The End of Men

by Karen Rinaldi

  Helen then offered news of the previous night’s escapades at Paul’s bedside. Apparently Raymond had come by and the family had played matchmaker again with him and Helen. Helen thought it apt that they couldn’t quite put together who Raymond was, in spite of his openness about being gay and his intimacy with Paul. They simply chose to ignore the fact and carried on about what a cute couple Raymond and Helen would make. All this while Paul lay dying beside them. The absurdity of it all certainly made the whole thing easier for Beth to take.

  The following few days felt like a holding pattern between life and death. Paul remained in critical but stable condition. His lung capacity deteriorated every day.

  On New Year’s Day, just minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square, Paul Marchand succumbed to respiratory failure with Raymond sleeping next to him in the hospital bed. In the end, as it should be, thought Beth, and with her thoughts, she took solace from this last image of Paul, dying next to the only other person who accepted him fully in spite of his ambiguity.

  Beth and Jessie cried together at the news and then wrote an appropriately silly and sweet rhyming eulogy in honor of his passing. Jessie asked her mother if she could read it at the funeral, and Beth didn’t have the heart to tell her that the family would most likely not welcome it. When Beth called to find out the arrangements for the service the following day, the final blow came from Helen.

  “Mom doesn’t want you and Jessie to come to the funeral. She’s afraid of what you might say or do.”

  Beth filled with anger, which displaced the sadness that had been welling. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Helen! She would deny his daughter, her granddaughter, a final good-bye? I’m sorry, but that’s just not going to happen.” She was yelling so loud she knew others in the office could hear her.

  “It would undo her, Beth, to have you there. You can’t come,” Helen said.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck. I am going to his funeral, Helen. Just warn her that I will be there with Jessie.”

  Beth slammed the phone down and let out an anguished cry as her heart began to race with rage and her mind with fantasies of vindication. The past nine years of controlling her anger and her fears, of protecting Paul and his secrets, of wearing a scarlet letter as a mask for his denial, came tumbling out in a fury of tears and garbled ranting.

  Maggie, in the office for the day, ran into Beth’s office.

  “My God, Beth, what’s happened?” Maggie asked. “Are you okay? Is Jessie okay?”

  Pacing with heavy and fast steps around her office, Beth circled her desk several times, hands in her hair as if to pull it out. On the final circumlocution, she swung her chair into the wall. She was breathing hard.

  “Helen just told me that Paul’s mother disinvited me and Jessie to Paul’s funeral,” and with this, she collapsed on the floor and sat there, back pressed against her desk. Maggie sat across from her, grabbed her hands and waited. Beth’s breathing slowed after a minute or two.

  “Do you know why I’m so upset?” Beth finally said, her voice now steady. “It’s not that Paul is dead, or that his family has disinvited me from the funeral . . .” Beth paused to choose her words carefully. “I just wish that they would know me now for the person in Paul’s life who gave him the most, not the one who took it away.”

  “You know it, Beth. That’s what matters,” Maggie said, as Beth squeezed back tears of rage. She paused for a few moments before asking, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know . . .” Beth shook her head hard. “I told Helen I was going no matter what. But is that the right thing to do? And what about Jessie? She needs to be able to say good-bye to her father.”

  “Maybe you can go without them knowing,” Maggie suggested. “I mean, not incognito, clearly.” At this Beth began to choke out hysterical laughter. When she’d finished Maggie added, “If the church is big enough, maybe you can sit in the back and leave early?”

  “So I have to sneak into my ex-husband’s funeral with our daughter? How fucked-up is that?! I’m sorry, I’m not angry with you . . .”

  “I know you’re not.”

  Beth regained her composure. “Listen, Maggie, I’m all right now. Thanks for coming to the rescue.”

  Maggie grabbed Beth’s hands and kissed them. “You are one amazing woman.”

  PAUL’S FUNERAL TOOK place at Saint Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue and Eighty-Fourth Street. Beth and Jessie showed up late. They stayed to the back of the church, in a corner where they wouldn’t be noticed. Seated next to Paul’s mother was Jeannie, the necessary girlfriend in mourning. As in life, Paul’s death was veiled in lies.

  Raymond sat in the back of the church as well and gave a tearful hug to Beth and Jessie when they arrived. Sam and Isabel came with the baby and sat next to them. It was important to Beth that she and Jessie attend Paul’s funeral, but not important enough to ignore a grieving mother’s wishes. If nothing else, Beth wanted to respect the unfathomable tragedy of Mrs. Marchand having lost her son. All the lies in the world would not make it one bit less painful.

  Since speaking with Maggie, Beth had been turning her anger over in her head. Now, perched on the church pew, she realized it didn’t matter if Paul’s family recognized what she meant to Paul or vice versa. Their relationship had nothing to do with them. She didn’t even fully understand it, so how could anyone else? Now he was dead, and it was over anyway. Why would his family think any differently about her at this point? And what did it matter? For the first time since Paul had passed, Beth fully relaxed, relieved to have come to an understanding with herself. She sat back in the pew and closed her eyes, opening them again only when she felt Jessie grab her hand. They smiled sadly at each other, but no tears came.

  Jessie whispered, “Mom, I’m praying to God and dingoes for Paul.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Anna

  ANNA HELD A laundry basket in one arm and Henry in the other. Oscar trailed behind her, holding on to her sweatpants. In an attempt to get chores done and include the boys, everything took three times as long as it needed to.

  “Okay, guys, let’s dump the clean clothes over here on the couch and you can help me fold them!” she said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt. Before she had unburdened herself of the clean clothes and the boys, she stepped on a yellow Lego piece, bruising the arch of her foot.

  “Goddamn it!” she yelled between clenched teeth as she dropped the laundry basket and the clothes spilled onto the floor.

  “Why is this place such a mess all the time?” she asked no one, but accusing all. At her harsh tone Oscar began to cry, and Henry, not knowing what was going on, imitated his big brother with his own whining. Hopping on one foot, her two sons clinging to her and crying, Anna screamed at Jason, who sat at the kitchen table eating a bowl of granola and reading the latest issue of Wallpaper.

  “Can you do something to help me out here, please? Take the boys and do something useful?” She turned her frustration on Jason more and more now that she was home. His self-exemption from the morning’s drama made her hate him at that moment. How could he remain so calm when three-quarters of the family was melting down before his very eyes?

  “You do it to yourself, you know,” Jason said without even looking up from the pages of the magazine.

  Anna flashed him a look of enraged confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Let the housekeeper do the laundry,” Jason calmly explained. “Why do you insist on doing it yourself? And with the boys in tow? They were fine not helping with the laundry when you were at work every day.”

  Anna plopped down on the couch and rubbed her injured foot. Then she grabbed her boys and hugged them to apologize for her outburst.

  “You’re right. I have no idea what I’m doing . . .” Anna capitulated, speaking more to herself than to Jason. Because that’s how she felt now, all the time. She wanted to work, she wanted to spend time with her boys, but not knowing how to navig
ate between the two, she couldn’t even say for sure what she wanted. While being with the boys could be intensely satisfying—the good kind of boring!—she couldn’t reconcile how mind-numbing toddler-play was after the first twenty minutes.

  She and Jason had considered putting Oscar in preschool, but Anna didn’t want to confuse him with a message that now that she was home, he had to leave. She tried a few playgroups around the neighborhood but soon became fed up with the conversations with the other mothers. They were all stay-at-home moms—what she’d thought she wanted to be—but she didn’t connect with any of them. Anna was beginning to feel that her frustration was chronic.

  The birth of Sammy gave Anna a new mission. Her reinvented life was supposed to be all about avoiding missions and learning to enjoy an unstructured day. Instead, Anna ran into the city three times a week to lend a hand to Isabel, despite the fact she had never once asked for help. It occurred to Anna more than once that she was fleeing her own household to feel useful somewhere else, but she felt if she parted with her new source of autonomous purpose she would go mad. With Jenny there part-time, Anna had so much more time on her hands, and yet she filled every minute either tending to the household or, now that she had a nephew, helping Isabel. She wasn’t unhappy with any of the ways in which she spent her time; it’s just that she seemed incapable of organizing her days short of chaos no matter the actual obligation.

  THE THIRD WEEK into the New Year, Anna received an urgent message from Eric at RHM. They’d had a phone meeting once a week since Anna’s sabbatical started, but it was mostly to assure Eric that he was doing fine in her place. She’d prepped him well before taking leave and found him so efficient that she’d begun to wonder if she had effectively been replaced.

  Anna felt not a little pleased to hear the urgency in his voice. When she was working, those messages caused dread. Now, she couldn’t wait to get Eric on the phone. She called him back immediately.

  “Eric, what’s going on?”

  “We got a call from our manufacturer in Brazil. He said the matter was urgent but he refuses to speak with me about it. He said he needed to speak to you,” Eric explained. “When I told him you were out, he asked if he could speak with Beth but then said he’d rather speak with you instead. Sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Give me his number. I’ll call him.” Anna’s voice felt stronger than it had in a year. Just having a professional task in front of her gave her a jolt of energy. She waited until Jenny arrived before calling the supplier back.

  Anna learned that a flood had destroyed the textile plant from where RHM procured much of its fabric. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the advance orders for the company’s most lucrative line didn’t completely depend on the availability of the fabric manufactured at this specific site. The flood event required shifting operations to another plant while the original was being repaired. There would be a lag in deliveries unless decisions could be made posthaste. Anna knew they needed someone on the ground there immediately. If she decided not to go, this was the moment to step away completely and hand over the reins to Eric and Beth.

  After hanging up the phone, Anna grabbed her coat and bag and slipped out of the apartment. She headed across the river into Manhattan to catch the Lexington subway line north. She barely knew where she was heading, but her body pushed in the direction of the Upper East Side. Her mind raced—was it a betrayal to her children if she returned to work full-time, or was it an inevitable result of the last few months at home?

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Sackler Wing, which housed the Temple of Dendur, had always been one of the places in which Anna could think most clearly. With its reflecting pool and sloping windowed wall looking out on Central Park, it provided an oasis of calm in the otherwise overly stimulating city. Over the years, the room had become a reliable respite from the noise on the street and in her head. Her last visit to the museum did little for her peace of mind, but she was in a decidedly different place now, even if unsure where that was exactly.

  Anna climbed the grand marble stairway and entered through the main hallway. She climbed again to the center hall as she wound her way to the Sackler Wing. It had been years since she’d visited this part of the museum, yet her body followed some homing directive. She found a bench in the corner of the vast room. The echo off the marble reminded her of church, but the secular nature of the space allowed her mind its own expanse not bogged down in dogma. She listened to the click of the visitors’ footsteps on the floor and watched the light stream in from the three-story windows.

  ANNA HAD NEVER fully understood the exhortation to “live in the present.” She’d turn to what needed to be accomplished in the immediate or far future and prided herself on her planning—no wonder she was never satisfied in the moment, she began to realize. Her manic efficiency was more mania than efficiency and it basically sucked for everyone.

  Anna considered how her childhood of witnessing subordination to a husband made her feel like she needed to do and be everything as a result. But now she saw her way wound up being a different version of her perceived fates of her mother and aunts and grandmothers. In many ways, it was worse. Instead of expecting her husband to shoulder his part, she expected nothing. The self-imposed burden of each and every labor—from earning the money and controlling the household finances to planning the children’s meals for the week, scheduling their doctor’s appointments, and countless other domestic tasks—made her resentful. Jason was a ready and willing helpful partner, but she took on more than necessary out of a perverse, ill-conceived sense of empowerment. Anna had swung the pendulum too far in the other direction: walnuts alone were not all they were cracked up to be.

  As Anna watched the movements of the other visitors in the great room without really seeing any of them, she tried to visualize a new kind of life, a life where she could hold the conflicts of work and family simultaneously, without tipping the scales unhappily in one direction or another. Her ambition had been tainted with the realities of the sacrifices it demanded.

  Ambition was no longer a necessary part of the equation. She’d already succeeded. She worked at a company whose value systems very much reflected her own and she’d helped it get there successfully. As a devoted mother and wife to a true partner, she valued the personal part of her life more than anything else. Anna needed to accept that as fact. Her lifelong fight to define herself outside of the family dynamic into which she was born was made futile now that she found herself at the center of her own little family, one of her own creation. Those old laws held power over her only so long as she allowed them to. Why was she fighting unconditional love?

  Anna sighed now with the relief of feeling for the first time like she had nothing to prove, not in her life as a mother nor as a professional. Her own mother’s words had finally wormed their way into her emotional consciousness. She knew with certainty that placing blame for the miscarriage was just another deflection, a lie meant to take the place of surrendering control of something she could not let go.

  Sitting in the temple, she gradually began to see the flood in Brazil as her chance at renewal. Maybe this was the opportunity Anna needed to help her make the transition to a viable way of life. She could work out some creative ways of getting the job done. Since the next few months of work would entail some traveling, maybe she could make some of the trips with the family in tow. Jenny could travel with them if necessary. She could do much of the work at home as well. Surely Beth would be open to some kind of arrangement. Her job at RHM entailed finding creative solutions to make the business work within its means. Why wasn’t she applying these same skills to her own life? She had been so fierce about compartmentalizing her work life and her home life, but what if she no longer split one from the other? That was an Old World way of living. It may have worked for men like her father, but she was dividing herself in the process. The time had come for a new way of making it all possible.

  The light filterin
g through the massive museum windows had shifted from ambient winter daylight to the soft gray hue of the coming evening. Anna felt peaceful and rose with welcome determination to tackle what lay before her. She stretched her arms toward the vaulted ceiling and then headed home to discuss the news of the day with Jason.

  PART FOUR

  SUMMER

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Isabel, Beth, Anna, and Maggie

  “ICE-COLD MARTINIS ON the way, ladies!”

  “Make mine hot and dirty!” Beth hollered to Maggie from the living room.

  “Same for me!” Anna chimed in.

  “Only dirty for me. I don’t know how hot pepper gets metabolized in mother’s milk and I’m not sure I want to find out,” Isabel said with a frown. “Although, I do have plenty of the expressed milk in the fridge for the occasion . . . On second thought, make mine a hot and dirty one too!”

  “Are you sure? Or are you just taking the opportunity to say that aloud?” Maggie asked with a smirk.

  Maggie expertly mixed up a pitcher of vodka martinis while her two-month-old daughter slept soundly in the bouncy chair perched on the kitchen table. Isabel, seated on the small couch in the kitchen with a pillow on her lap, nursed her almost eight-month-old son, anticipating the first sip of a martini since before she became pregnant. Anna and Beth played hide-and-seek with Jessie, Lily, and the boys, generating shrieks of surprise and delight that drowned out the Dixie Chicks playing over the house speakers.

  Over a year after the protests at RHM, the roundtable on motherhood was to be aired on national television. For the occasion, the participants had gathered for a weekend at the Ducci bungalow in Montauk. The magazine format show would debut on Sunday morning, and the women had decided to make a little holiday of it. Children included, no husbands. Anna and Isabel arrived on Thursday night to prepare the house to accommodate four adults and six children varying in age from newbie to eight years old. By Friday evening, the old cedar-shingled house was bursting with activity.