The Good Life

by Marian Thurm

  A man whose face and shaved head were completely covered in tattoos sauntered by with a bouquet of flowers under his arm.

  “You have my cell, right?” Dr. Whitacre said, and then— unforgivably, Stacy thought—she yawned. Exhaustion or boredom; whatever the reason for that yawn, Stacy would neither forgive nor forget.

  “We appreciate that,” Marshall was saying, and after the doctor left them, he draped his arm around Nathaniel and said quietly, “Listen, I don’t think there’s anything more we—”

  “No!” Roger cried, and you could hear all the grief he’d poured into that single word. “If we’re voting, I vote NOT to let Clare go.”

  But what authority did he have? Stacy tried to think of the kindest way to point out to him that, in fact, he had none.

  “I’m sorry, Roger,” Marshall said gently. He stretched out the fingers of his left hand, examined them, and with the inner edge of his pinky and the tip of his thumb, began to rotate his wedding ring. “Don’t be insulted by this, okay, but you need to understand that it’s my decision to make, not yours.”

  Near the reception desk, a woman in her twenties in leggings and dangerously high heels was talking too loudly into her phone. “I was, like, really, really hungry, and I opened Kendra’s pocketbook and was totally excited because I thought I saw a candy bar down at the bottom there, but then I realized it was only an address book and I was so disappointed.”

  “Fuck. You.”

  At first Stacy thought Roger was talking to the woman who’d mistaken the address book for a candy bar. But the instant he tore himself out of his seat and headed for the escalator that would get him to the lower lobby and out the front entrance, she knew the score. But did not run after him.

  “Marshall,” she said, leaning across Nathaniel to touch her brother-in-law’s knee, “you’ll forgive him, right?”

  Marshall looked bewildered. “We’ve been married for twenty-eight years,” he said, “and you know, this has got to be the worst fucking day of my life.”

  As if she might have thought otherwise.

  “I know,” Stacy said. “I know . . . I know . . . I know.” She squeezed his knee. “The worst fucking day of your life.” She tried very hard not to cry in front of Marshall, but quickly failed, and tears fell from her eyes and rolled past her chin and down the V-neck of her sweater. She remembered the first time she’d met Clare, and the mushroom-and-asparagus ravioli her sister-in-law had made from scratch that night, and the chocolate mousse, chosen because it would be easy for Stacy to eat after the root canal she’d had a couple of days before. With the tip of her tongue, she touched the tooth now, the very last molar up there on the left side. Clare had always been so generously solicitous of her; after her mother was killed, there hadn’t been many people like that in her life, Stacy recognized—and oh how lucky she’d been to have Clare. Who’d even wiped the blood from her thighs when Stacy was in the throes of her miscarriage. It was ten years from start to finish that they’d known each other, and it wasn’t nearly enough time.

  “I’m going to say good-bye to my wife now,” Marshall announced. He struggled to stand up; like an old man, he needed help getting out of his chair. Stacy and Nathaniel walked him to the elevator bank, and Stacy left the two of them there as they went upstairs to Clare’s bed in the ICU. She didn’t want to hear what Marshall would be saying, didn’t want to imagine what it would be like for him to walk away knowing that after twenty-eight years he would not get another chance to warm his body all night next to that beloved person whose life had been his.

  It was an unutterably sad, harrowing day, and how could she ever forget it?

  S

  She had no idea where Roger was, Stacy realized, and had no expectation, when she called his cell phone out here on York Avenue within spitting distance of Sloan Kettering, that he would answer. (He didn’t.)

  It was Clare’s last day on this earth, but Stacy still had to get home and pay the babysitter fifteen dollars an hour, and feed her children their dinner: chicken nuggets in the microwave two nights in a row. Which was what you got for dinner when you had a distracted mother and father for parents. This reminded her of Olivia’s friend Jazzmin, who had not been back for another playdate and whose father continued to show up at dismissal time with those bloodshot eyes of his, stinking of weed. Stacy needed to do something about this, she thought, and thought, too, that she had never been very good at minding her own business. Maybe she would make an anonymous phone call to the Administration for Children’s Services and see if they could send someone over to Jazzmin’s home to take a look at what was happening behind closed doors.

  But not before she got Roger safely through the next few days and weeks.

  S

  At the funeral, which was mobbed—a tribute to just how much Clare had been liked and admired by the teachers in the middle school where she’d worked her magic as a shrink for so many troubled, disenfranchised kids—Stacy held hands with Roger as he sat beside her in the very first row of burnished wooden pews. Next to Roger was Marshall, and then Nathaniel, both of them soberly dressed in their black woolen suits, rep-striped ties, and highly polished penny loafers, Marshall looking particularly pale and handsome, Stacy observed. There were shining quarters in the slots of Nathaniel’s loafers; Marshall’s were empty. Kissing the back of Roger’s hand, Stacy thanked God—or Whoever Up There might have been responsible—for her own family’s good health. She wondered whether Clare had ever acknowledged out loud that she was probably dying, ever acknowledged that the cancer was apparently immune to round after toxic round of chemo that brought painful sores to the insides of her mouth, banished her appetite and her hair, and, on the very worst days, had her puking her guts out. She and Clare had never, in the sixteen-month trajectory of her illness, talked about the future, except in the vaguest way; not once had she heard Clare worry aloud about whether she would live to see Nathaniel marry or open his own restaurant or, beyond that, bring grandchildren into her life. If Clare had had her suspicions, her fears, that her life would be abridged, she never raised them. At least not to Stacy, or to Roger either, and Stacy was grateful to have been spared the sadness of that. But now was the time for her to reflect on the tragedy of Clare’s life, on the undeniable fact that her sister-in-law had been cruelly robbed of decades in which there would surely have been much to savor.

  But when she got up there to deliver her eulogy from the lectern in the funeral chapel, it came to her that there was only one thing she wanted to talk about. Several years ago, she explained nervously into the microphone, she herself had fallen off a ladder and badly broken her leg; because of the surgery that had been necessary to pin the bones back together, she’d been bedridden, and unable to shower for two endlessly long weeks. Now she told the room packed with several hundred people how Clare had so sweetly, so thoughtfully, volunteered to wash her hair for her, arriving with fancy bottles of shampoo and conditioner and—get this—a child’s inflatable wading pool that she’d bought just for the occasion, so that Stacy could lie on her back across her bed, lean her head over the edge, and all those pitcherfuls of water could flow directly into the wading pool without soaking the carpet beneath it.

  “It was purely an act of love, one of the most loving things anyone has ever done for me,” said Stacy. “But ultimately there was nothing, not a single thing, that I could do for Clare to save her. And believe me, it killed me. Kills me.”

  She stepped down, and returned to her seat, where Roger—who was too distraught to offer even a single word about his sister, let alone a eulogy—waited for her, stiff and silent, as if he hadn’t heard a thing she’d said.

  S

  FINAL DRAFT

  To my dear family and friends—

  I have been struggling to say the right thing and this, I’m afraid, is about as close as I will ever get.

  My life has taken a nosedive, I’m drowning in debt, and the outlook is increasingly grim. I am deeply ashamed of my failure
s, both as a businessman and as a human being. I can no longer provide for my family in the way that they deserve.

  But you have to understand that my love for my family is EVERYTHING to me. And more than anything, I do not want them to suffer.

  Please don’t judge me too harshly—I’ve already done that myself. Again and again and again.

  If there were any other way out, I would take it. But there is none, trust me.

  IT’S BEST FOR ALL OF US THIS WAY.

  In the end, this is what it comes down to: I can no longer live with myself.

  ~ 30 ~

  Roger went alone to Renaissance Living Center to break the news to his mother. He put it off until three days after the funeral, and even though Stacy had offered to come along with him, he didn’t want her to witness what he could already predict would be a kind of pathetic farce. He signed in at the front desk now and tried not to see all the old women cluttering up the lobby with their wheelchairs and metal walkers, the bars of the walkers often adorned with dried food and the sticky residue of spilled beverages, the heads of the old ladies sadly bent from osteoporosis as they pushed themselves along. And there were the old geezers, just a sprinkling of them, gaunt or pot-bellied, their feet in backless leather slippers, walking arm in arm with dark-skinned caregivers who spoke jauntily to them, as if their charges were kindergartners just beginning to make their way in life.

  Observing them, it hit Roger, not for the first time, that just like everyone else his age, he did not want to grow old. The truth was, he feared it, and thought perhaps he’d rather die first.

  A tiny, short-haired chihuahua dressed in a blue-and-brown striped cotton sweater looked at him eagerly from the lap of a white-haired man in a wheelchair. “Now, in my darkest hour, as I await my pension,” the man said, his voice plaintive, “I’m suffering from digestive heart failure; can you help me, please?”

  Along with all the other people in the lobby, Roger ignored him, though he did pat the chihuahua on its head as he walked by. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel for the old man, it was only that he was in a rush to get upstairs and get this sorrowful business with his mother over with. He was on a fool’s errand, but it had to be done.

  His mother’s so-called best friend, Jewel, was out in the hallway when he got upstairs to the Alzheimer’s floor, and she was dressed, as always, in her saddle shoes and bobby socks and plaid skirt; perhaps, Roger thought, the fifties had been her hey day, and she still managed to draw some pleasure from even the vaguest memories.

  He waved to her caregiver, Bettina, who waved back. “Have a blessed day!” she called out to him.

  Starquasia greeted him at the door of his mother’s apartment and immediately offered her condolences. Then she hugged him. “Your mother’s not having such a good day today and I don’t know why. Maybe she already knows what you’re here to tell her,” she said.

  He suppressed the urge to roll his eyes, and thanked Star-quasia for the heads-up. His mother was in her La-Z-Boy, catnapping in front of the TV; he hated to wake her. “Hi, Mom,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  She stirred, opened her eyes, and immediately smiled at him. “Hello there, sir!” she said brightly. “Do we know each other?”

  The Xanax he’d taken at home had just kicked in, and he was suddenly aware of feeling almost preternaturally serene. “We do know each other, Mom. For almost fifty-two years, as a matter of fact.”

  “Huh, imagine that,” his mother said. “But I’m very, very thirsty, and need to wet my whistle,” she added.

  “Got some water for you right here,” said Starquasia. She brought it over in a lime-green plastic mug, and didn’t seem particularly surprised when Beverly knocked it from her hand a moment later.

  Roger jumped back, but the front of his button-down shirt was already soaked.

  “That’s naughty,” Starquasia said. “You got Roger’s shirt wet, and that’s not nice.”

  “Who’s Roger?” his mother said.

  “Mom, it’s me,” he said uselessly. He took the dish towel Starquasia handed him, but what was the point—his shirt was drenched.

  “You’re a sad young man, but a nice one,” his mother said. “I hope you have a family who’s good to you.”

  “I do,” Roger said. “But we need to talk about Clare, okay?”

  “I don’t know who that is—is she your wife?”

  “She’s my sister.” He was down on his knees now, and he took Beverly’s hand. “She was your daughter.”

  Beverly swatted his hand away and began to cry. “I want my mama,” she said. “When is my mama coming back?”

  “Oh, Jesus, please don’t start that again,” said Starquasia.

  Even though Roger could tell that the Xanax was shielding him from the worst of it, he didn’t have the heart to prolong his visit. Still on his knees, he told his mother not to cry, and that he loved her. Then he left, declining Starquasia’s offer to dry his shirt with a hair dryer first. He went out into the cold, his jacket thrown on carelessly and unzipped over his wet shirt. He walked the few blocks home along Third Avenue, thinking not about Clare or his mother, but about his modest apartment where he ate his breakfast leaning against a Formica counter as Stacy packed the kids’ lunches, he and Stacy trying to stay out of each other’s way in the small, cramped kitchen that made it difficult for her not to bump her hip against his. This recent move had only reinforced his feelings of failure, he reflected day after day, as he awakened in the new home that was less than half the size of his old one and rushed to the subway every morning to get to his office in Long Island City, observing the buses and cabs flying up Third Avenue and down Lex, mindful that on Park, a neighborhood he would never again be able to afford, there were only cabs—buses, that common mode of mass transportation, simply weren’t permitted to litter the pricey landscape.

  The following morning, he boarded a crowded, litter-strewn subway where of course there were no seats and he was stuck standing in the aisle, until, at Grand Central, he switched lines and found himself seated uncomfortably close to a morbidly obese woman dressed in an enormous yellow sweat suit and breathing wheezily beside him. And across the aisle there was the guy sporting a REPENT OR PERISH T-shirt and talking loudly to his companion, saying vehemently, “Why do you keep bringing this up, dude? What’s done is done and we’re seriously fucked.”

  This was his new life—Roger got it, he understood with perfect clarity what it was all about. He no longer had a car he could drive to work, a successful business, an enviable bank account or a home on Park Avenue, kids who went to private school, a beloved sister he could summon on his cell phone, a mother with her wits about her, or even an ordinary washer/dryer in his own little conveniently located laundry room right off a gleaming stainless-steel kitchen.

  All of this—including his sister and mother, though for those losses, at least, he was blameless—was out of reach and would, he felt certain, remain so. When he told this to Dr. Avalon, told him about this sense he had of himself as an absolute fucking failure, Avalon had suggested, solicitously, that this was “delusional thinking,” and asked Roger why he couldn’t try and see his way past his pessimism to something akin to optimism.

  Optimism? No way.

  Sorry, doc, but he was all out of optimism.

  Permanently.

  He was fucked, man, just like his fellow passenger across the aisle. For a guy with an MBA from Harvard, he had stumbled badly, and could not foresee how he would ever be able to repair things. Ever be able to restore what had been taken from him and his family by his own poor judgment and crappy luck.

  What if he could no longer afford to put food on the table and they starved to death? Then what? It had been clear to him that Avalon didn’t like hearing this, because the doc actually rose from his seat behind the desk and walked to where Roger was slumped on the couch, then bent slightly to touch his elbow.

  Is that what you really think, Roger? That your family is going to starve?

&
nbsp; What he really thought was that this beloved family of his deserved so much more, so much better, than what he was able to offer them, and how could you ever forgive yourself for that?

  S

  Packing for the trip home as Olivia sleeps off her upset stomach and Roger and Will head downstairs for one last dip in the pool while it’s still light out, Stacy checks on the damp bathing suits set out to dry on the terrace, empties the dresser drawers in the master bedroom of everything except what she and Roger will be wearing tomorrow on the plane, slips a couple of books into her carry-on bag. She inspects herself in the ornately framed mirror over her mother-in-law’s dresser and sees that there’s some nice healthy-looking color in her face, enough so that her neighbors will probably ask where she’s been and if she’d enjoyed herself.

  Enjoyed herself? Not . . . so much.

  Actually, it was very relaxing, she’ll say.

  Because, really, what’s so awful about lying to neighbors you barely know, letting them think you’ve come back well rested after a week of summery days and nights with your family.

  ~ 31 ~

  This was how Stacy requested a conference of sorts with Professor Sarno one night after class: “Hey, got a minute?”

  “For you, sure,” Dave said. He’d already shouldered his messenger bag, but dumped it back onto the seminar table, and said, “So hey, what can I do for you?”

  Well, let’s see, what about that momentary kiss nearly four months ago, which neither of them had seen fit to mention even once in all that time. Perhaps she’d imagined it, Stacy contemplated saying now.

  “I hate to put you on the spot like this,” she began, fingering one of her nearly shoulder-length peacock feather earrings, “and please forgive me for asking, but I really do need to know if you actually think of me as someone with . . . you know . . . I guess the word would be ‘promise’?” She wanted to say talent but couldn’t bring herself to pronounce the word out loud.