by Karen Smythe
The next day I felt a need to speak with someone else who had loved Josh, and the idea of contacting the Princess crossed my mind. She was easy to find on Facebook. She married Rob (their teenaged son looks like he did, at that age). She is friends with many of the people Gina and I knew growing up, and seeing those faces grouped together on her Friend list was like walking into a reunion I’d not been invited to. But I wondered if I should call her. No, not should. Dare. Did I dare contact her? She’d shared so much more with him than I had; yet Josh left her when he befriended me. He did. He left her, even though he loved her. He loved me, too, but on different terms. I didn’t understand then that he set those terms to make sure he could never leave me.
seventeen
The temple that Leah belongs to has posted its pre-Internet newsletters as PDFs in an archive on its website. One by one, I opened the documents from the late nineties — based on Leah’s comments, I’d narrowed it down that far — looking for Josh’s name in the yahrzeit listings, where the deceased are listed by the date of their death for annual remembrance. I found nothing.
Finally, when I opened the last newsletter for the range of dates I’d entered, there it was: Josh’s name, followed by the month and the day he died.
***
On September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers fell in New York City, a sudden worry about Josh’s safety drove me to the Internet. I felt as anxious as I’d been in 1981 after the earthquake in Italy, where Josh was modelling then, until he reassured me in his next missive that he’d been nowhere near the site. When his postcard, mailed from England, reached me, I was so relieved I didn’t think about the fact that he’d not told me he was going on a trip with a model — Tina, or Tanya, someone with another tinkly-sounding name — to London.
When 9/11 happened, we’d not been in touch for many years. I was slightly worried that I’d embarrass myself, if we did connect, by exposing a lingering concern for him; but the magnitude of the catastrophe, I thought, would mitigate how ridiculous I might seem to him for making the effort.
Through online phone listings, I found a Joshua G. on West 57th in New York City. I wrote a brief letter, telling Josh I’d been thinking of him, that I was still in Toronto and happily married. I paused at the word “happily,” after I’d written it. Wasn’t that redundant? If a marriage wasn’t happy, surely you’d be writing a different kind of letter. But I sent it off as written, with my email and street addresses at the bottom, and waited for weeks to hear back from him.
Now I know he’d been gone for over two years by then. My undeliverable note, my dead letter, was likely opened by some other Joshua G., who probably tossed it away.
***
In August I googled Josh’s name once more, this time with the date of his death. Even graveyards have come into the age of the Internet, it seems. “I’ve finally found you,” I said out loud. I stared at the facts that faced me on the screen for several strange moments; there was a fleeting sense of relief, before the grief settled into my lungs, my abdomen. The search was over. If I kept a diary, I would have written this: “Today I found Josh. He’d be fifty-one now, had he lived.”
His first name wasn’t Joshua, but Lev. I didn’t think it suited him. When he told me, I thought he was kidding, so he pulled out his driver’s licence as proof.
Lev. I’d forgotten that detail, about his name. Thinking about how it made me feel oddly happy. Seeing it in the listing reassured me that there would be other things I’d remember about Josh, in time. I hadn’t expected that, to be comforted.
***
I’m smiling now, remembering the night Josh and I saw Young Frankenstein, when he told me there’d be lots of movies we’d go to that I might like better. He asked me while the credits rolled what it would sound like if “Maslen” were followed by his last name, instead of my own.
***
Need tarnishes friendship, said Weil. I still wonder, now and then, if Josh might be alive if I hadn’t coveted him so. Not that I was so powerful a person in his life that I’d have been able to keep him afloat — it’s clear by now that I’m not capable of doing that for anyone. I mean that perhaps our friendship would have lasted longer, without the Letter; and if it had lasted longer, then a different chain of events would have unfolded. Not necessarily leading to a different outcome, but possibly. Possibly.
When I am having one of my bad days, when I am sundered and inconsolable about life and James’s death and what choices I’ve made, or how I’ve behaved, I decide I am responsible for poisoning what we had, Josh and me, with greed. On better days, though, I know that without that confession to Josh, I might not have loved Ted and therefore probably would not have met James. On better days I can forgive my young, passionate self for sending my honest, desperate plea to Josh. In between I am melted by the thought that because Josh drifted away, I had James in my life for as long as I did.
***
Rachel did not respond to my email, so I didn’t persist. We’d been long-time competitors in a way that the Princess and I never were. Her demons could be much worse than mine.
Recently I’ve looked at old photographs that my university friends took during our trip to New York. Lise even snapped one on the patio when Josh arrived to pick me up. It might be commonplace for older people to be reminded, when they compare a picture taken decades before to what they see in the mirror now, how attractive they were their youth. But when I look at my young self, I’m shocked — not because the lineless face of the slim girl I see in the photo is so different from the woman I am today (though that is true, too), but because I see a beautiful young woman who thought, without any doubt at all, that she was unworthy of the young man who stood next to her.
How sorry I feel for having caused her so much suffering. She wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even ordinary-looking. She was, as her mother had told her, interesting-looking. Striking, even. Maybe Josh could have loved that twenty-two-year-old face.
***
I was never the kind of wife who took an interest in dressing her husband, but James hated to shop, and he never wanted to try on clothes; so on occasion I went to the Scarborough Town Centre on a Saturday, to pick up jeans or jersey shirts from the one men’s store he seemed to like when they went on sale. When I did, I took the bus up Brimley Road from Kennedy Station. I don’t know why, but on those trips I’d close my eyes and become that seventeen-year-old girl who heard Josh approaching her in the wide hallway at school. Or Josh would be standing in the front hall of my house, handing me a silly stuffed animal he bought for me in Florence, for Christmas. Driving in his car, “Born to Run” blasting and the windows down, and I’m watching the wind blow back his hair. Sipping tea in a Japanese restaurant in New York.
There was no voice saying his name, on these bus rides, telling me Josh was close by — I wasn’t as crazy as that; but I do wonder if I was sensitive to a signal, an energy of some kind that emanated from the burial ground as I passed it. Maybe spirituality, that belief in the existence of a life beyond and the feeling of connection to otherworldliness, can be traced back to energy: to light, to atoms and neutrons and electrons, to earth and to water and the elements.
***
There he is, I thought as I pulled the car over to the side of the narrow paved lane. The cemetery is on Brimley Road in Scarborough, in what would have been the far outskirts of Toronto, back when Jewish people were not allowed to join country clubs or golf clubs or yacht clubs, or bury their dead on prime real estate, or go to medical school once those five slots reserved for their race had been filled. Not very long ago.
I walked up and down the rows of tombstones, reading brief biographies that sounded like abbreviated eulogies: “Seeker of justice, elegant, kind.” “Charming, witty, charismatic.” “A pioneer in his field.” “Aunt and dear friend to so many.” Josh’s family had not provided a description that would allow future generations to grasp the kind of person he had been. As it is, the blank space speaks to his vanishing. Life had driv
en him away from the light; his mind had betrayed his being, trapped him in a silo others couldn’t penetrate, where he sentenced himself to death.
When I went to him that bright August day, I was the only visitor. The grounds had been freshly mown and the tombstones were very orderly, even in the older sections where parts of names and dates were worn away and harder to read. The back of each marker bore, in large block letters, the last name of the deceased. As I looked for Josh’s plot, I recognized surnames of childhood neighbours and acquaintances: HIRSCHFELD. BLOOMBERG. SILVER. ALTER. GOODMAN. FEDDER. ROSEN. Josh’s was the only gentile name there.
I stood petrified in front of his tombstone. Carved on the front was his full name in English, but it was also carved in Hebrew script in the line below, followed by his dates of birth and death. There were a few pebbles on top of the headstone. How perfect that custom is, I thought, marking a visit to the dead with a rock, a piece of time.
I stood there for twenty minutes or so, holding my sides like a swimmer with muscle cramps. I grieved for Josh, for our lost friendship and the loss of our youth and the brevity of his life. I grieved the fact that I hadn’t known how badly beaten down Josh had been by life, so badly that he chose to leave it.
I touched his name. I ran my fingertips from right to left along the script as if the engraved letters stood out, instead, like Braille. I told him how much he meant to me. I told him I was sorry for our estrangement, and that I knew estrangement can happen within a person, too, and that I should have said so. I said I did not think he’d betrayed or abandoned those of us who loved him, and that I understood. That I will always regret not being strong enough to let him know how much I understood, when I’d had the chance.
I stood at the grave for a long while. My grief roiled from the place where I’d locked in so much feeling before I’d even met James. I mourned anew for my husband and our lost future, for the life we’d had and the life we’d not. I howled silently into my hands, while three staff gardeners gathered near the gate at the entrance at the end of their day’s tending, speaking with each other in a language I didn’t recognize.
When I was spent, I lifted from my purse the several small stones I’d collected from the farm. I had not seen Josh in many years, so leaving only one marker to note I’d been there, and that he mattered to me, did not seem enough. I took my time and placed them, all of them, one by one on top of the headstone. I considered where each seemed to fit in terms of colour, texture, shape, before I put it down. I thought about the way James selected rocks for his wall, too; it was like choosing the right words to build a sentence that means more than its components. The stones I left for Josh that day tell the story of a deep adoration that will not be dispelled or dismissed.
I snapped off a bloom from the pruned plant — a begonia, I think — that was growing in the ground that covered his bones, and I took it back to the car with me. I pinched the stem between my finger and thumb, as if I could imprint myself onto it, onto those green cells grown from the earth that sheltered the sweet, decayed, silent love of my youth.
I hadn’t visited Josh’s relatives during shiva. I hadn’t kept his soul company for twenty-four hours before his burial. But I communed with Josh that day. Communing with him in my mind was something I’d become so expert at, while we were close friends, that it seems almost a reunion of sorts, to go back to him that way again. And it will go on. When I’m an old lady, I told him, I will still be standing here missing you, whether I visit your grave again or not.
eighteen
James was a genius at making my taste buds sing. His sweetened rosemary quiche, for instance: my salivary glands would hurt from the surprise of sugar, and then the savoury pastry dissolved on my tongue like liquid velvet. I couldn’t help but put on a few pounds over the years. James pushed me to jog, to run, to walk at least, but I didn’t listen. I thought I’d be able to go for long walks when I was stuck at home for weeks, after my surgery, but my focus turned to James’s health, to his panic attacks and anxieties, his adjustments to retirement.
And then there was the farm. I drove up there every weekend, and I spent weeknights after work checking in with James on the phone, laundering sheets from two households, and feeding myself with whatever I could scrounge from the fridge. When I walked in the door on Friday nights, James used to look at me and say, “You’re not taking care of yourself. You need to eat when I’m not home.” It didn’t matter, though. After years of sitting behind a desk, my rate of metabolism was barely above a cadaver’s.
One Sunday when I was on my way home, I made an impromptu visit to Lou on my way to the city, and Didi was in his room. “Hmmm,” she said when she looked my outfit up and down. I was wearing my farm clothes, an old sweatshirt and jeans. “You’re not as thin as you look in your regular clothes.” I hugged her for making me laugh, and she pushed me away.
James had spoiled me, doing all the usual household chores after his day ended. We’d eat the dinner he’d prepared — gorgeous risottos, handmade pasta dishes with that spicy red-wine tomato sauce, kormas or jambalayas on basmati rice — along with a glass of the wine he’d chosen to accompany it, and then he’d clean up (I would offer every night, for the first year we were married, but I don’t think the result I achieved ever met his standards). For the rest of the evening, James would mark assignments or watch the sports channel, and I’d read a novel or the New Yorker. Sometimes — less often as time went on — we’d make love before falling asleep.
Life seemed so full to me, then: busy, but relatively calm, and full. Was it for James, too? I thought so, but I never asked. Not that I didn’t care, but you don’t pester the other person with questions when you think that you’re happy. That you both are.
***
In the express line the other day, I heard a man several people back say my name as if it were a question. At least I thought I heard my name. I was counting coins from my change purse and was annoyed at the interruption; and since I wasn’t completely sure I’d heard right, I only half turned to quickly scan the male faces behind me. I didn’t recognize anyone, so I paid, took my bag, and walked out.
All the way home I thought about that man’s voice. I tried to attach it to someone, some place, sometime in my past. Was he a former colleague of James’s? Was he someone I knew years ago, who hadn’t aged well, who’d changed beyond recognition? Maybe he was a former teacher from the language school, who’d had his adventures abroad and then come home again to live an ordinary life, like the rest of us. If he had known me and I’d forgotten who he was, then my dismissive response would have embarrassed him. I’d spared myself from feeling foolish at his expense. Now, whoever he is and whether he knew me or not, he’ll think I’m a shallow, unkind person. And he’ll be partially right. Impressions are all people have of you.
Putting the apples, yogurt, peanut butter, and spinach away, I felt overwhelmed, the way I used to in university, when putting a meal together was beyond my capabilities. Tanis and I ate junk food, mostly, and every few weeks we would subject ourselves to extreme dieting regimens: we’d drink black coffee on campus all day and eat huge bowls of unbuttered popcorn when we got home, for days on end. James was horrified when I recounted those days to him. “What’d you think, you were a plant that could live on sunshine and water alone?” No, I answered, reminding him that I’d studied physiology and cell biology. I’d starved myself despite knowing about mitochondria and hypoglycemia and ketosis. “I know it was stupid, but I refused to learn how to cook because I didn’t want to be like my mother,” I said. “Good thing I found you, to keep me going.”
***
Sometimes I still lack the energy to haul myself out of bed in the morning. I wake up late and think the day ahead of me is still long, far too long. I tell my doctor that it’s too much to expect me to face it, but he is an optimist. He says I need to exercise. The endorphins will help, he says. “It won’t happen overnight,” he adds, as though he is a wise old man. He is perhaps thirty, th
irty-five at most. My personal trainer — I have one now — agrees with my doctor. “You have to get your metabolism charged up again, which takes time.” So I will try.
I registered at a gym near the house, dreading my entrance into the wilds of sweat and youth and ruthless self-improvement. Trim blonds prance about in sleeveless spandex T’s and capris that they may as well leave in their lockers, they’re that tight, and I think, What are they doing here, anyway?
I hated phys. ed. in junior high school, and was relieved when I broke my leg to be let out of gym class for more than two months. The teacher made me change into my uniform as if I were participating anyway, and I stood against the wall with my crutches, watching everyone practise volleyball or tumbling, or do the Canada Fitness Test. Gym was coed, and the boys could wear whatever they wanted, but we had to wear shapeless, short-sleeved, one-piece numbers in royal blue. They buttoned up the front; they were called rompers, I think, and they had elastic around the leg holes like old-fashioned underwear. Most girls wrote their names across the back in red Magic Marker, but I stitched mine with multiple strands of silky embroidery thread, the kind women used to monogram pillow cases for their trousseaus in my mother’s day.
My new workout clothes are extra-large men’s T-shirts and below-the-knee leggings, both in black. I indulge in matching sets of tennis socks and headbands. James always said I looked good in black. Not that anyone’s looking; at my age, women become practically invisible. But I like to think, when I glance in the change-room mirror, that James would approve.
***
Lou is in decline. It wasn’t two weeks ago that I sat at a guest table in the home and had dinner with him. I suppose I’ve not paid enough attention to the little changes in him along the way. Lots of little changes.