by Julie Metz
As I brushed by him, attacking the mess, his face grimaced. “Get out of my way, goddammit, can’t you see I’m busy here?”
Despite the togetherness we presented at our New Year’s Eve parties, Henry and I could barely get through a week without yelling at each other. In our early days, we’d argued about politics, but now we fought the domestic battles of child rearing and housekeeping. Once, during one of our more heated battles, he threw volume one of The Oxford English Dictionary at me. It missed, but I still felt wounded by the weight of a book with so many words I didn’t know, words I hadn’t been able to summon up as a clever retort to his insult. Later he had apologized, as he did now, quickly and tenderly.
I rushed to the cellar to hunt down the plastic champagne glasses. Although alcohol inspired carelessness in our guests that made me fear for our beautiful Venetian glass champagne flutes, Henry always insisted on releasing them from their glass case for the early birds. Delighted by their flamboyance, Henry liked showing them off to guests, even if there was a risk of breakage, while I treasured them as objects and would rather have saved them for more intimate gatherings. They were a wedding gift from a generous friend, too expensive to replace. Returning upstairs with the plastic glasses, I placed them and the paper plates, napkins, and cutlery on one side of the dining room table, soon to be heaped with a mighty spread. A large cooler waited with ice and several dozen chilling oysters, ready to be shucked. I didn’t dare ask Henry what those oysters had cost. Urging restraint seemed pointless. When he took my debit card to go food shopping for our dinner parties, I made a point of barely glancing at the receipts. Living with Henry meant embracing the necessity of a $150-an-ounce white truffle.
When I reentered the kitchen, he smiled and offered me a taste of his potion. The sauce was velvety and impenetrable, the tastes of dinners past mingled with the present drippings and port, a bay leaf sailing on the surface of the dark liquid. I gazed around at the mess in the kitchen—my mopping and tidying had done nothing to calm the hurricane.
“What does it need?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I watched him stir with tenderness. For him a sauce was such a serious business. Too bad he hadn’t become a professional chef, with a staff of minions to admire him and clean up after him.
He fussed some more, stirring and tasting. “I think it needs more salt.”
“It’s excellent,” I said. “Perfect. Really.” But I suspected that his sauce just needed a larger, more appreciative audience.
Liza galloped down the stairs, looking for her friends. At six and a half, her face had the look of children from another time and place, with an eclectic combination of traits from the available gene pool—Henry’s Asian-Anglo background and my mishmash of Eastern European Jewry. She had inherited Henry’s olive skin, and the bowed lips that reminded me of a pink rosebud. Dark honey-colored hair fell in perfect corkscrew ringlets to her shoulders, framing large almond-shaped eyes the color of seawater cupped in gray granite. She had my firm chin and my square-tipped fingers, purposeful and charming in diminutive size, especially when painted with robin’s egg blue nail polish, as they were that evening.
Our first guests arrived, bringing an icy blast of snow and the musty scent of dead leaves from the wintry backyard. They carried cold bottles of champagne, and the bakers of the group brought homemade Swedish chocolate cookies and almond torte.
Emily and her husband, Justin, arrived early. I could always rely on Emily to provide a bit of bohemian glamour, a taste of the urban life I had left behind. I had sought her out after spotting her with her family at a local restaurant. The cute haircut, the red lips, the cloche hat. That woman, she could be my friend. Like many women in our town, she wasn’t working and spent the time while our kids were in school on her personal writing and artwork. My life was all about deadlines, but since I was a freelancer we talked daily about books and art, often while I worked at my computer. In the afternoons after school, I often took Liza to her house. Her younger daughter Zoe had become one of Liza’s good friends. While the kids played, Emily and I continued our talks over cups of tea. She could be the most exuberant fun, and a breath of fresh air in my otherwise quiet life, but sometimes, in contrast to her confident-looking appearance, she was as fragile as a needy child. Now her party persona—an all-smiles starlet on the red carpet—was on full view as she burst into the kitchen to admire the preparations.
“My God! Look at this feast!”
Henry put an arm around her shoulder, embraced her affectionately, and kissed her rosy cheek with enthusiasm.
“You are the best, Henry, the absolute best!” She received the wedding champagne glass Henry offered in her honor, giggling and flushing happily as bubbles drifted upward in her fluted glass.
Anna, a more recent friend, her husband, John, and son, Leo, stomped into the hallway. Leo kicked off his snowy boots and dashed upstairs, happy to charm the girls.
Lively, with bright blue eyes and long, curly, unnaturally dyed red hair (a “correction” is what she called her color choice), Anna dressed like a real New York girl. I was surprised when she told me that she had grown up in Ohio. She had left Ohio immediately after college graduation and headed to New York, where she worked at Betsey Johnson’s retail shop in SoHo and partied at night in the East Village. Looking at her bright red hair, I could believe anything she told me about her wild days in the 1980s.
After we were introduced through a colleague, our friendship developed as we struggled to shed our lingering pregnancy weight. We signed up for a brutal calisthenics class at a local health club. Jumping jacks, push-ups, jogging in place. Every class was like a bad day in high school gym class, but we each lost five pounds. The deep muscle pain after each class was a true bonding experience. After eight weeks of boot camp, we decided we deserved something more soothing.
We became devoted yoginis over the next two years. I looked forward to our weekly outings. She drove down from her house, honking her horn in front of my driveway. In the car we had time to commiserate about work, fret about our kids’ education, and listen to our favorite Lucinda Williams CD.
We appreciated each other’s pragmatism. We both worked as graphic designers. We even shared an assistant. We mothered our same-age kids. She grumbled if I was late for our exercise outings. I was annoyed if she forgot about lunch plans. We understood each other. We were busy, our lives slotted into half-hour segments. There was nothing extra, no padding, no time to waste.
Our small group of younger, unmarried, and childless friends included Tomas and his housemate, Nick, my assistant. Tomas seemed restrained, holding a beer in his lanky hand. I smiled at him in a friendly way as I rushed around playing hostess. The party was alive at last, people in motion, mingling, talking, laughing. Tomas smiled at me as I moved toward the living room to change the music.
We’d become friends over the course of a few years, growing closer after we took a trip with him; his then girlfriend, Lindsay; and a group of friends to Costa Rica the prior winter. Tomas had lived in our attic for two months while he renovated his new house in the town north of ours. He was a very good-looking young man, over six feet tall with sandy brown hair. He changed his hairstyle frequently, so I was not surprised by his periodic transformations. Sometimes he cropped his hair short, like a boy from the 1950s; a few weeks later he might be sporting a short beard and “I’ve just returned from three weeks in the wilderness” shaggy curls; or he might try bangs that brought to mind an early sixties pop star or a monk about to take holy orders. His personality showed those extremes—by night he was happy to throw back a few beers with friends, but by day he worked on large figurative sculptures alone in a studio up the hill behind his house.
Tomas had made a good addition to our household. Henry liked cooking for an extra, very appreciative male pal, and I often found them together in the kitchen, drinking a beer, deep in conversation. When I entered, I became an intruder. Talk stopped, and I always left quickly with the feeling of havi
ng interrupted a confidential moment. Tomas had well-known girlfriend problems, the subject of small-town gossip. He was at our house the night his girlfriend broke up with him on the phone. He came into our bedroom, sat down on the bed, and cried. We, the long-married couple, were quietly supportive and comforting.
Liza loved riding up the stairs high on Tomas’s shoulders and wrestling with him on the living room rug. She giggled when he tickled her. He listened generously to the stories she told about her school day—who was mean, who got in trouble, who she played with at recess. She loved drawing pictures with him at our kitchen table.
And having an outsider around kept Henry and me from squabbling.
While I was folding laundry one evening, Tomas looked at me in a strange way, and said I was beautiful. I thanked him—while my stomach turned somersaults—and kept folding laundry. Most of my life was spent at home, working and mothering. I felt invisible to other men, especially young, handsome men.
Once his new house had plumbing and electricity, Tomas moved out of our attic. I was surprised how much I missed his company. The next time I folded laundry I smiled, remembering his compliment, happy for the safety of his absence.
Henry envied Tomas’s new bachelor life. One evening, as we cleaned up the kitchen, he remarked, “How would you feel if I moved in with Tomas and just visited you and Liza on weekends? Then it would be more like you were my girlfriend.”
I looked up from the sink of dirty pots and pans and forced a laugh to show him I knew he wasn’t serious. “No, I wouldn’t really like that.”
“And you should have an affair with Tomas,” he continued, clearly enjoying this game. “Don’t you think he’s attractive? I wouldn’t mind at all.”
“Tomas is very good looking, but right now I’m married to you. Why do you even say things like that to me?”
Henry never gave up. He was like a cheerful dog, playing with a bone. “Would you mind if I went out on a date with his hot new Mafia Princess girlfriend?”
“You definitely don’t get to go out on a date with the Mafia Princess.”
I scrubbed at a dirty saucepot with extra effort. Sometimes Henry really was just maddening, though there was always something exhilarating about his willingness to push the limits.
Back in full New Year’s Eve party hostess mode, I brushed by Tomas again on my way back to the kitchen to find more plastic cups. He took a swig of his beer and smiled shyly again. Tomas and I were similar—we both preferred solitude and quiet and were perhaps a bit out of our element at this large gathering.
Cathy, her husband, Steve, and their daughter, Amy, arrived with some of their friends from church. Steve was tall and handsome in an American, square-jawed way. Wineglass in hand, he took up his prearranged position as oyster server. A crowd gathered immediately around him, and he beamed from the center of his small theater in the round. Amy bolted upstairs to find Liza.
My friendship with Cathy was the common result of exurban parenthood. You move to a new place with your not-quite-two-year-old. After the Tuesday run up to the shopping center to buy cleaning spray, laundry detergent, and diapers in bulk, you head to the local playground. Your kid sees another kid the same age. They bond while building sand castles and riding on the seesaw. You check out the parents. Maybe they aren’t exactly the people you would choose for friends, but they seem responsible, educated, not ax murderers. Though different in personality, Cathy and Henry were both writers and had seemed to bond quickly over their work.
Until this past summer, Cathy and I had been inside each other’s houses almost every day. We picked up each other’s kids from school. We provided each other with emergency child care. We took each other’s kids for sleepovers. The four of us ate meals together. Our houses were almost interchangeable. I had spent many hours with the mother of my child’s best friend, but in reality, I knew very little about her.
Cathy and Steve were a bit old-fashioned in their parenting, and their politics were more conservative than mine. Though she could at times take on the role of beer-drinking party girl, Cathy had grown up in a wealthy New York suburb. Cathy and Steve insisted on proper table manners that I found excessive for finicky three-and four-year-olds, who were still learning to wield a fork (I was more interested in my daughter actually eating food). At Christmastime I smiled at the propriety of the outfits Cathy’s mother sent for Amy to wear—stiff, formal dresses with plaid taffeta skirts, patent leather Mary Janes—uncomfortable clothing I would never have presented to Liza but similar to outfits I wore in the 1960s.
Henry frequently made caustic remarks about Cathy’s appearance, which seemed unkind to me. Petite, an inch or so taller than I, she had dark hair, small light eyes, pale skin. She was slim and fit from daily race-walking, an enviable victory over postpregnancy flab. Henry said that she was haglike and gaunt from over-exercise. I envied her wiry legs.
The women of my circle of friends were undecided about her, and I found myself lobbying on her behalf. “She’s shy,” I’d say, when people complained about her manner. One-on-one we shared engaging conversation about books and films we loved, but she was withdrawn at parties, tucked in a corner holding a beer, looking ill at ease, waiting for the alcohol to melt her chilliness. And after a beer or two, she was unpredictable.
The year before, Cathy had arrived at our party and, while shedding her coat, announced quietly, “I’m going to get shitfaced.” She made good on her promise, downing beer after beer for the remainder of the evening, laughing too loudly. She spent the first hour of 2002 vomiting violently in the bathroom while our daughters slept entwined on the living room rug.
I sincerely hoped that we would not witness a repeat performance this year. Her appearance suggested the opposite. She was dressed in a simply cut, knee-length purple dress with a high, round collar, black pumps, and stockings. She looked ready for a Sunday church service.
I wondered if the recent trend of weekly church attendance was more of a plea for social acceptance than a genuine attempt to connect to a higher power. Henry told me about a car trip with the girls during which Amy cheerfully sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” complete with too-cute hand gestures. An agnostic girl of vaguely Jewish upbringing, I had sung that song too, at my Episcopalian summer camp.
I wanted to raise Liza differently. Cathy and Steve often invited Liza to attend Sunday services with them. But our daughter was turning out to be a skeptic just like her parents. If you couldn’t see, smell, or hear Him, then how could God exist? And why was God a He anyway?
Henry told me abruptly in June that he no longer wanted to spend time with Cathy and Steve. “She is narrow-minded and the most conventional person I know,” he announced. I was surprised—but relieved—and didn’t press him further.
But in September, on the school playground, Cathy started crying, upset that we had pulled away. Amy missed seeing Liza for playdates, she said. I didn’t miss spending time with Cathy, but it seemed unkind to cut her off in such a brutal way, unkinder still to hurt her daughter. I arranged a playdate for the girls, and as the holiday season drew near, I urged Henry to invite Cathy to our annual party. I secretly hoped that Liza would make other friends.
The New Year’s Eve banquet continued noisily. Henry, ever the eager host, roamed through the rooms, carrying champagne bottles, refilling glasses. At last he seemed to be reviving his bon vivant self.
One family had brought a telescope. While Henry entertained our guests, I escaped for a peaceful moment outside with father and stargazing son to peer through the lens at the full moon. The son eagerly explained to me that there was an unusual alignment of the moon and planets. It was a clear night, the lunar craters brilliant in the cold air.
After the midnight toasting, parents gathered up their children. While I helped them search for hats, gloves, and snow boots, we made vague plans for the last vacation days before school began again and declared the party a complete success.
The energetic promise of New Yea
r’s Eve was short-lived. Over the next few days, Henry slumped into lethargy, slept frequently, and began to complain of breathing problems, possibly related to his asthma. His inhaler, though, didn’t help. He told me he had scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I was surprised—I usually had to force him to see a doctor.
January 6. With my workload light and Liza back at school, Henry encouraged me to take a break with him that afternoon. We wandered upstairs to make love. I had always loved the light in our bedroom. The walls were painted a gentle mushroom gray. Low winter light filtered through the layer of dust on the windows onto the rumpled sheets and the carved headboard, a family heirloom. As we moved into our bed, the moment felt tender, calm, and familiar. I knew when I would come; I could count down the final seconds before liftoff in my head. We lay quietly in bed.
“You are a beautiful woman and I love you very much,” Henry told me. Lying next to him, my head buzzing, I believed him.
The next morning was Tuesday, January 7, garbage day. As I prepared Liza’s Cream of Wheat, Henry’s boots crunched in the snow and gravel outside, and the garbage cans scraped along the asphalt driveway. He reappeared on the back porch and struggled with the sliding door with an effort that seemed odd. He lurched into the house, hunched over, took a few stumbling steps, and fell forward flat onto the wooden floor.
He came to as I reached him. Ignoring his protests, I hustled Henry and Liza to the car. I dropped Liza off at school and drove straight to the doctor’s office, earlier than his scheduled appointment. His EKG and blood pressure were normal. His doctor arranged an appointment with a cardiologist for the following Monday, six days away.