties. We both had intimate knowledge of the

unending hostility that raged through our home. All those things bound us together, even as they forced us apart.

H. stood beside me at my brother’s grave site. I could see his anger in the way he clenched his teeth, in the whiteness of his skin, in the purple vein that throbbed on his forehead. He held my hand in his glove too tightly. My fingers were crushed. He was angry at the illness, furious at the suffering it caused, and helpless before its power. H. did not like being helpless. He was silent for hours after the burial. I am left now as the last adult alive who was witness to these events. If I doubt my memory there is no one to confirm or deny it. Someone in a family must be the last alive. The question is whether this is the first or last prize.

My father, mother, brother are not ghosts in my apartment. They do not stand at the foot of my bed and glower through the night. H. is not hovering over me either. He would if he could of course, but he can’t.

When Aeneas f led Troy as it stood in f lames, he carried his old father on his back and held his son by the hand. For his travels he had packed the household gods, his protec-tions from a malevolent universe, despite the fact that his sacked city was itself evidence that these household gods might better be replaced.

Metaphorically speaking, we are all carrying our household gods, our parents on our backs and the f lames behind us are not the last f lames that we will see. H. tried to shield me. He did the best he could.

• • •

I am concerned about self-indulgence. It is so easy to fall into that swamp. I know ways to resist that error. If I use

fewer words I risk it less. If I bind myself to the rock of rea-son I will survive the inner storm. If I don’t allow general-izations, clichés, through the gates I can protect myself from bad manners, from most sloppy thinking. But if I slam the door too tightly on the emotions that roll in and out with daily tides I will become robotic, mechanical, unrecogniz-able to my own eyes and useless to anyone else. Mawkishness, murky, exaggerated emotion, insincere because it has been heated up beyond truth, mawkishness is a sin against the mind. H. would hate it. He preferred the Dutch masters to the baroque Italian. He preferred Mozart above all. He cried sometimes, at movies, at a child’s illness, pretending he was not, tears misting up his glasses. I always knew why he was crying. Which was a good thing because he would never have told me. I promise myself that I will censor the sentimental in me. But I cannot depend on the fact that I will recognize it when it comes. Self-pity is the graffiti of the heart but not so easy to avoid. I don’t want to wallow. But I begin to see that wallowing is a chronic malady easy to condemn and hard to cure.

• • •

I will never leave this apartment for another. I will leave this apartment. Both convictions are strong and absolute and exist side by side in my head. I cannot leave this apartment because it is the place I lived with H. His drawings are on the wall. His robe is still in the bathroom. He was in my bed. These are his children whose photos are everywhere. His books are on the shelves. His spices are in the kitchen cabinet. The Persian and the Kurdish rugs we picked out together the year we moved in are on the f loor.

To leave this apartment would be to leave him, although he has left without me. To find a new apartment, a smaller one perhaps, would save me some funds and bring me into my own place, unshared, accompanied only by the memories that can be carried in my brain, not those that exist on the table or in the walls. I read the real estate section each Sunday. Perhaps I should move to a condo in South Beach or a shack in the mountains of North Carolina. Perhaps I should move to the other side of town. This city has two rivers, one on each of its sides. I now live on the west, but if I moved to the east I would be closer to the sunrise, the river would run to the sea underneath the black curved steel of the bridges. I would walk by the river and watch the barges f loat by. I circle advertisements with a red pen. But I do nothing else. I have not come to a decision. I am not ready to go anywhere. I could not bear to lose my home, not now, not for another one, one that would not have the scent of my life, no accumulation of secrets told, no sorrows, just walls and f loors and windows. But on the other hand—

A man e-mails me from the match service. He has never been married. He lives in Park Slope in Brooklyn. He is a child psychologist. He sounds like a good person. He wants to travel. He likes walking in the park, so do I, but then so do most people, even serial killers enjoy a stroll in the spring. But he is looking for a woman whose outer age is a few years younger than mine. Perhaps he is older than he claims. I am not younger than I claim. I answer his e-mail. But why has he never been married? Why has he never had children? Do I really want to know the answer to this question? I fear it lies in the direction of depres-

sion or wounded expectations or anxiety uncontainable or medication needed or bad memories of childhood or war trauma and on and on my thoughts run.

How long, I wonder, does it take to know a man’s unspoken thoughts? I never knew everything that passed through H.’s mind. Maybe only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Maybe only the tip of the tip. But I did know that. He would not tell me if his cold bothered him. He would not tell me if he was worried about a child. He would not tell me if he was concerned about the tuitions or the taxes. Those were matters I guessed.

He had never learned to dance. When we tried, he stepped on my toes, bumped into me, wore a silly expression on his face that said, What on earth am I doing? He would have wanted to dance with me but his body wasn’t meant for it. His mind was too present. His muscles and tendons curled too tight. But when it came to leaning against me in the movies, taking my hand when the plot thickened, bending over me when I was at work at my computer and stroking my neck, when it came to making soup for me or watering a plant on my desk, his body and mind worked together.

How long, I wonder, does it take to know when a particular man wants to go home from a party, wants to have dinner, does, does not want to talk, wants to sleep? Longer than the rest of my life, I think.

• • •

It snowed last night. A light snow. I heard the scraping sound of the snow trucks on the avenue. I saw the frost on the windowpanes. I felt the icy air as it slipped in beneath

the crack in the window I can’t seem to close all the way. On the street corners snow has piled up. I have to climb over mounds in my waterproof boots in order to make my way. The harsh, unforgiving wind blows off the river and pounds on my back.

I have breakfast with my psychoanalyst stepdaughter. We meet in a café near her apartment building. All is well with her. All is well with her children. Her life is good, perhaps it is perfect. She is going on a safari with her family in August. I tell her I am having trouble working. Writing is something I have done all my life, one paragraph after another. Now I can hardly sit before my computer for five minutes. My mind wanders away from the sentence I intended to write to a blankness, a stillness. I grow tired instantly even at nine in the morning. I am writing these pages, but slowly, like a snail. I forget from day to day what I wrote before. I repeat myself. I stare at the wall. My stepdaughter thinks I’m depressed and should now consider antidepressants. Rethink my Paxil decision. But here’s the problem. I’m sure they would help. I believe in medicine. I am not for brewing teas from the bark stripped off a yew at midnight. I object to pharmacology only in its rudest advertising moments. The products are fine, the prices a different quarrel. But I can’t medicate a life crisis. I can’t heal a cut by sealing off my sensation of bleeding. I am tough as the clichéd nails. And if that’s a lie I prefer not to know it. I want to face squarely my own life story. Is this false pride? Is this ridiculous? I would say to a friend of mine who said these words to me, “Don’t be so moralistic. What is wrong with a little artificial well-being? There is no advantage to unnecessary suffering.” I think that’s true.