We Are Not Ourselves (70 page)

“Help me with the coats,” she said with a quiet urgency that had no time for rancor. She had spent a lifetime adjusting hopes downward and knew what order to handle things in. “Get some drinks going. We have to make the best of this.”

•  •  •

When he was done, he went out to the front porch and picked up the string he had disconnected from the others and plugged it in. The lights came on at once, completing the outline around the railed fence that his mother had drawn for passing cars and those making the turn into the driveway. It made a neat picture, and he stood taking it in, trying to derive a simple pleasure from the lights, trying to forget that they and the hundreds more inside had not prevented the encroaching of a fathomless darkness. His father was gone, gone.

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he had worried that the party would last late into the night, everyone frozen by Ed’s presence, unsure when they could leave,
if
they could leave, but then one by one they started to go. Before everyone had departed—because she knew it would be impossibly painful for her to get him out of there once they had—she announced that she was going to take Ed back to the home, and she had Jack and Connell get him down the stairs, said some quick good-byes and asked Ruth to handle everyone’s coats. Connell wanted to drive Ed himself, or go with her, but she insisted on doing it alone.

When she got to the home, she parked by the front door, even though she wasn’t supposed to stop there. She left the wheelchair in the trunk, helped Ed out of the seat in a bear hug and shuffled him over, as if she was dancing with a passed-out man and trying to keep him up. Everything inside was dark except for a single light in the entry to the foyer. She rang the bell and held Ed up with both arms, regretting that she hadn’t just left him in the car while she waited, or stopped to get the wheelchair out of the trunk, but she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She rang again. He was shivering, and she rang again and she thought of bringing him back to the car, wondering whether they were going to come at all, but then an attendant came to the door and Eileen asked for a wheelchair. She’d return the other one another time. She wheeled him in, got him into bed, kissed him good night, and left before she could feel what was starting to well up in her, which she whisked away by shaking her head quickly from side to side and throwing her hands out like she was trying to dry them off.

She hadn’t been able to bring herself to let Ed stay in the house that
night, because it would have broken her heart to have him there one more time only to have him have to leave again, and there was also the matter of Sergei. She hadn’t been intimate with him since that night she’d gone into his room and let what was happening happen, the first spark catching the kindling and sending flames up quickly, and she had almost gotten to the point where she’d convinced herself it hadn’t occurred. Lately, though, they had fallen into a habit. He would come into her bed after she’d turned in and hold her for a while. At some point in the night he would get up and go to his own bed, but there had been mornings she’d woken up and found him there, and once she’d even woken up in his arms. She couldn’t have had Ed sleep in the bed, because it didn’t feel like her bed with him anymore. It wasn’t hers with Sergei, either, and it felt less and less like her bed, period. She could hardly sleep in it. She had been thinking of getting a new bed for years, and now she saw that she would have to do so right away—tomorrow, even. Now that Ed had been back in the house, it couldn’t continue the way it had been.

She was glad Connell had slept in late. Sergei was waiting for her in the kitchen when she came down. He made it easier on her by stopping her quickly into her speech and making a gesture that showed he understood. She got the feeling she might not have had to say anything to him at all, that he would have figured it out on his own. He always made things easier on her. He had gone up to his room the night before as soon as Ed came in, and he hadn’t come back down, and Ed’s presence had caused such a distraction that she was sure no one had drawn any conclusions from Sergei’s departure, and she had been grateful because leaving the room had been the perfect thing for him to do and she hadn’t had to ask.

He gathered his things quickly; there wasn’t much to gather. She asked where he would go and he said he would stay with his daughter until he figured out what was next. Something told her he would end up back with his wife, that he had been going to end up back with her from the beginning, that this had been something he had been doing for himself as well as for Eileen, that it was a life-giving escape for him too.

He stood in the door and she felt a rush of something like panic and asked if he wanted to go into town and get some breakfast with her. When
he said he did, she spirited them out quickly, as it felt somehow that the reality of what had been happening between them would become more permanent in her own mind if her son came down and saw them leaving for town together.

She got in Sergei’s car, which she’d never been in before. It touched her to see how neat and clean it was, not a scrap of paper or food wrapper anywhere. There was an air-freshener smell in the car, and the smell of broken-in leather, and the smell—she wouldn’t have guessed she’d recognize it—of Sergei himself.

She had thought of Pete’s, or the other diner in town whose name she could never remember, but as he drove she realized it would be uncomfortable to sit with him and have a full-on meal and have to wait for a check and manage all the time, the silences, and have to look at each other that long, because she realized she felt more for him than she’d ever admitted to herself, and she knew he did too, or else he wouldn’t have put up with being intimate with her just the one time.

She had him pull into a spot on Palmer outside the bagel shop, and they went in. It surprised her to realize that it was the first time they had ever been in public together. She asked him what he wanted and he told her to get what she thought he would like. She remembered seeing him eat an egg and cheese sandwich once, so she ordered him one with American cheese, which he loved, a fact that had always surprised her somehow, on a plain bagel, because that was the safest choice, and a black coffee. She got the same for herself, except for the cheese, cheddar in her case, and she was so nervous paying that she had to hand over another dollar to have enough, and she felt a little of what she imagined Ed had felt when paying, and she also felt a pang of sadness or guilt, she wasn’t sure which, run through her like an electric shock. She glanced over while paying and saw Sergei looking at her, taking her in frankly and unapologetically, maybe because he was free to do so now, and she was sure the woman behind the counter would be able to see the whole story of their relationship—she had to call it that, if she was being honest—from that one look.

She brought the food over and sat at the little café table with him, in a plastic chair, and they talked about the safest of things: the weather, how
the coffee was. He asked her to get him another napkin, because they kept them behind the counter and it would have required some negotiation on his part to get one, and she felt a surge of connection to him that made all the nights of his holding her settle in, like a dog going to sleep with a sigh by a fireplace, and she wanted to reach out and touch his face, but she knew that she would never be with him, that something about the circumstances of how they’d come together made that impossible, that their lives were too different, too incommensurable, and that while they’d had this thing that she saw meant more to her than she’d understood while it was happening, it too, now, was gone.

When the sandwiches were eaten she ordered a muffin for them to share, and they picked at it with a tender deliberateness that gave the sadness she’d been feeling room to breathe. After every crumb was gone, and there was no reason for them to be sitting there anymore, they sat and looked at each other for a little while. She didn’t care now what the woman behind the counter thought, because she was going to take this moment for herself and not let it slip away. She could tell he was feeling the same thing she was, though she wasn’t prepared to give it a name. They sat there and let that nameless feeling pass over them like a wind in an electric storm. Then she got up and he followed her out. She walked him to the car and he offered to drive her home, but she said she would walk, and the moment for him to get in his car was upon them, and people were coming at them from both directions, and she was nervous to be seen there with him, because she knew everyone would know, that it would take only one look at her for them to know. She put her arms around him quickly before she could stop herself and sank into his arms as he pressed her to him one final time. She wanted not to forget any of it: the fresh smell of his shirt mixed with cologne, smoke, and sweat; his jacket rough against her face and the strange innocence of its red and black checks; the strength of him squeezing her; the sound of his breathing. She felt rise up in her the years of Ed’s illness and the months since he’d been gone. She felt it in her chest but she didn’t let it out, because she didn’t think she deserved to do so. She would have to carry it around in her a little longer at least. He gave her small kisses on the neck and said something to her in Russian that she
didn’t understand, and then he took her face in his hands by the ears and gave her a few smacking kisses on the forehead and walked around to the driver’s side door. He took one more long look at her before he dipped his big body down into the car, which shook with his entry into it. She listened to it starting up and watched it pull out and waited for him to come around the circle and head back the other way toward the Bronx River, and after he was out of sight she went back into the store to buy some bagels for Connell. She would eat again with him when he was up. It would give her less to explain, and it would make it less real, what she’d been feeling sitting there, and it would make it more real, in a way, it would make it more hers, something that didn’t have to exist for anyone else, something she’d done for herself, for once, and there was no need to apologize for it. She looked the woman in the eye and handed over her money and left to start the walk home. The second half was all uphill. She knew she’d barely be breathing by the time she arrived.

Part VI

The Real
Estate of
Edmund Leary

1997–2000

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he had a hard time leaving him at night. It was better not to say good-bye. She’d tell him she was going to run an errand or to take a nap—trying to imply, in the way she said it, that she’d be returning. “I just need to run to the store,” she’d say, and then mechanically make her way through the corridors and out the back door, the whole time telling herself she could turn around and go back.

Once, when she said, “I’m going to get something to eat,” he seemed to laugh sardonically, and she looked at him, trying to find a deliberate message in his expression, some chastening meant for her, but she saw only that familiar blankness as he stared at something she couldn’t see. This disease was making her paranoid too.

She went every day. She never accepted the invitations for weekends in the country or at the beach. Her friends said she was being too hard on herself. She thought she was being too easy.
I could bring him home
, she wanted to say.
I could take care of him
. They told her she needed to have some semblance of a life, that it was too much. And she thought,
It’s not enough. I’m a nurse, for God’s sake, that’s what I do
, but all she said was, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.”

•  •  •

His wallet was still on the mule chest. She rubbed her fingers on the worn, smooth leather, took out the driver’s license and looked at it, read the prayer they’d written together. Inside was everything she’d allowed him to carry in his final ambulatory years, and everything he’d been carrying on his last day as a full-dressed member of civilization: seven dollars cash; an index card listing his name, address, and phone number and her work phone
number, written in her own hand; his Alzheimer’s Association Safe Return card (“If I appear lost or confused, please help me by calling . . .”); his Mobil and Amoco gas cards; his AAA card (“Membership year 27”); two different Board of Elections voter registration confirmations; his Waldbaum’s Valued Shopper Card with Check Cashing Privileges; his PriceCostco card under Jack R. Coakley Consulting; his AARP card; his ID from BCC; an index card with the number for the car phone; his Sears card (“Valued Customer Since 1973”); his Blue Cross/Blue Shield card; his GHI card; his PSC-CUNY card indicating he was a member in good standing of the AFT Local 2334 (AFL-CIO); his New York Academy of Sciences membership card; a picture of her from June of 1968, when she had been thin; a picture of Connell in his baseball uniform from his freshman year of high school; a picture of Connell from preschool; a picture of Connell graduating from St. Joan of Arc; and the edited index card with her size written on it. She opened the card. She was going to cross the “10” out and write “12” in its place, and then throw it in the garbage, but when she saw that the “10” was in her own handwriting, the tears came all at once.

•  •  •

His roommate was named Reinhold Huggins. Mr. Huggins had been a celebrated piano teacher. Now he pushed a walker around and refused to wear an undershirt under his hospital robe, his naked back bisected by the tight string, his steps tiny and shuffling, his posture slightly hunched. He was surprisingly alert. He didn’t say anything unprompted, except to ask for water, but if she asked how he was doing he would say, “Rather well, thank you, and yourself?” always quietly and gently, so that she had to lean in to hear him, and without the rising intonation that would have made the statement a question. Despite his manner of speaking, he was fearsome-looking, with a hoary, streaked beard and an unsmiling visage. The one time she had tried to direct him to the piano in the lounge, he gripped her shoulders with his long, bony fingers and squeezed hard. She didn’t do it again. Often when he spoke or sat in his chair, he raised his forefinger and beat it back and forth like a metronome. Other than that, he wasn’t a bad roommate; there were worse in the building.