Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (14 page)

She pointed with her long knife toward a cabinet over the refrigerator, where I found sesame oil and soy sauce. "I haven't done stir-fry in a long time," she said. "Mostly I bake. But lately I've realized I'm not fond of baking."

I didn't have much to add on the subject—my mother and I were microwave chefs—but I did like the fresh scent of chopped vegetables and the spit of the hot skillet, the oily humidity in the room, the salt rising and settling on my skin.

Alicia pushed the onions around with a wooden spoon.

"You could cut the mushrooms," she said.

She added red and green peppers, chopped garlic, thin strips of chicken.

I sliced the mushrooms thick, lightly touching her arm with the cutting board as I handed it to her.

"Thank you," she said with a small smile.

Since the dining room table was covered with files and papers and photograph albums, we put our plates on top of one of the long cardboard boxes in the living room. I turned off the standing lamp by the window and Alicia set two votive candles between our plates.

She poured what remained of the wine, filling my glass almost to the top.

"What should we toast?" I asked.

Alicia sat cross-legged on the floor. I sat sideways, my legs swung out.

"I'm not sure," she said. "You tell me."

Her eyes reflected the gold flickering of the candlelight, the obscured outline of my own face across the makeshift table.

"To finding a nice place for all these boxes," I said.

After we finished eating, we opened a second bottle of wine and lay on our backs on either side of the long packing box. Blades of shadow intersected on the walls.

"I want a house with higher ceilings," Alicia was saying. "Low ceilings close me in."

"I'd like to own a lodge." I turned my head to look at her. "A lodge at the base of some mountain out west with a huge stone fireplace, old skis and snowshoes and bear heads along the walls."

"I like bears," she said, sitting up, suddenly blowing out the votives. "Should we watch the movie now?"

I followed her through the kitchen to the other half of the house, where she led me by the hand into her and Arthur's bedroom.

I thought she might kiss me. We were that close.

The bedroom had blue-bordered wallpaper, heavy furniture, and shag carpeting. Flattened boxes leaned against the closet door. Packed boxes were lined up next to the bed, a four-poster with a lace canopy and small steps climbing up one side. Atop a stack of framed photographs was a picture of Alicia and her wolfhound at one of the dog shows.

"Where is Gavin anyway?" I asked. I hadn't even thought about the dog.

Alicia was standing in front of the television screen, fast-forwarding through the trailers. "He's still not feeling well. I put him out back in the dog run. The fresh air should help."

As the film began, she turned off the overhead light and climbed onto the bed, patting a place beside her. "You can sit with me," she said.

I stood by the side of her bed, dizzy with desire.

"Quite an elaborate bed. I'll have to take the stairs," I managed, and she laughed.

Theoretically, I supposed, she was still a married woman. It had n't been a month since Arthur had died, after all, but I was trying not to think about that. Alicia covered her smile with the back of her hand, sliding over to make room, handing me three pillows. Her bed was full of pillows.

Fanny and Alexander
begins on Christmas Eve; the family estate is festooned in red—red drapes in all the windows, red bows on the Christmas tree, the chairs upholstered in red, red curtains hanging along the walls, the matron of the house giving orders in a red velvet dress. The film gave Alicia's bedroom a warm red glow.

I paid very little attention to the film, tuning in occasionally to read subtitles when Alicia responded to something. Instead I watched her feet, her thin ankles. She had remarkably thin ankles.

My thumb and middle finger could have wrapped around them and touched. My leg brushed her leg as I shifted, and she didn't move away.

She seemed to watch with detached interest, wiggling her feet, shifting every so often.

The family and servants in the film held hands and danced through the house singing Christmas songs in Swedish. I felt remarkably at ease, prepared by days of imagining this moment. I thought about winter, blankets on the bed, hot drinks, coming in from the cold. At Christmas we'd exchange presents. I'd bring Alicia home and my mother would love her straightaway.

Alicia sat up with a start. "Was that the doorbell?" She crawled across the bed and pressed Pause on the VCR.

"I didn't hear anything." Actually, I had heard something but assumed it was from the movie.

"I'm going to check the door," she said.

I made a move to join her, but she waved me back. "I'll just be a minute."

A moment later she was back, shutting the door behind her.

"Well?" I asked.

"It was Margaret." Alicia shook her head.

"What did she want?" It was ten o'clock at night.

"Who knows? I wasn't about to answer it." She climbed back into the bed, fixing the pillows. "Margaret used to live here, you know. She's always lurking around."

"She used to live here?" I was surprised.

"Long story," Alicia said. "Let's put the movie back on."

I pressed the play button, climbed the steps back into bed, and lay down beside her.

"You're sweet," she said, and turned and kissed my cheek, sliding her leg over mine, her knee between my knees. She put her hand over my palm and I grasped it, weaving her fingers through mine. We rolled onto our sides, facing each other. Her eyes were closed as our mouths came together. With her fingers she traced my jawline, unbuttoned my shirt, eased my pants over my hips. When she sat up and pulled off her sweater, her body was bathed in a cathode red.

In the swoon between consciousness and sleep, that middle place where things seem clear, I had a dream that may well not have been a dream but a memory. I'm two, three, four years old, walking across the slick gray tile of a locker room shower into the stark brightness of a public swimming pool. The midsummer heat is infused with chlorine and the excited screams of children splashing about, padding along the deck.

It's a small town, like many of the small towns I'd driven through as a child, only this swimming pool sits in the middle of the town square and is fed by a towering, twisting blue waterslide.

From the shallow end I watch the children at the other end of the pool climb the high ladder to the top of the waterslide, silhouetted against a pharmacy, hardware store, and five-and-dime. They go down head first, feet first—Superman, toboggan. The bold ones get a running start.

I watch them longingly.

Two hands reach under my arms and lift me up. I'm swept into the air and when my feet come down they're touching water. First step. Second step. I'm lifted, gently pushed until the water is waist high, until it's up to my chin.

Out of instinct, my legs start kicking. The hands move under my belly, large hands that could cover me completely or swallow me up.

The shallow end is empty except for a woman ahead of us in a black bathing cap, who faces away, leaning her elbows over the lip of the pool.

I kick and paddle my arms. The hands beneath me become ten fingers, then six, then two, then none at all.

The children's laughter goes quiet, tinny, as my ears drop below the surface.

Ahead of me, the woman in the bathing cap turns and smiles. White arms, dark eyes. She reaches out to receive me.

I stop kicking and paddling and let myself sink beneath the surface, and as the world disappears, I wait for the large hands to reach under my arms and lift me up again.

I awoke to a scream.

"What was that?"

"What?" Alicia asked. She was sitting up in bed watching the movie, wearing my oxford shirt, unbuttoned.

"That scream," I said, and heard it again, this time longer than the first, more guttural.

Alicia laughed, leaning over to kiss me. "Poor boy," she said.

The scream had come from the television set, where the two children, Fanny and Alexander, were wandering through the hallways of their great family house, awakened in the middle of the night by the same screams that had awoken me. The screams grew louder, more frequent, as the children followed them to their source.

Through the crack of a half-opened door, Fanny and Alexander watched a woman pacing in front of the open coffin of an older man, her long, wounded screams filling the night.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Their father died," Alicia said.

"How?"

"He just died. I'm not sure."

She ran her fingers from the back of my head through my hair. Thin fingers with long fingernails.

"And that's his wife?"

"Yes, that's his wife."

"She's pretty," I said, reaching my arm behind Alicia's waist, curling myself around her. "Not as pretty as you."

THOSE FIRST DAYS,
I barely slept.

I'd hold her hand all night and try to stay still and open my eyes at dawn to watch her, bare-shouldered, peaceful beside me. She called me "sweetheart." Almost immediately, she called me "sweetheart." So soon. We were that comfortable. That easy together.

This was Alicia's gift. I dropped my guard.

My father's life fascinated her. She wanted to know everything about him, to the point where I'd call my mother from the office to collect further anecdotes and fill out his career. I told her about the Kennedy assassination, the Warren Commission investigation and the Jack Ruby trial, my father's two-year stint in Dallas, first with the
Kansan,
then later with the
Chicago Tribune.

Alicia was from Dallas. Her father, it turned out, had been a career police officer in Fort Worth, a member of the security detail at the Fort Worth airport that sunny morning when the President boarded his short flight from Fort Worth to Dallas's Love Field. Alicia's father had seen Kennedy board the plane. My father had seen him disembark. I cherished this connection between us.

In 1965, my father moved to Chicago to run the
Tribune
's city desk. For three turbulent years he took on Mayor Daley's political machine, jumping from editor to columnist before becoming lead reporter for the 1968 election. He sat in the front row of the White House press room when, at the end of a dull Sunday press conference, Lyndon Johnson surprised the world with an announcement: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." And when Bobby Kennedy was killed in California, my father was following the Wallace campaign through the Deep South.

"It's probably good he wasn't in L.A.," Alicia said. "You can only distance yourself so much from something so horrible."

I had never felt such an intensity of interest from anyone, not even Thea. I'd always followed my passions alone, but now, with someone to share them, I felt edgy, invulnerable.

I told her about the '68 Democratic Convention, when my father had his head bloodied by Chicago police. Mayor Daley had refused to issue a permit to a group of young war demonstrators led by what would later be known as the Chicago Seven. The blue-helmeted police force waded into packed crowds, thrashing protesters and onlookers with impunity, injuring hundreds.

My father never forgave Mayor Daley for the scar on his head. Promoted after the election to managing editor, he relentlessly attacked Daley's tolerance of local corruption and his questionable use of power.

In the middle of our first week together, Alicia planned an estate sale for the coming Saturday, the second day of November. The weather was beginning to turn, and she wanted to take advantage of what was supposed to be a warm weekend.

I was secretly pleased that so many of Arthur's possessions would be sold. The sooner Alicia moved on, I figured, the more open our future would be. I helped with the packing, labeling, and pricing of Arthur's things, and she resisted telling me the history of each artifact. I couldn't bear to think that she had lived a separate life before me, that another man had slept in her bed, kept his razor in her medicine cabinet, bought her gifts. I knew one thing about myself from my experience with Thea: I was a deeply jealous person.

That Friday, to my surprise, I got a call at the office from Margaret Whiting.

"I had been thinking about calling you, but then Joe told me he saw you at the dog museum," she said, implying some kind of disloyalty.

It was a curious way to begin a conversation, but I rolled with it. "I was there because Joe invited me. He seemed eager for me to meet his painter friend. It was a nice evening."

"Why didn't I see you?" she asked. "I was there as well."

"I must have blended with the crowd." I recalled the event's modest attendance.

"So what about this story you're writing on my brother? I assume that's another reason you were there."

I had frankly forgotten about the story, which now seemed absurd, as I was attempting to remove all traces of Arthur Whiting.

"Perhaps we can talk about it," I said. "I assume you'll be at the estate sale?"

"What estate sale?" she asked.

And before I could catch myself, recognizing my mistake even as I was speaking the words, I heard myself say, "Arthur's things are being put up for sale tomorrow."

"Oh," she sighed, sounding bewildered. "I hadn't heard about that."

I thought about Margaret ringing the doorbell while Alicia and I were watching the movie the other night, how perhaps she had still been waiting outside as we lay in bed together. And I wondered why I was hearing from her now.

"Alicia will be awfully surprised to see me there," Margaret said.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather meet somewhere else?" I asked.

"No, we'll meet at the estate sale," she said. "Don't worry about your own skin. I'll tell her I saw it advertised in the paper."

Next to Alicia's bedroom there was a small guest room done in pink wallpaper, where by Saturday morning we had moved all the boxes and pieces of furniture that weren't being put up for sale. It surprised me how little she planned to take with her: five boxes, three suitcases, a leather portfolio, a couple of hanging bags, a folding bookshelf, a radio and cassette player—no more than could fit in her car. I loved how she traveled light, needed little, had the strength to pick up and start again. My mother had done the same after my father died. She knew she couldn't bear to remain in Chicago, so she packed up the house, leaving nearly everything behind.