Dying Unfinished

by Espinosa, Maria

  The Safeway, huge and bright and glittering, catered to the tastes of its customers with a large stock of gourmet items. He chose a bottle of Merlot, chocolate ice cream for Isabel, a package of white rice, a head of lettuce, three lemons, and a T-Bone steak, along with a package of Viceroys. When we returned to his apartment, he started the rice and broiled the steak while I made a salad. It was comforting to do these chores together. With Antonio I felt anchored, as if his presence created our true home.

  “I miss my good china,” he said while I was setting the table with the few chipped plates I could find in the cupboard. “I leave them all in Novato. All the good carving knives, too.”

  “What happened?”

  He set down the platter of steak and motioned for Isabel and me to sit down, while he remained standing by the counter and sipped his wine. “In Novato, where I move after San Rafael, I go to a local bar. Too late I learn is a Mafia bar. I hear too much. One day the men look at me in a way I know they mean to kill me, and it is not safe even to go back to my apartment. I leave everything—my manuscripts, my china, my clothes, my books, my photos. I leave the key with a girl who lives near me, and I ask her to take care of my things. Not to go there for a week or so until it is safer. Then I get in my car, and I drive. When I get here, I call her. There is never any answer. I write her a letter. Nada. When I call her yesterday, her phone is disconnected.”

  “Oh, Antonio!”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Isabel, reaching up to stroke his hand.

  “No importa. Tu es belle, ma fille,” he said. “I have a marvelous hija. That is what is important.” A fleeting look of anguish swept over his face. He drank more wine and shrugged. “C’est la vie. As the good God wills. Is only words.” He made a violent gesture of dismissal. “I am a story teller. My story is my life.”

  A bizarre memory flashed through my mind. There was the night in Paris we found an abandoned briefcase on the sidewalk of the Rue Saint Antoine. Antonio acted strangely about it. He made me accompany him on a futile search for the papers he was sure it contained. At times his perceptions were clearly paranoid.

  “Eat. Eat,” he said.

  Feeling little appetite, I bit into the steak. It was a trifle rare.

  “Always I have friends. It is my friends who save me. Monty—you will meet him maybe later—gave me his old Buick. It needs a little work, when I have the money. He gave me a new leather jacket.” He went out of the room and came back with a brown suede jacket on a hanger. “Look. Brand new.”

  Around nine at night, we went out again. The air smelled of the sea. Stars shone through clouds as we walked along the boardwalk and made the rounds of nightspots. To my surprise, no one made any fuss about admitting Isabel. A relaxed small-town feeling prevailed.

  “My daughter, Isabel. My former wife. A writer.” He introduced us to his friends with a certain formality. One was a bosomy realtor with bouffant hair. Another was a dark-haired young woman who had been helping him with Social Security papers. There was also a Cadillac dealer, a bearded carpenter from Ecuador, several boozy intellectuals. We met his benefactor, Monty, a retired tire salesman.

  A young girl of about thirteen came in. Antonio accosted her. “Why you not make money? Carry a straw basket of flowers and sell one each to the women. You dress up beautifully and you sell the flowers.”

  This was a mellow crowd, filled with the relaxation born of sea, sunshine, and money. They liked Antonio. But I knew the cycles too well. For the first six months, it would be easy. Then he’d begin drinking more and picking fights with people that would get him thrown out of these same places.

  Later that night Isabel and I lay on his worn carpet in our sleeping bags. I awakened to feel Antonio’s cool hand on my brow. “Come, Petite” he whispered. “Sleep in my bed so Isabel will know we are a family. Is only for one night. Is important for her.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  I was still infatuated with my current lover. I wanted to be faithful to him—no matter that he was with his wife. Besides, Antonio did not attract me now. In fact, I found his body repellant. He smelled unwashed.

  What if I had said yes? If I had made love with him while Isabel slept? She slept so soundly that night, as if granting us permission in her dreams to make love. What if Isabel and I had moved here to be with him? What if the three of us had started afresh in southern California by the sea?

  The next morning we rose late, had rolls and coffee, and walked along the beach. Isabel clambered on the rocks. He joined her, while I watched the two of them, happy they could be together for at least a short time.

  He had shifted his schedule at work so that he would have the day with us.

  When Isabel went on ahead to look for shells, I felt compelled to tell him about my lover, a constant source of pain. Irrationally, I wanted him to say “Merde! This man is an idiot!” I wanted him to comfort me the way he used to when we confided in each other about our love affairs. But Antonio was in no mood to do this. He was hurt by what had happened last night.

  “Why can’t you pay child support?” I asked, a little while later while we stood looking at the waves. Isabel was clambering over some rocks. Gulls flew overhead on this deserted stretch of beach. “Why can’t you? Even a little? Even ten dollars a month?” I persisted. I had asked this so often that it hurt us both, like a dental drill going through a rotted tooth.

  He turned his pockets inside out. “Je n’ai pas un sou. I make four-fifty an hour,” he said. “I have debts. My car isn’t running. It needs points and plugs.”

  We were walking back towards the center of town.

  “Shit!” I shouted, standing stock still in front of the middle of the boardwalk. Mildly curious young girls and men in shorts with surf boards surged around us. “I don’t even have a car. Isabel and I go everywhere by bike, and that’s not safe for her on crowded city streets. Sometimes we live on beans for days. Shit!”

  Isabel, who had rejoined us, cried out softly, “Mommie, stop!”

  “Arrête!” Antonio’s voice rang out. Shabbily clothed as he was, he still had the air of a commanding general, hair blown by fresh Pacific breezes.

  The three of us continued walking. Isabel gripped both our hands in her strong little hot ones for a moment, then ran on ahead.

  “When we divorced,” he said, “I thought your parents would give you more help. You have talent. I thought they would encourage and support you. I told them to.”

  “They have no belief in me at all. They just keep after me to get a real job. But I need this time to write. If I don’t, I die inside.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been doing side jobs all along. Cleaning houses. Waitressing sometimes.”

  He stopped to smooth my hair.

  “We could never live together,” he said. “But we understand each other.”

  “Yes,” I said. Tears glistened on my cheeks. “With you I feel whole.”

  “I want you to meet my friend Gus,” said Antonio as we were walking towards the bus depot late that afternoon. I’d learned that if we took a local bus to Costa Mesa, we could connect there with a Greyhound going north. “His house is on the way.” He shifted the weight of Isabel’s blue pack on his shoulders.

  Gus lived in a ramshackle cottage off a dirt road. Dusty geraniums planted in tin cans stood in the front yard. He was a plump, kindly looking man with white hair who appeared to be in his seventies.

  “I want you to meet my former wife, Rosa, and m’hija, Isabel.”

  “Glad to meet you. Sit down a spell. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No thanks. We can only stay a minute. We have to catch a bus.”

  “Make the coffee,” said Antonio. “There is time.”

  Gus put a pot of water on an ancient gas stove covered with grime.

  “Gus has a car. He will drive you,” said Antonio.

  The two men began to talk of local people. Antonio’s car repair. Mechanics. Time went on. I grew more anx
ious. It was nearly six. The bus was due to leave soon, and it was the last bus of the day.

  “We’ve got to go!” I said, jumping up and grabbing both our packs. “Come on. Let’s go. Gus, can you take us now?”

  “Goodbye,” said Antonio coldly.

  “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  He shook his head. Then he hugged Isabel, but stood motionless when I embraced him.

  Gus drove us to the bus depot.

  When the bus pulled out, we looked back and saw Antonio in the middle of the street holding a bouquet of red roses. Tears were running down his cheeks. We waved, but he turned away without appearing to see us through the dusty rear window.

  CHAPTER 35

  ILLNESS

  A crow has taken up his residence

  Where once the nightingale sang.

  Poor crow!

  Never will those enchanted notes

  Come from your throat.

  Oh, that I could sing

  That I could play upon the violin.

  — MSC

  After their children left, the big house in Westbury became too much for them. Eleanor and Aaron felt isolated in a world they had moved into merely by chance. Old friends moved away, and they both wanted to be in Manhattan. Although Aaron hated to leave his studio, he finally agreed to make the change.

  They sold the house and leased an apartment on East 84th Street. Aaron set up a studio in Brooklyn. The living room of their new home looked out onto trees above the street, while the kitchen windows gave a glimpse of other people’s kitchens across the air shaft. Eleanor loved being back in the City, although it wrenched her heart to sell the house. It was difficult to part with so many things as they moved into smaller quarters. There were dishes and silverware handed down from her grandparents, dresses she had kept all these years. Each book, each piece of furniture, each picture had for her a sentimental past.

  Even before the move, Eleanor had become more ill. She acquired a painful nervous spasm in her head that would not go away. Tic douloureux it was called. Then glaucoma. Worsening of the arthritis and degeneration of spinal disks. She suffered from numerous accidents, injuring and re-injuring herself. One of the motivating factors for their move, in fact, was that in the City she would be closer to doctors and wouldn’t need to drive. Much of the time she was bedridden, and she walked with a cane. (Strangely enough, she still loved to dance because, as she said, she could keep shifting her weight.)

  Rosa sent her books with titles like The Apple Cider Vinegar Cure for Arthritis or Ninety Days to Perfect Health through Fasting. They lay unread on Eleanor’s shelves. “I wish you took me seriously,” Rosa said. But to do so would be to rupture the smooth shell Eleanor had built. It would be admitting defeat. Aaron and she had always scoffed at Rosa’s eccentric ideas. Perhaps there was something to them, Eleanor realized. However, there was a kind of pride in her, unyielding as steel, with regard to her daughter.

  “How can you stand being so sick, Mother?” she asked on one of her rare visits to New York. In truth, there were times when Eleanor didn’t mind lying in bed in her pale pink satin bed jacket and a clean nightdress. Aaron or the cleaning woman brought her trays with food at which she nibbled. She read books she’d had no time for in the past. But at other times she wept with frustration.

  Heinrich was also suffering. Spinal stenosis caused him a great deal of pain, and arthritis was crippling his hands. He despaired because it had become so difficult for him to work with pen or brush. They would compare notes over the phone, laughing with gallows humor over their symptoms which had a curious synchronicity.

  She was given drops for the glaucoma, which she would need to take daily for the rest of her life. Her grandfather had lived his last years blind, aided by a huge guiding sheep dog. In those days they had no medication. Eleanor recalled his thick Hungarian accent and the smell of his whiskers as his hands explored her face, then explored the rest of her with a touch too much intimacy.

  Rosa, I was a good girl, and I was four years old. There was no one to whom I could have told this. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. I sensed it wasn’t quite proper, but that was a secret between us. He never asked me in words to keep this secret, but he had no need of words. Now I wonder if he fingered my brothers in this way. In this outspoken age I can say it—perhaps he did. But the boys were loud and rambunctious. They would have objected stridently, while I was more passive. At my core, I remained untouched by human contact. It gave him pleasure to feel between my thighs, quietly and gently underneath my dress.

  “Hands outside the coverlets,” murmured our governess. My hands were not to touch myself in those places too secret to name.

  Later that year they implanted an artificial hip. The hands of the anesthesiologist were soft as he adjusted the mask over her face. When she breathed in the ether, it had a strangely sweet odor. “One … two … three,” she heard them murmuring. “Lower to the left … four … five.” Deeper and deeper she sank against the white linen-covered operating table. After they removed the bandages, when she put her hand against the place where her hip used to be, she felt metal plate. Me. Not me. What of me is left? The spirit is not the body, came over her with force of revelation. When I die, I will still exist.

  At times she regretted she had not written more. But when she tried now, the swelling in her fingers made it painful to work for more than a short time. Memories emerged in the form of dream-like images such as red geraniums, motes of dust floating inside a ray of sunlight, or the color of a favorite dress. But she lacked the strength to enlarge upon these.

  “Let me have your writings, Mother,” said Rosa. “I will type them up.” She gave Rosa two worn manila folders that contained scraps of paper with poems, a few stories, and two chapters of a novel. Some of the writing was scribbled on memo pads or the backs of envelopes. Other pieces she had laboriously typed many years ago on the Underwood that dated back to high school

  “My very first efforts met with a scolding,” she told Rosa. “One evening when I was about eight, I was washing the dinner dishes—at that time we didn’t have a maid—when inspiration came over me. I sat down and wrote a long medieval ballad, no doubt influenced by all the ballads I had read. Just as I was finishing, Mother came into the kitchen. She saw the stacks of dirty dishes, and burst into a fit of temper, as in those days she often did.

  “Fighting back tears, I washed the rest of the dishes and fled to my room. Later that evening, Mother read the ballad I’d left on the kitchen table. She came to my room. ‘Forgive me, my dear,’ she said. ‘This is beautiful.’ Nevertheless, I began to associate artistic inspiration with leaving something vital undone.

  “Later on, the life of a writer seemed too lonely. Above all, I suppose I wanted human warmth.”

  Another medical appointment. Table covered with disposable paper, its surface harsh against her skin. After the exam, she sat in her dark tweed suit, alone in his office, examining the seascape that hung on the wall. The door opened. Slowly the doctor walked to the chair behind his desk, sat down, and leafed through a thick manila folder. Even before he spoke, she knew what he was going to say.

  “Mrs. Bernstein, the tests were positive.” The Big C word. He averted his eyes. It had metastasized. There was a chance that radiation treatments would stop its spread. “Mrs. Bernstein, you’re a brave woman.”

  She left his office in shock. Was this bravery or merely paralysis?

  “You must have the radiation, of course!” Aaron cried.

  “There’s only a small chance it will help.”

  “We must try every possibility.”

  In her heart, she knew the radiation wouldn’t help. Her time was approaching. However, to please him she went along with the treatments.

  Occasionally she met with Melanie, her friend from cooperative nursery school days. One day they lunched at a French restaurant. Melanie devoured her brochette d’agneau. But Eleanor could scarcely bear to touch the food on her plate Lately she
had trouble eating, and she’d lost weight.

  “That Chanel imitation at Bonwit’s was tacky,” Melanie was saying in her loud Southern voice, when the chef himself, a scrawny man in a tall white chef’s hat who had been making his way through the crowded room and stopping at each table, came to theirs.

  “Eh, c’est bien, mesdames?”

  “Oui, c’est tres bien,”

  Melanie looked up at him. “What an honor!”

  “Vous n’aimez pas l’agneau, Madame?” He looked with disapproval at the hunk of meat in front of Eleanor.

  “Oui, c’est delicieux,” she said, although she couldn’t force herself to swallow another mouthful. But she couldn’t bear to leave the uneaten portion on her plate and offend him. So she rolled the brochette into a napkin and stuffed it into her purse, just as she used to hide morsels of egg from her governess when she was a child. Later in the taxi, when she reached inside her purse for cigarettes, she felt the napkin with a shock of surprise. She had forgotten about it.

  “Rosa, I was walking alone with my cane and in my fur coat. Rather foolishly I put a token into the turnstile at the 59th Street subway station without realizing there was no one else around. After I’d gone down the steps, I discovered I was alone in the tunnel with two men in ragged clothing who looked like hoodlums. They looked as if they could do me in without batting an eyelash. I smiled up at them, a frail old lady in a fur coat with a cane, an easy number. I said, ‘Hello’ in a calm voice, acknowledging them fully. They were used to averted glances, hastening footsteps, being ignored. ‘Can you tell me which subway to take for Astor Place?’ I asked. ‘The one that’s coming now.’ They rushed ahead to the platform and held the subway door open for me. I thanked them.”

  When I tell her this story, Rosa and I are sipping scotch at a bistro in Manhattan, where a jazz trio is playing. As we sit in the dim smoky noisy room with its backdrop of piano, saxophone, and bass, it seems that she and I have traveled over a rough, almost endless terrain.