“I didn’t mean how you look, I meant how you are.”
This seems to surprise her, and she starts crying again.
“Uh-oh,” he says.
She waves her hand and blubbers, “It’s just… Well! I guess a lot of things are hitting me all at once.”
He could say the same. They had talked about so many things! From a random and seemingly weightless remark at a dinner table to… this! He’d sat next to Candy Sullivan only to… well, to sit next to Candy Sullivan. To say a brief hello. And, if the truth be told, to have the opportunity to look at her close up—God, she was something. Then he’d intended to take a place at the nearly empty table where Ben Small was sitting. He was going to face the door so he could see when Mary Alice arrived, then wave her over to sit beside him—he had expected that, after their lovely afternoon, they might have dinner together. For starters.
But then he formed what felt like an immediate bond with the Homecoming Queen. “Candy Sullivan?” he said, and she turned around and looked up at him. He extended his hand and reminded her of his name—he’d discovered that not all of the people there saw well enough anymore to read the name tags.
“Oh, Lester!” she said. “I know you. I remember you very well!”
She removed her purse from the empty seat beside her and he sat down and said, “So. The last time I saw you was the day before you left to go to Boston for college, BU wasn’t it?”
“It was! What a memory!”
“Well,” he said. “What a goil. Everybody knew everything about you. That day, you were in line ahead of me at the Dairy Queen. Wearing… well, Candy, I think you would have to call them short shorts. And a white blouse, knotted at your waist. You were barefoot, and you had a daisy stuck between a couple of your toes. You were talking about how you were going to marry a neurosurgeon and have five children.”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Did we talk that day?”
“Nah. I just overheard. You were surrounded by your usual friends and admirers. A guy couldn’t wedge his way in with a… with a wedger.”
Her eyes shifted briefly away from him. “Yes, well.” She touched her right earring, her left. “And you were off to college, too. The University of Minnesota, right?”
Lester laid his hand over his heart. “I’m touched you remember.”
She tilted her head and studied him. “I remember a lot about you, Lester Hessenpfeffer. I remember how smart you were, and how kind. How you were going to be a vet. How a lot of people were really awful to you. And how I never stood up for you when I could have.”
He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, really. I turned out fine. I’m happy! I’m a vet! So did you marry a neurosurgeon and have five children?”
“Not exactly,” she said; and then her chin began to tremble, and she started telling him things that would have made him leaving her table rude, if not impossible. From the corner of his eye, he had seen Mary Alice come in, and he’d thought to give her some sort of sign—a finger held up in the air? A quick lift of his chin that would let her know he’d be right over? But then he’d noticed Pete Decker with her and thought, Huh! Well, that’s that. Oh, he’d intended to validate his assumptions, not for nothing had he been trained in the scientific method. But as his talk with Candy grew more intimate, the idea of him pursuing a relationship with Mary Alice (sitting with Pete Decker, why was she sitting with Pete Decker?) became less and less urgent.
Dinner was delivered, and Candy sat staring at her plate. Then she began to cry into her filet mignon, tears suddenly spilling over and apparently taking her by surprise. “Oh!” she said, and quickly dabbed at her eyes with her napkin, her head down—embarrassed, he thought. “Gosh!” she said. The tears kept coming, and finally he gently took her arm and led her into the hall, where her crying turned into all-out sobbing. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m all right. Really. I’m so sorry. I’ll just go up to my room. I’m fine.”
“Well. No, you’re not.” He was frustrated by a sudden desire to do something for her without having any idea what that might be. He imagined himself picking her up, swooping her into his arms, her white dress and her sparkly purse and the dinner napkin she still held clutched in her hand, and… what? Asking her if she’d like to take a truck ride with him to visit Elwood Masten’s eleven golden retriever puppies, seven and a half weeks old and each one better looking than the next? Abandon their reunion dinner in favor of brown sugar meat loaf and carrot mashed potatoes and heavily buttered green beans and gooseberry pie at the Clean Plate Club? Which fortunately or unfortunately (depending on whether he was wearing his medical professional hat or his starving man hat) was right across the street from his clinic? Samson the mastiff had availed himself of half a sandwich made from that meat loaf when Lester had carelessly left his take-out lunch on top of the reception desk and Jeanine had turned her back, and that is probably why Samson never cowered in the waiting room anymore. No, Lester decided. He would give Candy her privacy.
He did punch the elevator button for her, though, and when the doors opened, the people who stepped off stared with blatant, nearly openmouthed curiosity. Lester stepped between them and Candy and thus ended up on the elevator with her. When they reached her floor, he walked her to her door. She hesitated, then said, “I wonder… would you come in and have a look at my dog? I’m sorry to take advantage of you this way. But I just noticed this awful swelling on both her sides, and I’m so worried that she—”
“I’d be happy to have a look,” he said, and when she slid the key into the door, he couldn’t help it; his heart sped up. And it wasn’t that (although who could be a straight man with a functioning brain and not have the briefest of scenarios occur to him when a beautiful woman like Candy unlocks her hotel room to him?). But it wasn’t that he wanted to have sex with Candy Sullivan. It was that he felt retroactively invited to sit at the Table. He supposes some things never go away. Jeanine’s mother lives in an old-age home where there’s a Popular Table. “It’s just like junior high, I swear,” Jeanine had told him. “The royalty still saving seats for each other.”
“Is your mother a member of the royalty?” Lester had asked.
“No,” Jeanine had said, “and it drives her crazy. She says she doesn’t care, but when I go to have a meal with her, all she does is watch them. Oh well, one of them will probably die soon, and then maybe she can move up the ladder.”
After Lester examined Esther, he and Candy kept a respectful distance from each other, but then Candy slipped off her heels and stretched out on the bed and said, “Oh, boy, this feels good. Do you want lie down, Lester?” And he did. By that time, each knew that “lying down” was simply acknowledgment of presumed aches and pains and a reduced capacity for alcohol. If Candy weren’t so sad, the situation might have been funny.
They talked about how Candy had been living a life more and more distant from what she had wanted it to be; how lately she had been having difficulty making simple decisions, and this made her feel she no longer knew herself at all. (Do I like strawberries? she’d asked herself at the supermarket recently and was literally unable to answer.) She said a weighty despair had insinuated itself into her life and now it was just the norm—every morning, she opened her eyes and searched the bedroom ceiling for long minutes at a time, looking for what was wrong. “What I finally decided,” she said, “is that everything is.” She talked, in halting tones, about how she feared her husband in ways too complicated to be fully acknowledged, and how she was ashamed of that fear, and didn’t feel she had anyone she could talk to about it.
“Does he hit you?” Lester asked, a question that seemed balanced between obscene and necessary.
She hesitated, then said, “No. Not… like that. But if he did, it wouldn’t surprise me. Or even make me mad. I would just feel like it belonged, somehow.” The elevator dinged out in the hallway and she tensed, then looked quickly at the door as though waiting for a knock. Then she looked back at Lester and sighed. “You kno
w, this diagnosis has been a kind of gift. It’s making me look at things and see them.”
She told him she had begun to think about what death really meant and what life really meant—nothing like death to make you think about life! She said a friend’s baby had died at only eight months old from an overwhelming bacterial infection, and that she found consolation in remembering what that mother had put on her baby’s gravestone: “A brief life, but oh so joyful.” Candy said she intended to move toward joy, if only for the last several months of her life.
Lester talked about himself, too. It seemed that a certain type of intimate exchange could elicit more and more soulful admissions, especially if you’d had a few drinks and were experiencing the kind of jaunty surrealism a high school reunion can bring. Lester told Candy that he loved his little neighbor girl like a daughter, and that she had used his house for her last sleepover party because her mother had said never again. He said he had served seven little tomboys spaghetti and meatballs at the picnic table in his backyard, and then made ice cream sundaes, which he believed he was not alone in thinking were absolutely fantastic. He told her he’d recently offered Miranda another such party and she had refused him because of the unacceptable amount of time he’d spent hanging around the girls last time, thus preventing them from talking. Which she hadn’t wanted to tell him, but since he’d asked about doing it again… When Lester said he’d do better next time, Miranda said all right, how about two Saturdays from now, which by the way was the day he had promised to let her sit in on the day’s surgeries, and he had readily agreed. Tacos, he was going to give those girls this time, and a repeat of the sundaes. Then he was going to turn over the living room to them, and retire to his bedroom to read.
He described to Candy the impact his wife’s and unborn child’s deaths had had on him, not only right after they happened, but also the ripple effect of the ever-transforming but never quite resolving grief. “I guess I believe I owe it to her to keep on feeling the grief,” he said.
“Hmm,” Candy said. “I wonder. I wonder if you asked her if she wanted you to feel such pain, what she would say.”
“She would want me to remember her,” Lester said. “I know that.”
“Yes, but in pain? How about another way? How about honoring the love you shared by loving someone again?”
“Well, funny you should say that,” he said, and told Candy about how he was very attracted to Mary Alice Mayhew, of all people.
“What do you mean, ‘of all people’?” Candy said, and Lester said nothing; he was embarrassed he’d put it that way. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
“She just didn’t try,” Candy said. “She was too smart to.”
Lester nodded. “You’re right. And you know, I had lunch with her today, and I noticed… She smells like outside.”
“Well, that alone!” Candy said, smiling.
“But she’s down there with Pete Decker. So I don’t know. I guess I kind of blew it.”
“Oh, come on,” Candy said. And something about the way she looked at him made him believe he still had a chance after all.
They have just agreed to head back downstairs when they hear the tinny sound of salsa music, and Candy sighs. “My husband calling,” she says. “I’ll bet you a million dollars. I should never have turned the phone back on.”
She pulls the cellphone out of her purse, looks at the caller ID, then puts it back in her purse without answering it. “Yup,” she says. “That’s who it is. Cooper Anthony Armstrong. My husband.”
“Does this mean I have to pay you a million dollars?” Lester asks. “Do you take Visa?”
Candy shakes her head sadly. “See? This is how he is. I ask him to come with me and he says no. But now the whole time I’m here, he’ll keep calling. This is how he always is, these mixed signals, and it’s so confusing. I wonder why he doesn’t ever just say yes to anything I propose. Why doesn’t he ever say, ‘Sure, I’ll go.’ Just like that. It’s as though he just likes to say no to me. Or needs to or something. Maybe it’s something he learned.
“You know, at my father-in-law’s wake, my mother-in-law was sitting in a corner by herself. She was sitting up so straight, her purse balanced on top of her knees, clutching a hankie. I went to sit by her and asked her how she was doing. She said, ‘He never played cards with me.’ I didn’t know what she meant, of course, and I said something like, ‘Oh?’ And then she told me that she used to wait for her husband to come home every night, that was the highlight of her day. Half an hour before he was due, she changed into a dress and heels, put on lipstick and perfume, and combed her hair. Then she set the table—candles every night—and served him a nice dinner. Almost every night when they had finished eating, she would try to get him to spend some time with her. Just a card game, perhaps gin rummy, she would suggest. And he never did. She said when the kids were home, she could understand it; he was tired—well, so was she. But even after the kids left, all the years they were together without children, she would still make him dinner every night and she would still ask him for a little card game and he never did play with her. But here’s the thing: he didn’t say, ‘I don’t want to play cards.’ Or ‘I don’t like to play cards.’ He would say, ‘Later,’ and then never do it. Why?”
Lester has a few ideas about why, but he keeps them to himself. The question seems mostly rhetorical. Besides that, Candy’s figuring things out for herself. And the process is new, still delicate. If he criticizes her husband, he suspects she’ll find a way to defend him. Let silence be his only comment. He’s known men like Candy’s husband seems to be, and the kindest thing he can say about them is that he will never understand them, the way they deny themselves happiness and contentment because of a kind of stinginess and general obstinacy toward their wives, if not a weird sort of hatred. He thinks that such men feel there is a pattern of behavior that must be adhered to during courtship; after that, the onus is on the woman—and the woman alone—to please.
“I wish I had the courage to leave him,” Candy says. “But then I’d be alone. It would be hard to deal with all that’s going on if I were alone.”
“I don’t know,” Lester says. “I think there’s alone-alone; and then there’s feeling alone when you’re with someone, which is worse.”
“You’re right,” she says. “You’re absolutely right. Alone-alone is… clean. Isn’t it?”
“I think it is.”
“To be alone without longing, that’s the thing.”
“That is the thing.”
“I have never in my life been alone. I have always had a man.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. Since I was eleven years old. My God. Since I was eleven. That’s when my boyfriend Billy Simpson would come over every day after school. Every day, and you know I would spend a good half hour getting ready for him. Instead of being outside and riding my bike or something, I would sit in front of my dresser mirror trying out different ribbons for my hair.”
“Didn’t your mom say anything?” Lester asks.
“Oh, sure. She told all her friends how wonderful it was that I had such a dedicated boyfriend so young. She was quite proud.” She is quiet for a moment, and then she says gently, “Bless her heart. It was such a different time.”
It is quiet for a while, and then Candy clears her throat and says, “Lester? In your professional opinion, do you think I’m going to die soon?”
He looks at her. “I’m a veterinarian.”
“I know. But do you?”
“Well, I think… You know what? I think people get hung up on statistics. The reality is that, when it comes to the individual, it’s zero or one hundred percent. And I’m struck, too, by the way that people assume a medical diagnosis is what’s going to take them out of Dodge. I could go out for a walk tonight and get hit by a bus.”
“Oh, I hope you don’t,” Candy says. “Then I’ll never get my million dollars.”
There is the sound of a door slamming, and then
they hear a woman giggling on the other side of the wall. She giggles louder, whoops, and then there is the sound of the headboard banging against the wall in an unmistakable rhythm.
Candy’s eyes grow wide and she whispers, “Do you think that’s one of ours?”
“Someone from the reunion?”
She nods.
“God, I hope so,” Lester says. “I hope it’s Dorothy Shauman and John Niehauser.” Lester hates to impugn the character of John this way, he was pretty a nice guy who had the misfortune to have been seen eating boogers in fourth grade and it followed him right up to the last year of high school, but Lester always liked him. He was a math genius, which put another nail in his high school coffin, and, as if that weren’t enough, he liked to bring the newspaper to read at lunchtime while he drank coffee from a plaid thermos. He was almost as big a nerd as Lester. But to pair Dorothy with someone so that they can put faces to the sounds of moaning and groaning is irresistible. He and Candy start laughing, just a little at first, and then long and loudly.
“Oh, God!” Candy finally says, her hand lying limp across her belly. “Whew!” She sits up and blows her nose and says, “All right. Let me fix my mascara and then we should go back down there. I’ve kept you here so long. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, Candy. Would you do me a favor?”
“Stop apologizing?”
“Bingo.”
“I know. One of the many habits I need to break.”
“I’m glad we talked. I really am. I hope you know that.”
“I’m glad, too. And now you’ve got to get down there and ask that sweet-smelling woman to dance.”
Lester sits up, his face full of worry. “I am an awful dancer. Awful.” He stares at his shoes, as though it’s their fault.
Candy puts her hand on Lester’s shoulder. “Here’s what I know about Mary Alice Mayhew. She won’t mind one bit.”
The Last Time I Saw You Page 19