Say Her Name (26 page)

A few nights later she woke up in bed as if from a nightmare, clutching her head in her thin brown arms, which looked like triangular paper clips. Her breathing was like soft shrieks, and then she was saying, I’m sorry, I can’t anymore, I can’t sleep next to her wedding dress anymore, and feel her all around me, I can’t, I can’t, lo intenté pero ya no puedo,
Ayyy, Aura, perdóname!

When we broke up a week later I told Ana Eva it had nothing to do with her, that she was wonderful but that I just wasn’t ready to have a regular lover. But don’t you think Aura would want you to be happy? she pleaded. I was mystified that she took it so badly; I thought by now she must be yearning to flee. When she kneeled before the Aura altar and the wedding dress to say good-bye, I recalled Flor, our former cleaning lady. There Ana Eva went on about our “poor dead little love” sounding like a lost child, and she begged Aura to forgive her, said that she’d tried her best to look after me like Aura had asked but that I hadn’t let her. Her shoulders shook and shook. Our relationship had lasted almost a month from start to finish.

* * *

Later, when I looked it up, I found out that Malamudovich means “son of a scholar,” or “learned one.” And what did my father learn from his father? And what did I learn from my father?

Aura and I both grew up around parental unhappiness, rage, and, to different degrees, violence. I didn’t dwell on it much, but it was something else that gave us a common understanding. We knew what we’d come from and what we were determined to avoid in the life we were making. One evening, when I was twelve, I’d come home from playing football with my friends later than I’d probably been told to. We were supposed to be going to Aunt Sophie’s for dinner that night—maybe it was one of the Jewish holidays—and now we were going to be late. My father beat me up inside the front door, at the foot of the stairs; that was the usual treatment when I did something wrong, but this time he kneed me in the back with so much force that I crumpled to the floor and when I tried to get up I couldn’t, I was paralyzed from the waist down. In the hospital emergency room, as I lay on the examination table, my legs slowly, tinglingly coming back to life, the doctor, his expression stern, asked how it had happened. It was my father who answered. He said, Frankie got hurt playing football, doctor. I should have spoken up and sent him to jail, or at least gotten him into trouble, but I kept quiet. How I hated him. For years I swore that all I wanted was not to be like him. Nothing could so discourage me, or fill me with more self-contempt, than to feel that rage that fed his tantrums and bullying in me, too. I told myself, insisted, that my temperament was more like my mother’s, we were the easygoing ones, putting up with and repressing a lot, essentially sweet-natured people though almost always too passive to speak up for ourselves. We rarely—in my mother’s case never—answered back or vocally expressed our anger.

But wasn’t anger one of the recognized stages of grief? Where was mine? I’d been lots of things since Aura died, but not angry. What would be an appropriate expression of that anger? Did it even have to be appropriate? When I ranted crazily about Sméagol, was
that progress? After I broke up with Ana Eva, I felt a black rage riding shotgun on my shoulder. I stalked around like everybody better watch out. I wanted to hand out celebratory cigars: It’s finally here, the anger stage. And I waited for something to happen.

One evening in the gym I came into the locker room after my workout and a guy in a suit, no tie, was standing in front of my locker, talking on his iPhone. His brown-orange hair was still damp from his shower. His polished leather briefcase was on the bench, neatly folded
Financial Times
and
Wall Street Journal
protruding from the side flap. A finance guy, there were a lot of them in my gym and I often overheard them in the locker room complaining and commiserating about their troubles. I took off my sweat-soaked T-shirt. The locker room etiquette was for him to step aside or at least to move his briefcase so that I could sit at my locker. I caught his eye, gestured with the towel in my hand at my locker. He stared at me blankly and kept talking. I waited, staring back at him. He turned slightly away. He seemed pretty involved in his conversation. Finally I said, Could you please move your stuff. And just like that, I saw the motherfucker roll his eyes and sneer as he turned his back on me, still talking into his phone. My hand shot forward and grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him around—NOOO it didn’t; I wish it had, but it didn’t. I was shaking with a murderer’s pent-up violence, I swear, but he was slipping his phone into his pocket and snatching up his briefcase. He swept past me without even a glance. A few other guys had noticed, and I felt them staring at me and silently laughing, staring at my tattoos—
laughing at me,
while my anger dissolved into humiliation like it was an acid bath. I went and took my shower, and stood under the water a long time.

Meanwhile, I kept on paying Aura’s monthly fees at that gym. Couldn’t get it together to send in the paperwork: notarized death certificate, et cetera. And that was all—my anger stage fizzled out like a wet firecracker.

Soon Aura’s savings would be used up and all my credit cards maxed out. Then what? What should my love and my loss turn into? I found
myself observing homeless people with too much curiosity and interest, the way I’d once observed famous and even published writers when I was in my late teens and early twenties—though not quite in the same way. I remembered being a college freshman, sitting in an upstate New York motel room with Ken Kesey, reaching out in awed disbelief to take the shocking pink joint he was passing me in his huge fingers. Earlier that night I’d been told that Ken Kesey had signaled me out in the audience from the stage during his reading, turning to the creative-writing student, a senior poet who’d been awarded the honor of introducing him, to ask her, Who’s that curly-head cherub? I bet all the girls like to mother him. That’s what Ken Kesey had said about me. Curly-head cherub, who all the girls like to mother. Impressed, the poet had invited me along with some other writing students to escort Ken Kesey back to his motel. He must have wondered why I didn’t say anything, why I just sat on the edge of the bed, sharing his pot, staring, laughing whenever the others laughed, looking away whenever he looked at me; or maybe he didn’t wonder. Where is my homeless mentor, who will single me out on the sidewalk or a crowded subway car to say, Who’s that curly-head loser? If he doesn’t get his shit together, he’s on his way down here fast. Dude think he’s the only one who’s ever lost a wife?

According to the grief books, those written by psychoanalysts anyway, the mourner’s dreams should divulge the inevitable if slow process of his or her detachment from the Lost Object. In one case study that I read, when a middle-aged widower, after a long and difficult mourning, had a dream about a little smudge of excrement on a piece of white cloth, his psychoanalyst interpreted it as a sign that he’d made important progress. As much as the widower loved his wife, he was putting death and loss in its appropriate place. He was ready to reengage with life, to love again. One night I dreamed that Aura had left me. I was alone in a very messy but large apartment that wasn’t ours. Then Aura came in through the door. She was sad, heartbroken, because she’d fallen in love with a hippie
puppeteer from Spain and run off with him to Vermont but now the Spaniard had rejected her. Please come back to me, I pleaded. You know we love each other. Her eyes didn’t even register my presence. She lay on a divan, looking disheveled, wan, and kind of wobbly headed but most of all distant and preoccupied. Finally she got up to leave. She didn’t even say good-bye. So listlessly, she walked across that debris-strewn floor to the door. She was halfway out the door. I was never going to see her again. But I ran to her and caught her by the arm and pulled her back inside. Next thing I knew, Aura and I were madly kissing and saying mi amor, mi amor, and in the dream I knew I’d cheated destiny and won her back, and oh, we were both so happy.

Then it was the second New Year’s Eve. Deep in the lost jungle city of
Soobway,
Aura’s belly was growing huge, the kicking coming night and day, Natalia’s birth only seventeen days away. In the lost city, I’d accepted that tenured high-paying teaching job at a mediocre northeastern university that I’d been offered that last spring—one hundred and sixty-five grand a year. A heavy workload, there wouldn’t be much time for writing, but that was okay while Natalia was a baby and Aura was finishing her first novel. Save money. In a few years, maybe we’d move to Mexico.

I’d spent the first New Year’s Eve without Aura in Berlin, with Moya and his German wife, Kirsten, in a Vietnamese restaurant with a bright orange plastic-seeming interior that we’d stopped into because soon it would be midnight. We’d been walking awhile—earlier, in their apartment, we’d drank a bottle of prosecco called Bella Aura that I’d discovered in a supermarket—and hadn’t found anywhere else to pass New Year’s Eve. We ordered food and a bottle of champagne. The restaurant owners and their relatives were out on the sidewalk with some of their employees, who were stringing firecrackers onto a stepladder. In the streets of Berlin New Year’s Eve is celebrated like
a holiday about war, or else as a sort of exorcism of war, with firecrackers, exploding rockets, small bombs going off all over the city, groups of youth crouched with fingers in their ears behind mortar tubes on every dark street corner, the smell of explosives saturating the cold air. As the countdown drew near, I told Moya and Kirsten, This won’t mean anything to me, the only date that marks the passing of the years for me now is July 25. But when Moya and Kirsten got up to stand by the door with their champagne glasses to watch the fireworks and celebrate the stroke of midnight with the other customers and restaurant staff, I followed. Aura and I had spent four New Year’s together; only four. When midnight came it hit me hard anyway and after I’d embraced Moya and Kirsten, I moved away down the sidewalk into the shadows to be by myself. We’d spent New Year’s Eve in Paris a few years before, when we’d rented an apartment in the fifteenth
arrondissement
for a month. Gonzalo and Pia, friends from Mexico who’d moved to Paris, invited us to dinner at their apartment in Montmartre. They had small children and so did Gonzalo’s brother and his wife, who were visiting. It was one of those dinners where half the adults are always away from the table tending to children, but the children are also the entertainment. I played Super Mario and had a sword fight with little Jero. It was a low-key but pleasant, married couples’ New Year’s Eve. Aura and I left before one in the morning and decided to walk down through Pigalle, with its seedy bars and clubs. We stopped into one with steamed-up windows and a small cover charge where a live African band was playing. The place was packed with Africans and Europeans, and nearly everybody was dancing. The band was great, with pedal steel and electric guitars, talking drums, and a saxophone, and the lead guitarist-singer was a dynamo. We danced there until dawn, when the band finally stopped playing and the crowd began to thin. Out on the sidewalk, sweaty and exhilarated, squinting against the stony glinting light of a Paris winter morning, we decided to walk instead of taking the metro. We walked all the way to the Luxembourg Gardens to see the statues of the queens and Babar’s castle, and then into the streets around the Sorbonne, and we went
and looked at the old apartment building across the street from a small medieval church where Aura had shared an apartment with two Japanese girls in the summer of 2001, when she was studying French. We found a place open for breakfast, had perfect omelets and
pommes frites
and champagne, and afterward took the Metro back to La Motte-Picquet–Grenelle. So had begun 2005.

Now it was going to be 2009. I was meeting Lola and her fiancé Bernie Chen at a bar on Ludlow Street at two in the morning. They’d come into the city from New Haven to watch the ball drop in Times Square. I don’t know why they wanted to do that. I’d been drinking alone at home, watching college football. Maybe it was because I was already a little drunk that shortly after midnight I decided to head out to a neighborhood bar for a drink or two before I had to catch the subway into Manhattan. In honor of the holiday, and of seeing Lola and Bernie, I put on my suit. The suit had been made for me by an elderly Mexico City tailor a week or two after Aura’s death, a tailor recommended by a friend’s girlfriend who worked in the government, who said he made suits for her bosses. I wanted a raven-black mourning suit, of coarse, heavy cloth, which I imagined myself wearing every day for at least a year. The elderly tailor who came to our Escandón apartment—this was several weeks before I was forced to leave it—to measure me was an elegant grandfatherly man with kind, lively eyes in his drooping age-mottled face, who in his suit lapel wore a small round sponge with pins stuck into it. He told me that he didn’t believe Aura would want to see me going around all the time in a black mourning suit. Gesturing at the photographs of Aura all over the apartment now, the tailor said, I can see from her eyes and her smile that your wife was full of life, Francisco, and I know she wouldn’t want you to drag yourself down like that, showing such a heavy sadness to the world. Can I recommend a charcoal-gray wool? It’s dignified, but it has some lightness to it. And he opened his book of fabric samples.

When I reached the bar on Ludlow Street, Lola and Bernie were already there. I was cold because all I was wearing was my suit over a sweatshirt, and my hat, the same Chinatown hat with earflaps
that had made it all the way through the first winter. The bar was full of people standing, but Lola and Bernie had a table, which seemed lucky, a good way to start the year. Lola was only drinking bottled water and Bruce had a vodka tonic. Lola and I hugged tightly and when we parted she blinked her eyes a little and said, There’s so much that I need to talk to Aura about, sometimes I think I can just phone her and then I can’t believe it, that I can’t. Me, too, I said. But I had a hard time following the conversation. Maybe they were mostly talking to each other, but no, they were looking at me; in fact, Lola was telling me a story about Aura and her mother. Spread over part of the tabletop was a garland of seaweed intertwined with oatmeal and splatters of raspberry jam. It looked like a flattened octopus. First I tried to lift it off between two fingers but I couldn’t and then I took a napkin to try to wipe it off, but when the napkin touched the tabletop, there was nothing there. I wasn’t sure if they’d noticed. Lola was telling me about the day they’d had to hand in their applications for Mexican government, foreign-graduate-school scholarships. Juanita drove Aura and Lola to the building where, inside, students were waiting in long lines to hand in their applications, but because they were with Aura’s mom, they didn’t have to wait; Juanita led them right to the front. Lola remembered the resentful stares of the other students and how mortified Aura was. Afterward, in the car, Aura wept like a child: she didn’t want to take the scholarship exam, she was exhausted from studying and working on her master’s thesis, she needed a break from what felt like years of unbroken pressure and studying. So Aura had ended up not taking the exam that time, which was why Lola had left for graduate school a year before Aura.