One afternoon he was in the local organic grocery, trying to find anything he wanted to eat, when the blood drained straight out of his brain, like someone pulled the plug. He woke up on the floor, unknown Floridians gazing down at him.
Tory must have been in the store, too, unbeknownst to him, because suddenly she elbowed through the crowd, in the yellow sundress, and knelt next to him.
Instantly she took command. “I know him. He has a heart condition. Please dial 911.” She gave them the name of his cardio, to tell the dispatcher.
To help him breathe, she undid the top buttons of his shirt. She started to cry, silently, not asking for attention, just tears sliding down her cheeks.
He squeezed her arm. “I’ll be okay. This has been happening lately.”
But he held on to her hand, and when the paramedics came, they let her climb into the ambulance. It seemed to steady his heart, just touching her.
It was already dark when they released him from the ER. Both their cars were still back at the organic grocery, and he called a cab to take them there.
But instead of going to her car, she climbed into his, and he drove to their favorite restaurant from the year before, an unpretentious Cuban seafood place, brightly lit, with a dance floor, live band, and local fresh fish. He wasn’t hungry, but it was good to sit beside her in a wooden booth.
After they ordered, he was overwhelmed suddenly by Tory’s presence, the warm sweet smell of her hair, the pulse he could see beating in the tender skin of her neck. He loved the eagerness in her face as she looked around, watching a pretty waitress dance with customers between orders, two-stepping, short skirt swirling to show off a slender waist and pretty legs, almost as nice as Tory’s own. They had often watched her the year before.
“She’s still here,” Tory said happily, tears dried now, leaving salt tracks on her cheeks.
Why had he denied himself this simple pleasure, sitting with her in a restaurant, holding her hand? It was like he’d sent himself to hell. Well, maybe he had done his time. Maybe now he could be with her and get the demons to leave him alone.
“I’ve missed you,” he said, realizing it was true.
Tory studied his face. “You’re not going back to Abby again, are you?”
He shook his head, though it made him sad. “No, I don’t think so.”
Gracefully she slid one small arm around his waist and pulled him close against her taut body.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m coming home with you.”
Sixteen
Abby knew she and Ray were not like other couples, any more than his heart was like other hearts or his mind like other minds. It didn’t matter what they said in the heat of the moment. It wouldn’t even matter if they got divorced, and in December, when she came back from Miami, she had restarted the process, just to straighten out who owned which house and simplify their taxes—though she heard nothing from her lawyer after that for months. But Tory had gotten into Harvard, and once she went, Abby knew he would stop feeling guilty and come back to her, because he always had before. She could give him time.
And they were still deep in conversation, texting every day, about little things and big. It was the same relationship he’d had with Tory before he lived with her, and now he was having it with Abby. Surely it was going to lead somewhere.
“I’m seeing Tory again,” he mentioned in March. “It’s nice to have someone to go out to dinner with.”
Abby knew he meant that’s all it was—“seeing” someone meant just that, not sex. It was a misunderstanding they once had, back in Morgantown, when they first started going out. He told her he sometimes saw the girl in the pink angora hat, and with her Berkeley instincts, Abby assumed he meant he sometimes slept with her.
When Ray had realized that, he was horrified. “You thought I would just two-time you like that? What kind of jerks do you know?”
So she wasn’t worried now. Tory would be gone soon, and it was okay that she and Ray were friends. Abby envied him, having someone to go out to dinner with.
Abby’s book came out, the cover design a very cute goat in spectacles, and she flew to New York for the book party and a reading. They were small events, nothing compared to the hoopla that surrounded Ray, the big audiences, other poets showing up.
But several of her grad school friends who taught around New York were there, and Nell took a cab down from Columbia with an armload of white lilies. Afterward they all went to a bar and talked for hours. Her friends wanted to know what was up with her marriage, and Abby explained that they were in a sort of limbo.
“The girl got into grad school at Harvard, and he’s told me that will be the end of it, when she goes. He wanted to make sure she was all right and on a better career path. She was his student, after all. And when she’s out of the picture, he and I will see. We’re still married, technically. He can’t seem to face the divorce. He ripped up the papers my lawyer sent him.”
Her friends murmured skeptically, most of them with marriages that were more conventional, husbands at home right then with the kids. But she did not try to convince them, and they went on to talk of something else.
There were things she could not explain to her friends or anyone. Asleep, in her dreams, Ray was always there. Sometimes they tried to find a place to be alone, so they could make love. It seemed to be something her mind required, and it could be unbearable to wake up to a world where he was not. But if she put her feet on the floor and kept moving through space, she found a way to make it till bedtime again.
In April, she was in Berkeley, impatiently counting off the weeks till Tory left for Harvard, when Ray texted her. “What’s taking so long with the divorce?”
Abby was surprised, after all his resistance. “Did you fill out the paperwork?”
“Yes, and sent it back.”
She called her lawyer’s office, and they said he had returned the second set of papers but didn’t fill them out or include his financial documents.
She wrote back to Ray. “They need your bank account and credit card statements.”
“Fuck that,” he wrote. “None of their goddamn business.”
“Hey, it was your idea,” she replied. “I didn’t want to stop being married. If you can’t fill out the papers, get Tory to do it.”
After all, Tory was around, helping him, being his nurse, and she was implicated here. Let her help, if Ray wanted to go through with it now.
“No way,” he texted back. “It’s not her mess. It’s ours.”
“True,” Abby conceded. “All right, send me two months of your pay stubs, credit card and bank statements. I’ll get new forms and fill them out.”
It was just another of the million small tasks she had always done for him. She helped him spell, proofread his manuscripts, balanced the checkbook, paid the bills, made his doctors’ appointments and travel arrangements. She was his interface with the world. He needed her. That was all this meant.
It took him months to get around to it. It was June before he sent the documents, and she went over them. The credit card bills listed charges to a hair salon she didn’t know he used, though of course he had to cut his hair. There was also a purchase at a women’s clothing store, but he was generous and liked to buy presents. There was a charge from a dog groomer, but he loved dogs and sometimes took care of Emile.
One set of items puzzled her: restaurant bills on the same night, in Miami and Chicago, where she knew Ray had gone to give a reading. Grocery store charges in Miami, too, while he was away. Did he give the girl a copy of his credit card?
She called him up, and it went to voicemail. “I did the paperwork and got the figures they wanted off your statements. But wow, Ray, speaking as your accountant, I have to say, you thought I was bad? That girl is into you for a lot of bucks. I thought you were just going out to dinner with her? Good thing she’s leaving soon. Your bank account could use a break.”
Cal had given Abby a generous travel grant, and in July s
he flew to Paris to join Nell, who was over for the whole summer. Nell had lived there for six years, working as a translator, and Abby had heard her on the phone, bursting into rapid French or Italian, as she spoke to friends on the far side of the world.
Now those friends lent Nell places to stay, big enough for Abby, too. After weeks trolling around Paris, they took a train to Tuscany, rented a car, and stayed in a tiny stone village surrounded by olive trees, with an icy swimming hole in a nearby creek. They stayed in a villa on the Tyrrhenian Sea and swam in warm blue water, before moving on to Venice and a top-floor flat with roof-deck that belonged to a Spanish psychoanalyst. They explored little-known canals with tiny shops, avoiding the crowds from moored cruise ships, who followed predictable routes, like ants. They rode the vaporetto, ate wonderful food, and watched men blow glass.
It helped pass the time, while she waited for Tory to go, and Ray to come to his senses. While she was there, he sent reports of his progress. In mid-August, he packed a U-Haul and drove Tory from Miami to Cambridge, where he helped her get set up.
So when it was time to fly back to the States, Abby did so with new hope. She and Ray texted more freely now, since he’d gotten the girl out of his life, in a way he could live with—in a good grad program, far from Whitney Ames. Every time they texted without mention of her, Abby breathed more easily. Tory had poisoned every conversation for too long, and now she was gone.
One beautiful September morning, Abby decided to climb onto the roof of their building. A rare hurricane in LA had caused a rainstorm in Berkeley, and water had cascaded from the gutters, which meant they were filled with leaves. Ray was the one who usually cleaned them out, but she did not suppose there was any trick to it.
The air was super clear, washed clean, as she crawled up the rickety fire escape, carrying a garbage bag. Glancing down from four floors up gave her vertigo, but these days, her balance was good. She was running and riding well, and she felt strong.
When she reached the wide flat roof, the sun was bright, and a panorama opened up—blue bay, San Francisco white on its hill, white fog near the red bridge. She was so high up, it seemed nothing stood between her and Japan.
She had brought her phone, and she took a picture and texted it to Ray. “Great view from the roof. I didn’t know. You kept that to yourself.”
He instantly replied, “Abby, be careful! I’m calling Joel to help you right now.”
“No need,” she wrote serenely. “I have on tennis shoes with sticky soles. This is more fun than reading inside on a beautiful morning. How are you feeling, honey?”
“Crappy. Lots of fatigue and pain. Had to go to the ER again last night.”
Alarmed, she wrote, “Maybe you need to go somewhere else, get another opinion. Like the Mayo Clinic or somewhere in New York. I’ll do some research on heart doctors.”
She imagined flying wherever he went, to give him support.
“These guys are all right,” he texted back. “They’re roughriders. I like their attitude. They don’t get discouraged easily. And I’m okay. Teaching, running the goddamn program, making progress with the snakes.”
When they stopped writing, she examined the roof. It was slightly sloped, so that water ran to the front corners and into chutes connected to downspouts. But the sycamores along the street were taller than the building now, the chutes easily clogged with brown leaves the supposedly drought-resistant trees shed all year long.
She lay on the gravel in one corner, reached down the chute, and scooped out soggy leaves. When she had gotten all she could, she attacked the one on the other side, filled the bag, and decided to airmail it to the driveway. Standing at the parapet on the roof’s edge, looking gingerly over, she waited till no one was on the sidewalk, then let it fly—it sailed for a long time before the whump. Feeling like a kid dropping water balloons on passersby, she went down to empty it into the yard-waste bin.
On her way back into the building, she noticed the mail had come, including a thick manila envelope addressed in Ray’s printing. Pleased, she sat on a retaining wall by the driveway and opened it.
Inside were the divorce papers. He had signed them and enclosed a note.
Abby,
We were legendary and heroic. We were a love for the ages. I will
be sorry forever for what happened to us, and I will always love you.
You know that, right?
Ray
Her heart clanged dangerously—that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Nothing so final as that, an elegy for them—surely it was not so certain they were done. There would be another act, as there had always been. They fought, they made up. They broke up, they got back together. It wasn’t possible that it could end.
But, yes, they could get divorced. It was just a property arrangement, a legal deal. Refusing to feel anything, she signed the papers, slid them in the envelope her lawyer had provided, walked to the nearest mailbox, and dropped them in.
Three weeks later, the papers came back, covered with legal stamps. The divorce had been declared October 1.
“So we’re divorced,” she texted wistfully, and he wrote back right away.
“Yes, Beanie. I am so sorry I caused you pain. I will be sorry forever.”
At least he wasn’t with Tory. So long as that was true, and he wrote her every day, there must be hope.
Her right knee hurt, and it was hard to run. She had changed doctors, to a practice in the suburbs east of Berkeley, because the hospitals were better there, and she had a smart woman doctor now. When she went in about the knee, she surprised herself by crying in the examining room.
“You should be dating,” the doctor said. “You’re still cute. Why don’t you take a class? You’ll meet someone. You’ll do better then.”
Her friends all said the same thing, when she talked to them. “Are you dating yet?”
Dating—what a concept. And date who, anyway?
“What about Jacob?” Ginger asked. Ginger’s husband worked out at the same gym as Jacob, and he said Jacob’s latest live-in girlfriend was gone.
Abby laughed. After all the accusations, it could be twisted revenge. But she could see it only in relation to Ray. She had no desire to solve the mystery firsthand, of why women got close to Jacob and then ran.
No, to date she’d have to find someone she was attracted to, who wanted her, a woman of sixty-three, when every man she knew hooked up with someone much younger whenever he was free—or even when he wasn’t. She had read somewhere that a woman was more likely to be struck by lightning than to marry after fifty.
“Go online,” suggested her horse trainer, who was on about her twentieth romance from dating sites. Sometimes her current guy showed up at the barn, and two months later, there would be another one. She was attractive and barely forty, but even so she didn’t make the process sound like fun: “I’m so sick of myself, I could die,” she had told Abby, about all the dinner dates, selling herself, how wonderful she was.
And Abby was pretty sure it would be worse for a woman her age. She rode with two reasonably good-looking women in their fifties, Bunny and Jennifer, who had tried it. One morning after a jumping lesson, she went for a trail ride with them. As their horses ambled on a dirt road past live oaks and fields of tall green grass, Abby asked them how the dating was going.
“Christ, they’re all such losers,” Bunny said. “They lie about their ages.”
Jennifer agreed. “They never use a current picture. You meet the guy, and his supposedly black hair is white. Or he’s bald, and he has a huge potbelly.”
“And if you meet one you like even a little bit?” Bunny said. “He’ll never call you back. Even the fat bald ones don’t usually, after they meet you for coffee, because they all want a woman twenty years younger than they are. I’d have to go for a guy who was close to eighty, and I could end up being a caretaker for a virtual stranger.”
Jennifer turned in the saddle and looked at Bunny. “But you had a boyfriend for a while, d
idn’t you, that cherry farmer in the San Joaquin?”
“Oh, yes, and he broke up with me in a text message. He also claimed to be sixty-one, and he was in his seventies. His photos were about twenty years old.”
Jennifer started to laugh. “Last week I was on a coffee date with a lawyer, and he took a call from another woman. He told her he was in a meeting, like it was professional.”
“Get this!” Bunny cried. “I saw a profile of a guy who claimed he was fifty-seven, though God knows how old he really was. And how old do you think he said his ideal match would be?”
Abby knew the answer already. “Thirty-six?”
“Twenty-nine?” Jennifer guessed.
“No! Eighteen to thirty-three!”
Abby went to a knee surgeon and scheduled arthroscopy for a torn meniscus. Late October, day of her surgery, she decided to bike to the hospital, sixteen miles to the east, since she would get no exercise for a few days afterward. Cycling across town, she carried the bike onto a BART train and took it through the tunnel under the Berkeley ridge. Getting off on the other side, she rode east in cool morning air, on paved trails beside canals, past dog walkers.
The surgery was easy, just two quarter-inch incisions, and they gave her the drug that Michael Jackson used to sleep. It burned clean, and she woke up clearheaded after an hour. Ginger showed up with her pickup truck, hoisted the bike into the back, and took her home. Abby was on crutches, leg in a stiff brace, and she had to scoot backward on her butt up the carpeted stairs. She was supposed to stay in bed, but only for three days.
Next morning she was reading, when Ray texted her.
“Bean, I’m in the ICU but doing okay.” He sounded normal, and he’d been in the hospital so many times since he went to Miami, she wasn’t worried.
“I had knee surgery yesterday, so I’m in bed, too. Want to talk on the phone?” It seemed like they could keep each other company.
“Knee replacement?” he wrote back.
“No, nothing serious, just arthroscopy. I’ll be up by Sunday.”
She heard nothing back. But the pain meds kept her mellow, and she indulged them and slept, till four o’clock that afternoon, when Walt called from Cambridge.
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