Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  She’d shaken her head. “How about Mom?” she’d asked. “You think she’s having an affair?”

  Melissa had winced. “Mom? Are you kidding?”

  “No, I’m not kidding. Why can’t Mom have an affair?”

  “Because she’s . . . Mom.” Melissa’s eyes had welled up. She’d pulled a paper napkin from the popsicle-stick napkin holder Noah had made last year at summer camp and blown her nose into it. “She’s in her sixties, Jill.”

  “Women can’t have sex in their sixties?”

  “I don’t know if they can’t. But why would they want to? I mean, their bodies are all . . . you know. Old.”

  “There was a time I thought thirty was old,” Jill had remarked pointedly. Melissa might be the baby of the family, but she’d celebrated her thirtieth birthday more than a year ago.

  “It is old,” Melissa had said glumly. “I feel old. All I do is work. Then I come home, open a can of soup and spend the evening juggling numbers to see if there’s any way in hell I can afford to buy an apartment. You and Doug own your own homes. I want to own property, too.”

  “You’re earning a fortune,” Jill had pointed out.

  “Not a big enough fortune.”

  “Maybe you need to hook up with a guy who earns a fortune, too. Two salaries are better than one.” As if the money Jill earned writing catalogue copy represented the difference between her family’s being able to live in a house in the Boston suburbs and a cardboard box on a street corner in Mission Hill.

  Melissa’s gaze had drifted toward the door to the family room, through which the guy she was currently hooked up with had disappeared not long ago. “Luc earns a salary,” she’d said. “I’m not sure exactly how much, but I think it’s pretty good.”

  “He’s a hairdresser.” Jill had learned this over dinner and had done an estimable job of pretending she thought that was terrific.

  “At one of the city’s top salons.”

  A top salon. Jill had supposed she ought to be impressed. “Is it serious, you and him?”

  Melissa had sighed. “We haven’t known each other long enough to be serious. But he’s gorgeous and sweet, and the sex is fabulous. And look at my hair. He’s a magician.”

  Jill had shaken the excess water from her hands and reached for a dishtowel to dry them. “Is the sex so fabulous you’d still want to be sleeping with him when you were sixty-four?”

  “My body’s going to be disgusting by then,” Melissa had moaned.

  Jill had inspected her sister’s figure. Not a perfect ten, but at least an eight. Maybe a nine. She’d inherited their mother’s round hips and sloping shoulders, which some men loved. Jill used to despise her own physique, which she believed resembled a tootsie-roll more than an hourglass. After two pregnancies, though, she’d decided to be grateful she weighed only five pounds more than she had when she’d met Gordon. There were things in life worth stressing over—like your parents’ marital woes, or your daughter’s bat mitzvah, or whether writing catalogue copy was really a job—and things not worth worrying about—like whether your shoulders were too square or whether you weighed five pounds more than you used to.

  Of course, once she quit Diet Coke, she’d probably gain more weight. Unless she drank only water.

  “I always thought you’d wind up with a fellow lawyer,” she’d told Melissa as she’d lifted the dishwasher door and clicked it shut.

  “Ugh. Lawyers are boring.” Melissa had wrinkled her nose.

  “You’re not boring.”

  “I am. I worry about when Luc’s finally going to realize how boring I am. I could never have a relationship with another lawyer. If we had a child, it might wind up inheriting boring lawyer genes from both of us. Like Tay-Sachs disease or something.” She’d sighed and glanced toward the ceiling. “What’s the point, anyway? I mean, you can be together for forty years and suddenly decide you’re sick of each other. Maybe I should just skip the whole falling-in-love thing. I could have a baby through artificial insemination and the hell with marriage.”

  Jill hadn’t known how to respond. Should she lecture Melissa on how much work a child was—and double the work if you didn’t have a husband to share it with? Nah. Even in these enlightened times, most husbands didn’t come close to shouldering a full half of the childcare burden. They changed a diaper and spent the rest of the day boasting about how helpful they were. They coached the kids’ soccer teams but left their wives to oversee the kids’ baths and take them shopping for shoes and check their homework.

  Instead, she’d said, “Do you think Mom and Dad still love each other?”

  “Can you love someone if you’re sick of him?”

  Jill had thought for a minute before answering. “Probably.”

  She wasn’t sick of Gordon. He was sweet and smart and adorably dense, and he’d even taken Noah shopping for shoes once. The two of them had come home beaming over their purchase of a one-hundred-nineteen-dollar pair of sneakers that Noah had outgrown in less than three months.

  She wanted to believe she would still be not sick of him in thirty years, but right now the sex thing just wasn’t working for her. “I’m sorry, Gord,” she said, gently nudging his hand away from her breast. “I have to pee.”

  When she returned to the bedroom, Gordon was sprawled out on his back, his tousled hair circling his face like a wavy brown halo. He wore it too long, but Jill liked it that way. So did his students, a few of whom got crushes on him every year. Not because he was gorgeous. Not because, like Melissa’s new friend, he was fashion-spread handsome and polished to a glossy sheen. But he was tall and lanky and had a warm, genuine smile that made him approachable.

  Jill had never been drawn to the best-looking guy in the room. She’d fallen for Gordon because, not in spite, of his long nose and chronically messy hair. In her experience, perfect-looking guys were always either dull or egotistical or, well, hairdressers.

  “Better?” he asked, sending her what he undoubtedly believed was a seductive smile as she rejoined him in bed.

  “Emptier.” She slid under the blanket, cuddled up to him and rested her head on his naked shoulder. It was bony, not very comfortable, but she thought it best to behave affectionately while she told him he wasn’t going to get lucky tonight. “I’m sorry, Gord.”

  She didn’t have to elaborate. He knew. He twined his fingers through her hair and said nothing.

  She ran her hand down to his crotch. He was still raring to go, and she gave his erection a wifely stroke. “How about a cheap thrill?” she offered.

  He nudged her hand away. “That’s all right,” he said.

  He was so good-natured. So accepting. She simply couldn’t imagine walking out on him, even if he did leave globs of toothpaste in the sink. “I can’t stop thinking about my parents,” she explained.

  “Now there’s a real turn-off.”

  “I know.”

  “Your parents,” he said, stroking the nape of her neck and lulling the caffeine jitters out of her, “are nuts.”

  “I know.”

  “But they probably don’t pose a danger to others. So let them be, Jill. Don’t try to fix things for them.”

  He might as well tell her to stop breathing. She was a Good Daughter. When her parents were troubled and in pain—and she was convinced they were—it was her responsibility to make things better. “If I wait for them to come to their senses, it might never happen.”

  “So they’ll be senseless. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Easy for him to say. His parents were happily married. Tall and raw-boned like him, they were partners in an insurance agency in suburban Maryland, spending all day together in their office and all night together at home, and they never seemed to get sick of each other. But who knew? Maybe next week, they’d be the ones announcing the end of their long, stable marriage.

  “It’s not something I can shrug off,” she explained. “I can’t just say, ‘They’re nuts,’ and forget about it. I love them.”
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  “They drive you crazy. You tell me all the time that they do.”

  “I don’t tell you all the time.”

  “Your mother calls you when you’re trying to work, and she asks if you have a free moment, and you tell her no, and she keeps on talking anyway,” Gordon reminded her.

  She couldn’t deny it. Her mother did do that a lot, and she complained to Gordon about it whenever it occurred.

  “Your parents always want you to solve their problems for them. How much should they give to their synagogue this year? Should they buy the sofa they fell in love with at list price or drive out to the discount furniture place in Gardner and see if they can find something cheaper? Should your father add that new young hotshot from Johns Hopkins to his practice? All this stuff that’s not even your business, and they’re asking you for advice. Well, this separation is their disaster, Jill. Not yours. Let them deal with it.”

  He was right. He was absolutely right. Except. “My sister is heartbroken.”

  “Your sister is fucking her brains out with her hairdresser.” He sounded a little envious.

  “But she’s still heartbroken. And Doug. He’s shaken by the whole thing. I know him. I know when he’s upset, and he was really upset when he left the house today.”

  “You’re upset, too. Big deal. Leave it alone, Jill. Don’t try to fix it.”

  She could have written off his brusque words as a result of frustration about the fact that he and Jill weren’t fucking their brains out like Melissa and Luc. Or she could have accepted them as sound counsel.

  Instead, she rolled away from him, settled her head into her own pillow, which was much softer and more malleable than Gordon’s shoulder, and closed her eyes. And thought about the toothpaste mess he’d left in the sink.

  Chapter Eight

  Richard ate his sandwich in the den. The kitchen was too empty to eat in; the drone of the refrigerator motor sounded like an inflamed bumblebee. The dining room, forget it. Too grand and formal. The table was long and imposing, its glossy mahogany surface now filmed with a thin layer of dust, and the chairs surrounding it had stiff, straight backs and damask seat cushions no thicker than a slice of rye. The chandelier scattered the light in all directions, making it impossible to see what you were eating. And Ruth never put anything on the table without first covering it with pads that were felt on one side and waterproof plastic on the other, and then draping a tablecloth over the pads. Richard had no idea where she stored those pads. Or, for that matter, her tablecloths.

  In the den, no pads, no refrigerator motor, no formality. He could sit on the leather couch, legs kicked up onto the coffee table and a plate balanced on his knees, and watch TV while he ate. And he could channel-surf all he wanted. Unfortunately, he needed both hands to hold his sandwich, a six-inch-long torpedo roll stuffed so full that shreds of lettuce and blobs of mayonnaise kept leaking out of it. If channel-surfing was necessary, he’d have to push the channel button with his chin or else put down his sandwich. Neither option appealed to him, but he’d still rather eat in the den than the kitchen or the dining room.

  Besides lettuce and mayo, the torpedo roll was crammed with turkey, tomato slices, thin, rippling circles of sweet pickle and a couple of slabs of provolone. He’d purchased it at a deli just down the block from Beth Israel Deaconess. Last night he’d brought home two large rectangles of Sicilian pizza topped with pepperoni from a pizzeria five minutes away from the house, and the oil, cheese and sausage were enough to short-circuit an EKG. The night before, he’d opened one of the cans of soup Ruth had left behind—low sodium, he was pleased to note, although it still tasted damned salty to him. The turkey in his sandwich tasted salty, too. God knew what eating like this was doing to his health.

  On the television, a blowhard pontificated about corrupt politicians. So, what’s new? he wanted to say, but there was no one around to say it to.

  She’d been gone one week. Seven bleary, dreary days. Richard couldn’t live on pizza and sandwiches and cans of soup for the rest of his life. Maybe he should hire a housekeeper, someone to dust the dining room table, vacuum, wipe down the counters, scrub the bathroom sinks and have a hot meal waiting for him when he got home. How much would someone like that cost?

  A sharp pang seized his chest. Not a heart attack. He was a cardiologist, he knew heart attacks. Nor was this indigestion, although the turkey seemed a little greasy along with the salt.

  This pain was emotion. It was the sort of throbbing ache a man felt when his wife walked out on him and he found himself calculating in dollars and cents how much it would cost to hire someone to replace her.

  How much had Ruth cost? She’d been his partner. His wife. She’d dusted, vacuumed, wiped the counters, cleaned the sinks and had a hot meal waiting for him at the end of the day. Had she felt like a housekeeper? Should he have given her a raise? Diamond earrings weren’t enough?

  Damn it—a marriage was supposed to be about compromise. You give a little, you take a little. You meet each other halfway. But Richard couldn’t see the compromise in his current situation. She wanted a change. He didn’t want a change. She got exactly what she wanted: a change. He got exactly what he didn’t want: a change. He’d given and she’d taken. It wasn’t fair.

  His appetite gone, he set the sandwich down and sank back into the sofa cushions. After licking his fingers clean, he thumbed the channel button on the remote. Click: a weather report. Click: gales of laughter from a sit-com rerun. Click: a view of an ancient desert city, accompanied by the ponderous voice of a public-television narrator explaining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as if such an explanation existed. Click: a woman dancing around a kitchen with a mop in time to a bouncy rock tune.

  So many rock musicians sold out, he fumed. Back when he was in medical school, too busy with his studies to storm the ramparts, he’d counted on rock stars to fight authority and overturn the government on his behalf. There’s something happening here. All you need is love. Come on, people now. I can’t get no. He’d expected musicians to end the war—thank God as a medical student he’d received a deferment and hadn’t wound up in Vietnam. He’d expected rock stars to end hypocrisy, undermine authority, overturn the social structure. He’d expected them to serenade a new era of love. Free love. Peace and flowers.

  Nowadays, rock stars sold mops.

  With a few more clicks, he located a Red Sox pre-game show. He tossed the remote onto the coffee table next to his sandwich and lifted the bottle of beer he’d taken for himself. Ruth would give him hell for drinking beer straight from the bottle during a meal. You don’t like my table manners? he silently asked his absent wife. Come home and I’ll eat like a mensch, with a fork and a knife and a napkin in my lap. If you’re not coming home, you lose the right to nag.

  One entire week. Some days he felt nothing but sorry for himself. Some days he felt nothing but angry. Today he felt defiant. Shut up, Ruth. You’re not here. I can drink my beer any damned way I want.

  The cashier at the deli had flirted with him. He always acted friendly toward her when he stopped in for a coffee-to-go on his way to work, or for a bagel with a schmear if he had time for a quick lunch. He hadn’t expected to find her at her register in the evening—did she work all day? Did she own the place? An owner didn’t run the register, did she? Anyway, this woman looked too young to own a thriving business.

  Not that she was a kid. Late twenties, maybe—he could guess the age of a naked patient, but not a fully clothed cashier. With her soft face, wide cheekbones, dark eyes and olive complexion, she probably had some Latina blood in her arteries.

  “Hello, doctor,” she’d greeted him today. “Kind of late for you to be stopping by, isn’t it?”

  “I’m just grabbing some dinner to take home. My wife . . .” What? What should he say? Who was this girl that he should be telling her his marriage was on the rocks? “My wife is out of town.”

  “You ought to spend the evening with your buddies, then,” she said. “When
your wife’s away, you should enjoy a night on the town with the boys.”

  What boys? he wondered. Doug was his only boy, and he’d undoubtedly arrived at his own house an hour ago. He kept banker’s hours, tweaking the eyes of the vain. And unlike Richard, Doug had a wife waiting at home for him. A lovely girl, Brooke, and she made his son happy. Doug had Brooke, a clean house, a hot meal. He had love waiting for him at home.

  Nothing was waiting for Richard. “It’s a weeknight,” he told the smiling cashier. “How can I go out on the town? I’ve got work in the morning.”

  “Well, then, I guess you’re stuck with the sandwich. Next time your wife is out of town, you ought to make a plan with a friend. A man like you shouldn’t have to eat dinner alone.”

  How right she was.

  He leaned over his knees to put down his beer and pick up his sandwich. He still felt defiant and exceedingly pissed off, but thinking about the cashier caused him to smile. If he could find himself married to a cashier at First-Rate, which apparently was what Ruth was these days, then why shouldn’t he flirt with a cashier at the Longwood Deli?

  Tomorrow, he’d get another sandwich. Something other than this greasy turkey. Maybe they had a nice brisket. And he’d ask for a dill cut into spears, not sugary pickle slices that resembled soggy, green ridged potato chips. And when he paid, he’d chat with the cashier for a minute or two.

  It wasn’t dating. Regardless of Doug’s insinuations, Richard didn’t want to date.

  But a man like him definitely shouldn’t eat dinner alone.

  All you need is love, he thought, settling back into the upholstery and listening to the sportscaster announce the Sox line-up.

  Chapter Nine

  Ruth adjusted the waist ties of her First-Rate pinafore and scrutinized her reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was the only mirror in the apartment, other than the shiny surface of the wall oven, which provided a ghostly impression of her appearance from her shoulders to her knees. The bathroom mirror reflected her from the chest up. She’d just have to trust her own eyes in judging how her shins and ankles looked.