The Beginner's Goodbye Page 5

  Over the course of an evening the phone would ring several times, but I always checked the caller ID before I picked up. If it was Nandina, I might as well answer. She would arrive at my door in person if I didn’t let her know I was still among the living. But the Millers, always after me to go to the symphony with them, or the eternal Mimi King … Fortunately, I’d had the good sense to deactivate the answering machine. For a while I’d left it on, and the guilty burden of unreturned calls almost did me in before I remembered the Off button.

  “I’m fine,” I’d tell Nandina. “How are you since five o’clock, when I last saw you?”

  “I can’t imagine how you’re coping there,” she would say. “Where do you sit, even? How do you occupy your evening?”

  “I have several places to sit, and no shortage of occupations. In fact, at this very minute I—Oh-oh! Gotta go!”

  I would hang up and look at my watch. Only eight o’clock?

  I angled my wrist to make sure the second hand was still moving. It was.

  Occasionally, the doorbell would ring. Oh, how I hated that doorbell. It was a golden-voiced, two-note chime: ding dong. Kind of churchy, kind of self-important. But I felt compelled to answer it, because my car was parked out front and it was obvious I was home. I would sigh and make my way to the hall. Most often it was Mary-Clyde Rust. Not Jim, so much. Jim seemed to be having trouble these days thinking what to say to me, but Mary-Clyde was not in the least at a loss. “Now, Aaron,” she would tell me, “I know you don’t feel like company, so I won’t intrude. But I need to see if you’re all right. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Okay, good. Glad to hear it.”

  And she would nod smartly and spin on her heel and leave.

  I preferred the neighbors who avoided me. The people who gazed suddenly elsewhere if they happened to be walking their dogs past when I stepped out of the house in the morning. The people who got into their cars with their backs kept squarely, tactfully turned in my direction as I got into my own car.

  One evening when the doorbell rang it was a man I didn’t know, a keg-shaped man with a short brown beard and a mop of gray-streaked brown hair. “Gil Bryan,” he told me. “General contractor,” and he handed me a business card. The outside light bulb made the sweaty skin beneath his eyes shine in a way I found trustworthy; that was the only reason I didn’t just shut the door again. He said, “I’m the guy who put the tarp on your roof.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I see you haven’t got it repaired yet.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Well, that’s my card, if you ever want someone to do it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I know it must be the last thing on your mind right now.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, and then I did shut the door, but slowly, so as not to give offense. I liked the way he’d worded that. Even so, I just tossed his card into the porcelain bowl, because I was purposely ignoring the roof the way I had ignored those doctors peeking into the waiting room. “Roof? What roof?” I should have asked Mr. Bryan. “I don’t see anything wrong with the roof.”

  The earliest bedtime I allowed myself was 9 p.m. I told myself I would read a while before I turned out the light; I wouldn’t go to sleep immediately. I had a huge, thick biography of Harry Truman that I’d begun before the accident. But I couldn’t seem to make much headway in it. “Reading is the first to go,” my mother used to say, meaning that it was a luxury the brain dispensed with under duress. She claimed that after my father died she never again picked up anything more demanding than the morning paper. At the time I had thought that was sort of melodramatic of her, but now I found myself reading the same paragraph six times over, and still I couldn’t have told you what it was about. My eyelids would grow heavier, and all at once I’d be jerking awake as the book slid off the bed and crashed to the floor.

  So I would reach for the remote control and turn on the TV that sat on the bureau. I would watch—or stare in a glazed way at—documentaries and panel discussions and commercials. I would listen to announcers rattling off the side effects of all the medications they were touting. “Oh, sure,” I would tell them. “I’ll run out and buy that tomorrow. Why let a little uncontrollable diarrhea put me off, or kidney failure, or cardiac arrest?”

  Dorothy used to hate it when I talked back like that. “Do you mind?” she would ask. “I can’t hear a word they’re saying.”

  This TV was just a little one, the little extra one that we sometimes watched the late news on when we were getting ready for bed. Our big TV was in the sunporch. It was an old Sony Trinitron. Jim Rust told me in the hospital that that was what had crushed Dorothy’s chest; the firemen said it had fallen off its bracket high in the corner. Sony Trinitrons are known for their unusual weight.

  A while back, Dorothy and I had discussed buying one of those new-fangled flat-screen sets, but we’d decided we couldn’t afford it. If we had had a flat-screen TV, would Dorothy still be alive?

  Or if her patient hadn’t canceled. Then she wouldn’t even have been home yet when the tree fell.

  Or if she had stayed in the kitchen instead of heading for the sunporch.

  If I’d said, “Let’s see if I can find those Triscuits,” and gone out to the kitchen to help her look, and then sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate them.

  But no, no. I had to stomp off in a huff and sulk in the bedroom, as if it had mattered in the least that she’d refused to settle for Wheat Thins.

  Oh, all those annoying habits of hers that I used to chafe at—the trail of crumpled tissues and empty coffee mugs she left in her wake, her disregard for the finer points of domestic order and comfort. Big deal!

  Her tendency to make a little too much of her medical degree when she was meeting new people. “I’m Dr. Rosales,” she would say, instead of “I’m Dorothy,” so you could almost see the white coat even when she wasn’t wearing one. (Not that she actually met new people all that often. She had never seen the purpose in socializing.)

  And those orthopedic-type shoes she had favored: they had struck me, at times, as self-righteous. They had seemed a deliberate demonstration of her seriousness, her high-mindedness—a pointed reproach to the rest of us.

  I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.

  But somehow, it didn’t work that way.

  I wished I could let her know that I’d kept vigil in the hospital. I hated to think she might have felt she was going through that alone.

  And wouldn’t she have been amused by all these casseroles!

  That was one of the worst things about losing your wife, I found: your wife is the very person you want to discuss it all with.

  The TV infiltrated my sleep, if you could call this ragged semiconsciousness sleep. I dreamed the war in Iraq was escalating, and Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the Democratic nomination. I rolled over on the remote control and someone all at once shouted, “… this stainless-steel, hollow-ground, chef-quality …,” by which time I was sitting bolt upright in my bed, my eyes popping and my heart pounding and my mouth as dry as gauze. I turned off the TV and lay flat again. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth: Go to sleep, damn it.

  You would think I’d have dreamed about Dorothy, but I didn’t. The closest I came to it was the whiff of isopropyl alcohol that I hallucinated from time to time as I finally drifted off again. She had carried that scent home on her skin at the end of every workday. Early in our marriage I used to have vivid dreams about childhood doctor visits and vaccinations and the like, evoked by the alcohol scent as I lay sleeping next to her. Now the ghost of it brought me sharply awake, and once or twice I even spoke her name aloud: “Dorothy?”

  But I never got an answer.

  The casseroles started thinning out and the letters stopped. Could people move on that easily?
Yes, well, of course. New tragedies happened daily. I had to acknowledge that.

  It seemed heartless that I should think to go in for my semiannual dental checkup, but I did. And then I bought myself some new socks. Socks, of all things! So trivial! But all my old ones had holes in the toes.

  One evening my friend Nate called—WEISS N I on my caller ID. Him I picked up for. Right off I said, “Nate! How’ve you been?” without waiting for him to announce himself. But that was evidently a mistake, because I caught a brief hesitation before he said, “Hello, Aaron.” Very low-voiced, very lugubrious; not at all his usual style.

  “How about a game tomorrow?” I asked him.

  “Pardon?”

  “A game of racquetball! I’m turning into an old man here. All my joints are rusting.”

  “Well, ah, but … I was calling to invite you to dinner,” he said.

  “Dinner?”

  “Yes, Sonya was saying we ought to have you over.”

  Sonya must be his wife. I had never met his wife. I suppose he must have mentioned her from time to time, but we didn’t have that kind of friendship. We had a racquetball friendship. We’d gotten acquainted at the gym.

  I said, “Over to … to your house, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, gosh, Nate, I don’t know. I don’t even know where you live!”

  “I live in Bolton Hill,” he said.

  “And also I just … It’s been really busy at work lately. You wouldn’t believe how busy. I barely have time for a sandwich, and then, when I do find time, there is so much extra food in the fridge, these—these—these casseroles and these … cheesecakes. It’s practically a full-time job just to g-g-get it all d-d-d—just to eat it!”

  “I see,” he said.

  “But thanks.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Tell Sonya I appreciate the thought.”

  “Okay.”

  I wanted to revisit the racquetball idea, but after I’d made such a point of being busy I figured that would be a mistake. So I just told him goodbye.

  Not half an hour later, the phone rang again. This time it was TULL L. I answered, but I was warier now. All I said was, “Hello?”

  “Hi, Aaron, it’s Luke.”

  “Hi, Luke.”

  “I can understand why you might prefer not to go to Nate’s.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He told me you’d turned down his invitation.”

  I said, “You’re talking about Nate Weiss.”

  “Why, yes.”

  “You know Nate Weiss?”

  “We met in the hospital waiting room, remember? When we both stopped by to visit.”

  This had been happening a lot lately. I swear I had no recollection that either one of them had stopped by, let alone that they’d met each other. But I said, “Oh. Right.”

  “He says he got the impression you’re not up yet for coming to dinner.”

  “No, but racquetball …” I said. “I’m itching for a good game of racquetball.”

  There was a pause. Then Luke said, “Unfortunately, I don’t know how to play racquetball.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I was thinking: if getting together with wives and such is too much to handle just now—”

  “Oh, no. Lord, no,” I said briskly. “Doesn’t faze me in the least.”

  Another pause. Then he said, “I was thinking you could come to the restaurant instead.”

  He meant his restaurant, which was how we’d been introduced, back in the era of The Beginner’s Book of Dining Out. I said, “Well, that’s a good idea, Luke. Maybe sometime in the—”

  “Just you and me and Nate; just us guys. No wives. We could have an early supper, and then you could head on home whatever time you felt like. How about it?”

  I didn’t want to do that, either, but what could I say? It was nice of him to make the effort. It was nice of both of them. I doubted I would have done as much if I had been in their place. I was more the “Let’s move on” type. The “Maybe if I don’t mention your loss, you’ll forget it ever happened” type.

  I kind of wished they were that type, to be honest.

  But okay: might as well get this over with. I met them directly after work the next evening, a rainy, blowy Tuesday in mid-September. It had been pouring all day, and driving conditions were terrible. On top of that, I had trouble finding a parking space. By the time I walked into the restaurant (white linens, wide-planked floors, a certain worn-around-the-edges friendliness), Nate and Luke were already seated at a table. They made an unlikely pair. Nate looked very sleek and dark and professional in his black lawyer-suit, whereas Luke was one of those all-one-color, beige-hair-beige-skin types in shabby khakis, going a little soft around the middle. They seemed to be having no trouble finding things to talk about, though, if you judged by the way they’d set their heads together. I had the distinct impression that it was me they were talking about. How to deal with me, what topics would be safe to discuss with me. I’d barely pulled my chair out before Nate asked, “What about this weather, hey?” in a sprightly tone I wasn’t familiar with. And Luke rode right over the tail of that with “You been following the Orioles?”

  I felt compelled to answer in kind, in a louder voice than usual and with more verve. “You know, I haven’t as a matter of fact been following the Orioles lately,” I said, and then I wanted to take the words back, because I knew they’d be misinterpreted.

  Sure enough: Nate said, “Well, of course you haven’t. You’ve had a lot more important things to think about.”

  “No, I just meant—”

  “Both of you should try the oysters!” Luke broke in. “We’re in the R months now!”

  Luke was such a quiet man ordinarily that it was bizarre to see him so animated. Besides which, he clearly felt uneasy sitting idle in his own workplace. He kept glancing around at other tables, raising his eyebrows significantly at waiters, frowning over Nate’s head in the direction of the kitchen. “I personally recommend eating these raw,” he told me in a distracted way, “but if you prefer, you could order the, uh …,” and then he paused to listen to what a short man in a stained apron was whispering in his ear.

  “… the Oysters Rockefeller,” Nate finished for him. “Those are great. They use this special slab bacon that comes from upstate New York.”

  “You’ve eaten here before?” I asked.

  “Yes, we came by last week,” he said, and then he gave a little grimace, which I couldn’t figure out for a moment. Was it because he had let it slip that he and Luke had met earlier, perhaps to cogitate over The Aaron Problem? No, on second thought it must have been the “we” that had embarrassed him, because next he said, as if correcting himself, “I had thought after I met him that I’d like to try his food.”

  So apparently the plan tonight was to avoid all mention of wives. Pretend neither one of them even possessed a wife. For now Luke, turning back to us as the aproned man left, said, “Sorry, the chef has run out of lamb chops, is all,” and I happened to know that he was married to the chef. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have said that Jane or Joan or whatever her name was had run out of lamb chops, and he might also have brought her out to introduce her. But these were not ordinary circumstances.

  I became perverse. I do that, sometimes. I started mentioning wives right and left—each utterance of the word “wife” thudding onto our table like a stone. “Did your wife like the Oysters Rockefeller, too?” I asked Nate, and Nate shifted in his seat and said, “Oh, um … she doesn’t eat shellfish.”

  “You know, I’ve never thought to wonder,” I said to Luke. “Did your wife become chef here before you married her, or after?”

  “Er, before, actually,” Luke told me. “Say! We need to decide on the wine!” And he sat forward urgently and beckoned to a waiter.

  But I relented, after that, and let the conversation drift into more or less normal channels. Nate turned out to be the food-for-food’s-sake
type, going on at length about the breeding beds of oysters and the best source for heirloom pork. Luke, whom you’d expect to be deeply concerned with such things, didn’t seem all that interested and spent most of his time focusing on what everyone else in the place was eating, or not eating enough of, or looking dissatisfied with. And within a bearable length of time, we managed to get through the evening.

  “We should do this again!” Nate said as we were parting, and Luke said, “Yes! Make a regular thing of it!”

  Oh, or else not. But I nodded enthusiastically, and shook both their hands, and thanked Luke for the meal, which he had refused to let us pay for.

  I didn’t thank either one of them for the event itself—for the act of getting together. That would have implied that it had been a charitable gesture of some sort, and I most certainly was not in need of charity.

  So I turned up my collar, and gave both of them a jaunty wave of my cane, and set off through the downpour as cocky as you please.

  Though I’d have to say that I felt a little, maybe, woebegone as I drove home alone.

  The outside light was supposed to come on automatically at dusk, but the bulb must have burned out. A damned nuisance in the rain. I stepped in a couple of puddles as I was walking up the sidewalk to my house, and my trouser cuffs were already wet enough as it was. I unlocked the door and reached inside to turn the hall light on, but that was burned out, too. And when I pushed the door wider open, I met with some kind of resistance. A gravelly sound startled me. I peered down at the dark hall floor and made out several white and irregular objects. I nudged them with my foot. Rocks? No, plaster, chips of plaster. I pushed the door harder and it opened a few more inches. My eyes had adjusted by now. Against the black of the floor I saw scatterings of white and then a mound of white—pebbles and clods and sheets of white. And now that I thought about it, the air I was breathing was full of dust. I could feel an urge to cough pressing my throat. And I heard a loud, steady dripping from somewhere inside the house.

  I closed the door again. I went back to my car, stepping in the same two puddles on the way, and got behind the steering wheel, where I spent several minutes collecting my thoughts. Then I drew a deep, shaky breath and fitted my key into the ignition.