The Year of Pleasures (7 page)

That afternoon, while the movers carried in box after box, chatting in Spanish and laughing at things I couldn’t understand, I’d abandoned trying to keep up with them and instead went outside. The trees lining the block were mostly skeletal now, but there were still a few leaves in glorious reds and yellows lying on the lawn and sidewalk. I picked a few of the brighter ones and lined them up on my kitchen windowsill. I knew that the next day they would be dried out and curled at the edges, but I couldn’t let them just lie there, they were too beautiful. It was a tradition for me to do this; from the time I was a little girl, I had decorated kitchen windowsills with gifts of the season. John joined in this tradition. He used to carve fearsome little faces in the miniature pumpkins every Halloween, for example, and we would light them with votive candles. In December we had branches of holly berries and mistletoe; in spring, forsythia in small, colored bottles; and in summer we would line up the three sand dollars John and I had found on our second date when we walked along the ocean holding hands, both of us taut with the knowledge that we had found The One—though neither of us admitted that until much later. It was the same beach where I scattered his ashes. It is good we don’t know our own futures.

A small gust of wind rushed up under the blanket, and I shivered; but I wasn’t quite ready to go back inside. I looked around at the houses up and down the block. A few porch lights were on, but otherwise it was all dark. I supposed people went to bed early here. I used to like doing that myself, though I was long out of the habit. The last few months of John’s life, we’d both slept in fits and starts.

I rested my chin on my knees, huddled in closer to myself. I wished, suddenly, that I smoked—never mind the danger, what
wasn’t
dangerous, anymore? I wished I could take in a long drag and then watch the exhalation dissipate into nothingness. I believed there must be a comfort in it.

In the late sixties, the three women I lived with when I was in college—those ones who’d been my last close friends—had all smoked. Almost every night, we sat in the kitchen and talked until very late, and the air would be thick and colored blue, the big orange ashtray we kept in the center of the table filled to overflowing. Sometimes I’d tried to smoke, too, but it never worked. If I inhaled, I’d have a fit of coughing. If I smoked without inhaling, I’d feel like an idiot. So I’d watched them, watched the lift of their chins and the whiteness of their throats as they blew straight up toward the ceiling, their long earrings dangling.

Also I’d helped drink the cheap bottles of Boone’s Farm wine we bought and I’d helped change the records on the turntable so that we would never be without music. Odetta, we’d listened to. Dylan. Marvin Gaye. Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi and Janis. Also Lou Rawls’s elevated version of “September Song” and Morgana King’s “How Insensitive.” Music had been more important then. We’d put on a record when we got up in the morning; we’d put on another to send us off to sleep. We played music to articulate our own wants and needs, to amplify our burgeoning political convictions. Musicians posed questions we didn’t know we had until we heard them asked. It was understood that if certain songs came on, everyone stopped talking, no hard feelings.

Maddy, Lorraine, and Susanna, those were their names. Maddy was Italian, beautifully complected (it was the olive oil, she insisted), and she was always doing something for you, though she would never let you do anything for her. She was an exquisite cook, even at twenty; she embroidered with great skill, and she was a serious mountain climber—she kept the scary equipment she used in pillowcases at the back of her closet. Susanna wanted to be an actress and was very dramatic about everything—“Oh my
God,
I’ve got a
run
!!!”
—
and she had a kind of charisma that makes me think she probably did make it in theater. And then there was the beautiful, black-haired Lorraine, who, despite her inherent snobbishness and her dark moods, was the one I liked best. Lorraine once poured a drink down the front of a woman’s dress, long before it had been done on film. She told the men she dated that her mother was a Hungarian Gypsy who had castrated her husband. This, strangely enough, seemed to attract them. Lorraine and I once gave our little Christmas tree a Viking funeral: On a railroad bridge, we set it on fire, all its ornaments still on it, and then we cast it into the Mississippi River. The idea, I think, was that a thing of such beauty should not suffer the indignity of being undone; let it go out in glory. I remember when Lorraine had proposed the idea, I’d said, “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?” and she’d said, “Of course.”

We lived in a house full of the smells of shampoo and White Castle and patchouli oil. Necklaces hung from window latches and doorknobs and closet pulls, rings were cast off onto saucers. No one had anything so practical as a jewelry box. Books and record albums and clothes were piled everywhere, and the phone rang all the time, often in the middle of the night. Once, a boy named Dan had called at 4
A.M.
to tell me I was his Suzanne, and then he sang the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s new song to me. I was honored. Dan’s roommate, Ron, had called me when their phone was first installed—neither of them had ever had his own phone, and they wanted me to call their number to make sure it worked. When I did, the phone rang thirteen times. Just as I was ready to hang up, Ron answered with a stoned “Hello?” “Why didn’t you
answer
?” I said, and he said, “We were
lis
tening.”

It was also Ron who once called me on a cold January night a little after midnight. I had just fallen asleep. “Come over,” he said. “Dan and I were just talking about you, and we want to see you.” I told him I had just gone to bed and I was tired; also, I had an eight o’clock class the next day. “Aw, come on,” he said. “What we were saying about you is that you are real people. If you’re real people, you’ll come over.” I told him I had no car. He said to take Lorraine’s. I reminded him that I also had no driver’s license. “Drive real slow,” he said. I did take Lorraine’s car, which was a ’65 Mustang convertible, burgundy with a white interior—what I wouldn’t give to have that car now! Its windows were coated with ice, and I had no idea how to work the defroster, so I put the top down and drove the mile and a half to Ron’s house half sitting, half standing so that I could peer over the top of the windshield. I remember I had the radio up loud and was singing along. It was one of those moments you hold forever in your internal scrapbook.

It had been fun living there, yes, but mostly it had been comfortable, not so much physically as psychically. Lorraine had called it
safe,
meaning, I think,
accepting.
You could station yourself at the kitchen table and someone would show up to talk to you with unflinching honesty about anything.

I wanted suddenly—intensely—to know where those women were. We could truly talk, I thought; they would still be able to hear both what I said and what I meant. It was Kierkegaard who’d said that if a friendship is true, it doesn’t matter how much time has gone by, you just pick up where you left off. But how would I ever find them? Probably they had married and changed their names—we came before the time of casually keeping one’s own; surely they were spread out in different cities, perhaps they were not even in this country. And I knew only too well of another disturbing possibility: One of them—or more—might have died. I leaned forward and back, forward and back, rocking myself in the ancient rhythm.

I took one more look at the sky, then stood to go back inside. Something in my knee hurt, doing this. Arthritis, already? So soon? Who would I tell my old-lady fears to now? Who would tell me I had lipstick on my teeth, or that the story I was telling, I’d already told? Who would, sotto voce, suggest a mint and not have it embarrass me?

There was an old lady who lived on our block in Boston. She didn’t come out except to get the mail, which she always retrieved as soon as it was delivered. Then she stood on the sidewalk and examined with great care everything she received, mostly junk mail and flyers, it seemed. “I’ll bet she actually talks to phone solicitors,” John said. He used to say hello to her, but she would only scurry back inside. I’d always thought of that woman’s life as being so different from my own, alien, almost. Now it did not seem so strange what loneliness might do.

I went back into the house, folded the quilt, and lay it over the arm of the sofa. I looked around the living room, chaotic with unpacked boxes, but settled somehow, anyway, the rug in place, the furniture, too. John would have loved this house. “You,” I whispered.
“John.”
The specificity, as though it might help. As though it might bring him here in whatever form he chose: A step on the staircase. The wash of moonlight against the back of a chair. A touchless touch, a scent. I waited. I thought of Lydia Samuels and her eerie pronouncement:
He will come.
But he did not.

I turned out the lights and locked the front door. Then, as I was turning to go upstairs, I saw a small figure on the porch bend down and then run away. I opened the door again, mildly frightened, and saw a note on the top step, anchored by a rock. I brought it inside. In labored print, it read:

My name is Benny. In case you didn’t know, I live next door. Welcome to our neighborhood! If you need any help done, you can hire me. It is only fifty cents (or more if you think I did a really good job). You can call me, and here is my number, get ready it is 555-0098. Or if you don’t want to do that I can be found on the block after school and on weekends. When I am done, believe me you will say Wow, Everything is perfect!!!!

I’d seen a boy sitting on the porch of the house next door, earlier in the afternoon, watching me as I gathered leaves. It occurred to me now that he might have thought I was doing a pathetic version of raking, hence his entrepreneurial overture. He was a slight boy, with shaggy black hair, wearing glasses and a faded blue flannel shirt. About nine or ten years old, I’d guessed. I wondered what he was doing up now. I looked out the window at his house. Dark.

I went to the kitchen, opened one of the top drawers, and dropped the note in it. The drawer was otherwise empty, the surest sign that a house’s inhabitants really have left. Soon it would become the junk drawer, full of the usual tangle of scrap paper and pens, coupons, rubber bands, random buttons, plastic silverware, and take-out menus. I used to also fill our old junk drawer with pictures torn out of magazines and newspapers, an odd habit of mine. “Why do you
keep
these?” John had once asked, in a rare fit of exasperation. “Why don’t you either
do
something with them or throw them
away
?” “Leave them alone,” I’d told him. “You are not the keeper of the kitchen drawers. I am the keeper of the kitchen drawers. You are the keeper of the workroom drawers and the garage drawers. I don’t tell you to throw out bolts.” “Bolts have a
purpose,
” he’d said. “So do my pictures,” I’d told him. And when he’d said, “Oh? And what purpose is that?” I hadn’t answered him. That was one of the last times I’d had the luxury of ignoring him—his diagnosis had not yet arrived and unpacked its terrible valise.

But a few days after John complained, I did remove the pictures. He’d been right—they were taking up too much room in the drawer. I pasted them into a small, suede-covered scrapbook, and when it became full, I started another. It became my habit to sit sometimes in the afternoon with a cup of tea, making up stories to fit the pictures. It was a different kind of writing, in a way; nothing I had to put to paper or turn over to a publisher or anyone else. It was imagination back to its purest and best form, unpolluted by thoughts of deadlines and reviews and sales figures and book tours. I liked the way the stories changed each time I flipped through the pages. I liked the way bits of dialogue would come into my head, strains of music, and I liked the way the pictures would sometimes expand in my mind so that rather than seeing just a yellow kitchen, I would see the living room next to it, then the street outside. And look, here came the woman whose kitchen it was, walking down the sidewalk with shopping bags knocking into her knees, smiling hello at a neighbor. Cheeks reddened by the wind. I had many of those scrapbooks by now, and I had unpacked them and stacked them by the chaise longue.

John never knew I did that with the pictures. I suppose everyone must have his or her own private pleasures. Surely he had his. Trout fishing, that was one—I never went with him when he did that. And oftentimes, in the evening, he took a walk without me and smoked a cigar. Sometimes he disappeared when he listened to opera with his headphones. He would close his eyes, his face full of longing, and I would envy the diva who moved him that way.

I sat at the kitchen table, hands folded in my lap. Overhead, the light hummed—something I’d not noticed in the daytime. Was that something I would need to get repaired? Whom did you call? An electrician? A handyman? A drop of water hung from the kitchen faucet, not quite heavy enough to fall. From the corner of my eye, I could see my face reflected in the window, and I could see the blackness beyond. This quiet was dense and annoying, just as too much noise was—I wanted to swat at it, to make it go away. I thought of putting on some music, but I didn’t know where the stereo or the radio was and I was too tired to unpack any more.

But not tired enough to sleep. I’d need to be somnambulating before I went into the bedroom. Even in this new house, the bedroom was a dangerous place for memories—John, untucking his shirt, laying his watch on the dresser, then crossing the room toward me, his sweet intention in his smile. Here, on this first night, we would have held hands in the darkness, whispering excitedly about what part of our new town we would explore first. Always, we whispered, after the lights were out. Always, upon awakening in the morning, he smiled at me. “Welcome to Tuesday, Betta,” he would say. He did that up until the end, when a pleasant routine had become grimly ironic. Welcome to Friday, Betta, and another day of hell. One kind of hell for you. Another, more breathtaking kind of hell for me. But welcome to it.