The Red Book (38 page)

Not this hand, buddy, she suddenly thinks, rubbing her belly, willing it to expand. She turns to her right and spots Bucky up against the wall, clutching his BlackBerry. Clover catches his eye, and he gives a slight, almost embarrassed wave as the piano player stands up to speak.

“We’d like to dedicate this piece to Sharon’s memory,” says the pianist, clearing his throat. “It was her favorite. Everyone ready?” They all nod. He lifts up his hand, as if holding an invisible conductor’s baton, then lets it drop, scrawling the anchor of 4/4 time into the air: “And one-two-three-four, two-two-three-four . . .”

The first doleful notes glide off bows, whistle through openings. Bucky’s thumbs peck at his BlackBerry. Clover’s screen lights up. “wow.stunning. what’s it called again?”

“pachelbel’s canon,” she writes back. “he forgot to say the name of it.” She’d walked down the aisle to that piece the day she got married. She didn’t care if it was almost as old, tired, and clichéd as the Wedding March. It was and remains, to her mind, one of the most lovely pieces of music ever composed. Plus it reminded her of Sharon, with whom she’d become friendly several years after college, and then quite close after she got sick. Sharon had lived long enough to have met Danny, but not long enough to have made it to the wedding. She was the only one of Clover’s friends to have expressed any reservations about the relationship, however slight, based on a minor interaction she had with him in the hospital room, a few days before she was sent home to die.

“Doesn’t your husband’s firm need him?” Danny had asked Sharon, after Whit and Clover had both stepped out into the hallway to take calls from their offices. Whit, like Danny, was a litigator, but he’d reassigned most of his cases when the cancer that first appeared in Sharon’s left breast was found to have metastasized throughout the rest of her body. When Danny and he became acquainted, Whit was spending the bulk of his days rushing back and forth between the hospital and home, calling into the office to consult on various cases only when absolutely necessary.

To which Sharon, slightly taken aback, said, “Well, yes, they do need him at the office, but right now the kids and I need him more.”

“It’s amazing they allow him to take off that much time,” said Danny. “It can’t be good for his career.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” said Sharon. “But that’s kind of beside the point right now, don’t you think?” She asked him what he would do, say, if it were Clover in her place, dying.

“Clover’s strong,” he’d answered, unable (Sharon could tell, she later told Clover) to even imagine such a scenario. “She’d be fine.”

“Strong and fine have nothing to do with it,” Sharon said.

“He’s just young,” said Clover, by way of excuse, when Sharon told her about the exchange. “His career means everything to him right now. You know that phase. We all went through it.”

“Just make sure, before you marry him,” Sharon said, her terminal status stripping her of any obligation for euphemism or niceties, “that he will be there when you need him. That’s all I’m saying. Have that discussion. Now. Before it’s too late.” Clover and Sharon were lying side by side in Sharon’s hospice bed in her living room when she said this, the two of them listening to Pachelbel’s Canon and staring out at the falling snow that had stranded Clover on a business trip overnight, much to her delight, since she was able to spend some unexpected quality time with Sharon. DC schools had been canceled for the day, so Whit was in the kitchen with the kids, making cookies and hot chocolate and playing air guitar to Green Day after an afternoon spent sledding. He was good at that. Keeping the party going, no matter the circumstances.

Three weeks later, Whit sent out the e-mail saying Sharon was gone. The funeral, as per Jewish law, was to be held the next morning at Washington Hebrew. Clover begged Danny to take the train with her down to DC, but he had a massive case pending. “She was more your friend anyway,” he said, not understanding that what Clover needed at that moment wasn’t a friend of Sharon’s, but rather a friend. Period.

Clover types into her BlackBerry: “giving next eulogy. v nervous.”

“don’t be,” writes Bucky. “u’ll be gr8.”

“doubtful. don’t love my speech. too clinical, too much about her work. wish i could rewrite.” Danny, whose oratory skills have been known to change the paths of his clients’ lives, had promised to help her, but he never actually found a pocket of time to sit down and do it.

“fuck the speech. speak from the heart,” types Bucky.

“i think i’ve forgotten how to do that.”

“no time like the present.”

“as if i needed reminding of that right now.”

“i know. so sad. people our age. poof. gone.”

“kills me. i loved sharon.”

“carpe diem, lady.”

“no shit.”

“i mean it.”

“mean what?”

“carpe diem. u and me.”

“wtf are you talking about?”

“run away with me, pace.”

“ha ha. very funny.”

“not joking.”

“don’t understand.”

“yes u do. i know u felt it. maybe not fri night. but definitely sat morning.”

“felt what????? u r being obtuse.”

“oh, come on. u’r going to make me say it?”

“say WHAT?” She looks over her right shoulder at Bucky, beseechingly.

He pauses for a moment before typing, “LOVE!” without losing eye contact.

The word combined with his expression feels like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, like that scene in
Pulp Fiction
where Uma Thurman is revived out of a drug-induced coma.

“am MARRIED,” she types.

“me 2.”

“happily.”

“yeah, right.”

“what’s THAT supposed to mean?”

“ur actions speak otherwise.”

“that was NOSTALGIA, ok? nothing more.”

Addison is watching this entire exchange, riveted, trying desperately to sneak a peek at the words being typed. With the few glances she manages to steal, she understands most of it. Addison likes Danny, but it’s not as if he’s been in the picture long enough for her to really know him. Hell, her husband’s been in the picture forever, and she still doesn’t know parts of Gunner the way she knows Clover. Or Bucky. Or Jane or Mia or even Bennie, who was an open book from day one.

Some people put up walls. Others don’t. Addison’s finally understanding this, twenty years too late. When she bumped into Gunner at that bar in Eressos, the Berlin Wall was being hacked to bits on the small TV behind the bar. “Isn’t that amazing?” she’d said, with tears in her eyes. He’d shrugged, dry-eyed, and said, “Yeah, I guess.”
Yeah, I guess
? What kind of person says, “Yeah, I guess,” while watching a man take a sledgehammer to the Berlin Wall? The signs were there from the beginning, but she willfully filtered them out.

Mia is listening to the music, moved to tears by its beauty. She would like to move people again, to have her name listed in a playbill once more before it appears in the program for a memorial service. She feels as if she’s finally waking up from a decades-long hibernation. There has to be a way for her to get back onstage.

Jane recalls the simple fragments from Proust Bruno showed her last night—“Let yourself be inert”; “henceforth you will always keep something broken about you”—and makes a mental note to e-mail the full passage to Lodge Waldman, along with an offer for him to have first dibs on her mother’s house. They are perfect, as words of condolence go. So simple, so direct, so explicit in their scope and feeling. She wonders if she’s capable of ever writing sentences one-tenth as good, of stringing together a bunch of nouns, verbs, and adjectives that don’t just tell a story but describe Life with a capital
L
. She gets distracted by a stray hair on the woman’s sweater in front of her and has to sit on her hands so as not to be tempted to remove it.

“not nostalgia,” types Bucky. “love.”

“u calling me a liar?”

“maybe.”

“u confuse lust for love.”

“negative.” Bucky’s now typing furiously, his thumbs pecking away at warp speed. Finally, the treatise lands on the face of Clover’s phone. “i know what i felt, pace. that shit doesn’t just go away because 20 yrs have passed or because i was too stupid to understand what i gave up back then. i love u, pace. i’ve always loved you. you’ve been living inside me since 1985.”

The words, in their nakedness, make Clover gasp. “stop it! u don’t love me. u don’t even know me!”

“yes. i do. and i do. i probably even know u better than u know yourself.”

The notes of the canon build to a crescendo. Its melody—her wedding march—combined with Bucky’s texts and Sharon’s absence and the possibility of new life forming inside her rattle Clover to the point where her stomach tightens, her eyes mist. What the fuck is wrong with him? Why does he have to bring love into it? “i’m serious,” she writes back, shooting him an angry glance. “stop. now.”

“am being dead serious. i love u. run away with me, lady. we’ll go sailing off together into the sunset. what do u have to lose?”

“MY MARRIAGE!”

“to a big baby who won’t get his sperm tested?”

“bucky! jesus! stop it. u don’t understand the parameters.” She doesn’t really understand them either, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that Danny is her husband, ’til death do them part. She made a vow. A solemn vow! Of course, part of that vow was not to sleep with anyone else, either, but in the grand scheme of vow keeping versus baby making, the baby won. Chubby hands down.

Bucky refuses to give up: “i <3 u,” he writes. “i want to spend the rest of my life with you. i want to make this clear, in case there was any doubt. i don’t want to regret not saying it. i love u i love u I LOVE U!”

“u don’t love me! u love the IDEA of me. of righting a past wrong. of reuniting after so many years. u’d be bored of me in 5 minutes. i don’t even have a job right now. am pathetic.”

“so not true!”

“so true.”

“tell me something.”

“what?”

“what do YOU think happened between us yesterday AM? and don’t tell me it was just sex. i’ve had ‘just sex.’ this was something else.” After he woke up to an empty bed, Bucky stumbled into the shower and mentally ran through the events of the night and morning more thoroughly, still basking in the astounding glow of it. Crazy, really, to find himself in bed with Clover Love! And yet not so crazy either. In fact beautiful, on so many levels. He hadn’t felt his heart beat with such rhythm or purpose for years. But it was only while he was washing the caked-on sperm off the shaft of his penis that he suddenly realized he hadn’t used a condom with a desperate-to-get-pregnant woman whose husband, in all likelihood, was sterile. So there was method in her madness? Everybody wants something. (His heart fell.) But reexamining the memory once again, it struck him, profoundly, that their lovemaking Saturday morning could not have been just about babymaking, even if it might have started out that way. It was, unless his memory has completely failed him, the most profound and mutual act of love he’s ever experienced.

“it was just sex,” Clover types.

“bullshit.”

“enough, bucky. the song’s almost over. i have to concentrate on my eulogy. too nervous.”

“ok ok. don’t be nervous. i’ll be here. pretend it’s just u & me and u r telling me a story. forget everyone else. pretend they r not even here.”

“easier said than done.”

“just promise me one thing, b4 i never see u again.”

“don’t say that. we’ll see each other again.”

“no. it’ll be too painful for me.”

“stop exaggerating.”

“not exaggerating. at all. but i need you to promise me 1 thing.”

“sure. what?”

Bucky types out his request, hesitating a few seconds before pressing send, his heart beating wildly. “if my hunch correct, put me on your xmas card list. allow me at least that.”

But before Clover can respond, in the midst of her shock at seeing what she thought was her hidden deed spelled out so baldly on her tiny screen, the canon ends and she hears the pianist say, “And now Clover Love will say a few words on Sharon’s behalf.”

The thump-thumpings in her chest make her feel faint. Her limbs feel de-boned, filled with sand. She should have known it was no use trying to hide something as enormous as a blastula from Bucky Gardner. He’s seen through her since the day they met.

Authenticity
. The word, or more precisely her lack of it, hits her, propels her forward, a determined hand at her back, until she’s standing at the podium. She lays her speech on the lectern and reads the first sentence silently, to herself: “Sharon Warren worked tirelessly on behalf of her organization, the Lila Fund, raising over twelve million dollars annually in support of breast cancer research.” What a terrible opening! More of an introduction to the keynote speaker at a corporate luncheon, not a proper eulogy. She stares out at the audience and catches Bucky’s eye. He’s nodding his head and urging her on. He mimes crumpling up a piece of paper and tossing it over his shoulder. She realizes that this is what she must do. Throw it away. Toss it. All the plans, the belabored effort, the well-intentioned something that turned out to be nothing. Speak from the heart. Starting right now.

“So I wrote this eulogy the other day.” She holds up the speech for her audience to see. “But now that I’m standing here in front of you, it seems totally wrong. Inauthentic. Not worthy of anyone’s life, let alone Sharon’s.”

Bucky makes okay signs with both of his forefingers and thumbs and smiles. Then he mimes what she’s seen a thousand mothers miming every morning to the windows of the yellow school buses that clog the streets of her neighborhood, snarling traffic and making her ache for her own shadowed figure in a school bus window. It’s a three-part sign: first a pointed finger to the middle of his chest, for
I
; then the forearms crossed over the heart, for
love
; then the finger pointed out at the object of affection, for
you
.

She folds the speech and places it on the slant of the lectern. “I didn’t really know Sharon all that well in college. We ran in different crowds. Mine was fast and furious, and hers was . . . well, I guess you could say human-paced and kind. Anyway, though our paths rarely crossed here, I did recognize her, when I bumped into her one night after work at the Harvard Club, from a freshman seminar we both took called Illness as Metaphor. Ironic, isn’t it? It was based on Susan Sontag’s treatise by the same name, but we read lots of other writers on the topic as well. Tolstoy, as I recall. Chekhov. Kafka. William Carlos Williams. A bunch of others I’m forgetting, but always in the context of Sontag’s words. I’m sure some of you know them well. The rest of you, like me, read the CliffsNotes.” A few chuckles.