Middle Age (4 page)

“Marina, we are so very very
very sorry
.” Marina, breathing through her mouth, pushed away, managing not to scream.

The Thwaites were not present. Marina was spared knowing of
Thwaite
until a later hour.

The next several hours would pass like a delirium dream of distortions and quick dazzling cuts.

“Marina Troy? You’re here for Adam Berendt? Please come with us.”

Escape! Marina was being led away from the guilty-faced “friends” in sports clothes, one of whom managed, as she’d discover afterward, to slip into her hand the keys to Adam’s car. What had Adam to do with these people, why hadn’t he told her about them, a Fourth of July cookout in Jones Point? Had that awful woman been one who’d adored and pursued him? Marina was trembling with fury, at them and at Adam for his poor judgment. Wasn’t it like him! Impulsive, impetuous! A young man in hospital whites and an older Asian-American woman who’d looked upon Marina sympathetically were leading her to the morgue for the viewing and identification, and they spoke softly to Marina, preparing her for the ordeal (was this a fixed script? though Marina had never heard it before, she seemed somehow to recognize it) but Marina was having difficulty comprehending, nor was she in this breathless blinking-eyed state aware of the shiny corridors through which she was being taken; an elevator

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entered, and exited on a lower floor. Underground? “Adam?
Adam!
” She had only a vague awareness of someone speaking aloud. Possibly it was her. Wiping her nose on the edge of her hand. Rummaged in her purse but couldn’t find a clean tissue, God damn. And God damn why was it so cold here? While outside the air was warm and heavy as an expelled breath.

Couldn’t stop shivering. Adam had commented, sometimes on their hikes, Marina’s fingernails turned blue, she must have low blood pressure, was she anemic? and Marina laughingly protested, no, certainly not. She wasn’t a woman comfortable with being
looked at, considered
. She hadn’t a normal store of vanity, and that was indeed a handicap. She’d run to her car after the summons came to her, drove twenty-three miles in whatever clothes she’d been wearing, denim shorts, a T-shirt that fitted her slender torso loosely, bare pale legs and well-worn sandals. Tendrils of damp hair stuck to her forehead and neck like seaweed. She hadn’t glanced at herself in any mirror in hours and she wondered how desperate she would seem, to Adam’s critical eye.
Marina for Christ’s sake get hold of yourself
.

Or would he say, sobered by his near-escape,
Marina, thank you! For
coming to me on such short notice
.

Marina was being warned. Of what? The young man and the Asian-American woman in their crisp hospital uniforms. Warning her she should prepare herself? How, her
self?
Car keys clutched in her hand. Her sweaty palm. She’d been entrusted with these keys, and told that Adam’s Mercedes was parked behind Emergency. (How anxious they’d been, the cookout couple, to transfer the car keys to Marina, and to be rid of the nuisance of Adam’s car.) She was being led into a large refrigerated room.

The morgue. Stark lighting here. A powerful chemical odor. “Yes.

That’s—him. You have the right man.” Idiot, why had she said such a thing? Yet her voice was even and calm, and reliable. Marina Troy was one of those whose concern is to behave in a civilized manner; in a way helpful, not hurtful, to others. She was not a woman of raw emotion. She was not a woman to break down in tears. She was not a woman to break down at all. In public. Yet her vision had narrowed strangely (good, for she was in a medical facility, if she were having a hemorrhage or a stroke it could not be happening at a more convenient time) so that she was able to see little in the fluorescent-lit space except the man who lay motionless on a gurney beneath the strongest of the lights. “Adam?” How bulky this body was, how graceless. Yet profound. Had Marina ever seen any person, living
Middle Age: A Romance

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or dead, looking so profound? Adam might have been a sculpture of subtly colored lead. It would weigh, what would it weigh!—a literal ton. This thing both was and was not Adam Berendt, her friend. The indignity of being near naked, in strangers’ eyes! Marina had seen Adam in swim trunks, she’d been struck by his barrel-like torso covered in swaths and swirls of silver-glinting hair thick as an animal’s pelt, but at such times he’d been in motion; always in her memory, Adam had been a man in motion; and that made all the difference. Here, lying exposed on his back, no pillow for his head so that his head too rested flat on the aluminum surface, Adam was clearly “dead”; “deadness” lifted like a vapor from his ashen, slack skin, the sightless eyes, the mouth partly agape. Which of the eyes was the blind eye, now you could not have told. Both were nearly shut, sickly-white crescents. “Adam? It’s Marina.” She was whispering.

Though she knew that Adam was dead, yet she was close beside him whispering. As if some secret might pass between them, unknown to observers. Marina fumbled to take hold of Adam’s hand. So heavy!—she could lift it only with difficulty. Adam’s muscles were rigid in the death-lock of rigor mortis, was that the explanation? This man who’d been so special in life, unique, subjected now to the most common of death symptoms. And decay to follow. “Cremation. His wish was for cremation.”

Marina spoke distractedly. She was but half conscious of being questioned. “He must have next of kin, in the Midwest I think, or the West, but—I don’t know who they would be. I—I’m not the one to know.” If her questioners had believed her the lover of Adam Berendt, now they must be reassessing her. But she’d taken Adam’s hand firmly in hers, as if to assure him. Knowing his instinct would be to draw away from her in manly embarrassment. How mortified Adam would be, laid out naked like this beneath a flimsy sheet, and he’d not have liked to see Marina here, nor any of his Salthill friends. Any of his women friends. Marina’s voice echoed faintly in the room that seemed so vast, her vision severely diminished, focused upon Adam. “Yes. I can give you his lawyer’s name. But just not now. Can I be alone with him, please. Now.” Her voice rose sharply on
now
. This hand gripped in both her shaky hands: clearly it was a “dead”

hand. Yet it was her dear friend’s hand. The big, bruised knuckles, thick fingers and thumbs twice the size of her own, and the nails discolored and ridged with dirt. Adam was a gardener, a handyman, a stonemason, an occasional sculptor; a man who loved to work with his hands, and put them to hard use. You could see, in Adam’s use of himself, how a man wishes to

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pay little heed to how he wears himself out physically. Adam’s fingernails had begun to crack recently, Adam had casually complained, and this made getting the dirt out virtually impossible even with a knife blade; Marina had said it must be a mineral or vitamin deficiency, concerned for him, but Adam had been indifferent and changed the subject. “Adam. Oh, my God.” Her head was ringing. Her heart was beating strangely. (Maybe it
was
a cerebral hemorrhage? A gathering of pressure as of water building up outside this lighted space; as if, and for a fleeting moment, as in dream logic, she thought this might be so, she’d descended into a vessel like a submarine, deep under water.) The strangers in white had left her alone with Adam. She had the idea that they were observing her through one-way glass brick. She touched Adam’s face as perhaps she wouldn’t have done, quite like this, in life. His cheeks had gone slack. Crepey flesh beneath his jaws. Strange, he looked ashen, who in life had always seemed flushed, overheated. Now his blood was draining out of his face. Draining downward. Blood thickening in its own rigidity, as if congealing from a massive wound. There was a gash in Adam’s skull and forehead where he’d been struck by a boat (a rescue boat?) and the gash had bled, but had ceased bleeding; it would not bleed now; if cut elsewhere, Adam wouldn’t bleed; his flesh was “dead.” Marina hated it that Adam was looking so
old
.

She wanted to protest to the hospital staff,
Adam Berendt didn’t look like
this
. So old, and so ugly. Deep shadowed creases beneath his eyes, his bumpy skull visible through his thinning, short-trimmed hair, that slack mouth. In the corner of the mouth, something white and crusty. If Marina could coax a smile from him, for Adam was the sort of man you could tease, he’d be himself again, and good-looking, with that bold funny sexy swagger, but she was beginning to feel desperate, she could not make him respond.
Here I am. Marina. Adam, you know me
. Of course she knew that he was dead. Yet she couldn’t help thinking that, in Adam’s sly way, he was kidding; had to be kidding; breathing very faintly, but breathing. “Could this man be in a
coma?
” Marina spoke sharply, accusingly. She was shivering, her teeth chattering. Her skin puckered and pimpled in goose bumps, hairs stirring at the nape of her neck. Whispering, “Can you hear me, Adam?” Yes, this was ridiculous, but she had to ask, didn’t she? “They think I’m your lover. But who is your lover? I don’t envy her.” Often, Marina was angry with Adam without informing him. She was angry with him now for behaving recklessly. Stupidly. Diving into the Hudson River? “Saving” a child from drowning? Where were the child’s parents?

Middle Age: A Romance

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Who will
pay?
Adam Berendt had died of
cardiac arrest
in a “boating accident”? Wasn’t it like him: offering aid to total strangers. Bad enough, helping his needy friends. Straining his back, after a New Year’s Eve party at the Hoffmanns’, helping a drunken friend dislodge his enormous luxury Lexus from a snowy ditch on Old Mill Way.

When Adam remarked to Marina that he wanted to be cremated, not buried, in a simple, private ceremony, and his ashes scattered on his property, mixed in the soil of his garden, he’d continued to ask Marina if she would be his “personal executor”; and Marina, deeply moved, but agitated, not at all wanting to pursue the subject of her friend’s mortality, had quickly said yes, yes of course—whatever “personal executor” might mean.

(Seeing to his household effects, maybe. Assuming care of his dog. Oh, poor Apollo! Marina had tried, but she’d never been able to feel affection for Adam’s part husky, part shepherd mongrel who eagerly licked any part of Marina’s body he wasn’t prevented from licking.) Nor had she taken the opportunity to ask Adam about his family, relatives, who should be noti-fied in a time of emergency, where did these mysterious folks live; would Adam be leaving a list of instructions with his lawyer? None of these practical questions had Marina asked. Instead, she’d laughed nervously and allowed Adam to change the subject. She hadn’t wanted to think that Adam would die before her. (As if, considering that Adam was in his early fifties and Marina in her late thirties, this wasn’t likely.)
If you catch me and I don’t escape you
. These mysterious words were from Plato’s
Phaedo,
which Adam sometimes quoted, the lyric, long death of Socrates who, having drunk poison, awaiting death, in the company of his friends, had turned playful. But the dead are easily caught, Marina was thinking. The dead escape no one. “Oh, poor Adam. You weren’t ready, I know. Darling, I’m so sorry.” She was greedily kissing Adam’s hands, both his hurt, stiffened hands. She was pressing against him, absorbing cold from him, the terrible bulk of him, a fallen colossus, heavy as lead; she kissed his forehead, his half-shut eyes. She cradled his head. She stroked his quill-hair. Kissed his lips. Dared to kiss a dead man’s lips. She’d been going to ask him frankly
Do you know how I love you, Adam?
Though risking the end of their friendship.
Adam, why don’t you know?
She pressed herself against him. She was shameless, desperate. She passed out of consciousness, in a swoon. A smothering wave rose in her, again came the sensation of being deep under water, and doomed. Her strength drained from her, she was weak, falling. She was wracked with spasms of vomiting.

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She would strike the side of her head against something metallic and sharp and when they lifted her, to wake her, speaking her name urgently, she would discover that the front of her shirt was covered in a foul-smelling glutinous liquid, she’d coughed up the rank river water that had drowned Adam Berendt but of what help was this, Adam was still dead.

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“S, M Tell me: what’s the purpose of life?”

They were hiking together, Marina and her friend Adam Berendt, in the Eagle Mountain Preserve, north of Hastings-on-Hudson. They were not a couple, though often together. “Just friends. But very close friends.”

Marina understood that Adam had many friends, and he was a man who enjoyed plying them with sudden sharp questions. It was known that Adam’s interests were impassioned but curiously impersonal. You would never get to know the man intimately. But you might get to know yourself.

It was May of the year preceding Adam’s death. Marina was the only woman friend of Adam’s who enjoyed the out-of-doors and who was hardy enough to accompany him on hikes. He teased and baited her, he embarrassed her, but she didn’t mind. She said, “Do you mean what’s the purpose of ‘life,’ or what’s the purpose of ‘my life’? There’s a crucial distinction.” Adam said, “Answer one, and you’ll answer the other.” Marina laughed, though feeling a bit rebuffed. “The purpose of life, Adam”—she drew a deep breath as they were ascending a steep hill—“is to get to the top of this hill.” Adam said, “And beyond this hill?” Marina said, “I can’t see beyond this hill, yet. It’s just theory.”

Was it a form of sex, she wondered. Adam Berendt prodding, probing, querying his friends. His women friends.

Adam said expansively, “Beyond all hills, Marina.”

“Beyond all physical hills?”

“What other sorts of hills are there, Marina?”

Marina knew. Marina knew where this was going. She was a young headstrong dog, untrained. Her master directed her, with only his voice that was kindly, hypnotic, and tireless.