“I don’t want to swallow any scientific miracle designed to keep me from feeling what I have every reason in the world to feel. It’s not going to kill me to cry once in a while. It’s not going to kill me to feel depressed. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to feel depressed. When you lose someone you want to realize how much you’ve lost or else you don’t appreciate how much you had. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, depression. It can be a relief. Or a release, I don’t know which I mean. Maybe both. Like crying.”
She remembered the night she’d sat up with a bottle mourning Winkie. And other scattered nights when alcohol and solitude helped her sit among shapeless sorrows reaching out at wispy insights.
“Thirty-nine years. Do you know something, Andrea? We loved each other.”
“I know.”
“That’s not terribly common. As a matter of fact it’s unusual. I was with your father, why, since I was a girl, really. My whole adult life. Wouldn’t it be terrible not to be sad? Wouldn’t that be a terrible thing?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It would be awful. I would not want to be like that,” said Sylvia Kleinman.
They were in the house on Admiral Road for almost two hours before they left for the cemetery. They had lunch, they drank coffee, they talked, and the older woman worked on a sweater for her granddaughter. Andrea had tried knitting at various times before deciding she lacked the patience for it. Watching her mother, she thought that it didn’t even seem very interesting. Once you were accomplished enough to do it properly, your fingers worked automatically without any participation by your mind.
The telephone rang periodically. Each time her mother answered it, and each time it was one of her friends just calling to see how she was doing. The first few times the phone rang Andrea thought it might be Mark. Their conversation had disturbed her and she supposed it had disturbed him as well, and she thought he might try to reach her at her mother’s to make some effort at smoothing things out. But the phone kept ringing and it kept not being him.
And why, really, should he call? Nothing he could tell her over the telephone would make things any better, and any number of things could make the situation worse.
She reached for a cigarette and discovered she had one still burning in the ashtray. Every few months she tried to stop smoking, and each time she found some source of tension which excused her putting off the job of quitting. Most of the times she stopped she did so without missing a cigarette. She would put out the last cigarette of the night and resolve not to smoke the next day, and when morning came she usually had a cigarette going before the resolution even came to mind.
Now she sat smoking and listened to her mother having her standard conversation. Her voice had an artificial brittle tone to it, or so it seemed to Andrea.
“That was your mother-in-law, Andrea. I thought of telling her you were here but I didn’t bother.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“You’d have had to talk, and it was enough that I had to talk to her. I shouldn’t say that. It was nice of her to call. It’s nice of everybody to call. The phone calls have been tapering off a little the past few weeks, but today the volume’s up again. Because of it being the anniversary, but do you know that not one single person has mentioned the fact? As if they don’t want to call it to my attention in case it slipped my mind. Although I’m sure I’d behave exactly the same way. As a matter of fact I know I already have behaved the same way, making a point of calling on a birthday or a yahrzeit but not mentioning it unless the other person mentioned it first. Which is sensible, actually. I’d rather not have that particular conversation with the entire world, and by not mentioning it they leave it up to me.” She stopped talking suddenly and frowned. “Do you know something? I’m becoming a chatterbox.”
“Oh, Mother, you are not.”
“But I am, I know I am, I can tell the difference. I’m thinking out loud, using you being here as an excuse for talking to myself.” She stood up. “Are you done with that coffee? Because I’d like to go to the cemetery now.”
“You’re absolutely certain? Maybe the first visit since the funeral, maybe it shouldn’t be on a special day, that’s all.”
“Second visit.”
“What was that?”
“Second visit. I went by myself two or three weeks ago.”
“You never said anything.”
“Why should I say anything? I was sitting here one afternoon and I got the impulse to go and I went. Andrea, there is something you’ve got to understand. I am able to cope with things.”
“Oh, Mother, I know that.”
“I’m not sure that you do. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. I surprise myself every day. I have more strength than I ever knew I had. Except that I’m not sure it’s right to call it strength. Whatever it is, it’s the thing that enables a person to keep on. The fact that I’m very sad, that I have a deep sense of loss, that doesn’t seem to interfere with my ability to handle things. Now can we just go? Or I’ll go myself if you’d rather, but I want to go now.”
“Oh, Mother!”
“I’m sorry, Andrea, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean the way that sounded. You know I didn’t.” The phone began to ring. “Oh, don’t bother to answer it. Just let it ring or we’ll never get out of here.”
They could still hear the phone as they got into Andrea’s car. But it wouldn’t be Mark, she told herself. There was no reason to think it was Mark.
Mother and daughter kept up an effortless conversation on the drive to the cemetery. When the main gates came into view they fell silent. As Andrea turned the car into the cemetery she said, “You’ll have to tell me where to go. I’d be completely lost.”
“They gave me a map when I was here before. A little man offered to show me the route but I told him I would find it myself. I remember he had something wrong with one of his eyes. I have the map somewhere in my bag but I think I can remember. Keep bearing left until I tell you different.”
They drove slowly, and in silence. The spring weather had brought other visitors to the cemetery. They were mostly women, and most of them had come alone. Signs of spring, Andrea thought. The trees begin to leaf out, the spring bulbs push up out of the soil, the birds come north again. And the widows emerge from their dark houses and swim upstream to graveyards.
“The next fork to the right. And there it is, on the left just beyond those trees.”
The grave was situated in one of several Jewish sections of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The double plot of which he now occupied the southern portion had been purchased by David Kleinman in 1961. He had never mentioned this fact to his wife or daughter; they learned about the plot when they opened the strongbox in which he kept his insurance policies and a copy of his will. (The will was unremarkable—after token bequests to his office staff, everything was left outright to his widow.) Sylvia Kleinman was not surprised that a burial site had been purchased. Her husband had been meticulous about putting his affairs in order since that first heart attack. What did surprise her was that he had made this purchase so long ago. But it was not an enormous surprise, and certainly not out of character. It was very much the sort of thing David Kleinman might do on his own initiative, and, having done it, the sort of thing he would never dream of discussing. The grave was as yet unmarked. In some months a stone would be put in place. More orthodox Jews waited a specified number of months before raising the stone, and did so at an unveiling ceremony accompanied by a brief memorial service. But there would be no ceremonial unveiling for David Kleinman. When the stone was ready it would be installed without a fuss.
Andrea knew what the stone would look like. She had been consulted when the stonecutter had been commissioned to prepare it. It was to be a very plain rectangular block of granite. The name Kleinman would be engraved across the top; below it her father’s name would be on one side, along with the year of his birth and the year of his death. The other half of the stone’s face would be blank. For the time being.
Andrea parked the car a few dozen yards from the grave site. She walked around to open the door for her mother and took her mother’s arm when she emerged. She could read very little expression in her mother’s face. The features were masked, withdrawn, remote. They walked together across the asphalt roadway and over the grass.
She found herself walking very carefully, setting her feet down gently, as if she were walking not on the dead but on the living. At the last interment she’d attended before her father’s, it had struck her that there ought to be walkways between the graves. When hours later she’d mentioned the thought to Mark he’d called her inconsistent. “You were just saying what a waste of space cemeteries are. How everybody should be cremated and the ashes scattered. Now you want aisles between the graves.” And of course she had been inconsistent, and of course burial was stupid, and of course embalming was stupid, and the disgusting cosmetology of undertakers was stupid. But if you were going to bury someone, and then walk so matter-of-factly over their bones—
So now she walked lightly, as if the dead might groan beneath her weight.
She did not know how long they stood together, heads bowed, at the side of the grave. It seemed to her that she ought to order her thoughts somehow. There were prayers to be said at gravesides, but she did not know any and would not have said one if she had.
Was there anything that she could say to her father? If there were important things they should have told each other, it was past the time for that now. And so she just let her thoughts find their own paths. It was a beautiful spring day, certainly. Many of the graves were planted with flowers and flowering shrubs. They would do the same, but not until the stone was up.
She closed her eyes and heard birdsong not far off. When she was in high school a boy in one of her classes had been an enthusiastic bird watcher. He used to go to the cemetery early in the morning before dawn to look at birds through binoculars. He had told her this once, and she had shown polite interest while thinking privately that anybody who would get up in the middle of the night to chase sparrows had to be out of his tree himself. Then one day, painfully shy but resolute, he had invited her to accompany him on his next birding expedition. She couldn’t now remember what excuse she had offered. She’d stammered out something. What she did remember was the look on his face. She had evidently figured prominently in his fantasy life, while he had scarcely existed for her, and she had consequently managed to be unintentionally cruel.
Funny. She hadn’t thought of him in years. And, considered in retrospect, the prospect of walking through the still cemetery at dawn was attractive, even romantic. At the time she’d thought it creepy and ridiculous.
“Andrea, wait for me in the car, please. I want to be alone for a few minutes.”
She hesitated for just a moment, then turned and walked back to the car. A cloud had slipped across the sun and she felt a chill. She got into the car, sat behind the wheel with her arms folded over her breasts. Through the windshield she watched her mother, a still figure on a painted landscape.
Her mother stood beside the man at whose side she had spent two-thirds of her entire life. And she stood where she would someday lie. Andrea felt something very chilling in the idea of standing upon a spot and knowing you would one day be buried there. And when the tombstone was in place, with one side left blank for her mother’s name—oh, it was chilling, of course it was, and yet in a strange way there was something almost comforting about it.
In a month she and Mark would celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary. At any rate they would mark the occasion. A celebration might not be entirely in order.
In thirty-two years she and Mark would be married as long as her parents would have been married today. If they were alive.
If they were still married.
She shuddered, more at the second thought than the first, and fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes. Was it proper to smoke in the cemetery? But she was in her car, for God’s sake. It shouldn’t matter, should it?
She lit a cigarette, glanced at her mother, who did not seem to have changed position at all. The woman lived each day with grief for company, but for all that Andrea felt sorry for her, today she envied her. She had lost something infinitely precious, to be sure, but for thirty-nine years she had had something precious.
While Andrea, for the first time in seven years, was forced to consider the possibility that her marriage might fail.
And that of course was why she found Mark’s infidelity so impossible to cope with. She could not reasonably be upset at the fact that he might find someone else attractive. If she could only have believed Eileen’s argument—that men committed adultery in a casual and meaningless manner—then she could probably have accepted it readily enough, could have overlooked it as Eileen had advised her to do.
But Mark was not apt to be casual about such things, The sexual roles, as Eileen conceived them, were turned upside down in Andrea’s marriage. It was Mark who had had rather less premarital experience, Mark who was less able to divorce the physical and emotional components of sex.
She had been with two other men since her wedding day, and even now, when she found the whole idea of adultery hateful, she could not really find it in herself to waste time regretting those two affairs. That afternoon with John Riordan hardly seemed like adultery, and certainly could not be said to constitute an affair. It was a way of closing out the past, of recognizing the dimensions of the role she had chosen for herself, of saying good-bye permanently to the person she had been before marriage. She had not been touched, and this was consistent with the nature of the sex act she had chosen. She had remained clothed. Riordan had not touched her flesh. Her mouth had performed a mechanical service, making the sex act a metaphorical statement.
With Cass Drozdowski, the string of Thursdays had been any number of things, none of them threatening her marriage in any substantial way. There had been a real element of risk. If Mark had found out about their affair—and it had not been impossible that he should have found out—then her marriage might have been imperiled. That possibility aside, it had never been for a moment conceivable that either she or Cass would begin building sand castles of romantic love. Oh, Cass was a way for her to “prove to herself that she had a life outside of her role as wife and mother. It gave her a vehicle for harmless revenge on Mark for his having cast her in this role. But it had never meant anything to either of them, and they were both relieved when she ended it.
On her thirtieth birthday she had decided to terminate the affair, and indeed she had seen him only once after that. It was two weeks and a day after her birthday and they met as arranged at the motel where they always met. But they did not embrace and they did not go to bed. She explained to him what she had decided, finding as she did so that it was much easier to have this conversation than she had thought it would be. But then she had always found it easy to talk to Cass.
When she had finished speaking he said, “Well, I expected this. I thought another month or two, but probably not much more than that, and God knows we’ve already had the best of it. I’d say something about staying friends but of course we will and it goes without saying.”
“Friends. It’s all we ever were.”
“That’s exactly true, Andrea. Andrea. Did they ever call you Andy?”
“They never did and they better never start.”
“Far be it from me to be the first. Where were we? Friends and how that’s all we ever were. It’s true, and I’ll tell you something. That put us ahead of most people. You wouldn’t believe the number of people go to bed together without even liking each other.”
“Oh, I would believe it.”
“Yes, you might at that.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Just the dumb Polack making conversation. No, it’s not supposed to mean anything in particular. Why did you ever marry the guy in the first place, Andrea?”
“Now that’s a hell of a question.”<
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He nodded. “It’s one I’ve been wondering about ever since I met you. Well, not quite, because I met you before you were married.”
“New Year’s Eve.”
“New Year’s Eve, and I can’t say I paid much attention to you that night. Nothing personal. The way I was drinking I didn’t pay much attention to anything or anybody. But ever since I got to know you, yes, I’ve been wondering about it.”
“And what is wrong with the usual answers? Such as Mark and I happen to love each other.”
“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think that’s why you married him. It could be why he married you but not the other way around.”
“I suppose you have a theory.”
“Oh, maybe the bare bones of a theory. Not that you want to hear it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
He considered, then shrugged. “All right. I think you married him the same way you moved back to Buffalo and into your parents’ house. Both moves were ways of coming home, of playing it safe. It was a kind of retirement, wasn’t it?”
“That’s a really crummy way of putting it.”
“If it makes you angry I’m sorry.”
“I’m not angry.”
He looked at her, his eyes intent. “I have the feeling something happened in New York before you left, something that really scared the living shit out of you. And everything afterward was a reaction to it. What happened there, Andrea?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
She thought for a moment. “Nothing you don’t more or less know about,” she said. “I was doing too much drinking and too much screwing around. The two seemed to go together.”
“They still do, I’ve noticed. For most of the people in the world.”
“Maybe. Where was I?”
“Drinking and screwing around.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment, taking time to examine the memories that filtered in behind her eyelids. “I’d been working uptown. A music publisher, it was secretarial work but there was supposedly an opportunity to learn the business. But I didn’t want to learn the business and I didn’t care about the work and I lost the job.”
A Week as Andrea Benstock Page 20