I might have let him into my story, explaining that kiss and what followed, the day at school when we learned poor David had hanged himself. No official announcement was made, but by midmorning everybody knew he was dead, that his father had found him dangling in the garage that morning. I might have written about how our stricken teachers had whispered in the halls, and how for the rest of the day both they and the other kids watched me closely, David’s only friend, as if they suspected something—that I’d known what he intended, maybe, or that now I’d be next. After school I rode my bike out to Whitcombe Park, gripped Gabriel Mock’s fence with white-knuckled fists and indulged my grief, sobbing loudly and with purpose, trying to drain the sorrow from my body, so that when I returned home I wouldn’t seem any more distraught than the rest of my classmates.
Over dinner that night, I thought I did a pretty good job of pretending to suffer some lesser version of grief and loss than the one I was feeling. But my mother knew better, as she so often did, knew that I was hurting worse than I let on, because after I’d gone to bed she came into my room with tears in her eyes and told me how sorry she was, and I learned then that no matter how hard you try, you can never empty yourself of tears. “It’s a mean old world, sweetie,” she said. “It never lets up either. I wish I had better news for you, but I don’t.”
A month after he took his life, his father came into Ikey’s. Apparently David had left a note that mentioned me. I happened to be working in the back room, but I heard my father say, “My Louie ain’t that way.” Later, after Mr. Entleman left, he came out back and found me sitting on a crate and staring at nothing. “You ain’t that way, are you, Louie?” he asked, and I assured him I wasn’t. “Boys ain’t supposed to like boys that way,” he explained patiently. I told him I knew that, and that when David had tried to kiss me I’d pushed him away, that we hadn’t been friends since, which reassured him.
Except for what happened in the voting booth, my father had no secrets from my mother, so that night at dinner he told her about the terrible things David’s father had said. “The poor boy,” my mother sighed, looking at me.
“That don’t mean you got to be mean to him or nothin’,” my father told me, as if he’d forgotten that David was dead. Probably he just meant that if something like that ever happened again, with some other boy, I wasn’t obligated to be cruel, but my mother looked at him as if he’d just sunk to a new low, stupiditywise. “Jesus, Lou,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Christ on a crutch.”
Was I, as my father put it, “that way”? I didn’t know. I did not. Was David? I didn’t know that either. He was just a boy. I knew only that he was frightened to be in a strange new place and terribly grateful I’d befriended him. He felt about me like I’d once felt about Bobby. “Adoration” is probably not too strong a word to describe that heady mingling of intense affection and dependence. Back when we lived at Berman Court, and even later on Third Street, during that summer when we surfed my father’s truck, I’d wanted to kiss Bobby. I had. I’d known it wasn’t permitted, but what, I thought, was so wrong about it? I remember thinking about little Gabriel Mock kissing my mother so long ago. How powerful his feelings for her must have been to risk the consequences that were sure to follow. And, like David, he’d done it in broad daylight. Could it be that acts committed in the privacy of darkness became wrong only in the public light of day? Wasn’t that the very adult wisdom Perry Kozlowski had tried to convey to me in the balcony of the movie theater shortly before he went out into the brilliant afternoon sunlight and beat Three Mock half to death?
I might have written all this, but did not. Why? The answer to that question, I suspect, can be found in that photo of my father hanging on the wall of my study. My story was written under his watchful eye, and if I’ve told it dishonestly, it’s because I didn’t want to embarrass him. To write about David would have meant admitting to my deepest thoughts about what my mother described so accurately as the “mean old world” we share, that its meanness resides deep within each of us. It would’ve revealed what I’ve always known to be true, though I’ve denied it to my mother, my father and myself—that I’m as much her son as his. For my father, the world wasn’t a complicated place. Its rules mostly made sense and they were for our own good. I’ve always wanted to be the person he believed me to be, which at times has kept me from being a better one. A terrible realization, this.
I look over at Sarah and wonder how I’ll manage without her, absent her ability to see what’s there instead of what I prefer to see. I’ll have to make sense of things for myself. She’ll wake up soon and then be gone, so for a while I’ll watch her breathe and dream. So lovely. She’s wearing a cotton nightgown, modest and opaque, but of course it reveals what isn’t there, the breast she surrendered last year to save her life, and looking at her now, knowing the small secrets she’s kept in her good heart, I feel a little better about my own. Perhaps we are all entitled to keep a small place that’s our own.
The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms. The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.
Blame love.
THE BLUE DOOR
TRUE, IT WASN’T MUCH of a plan. When the Albany train deposited her at Penn Station, Sarah intended to take a taxi up to the Waldorf-Astoria. She and her mother stayed there once over the Labor Day weekend, splurging, they’d called it, though it was her mother paying for it. Sarah’s babysitting money, a goodly sum by the end of August, got put away for college. She remembered, during those end-of-summer goodbyes, going to museums, window-shopping, sometimes strolling across town to see the kind of Broadway show her mother liked, something visually extravagant. Beyond that, she hadn’t given it much thought. “Ma,” Owen kept saying at the train station in Albany, “you’re sixty. What’re you gonna do?”
She supposed he didn’t mean to be insulting. He was concerned about her recent illness, so she made an honest effort not to take offense. “I know how old I am,” she said. And had she ever mentioned how much she disliked “Ma,” instead of “Mom”?
“I know Pop screwed up,” he conceded. “I’m mad at him, too.”
“I’m not mad,” she corrected him. Disheartened, it was true, maybe even heartbroken, but if she was angry with anyone it was herself. After all, she knew what Lou could and couldn’t do. She’d seen this recent meltdown coming and chose to ignore it.
“Ma,” Owen said. “You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t pissed. I just wish you’d let me into your plan. I’m on your side, remember? Why don’t you let me help?”
“You want to help?” she said. “Grab that bag.”
Because in fact she had no idea where she’d go or what she’d do when she got there, or when she’d tire of it and return to her life. Or if. Not long ago she’d read a magazine article about a woman, a photographer, who left her life and work in Boston and moved to New Mexico, where she purchased some land and a modest house out in the desert. There she’d experienced what she claimed was an artistic and spiritual rebirth. Had she left her husband, or had he recently died? Sarah couldn’t remember. But this woman was a decade older than Sarah, which proved something of the sort could be done. Sarah couldn’t decide what she liked most about the idea, the magnificent desert solitude or just the absence of men, their neediness and willful incomprehension. Maybe she’d consult the onsite travel agent at the Waldorf. She’d packed her passport. She could go anywhere she wanted.
ON THE TRAIN she opened the new biography of Frida Kahlo she’d bought, read the first page three times without comprehension, then decided the book would be most useful as a prop. Without it, someone might be tempted to engage her in conversation, which she was determined to avoid. Once under way, she f
ound herself recalling those earlier train rides to and from the city all those years ago. These days, her mother was never far from her thoughts. She’d been forty-six when she died. Just beginning menopause, Sarah supposed. At the time, though, Sarah had been too young to understand what that meant to any woman, much less one like her mother. As a girl, Sarah had always believed her parents’ separation had been caused by her little brother’s death, the result of grief and loss. Her mother had often intimated as much. “After Rudy,” she’d begin, but then the thought would trail off in her typically maddening fashion. Other times she’d say, “Well, the truth is your father and I were never compatible.” Sarah had supposed she meant that her father was an intellectual, a man who lived not only for ideas but also the words necessary to compose them, whereas her mother was different. She thought in images, and once she got those to her liking on a canvas or in her sketchbook, any words at all were redundant. What she’d done was either good or it wasn’t, and no amount of arguing—her husband’s greatest skill—could make it otherwise. The differences between her parents, Sarah imagined, were a lot like those between her father and herself.
She’d been wrong, of course. It went much deeper than that. Sarah didn’t have many vivid memories of the time before their separation, but there’d been arguments. “It wouldn’t kill you to read a book every now and then,” he’d snap. “Any more than it would kill you to put yours down,” she’d snap right back. At home, in private, her father belittled everything from her mother’s logic to her fondness for TV. In public, often at parties, she scorned his poor social skills and his ignorance of anything that didn’t come out of a book. She had been very attractive and loved to dress provocatively and have fun. When her husband held forth on some literary or political subject, she’d pretend to listen with rapt attention until he finished, then she’d laugh and say, “He certainly does talk a good game, doesn’t he?” Sarah was herself a married woman before it dawned on her that the real reason for her parents’ separation had probably been sex. It might be true, as her father always let on, that her mother was a disappointing intellectual companion. But her mother had been hinting, too. Sarah had just been too young to catch on, and of course her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to anyway.
As a teenager, she’d understood why her mother had lovers at the Sundry Arms, and the questions her father asked every September when she returned from Long Island suggested that he understood all too well that the freedom afforded by their separation was, for her, largely sexual. Sarah now suspected his feelings about that must have been ambivalent. He always maintained that once his novel was finished and he was famous, her mother would come crawling back. But hard as it must’ve been for him to admit, he also must have known that he’d never be able to keep up with her in the most important respect. He talks a good game. That remark surely burrowed down deep and rankled. His retort took him over a decade to compose and ran to fifteen hundred single-spaced pages. Back then Sarah didn’t understand how he could spend so much time and effort on his novel, only to give up when a handful of editors didn’t like it. Now she did. Those rejections came at him on two levels: first, he wasn’t a very good writer—he didn’t even talk as good a game as he’d hoped—and also his wife had been right about that other thing he wasn’t much good at.
What particularly troubled Sarah about the final year of her mother’s life was that her courage had failed her so swiftly. The year before, she’d been roiling with her usual defiance, declaiming against men like Sarah’s father and against marriage as institutionalized slavery. Then the change. As if one morning she’d looked at herself in the mirror and saw into the future, that before long even the most desperate and befuddled of the Sundry Arms divorcés would stop coming to her for solace. Probably she saw, too, where all the martinis had settled, in the dark bags under her eyes, her sunken cheeks and breasts. Possibly it wasn’t even the bathroom mirror so much as the one on men’s faces, where she didn’t register anymore or, worse, she registered briefly but then didn’t pass the test. Sex had been the currency of her life, and soon she’d be broke. If her husband had talked a good game, well, at least he was still in business. That was something you could still do, and maybe even get better at, in your advancing years. Whereas she had fucked a good game, which game would soon be over, with nothing to replace it. For all Sarah knew, her father may even have warned her about the day when she’d flirt and no one would flirt back, when men no longer would gather around her at parties for the privilege of looking down her blouse, when she’d have to face what little remained and face it alone. Maybe she’d married Harold Sundry to keep that last part of her father’s prediction from coming true.
But Sarah’s worst fear was that she herself had played a part in her fatal decision to give up her hard-won freedom and remarry. That final summer she’d been too preoccupied with adolescent concerns to really take in what her mother was going through. And that drawing of her in her bathrobe—looking old and exhausted, as lifeless as the ash on the end of her cigarette. Sarah had spent the summer looking at herself in the mirror, studying her own metamorphosis from girl to young woman. Had she been less self-absorbed, she might’ve eased her mother’s desperation and counseled her against doing anything out of fear. “What you don’t understand,” her mother had told her when she saw the bathrobe drawing, “is that one day you’ll be that woman.” One day she, too, would be lost, alone, in search of a destination.
And was she that now? Certainly her mother’s prediction hadn’t come true in the sense she’d meant it at the time—that one day Sarah would wake up and discover that youth and beauty fled and she was no longer the object of men’s desire, that menopause would erode her self-confidence, leaving her frightened and desperate, grasping at straws. Because Sarah had emphatically not become that woman. Time had taken its toll, of course, there was no denying it. Her body had thickened, her hair grayed. Lines had appeared at the corners of her eyes and deepened, and the skin along her neck had grown slack. But menopause hadn’t undermined her, nor had she felt either frightened or desperate, in part because she wasn’t alone. She had Lou, whose affection and devotion never wavered, and she had Owen, and she had, well, her life. Maybe her sexual currency in her fifties was less than it had been in her thirties and forties, but sex had been her mother’s only currency, or so she’d believed, which amounted to the same thing. Which was why she’d felt less like a woman that last summer, a feeling that Sarah had escaped.
Until now, perhaps. Had her mastectomy finally fulfilled her mother’s prophecy, or some irony-rich version of it, at the very moment she’d congratulated herself that they didn’t share an emotional destiny? All Sarah knew for sure was that she’d come out from under the anesthesia with a profound sense that her mother had been with her through the whole thing. Not there in the operating theater, or out in the waiting room with Lou and Owen, but with her in her drug-induced dreams, riffing the entire time, though Sarah couldn’t remember a single word she’d said. In recovery, her first conscious thought had been of her mother’s mutilated body lying for hours in the blood-soaked snow. Later, when she could examine what had been done to her, she recalled again the warning that she’d eventually become the woman holding that cigarette with the long, lifeless ash. Had she sold her mother short? Sarah wondered. Had she been wiser than Sarah gave her credit for? What if she hadn’t been talking about menopause at all, but rather life’s ability to demonstrate just how alone you really are?
In the months following the operation, her mother continued to haunt Sarah’s dreams. Which made a kind of sense, she supposed. Her mother had been so badly disfigured by the accident that her casket had been closed, and some subconscious part of Sarah had probably clung to the hope that it was another woman inside. Living with her father when the terrible news came, she’d never felt that she could properly grieve. To give herself over to the devastation of that loss would have shown him the truth, that she’d loved her mother more, this at a time w
hen his own troubles were fast closing in and he was teetering dangerously on the brink. Had her own recent scare given her long-delayed permission to imagine this woman’s loneliness and, finally, to grieve her loss?
Possibly. Except that somehow it seemed less like grieving than…what? Sarah couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it was more like a conversation between them had been left unfinished, as if one or the other had started to say something important and then been interrupted. But what? Several conversations had been left dangling. Was it possible to be in love with two boys at the same time? Should she worry that one of them always played it safe and the other was both reckless and careless? Was it more important to love or be loved? Was Sarah’s great gift—as her mother saw it—incompatible with love? Was that why she’d said, “I’m so, so sorry”? Sarah had tried asking these and many other questions but to little or no avail, her mother invariably retreating further into self-doubt. Then there were all the other conversations they’d have had if her mother hadn’t died. Would she think she’d betrayed her gift by marrying Lou and be angry because she’d squandered what she herself would have valued most of all? Sarah just needed one more hour in her company, maybe in one of those small, narrow New York restaurants they’d gone to—except for that final summer—for an oh-so-late supper after the show before Sarah returned home.
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