The Year of Pleasures (10 page)

I looked over at the young man and smiled sympathetically. Embarrassed, he smiled back. “Sorry,” he said. “She’s just . . . anyway. Sorry.”

“No problem.”

He took in a huge breath, raised his eyebrows. “Not my day, I guess.” He grabbed his backpack and walked out, heading quickly down the block in the opposite direction. I felt bad for him; I wished I could have come up with something soothing to say. I watched him go, watched the wind lift his jacket and rush up underneath, wondered if he felt it. “This will be nothing in a few months,” I wished I’d said. But he would not have believed me. I knew something about others predicting how long pain would last. Pebbles flung against a mountainside, that’s what that was. Little bits of speculation thrown against an overwhelming fact.

In the grocery store I walked down the baking aisle, thinking I’d get some chocolate chips. It was Benny I was thinking of, but I was not opposed to having a bit of the dough myself—I preferred it to the cookies. I reached for flour, saw out of the corner of my eye a bottle of molasses, and it came to me what John meant by
gingerbread.
One night for dessert, I’d made gingerbread, complete with my mother’s famous warm lemon sauce. When we’d eaten it, I’d told John that I wished I could have it for breakfast. “Have it, then,” he’d said, and I’d offered reasons galore for not doing so—I was a big believer in sensible breakfasts. “Don’t let your habits become handcuffs,” he’d said, and I’d asked him if he’d gotten that out of some dumb self-help book. “No,” he’d said. “It’s my own dumb idea.” Now I reached for the bottle of molasses and reminded myself to buy lemons, too.

It had gotten colder when I came back outside: dark clouds hung heavy in the sky. December had arrived without my quite knowing it. One reason was that the weather had been so mild, but the other reason was, I still wasn’t really paying attention to what day it was. I walked home quickly, and my arms were aching by the time I climbed the front porch steps. My street was deserted now; no children outside—I saw no signs of activity at all, in fact. It came to me that serious winter weather would soon arrive, and with it temperatures so extreme a deserted street would be the norm and not the exception.

I carried the groceries into the kitchen, put away the items needing refrigeration, and left the rest. I needed to lie down. A sudden despair was rising up within me, and I wanted sleep’s defense. “After it’s all over,” John had advised me, shortly after his diagnosis, “I want you to take really good care of yourself. Don’t get too hungry, too tired, or too sad.”

“Is that advice for widows?” I’d asked.

“For drunks, actually,” he’d said. “They use it in AA. But it’s good for widows, too.” We’d laughed—laughed!—and I had felt proud of us, that laughter was still in us. And I had felt afraid, knowing that it was because nothing had made itself real yet.

I turned on a light, lay on the sofa, and closed my eyes. I felt a deep despair, a vague longing to go to sleep and not wake up. I knew it was self-indulgent and phony, really; if death appeared and said, “Ready?” I’d gasp and plead. What a change this was from my cheerful start to the day. But it was not surprising, really—so much of grieving was holding things at bay, resisting a great force bearing down. Every now and then it broke through. Nowhere to go then, but to tears or the nether land of sleep.

I slept briefly, and when I awakened I went into the kitchen and began putting groceries away with an intense focus that was close to rage.
There!
A small jar of peanut butter on the top shelf of the cupboard.
There!
Tinfoil in one of the long drawers. A loaf of bread . . . where would it go? I had yet to unearth the basket in which I kept bread. I turned around and around in a circle, saying out loud with mounting hysteria, “Where is it? Where is it?
Where?
”

The doorbell rang and I jumped as though I’d been caught stealing. I went to the door to find Benny, looking up at me with a half smile. “Surprise! I came to help you unpack—I got done early with my other jobs.”

“Oh!” I said. “Good!”

“But I can come back.”

“Why?”

He laughed nervously, looked over at his house, then back at me. “Because . . . are you crying?”

“No!” I put my hands to my face and felt the wetness there. “Well, not anymore. Come in. Guess what I got?”

“Dr Pepper,” he said, striding in confidently and again dropping his coat in the hall. This time, though, I picked it up and hung it in the closet on what an efficient and rehab-minded part of my brain christened “Benny’s hook.” And then I confessed: It was the chocolate chips I’d wanted to tell him about; I’d forgotten to buy Dr Pepper.

He sighed. “That’s okay. Everybody does. Want to get to work now?”

I nodded, then followed him into the living room. Such a small person to be such a savior.

At ten o’clock I took a bath, then came downstairs to make a cup of tea and sit in the chaise to contemplate my finished living room. An hour earlier, I’d paid Benny twenty dollars and felt like a thief. He’d been tireless: except for a dinner break with his mom, he worked straight through until nine o’clock, when he headed home for bed. We’d unpacked every box, and though not everything was put away, at least I finally knew where everything was. Surely a celebration was in order.

I moved to the stereo and put on a Thelonious Monk CD I had always loved and John had always hated. There were these things, these random compensations. I stood listening for a while, thinking that no other musician made music talk for me the way Monk did. No one else had such a transparent sense of humor. My roommates had loved him, too: we’d nearly worn out the grooves in our only album.

I started to go to the computer but went instead to the kitchen and picked up the phone. I was going to find those women. I was going to find them and suggest a reunion. I called directory assistance and asked for Providence, Rhode Island, the town we’d all lived in so many years ago. There was no listing for Maddy, nothing for Susanna. But there was a number for a Lorraine Keaton. I wrote it down with a soaring excitement I tried to temper—what were the chances, after all? There was no answer, and no machine. I supposed she could be online, whoever this Lorraine was. Or ignoring call-waiting, the new etiquette. I’d read for a while, then try again.

Forty-five minutes later the number still rang, unanswered. Fifteen minutes after that it was the same. I turned out the lights and brought the number upstairs with me and put it on the bedside stand. In the morning, then. She’d always slept late; I’d call early.

I lay in the dark, full of an odd kind of surety. I only had a phone number, but it felt like a major accomplishment. And I somehow felt positive it was Lorraine’s. I wondered how she might look now. No doubt her hair had started graying, too. But I thought it must still be long, that would be her style. Long and wild. I wondered too if she could possibly have felt me thinking of her; if, when I called her, she’d felt some quick rush of
knowing.
Had she lifted her head from what she was doing to turn in the direction of me? Didn’t we all occasionally feel such hair-raising beckonings? How to account for déjà vu, for the other supernatural ephemera to which all of us were exposed but, for the most part, refused to acknowledge?

As for me, I liked things that couldn’t be explained. I liked outrageous statements of faith; defiant acts of belief that flew in the face of science and practicality.
Día de los Muertos,
for example: I loved the idea of bringing food and cigarettes to a grave site. The Japanese rite of sending out offerings on burning paper boats. The Irish custom of setting a place at the table for those who have gone on. I appreciated not only the intent behind such rituals but the form. In a curious mix of sacredness and absurdity, these things suggested—perhaps insisted—that the dead do not entirely leave us. Was it really only wishful thinking? Or was there old knowledge in our bones, a stubborn holding on to things ancient and true that, though they did not mold themselves to our current way of thinking, were nonetheless valid?

I resettled myself under the covers. Probably better not to think about such things now. In the morning I would make gingerbread, and on my most beautiful dish, I would set one piece aside. My little boat, anchored. Anchoring me.

I waited until Friday to try Lorraine again. Then, at half past seven in the morning, before I got out of bed, before I was fully awake, I dialed the number. No answer. I was becoming obsessed. But who cared? Who would know? It came to me how necessary the near presence of others was in keeping me civilized and sane; I could see how quickly I might become a woman gnawing a chicken leg over the kitchen sink for her dinner, a woman wandering around the rooms of her overly large house, talking aloud to no one. After my father died, I’d called my mother one night to see how she was doing. I’d asked what she’d had for dinner, and she’d said cereal. Straight out of the box. “Mom,” I’d said. And she’d said, “I know,” in a voice so thin and apologetic it broke my heart.

I hung up the phone, lay back, and pressed my fingers against my temples—I had a bad headache, probably from a poor night’s sleep. I’d awakened many times, suddenly very much frightened at being alone in this new place. The darkness had seemed alive, slithering about me like snakes, and turning on a light hadn’t helped much—it seemed as though that only irritated the blackness, pushing it into corners, where it waited with ratcheted-up intentions.

It had never happened in this way before, that I had felt so afraid at night. When John had gone on business trips, I’d sometimes gotten a little frightened. But that was a woman feeling a little nervous because she was used to someone being around—a woman who listens overly hard to a normal rattling in the pipes; a woman who puts her head under the pillow to hide from lightning. Sitcom fear. What I felt last night was different.

At one point I’d had a dream in which it seemed as though I were wrestling with a smoky-faced, slit-eyed, terrifying presence. I’d awakened wide-eyed and struggling to breathe, and I’d not been able to swallow—it was as though someone’s hands had been around my throat. I’d sat up quickly, so flushed, so hot, and then everything suddenly stopped—the terror seemed to crack open and fall away. There were my hands, clenched in my lap. There was the sound of my rapid breathing. There were the books stacked on my bedside table; there were the shadowy outlines of perfume bottles on my dresser. Eventually I’d fallen back into an uneasy sleep.

I splashed water on my face, put on my robe, and headed downstairs. Already my headache was receding. After I started the coffee, I went to the living room window to look out at the day. The temperature had risen again—what could have been snow became a downpour during the night, and now the sky was a redemptive blue, the pale pastel that often follows a rain. Birds sat in a convivial row on the nearby utility wire. Elongated drops of water hung beneath them, shimmying in the breeze. I watched the birds for a while, waiting for the invisible signal that would have them all lift off together, but it did not come. They sat content, enjoying their version of a coffee klatch.

Across the street, I saw a man dressed for work come out onto the porch for the newspaper, and I watched him hold his tie aside as he leaned down to pick it up. A memory of aftershave came to me, the smell of coffee and toast. And now the smell of John, that aphrodisiacal pocket between his neck and his shoulders. How long before memories of him would not intrude on almost every thought? How long did the real memorial service last?

Two doors down, a little girl came down the steps of her house. She hopped, her legs tightly together and her knees bent, making a game of her short descent. She was going to school, her backpack on, a pink lunch box in her hand. Farther down the block, a woman in a red plaid robe came out onto her porch to toss squares of bread to the squirrels gathered on her lawn. Her mouth moved; she was speaking to them, smiling. She tossed the last crumbs and stood for a moment with one hand on her hip, looking up to inspect the sky. Then she disappeared inside.

I watched to see who else might come out, but no one did; the only movement was of an airplane passing overhead. I watched it, imagining the people aboard straightening in their seats, looking down at where they would soon be arriving. From an airplane, the earth always looked so orderly, so gentle. So full of abundance and grace and purposeful intelligence. By day you could marvel at the precise patterns of the cultivated fields. At night, you could see clusters of lights, showing an obvious need for people to be near one another. Who would not be moved, looking down from such a distance, at the evidence of our great intentions?

I brought in the paper I’d ordered last week and went into the kitchen for coffee. I read the news and cut out a photograph I particularly liked: an old man on a city bus, sitting proudly erect and dressed in a three-piece suit. I would paste him into my scrapbook and imagine various destinations for him.

I stood to go to the cereal cabinet and was startled by the sight of Benny, his hair wetly combed, staring expectantly at me through the parted curtains.