The Widower's Tale (29 page)

He knew now that he would rather be holed up alone with a dozen uncontrollably sobbing three-year-olds than sit beside the hospital bed of a woman who'd nearly thrown her life away over a married cad and saw Ira as her "last true friend in the world." He still felt guilty about losing touch with her. He had never deleted Sadie's last e-mail--awkwardly cheerful, the tone of their entire correspondence after she left town--and sometimes, late at night, he wondered if he should cast a line her way. But he never did, reasoning (feebly) that no doubt her address had changed several times since then and his words would scatter in the ether of undeliverable bytes.

"The thing that upsets me so much," Clover was saying, "is how soon he's planning to marry this woman. You'd think, especially if he sees himself as having married a screw-up the first time around"--she laughed bitterly--"well, you'd think he'd be extremely cautious."

Ira put the bleach and the spritz bottle back on their high shelf. He looked at Clover briefly. "People are inexplicable, aren't they?" he said before going to the closet to get out the broom.
Love is irrational
, he might have said, but this would have been hurtful--and, in this case, probably not even true. You didn't have to be a genius to know why the man might want to remarry quickly. He probably wanted someone to take on full-time sharing of his kids' lives, all those responsibilites and chores, as soon as possible. And there was always a good chance that the second wife wanted to have a child or two of her own.

"I should have brought the kids with me," said Clover.

"No. They were old enough to be rooted where they are. You did the better, less selfish thing by leaving them with their dad."

How sincere was this consolation? The story he'd heard from Clover was surely skewed in her favor, no matter how self-deprecating she was; and that story gave him no reason to think her husband and the new wife
shouldn't
be raising those kids. What would he think if he heard the ex's version?

Ira tried to imagine returning to his own parents if his life were to crash and burn. What if, six months before, he'd simply lost his job at The Very Beginning, without the safety net of Elves & Fairies, and had fallen into a deep depression, leading Anthony to dump him? What then?

He pictured himself arriving, suitcase in hand, on the doorstep of his parents' Tudor house in Forest Hills, retrieving the key from under the stone hedgehog that lurked beneath a bush of bleeding-hearts.

Ira's father and mother did everything in tandem: ran his father's chiropractic office, took out garbage, cooked dinners, had sent Ira and his sisters off to school every morning--a clockwork pas de deux. The harmony of it--the perfect "dividing and sharing," as they called it--would have been caviar for some women's magazine if his parents had wanted to be famous for those fifteen minutes, but nothing could be further from their humble intentions.

So say Ira had shown up, unannounced, sometime before 5:22, the usual time his mom arrived home from the office. She'd come in the door and maybe, despite the empty nest, a matter of habit, call out, "Anybody home?" He'd startle her by calling out that yes, here he was--"Just me!"--exactly as he'd replied in the old days. (Ruthie and Joanna, his sisters, were the sporty ones, so Ira had often been the only one home when his mother arrived.)

"Darling, do you want a little nosh?"

"Thanks, Mom!"

She'd fill the dishes in the lazy Susan on the kitchen table: cottage cheese sprinkled with Lawry's salt, Wheat Thins, black olives from a can, cherry tomatoes. While he ate and answered questions about his day, she'd do the "prep work" for dinner, finishing almost precisely as his dad walked in the door at 6:30. She would hand Ira's dad his sole drink of the day (a vodka collins), and when he said, "Son! What brings you home?"--with genuine pleasure--Ira would tell them everything: how he'd lost his job, how his boyfriend thought he was a coward and a loser, how he had no choice but to move out, how he had almost no savings and wasn't sure he still wanted to teach....

But where had this morbid fantasy come from? He didn't have to go home. He didn't have to watch his parents remind themselves (through glances they'd exchange, thinking he didn't notice) that they were liberal-minded, modern-day folks and felt not a mote of shame or disappointment that their only son was gay, and thank heaven he didn't have AIDS! He was in a stable relationship with the kind of man they'd have killed to see one of Ira's sisters marry. (Ruthie had married a dentist--not bad--while Joanna had become a financial analyst but couldn't hang on to a guy for longer than a couple of months.)

Now Clover was saying, "Do you think I should just go ahead and ask Filo and Lee what
they
think about everything? And about this ... stepmother? Risk hearing the worst so we can just go forward, so I can ask their forgiveness if I have to?"

Ira leaned the broom against a bookshelf. He sat next to Clover on the reading couch. "I don't know," he said. "That sounds pretty scary."

"You're right. I'd be terrified."

Ira put a hand on her knee and sighed. He'd meant that it would be pretty scary to her children, but all he said was "I know."

Saturdays, they worked out together at the fancy gym Anthony paid for. Or Ira swam while Anthony did his weights, and they joined up in the sauna. Usually, they sat side by side on the bench, sweating in silence. Ira loved this silence, especially when they had the sauna to themselves. They hardly touched, yet it felt wonderfully intimate. He imagined the week's anxieties seeping from their pores, soaked away by the club's enormous plush blue towels.

But that day, Anthony spoke. "Your pal Clover."

"Mm."

"So I saw her."

"I know. She's incredibly grateful."

"That's what I was afraid of."

"Afraid of?"

"Ira, she's living in a dream. Is anyone treating this woman like a grown-up? Telling her what's what?"

Leave it to Anthony to ask the glaringly obvious question.

"You know, it's not like she's my best friend. And she has a therapist."

Anthony laughed. "A therapist. Well. Therapists come in many flavors."

Ira made a noise of amusement. He thought, No talk, please.

Anthony, no mind reader, continued, "Though it's water way the hell under the bridge, I wanted to ask her why she hadn't tried to reconcile. And I had to wonder why nobody else had pushed her in that direction. Or maybe they did. But the story she told--God, it involved one of those horrible conversations you have with a mate that linger between you like a cloud of poisonous gas. The kind you'd pay a fortune to take back. The kind that sits in a closet like a time bomb, just waiting to blow you up."

Ira looked sideways at Anthony. Was he alluding to something about them? As Ira did too often, never voluntarily, he remembered the night he'd told Anthony about being fired; the night Anthony had called him spineless--and he, rather than turn the other cheek, had called his partner heartless.

Was that one of those "horrible conversations"?

"There are cases," said Anthony, "where against the odds, some clever attorney convinces a judge that a mother's place as the chief source of nurture is essential, that so long as she has a stable home and a means of support, she deserves primary custody. But the kids are usually little, and"--he laughed--"the judge is almost always a much older man, like the kind who got out of law school before the Beav was a glimmer in June Cleaver's eye."

Ira echoed Anthony's laugh.

Anthony punched him playfully. "Hey. This is your friend."

"She's been extremely nice to me, but I hardly know her. For God's sake, Anthony, I've been at that place less than three months." Ira stood and secured his towel. "Let's go to a museum. Want to have lunch in Cambridge? Let's walk around and ogle the baby best-and-brightests, then grab a little culture."

In the shower, he found himself thinking of Sadie for the second time in two days. Had his conscience hardened--or was it softening again? He realized that the children now in his care concerned him less, when they weren't with him, than the kids he'd looked after in Lothian. His class was smaller, yes, but the main difference was that he had far fewer worries about these children. Marguerite was a little pushy, Rico tended to brood, and Lucian had been sent home with lice. And thanks to Lily, they used up twice as many art supplies in every shade of pink.

So had part of his brain opened up, posted a vacancy, into which a new batch of tenants (questions about friendships, old and new; questions about himself and Anthony) had moved?

Ira felt as if he'd contracted an all-over emotional itch, as if he'd put on a sweater made of spiritually abrasive wool--but to take it off would leave him dreadfully cold.

"This is definitely not fun," he muttered as he took the shortcut through the local playground that Sunday, hunching into his collar as he passed the swings. If his arms hadn't ached from the weight of the groceries, Ira would have skirted the park. He should have taken the car--but who knew there'd be a sale on OJ
and
the canned nuts Anthony loved so much?

How much nicer Lothian had seemed--and, face it, how much cooler Ira had felt--when he had walked to work at The Very Beginning, proud to be a full-time member of a community both real and colorful, struggling but on the rise. Once, he'd even had wispy notions of running for the local school board. He'd loved strolling the residential streets lined with working-class houses, plain clapboard or aluminum siding, painted white or gray or yellow. A few had been embellished with sun porches or ready-made arbors from Home Depot.

But there were still areas of town where a single culture asserted itself, where Ukrainians, Brazilians, or Italians held fast against the yuppie tide. In the four square blocks of Lothian called Little Palermo, the postage-stamp yards filled with grapevines each summer. In cast-off bathtubs, fruit trees blossomed as willingly as they would have done on a terraced Sicilian hillside. And from house to house, laundry lines crisscrossed these tiny vineyards and orchards, bedsheets snapping and luffing like sunlit sails. At Christmas, this was the neighborhood decked most sumptuously in blinking lights, inflatable Santas, and glowing Wise Men with extension cords trailing from the hems of their plastic raiments. "Ethnic snow globes," Anthony called such pockets of charm.

But now, if Ira did venture out for a long walk or the occasional run, he shunned these folksy streets. Of the families he'd known through work, he still remembered which ones lived where, and he did not relish the idea of running into the parents (who
knew
what tale they'd been told about his departure?) or even the innocent children he'd taught (who would make him sad whether or not they recognized him on the street). Though he was ashamed of it, more than once Ira had turned away from walking into a store, or had crossed a street, when he'd seen such a run-in about to occur. (I'm sparing them too, he reasoned.)

Anthony had scolded him last month when he'd hesitated at the suggestion of going to Courgette, the one upscale bistro within walking distance of their apartment. Ira had tried to pretend he wasn't in the mood for French, but Anthony had seen through him in a flash.

"You are worried about meeting up with that perv dad, I know it," said Anthony. "But me, I'm just raring to confront the bastard. Bring him on."

"Oh really? And what would you say?"

"It would come to me," Anthony said. "I work best off the cuff. That's how I win my cases, darling. I'm a pro at handling hypocrites. Rich ones? Fish in a California Chardonnay barrel."

So they had gone, and of course they'd seen no one familiar at all. Yet every time the door to the restaurant had opened to admit someone new, Ira's pulse had soared.

So here he was, passing a simple playground as if he were a fugitive, keeping his eyes on the asphalt path, moving as fast as the overloaded canvas bags allowed, when he did, after all, run smack into someone he knew--though not from The Very Beginning.

The shoes--severely worn work boots--had halted, facing him. Quickly, Ira looked up at the face that went with the shoes.

"Oh! Goodness. Hi!" he exclaimed. He set down the groceries. To his embarrassment, he was panting, even perspiring.

"Hello. You need help?" Celestino smiled. He held out a hand.

"What are you doing here?" said Ira, then realized how rude this sounded. "I mean, this isn't--do you live around here?"

"I am walking home from Mass."

"Goodness, are we neighbors?"

"I live several blocks that way." Celestino pointed in the direction of the grocery store, the less gentrified side of the park. "You could use help with those," he offered again.

Ira sighed. "Shows, huh? I am so totally out of shape these days."

Celestino picked up the groceries.

"Oh no." Ira took back one of the bags. "And I'll only let you help if you have a bite with us. Really. At least a cup of coffee." He'd done it before catching himself. Acted as if the world were this friendly, open-arms, homo-accepting place, the place he had naively believed it to be in the not-so-distant past.

Celestino seemed unsure, and for a moment Ira hoped he would refuse--but how could he? And Ira wondered how much of his eager invitation had sprung from the same place those dreams did: twice, he'd had a dream in which he was alone with Celestino in the tree house, alone and naked. The only impediment to their wild-horse passion (which was mutual--oh the wishes of dreams!) had been the presence of the Birches and Cattails milling about below, waiting to come up the ladder.

"Coffee, yes, thank you," said Celestino.

Awkwardly, Ira stepped ahead, leading the way. For the next two blocks, they walked in silence, single file.

Please let Anthony be dressed, thought Ira. He might have phoned ahead, but he hadn't felt like stopping again. As a compromise, he rang the bell. He waved at the video cam. "I've picked up a guest!"

Anthony had showered and dressed. Sections of the Sunday
Times
lay scattered across the kitchen counter, the
Boston Globe
untouched.