Honeydew: Stories (5 page)

“Interdependent,” he corrected.

Her father’s knee gave him a shitload of trouble. She’d wanted to borrow the book for a night and bring it home to Camilla, who could have looked at the various two-dimensional drawings and carved a knee in her own peculiar style. But Joe would never permit the book to leave the room. So one day Acelle herself tried to draw versions of the joint. Joe was muttering the names of the facial nerves, probably memorizing them. Zeph’s book was open on the bed, and they were kneeling before it. Joe kept repeating his sequence, and she kept drawing. Then he turned toward her. “Lacrimal, lingual, mandibular. Aren’t you through yet? Ophthalmic.”

“Yes,” she said. She would come back to the knee.

They turned a few pages, and found the circulatory system.

And there it was, just what she’d been waiting for: a lumpy device with chambers and ventricles and arteries and atriums—atria—looking nothing at all like a valentine. Yet in one of those ventricles love got born, and then leaped to somebody else’s ventricle, from one heart to another, that’s how it was, it happened in every story she’d read. It happened in palaces and cities and farms and in the neighborhoods. You could be a princess lying in a Castle bed, you could be stuck in a wheelchair, you could be a security guard, you could be a woman with hair like a boy’s. The anatomy book did not identify which chamber was the seat of love, but the anatomy book was shy, like Zeph, like Joe…

“It’s getting dark,” Joe said.

“I’d better go home.”

“Tiptoe,” he warned.

Catherine would receive her useless chemical infusions as an inpatient—fetching her with an ambulance every day, meanwhile trying to slow the failure of the other organs, was too impractical even for the nitpicking insurance company.

“So I’ll die here,” she said, “of one thing or another.”

It was their five o’clock visit—the only one of the day. This was her most alert half hour. By the end of the first week they knew everything about each other—her long deteriorating love affair; his compliant mother, who followed Old Walking Stick from commune to commune, Zeph in tow, until she died of exhaustion; his difficulty talking to anyone who wasn’t on the table; her disappointment with the trajectory of her life. He described special places in the Castle. There was a memorial tomb containing a Civil War soldier in the basement, so big you could sleep on it yourself—he sometimes had done so. The residents’ crash room, where anyone with a free quarter of an hour could lie undisturbed on the bed. (“I kept
Treasure Island
under the pillow,” he confided.) The hospital chapel, so plain and undenominational that, when empty of sobbing people, it seemed like the waiting area of a railroad station at two in the morning.

He always brought pastry from Victoria, who saved it for him. Catherine managed a bite; after a while Zeph ate the rest. One afternoon, after leaving Catherine, he went into the gift shop and bought the suffering doll. “Preeclampsia,” he diagnosed. Victoria quietly took down the Not for Sale sign and wrapped the thing. Zeph put it on a shelf in his room.

The time came when Catherine’s organs insisted on failing—kidneys, liver. “Without the chemo I might feel less sick,” she said.

“You might.”

“I think I’ll order it stopped.”

He didn’t reply.

“What would you do if you were me?”

“If I were you? If I were you I’d marry me.”

IV poles were their best men. Zeph had invited Joe and Joe had invited Acelle. The justice of the peace ignored the ages of these witnesses—they could write their names, couldn’t they. Through the three narrow archers’ windows a pale sun illuminated Catherine’s pale face. The groom had remembered to supply the bride with flowers, and he had bought rings for both of them. His “I do” was firm, surprising everyone but Catherine. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was bitter.

He had signed up for vacation beginning that day, and as a family member he was permitted to sleep on a folding cot beside her bed. The walking stick stood aslant in the corner. It did conceal a sword, as Zeph knew. One night Zeph drew the sword from its sheath and swished at the air, back, forth. Catherine laughed a little. He reinserted it.

From the cot he held her hand as both pretended to sleep.

She died a week later of renal failure—more or less peacefully, as such things go.

Camilla didn’t become the rage, but she acquired a small reputation in the city, and she banished the crook who called himself a dealer. Victoria persuaded her to entrust her work to a small respectable agency with a good publicist. Camilla agreed, on the condition that her own photograph never appear and her disability not be mentioned. Pride, Victoria expected, could be overcome as time went on. Money came in. The Bahande flat was gradually improved until it looked like a home.

“But what about
your
ten percent?” Hector argued one day after dinner.

He and Victoria were now sitting on the porch, Hector’s painful knee elevated on a wicker stool. Victoria had cooked the meal for everyone in the Bahande kitchen—fish, a salad, fruit, walnut bread. Joe had spent the rest of the evening reading Richard Dawkins; Acelle, working on her knitting: a scarf for someone. Zeph watched Camilla carve a cat’s head for his walking stick; one feline eye had a congenital droop. Only Camilla knew that Zeph was planning to give the stick to her father. When Joe said he was going home, Zeph had interrupted his silent concentration to keep the boy company on the walk. The girls had gone to bed.

“Your ten percent,” Hector said again.

“I’m aging, not an agent. I’m glad someone else is doing that hard work. I’m suited to a gift shop.”

“You have been a gift to us,” he said softly.

How handsome he looked in his new shirt—though no more handsome than in the security officer’s uniform he put on every day.

“As for old—you are not much older than me,” he said, leaning forward but not yet touching her.

“I’m sixty.”

He nodded without surprise. “I’m forty-five, and my bad joints make me fifty. Come live with us.”

She considered this suggestion. Her sisters would never speak to her again—that would be a blessing. She was an experienced caretaker. The family’s nutrition would improve. She could keep an eye on the romances developing in the neighborhood.

“Together we can walk to the Castle,” she said. And he took that as the acceptance it was.

S
he had come south from New York City to live with a small family in a stone house in a flat town. There was lots of wildlife too. She wasn’t much of a naturalist, or someone who craved companionship, or a gifted cook. She must, then, be something of a fool.

The flat town was surrounded by low mountains and contained a small college and a river and a single movie house. The family was a decorous threesome. And she, Ingrid? A woman of a certain age, twice widowed, made rich by the second spouse. Member of several boards; at home, always a telephone call away from any one of her interesting friends if she wanted a brief spurt of company; possessed of a little den lined with books when she wanted to be alone. Admired for the arresting angularity of her face; and for her height (she was very tall and her extra-long neck added a few inches); and for the melancholy curve of her smile; and for her golden eyes, halved by bifocals, turning their gaze nowadays toward distant hills, though their usual view was the row of brownstones across the street from her Upper West Side apartment. She lived on Sixty-Third Street.

She
had
lived on Sixty-Third Street. Now, in this town of no account, she was employed by her first dead husband’s dead sister’s son. During the past decades he’d grown from a rangy quiet boy into a tall taciturn man with thighs as strong as the trunks of pecan trees. Now she engaged in not-quite-confidential conversations with his underweight wife, Lynne. Lynne was exactly the age—thirty-six—of Ingrid’s own daughter, a photographer out in Seattle with a wife who was also a photographer. Strung with equipment, the two women came to New York every so often. Eager, bold greyhounds—next to them Lynne could be taken for a rabbit. Now Ingrid played Sorry! with her nephew’s five-year-old daughter, Chloe, exactly the age that her own son had been when disease snatched him from her…well, wouldn’t that be synchronous. In fact, her little boy had been only four.

Ingrid missed her favorite lunch place on Broadway. She missed those interesting friends; they would do anything for each other, see each other through sicknesses and crises and losses, supply a word that had fallen through a crevice in the brain and try to patch the other cracks of their shared aging. They wanted her to come home; so said their letters (she had taken a vacation from e-mail). Also she missed her dressmaker, a genius whose designs did not attempt to conceal Ingrid’s long, long neck with collars or scarves but instead advertised it with long, long necklines, making it seem something that you might want for yourself.

Here she was, and not a dressmaker for miles.

The house was at the end of a dirt road. Its gray stones glinted, and a fecund trumpet vine ran all over the walls. There was a gable roof of slate and a chimney and a pale garden tended by Lynne. The dense woods pressed on the backyard; it seemed as if the two apple trees in front had pushed themselves forward without permission. The house had an old black stove in its kitchen—an inconvenient appliance you had to light with a sparker. Someday, Chris swore, he would provide his family with a house of his own making—wooden, of course, for wood was his business; porched, the better to admire the flowers outside; a second floor as wide as the first; and, in back, a shed for his tools, now rammed behind the furnace. And a real downstairs bathroom, not just a toilet on the other side of the little room off the kitchen, a room called Useless. Useless had a single high window and a sink in one corner. You could wash one handkerchief in that useless sink. Someday, yes, a new house. Meanwhile, Ingrid thought, the small deep-set windows with their lashes of vines gave the old house a knowing air, as if it heard your thoughts.

Ingrid’s living there—it had happened in an accidental way. She had been visiting last June—she came every season for exactly four days. Chris was then completing the arrangements to enlarge his carpentry and woodworking business to include the manufacture of wood pellets. He was converting a small plant a few miles away from the shop. The lining up of suppliers and distributors and the hiring of staff—that work would soon take almost all his time. He needed someone to keep the business itself running. Ingrid and his uncle had run a small leather-brokerage company. And so, seemingly out of the blue, he invited her to be the temporary manager; to join his staff and his household as well. “For about three months, I’d say.”

“Me? Why on earth me?”

“You are…wise.”

She shook her head so violently that her glasses flew off—very smart narrow ones, she hoped they hadn’t broken—and her hair shook too, hair that had once been the color of an autumn maple leaf but had now faded to wood shavings. Here and there her expert hairdresser had striped it with the old maple color. “Wise,” Chris repeated, with one of his rare smiles. “Worldly.”

Did he mean
old?
She sucked in her stomach, and her bosom swelled slightly. She was wearing a V-necked jersey blouse. It had captivated a number of elderly suitors, but paired with these jeans she’d bought yesterday, it probably looked ridiculous. When Chris had first seen the blouse, he turned his face briefly away…Did he think she was too noticeably available? She was still interested in men at seventy-two; perhaps that offended him.

“And warm,” he finished, pulled by alliteration. “Can I have you?”

“Oh, good Lord.” And she produced an exaggerated and somewhat tactless groan. “I don’t think so.”

He picked up the fallen glasses and folded the earpieces inward without touching the lenses. Holding the bridge between thumb and third finger, like a ring, he handed them to her. Almost handed them to her, that is—she’d been told that her eyes without glasses gleamed like warning lights. And so, warned, he paused, and pressed his well-defined lips together into a grimace of disappointment—no, it wasn’t a grimace, he was preventing himself from saying please. Then he gave her the spectacles. “Maybe?” he said.

Of course not,
she thought. And then:
Why not? A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo…

“Maybe?” he repeated.

“Maybe,” she echoed. But it turned out she meant yes.

To slip away from her New York life…it was as easy as stepping on an escalator. Board members would hardly notice her absence; real decisions were made by three or four people who met in a broom closet. She leased her apartment immediately—one of her friends had a cousin from New Jersey eager to spend a season in the city. She gave herself a farewell party on Labor Day.

The following morning, she visited Allegra. Allegra was not bedridden yet, but soon.

“Don’t look mournful, Ingrid. You’ve seen me through a long illness. There are plenty left to help me die.”

“I…should be one of them.”

“Perhaps I’ll hold on.” They wetly embraced.

And just like that, Ingrid returned offhandedly to her relatives, as if the visit would be the usual strict four days, not a lax three months. She took a plane from New York to a southern hub with a moving walkway that kept falsely warning her it was about to stop, a mini-plane to an airport thirty-five miles from the town, a bus. At the depot, the driver pulled her single large scuffed suitcase from the bus’s belly. “What an item!” Allegra had once said.

“Fido? My second-best friend.”

Lynne had wanted to give Ingrid the guest room she occupied during her quarterly visits, one of the three charmed rooms under the slanted roof—she’d been able to hear Chloe cry when the child was an infant, she could hear Chloe’s parents’ soft lovemaking now. The room would have been perfect for a second child, but Lynne’s hysterectomy precluded another child. Ingrid didn’t want that room. “I am no longer a guest,” she said. “I am an employee.” And indeed she was; Chris was paying her a salary; she was quietly depositing it in the trusts she’d set up for her daughter and for Chloe. “An employee of the woodworks, with household and child-care duties at home. I will sleep in Useless. Let’s find a bed, a bookcase, a dresser. Secondhand, please.” The four of them went right out and bought those items. What more did she need? Well, a mirror would be nice. Chris supplied one he had made himself, probably intended to sell, could sell, after she left. It was oval, framed in cherry.

The woodworking shop was two miles away along a two-lane road. She could have hitched a ride with Chris in his pickup, but at six a.m.! Anyway she liked to walk through the woods. It took more time. She’d discovered she was interested not in saving time but in spending it. She chose a longer route along a path of old-growth trees and new saplings and spiders’ webs and busy wasps. Brushwood guarded her way.

Then she turned off again, along a second path that led to a narrow river with a gentle decline. The water splashed swiftly through groups of pearly rocks, then leveled. She called this little plaything of nature the Falls. Alders by the side of the brook were dropping leaves thin as tin. Cylinders hung in tiny clusters from their branches, protecting the pollen of the spring to come. On the other side of the river the ground was green with tiny, ivy-leaved veronica boldly rising. They would straggle through the winter and in April greet the sun. And greet Ingrid too—she often visited in April, when the opera season was over. Nearby, unseen, caterpillars were spinning their cocoons.

She noticed one day that a black stone was awaiting her on the path. She picked it up. Partially smoothed and also jagged, veined with green, it seemed to throb on her palm. She slipped it into her back pocket.

From these private Falls, she returned to the main path and went on to the woodworking shop. There, as Chris had predicted, she deftly handled the business of the business. Her office was a little doorless room off the large shop floor. During her few idle minutes, she watched the men at work. She saw chests and dining tables and moldings in the making, and sometimes an artistic element—an elaborate architrave which would surround a simple window. She thought briefly of her own slatted Manhattan blinds. She admired the tools: drills and chisels and gouges and what seemed like hundreds of kinds of saws. She loved the planes that lifted a thin epidermis from a plank. There wasn’t much conversation on the floor, although one man, Danny, older than the others, sometimes took his break at her desk and talked about his beekeeping. He lived alone in a cottage and grew vegetables. He told her that the black and green stone now resting on her desk was chromite. The rough part could be smoothed. “I know a silversmith who could set it, and you could wear it dangling from your neck.”

My long, long neck…
But she didn’t say that. “I don’t want to tamper with it” was what she did say.

At the end of the day she tramped back through the woods. At the familiar black stove she prepared dinner with Lynne and Chloe. Then came the eating of dinner, and the washing up, and then Sorry! or television or reading. They had no stereo. She wanted to give them a piano but they wouldn’t accept it. She could will her own Steinway to them and then fling herself onto the Falls, but she’d just smash her kneecaps on the rocks.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, if Chris had loaned his pickup to someone, that someone drove him from the pellet plant to the shop. From there, Chris offered to walk her home, grave as a suitor. He pointed out things that she was not yet clever enough to notice: the hunting spider, which does not build webs but instead spies her prey and chases it and pounces. He showed her a toad crawling to his death while nearby a generation of tadpoles, some of them his progeny, sped through the water. His fingers lifted a low branch and there bloomed a miniature plant with a tiny dark flower: a plant that lives its whole life under a leaf, hostage to its own nature, visible to no one except some expert winged pollinators. Its story would make a good opera, Ingrid thought; no, not an opera, a ballet, a ballet meant for children. She imagined lines of well-dressed kids and their grannies lining up to see
The Lonely Flower.
If she were in New York she’d be obliged to take Allegra’s grandchildren…She was still squatting to peer at the flower. Getting up wasn’t as easy as it had once been. Chris held out his hand.

In the evening Danny sometimes dropped in. His bees were swarming, he told her. The queen mates with a few lucky drones—they are her sons, if you want to be accurate, sometimes her grandsons. Nature is no respecter of seemliness.

Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite. When she went back to New York she would feel that a different person had occupied her body for a while, and a different wardrobe had taken over her closet—now she wore only tees and jeans. The stone had found a proper home in her back pocket. The V-necked blouse had been shoved into Fido. Her hair was of course longer, its seemingly random stripes of chestnut—how clever her hairdresser was, how natural they’d looked—now surrendering to honest blond-gray. Brown, pale yellow, gray—she was coiffured in wood bark, wood pulp, and dust. Her glasses were permanently bent because Danny had sat on them. She could probably be mistaken for a displaced bag lady. Or a beaver, who lived among trees and water and other beavers, and feasted on cellulose.

In November she went back to New York for a few days. Allegra had died.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said the well-brought-up Chloe. “Come back right away,” she then commanded. “It’s more fun when you’re home.”

“Keep the chromite for me,” said Ingrid. “Rub it once in a while.”

In her ragged state, Ingrid attended the funeral and then went to Allegra’s apartment. Everybody recognized her except for one woman she had never liked, who glared as if she were a hillbilly freeloader. But other friends asked eagerly when she would return to New York. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. She visited a gallery she admired, and also the optician.