by Julie Metz
During the last months of my mother’s illness, my father and I ate a good number of meals in a restaurant near their apartment. He needed time away from the sickbed.
My father, vigorous at eighty-two, is well known for his fantastic memory. He remembers the scrawny sandwiches he ate at a picnic seventy-five years ago during the depths of the Great Depression, songs and jingles from the 1940s, baseball scores from the World Series in 1956 or any other year. So I was not surprised to discover during one of our dinners that he had a vivid memory of a day I had completely forgotten.
Liza was about two and a half. We’d just moved away from Brooklyn, so this was possibly one of our first trips back to visit family. My parents met us at Grand Central Station. My father recalled his delight as he spotted Liza on the platform, running up the ramp toward him. Then he looked beyond her and saw Henry and me walking slowly behind her.
“Liza’s face was so full of joy, she was running up that ramp with her arms stretched out, but you two looked so miserable,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on, but we were very upset to see that.”
My father told me about his growing suspicions that Henry had lost his way and that something was wrong in our marriage. My parents never spoke directly to me about their fears. For a long and happily married couple like my parents, it must have been heartbreaking to see me unhappy. And in the end, I doubt that I’d have been able to listen to them, any more than I would have been able to hear Irena’s more direct evidence.
I was glad that my father remembered. His memory was now mine again. After he told me the story, I was able to recall the day, though I could not remember the fight Henry and I must have had on the train as we traveled to the city.
I was ready to see other forgotten days. I had some home movies, films Henry shot on a long-gone Hi8 camera, transferred to DVD. I was curious to see those years again, through his eyes. Me feeding Liza strained beans, me giving her a bath, the scintillating material only new parents record and view again. One clip, a bit of film I’d never watched, showed a birthday party at Cathy’s house, for her daughter, Amy, who was turning four. The cake is presented, the song is sung, and Amy blows out her candles. Packages are unwrapped to the drone of too-cheerful oohs and aahs over gifts that will soon be forgotten. Cathy winks and sticks her tongue out at Henry behind the camera. Now I could understand the body language, the suggestive glances, and Henry’s coy comments. I am occasionally on camera, distracted, focused on Liza.
I was able to watch the film with the curiosity of encountering my past self. When I saw Liza in her party dress, I smiled with pleasure. I was even able look at Cathy without feeling injured.
I don’t keep much of Henry out in the open. One photograph of him looking at me fondly with a blurred two-year-old Liza in the foreground is positioned discreetly on my dresser, usually well concealed behind piles of clothes I have forgotten to put away. The gold claw ring clasping a piece of coral and our wedding rings rest in my jewelry box, objects for Liza to consider when she gets older. I do cherish the copy of Macbeth with illustrations by Salvador Dalí, though I wonder if I shouldn’t donate it to a rare books library, where more people could appreciate such a unique work. The menu he wrote for my fortieth birthday party is tacked onto the side of our refrigerator. On days when I still wonder about the nature of the love he had for me, I consider that well-planned menu. Though Henry aimed to impress my friends who attended, though he flirted with all, though Cathy was present at that gathering, I believe that the effort he put into the preparation of this meal represented a genuine love I can now appreciate without anguish.
During one of my long talks with Will, early in our relationship, he said something that I knew was difficult but correct: “You have to forgive him, for us to move on together.”
Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, the only truth that saves us from eating ourselves alive and causing damage to everyone we love. I continue to work on forgiveness. I do not, however, wish to forget any of this.
I cannot forget what Henry did. Nor can I forget Cathy’s part in such a layered deceit, though the pathetic absurdity of the fruit salad she left in my refrigerator now summons up something softer than outrage.
I have concluded, in the aftermath of everything, that I am a terrible judge of character. My friends laugh and assume I am joking when I declare this, but it is not a laughing matter for me. The problem is those brief fits of exuberant optimism that sometimes cloud my first impressions. I won’t always see through the beautiful smile, the clever remark, or the practiced gesture. I find that I need to allow myself many meetings to take the right measure of a person.
Cathy and Henry remain in my mind toxic persons, the likes of whom I hope I will never encounter again at an intimate level. I believe that I have, at last, learned to identify other such persons. I see them now at parties, in shops and restaurants, at school gatherings. I try to observe their confusion, and connect it to my own confusion as another struggling human. I can engage such people in polite conversation if required, but I do not want them in my life.
When I think about Christine, Ellen, and especially Eliana, I experience different emotions. These women briefly crossed a terrible line. They never knew me until after Henry’s death. They never ate in my home or pretended to be friends. Confronted, they did not run away from me. We struggled as best we could and learned something. We were able to make changes in our lives. I am proud of the effort we made together.
On a good day, I can tell myself that Cathy is another imperfect human, for whom I can have a good deal of sincere compassion. On such a day, I can remind myself of the bottomless tragedy of Henry’s choices and feel a genuine sadness that he never had the chance I received to start over. On a great day, I do not think about Cathy or Henry at all. I am doing my best, living my life, in the present moment.
Henry’s idea of a perfect day was an action-packed race from waking to sleeping. He was afraid of the tedium of everyday life, with its chores and routines. Every real day, however, includes a portion of boredom.
I have struggled to resolve my own boredom through frantic mental activity or shoe shopping. In rare, blessed moments, I have understood that, with patience, boredom can lead to stillness and calm. And in calm, I can experience a meditation where I connect with my true self. I can greet myself with kindness, before I return to my work, parenting, and chores. These uncharted moments, whenever they happen, are as close as I have come to heaven.
Henry fought off every meeting with his true self, with all its flaws, contradictions, and talents. For his own sake, for Liza’s, though no longer for mine, I wish he had made the attempt to see himself.
One afternoon in Brooklyn, during a surge of home-office tidying, I reencountered one of Henry’s small black notebooks, among the dozen I had saved and stored in a set of work drawers, all that remains from his umami project. I had never read through the notebooks, but now, with effort, I deciphered lines in his looped script.
Symbols arise from the instant and continuous deterioration of sensation in the memory since first experience.
One of the urges to lie or embellish is an attempt to re-create the original intensity of sensation.
There is nothing quite so seductive for a woman as a man who is apologizing and admitting wrong.
Everyone understands this level of obsession. As Wilt Chamberlain (from an article about how they couldn’t sell his house because of the stigma of his sleeping with 25,000 women) said, “We tend to get addicted to our activities so you better make sure you love what you do.”
All important activities are addictions, otherwise they wouldn’t be important.
Henry had made his choice to go for the extremes, to try to recapture first-time experience every day. But he might have lived a longer life if he had been able to take more pleasure from everyday activities, the scintillating thrills of real love, the heart-opening delights of parenthood, the occasional flashes of success in work life. I do not agree
with Henry’s view that “all important activities are addictions,” not to mention that the rare occasions of his apologies were hardly turn-ons. We cannot experience umami in every moment—that would be like a heroin addict finding the magic potion for an ever more ecstatic high—but we can remain open to “perfect” moments and appreciate them when they appear, perhaps more so from a place of calm.
On an unseasonably mild day in early January 2006, Will and Liza decided to take a bike ride in Prospect Park with Molly, one of her new school friends, and Molly’s father. I had just returned from a yoga class and was swallowing the first bites of a hastily made tuna sandwich when I received a call.
“Mama,” Liza reported with admirable calm, “Will fell off his bike, the ambulance is coming.”
Dropping my sandwich on the plate, I grabbed my coat and ran up to the park in time to find two EMS workers prepping Will for the waiting ambulance. He was strapped onto a stretcher, his neck in a plastic brace, his face smeared with blood and road dirt. Fresh blood oozed from a one-inch-long gash on his left cheek. My head felt light, my stomach queasy. I hoped it was because I hadn’t finished lunch. I took Liza aside to comfort her and to ask her more about what she had seen.
“Is Liza okay?” Will kept asking.
“She’s fine, don’t worry,” I reassured him. Liza did seem remarkably calm.
“Mama,” Liza said, “Will didn’t recognize me right away after he fell. He sat up and asked me who I was.” This suggested that he’d had a concussion, though I comforted myself that at least he knew her name now.
Molly had been riding with her father a quarter mile ahead on the bike path. They’d stopped, waiting for Will and Liza to catch up. When no one appeared, they turned back and were now able to take Liza home with them while I boarded the ambulance. Molly’s mom called on my cell, offering to meet me at the hospital later. I got into the ambulance.
Will was still rambling. “Is Liza okay?”
“She’s fine, please don’t worry.”
“Is Liza okay?”
The siren whooped and wailed. The ambulance surged forward into Brooklyn traffic as I glanced at the wall clock. It was 2:00 P.M.
“Sir,” I asked with a sudden shudder, “what’s the date?”
“January eighth, ma’am, for the rest of the day,” he replied, looking up from the forms attached to his clipboard. “You don’t happen to know his social, do ya?”
Will rattled off his social security number.
“Hey,” the EMS worker said with a chuckle, “you in the military or something?” He began asking Will questions—name, rank, and serial number. Will got through most of it, remembering his office telephone number but stumbling for a moment over our new apartment address. This was good news. He might have had a concussion, but it looked like he’d be fine. The bad news was, I’d forgotten the date. Will had fallen from his bike on the third anniversary of the hour and day of Henry’s departure. Now I really felt light-headed.
After my earlier encounters with Henry following his death, I took a pragmatic approach to the afterlife. Spirits might not make sense, but I’d had experiences that had felt real enough. We’d forgotten his day. This time Henry wasn’t a kitchen spirit encouraging me to salt a steak before cooking. He was pissed off.
After a night of hospital observation and more than twenty stitches around his left nostril, under his left cheekbone, and inside his lower lip, Will began a speedy recovery. He remained cheerful during the three days he took off from work, padding around the house, his wounds and road rash covered with a mask of newfangled bandages we bought to help heal without scarring—the Phantom of the Opera. By week’s end, Will was back at his office with just one bandage over his cheek. He looked like the feisty boxer he’d been as an adolescent—bruised but ready for another round.
When we returned to the site of the accident, there were no potholes. Will was an expert cyclist; he’d been riding the Prospect Park loop for years. When Liza described the accident again for me, she said his bike had just stopped and he’d flown straight forward. It could have been some mechanical failure, but I had my own opinion: Henry was jealous of Will’s new dad status.
Will didn’t think much of my haunting theory. He started singing the theme song from Ghostbusters, which made me laugh but didn’t change my mind about what had happened. I knew the angry Henry better than he did.
I felt wary in our apartment, wondering what calamity would happen next. Would Henry drop a pot on my head from the overhead rack as I washed dishes at the sink? Would I trip and fall down the stairs? I needed a housecleaner, so to speak.
I wrote to Eliana. She didn’t think I was crazy. She said there were people I could find to help with this kind of “energy” problem. I lived in Park Slope—not California but still a New Age mecca; there had to be someone here who wouldn’t laugh at me.
When I sheepishly mentioned my predicament to a neighborhood friend, she told me, to my surprise, that she’d once hired a woman to visit her house for what was termed a “spiritual cleansing.” She e-mailed me the contact information. A week later a sprite of a woman appeared at my door. She said that before she became a spiritual healer she’d been an attorney. With thoughtful, no-nonsense movements, she filled a spray bottle with kitchen tap water, chanted prayers, and then walked through the apartment spraying water here and there, whispering more quiet prayers. “He was here,” she remarked calmly as she peered into the corners of the living room, as if confirming that Henry was no longer huddled behind the couch. “It’s not good when they linger. He needed help moving on.”
Yes, yes, move on, please move on.
“Now you will find that this home will feel refreshed and you will work well here,” she said. We hugged. She thanked me as she accepted my check and left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but as I watched her walk down the stairs of my front stoop, I felt better already.
January 8, 2007, passed peacefully. I had found happiness and productivity in our new home. I purchased a Yahrzeit memorial candle from the grocery store; Liza and I had a quiet moment together. I hoped that if Henry dropped in for a visit from his astral plane, he would observe our family life and leave us in peace.
the present moment
“Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?”
she said, looking at him shyly.
“I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.”
—E. M. FORSTER,
A Passage to India
Even at twenty-two, long before frantic motherhood and the onset of pre-senior moments, I worried about losing memories and the sensations that fix them in place. When it comes to preserving love’s fragile, clear moments, sometimes the only thing we get to keep is an image, as fleeting as the splashes of light on curling waves.
I was with Paolo, a man I loved, in Italy, on a sailboat in the Mediterranean waters of the Cinque Terre. A friend had invited him for a week’s sail, and he’d stopped back in the town where I was still staying, persuading me to join him for a few days, though it meant changing my return flight to New York.
We’d met two years earlier, at the beginning of my college junior year in France, and we formed an immediate, though not easily nameable connection. I spent time with him during that school year, wrote to him when I returned to campus for my senior year. A year after graduation, I traveled back to see him for the few weeks that ended in this boat trip.
Once, while we walked the curved shore, lined with colorfully painted houses and swaying palm trees, he said, “Ci sposiamo?” I thought he was teasing me and didn’t answer. I knew what the words meant, though I had never heard anyone say them. Sposare, to marry. Ci, the first-person plural reflexive pronoun. “Shall we marry?”
In the end we never spoke much about the nature of our relationship. He had a real girlfriend in Torino, where he wintered, a popular arrangement for many of the men he knew. As the weeks passed, I wished for the courage to fight for something more nameable, but I
was afraid that the fragile thing we had would shatter like a wineglass hitting a terra-cotta-tiled floor.
I woke up early in the forward sleeping cabin to the sound of the clanking halyard on the mast and the gentle sway of the boat. Paolo was still sleeping next to me, his body curved into a half-moon shape. I was going home that afternoon, returning to my life in New York, whatever that would be. Paolo hadn’t asked me to stay in Italy. I knew he wouldn’t do that. I also knew that staying in Italy would be more difficult than learning the language well and finding work. The cultural divide was huge and might overwhelm me completely. Life in the Italy I knew always looked romantic, but I’d seen plenty of unhappy young American women that summer with their Italian men and thought, That could be me, too far from home. I didn’t think Paolo’s hovering mother would want an American daughter-in-law. I was what some people of my parents’ generation referred to as a “goddamn women’s libber.”