by Julie Hilden
‘I want to stay here.’
‘Yes, of course you do. But tonight, perhaps, you might want to stay uptown?’
‘If it’s not too much of an inconvenience, yes, I’d really like to. Last night was hard,’ I tell him. He nods.
After the previous night’s heartbreaking dream, I look forward to sleeping elsewhere. And I have an ulterior motive for going uptown: I want to see Ilan’s mother’s room, the last place he visited before he died.
During the taxi ride, Mr Resnick asks me again if I am okay, really okay – and even touches me, his hand over mine for reassurance.
When we arrive, he shows me to the living room and sits down across from me in an upholstered chair. A maid serves tea. I don’t drink from my cup; I only hold it beneath my face, to feel the steam on my skin.
Again Mr Resnick presses me for answers; again I gently resist him. Finally I ask to see Ilan’s mother’s room, and he leads me there. Its marble floor is still bare. I think of Ilan as a child, sleeping beneath his mother’s bed, his cheek pressed to the cold marble.
‘May I sleep here?’ I ask Mr Resnick.
He is startled. ‘There’s a very nice guest room down the hall.’
‘But I’d like to stay here, if it’s all right.’
He nods. ‘Yes, it’s all right.’
* * *
As soon as he leaves, I slip below the bed, to lie as Ilan lay, but it does not make me feel better, as I had hoped. The floor is the same cold marble, but the past is still the past; I am not haunted except insofar as I haunt myself. All is quiet here. And still I dream of a supernatural life, one that could transport me; I dream of somehow being able to see Ilan once again, one more time.
After a time I slide out from under the bed and rise up. Curious, I open all the dresser’s drawers – wondering about the woman whose ring I wear, the woman whom Ilan loved so much and who left him.
She kept everything, I realize – from the dresses she wore in the flush of health, styles from the Sixties and Seventies, to the soft fleece sweater and sweatpants she must have worn in her last illness. And her husband has kept everything too.
From one of the dresser drawers, I select a plaid pair of pajamas. As I fasten them around my waist, I am unnerved by how well they fit, but then I remember that, as with her wedding dress, I have been tailored through surgery to fit them. Then I fold down the covers and climb into bed, but soon there is a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ I say quietly.
Mr Resnick inches into the doorway, with a glass in his hand. I can see that he notices the pajamas, but all he says is, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I thought you might want a glass of water.’
Late at night, I notice, his face relaxes, until he resembles a much younger man. I imagine for a second that he looks as you would someday have looked, Ilan, if you had lived.
In the moonlight, the glass of water shines. I drink it down like a cure.
‘I’m so unhappy,’ I confess. ‘I want the pain to go away. I want a new life, where it doesn’t hurt so much.’
‘A new life, yes, of course you do. I thought that with Ilan’s mother for a long time, years maybe. It’s only human. But I was wrong, of course. There is only the one life. You already have it. There is no need for a new one.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any disrespect.’
‘Of course you didn’t.’ Mr Resnick reaches out to touch my arms, as they lie on the coverlet, and I feel lucky that the pajamas are long-sleeved; they cover my scars. He leaves his hands there for a long time, as a healer might – almost as if he knows the scars are there.
He tells me then that Ilan had a trust; the amount is in the millions, and it is mine now, I am entitled to it. It is still technically revocable, for complex tax reasons, he explains, but he will never revoke it; it is mine.
I am shocked. I had never paid much attention to money after we’d married, because I had known there would always be money enough.
I realize the trust must have contained money meant for my children’s – his grandchildren’s – college educations, for their first homes, for their children. It is a trust for ghosts. Still, I thank him for it, and for once I keep myself from crying.
Mr Resnick talks in a hushed voice of finding me a psychiatrist, of my reconciling with my parents, of my writing again. I realize that he has more hope for me than I have for myself.
In the middle of the night I awaken, my mouth tasting of iron. I turn on the light. When I put my finger in my mouth, I draw it out stained with blood.
Frightened and dazed, I spit the blood into the glass of water Mr Resnick has left for me. The blood slowly unspurls into dark strands. As it loosens it also, and very slightly, trembles, like the netty leaf of an undersea flower. Drifting downward it comes undone, its dark red spreading out to color the rest of the water.
Staring at it, I am relieved to realize that it must be the teeth-grinding again, nothing more. I rise and go to rinse out the glass in the bathroom sink. Feeling inside my mouth for the cut, I find it, small and tender, the mark of a tooth’s point on the inside of my cheek.
The cut; the cause. It is only a physical wound. Nothing to worry about, I reassure myself. But I am nervous. The blood was supposed to have stopped, but it is still here with me.
In the morning, Mr Resnick begins to question me about Ilan again, and I realize I must leave. As much as I might wish to, I cannot help him, because I can never tell him any part of the truth; he could not bear it.
I return to the loft, and that night I sleep on the leather couch where Ilan died, as if I can somehow be close to him that way. I almost expect to awaken covered in blood, but I do not.
At Ilan’s service, three days later, my family escorts me like a group of bodyguards, flanking me as I sit. Though Jewish tradition is to bury the body quickly, the funeral has been held off, the body kept frozen, so that I could attend.
Ilan’s father’s speech is moving, yet as I did at my wedding, I feel lost, Ilan’s colleagues speak as if they had truly known him, when I know they never came close. They praise the writing I submitted for him as if it were his own. They claim he had all sorts of virtues he never possessed, and they miss the one that was really his.
He loved deeply, obsessively: for me, that was his saving grace. He loved me more than life. Sick as it was, it was a powerful love, and for a long time it was the love I wanted, however dangerous it may have been.
After the speeches, many of the journalists come up to me to express condolences, chatting with me in low, confidential voices as if they know me well, and I realize they believe they do, because they have read about me, or read my interviews.
I am introduced, then, to one of the effects of my small, new fame – the false familiarity; the attempt at an unearned intimacy; the ugly, desperate wanting of the gifts they believe I can bestow.
Strangers accompany me on the walk to the grave, and strangers watch with me as Ilan’s coffin is lowered into the ground. It is part of a double plot that lies next to another double plot, which contains Ilan’s mother’s grave. There is a grave next to hers, I realize, for Ilan’s father – and a grave next to Ilan’s for me. I imagine for a moment that on Ilan’s tombstone, under his name, is mine. I think of how someday Ilan and I, and Mr Resnick and his wife, will all lie immobile here, like four dolls in our underground beds.
Strangers speak to me, and try to console me, and even provide me with the white rose I toss into the suffocating dirt, the dark opening that will be Ilan’s new home.
It is so strange and terrible, and their familiar words are almost disorienting: I do not care if they are ‘sorry.’ ‘Sorry’ is much too little to be, and I am not sorry, I am something else entirely. Destroyed, perhaps. Or grateful.
Ice crystals shine in the broken earth on the sides of the grave, and I try to concentrate on them, willing every other thought from my mind. I try to block out all the black-suited journalists somber at the graveside; to pretend that I
am here alone, and that it is I alone who must fill, with a heavy shovel, the wide grave where the coffin waits to drown.
I wait at the grave for a long time, until only I and Mr Resnick and the gravediggers are left standing there. The gravediggers fill the grave with dirt, and then they leave, and still I wait, until Mr Resnick kindly leads me away.
For Ilan, I remain the quietest girl, the stillest waiter. I continue to wait, but I don’t know, anymore, what I am waiting for.
The next day the Times runs a short, kind obituary that talks about Ilan’s writing and says that he was ‘survived by’ me, his ‘wife and colleague, the journalist Maya Sumner.’ In fact, I do not ‘survive’ Ilan. Instead I begin to become a different person through his death, I can feel it happening.
Now who knows what the new person – born in a death, inside its black and sticky caul – will do? I am too tired to become someone else, but despite myself, change will come to me, I feel it. Ilan, who will I be without you?
After the funeral, Mr Resnick calls me frequently – to check on me, he says. And sometimes he’ll stop by. But I am quiet at his approaches. Not rude, only quiet – like the child I once was. The girl was underfoot, she is gone; the adults resume their talking. The line between quietness and disappearing is a tenuous one. Gradually Mr Resnick’s calls and visits fade away, becoming more and more infrequent.
For a while, my mother checks on me often too – because she feels she should, I am sure; because she knows that is what a mother does in such a situation. She coos with sympathy. She drags my stepfather into the city, convenes my half sisters and half brothers here too; makes recriminating calls to my father, demanding that he explain his absence. There are crowds and coffee cakes for days. I am lucky it is still winter; I can always wear turtlenecks and long sleeves so no one sees my scars.
But after a time I am alone again. My family shouldn’t be faulted for leaving: I have always been a difficult child, an ungrateful child, and as they draw away from me, feeling my ingratitude, I draw away from them too, and toward Ilan – as I have done ever since he first took me out into that empty Connecticut field. Even in death, I am still his, and his alone.
Somehow the days pass. Often I rent movies, but I watch them through a haze. In one, a flock of birds descends on a jungle gym, and only a moment later do I remember to find it threatening. All the birds have alighted and still I am slow to fear them: were I a character in Hitchcock’s movie, I would doubtless die.
Yet despite my frozenness, I nevertheless keep writing my magazine pieces. I feel as if my byline’s appearance is, at least, proof I am still alive.
I always file by email now, speaking to editors only on the phone. I want to put off, for as long as I can, returning to the magazine’s offices. I fear it will be too hard – too hard, especially, to see the new interns at the desks where, only a few years ago, Ilan and I once faced each other and finished, late the same night, the first articles we wrote.
I do not want to see any of the people there whom I once knew or who, more accurately, were once my passing acquaintances; they will only pity me. And I am quite an object for pity now, for I look terrible, this death has aged me all at once.
Lately, I have skipped all the appointments I used to make to try to be pretty for Ilan, to be as pretty as the other women, I hoped: the manicures and pedicures, the body wraps and hair colorings. I have let my nails grow, my hair become unruly – as I imagine is happening to him in his dark grave. I have stopped caring about being pretty, since he is not alive for me to be pretty for.
I pull myself together only for my interviews – putting my hair up and hiding it beneath a cap, clipping and cleaning my newly stubby nails. The interviews, I know, are good for me. They force me to fly places, to speak to strangers, to become the woman with the laptop and sunglasses next to the hotel pool. They force me, even, to smile a hollow smile that feels borrowed from someone else, or some other time.
In front of the actors, I pretend sanity and am accepted as sane. They seem to notice nothing. Used to being the center of attention, and caught within their own anticipation that I will tease out their secrets, they seem barely to notice me, playing out their own dramas as I watch.
Knowing them, seeing them for what they are, becomes easier and easier the quieter I become, and so my interviews improve and deepen. Eventually I start to realize that my depression has actually benefited my interviews. And my reclusiveness, it seems, has equally increased my fame – enhancing the impression that I have secret access others do not, that I move in exalted circles.
Though I do not appear in public anywhere, the gossip columns have an answer for that: they simply make up places where rare spottings have occurred. I attend the Oscars, according to them; I have dinner with, become close friends with, several celebrities whom, in real life, I merely interview.
The interviews take up only discrete segments of my time: two days to conduct them, three or four days to write them up. The rest of the time, I write about you, Ilan – it is the only writing that truly occupies me now.
I complete the interviews hastily on my laptop, but to write about you I return to my desk in our writing room. With my back turned to your desk, I can imagine you working there too, just behind me.
Still taped above my desk are the photographs that accompanied my Siberia article – the one about the lovely actress who moved with her actor husband to the middle of nowhere, an absolute seclusion where no one could reach them. Now, though, the photographs have changed for me. The icy vistas and the couple’s angular, modern house are the same, of course. But what used to seem austere and beautiful now seems to me only dull and blank.
On my neck the red scar fades to white – the traces of the collar I wore for you. On my sternum, still, your tiny hand hangs. On my wrists the white ghosts of your cuts remain. You still captivate me; my mind and heart are marked just as deeply.
As I write, I see my own bias but I do not bother to correct it. Passion is bias to some. I write emotionally, riskily.
Simply writing about you feels strange and dangerous now – the way our love did when you lived. Sometimes it feels almost as if my life were a piece of paper being folded dangerously smaller and smaller, a tight packet I can never leave, a story I am writing that entraps me.
As I write, I begin with your three expressions – the ones that I saw only in sex, that you forbade me to tell you about in Italy. At the time, I did not even silently describe them to myself. To do so would have seemed a betrayal. Now I permit myself to think, even to write, about the way you looked, the way you will always look to me in memory. It is your eyes I remember most clearly, with their dark underlying half-circles of gray-smudged, grainy skin.
Here is what I would have said to you then, if you could have borne it. My descriptions are simple, and not so shocking or embarrassing after all.
First, there was an expression of pleading. Second, there was one of pure want. Last, there was one that was brutal and acquisitive and foreign – one that I hated, that I loved, and that aroused me, all at the same time; that triggered in me a mixture of feelings that I now associate with you, as closely as I do the very image of your face.
These are my descriptions, but they do not satisfy me. In the end, I am consummately alone with these expressions. Had you been able to see them yourself, you would have revised them, for they were too naked, too open. Had I described them to you, you would never have shown them to me again. Now I cannot describe them fully even to myself – let alone to another person, let alone to you. But I can see your face before me as if you were alive.
I wish that while you lived, I’d had a secret camera – if only so that I could give these three expressions away to another person, if only to keep from keeping them inside me, where they reside. If only to be allowed to give this story, this life, away, instead of keeping it inside me where, again and again, it reopens the deep cut of your death.
Part 3
One day in early M
ay, about eight months after Ilan’s death, the buzzer sounds, interrupting my writing. I am working on a piece based on another interview with the gay star, who now claims he’s actually bisexual, and I am annoyed to be interrupted.
I look down from the window to see who it is – a woman I don’t recognize. I take the elevator down, and open the door to the street.
The woman has straight auburn hair and fair skin. The bright pink sweater she wears is a color I thought was forbidden to redheads, but it suits her.
I don’t need a scale to weigh her, or a tape measure to know her height is precisely the same as my own. She is 5'9", 130 pounds – exactly. If she were to wear my clothes, they would fit her perfectly. She could impersonate me, seamlessly replace me in the world.
Uncertainty skitters in me: what is she doing here, now? She is from a past that can’t exist anymore.
‘Hi,’ she says, and smiles. Her smile has pain flashing in it, pain and uncertainty. We resemble each other even in the incompleteness of our pleasure.
She glances down at the scrap of paper in her hand. A set of shiny bangles on her wrist shifts as she scrutinizes it. I can see that it bears an address, and in a moment I make out that it is ours. And that is Ilan’s handwriting, I’m sure of it – as another little fishhook leaves another little scar.
‘You’re Maya.’
‘Yes.’ I open the door wider. She slips past me, into the building’s foyer.
‘I’m Olivia. Is Ilan here yet?’
‘No. I’m not expecting him either.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says, flustered. ‘He asked me to come today, I’m sure it was today. Didn’t he tell you? He said you’d be expecting me.’
‘I might have forgotten.’
‘Do you mind if I come upstairs? I’m curious to see the apartment. A triangle, isn’t it? It sounds very cool.’
‘Sure,’ I agree. ‘Come on in.’