We Are Not Ourselves (51 page)

She watched Connell disappear with the paperwork up the sloping stairs and started the car. The light from the one working headlamp diffused into the snow and reflected off the mangled BMW. She blasted the heat. When Ed reached to turn it off—it had to be unconscious, the force of habit, because no one, not even him, could be
that
absurd—she smacked his hand away and turned it up again.

•  •  •

She and the boy stood in the snow waiting for the tow truck to arrive. Ed was in the car.

“What a disaster,” Connell said. “This is going to be expensive.”

She’d fought endlessly with Ed over keeping collision on the Caprice. Time and again she’d said it was a waste of money on a ten-year-old car, but Ed had insisted.

“Maybe not as expensive as it looks. Anyway, that’s what insurance is for.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Nobody got hurt,” she said. “Nobody died. Cars can be replaced.”
Or not
, she thought. She felt a hint of a smile cross her lips but stifled it. “Well,” she said under her breath. “That’s one way to get rid of a car.”

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘That’s one way to ring in the New Year.’ ”

“Happy New Year,” he said glumly.

“Happy New Year.”

•  •  •

The AAA guy offered to drop them off at home before taking the car in. She sat on Ed’s lap in the seat, Connell between them and the driver.

When they pulled into the driveway, Connell asked the driver if he’d mind giving him a lift to the train.

She was flabbergasted. “You’re not still planning on going out?” He must have known that once inside, he wouldn’t be able to leave. The driver and Connell both looked to her for approval. “Go,” she said, annoyed, waving him off.

She climbed off Ed and helped him out of the truck. The snow was now a few inches thick. She held his hand as he navigated the fluffy terrain. She punched in the code for the garage door and watched the truck pull out.

Upstairs, she took off her string of pearls and changed out of her evening gown into a sweat suit. She got him ready for bed, in case he wanted to go up early.

She pulled a half gallon of ice cream out of the freezer and took two spoons from the drawer, though the second spoon was a fig leaf for her own guilt. Ed would have two spoonfuls, tops.

They sat through the lip-synched entertainment, waiting for the countdown. Ed fell asleep with his head back and his mouth open, hours before the New Year. She didn’t wake him.

As midnight approached, she thought of the night they’d met, the way he’d leaned in to kiss her when the hour struck. She’d been waiting for him to do it all night. They’d been in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by hundreds of couples. When he kissed her, she experienced a sensation she’d heard described a thousand times but always dismissed as malarkey: that everyone around had disappeared, and it was just the two of them. And now it really was just the two of them, and everyone had more or less disappeared. The ball made its languorous drop; “1994” lighted up onscreen. She tried to remember what it had felt like to kiss him that first time. All she could remember was that he had begun simply, almost politely, and then he had taken her face in his two hands and kissed her with a sudden intensity, as if he had been waiting to do so for longer than the few hours he had known her. She knew right away that she would marry him.
So many years had passed since that night that it was almost a different man she was looking at now. Hairs poked up over the neckband of his undershirt. His chest rose and fell weakly, as if he were not really breathing. She leaned over him, touched her lips to his. His eyes were closed now, as hers had been that night. She was afraid he’d startle awake and scream, or throw her off him, but he just started to kiss her in his sleep.

•  •  •

The Caprice was declared a total loss. She took the insurance payout and added it to their checking account.

Maybe, she thought, she should use the money for a new car for herself. She was tired of buying American cars. Maybe she’d buy herself a sporty two-door BMW like the one Connell had crashed into, or one of those E-Class Mercedes that looked perfectly enameled and invincible. She wouldn’t have to cringe at the paint peeling from the roof, the felt bagging around the center light in the ceiling, the rusty creak and thunderclap of the door closing. She could get a car she wouldn’t be ashamed to park in the church lot.

The boy could be expensive, but there were times he returned something on the investment.

59

P
eople came from all over for the funeral for Ed’s mother. It was the first time Eileen had seen Fiona leave Staten Island since the surprise party for Ed. Phil and Linda flew in from Toronto. Having Phil around seemed to add to Ed’s grief, not diminish it. It was as if Ed had finally realized that all the years they’d spent in different countries couldn’t be gotten back. The night before the funeral they’d sat at the kitchen table together for hours, Phil talking and Ed listening. Every time she went in there, Ed was crying big, unrestrained tears.

Cora had been a force in the parish, St. Mary’s Star of the Sea in Carroll Gardens, and so the church was packed with a lot of people Eileen had never met. Ed didn’t seem any more at home than she felt in his childhood church. His face was so red during the services that she kept reminding him to breathe. Cora had been ill for a while, and she’d had a good, long life, but it looked as if it had never occurred to Ed that his mother would actually die.

Eileen had always thought of Ed’s conscientious presence at his mother’s apartment, his willingness to go and change a bulb for her or pick her up groceries, as the fealty of a dutiful son, but the way he was responding to her death suggested a depth of feeling for her that Eileen hadn’t imagined. It might have had something to do with his condition. He was a step closer to death than an average person.

Afterward, as everyone hurried to their cars—it was a frigid day in February—her aunt Margie asked Ed for directions to the cemetery.

“Well,” he said, standing in front of the church, “where are you parked?”

“Around the corner.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He was kneading his hands together as if they might release an answer. “You need to take the highway.”

“Which one?”

“The highway around here. God, what’s the name of it?”

“You mean the BQE?”

“Yes! That’s it.”

“Where can I pick it up?”

They were a block away from the building Ed had grown up in. He might have driven a few thousand times to the BQE from where they were standing.

“It’s not far,” he said. “It’s only a few blocks.”

She cut Ed off and gave Margie the directions. She waited until Margie was out of earshot.

“You don’t know where the BQE is?”

“Of course I do,” he said. “It’s right around here.”

She looked at Connell huddling by the car waiting to go, then back at Ed, and she was overcome by the difference in age between father and son. Ed looked more like a contemporary of his mother’s than a husband to her. His shoulders hunched forward and his face was scored with new wrinkles, as if the trauma of his mother’s dying had aged him. She knew she would have to play nursemaid to him eventually, but she wanted to hold that off as long as possible.

That night, although they were in mourning, and although Phil and Linda were in the guest bedroom, Eileen got on top of Ed, leaning close to him as she moved back and forth. Afterward, she lay wondering how long he’d be able to perform in bed. The thought of the loss of consort kept her awake most of the night, and it was only toward morning that she realized it wasn’t the idea of physical loneliness that had been bothering her but an incipient awareness that she herself was going to die someday.

•  •  •

She kept a log of the first times he failed to do things. It was like a diary of a child’s development in reverse. Certain failures correctly augured great
changes in his mental powers. Others were false alarms, momentary hiccups.

02/19/94: Couldn’t find the BQE after Cora’s funeral. Losing his sense of direction.

At Karen Coakley’s wedding, she turned her back on Ed to get a plate of hors d’oeuvres. When she next spotted him, he had joined a group arranged along the far wall for a picture with the official photographer. It was the groom’s family, and she didn’t recognize any of them, and yet Ed was smiling gamely among their number, as if he’d watched them all grow up. He was ruining the photo by his presence. When the photographer was finished, she whisked him away with a quick, pitiless jerk, hoping no one had noticed him, though there was nothing she could do about Karen and her husband seeing him there when they examined the matte prints.

A provocative beauty emerged from the group, looking flustered. “I got felt up,” Eileen heard her say indignantly. “This man put his hand on my ass.”

“Who?” the boyfriend asked. “Point him out.”

The girl motioned in Ed’s direction. The boyfriend, packed like a sausage into his suit, started punching his palm in a manner both absurdly unoriginal and genuinely frightening. Eileen shifted instinctively in front of Ed, holding up her hand to halt their advance like a crossing guard protecting a child.

“It’s not what you think,” she said as calmly as she could. “It’s not what you think at all.”

04/16/94: Grab-ass at Karen’s wedding. Be there when he meets people
.
Stay by his side at parties. That time he held onto Susan’s breast when saying good-bye? No accident
.

They were invited to a party in Chelsea at the home of the chief of staff. They parked several blocks away and walked, soaking up the energy of a Manhattan evening. Ed had on a beautiful suit, she an expensive dress she’d bought a year ago and hadn’t had occasion to put on. She was enjoying wearing it. It fit a little snugly, with all the stress she’d been under lately, but it still framed her shape nicely.

She didn’t notice until she was a few paces ahead of him that Ed had fallen back like a recalcitrant dog on a walk.

“What is it?” She went back and tried to pull him along. “What’s going on?”

“You go without me.”

“This is absurd,” she said. “We’re a block away.”

“I’ve never met these people.”

“So what? They’re nice people.”

He shook his head.

“You’re
going
, Ed. I RSVP’d. I can’t mess around here. This guy, the chief of staff, he didn’t bring me in. He’s younger. I need to make a good showing tonight. I need you to rise to the occasion. Okay? I need to make it to ten years.”

“They’ll never know the real me,” he said.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Ed might think this way, but then they hadn’t spent much time around people who didn’t know him before.

“Half of you is better than ninety percent of people with a whole brain,” she said, and was surprised to find she believed it. “Even now, you’re funnier and smarter than most of those people in that room will be. Don’t forget who you are. Stick by me and they won’t notice a thing.”

He was at her elbow all night and no one was the wiser. The good thing about parties was that no conversation had to go that deep. If Ed didn’t answer a question right away, it fell back to the questioner. He only seemed more interesting the more time he took to answer. She held the plate and gave him only one-bite morsels. The dim lighting, the noise, and the crowd all helped. In his suit, Ed cut a dashing figure. He gave her an advantage with the chief, who talked with him for a long time about the research he’d done.

When they reached the street on departure, Ed was shaking so much that he could have been having a seizure. She saw that he must have exerted superhuman will to keep it together for her.

For several days, he seemed drained, and not long after, his conversation began to suffer.

05/20/94: Slurred speech after Chelsea shindig.

A few months after Frank had his stroke, they met Ruth and Frank at the Metropolitan Museum. Frank was in a wheelchair.

They’d only been there a few minutes when Ruth insisted she needed
a break from her husband. Eileen understood; Ruth had Frank to herself round-the-clock now. They told Ed and Frank to wait at a bench and slipped away to a costume exhibit. Even though she was thoroughly utilitarian in her attire—a powder-blue cardigan was an extravagance for her—Ruth performed delighted astonishment at the beauty of the elaborate dresses. Eileen’s gaze lingered on the cascading folds of finger-thick fabric, which seemed almost big enough for a person to hide away in.

When they returned to the bench, their husbands were gone. Eileen felt panicked, but a hunch led her to the main gallery, where she saw Ed standing, hands on the wheelchair handles, in front of his favorite painting, David’s
Death of Socrates
. Between him and Frank they barely had a whole working body.

She and Ruth walked up silently behind them.

“This one in the middle is Socrates,” Ed was saying. Eileen and Ruth looked at each other. “And this man with his hand on his knee. I forget his name.” She wanted to say “Crito,” as she’d heard him say before, but she kept quiet. “And the man at the end. I forget his name too.”
Plato
, she thought. “You know the story?” Frank was nodding along. “They’re making him take the cup.” Frank’s head was nodding like a piston. “They’re afraid of the influence he’s had on people.” She was amazed at how much of this he remembered. Ed wheeled Frank closer to the painting, and she felt the guard’s eyes on them.

“Look at his finger pointing up,” Ed said. “He’s saying, ‘I know there’s more after this.’ The cup is filled with . . . with . . .” Ed grappled for the word. Frank started to say it but couldn’t get it out. He stammered a couple of syllables.

“Hemlock,” Ruth said tersely, but not without emotion, as she took the handles of Frank’s wheelchair and began the march out of the room.

6/11/94: Went to Met. Ed forgot Crito, Plato, hemlock.

He was haunting her in the kitchen. She could tell he wanted to feel useful. She told him to chop a turnip. She had her back to him cooking and heard a lot of noise. When she turned he had lodged half the turnip on the knife and was banging both of them, turnip and knife together, on the
cutting board. Connell, who had been sitting at the table looking through philosophy books for quotes for the upcoming debate season, leaped up and seized the knife.