Life After Life (35 page)

Stanley

S
TANLEY IS TIRED OF
his game, tired of pretending he doesn’t notice what is really going on; the way it is so clear Sadie is fading away, the way Rachel Silverman clearly had more connection to Joe Carlyle than she let on, the way Ned, for all the pushing, is still not out there actively seeking a new life and company better than his flaky old man. After dinner he goes and sits in the chapel and stares at all the photos of Lois Flowers. He had known her for years. Some people thought she was a little uppity and overdressed for these city limits, but he admired the way she went her own way, or at least seemed to. He closes his eyes and pictures her swaying there in the dining hall, jet black hair fixed just so. He liked the way she could make her voice gruff and then come right back and hit every high note. She will be missed around here. She leaves a big empty hole.

He looks up and there is Rachel Silverman. She sits in the pew across from him, also looking straight ahead at Lois, a young Lois on a city street, a war bride, a young mother, mother of the bride, grandmother.

He’s so tired, but he has to say something, especially after being so serious earlier. He had hoped to sit with her at dinner, but she didn’t come and neither did Sadie. He sat with Toby who spent the whole time talking about how it just wasn’t the same without Sadie and Rachel. The silence is unbearable and he knows he has to break it. “This ain’t no synagogue, sister.”

“It’s interfaith.” She spits and then softens and points at the photographs. “I used to wear my hair just like that. In fact, I also had a sweater just like that, too. What a lovely person she was.”

“Lois was always known for her clothes. I’ve known her my whole life.” He feels a catch in his throat and has to say something else, quick, one of those stupid things he thinks up just for these occasions. “And speaking of clothes, why do they call a cheap little part of a turtleneck a “dickey”? Why not a neckey?” He can smell her cologne, can see the dirt on the side of her hot pink shoe. “A dickey should fit on something else, right? And where’d you get those shoes anyway? They make me think of jokes my sons used to tell when they were young and ridiculous.”

“I bought them.”

“I know how it went. Why did the elephant wear red tennis shoes? And then it was something like to hide in a strawberry patch or a bag of M&Ms or some other stupid place.”

“Are you calling me an elephant?”

“No, no way. I know not to tell women such things.”

“Shhhh.” Marge and a whole army of church women with walkers come in and sit right behind him. “This is a place of worship and respect.”

“You’re right,” Rachel says, and turns back toward the front and then in a few minutes she gets up and heads back out in the hall. Stanley waits until he hears the door close and then he follows, runs, in fact, to catch up with her. He gets right up behind her and asks if she’d like to come to his room to listen to Herb Alpert and drink martinis.

“Not this time,” she says sarcastically.

“You can pretend I’m
Joe Carlyle.
” He speaks the name in a way that makes it sound like it’s dripping in disgust. He walks ahead of her, self-consciously aware of how disheveled and demented he must seem to her. He is almost to his hall when she comes up behind him. She presses in close and whispers in his ear. “First of all, I do
not
have haunches like a sack mule as you said several months ago and I do
not
have horns, and secondly, I am on to you. If you would ever like to have a real conversation with me sans whipped cream and martinis and other malarkey bullshit, I am here, otherwise, just stay the hell away from me. This is hurtful. All that you are doing is hurtful.”

“What do you mean you’re on to me?” He can’t look at her.

“The act. I watch you. I’m no fool. You need to join the theater. You might actually be appreciated there.”

“What act?”

“Oh, come on. I spent years in a courtroom and I know how to study a face,” she says. He knows she is within a foot of him, but he still doesn’t turn around. He can smell her cologne. “You have nice eyes, in fact, and a captivating face when you aren’t behaving like some goddamned imbecile.” She says this last part with gritted teeth. “Earlier today, for instance, there was a moment.”

“Are you saying you find me attractive?” he interrupts.

“No. But I am saying that for a few minutes there you acted like a human being, and a kind one at that.”

“That’s sad.”

“What’s sad? Being kind to someone? That I know you’re faking, though God only knows why? That I thought you might be someone, like Toby or Sadie, who I could actually have a real conversation with? We were both lawyers. We both live in this”—she pauses—“this home for the aged. We both clearly have things we’re hiding from.”

“Oh boy.”

“I rest my case.” She steps around and bends forward to make eye contact. “So why?”

Stanley sighs and opens the door to his apartment, motions for her to come in and she surprises him and does, leaving him suddenly worried about the way it looks or what he might have lying about that she might latch onto. She walks straight and picks up a copy of
Wrestlemania
under which is a copy of the
New Yorker
and
Harper’s,
a stack of
Wall Street Journal
s and all of his gardening catalogs. And under Herb Alpert she finds Frank Sinatra and Louis Prima and Cab Calloway and a whole library of classical. “What’s the deal?”

“My son. He wouldn’t leave me alone, said he was going to move in with me. I just want him to have a life.” He pauses, realizing how stupid it all sounds as he says it, recognizes how he has avoided dealing with all the barriers standing between the two of them, barriers that have been in place for as long as he can remember. “He thinks I saved him and that he’s forever indebted to me or some such crap and I want him to break off and have his own life.”

“But isn’t this kind of extreme?”

“Yes, but it’s such a long tiring story.” He waits, giving her the chance to bail, but instead she sits and makes herself comfortable and motions that he continue. “He fucked up early in life—always in trouble—one of those kids who always got caught, then it looked like he was on a path and was going to be okay but no such luck. Too vulnerable. I want him to have a life. Kids need to live their own lives.” He takes out the Herb Alpert album and puts it on the stereo. “It keeps people from bothering me.” They both laugh. “In the beginning, people would come by and want to hear it, say things like,
I haven’t thought of this in years,
but after a while, it got old. Even Toby is sick of it.”

“But surely there’s an easier way to do this with your son,” she says. “I mean, think of what you’re missing by not having a
real
relationship with him.”

“We’ve never had a relationship,” he says, and the weight of the words hit him. He sits down, shocked by how sad and stupid it all is. “Oh God. We really have never had a relationship.” He puts his head in his hands and takes several deep breaths. “Me telling him what to do. That’s it. That’s all.” He feels her hand on his shoulder, patting and then held there. “Enough about me,” he finally says. “Tell me about you. Tell me about Joe Carlyle.”

She begins talking and he listens. In fact, he can’t believe how open and honest she is, her voice rising and falling in a way that he finds mesmerizing. She is able to describe in a few simple words the loneliness she felt in her life, the kind of loneliness that others don’t really see because everything looks so good and full from the outside.
An inner loneliness.
She said it was something she always thought would go away and then she thought, no, you just learn to live with it. Then she met Joe Carlyle at the height of loneliness and it felt like the whole world shifted. She was almost forty and was suddenly aware of all the doors that were going to begin closing—childbirth and career pursuits, even the geography of what you call home, family members and friends aging and dying and leaving new empty spaces to fill.

“Sounds pretty depressing, doesn’t it?” she asks, and smiles at him in a way he has never seen her smile. She is relaxed, leaning on the arm of his sofa, fingers toying with a piece of needlework thrown over the arm that Martha had always kept there and that Ned had reverently placed just so when he helped Stanley move into this place. Martha had done the work as a young woman and now Rachel Silverman’s sturdy ringless hand strokes the fine threads in a way that is tender and admiring. “But it feels good to talk.” She nods at him. “It does. It feels like I’m alive again. Which is what I felt that summer I met Joe. We live days and weeks and months and years with so little awareness of life. We wait for the bad things that wake us up and shock our systems. But every now and then, on the most average day, it occurs to you that this is it. This is all there is.”

“I do know this,” he says. “I know what you’re saying.”

“And Joe, whatever else he was, was a talker and a wonderful storyteller. Oh, he could make you feel like you were there. He talked about that Saxon River all the time, the dark brown water like tea, the low hanging branches, the moccasins zigzagging from bank to bank. I hung on his every word. I’ll confess I found him very attractive. Up until that moment, I wasn’t even aware that I had a libido.” She pauses, as if testing, checking to see if he registers a look of shock or surprise, so he is careful to keep his face as blank as possible and nod in a knowing way. He spent enough time in court to know how to do a few things, too. He nods again and motions his hand for her to continue and she does. “Well, I had one. It had been dormant my whole life and then all of a sudden there it was!”

Stanley is about to say Joe Carlyle affected a lot of women that way, but he stops himself and instead studies his own hands, the hair on his knuckles, his wedding band so loose lately he worries he might lose it. It also occurs to him how lucky Joe Carlyle was on that day—a man in the right place at the right time even if he was a son of a bitch.

“And so there I was as Art was dying looking ahead to the last chapter of my life and wondering how I wanted to spend it. I don’t have children to depend on or them on me. There it was, the ultimate freedom. Did I want to go to Europe? Go to some island somewhere? Take lots of trips and cruises with Elderhostel? Retire where I’d spent my whole life and just watch winter after winter come and go until I broke a hip and slid on downhill? Then I thought why not see the world Joe had made come so alive for me? The small-town life, the river beach and old pavilion. I wanted to see where he had been a child; I wanted to see where his heart developed. And of course I believed it to be a good heart; I still want to believe it was a good heart, that some part of what I had with him was real and worth protecting.”

“I’m sure it was,” he says without looking up.

“No you aren’t,” she says. “But I do appreciate your saying so. It’s kind of you, Stanley, and I need the kindness.”

“You will have it, then.” His voice shakes as he says this and it makes him cough. “I’ve really missed conversation. Never thought I would, but I do.”

“You know”—she reaches and puts her hand on his bare arm—“even if all he did was wake me up, that would be something good, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And the way he described life around here sounded like a life I would love to have had. It was so different from anything I had ever known.”

“I’m sure about
that.
” He laughs and asks if she wants a glass of sweet tea before or after she accepts Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. “But what about your heart,” Stanley says, unable to look at her as he says it, so aware of the portrait of Martha staring out at him from over the mantel, a bouquet of roses Ned brought earlier in the day, there in her favorite cut-glass vase. “Tell me about your heart.”

“Late. My heart came so very late. Little glimmers early on. The other day I was thinking maybe only now has my heart fully come to be. I sit and listen to Sadie talk and I close my eyes and roam to all the places I loved. And I didn’t even know how much I loved them, which is sad but better late than never.” She slides her hand along his arm, plays with the band of his watch before lacing her fingers with his. “She has opened something in me that probably should have been opened when I was eight. Right? Isn’t that what she always says. We’re all just eight years old. My parents were immigrants and they were terrified that at any moment someone in authority might show up and deport them. They lived like they were living by way of some mistake. My brother and I were their great hopes. First my brother because he was the oldest and of course because he was a boy. He became a doctor, which thrilled them and then I became a lawyer because I knew they would have to be proud of that, too.”

“Hmmmm.” He feels his face flush. “I’m sure they were proud of you. Not many broads our age doing that.”

“I didn’t want to be afraid like my parents had always been,” she said, “and of course the irony is that I was anyway. Foolishly, I had convinced myself I had no fear at all. In fact, I felt that way this very morning only to have it all unravel. At lunch today, I felt absolute terror to hear the truth and I also realized that without the stability I had in my life with Art, I would have always
been
afraid, I might never have done anything at all. Art’s presence kept me from being afraid and I never gave him credit for that.”