The Stuff That Never Happened (19 page)

“I just want to go. Let’s go. I’ll go to the other market later if we need anything else.”

“One minute.”

I stand rooted to the spot while she goes off to the freezer compartment and comes back with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. We make our way to the checkout counter—Jeremiah is nowhere to be found, and I feel the most unexpectedly sharp pang of disappointment. This is ridiculous; it’s like high school. Walking down the wrong hallway, seeing
the guy
. The crush. Just like then, I don’t know what to hope for. It’s surely wrong to see him, but how can I not? I look at the magazines. Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt are now living in different houses. Will they file for divorce? I turn the pages quickly and put the magazine back, and then there he is. It is 2005. I haven’t seen Jeremiah since 1980. I was still a child.

He’s coming toward me, joining my line. Oh God. I could touch him. My hair over my face, I lean down and stare at the collection of gum and candy, and one of my hands flies up unbidden and cups itself around my eyes. He leans over to get some cough drops, my hand jerks downward, and our eyes meet.

Zap, and everything falls away, like in the dreams.

“Annabelle?” he says. His voice hasn’t said my name in so many years, it’s rusty with the sound of my name. “Oh my God. Annabelle! Is it really you?”

“Yes,” I think I say. “Jeremiah.”

“Wow,” he says. He stands there with his hands at his sides, smiling, his eyes crinkled up. He needs a shave. His hair is too long. “I can’t believe this.” He is chuckling as he takes my hand and holds on to it.

We talk. He says things about the market still being here, and that he’s back in New York after traveling in Europe, and something about how amazing this is. It’s a perfect New York City coincidence. His voice is calm, like on that first day when he surprised me at his apartment, the day I was rummaging through the cabinets. He’d told me later that he’d watched me longer than I had known; my back was to him and my skirt had ridden up over my hips, and he couldn’t stop staring. He’d gotten hard. That very first day. And now he’s talking about apples, the ice cream he’s holding and that Sophie is holding. Same kind. My ears are buzzing too loudly for me to completely hear him, and my toes swim up into focus. I must be looking down.

When I allow myself to look fully up at him, his eyes are shining with pleasure. His voice is the same. I take back my hand. I can’t get over the fact that I’m touching him, and then that’s ridiculous, so we hug, which requires some jostling of the groceries we’re both holding. Sophie—oh yes, Sophie!—stands there smiling in polite bafflement, watching us, and after we hug in slow motion I introduce them, struggling to get my voice under control. “My daughter. Sophie, this is an old, old dear friend of your father’s and mine. Jeremiah Saxon.” There’s a chalky taste in my mouth. I’m talking too loudly. He bows elegantly. I’d forgotten that about him: how courtly he could seem, with his old-world manners.

“So pleased to meet you,” she says. It’s surreal, watching them shake hands, his long slender fingers taking her small puffy white hand in his.

“Wow, she looks like you,” he says. “Although now that I really look, I see such a combination of you … and Grant.” His eyes meet mine in mischief at the hesitation there.
She
is
Grant’s, right? Did you … stay together?

I nod imperceptibly.
Yes. We made it. Although you don’t deserve to know about this
.

His eyes are soft with happiness. With a mixture, really, of sadness and happiness. I can feel it washing over both of us. I’ll have to soak this in and analyze it later. This must be what shock feels like, a haze of noises and impressions all at once. I hear the fluorescent lights while I notice that his face is looser somehow, less pointed, though I don’t dare stare at him the way I want to. Sophie is hyper-alert to this sort of thing. She hasn’t moved even one inch, and she’s looking back and forth from one of us to the other and smiling. I have to get some control.

So we scale back, do the required rundown: Grant teaching at the community college. (“Still?” Jeremiah says, and his eyebrows lift, mildly surprised.) Two children. Nicky a freshman. And now a grandchild. Sophie’s first baby.

When it’s his turn, he says the twins are fine. Yes, they are nearly thirty now. Lindsay is a translator at the U.N. Brice works for the National Security Agency. How ironic is all that, huh? Neither married, no children. How lucky Grant and I are to have a grandchild on the way. He remembers how much we loved children. And he laughs. I see Sophie catch that, just as if an electrical signal has been passed between us with her in the middle as the interceptor.

“How long are you in the city?” he wants to know, and I explain that I don’t really know. I’m here due to complications with the pregnancy, but everything is fine now. Sophie, on cue, whips out the ultrasound photo of the baby and Jeremiah rubs his eyes in astonishment that such things exist. It’s all so remarkable, the modern age, technology that can photograph the unborn.

I tell him I understand that people can actually talk to each other on little pieces of plastic they hold up to their ears, and he laughs.

Then somehow we get to his wife and my husband, and he says mournfully that Carly died last year. Cancer. I already knew, but I feel something that was tight let go inside me, like a rubber band has just been broken. By then we’ve both somehow paid for our items, although I’ve barely been able to notice anything, and now we’re mashed in the front of the store, in everybody’s way. He asks in his polite, hesitant voice if we’d like to accompany him for a cup of coffee.

“No, no, we can’t. We have ice cream we have to get home,” I say quickly, too quickly.

“Well, then, another time?” His eyes are all over my face, boring into me.

“You two can go,” says Sophie. “I’ll go home and put the ice cream away. Really, go, Mom. You need some time off. It’s fine.”

“No!” I say, and my voice comes out too forcefully. I see Jeremiah smile shyly and look away. Sophie looks startled and laughs.

But I just can’t go off with him. I can’t have coffee. My knees are already practically buckled. It’s too much already, his hand on my shoulder, the feel of his kiss brushing my cheek as we say good-bye
. He gives me his phone number, folds a little piece of paper and tucks it into my hand, patting me, and Sophie tells him where she lives. I hear her saying, as though I’m her shy little kindergartner, that I don’t get out much, that I’m deprived of real adult companionship. He smiles.

“I’ll make sure she calls you,” she says. “She could use an old friend.”

She is flirting with him. I feel light-headed.

When he has gone and she and I are making our way home, I feel her eyes on me, and her step exactly matches mine on the pavement. “So what
was
that?” she says. “You look like you’re about to have a heart attack.”

I try to adjust my facial expression. “Oh, it’s nothing. Just an old man who’s going to bore me by telling me about his wife dying and how sad and pathetic his life is now, and he’ll expect me to think of nice things to say to comfort him.”

“Wow,” she says and tucks her arm in mine. “I didn’t know you had waifs and strays dating back thirty years.”

“Twenty-eight,” I say, staring down at the pavement while we walk.

“Whatever. But he seems like a nice old guy.”

A nice old guy! As though he’s just some harmless old man—is that truly how he seems to her? I’m stunned by feeling so disconnected, so confused.

“And God knows it’d do you good to get out of the apartment every now and then,” she says.

The following Tuesday, against my better judgment and with my heart knocking about in my chest, I meet Jeremiah for coffee. Just to see. Because some things you simply have to know, as a person, married or not.

[twelve]

1978

M
y first winter in New York was a cold, snowy one. No matter what I did—piling on clothes, drinking gallons of coffee—I couldn’t seem to get warm and stay that way. On the days I wasn’t working at some office for the temp agency, I walked around the apartment in bulky sweaters and huge bunny slippers. My nose ran a lot. I shivered.

I had hoped that Grant and I could go back to California for Christmas and the winter break, but he said he was too busy with things, and anyway, he didn’t want to spend money. He needed to prepare for his second semester of teaching, he said. Instead, we took a few days off and went to upstate New York, to an inn that was near an old shut-down textile mill, a place where a utopian labor movement had been born and then failed. We trudged around the ruins of the place in the snow, looking at smokestacks and old bricks. Grant stood reverently on the wall of the foundation, gazing outward, while I shivered next to him. Outside, the snow was clumped in a stand of evergreens, and the watery sun was low in the sky. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but it already seemed to be night.

“This is like church for you, isn’t it?” I said. “An old factory.”

He laughed and looked at me, blinking, as though he was only just remembering that I was there.

“Oh, Grant! You’re so … so
you!”
I said.

“I’m obsessive, I know,” he said mournfully. “I should have told you that before I made you marry me and dragged you across the country.” But then we kissed, and his lips were the only warm thing in that whole place.

When we got back in the car, I said, “There’s just one thing I don’t really understand. Why was it Jeremiah that you wanted to work with? I mean, he doesn’t seem to be at all interested in any of this stuff.”

He’d been getting ready to back out of the clearing where we’d parked, but he put the car back in neutral and set both his hands on the steering wheel. “Oh, don’t underestimate Jeremiah Saxon,” he said. “It’s true that he’s bogged down with his family life right now, but he’s done just some extraordinary research—right in this mill, as a matter of fact. He’s the preeminent guy when it comes to these utopian communities, to these social experiments where everybody was going to be equal. His writing on this, and his understanding of these movements, has been
superb
. Really elegant, amazing papers. And books. He’s written several books on the subject.”

“Really?” I said. I looked at the ruins of the place with new interest, felt my heart quicken.

“That’s one reason I wanted to come to this mill,” he said, and there was almost a flicker of hero worship in his voice. “Just to see, you know, what he’s seen.”

I looked around. Just some stones, a foundation, smokestacks, the trees. The river rushing past big chunks of ice, with the skeleton of an old water wheel. Just ghosts of whatever had once been there. Jeremiah had come here; he had stood on these rocks, written down notes about the ghosts. The place took on a different aura suddenly.

We ate dinner that night in a dim, candlelit old stone restaurant nestled against the hillside, and the proprietor came and sat down at our table and told us stories about the day the mill shut down, and how his parents had wept at the kitchen table. Grant was blinking and nodding, and his big, wide hands on the red-checkered tablecloth seemed almost to be twitching with the desire to write it all down.

“Do you want to take some notes?” I said to him later, when we got back to the inn.

“No,” he said. “No. This is Jeremiah’s mill. I’m just an interloper.”

I looked over at him in time to see the awe just disappearing from his face. “If I could ever be as insightful as he is … His notes are meticulous. He understands everything.”

“Don’t say that!” I said, more forcefully than I meant to. “You have your own gifts. You have to respect what
you
have.”

IN FEBRUARY there was a huge blizzard—they were calling it the Blizzard of 1978—and my brother called to see if I was truly able to stand life in the Northeast. He was living in a rehab center by then.

“And how are you finding the shackles of married life with the goofiest nerd on the planet?” he asked. “And you know I mean that in the best possible senses of those words. I have a lot of admiration for a guy who doesn’t seem to know there’s a world that exists outside of his own head.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it would be better if I ever saw him,” I said. “He works all the time.”

“Teaching? I thought that was one of the cushy jobs—lots of vacations, classes only three hours a day.”

“Not the way Grant does it.”

He was huffing and puffing, and I knew he was wheeling his chair outside so he could smoke. His voice was muffled as he lit up a cigarette. Then he said, “Well. Cheer up. From my observations, it seems that married people who don’t see each other can often maintain the illusion better.”

“What illusion?”

“The illusion of happiness. You know. That marriage is somehow the magic answer. Tra-la-la and all that. When, really, all most people really want is to get themselves laid every now and then, and then be left the hell alone to die.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do. Trust me. That is life at its most minimal, bare-bones existence.”

I leaned against the wall of the kitchen. In the next room, I could hear Jeremiah explaining to the children that they could only go out if they were willing to put on snowsuits, and that meant no more racing through the house naked and climbing up on the furniture. He always talked to the children as though he were a labor negotiator and they were warring factions. “Okay, now let’s look at the risk/benefit ratio of climbing on the couch, when we could put on our snowsuits and head outside instead. Brice, you in?”

It had been six months since David’s accident, and he had gotten just better enough, he said, to realize what he was going to miss for the rest of his life. He said he didn’t believe in anything anymore, and why should he? His girlfriend had broken up with him—justifiably, he told me. Nobody really appreciated that paraplegic humor. She couldn’t take all the jokes about how he wanted to commit suicide, the silly woman. Together since they were twelve goddamn years old, and now he can’t stand the sight of her looking at him, the pity in her eyes.

“You’re the only one who really gets me,” he said. “You’re not going to call the cops and report that I’m thinking of offing myself.”

“Are you thinking of offing yourself?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t you, if you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life in some wheelchair, having aides know everything you do, and meanwhile people are coming in to tell you stories of other brave and upstanding folks who turned fucking lemons into lemonade and became amazing inspirations?” He changed his voice to a high falsetto when he said that last part. “I don’t fucking
want
to be an inspiration to others. And why the hell should I be? I’ve gotta go do something on a grand scale just to make everybody else feel better about me not having the use of my legs anymore? Fuck that! It’s a bunch of shit.”

It made sense. “You certainly do not have to be anybody’s inspiration,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said. “Tell that to Edie, will you? I think she wants me to be the first paraplegic to climb Mount Everest or something. Make a name for myself.”

“So how
are
the parental units coping?” I asked him. Jeremiah tramped through the kitchen, carrying one navy blue snowsuit and one red mitten. He stopped and tilted his head at me, made a face.
Is everything okay?
I nodded. I mouthed back: “It’s my brother,” and he made a sad face, pointed his thumb up and then down, questioning. I waggled my hand in the air: so-so. Jeremiah gave me a sympathetic look and moved back to the living room.

David was saying, “Gah! Now there’s a subject. There’s a new separation in the offing. They don’t want me to know, because, you know, I might not be able to stand the idea that
I’m
the cause of it. Poor fragile little David can’t take the truth. They’ve got a crippled son, and they fight all the time—but oh God, let’s protect him from thinking things aren’t right.”

“That’s not how they feel. I know that’s not how they feel. They separated before, and that wasn’t because of you. Their marriage is stupid.”

“Right. You know that and I know that, but everybody else is busy rewriting history. I was fake-sleeping one day so I wouldn’t have to deal with them, and I heard Edie telling the social worker that things weren’t working out with Howard, and that she’s moving out. He’s such a jerk. I tell you, be glad you’re not actually interacting with that sweet clueless nerd you married, because you never know what you might find out. Best thing that ever happened to me was that Michelle knew she couldn’t take care of a cripple for the rest of her life, and she didn’t stick around to torture me about it.”

I said, “Oh, David, you know Michelle doesn’t feel that way. You made her break up with you, and I can’t stand it when you talk like this!” There was an uncomfortable silence.

Then he said, “Yeah, riiiight. Well, I’m going to hang up now and go count my sleeping pills to see if I have enough yet to kill myself when the time is right. You take care.”

“Wait.” I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry. “Tell me. Are you really thinking of killing yourself?”

“Don’t
you
start now,” he said, and laughed. “Didn’t I just explain to you that you’re the only one who won’t call the cops on me?”

“But I can’t tell if you’re joking!” I cried.

“Yeah, yeah. Of course I’m joking,” he said in a serious voice. “What do you think? Now go back to your life. Waiting for Mr. Professor Nerd to come home and remember what your name is. I gotta go sweet-talk some nurse into giving me more pills than the doctor ordered.”

And he hung up.

Jeremiah was in the living room still trying to entice both kids into their snowsuits when I got off the phone. Through the curtains, the sky was the color of lead, and a branch laden with snow was scraping against the window. I came and stood in the doorway, hugging myself, watching them. There was a lump in my throat the size of the coffee table.

“If we go to the park,” he was saying to the children, “Annabelle and I will pull you on the sleds.”

I realized I would have been furious if Grant had just signed me up for a task without asking first, but somehow I wasn’t angry with Jeremiah at all. He looked over at me and raised an eyebrow, questioning, and I nodded.

Brice was riding the arm of the couch as if it were a bronco, and Lindsay was dancing and stomping on the carpet roses, a game she and I had invented on the days I used to pick her up from day care. For a moment, I felt like I was disconnected, floating somewhere up above them. My brother’s life was in danger in California, and yet I was here in New York, in this crowded, cluttered apartment, and it was softly snowing outside, and there were these children who did not belong to me but whom I cared about, and also this man. This man! I looked at him, at Jeremiah, the way his hair curled down over the collar of his black turtleneck sweater, at his laughing eyes, his jeans with a pacifier sticking out of the pocket. He was sitting back on his knees, holding the snowsuit out toward Lindsay, as though he were beseeching her to come and let him put her in it, and he was laughing. My ears started pounding, as though the blood was coursing through them too fast and too hard. I wanted to sink down in front of him. His eyes crinkled at the corners, his lovely long fingers curled around the snowsuit, he called her name.

Somehow, working side by side, we wrestled the twins into submission and got them dressed for the outside. I’d lived my whole life unaware of the difficulties of snowsuits and hats that needed to be tied under the chin, and scarves wrapped around just so, and mittens that came on strings that had to be threaded through the sleeves. California parents have it so easy, I told him.

As soon as we were ready to walk out the front door, Jeremiah burst into laughter. “Oh, no! Do you smell that? We have a threshold poop situation.”

“A threshold poop?”

“Well, that’s the scientific term for it. Those are the poops that happen just as you are trying to leave home. Scientists still aren’t sure of the precise cause, whether it comes from anxiety about leaving the house or if it’s related somehow to the air currents of the front door opening, or the pressure of the outer garments. But whatever it is, we have to take care of this situation
immediately.”

The culprit was determined to be Brice, and Jeremiah swooped him up and laid him down on the living room floor and took off his boots, his socks, his snowsuit, then his sweater, his corduroy overalls, and his long underwear and his diaper while Brice squirmed and tried to escape. Then he changed the diaper while Lindsay and I danced around the room, mainly so I could prevent her from stripping down as well. He put Brice’s things back on him, and we managed to get ourselves to the door once again.

He picked up Lindsay and I picked up Brice, and we headed for the door once again. I could see sweat glistening on Jeremiah’s forehead.