Without Jenny

by Mark Gunther

  “I remember that,” he said. “I hope I won’t frustrate you. The plumbing has gotten a bit cranky as I’ve aged. Although I did have a Viagra in my bag.”

  “You really are prepared!” She laughed and gave him a squeeze. “Looks like you’ll be just fine.”

  “I want to be, very, very badly!” She pulled him to the bed and they fell on it together, arms and legs reaching, wrapping, grappling, hot and mellow and soft and strong and she was tied to his eyes and saw all her yearning and all Danny’s heartbreak, there in him. His touch was soft as her babies’ skin. She yielded, luxuriant, truthful, mounting him, hips moving in time with his, looking down at this kind man who so recently had been a stranger. He rolled them over to look down at her, gentle love etched in his face.

  “Do you see Deb now?” she asked him.

  “I do,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “That’s good. You aren’t mine.”

  “No.”

  They surrounded each other and release vibrated through her core. Breathing quickened and he withdrew. The hot liquid pooled on her belly.

  “All okay?” he asked her.

  “I’m happy,” she said, and she was.

  They lay close, skin sticking them together, wayfarers tied in a moment. They found a romantic comedy on the TV and laughed their heads off. Later, Joy rejoiced at his tongue on her. She awoke in the morning, spooned, him already inside, growing easily, persistently. She rolled onto her front, moving him over her, the harsh memory melting away under his tender urgency. When the ugliness was all gone she exhaled; the clock moved them inexorably onward.

  Most of what had to be said already had been, and blessedly now there was the bike. They rode without speaking, east along the river in the rising heat of the morning, past the quiet wineries on Westside Road, an hour to Healdsburg. A big breakfast under the misters at the Oakville Grocery and a kind, chaste hug framed their goodbye. He had ninety-five miles to Fort Bragg. She turned south, seventy-five miles from home herself. She rode with focus and strength and enough determination for the painful parts—steadily turning a big gear through the miles of flat valley, attacking Red Hill with a cadence just a little quicker than she would have settled for on another day, charging down the descents like a falcon, a nimble dryad in magical space, immune to the heat, blessed with legs that could do no wrong and lungs of infinite capacity and the rhythmic and muscular heart she had built to power it all.

  Grief had usurped her desire, not stolen it. All she had been doing was wanting—not to have parked there and to have been able to buy the shoes, and to have Jenny back and her life restored, and to feel Jenny’s body at the cemetery, and to jump off a cliff into another world; and to preserve her grief and to show it off, and to glory in her suffering, and to bury her grief under duty, and for grief to be a way of life and for it to vanquish her, and she had wanted the pain to just stop, and she had had an imaginary relationship with some schizophrenic part of her self, and she had been ashamed to be seen, and she had lived without a soul, and she had pushed her husband away from everything but their shared grief, and she had been afraid to love her son. Even today she still wanted something impossible, the inversion of her loss to a gain; but yearning was yearning, a newly permanent part of her: a yearning that would never be fulfilled. In the physics of emotion her loss was a constant.

  But I’m not fated to lose everything.

  She was Jake’s mom. I get to love him, even though I’ll lose him to another girl. Sunday I can tell him I love him.

  She was Danny’s wife. She wanted to sit with him in their house and watch him read the paper. She wanted to call him on the phone and ask him to pick up a pizza on the way home. She wanted him to do something with her that was new to both of them, and she wanted to go to the grocery store and to the museum and to the movies. She wanted to lie on the beach and climb up a mountain and reorganize the basement with him. She wanted to take his hardness inside her, feel his muscles rippling under his skin and wrap him up in her legs and arms and never let go. She wanted to go with him to Jake’s wedding. She thought about Benny and how nice it had been and how she didn’t feel the least bit cross-threaded about it. The night was a great thing, a nice thing, an important thing, a real thing that she deserved and would treasure. Mostly, though, she thought about Danny and how she had lost him already.

  If I want my marriage back I have to get right to work.

  She called her husband as soon as she got home, when she was still hot and smelly.

  “I had an interesting couple of days,” she said. “I shined on work yesterday and went riding, and the funniest thing happened. I met Benny. Do you remember him?”

  “Of course, Compassionate Friends,” Danny said. “I liked him.”

  I hope you always will.

  “Well, it turns out he rides! I ran into him in Fairfax. He was out touring for a few days, hundred-mile days.”

  “Wow,” Danny said. “Your kind of guy.”

  “I guess. He has a really specific bicycle for that,” Joy said. “Once we recognized each other we had just the most fantastic talk. We talked about everything. Jenny. His son. Judaism. Grief. Memory. Him and Deb. Us.”

  “What about us?” Danny sounded guarded.

  “The point is,” she said, “I want to apologize. I lost you, Danny. After the thing happened on your birthday, I let you go. When we got married I promised you that I never would, but I did. I’m sorry for that, Danny. I want you back. I love you, Danny, but I’m gone if we can’t fix this.” She ran out of words. There was silence on the other end of the phone, then just when she was going to say something she heard a faint sniffle.

  “I love you too, Joy. I want you really bad. Every day. So many nights in this apartment I knew I really could be at home but I was afraid of the nights I lay in our bed ignoring you. I felt bad about hurting you and told myself I needed to let you set the pace, but it was an excuse. I couldn’t handle my own feelings. I need you. I’m not a monolith. Now I sleep in fucking Stockton. Stupid.”

  “We’ve both done foolish things,” she said. “Come home now.”

  Is that how I’ll classify last night? Can’t. It was too real to be foolish.

  “As soon as I can get away. I’ve got a dinner meeting.”

  She heard it first as one more no. But then she chose yes.

  “Okay. If I’m not awake, you can wake me up. Gently.”

  “Deal,” he said. “I’ll call you when I leave.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  “Wait. Did you ride all the way home?” he asked

  He wants to know the story. Is he worried?

  “No,” she said. “A hundred seventy-five miles? I’m not that crazy. He was stopping in Guerneville. I got a room. We drank some margaritas. Then we met up in the morning and rode to Healdsburg for breakfast. He went on and I came back.”

  It was extraordinarily easy to say that, she thought, and even though she knew that she would tell him eventually, today the memory still was hers alone.

  “I’m glad you made a new friend,” he said.

  “First one since,” she agreed.

  31.

  JOY KICKED AT the aggressive seagull eyeing Jake’s bag of popcorn. They were sitting on a bench that fronted the penguin pool at the San Francisco Zoo. For his eleventh birthday, Jake wanted to have a “special date” with her, he said, like they used to. She was touched. When Jenny died Joy had gotten out of the special date habit, and he never brought it up. You can lose things, she thought, without even suspecting it. Joy was pleased when he asked her and even more pleased to believe Danny’s denial of prompting the invitation.

  “Mom, I hardly ever remember her.”

  “What do you mean, honey? What she looked like, or what you did, or her voice?”

  He took a handful of popcorn. “All of those, I guess. She used to tell me jokes and stories and all kinds of stuff, and I can’t remember any of it. I look at her things on the little table, and I know they’re hers
, but not really anymore. I wish I could remember doing stuff with her. I wish she could watch me play ball like I watched her tap dance.”

  “I remember being here in the zoo with you and Jenny and Dad. Do you?”

  He brightened a bit. “Yeah. She liked those really big monkeys. She used to make faces at me that the monkeys were making.”

  Joy laughed. “Right, the gibbons. We’d come here and Dad would tell her to quit monkeying around. She thought it was so funny.”

  We always were together in those days.

  “Can we go see them?”

  “Sure. Can I have some popcorn?”

  He handed her the bag. “Tell me something else you remember.”

  The urge to run came and went. Jake wants to know his sister.

  They started walking, holding hands, blocked momentarily by a gaggle of peacocks crossing the path in front of them. She felt the scratchiness of popcorn salt melting under the heat of their twined fingers. Her little man. They strolled past the elephants and tigers to the big square gibbon cage close to the old entrance to the zoo. Across the way a lone orangutan sat on top of his tall pylon, watching them.

  “When you were still a baby, five months old, we had Jenny’s fourth birthday at the children’s zoo. We had all the little girls from her preschool, and Amanda and Lizzie. We went to the petting zoo, but Jenny wanted snakes. So Daddy got them to bring a python over, and the zookeeper put it on her shoulders and it slithered around her arm. First she didn’t quite know what to do, but then she started laughing because it was tickling her.”

  “Was it big? Was she scared?”

  “It wasn’t super big, but she was only four. I was scared. I think she was at first, but before the guy put the snake on her he let her touch it and watch it slither on his arm. Plus it had a non-scary name. Queenie. We have pictures at home. Maybe we can find them later.”

  Joy had not touched a photo album or put any pictures in a new one since Jenny’s death. The little envelopes from the photo store were piled up in a shopping bag in the back of the front hall closet. Now that Danny had a digital camera, records were even more ephemeral.

  “Did I eat any cake?”

  “No, I was still nursing you. But we also were feeding you baby food. You got pretty interested in food when you were about three months old, and every time we ate you’d fuss, so we started feeding you and there was no turning back.”

  Jake stood silently. They watched the gibbons swirl around their cage.

  “Do you think she knows we’re still here?”

  “In the world, you mean? Gosh, honey, I don’t know. Sometimes I really want her to. Sometimes I just want her to be off being happy wherever she is now.”

  “Do you think she’s somewhere?”

  A gibbon flew hand over hand across the top of the cage, swung down to a tree branch, and flung himself completely around it before landing on the platform near the back.

  “I used to. I’m not sure now. I’ve thought about it a lot. I hope so.”

  “Well, I don’t think she’s anywhere.”

  She heard exhaustion and resignation in his tone. She ached for him and for the thing she could never repair. “If she is somewhere, it’s really different than here. She can’t exactly call us on the phone.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’d hear her voice in my head or something. When I think about her it’s just this buzzing noise. Do you ever hear her?”

  “In the beginning I wanted to at the cemetery, and in her room. I had a couple of dreams right at the beginning where I thought I heard her, but not for a long time now.”

  “Mom, you remember a lot more than me. The harder I try, the less I remember. We hardly ever see Grandma Rose.”

  Joy understood something big. She took her son by the shoulders and looked him in the eye.

  “Jacob. Please listen to me very carefully. When you go to school every day I remember you. I have a picture of you on my desk so I think of you over and over again, and when you go on your baseball tour again next summer and Daddy and I go on our bike trip we’ll have a picture of you that we’ll put on the dresser in each hotel and we will talk and talk about you, and when we come back and you’re still away I’ll go sit in your room and remember you then too, and when you go away to college and when you get married and when I come over and babysit your kids. You might get sick of me!”

  Jake turned his face away from her and rubbed his left eye with his right hand. It was such a Danny gesture. “Let’s ride the zoo train,” he said.

  The rubber-wheeled train pulled up. He grabbed an outside seat. She sat next to him, as close as she dared, and felt the solid contact of their legs and shoulders.

  “Jenny used to tell me that when she grew up she wanted to get married and live in a house right next door to us, so she could see you and me and Daddy all the time.”

  “But I’m not going to live with you all the time.”

  “She was little. I think it was her way of saying how important you were to her.”

  It also was Jenny’s way of saying she never wanted her childhood to end. Joy would never know if Jenny was having a premonition. Maybe she had been seeding Joy’s memory so that this thought could return at precisely the moment Jake needed it. Joy thanked her, just in case she was listening. The zebra-painted cars made a circuit of the wide asphalt walkways that led through the zoo. Jake pointed out various animals as they went by.

  “Another animal that Jenny really liked was the capybara. She thought it was a funny word and it was funny that it was the same kind of animal as a mouse except huger. She wondered if people in Brazil had to put capybara traps in their houses like we put mousetraps in the basement.”

  Joy felt very pleased with that memory.

  Jake looked for the capybara as the train went by.

  “I can’t see it!”

  “We’ll see it when we come back here to watch the giraffes get fed.”

  “So did they have to use traps?”

  “No, Daddy looked it up and capybaras live near water. They like to go swimming, not make a mess in people’s basements.”

  The train came back to the start, and they went for lunch. The dining patio had netting over it to keep the seagulls out.

  “When I think that Jenny is somewhere,” Joy said, “what I really mean is that I want her to be here. But that will never happen. She has to be in whatever her own future is and not worry about us.”

  Jake considered this. He took a French fry, dipped it in ketchup. “I guess it’s like the zoo. If we keep needing Jenny all the time, she’ll be in a cage too.”

  He ate another fry. Joy gazed at him with great admiration.

  Her phone rang. She dug it out of her purse.

  “Hi, Danny. How’d you play?”

  Jake looked up. “Tell Dad I want to go with him next time!”

  “Here, honey. You tell him.”

  She handed Jake the phone and watched him tell his dad about their morning. He didn’t mention Jenny, but he did say the gibbons were monkeying around.

  “Dad wants to know if you want to go out later.” He handed the phone back.

  “No, let’s just meet at home,” she told her husband. “We’re still going to be here for a while, I think. Things are good, Danny. We’re remembering a lot. Really a lot. We have an amazing son.”

  She put the phone away and asked, “Is Daddy going to take you golfing?”

  Jake swirled the ketchup with his last French fry. “We’re going to the putting green tomorrow when you’re on your bike. Is it time to feed the giraffes yet?”

  Joy looked at her watch. “We have a few minutes.”

  “Can I get an Its-It?”

  Cookies and ice cream, plus the French fries? A little fatty.

  “Not now, Jake,” she temporized. “Maybe later.”

  Thank you, God, for everyone who loved him when I couldn’t. Thank you, God, that I can love Jake now.

  On the way to the giraffes the
y detoured past the capybara. The giraffe enclosure had a trough about ten feet high that the zookeepers filled with straw, and the zoo’s five giraffes gathered around, under a few tall, scraggly looking palm trees.

  “They look so funny from this side,” Jake said. “Big heads with no bodies.”

  He pulled her around to the other side of the trough, where the bodies became visible.

  “I don’t think I’d like to be a giraffe.”

  “Why not?” Joy asked him.

  “You can’t really go and hide anywhere, and people always end up looking at you.”

  “Do you feel that way sometimes?”

  “Not so much now. But I know I’m different. When I hear people complaining about their big sisters, I want to hit them. I don’t, usually, but sometimes I have to go sit by myself. Nobody really gets it, Mom.”

  “No, honey, no one gets it unless it happened to them. But no one really wants to hurt your feelings, either. They’re just thinking about themselves, but that’s okay. And you can trust the people who love you.”

  I can, too.

  32.

  THE BAG OF photos had beckoned from the floor of the closet. Now there was a pile of fifty envelopes on the dining room table. Joy got a pencil and a pad and a bag to use for the discards.

  “Okay, Joy,” she said, taking a deep breath, “you don’t need to agonize over every picture. If we can just label the envelopes that will be good enough.”

  She picked up the first one. Jake’s fourth birthday. She tossed a couple of blurry ones and a couple more ugly ones into the trash, stopping just a bit at a photo of Jenny cutting pieces of cake for Jake’s friends, but slipped them back into the envelope, labeled it Jake’s Fourth b-day, put it aside, and picked up the next one. Jenner Weekend, 1996. She only saved one of the endless shots of beautiful beaches with tiny family members bundled up in jackets and hats and scarves against the freezing winds. Lot of hours playing cards that weekend! One picture had Jenny with two arms raised high in victory after a particularly rough game of Hell, Danny bowing at her feet. She wiped a tear from her eye and turned to the next envelope. Danny’s parents’ fortieth anniversary. She worked her way through the stack.