My Life Among the Apes (10 page)

I DIDN’T DISCOVER MY HUSBAND’s affair until the day after his death, while looking through his papers for a file he kept on family history to give to the rabbi for the eulogy. I found a shoebox stuffed with nine years of letters from one Tilly Mellankop, who had liked to put a drop of perfume on her girly notepaper.
Here, use this
, I wanted to say to the rabbi, shoving a handful of letters smelling like air freshener at him. I resisted the urge, but at the funeral found myself violently throwing dirt onto the casket until somebody took the shovel away.

Tilly Mellankop was an executive secretary at Holtzman Sleepwear, but had retired six months before, as I found out on phoning the office. She was a divorcée, a word I thought should be brought back into fashion. There was only one T. Mellankop in the Brooklyn telephone directory. I would go across the river, all right. I would meet her when I was good and ready.

IT WAS SARAH, MY OLDEST, who gave me the cellphone. And she who called me every day.

“All right, Mom, enough is enough. It’s time to come home.”

It was as if she was trying to reverse our roles. I could imagine her moving about the house, just twelve blocks from my own, picking up kids’ toys or maybe pulling things from the fridge to start dinner. My two younger ones were busy with their own messy adventures and called me every week or so. But Sarah, the one who tried so hard to replicate her parents’ life as she saw it, made me want to scream.

“I know, sweetheart. It’s hard not having me there. And nobody wants to see her mother enjoying herself.”

“I hope you don’t believe that. I’m worried about your safety. You could get mugged or worse, God forbid.”

God forbid
? She sounded like her late grandmother. “New York is safe these days, honey. And maybe you forgot about the home invasion around the corner from you? Or that pervert they haven’t caught who goes through open windows and steals girls’ underwear. I think we can manage a little separation for a while, Sarah. Your father was gone on his buying trips all the time.”

“Okay, fine. If it’s not about safety, then it’s about your plan to see that woman. That’s perverse. I know what Dad did was awful. I mean, if Gary ever tried, I’d run him over with the van. But Dad is gone. You don’t need to demean yourself.”

I looked out the window and saw two people carrying a rolled-up rug, like in
The Godfather
. “Sarah, you worry too much. I shouldn’t have told you about it; that was a weak moment. I’m not going to demean myself. But I want to meet the woman who was part of your father’s life for almost ten years. Who was expecting his next visit when he died.”

“He never left you, Mom. Not in all that time.”

“I wish he had,” I said.

AFTER I HAD BEEN IN New York for a couple of weeks, and had filled one notebook with poems and then another with revisions, I passed a lamp post that someone had painted to look like an erect penis and noticed a flyer taped up. It was for an open writing workshop at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. I knew about the project, which had been run out of St. Mark’s Church just over on Tenth Street since the sixties. The idea of attending intimidated me, but I was sixty-one years old. Nobody would expect much of me.

Wednesday night, as I walked over, I could feel my pulse throbbing. The desire to be noticed and praised never dies, I thought. Hand-drawn signs led me to a basement room where five women and three men sat at a table under fluorescent lights with their manuscripts in front of them. One of the men was the workshop leader. I figured myself to be the oldest by a good twelve years. I sat down and listened. Most of the poems weren’t very good, but there was a line or stanza here and there that had something, that caught the ear. When my turn came, I opened my notebook and read three poems one after the other. They were shorter than everyone else’s. They rhymed. They didn’t sound anything like me and they weren’t beautiful.

“To be honest, they kind of freak me out,” said a black woman with dreadlocks.

“Really,” said the youngest woman in the room, the beautiful girl with a round face and green eyes. “You’re pretty dark for a grandmother.”

Jackson, the workshop leader, had a North Carolina accent and a voice so quiet I had to lean in to hear. “Maybe it’s a good thing, to be freaked out once in a while.” Painfully fair-skinned, he had freckles lighter than most people’s complexions. I guessed him to be in his late thirties, despite the prematurely old face, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, the hollow cobbler’s chest. The workshop was supposed to be free for only the first session, but the next week and the week after he didn’t ask me for money. It was after the third class that I asked him out for a drink.

He was reluctant to talk about himself, but after a couple of beers he told me that his father sold farm machinery and his mother bred dogs. That he’d gone to a state college, married his hometown sweetheart, taught high school, divorced and moved to New York. He had published two novels, now out of print, and had been working on a third for seven years. His job, as a copy editor for a legal publisher, he claimed not to mind. He had managed to get a small apartment in a massive subsidized artist complex on the west side.

Me, I was happy to talk. I filled him in, right down to the box of scented sex-talk letters. “I keep putting off going to see her. I’m just savouring the moment a little longer.”

“Whatever you’re expecting, something else will happen. It always does.”

“I don’t have a particular way for it to work out. I only know what I’ll say to her when she opens that door. After that we can scream, tear each other’s hair out, or she can start to cry and tell me how much she misses him. It’s all good, as the kids say.”

“You are an — an unusual woman.”

“You mean for somebody my age?”

“No, I mean for a Canadian.”

He smiled. I liked the way he smiled. I said, “After you’re finished that beer maybe you want to see where I’m living.”

THE BROWNSTONE WAS COVERED IN flaking pink paint. My apartment was on the third floor and with each upward step my bravado receded. No number of protein shakes or power walks or yoga classes could erase the twenty-two years between us. I had no idea whether Jackson even had the same idea as I did. And it was an idea rather than actual desire, which I hadn’t felt for longer than I could remember and doubted would ever feel again. My hand trembled as I unlocked the door.

The young woman who held the lease was an NYU graduate student gone to France. I had liked living in these student digs, surrounded by somebody else’s books and postcards and Post-it notes. It was a tiny L-shaped space tucked in the corner of the building, a postage-stamp living room, a tiny kitchen in the bend with miniature appliances, a bedroom behind a beaded curtain. The windows gave it good light during the day, although now the red neon sign from the Mexican restaurant across Ninth Street gave it the atmosphere of an opium den. If I thought living here had transformed me I realized at this moment that I was wrong, for I felt my suburban self pour back into the shell of my body.

I went straight to the bedroom and lit the student’s scented candle. Jackson flinched as the beaded curtain strands rolled over him. Bless him, he immediately came up and kissed me. I pulled off his T-shirt. He was skinny and unmuscular and pale as an inner stalk of celery, but his skin was hot to the touch. He whispered in my ear, unbuttoning my shirt while backing me up to the bed.

This is enough detail, except to say that although I did not “finish,” to use an expression that I’ve read in novels, everything was lovely. Afterwards, he lay back, catching his breath, and then leaned over to kiss me again. “You are very beautiful,” he said, even quieter than usual.

I got up, pulling the sheet around me. “The last time I had a new lover,” I said, “you were two years old.”

“Is that what you’re writing down?” He was watching me open my notebook.

“Something like that,” I said and wrote
pale as an inner stalk of celery
. “How about we run across the street? I’m starving.”

“You know,” he said. “I might be younger than you, but I’m not exactly a boy.”

“I know,” I said.

“YOUR GRANDCHILDREN ARE STARTING TO forget you,” my daughter said on the phone.

“I just sent them presents in the mail. That should help them remember.” I shouldn’t have used that tone, but I was becoming a little impatient.

“I’ve been thinking. You could come and live with us. We’ll turn the study into a bedroom. It has that little bathroom next to it. You’re living in that house all by yourself. We’d all love to have you.”

I looked out the window and saw a man lowering cases of Corona from a truck. I felt angry at my daughter for treating me like some incontinent ninety-year-old and tried to understand why she needed to see me this way. Maybe there was something going on with her.

“Are you okay, Sarah? Is there something you want to talk about?”

There was a long pause. Then Sarah began to cry. “I don’t know what it is. I feel like I’m drowning.”

MY HUSBAND HAD BEEN IN the
shmatte
business, buying seconds — shirts with uneven sleeves or bad stitching, dresses with misprinted fabric — which he repackaged with his Penny King Clothiers label and sold to discount stores across Canada. Holtzman Sleepwear was one of his most dependable suppliers. I slept in their pyjamas. He must have met Tilly Mellankop on one of his frequent buying trips. He was a big man, Harry, with a high shiny forehead, a wide chest, beefy hands. It was his good nature, his deep and easy laugh, which won people over and made him such a good salesman. It wasn’t so hard to imagine a woman falling for him nor, in retrospect, Harry being flattered by it. He wouldn’t have had any bad intentions, Harry never did. In all likelihood, if I had confronted him he would have thrown up his hands and insisted that he had no idea how any of it happened.

Meanwhile, Tilly Mellankop, unlike me, had known everything — that she was the mistress, the pleasure rather than the obligation. No doubt she waited eagerly for his visits, Harry breezing into the office with a handful of roses bought from a street vendor, a box of chocolates. Even now the woman had what I was denied, the luxury of missing him.

The day after Jackson and I went to bed for the third time, I took the L-Train, holding a strap while it rattled under the Hudson. Then a walk of three blocks to the apartment house, a mousy-brown building with no doorman. As I was peering at the directory a teenager with a skateboard came out and I grabbed the door before it closed. The vestibule smelled like egg salad. I rode the elevator up, blood coursing in my veins. I was frightened and excited and sick. The cage shuttered and let me out into a dim hall, the overhead lights missing bulbs. Almost every door had a peephole and a
mezuzah
. Harry had walked down this very carpet, a spring in his step, a boner in his pants. And then I was at the door, 807. The Brooklyn love nest. I knocked.

The wait was long. And then, ear almost touching the door, I heard something inside.

“Who is it?”

Who is it? I hadn’t prepared myself for the question. I considered lying to be sure of getting inside but decided not to stoop. I wanted the high ground.

“Cleo Dunkelman. Harry’s widow.” But even as I spoke the locks turned. The door opened on a woman in a housecoat, wig slightly askew, face the colour of ash. She gagged and hurried back into the apartment. I heard her retching.

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. The oldfashioned telephone table, rubber mat for shoes, little framed painting of the Parthenon. Canned laughter came from a television in the sitting room. I saw the drawn curtains, smelled sickness.

I took a couple of steps further in. “When was the last treatment?” I asked.

Tilly Mellankop shuffled out of the bathroom, wiping her face with a towel. “What did you say your name was?”

THE OFFICIAL DIAGNOSIS WAS CARCINOMA of unknown primary, meaning the doctors couldn’t find the original tumour, let alone try to cut it out or reduce its size. They could only treat the secondary sites, first a lymph node in the neck, then in a lung, giving her a little longer and temporarily reducing the pain. Her health insurance was lousy and she was using up savings that she had hoped to leave to her daughter, even though they didn’t get along. She’d already had two hospital stays and didn’t want to go back. I rooted around in the kitchen and found a can of minestrone. Waiting for it to heat up, I noticed dried spills on the stovetop, crumbs on the counter, jars left open. I poured the soup into a big cup and brought it to Tilly on the sofa. Between sips she asked me about Sarah and the boys. She knew the ages of the grandkids. I didn’t — couldn’t — say a word about the affair. Instead, she suggested we play a few hands of gin rummy. It was evening by the time I got up to go.

“When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a list on the fridge. Things I need. Toilet paper, coffee. Down the block is the supermarket I go to. Don’t use the kosher butcher, he’s too expensive. If you come by noon you can take me to my naturopath.”

“All right,” I heard myself say.

“And maybe you’ll bring something to read to me.”

“Read to you?”

“Harry used to read to me. He always brought a book with him. Usually something he’d seen you reading. He’d read it to me every night and, after he left, I’d finish it. You have good taste, maybe a little hoity-toity.”

I shut the door behind me, thinking that maybe this was how she kept Harry coming back all those years. She never gave him a choice.

AS SOON AS I GOT home I had a little session of contagious gagging over my own toilet. Then I took a shower, grateful for the endless supply of scalding water in New York apartments. I didn’t want to go to the workshop, but I forced myself to get dressed and go. When I came in, Juliette was reading aloud a comic story about sanitary napkins.

Jackson blinked his near-albino eyelashes at me. “Have you got something new for us, Cleo?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He came home with me. I needed to get our clothes off and go straight to bed, but all I wanted to do was hold him.

At two in the morning I finally told him what had happened. “The woman takes it for granted that I’m going to help her,” I said. “As if having cancer erases what she did.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it’s still awful.”

“She never had an attractive personality, I can tell. God knows what this says about my dead husband. She’s got a daughter in Portland who doesn’t even like her. Damn Harry. It’s like he wants to torture me some more.”

He stroked my hair. “You’re in turmoil. This isn’t something you should know how to deal with.”

“But she’s the one with cancer,” I said. “That’s what it comes down to.”