Kinder Than Solitude (9 page)

Moran wished now to return to her Saturday routine, which had been disturbed by her parents’ calls and Boyang’s email, but the news of a death, any death, was enough to prove the flimsiness of a calm life. The last time Moran had seen Shaoai was before her departure for America; by then, Shaoai had already lost much of her sight and her hair, her sinewy body taking on a dangerous plumpness, her mind no longer lucid behind her clouded eyes. What would twenty-one more years have done to that prisoner in her own body, Moran wondered, but did not force herself to answer. It was easier to imagine Grazia lying in a cabin and looking at the snowcapped mountains: a pitcher stood on her bedside table, the morning sunlight trapped in the still clearness of the water; an unfinished embroidery sampler of a Goethe poem lay next to her, reminding Grazia of the day when she, at five, had started to stitch with pink and white threads chunky alphabets.

When Moran had first arrived in America, people from local churches had paid her visits. She had replied, not as a mere excuse, though it must have seemed a glib one, that she did not have the imagination to become a believer. She knew now it was not imagination she lacked. The cobbler in Paris had lost his only son in a street battle; he did not know whom to blame, fate or revolution, and his confused tears stung Moran’s heart more than her own parents’ sighs. The woman in Bavaria had married without regret, unaware of her young neighbor’s desolation. She’d died when she gave birth to a baby girl, and, some days, when Moran felt an icy animosity toward herself, she would let the young shepherd steal the baby girl and
drown her and himself; other days, guilty about the violence she’d carelessly inflicted upon unsuspicious souls—for what reason but to make herself feel the pains that she did not allow in her life?—Moran would let the baby grow up, becoming more precious in the eyes of the brokenhearted man next door than she was to herself and the rest of the world.

Suppose one could allow oneself to be closer to the real world than to that of one’s imagination. Suppose she had had someone next to her at the moment her parents called, so that Shaoai’s death could be discussed. Right away Moran banged that door closed. To be caught at hoping—even if it was just by herself, but it could only be by herself—was like being caught once when she had timidly played a simple tune on a piano at a colleague’s party. A child, not yet four, not old enough for piano lessons as her older siblings were, came quietly into the room, where Moran had found a moment away from the guests. Hello, Moran said, and the girl studied her with a proprietress’ pity and annoyance. What right, her eyes seemed to be saying, do you have to touch the piano? Moran blushed; the girl pushed her aside and banged the keys with both hands, and despite the violent disharmony, the girl seemed to be satisfied by her performance. This, she seemed to be showing Moran, was how you played an instrument.

It was the girl whom Moran remembered now as she took her usual route to the neighborhood park, a grove that had not much to offer except an outdated playground with a metal skeleton of a train engine and a few squeaky swings, all rusty. Not everyone had the right to music, the girl’s eyes said, just as not everyone had the right to claim beauty, hope, and happiness.

An old woman, tightly bundled in an oversized coat and a scarf, waited patiently for her black poodle, clad in a yellow vest, to finish investigating a rock. Moran muttered a greeting and was about to pass the pair when the old woman raised her small face. “Tell you what, don’t ever forget the date of your last period.”

Moran nodded. When people talked to her, she always looked attentive, as though recognizing the significance of their words.

“Every time I go to the doctor’s they ask that question,” the old woman said. “Like it matters at my age. If I have one piece of advice to give, go home and write it down somewhere you can find easily.”

Moran thanked the old woman and walked on. Easily she could see herself lingering, listening to the woman retell the story of her long wait at the doctor’s, or at the vet’s office, or of a recent visit from her grandchildren, but such conversations with strangers had taken place enough times, in grocery stores and dry cleaners and hair salons and airports, that sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty.

When she returned, there was a message from Josef on her answering machine. Odd that more than one person had called her today. She waited until the evening to call back. She wanted him to think that she had things to do on a Saturday.

When Josef picked up the phone, his voice was frail. Had Rachel talked with her, he asked, and Moran felt her heart sink. Rachel was the youngest of the four children of Josef and Alena; two years earlier, when Josef had retired from his job as a librarian at a local community college, he had sold the house and bought a condo a few blocks from Rachel and her husband, as they were about to have their third child. Three years younger than Moran, Rachel had been the only one of Josef’s children to openly oppose her father’s marriage to Moran.

“Is there something Rachel needs to tell me?” Moran asked. She remembered her panic when her parents had called earlier. She had dreaded hearing that Josef was dead.

Moran had always known that someday a phone call would come, worst if from one of Josef’s children. Still, hearing it from Josef himself—about his multiple myelomas, new since they had last seen each other in June—did not make the message any less harsh. For a moment she was struck by the odd sensation that he was already gone; their conversation, a memory for the future, sounded unreal, Josef’s tone apologetic, as though he had erred and unwisely contracted cancer.

How long has he known, she asked, and he said four weeks. Four weeks, Moran said, feeling her anger swelling—but before she could launch into a tirade, Josef said that the prognosis had not been dire. Survived by a caring ex-wife, his obituary would read, Josef joked when silence set in.

How long would he last, Moran wondered. How long does anyone, or anything, last? A marriage that had begun with enough affection could have gone right, love teased out with tenderness where passion was wanting, childlessness never a disappointment, as it was not a result of the age difference between Josef and Moran but of her adamant disinterest in motherhood. On holidays, Josef’s children and grandchildren would visit, and friends—men and women twenty or thirty years Moran’s senior, who had been Alena and Josef’s friends and who had taken care of Josef after Alena’s accident—would continue their tradition of seasonal get-togethers, which they’d begun long before Moran had existed for any of them.

A caring ex-wife must be the best consolation prize, Moran thought, for a man to have, or for a woman to be called. Even if Josef’s children would oblige him, she would look like an awkward extra in an otherwise perfectly staged story in his obituary. For years Moran had been a regular visitor to a website that compiled obituaries from around the country. She never tired of the gently touched-up summaries of strangers’ lives. Without her intrusion, Josef’s life would be one of those perfect tales of love and loss: a solid upbringing in a
solid midwestern town; a happy marriage to a childhood sweetheart ended abruptly by a careless driver; a beloved father and grandfather to four children and eleven grandchildren; a longtime member of the local choir, an avid gardener, a generous friend, a good man.

“I’m coming to see you,” she said, deciding already that she would book the flights and the stay at her usual B&B after the phone call.

“But it’s not June yet,” Josef said.

During the past eleven years, Moran had visited Josef every June on his birthday, a lunch meeting rather than a dinner, because birthday dinners belonged to families, and he had children and grandchildren to celebrate with. He acted grateful for his birthday lunches, as though he did not know that they were for her sake more than for his.

June was a long while away, and who knew if he would still be here when June came again? The same thought must have occurred to Josef, and he reassured Moran that the prognosis was good: the doctors thought there was still time, at least a couple years, depending on how the treatments went.

Why, then, was he telling her at all; why not wait until they saw each other next June and spare her seven months of suspense? But she knew she was being unfair. He must have waited to break the news to other people, too—she should not expect to be among those called right away. “A plan should always be amendable,” she said. “Unless it’s bad timing for me to come?”

Josef said it was not bad timing at all. The hesitation in his voice—imagined or real, she could not tell—stung Moran: in death as in life she had no claim on anything. In a lighter tone she told him not to worry, as she would be out of his hair before Thanksgiving. She would book her return ticket for Wednesday, she said; other than Rachel, his children and their families would probably come and join him on that day.

“You think I’m worried about your staying through the holiday?”

“I don’t want to impose,” she said. Her decision to visit, she knew,
was already an imposition, but Josef was too kind to point that out. Her inconsistency, which she allowed only him to see, was in itself a love she had not given anyone else, though it was not the kind of love to have done him, or anyone else for that matter, any good.

“Ever so like you,” Josef sighed. “To worry about things you don’t need to.”

“You’re bound to people,” Moran said, though what she meant was that his time was bound to those around him. To think a person bound in any way—by blood, by legal documents of marriage or employment, by unsigned commitments to friends and neighbors and fellow human beings—is an illusion, though time is a different matter. In making commitments to others, what one really commits is one’s time: a meal, a weekend, a marriage as long as it lasts, a final moment by the deathbed; to make the mistake of going beyond that, to commit one’s true self—everyone has a story or two about that hard-learned lesson of giving more than is asked. “I can’t just come and ask to be among them.”

“Why not, Moran?”

“I thought you would have known by now that I don’t belong,” Moran said. That she had not belonged and could not blend in were the reasons she had given when she’d asked for a divorce. Blend in—what an absurd notion, as though a marriage ought to work like the hand of a masterful craftsman, slowly softening one’s edges and changing one’s hues until one becomes perfectly invisible. Josef, disappointed then, had nevertheless articulated that his conception of their marriage had never involved her adapting herself to his world.

But to mention his world, Moran knew, was to gain an unfair advantage. Having come into the marriage by herself—she had cited visa difficulties for her parents’ absence at the wedding—she had only herself to account for, while Josef had his family, which in the end had been used as part of her excuse to exit the marriage.

Of course, Josef said now, he understood her concern. She wished he would not say that; she wished he would be less accommodating.
She would get in touch once she had the flights booked, she said. He said okay, though his voice sounded defeated. Why couldn’t she be kinder to him?

After a moment of hesitation, Josef said there was one more thing she needed to know before she came: these days Rachel drove him around.

During her previous visits, Moran had not seen Rachel, and she’d wondered if Josef concealed their annual lunches from his children and friends. In their minds, she had been the calculating one: marrying Josef for security when it was needed for a new immigrant, divorcing him the moment she got her citizenship and a job offer. She imagined his having to plead with Rachel to drive him to meet Moran, guilty as a man caught cheating yet stubborn in his helplessness. “I’ll rent a car,” she said. “That way I can drive you anytime, if you need.”

Josef thanked her. “Till then, Moran?” he said.

A dread of the immediate silence made Moran breathe in sharply. “Josef,” she said, feeling, against all reason, widowed.

“Yes?”

She wanted to say that someone she knew from a long time ago had died, but it was selfish to unburden the news onto a dying man. She wanted to beg him not to let go of his hope, even though, had she been in his position, she would have easily chosen resignation. She wanted to apologize for things she had not done for him, and things she had done wrongly to him. But now, as he waited patiently on the phone, she knew that these words, true to her heart, would sound melodramatic once said. “Are you all right?” Josef asked gently.

“Of course I’m all right,” she said, and added that if she had any talent worth boasting about, it was to always be all right.

Josef ignored the meanness—to herself more than to him—in her words. He had never been a fan of sarcasm. “Is there something upsetting you, Moran?”

Was he asking if her heart had been broken by another man? He would, of course, offer solace, as he had once consoled Rachel when she had broken up with her college boyfriend—but how could Moran explain to him that what was broken was not her heart but her faith in solitude? When she had asked for the divorce, she had told him that only a small part of his life would go to waste. There were his children and grandchildren, his friends and his house, all of which had crossed paths with her minimally, all of which would remain his, as they had never been hers. Considering how excruciatingly long a life was, she had said, the five years they had spent together were no more than a detour. What she had not told him was that, giving up the marriage, she had decided to live in a more limited way: all she wanted was to have her mind and her heart uncluttered, and with discipline she had since maintained a savage routine that cleansed her life to sterility. But today, two calls had come, announcing one death and another impending, and what filled the uncluttered space but pain that the most stringent cleansing would not alleviate? She missed Josef; she missed people.