“Gil, I’m five years away from forty.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
“Tam was making a real point of it. She looked so young, but it was going to get tougher. She joked about plastic surgery, about media women who came back from extended vacations looking extremely rested.”
“I like older women,” my uncle says.
“So does Simon. He finds old interesting.”
“Beats the alternative,” says Gil.
On the wall of Tam’s office in a shiny frame was the firing-squad shot in which she always appeared—nine men in suits and my sister.
“Take me through it,” I said, sitting on the couch to drink the coffee her assistant had placed before me.
“My version or Mac’s?”
“Which one is funnier?”
“Mac’s,” she said. Tam stood up in her tweed suit and pointed. “Here goes: Asshole, asshole, good guy—that’s Mac—cipher, me, Harris, cipher, asshole, asshole, asshole.”
“Bad ratio,” I noted. “Who’s the king of the assholes?”
She didn’t answer.
“More than one? How can you stand it?”
“There are also two ciphers. Don’t feel sorry for me. They all love me,” she said.
“How can so many assholes have the judgment to think you’re fabulous?”
Tam sat down beside me. “They don’t care if I’m fabulous. They love my ratings. When my numbers go down, so will their love, believe me.”
“Scary.”
“Not really. I knew what I was getting into. No one forced me to be famous, make a fortune, get up at four—” She smiled, rueful.
“What happens after?”
“Sooner or later, I’ll be kicked off the show and have to do guest specials interviewing celebrities.” Tam did not sound happy.
“But you’ve been here ten years. Don’t they owe you some kind of tenure?”
“This is my world,” said Tam, “not yours. If you’re smart enough to have a good contract—and I do—they pay it out. That’s the deal.”
I could not adjust to the brutality of Tam’s work life.
“Look at it on the bright side,” she said. “I’ll retire in my forties and be able to give my kids breakfast.”
“I suppose. Although years of serving breakfast doesn’t quite have the gravitas of Canada’s premier anchorwoman.”
My sister’s sleek legs looked exposed next to my jeans. When she stood up, she was almost as tall as I am.
“I can’t believe your heels. How many pairs of pantyhose do you go through a week?”
“About the same number you go through a year,” she said.
“If that.”
“You can afford to take the high road,” said Tam, “because in your profession looking young is a liability.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“An aging woman professor looks as if she earned her stripes. But an aging TV anchor just looks over the hill.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“I have to. They can get two young blondes for the price of this brunette.”
“But all your experience—”
She shook her head decisively. “It’s under the knife for me.”
“What will you say to Ella when she sees that your face is a piece of raw meat?”
“Must you be so graphic?” said Tam. “For Ella’s purposes, I’ll be on a long business trip.”
“What if I don’t recognize you?”
Tam’s fiddling with her coffee mug stopped. “If you don’t recognize me, the surgery’s a failure.”
“You’ve already decided,” I said.
“The only change is that I’ll look like a better version of me. Hey, I’ve done my homework. I’ve looked at hundreds of before-and-after pictures. You’re making this harder.”
“Not fair.”
“You are. I don’t have a choice. Your problem,” she said, “is that you’ve never had to choose between two things that matter to you. You just keep not choosing.”
Tam’s eyes were on the enormous clock behind me. “I have a meeting.”
The window of candor was officially over.
“Tell it to yourself,” says Gil, yawning.
“What?”
“What Tam always told you. ‘Age doesn’t matter in your line of work.’”
I yawn after him. “Maybe it’s time to go to bed. Again.”
“I miss smoking.”
“Me, too. What do you do when you want to be bad? You were bad for so many years.”
“I did bad,” he says. “I’m over it. When I’m with Sybil—”
I look at my uncle. I see him every year, and yet all of a sudden his hair is gray.
“You still don’t think it will happen to you,” he says.
“What?”
“Middle age.”
“I feel the same age I’ve always been.”
“Eve,” he says objectively. “There will always be a man to fall in love with you.”
“But?” I elongate the syllable.
“Love and work, Freud said. You’ve got to get cracking on the work.”
“What is this—a conspiracy?”
“What are you talking about?” said my uncle. “And is there any chocolate in the house?”
“I mean that Tam’s been on my case about work.” I ignore the dilemma of tenses. “And no, there isn’t.”
“Maybe she wanted to see you settled. You know her definition of settled.”
“My incomplete life plan was somewhat irritating to her,” I say, an understatement.
“Not as irritating as it is to you, I’m sure.”
“I fade in and out of caring,” I say, trying to block the memory of an anxiety so paralyzing I was unable to open a book.
“You teach those women writers of the old country, right?”
“‘The old country,’” I make fun of him. “I believe our ancestors came from Poland.”
“It’s Simon’s old country,” he says innocently. “Let’s talk about Simon.”
“Must we? What’s so interesting to you about Simon anyway?”
“You’re not obsessed with him,” Gil says.
“That’s the first problem.”
“Maybe it’s an advantage.”
“I wish it were. I’m a romantic. And you know I always have been,” I say in warning. “Now I really am going to bed.”
“Good idea. How do you shut off this fancy light?”
“It’s called a dimmer.”
“I’d race you up the stairs,” says Gil, “but I don’t want to wake your mother.”
“I’d schmeer you.”
He folds up the paper and tucks it under his arm.
“If you wait a few hours, you can get today’s news,” I tell him.
“You know I can’t go to bed without reading the paper.”
Suddenly, I see him in his plaid pajamas, reading The Globe and Mail in the rocking chair at the cottage.
“Addicts of the printed word,” I say. “If I had something good to read, I wouldn’t have come down here tonight.”
“One of the worst things about death,” he says sotto voce, trying to tiptoe up the stairs, “is that at a time when you most need to read, nothing seems worth reading.”
“Saul Bellow: ‘We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next,’” I whisper to Gil’s back.
“Family hallmark,” he replies.
“I can see it now. Mum is reading Colette. Dad’s reading the footnotes to a new Churchill biography. Nana is rereading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And you’re reading a chess manual.”
“I am reading a chess manual,” my uncle says. “And you?”
I am reading a note that says: “I want to breathe you into me.”
THIRD
DAY
SIX
I OWN NO OBJECTS OF VALUE. I WEAR VARIATIONS OF the same layers of black clothes and have lived in too many apartments t
o count them on both hands. But I still have notes passed to me in grade two, postcards signed by people whose names I no longer remember, doctors’ reports with a personal postscript—anything that embodies my life in words.
I also have violet sticks of scented sealing wax, some with the wick unburnt, and seals with a carved rose or other pledges of eternity. I own the last sheet and envelope of crinkly paper, awash with pastel blossoms, that my father brought me from San Francisco when I was ten. In a red leather writing case is linen paper from my classical stage and pre-addressed cards to my parents, the postage outdated.
During the war, when Grandpa worked in New York, Nana wrote to him every day. The steady currency of my grandparents’ devotion is stacked in a battered trunk under the cottage dining room window, the one through which we would jump onto the porch bed below.
I have love letters of a different sort, expressions of abject suffering or raunchy lust, and sometimes furious curtailment. I have one that suggests, “As you read this letter, put your fingers—”
I have one that says, “The rage I bear you is my precious treasure.”
When I moved to New York, I would descend in the elevator to my apartment’s mailbox, my heart as tremulous as if I were en route to a rendezvous. Seeing a gleam of white in the metal cutout, I meant to go upstairs like a lady, make some tea in one of the porcelain cups my mother periodically bestowed upon me, slit the envelope neatly, and sit down to read with decorum whatever words awaited me.
Instead, I ripped open the letter for my first reading, stood in my doorway, transfixed, for the second, and carried the letter in my bag to read on the train or in line at the supermarket until, by the end of the day, I could recite its strongest lines, whether they astonished or berated me.
A little arrow into the future, I would think, mailing my own letter in return, hearing the scrape of the mailbox chute as it grated shut—no more time to erase or recopy, to contrive the apt phrase that would keep or relinquish him.
During Laurie’s high school trip to Europe, I was a beggar at the den window, pleading with the smug despot of impeded love for the mailman to appear. Only when I gave up did he manifest himself, a potentate in his authority to grant or withhold. However disciplined I tried to be, I could not wait until the letters fell, but opened the door, hand thrust out, speechless.
Then I cradled the mail against my body and walked to the kitchen, turning over the envelopes with an assumed nonchalance no one could see.
One morning, the thin blue airmail form materialized, sandwiched between my mother’s electric bill and a circular, almost thrown away—I deliberately frightened myself—nearly lost.
I held Laurie’s first letter to me as if it were incalculably rare. He was not a writer, but what he said was this:
“I have seen paintings in Florence and obelisks in Rome. My eyes are full of beauty. My heart longing for you, you, you, you, you”—emblazoned with such force that his pen had torn the paper.
From my closet, Tam’s letter taunts me, insinuating itself into my brain as a set of unanswerable questions: Why didn’t she tell me when she could? What does she want me to know?
The charged sentence in my backpack is tormenting me for another, more shameful reason. I, who have never envied Tam, not for the medal naming her broadcaster of the year, not for her silky newborn children or her life with Ben in their big old house and garden, am jealous of my dead sister because she had a lover who could say to her, “I want to breathe you into me.”
Simon does not believe in language that behaves in such a fashion. “The words of youthful love,” I hear his analysis. “A dream of merging, a language illicit love must imitate to achieve the same density of desire.”
“I love it when you talk dirty,” I reply. I covet the kind of language he disdains, avowals that slice through moderation to the passionate heart. I am tired of Simon’s nuanced approaches and retreats. I want to depose every piety.
I want to drive Nana crazy.
“Tell me a secret,” I say to her, the second we are sequestered for lunch.
“You were such an inquisitive child,” she replies, dipping her fork into eggs that are already gummy.
“Who was your first love?” I can feel my provocation barometer rising.
Nana tsk-tsks.
“Second?”
“I don’t know what you expect to hear,” she feints.
I picture her in a tennis dress, daringly cut to the knee. I see her bend to toss a horseshoe, the clang of metal against metal as she looks up, victorious.
“Tell me about Grandpa,” I say.
“What about him?”
Were you happy? is my silent question. “How did you know he was the one?” I ask instead.
She says nothing.
“Did you know he was the one?” I amend.
Here is what I know: Grandpa called to congratulate Nana on her forthcoming nuptials the very day she ended her engagement. When he heard the marriage was no longer taking place, he said, “I’m coming right over.”
As soon as he arrived, he made known his intentions. He was, according to Great-Aunt Abby, crazy about her.
Nana discouraged him firmly, telling him there was no hope.
To which he said, “If I want to keep beating my head against a brick wall, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”
They were married the following summer. In all their years together, they did not raise their voices.
Today, however, my grandmother is dyspeptic. “We had different expectations.”
This is a coded sentence, one of her store, signifying that in her generation young people knew how to be true to their promises, whether in marriage or employment.
Nevertheless, I persevere. “Nana, you won’t evade me forever.”
She affects not to understand.
“Pretend we are fellow scientists, studying the data empirically.”
“In what field?”
“Love,” I recommend. “Were you ever disillusioned with Grandpa? Fed up?”
“‘Fed up’?” She scoffs at my slang. “I don’t have much tolerance for speculation. Particularly now,” she says captiously. “Given what might have been.”
I do not know if she is speaking of Grandpa or Tam.
“If you mean”—she submits—“did I love him throughout our marriage, why, yes, I suppose I did.” She sounds amazed, not by the confession but by its recital aloud.
And then she blushes.
Grandpa died when I was five. The chandelier’s prisms cast miniature rainbows about the room while Nana allowed my mother to hug her.
After the funeral, Tam and I played tag around the legs of the milling adults. Panting in the kitchen, I stood by myself, calling down the laundry chute, “Grampy, Grampy,” when suddenly I heard his reply far below, in the recesses of the basement.
I told Nana insistently to come listen, but she declined, humoring me until I grew vociferous with frustration, crying to my mother and uncle as they led me away, “But I can make Nana feel better.”
“After his first heart attack, Dad asked the doctor,” Gil said to my mother, standing together in the doorway of the bedroom to which they had consigned me for a nap.
“He did? How did he ask?”
“‘Can I still be close to Mother?’”
I saw my grandfather in the hospital, a bulky contraption of tubes and levers covering his heart and preventing him from hugging my grandmother.
“Do you know what she told me?” my mother said in a low voice, as though offering a gift in exchange.
Gil made a responsive sound.
“Until his last day, she liked to sponge his back.”
I imagined Grampy, shrunk to the size of an infant, bathed tenderly by my grandmother.
These delectable confidences ended when brother and sister went down the back stairs.
Now I scrutinize Nana as she holds her fork upside down in her left hand to press her eggs onto the tines in British fashion.
“But didn’t you get bored?” I say.
She dismisses the question. “Bored? Eve, we had responsibilities. When we made a commitment, it was understood to be permanent.”
Nana does not quite have the courage to add: Not like you. “I hope you’ll be able to learn from Tam’s life,” she concludes.
“I have no doubt she will,” says my father, booming, as if entering stage right. “Come sit beside me,” he orders, taking my hand to shepherd me to the living room. “No one’s here.”
“Where’s Mummy?”
“Resting. She’s very, very tired.” His voice changes registers.
“Dad, how are you doing?” I notice that I ask in the same inflection I would use, shortly after the divorce, when my veneration of my father’s public self was infused by the unease of watching him alone in his new house, trying to heat a snack in the oven, jovial in conversation as he fussed ineffectually.
“You and I haven’t had a minute to talk. Really talk,” he says.
“Really talk?” says Tam.
Like many fathers, ours is not notorious for his ability to translate unvarnished feelings into speech.
“Look, we have to be strong,” he says. “We have no control over the input, only the output.”
My past crankiness in listening to these words is replaced with gratitude that at least one element of my life is intact. Unlike my mother, my father appears reassuringly the same. Growing up, I thought he looked like a movie star, and I suspected, from the way my mother’s friends inclined their heads as they listened to him, that I was not alone.
He paid no attention to such frivolity. When I asked him if he knew he was handsome, he seemed baffled. “I knew I could do whatever I set my mind to doing,” he said.
It would have been considered deviant, in those industrious postwar years, for a lawyer to think about his face any longer than the time it took to shave in the morning and straighten his tie. Yet even in grief, my father has not lost his distinction, conferred by height and by a magnetism all the more compelling because he is oblivious to it. Both the charisma and his denial are responsible for his success as a confidant of bereaved families, whose trust can extend to three generations.
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