by Sue Miller
It was still light enough as they ate that they didn’t have candles on the table, though the room turned dark fairly rapidly. But there was something pleasant, Annie thought, about sitting here in the indoor twilight with the back door open; and Graham continued to seem, in some way she couldn’t have described exactly, himself again. His easy self. She assumed it had something to do with seeing John, with the pleasure that always brought him—someone he could talk to about anything.
So she asked about lunch, and Graham told her about John’s conference, about his kids. “Oh! And he said he’d be able to make it to dinner tomorrow, by the way.”
They talked about Karen, about her increasing ditziness.
Then he asked her, and she told him, about her day—about how long the packing up took, about lunch in the park in the South End. About the oddness of Danielle. “Plus—oh God!—I ran into Rosemary Gregory at Formaggio and completely blew it.”
He looked startled. “What do you mean, you blew it?”
“Oh, just that I kept stepping into one awkwardness after another. I had the flowers, you know”—she gestured at the bouquet—“and first I said they were for the party, which, of course, I hadn’t invited her to. And then, because I was trying to scramble out of that one, I said they were for you, for you for being, as I so gracefully put it to a recent divorcée, a good husband.”
After a moment, he said, “I’m sure she didn’t notice. Or mind.”
“Actually, she sort of walked off, so I think she did. Mind.”
“Well, it may have had to do with any number of other things, too. You don’t know.”
She shrugged.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.
Just before they rose from the table to turn on the lights and begin their cleanup, Annie said, “You are a good husband, you know.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “It means everything to me. For you to say that.”
She couldn’t see his face, but his voice was even deeper than usual, a soft rumble.
She reached the light switch first and flicked it on, and they stood for a moment in the sudden light, surprised by each other.
8
Something was off, Annie felt it even as she opened her eyes. The light leaking into the room at the bottom of the window shades was all wrong—too bright—and the house was utterly silent around her. What time was it? She turned to look at the clock, the glowing green digits: 6:21. She turned slightly and saw that Graham, who usually woke her well before this, was still there next to her in bed, still sound asleep.
Then, before she moved again, before she touched him, she knew. Much later, when she was talking about it with Frieda, she said she knew on account of his color—because he had no color. (He was gray, really. An odd, almost yellowish gray.) But what she felt in the instant before she really noticed that, though she never spoke of this to Frieda or to anyone else, was that his soul was gone. That was what she knew the moment she looked at him, even from her odd vantage point, with her pillow partially blocking her view. That his soul had vanished and his empty body had been left behind with her.
But not his soul, no. Annie didn’t believe in the soul. It was just that something essential to Graham, to everything Graham was, wasn’t there any longer. She could see it. She knew it.
She turned her body then, and stretched her hand out to touch him. His arm first, the arm lying nearest to her, its inner white flesh exposed, the hand turned up, palm open and relaxed.
His skin was cool under her fingertips.
She slid toward him, rising up on her elbow to look at him—at his face, at his gray face. It looked sunken under the thick beard. It seemed to her that it had lost its meaning somehow. After a few moments, she reached over and ran her fingers across his forehead, his nose. They felt cool too. Cool and waxy.
Annie rose up in the bed then, and knelt next to him. Her breath was coming fast, she could feel her heart, each thud seemed to shake her whole body. She put her hands on his arms, his chest. He’d pushed the sheet down nearly to his waist, and his right hand rested on the white cloth. She touched that hand and then that arm, cool too under the soft fur that covered it. She sat back on her heels and closed her eyes, trying to calm herself.
When she looked at him again, she saw that his eyes were slightly open. Open, but empty. After a few moments, she reached up to close his lids, aware even as she did it of the number of times she’d read of this act, or seen it, in films, on television. The ritual gesture, the acknowledgment of death.
But Annie was doing it mostly because she didn’t want to look at his eyes, so strangely blank and unfocused. The flesh of his eyelids, that usually thin and vulnerable-seeming flesh, felt oddly thick when she pushed it down over his eyes. She sat back again.
She stayed there, just looking at him for a few minutes more. For a moment it struck her as strange that his eyes stayed shut. She started to cry, but felt instantly that that wasn’t going to help her. And of course, nothing could help him. She stopped, she made herself stop.
She got up and came around the bed and sat down next to him. His body tilted slightly toward her weight on the mattress. She felt for a pulse in his cool arm. Useless, of course.
His mouth was open, and she reached under his jaw and pushed it up. When she took her hand away, it dropped open again.
The eyes stay shut, but not the mouth, she thought. It must be the heavy bone of the jaw.
She felt a quick wave of self-reproach for being even slightly interested in this, interested in anything else besides the fact of Graham’s death. Though she understood too that this interest wasn’t real, in some sense—that it was a way of not considering what was real. She felt it intensely then, the sensation of living for these moments on two levels—the one that seemed to be trying to disengage from what was happening, the one that was trying to realize it, to know it.
She leaned forward and put her hands on his cheeks, holding his face between her palms. There was something that she should be doing, or feeling. Surely this would come to her, the answer. Nothing she was doing now, nothing she could think of doing, felt right. She took her hands away from him. She stayed there, her hands in her lap.
She lost track of time. Perhaps twenty minutes passed, perhaps only a few. She wept, finally, she remembered that later, but she knew even as she did that she was weeping mostly for herself, for the life that she could already feel stretching out in front of her, without him. How would she live? How on earth would she pass the days? He had been so much at the center of her life, of their life together. It was, so much, one life.
She got up and took a tissue from the box on his side of the bed. She wiped her face, she blew her nose.
When she looked at Graham again, she noticed that he was wearing one of his old T-shirts, grayed with age, pinholed here and there. He had nothing else on, she knew this. This was his bedtime uniform in warm weather, it was all he ever wore. She sat next to him again and pulled the covers down. There: his long, shapely white thighs, the darker penis curled over one of them, the grayish, abundant pubic hair. His belly had relaxed and flattened out slightly.
She had the thought that she should put some clothes on him. Someone would have to come, someone who would see him like this. She couldn’t think who that might be at the moment—the doctor, some ambulance guys?—but she’d have to call someone at some point, and she didn’t want anyone looking at Graham naked.
But then she couldn’t imagine dressing him. The work of it seemed impossible: lifting his heavy body, turning him.
It was crazy to think about it anyway, she told herself. Nobody cared. Nobody cared but her. And she didn’t care, not really. She pulled the sheet and the light blanket up to his chest, as though he were a child she was tucking in. She leaned forward and kissed him, and was conscious even as she did it of how false this was. She didn’t feel anything for him, for this body. He was gone.
And finally she wept for that, for how ho
peless it was, anything she could do for him now, any gesture she could make. For how empty his body could be.
She couldn’t have imagined it. Graham was his body—big, energetic, alive. Stilled, he was more absent than anyone else would have been.
They had trouble getting him down the stairs, he was so heavy and unwieldy, and the twisting, uncarpeted stairs were so narrow and steep. Plus one of the EMTs was a small woman, as small as Annie—though her arms, in her short-sleeved shirt, were ropy with tanned muscle.
Annie wasn’t looking. She never looked, even when it was just furniture being moved up or down the stairs. There was something about it that was reasonlessly terrifying to her. She could never stop imagining everything that could go wrong, all the horrible possibilities—things dropping, breaking, people falling backward under their heavy loads, getting crushed. And now, with Graham, her fear was more intense than ever. While the EMTs struggled, Annie was in the bedroom, sitting in Graham’s chair, trying not to think of what was going on out in the stairwell.
The rumpled bedclothes still held the suggestion of his shape, his body. Through the open window drifted the pleasant smell of the nighttime damp burning off. She heard birdsong and the quiet stir of air in the trees. Somewhere in the distance there was the sudden clash and clatter of an extension ladder being raised. Life, going on.
From the hall came a bump. “Jesus Christ!” the woman said softly, but not softly enough. The man whispered urgently, “I know, I know,” and it sounded as if they had stopped for a moment.
Then, muffled laughter.
Laughter!
Well, okay. After all, there was something comical about it, wasn’t there? The ridiculously perilous stairs, the big man, the little woman trying to carry him. Laurel and Hardy. All you’d need were the bowler hats.
Suddenly she found herself starting to laugh too. She went quickly into the bathroom and shut the door. Sitting hunched over on the edge of the tub, Annie let it come, the laughter, snorting and sniggering in her effort to be quiet, not to shame herself. It quickly began to feel dangerous, something she couldn’t control. It went on and on. She couldn’t stop herself.
Finally, thinking it would help, she went to the mirror over the sink and looked at her reflection. Her face was wet with tears, but she was still laughing. Laughing and crying at the same time. It was grotesque. She was grotesque, a mask of tragedy with strange, humorless laughter coming out of its downturned maw. She turned the faucet on and bent over the sink, lifting the cold water to her face again and again. She tried not to look at herself when she wiped her face off with the towel. Her breathing had grown regular, but she felt exhausted.
She opened the door and heard nothing. They were gone, then. She stepped into the hallway and stood there, looking across it into Graham’s study. She’d left his yellow filing cabinet drawer open when she went looking for his living will, the brightly colored metal drawer stuffed with information important to him. On his desk were his piled papers, his books, his computer. Above it, on the wall, a framed photo of her, staring out of a window, the cold light falling on her dramatically. Her photographer friend Natalie had taken it when she was pregnant with Sarah.
The telephone sat there too, a landline only Graham used anymore.
Annie had to start calling people, she knew this, but she hated the thought of it—the necessarily dramatic announcement, the inevitable reaction, the need to give herself over to other people’s responses: to their shock, their pain. She wasn’t ready.
She thought of Sarah. She would call her first.
But what time was it there, in California. Fiveish?
No, she should wait a bit longer.
Then: Lucas.
But Frieda, Frieda should be the one to call him.
And she couldn’t call Frieda first, before Sarah. She’d wait. Wait to call Sarah first, and then Frieda.
She went down the stairs herself then, the painted narrow stairs. She crossed the living room into the open kitchen. It was a little after 8:15, she saw on the stove clock. The sunlight was pouring into the room—weekend light, as she thought of it. On weekdays she would be getting ready to go to her studio by now.
She turned on the coffee machine she’d bought for Graham and did the minimal pushing of buttons that resulted in two shots of espresso and a pitcher of steamed, frothed milk. She sat at the table in the kitchen. The bouquet Graham had bought her had wilted a bit more in the night, she noticed. She drank her coffee slowly, falling again into the almost tranced state she’d been in earlier. She was conscious of time passing, but she couldn’t have said how much, how long. She heard Graham’s phone ring and then a distant voice leaving a message. Her cell might have rung too, but she wouldn’t have heard it—she’d turned the sound off last night before they’d gone to bed. Even after she’d called the doctor and the funeral home this morning, she hadn’t turned it back on.
Abruptly, she remembered the motion she’d felt in the bed in the night. She’d woken partway—it came to her now—with Graham’s stirring. She’d thought he might be about to get up, to go to the bathroom, and she’d turned over to try to go back to sleep. Was it then, she wondered? Then that his heart was stopping? Was he aware of it? Did he know he was dying? Was he in pain?
She’d started to rock herself back and forth, thinking of that moment for him. His aloneness in it seemed so pitiable, so awful.
And then the thought: Could she have saved him, could she have helped him, if she hadn’t turned away because she wanted sleep, more sleep?
She stopped. She put her hands down flat on the table. There was no point to this. It wouldn’t have made a difference, in all likelihood. And perhaps she was wrong anyway. Wrong about the moment of death, wrong about the motion she’d felt, or thought she’d felt, whatever it was.
It made no difference. He was gone, either way. He was dead. She made herself think the word, and then she said it out loud. “Dead.”
She’d used it earlier with the policeman, too, the young policeman, a boy really, who’d asked her how long she thought Graham might have been gone when she woke.
“You mean dead?” she had said.
He blushed, oddly, and looked down quickly at the pad he was writing on. “Yes,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Annie told him. “He was cold though. Or cool, I guess you’d say.”
He’d seemed to be writing this down, and then he went on to ask her other questions: how old Graham was. Sixty-four, she said. “No, sixty-five.” (The birthday in April, the gifts, the party with Graham happy at its center, all the friends at the long table, the row of candles down the middle, and in their gentle light, everyone’s face so young.) He asked whether Graham had had a heart condition, whether they’d gone to bed at the same time, what time that was, whether she’d heard anything in the night. Annie hadn’t remembered it then, Graham’s stirring, so she was telling the truth, more or less, when she said no to the policeman.
(The police would have to come, Graham’s doctor had said when she called him. An unexpected death at home, they had to be sure. “You understand.” Annie had said yes, though she didn’t understand at all, not until the policeman, so young, so polite, a freckled redhead, began to ask his questions.
“And you need to find his living will, too,” the doctor had said. “He had one, right?” Annie had liked this doctor the one time that she’d met him, at a reading Sherwin Nuland gave at the store.
“Yes,” she said.
“Be ready to show it to the EMTs, okay? We don’t want them doing CPR on him.”
“God, no! He’s dead!”
“Well, they’re required to try, otherwise.”
He would meet the ambulance at the ER, the doctor told her, and sign a death certificate, a necessary step. What she would need to do meantime was to choose a funeral home. Somewhere they could send Graham. His body.
The funeral home, then, was the one clear decision she’d made this morning, and that had been imposed on
her. Actually, it was hardly a decision. She’d phoned the only funeral home she knew of, a brick building with an enormous sign on Mass Ave that she’d driven by every time she went to her studio. The woman who answered the phone there said they would arrange everything. Annie didn’t care, she didn’t ask what the everything was, she just wanted to get off the phone.)
Finally she made herself get up and wash out her coffee cup. She emptied the dishwasher. She started to reload it with the leftover dishes that had been sitting, rinsed, in the sink, the dishes from last night’s dinner—their plates, their silverware.
She was remembering last night’s dinner with Graham as she worked, calling up the details. Sitting at the table, they’d laughed together about Karen, her trip to Paris. Then agreed that really, it wasn’t funny. And laughed again. It had made Annie think of her mother’s long, slow decline, and they’d spoken of that briefly.
She’d talked about her day, getting the photographs over to the gallery. She told him what Danielle had said, and how surprised she’d been. She told him then what she had remembered Sarah saying all those years earlier about her—that she was unreadable too.
“Not so,” he’d said, and reached over to cover her hand with his. “You’re an open book. Open to me, anyway.” And she had felt it again, the loosening, yes, the opening, of her body.
“Nice metaphor,” she’d said. “Especially for a bookstore guy.”
He had put an apron on, as he usually did, to help her clear the table, to rinse the dishes, a sight which always amused her with its incongruity—the big man, the old-fashioned full apron, sprigged with dainty flowers, given to her years before by her kind first mother-in-law, and beginning now to fall apart.
Suddenly she was recalling a time when she and Sarah, then a little girl, were still at the table, and Graham in the same fancy apron was cleaning up. They were in the old version of the kitchen, the version whose walls they would knock out a year or so later to make the one large open room on the first floor, the room where the parties happened—the room they joked about, the joke being that if they put a bed in it, they’d never have to use any other part of the house.