The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

  “I’m sorry, too,” I said.

  Renee rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t do that,” said Caroline to Renee.

  Pointedly, Renee did it again.

  “I know it’s silly,” Caroline continued, shifting her attention fully to me, “but . . . I think about Luna a lot. I joined that thing Facebook. Have you? It’s so easy to look for someone. I looked for her, but maybe she changed her name. Or maybe she’s not on it yet.”

  “I think about Luna, too,” I said. I considered telling my sisters about my walks, my lists, my belief that Joe was leading me somewhere, that I would see him again someday. This was the place, this was the time to talk about these kinds of things. Finally together again, a blanket of otherworldly calm thrown over us by the wine and the dim lights. If I didn’t tell them now, I never would. But I stopped myself. It seemed too unreasonable, too self-important. Selfish, almost. Of course they missed Joe, too. Of course they had loved Joe, too. But hadn’t I loved him the most?

  “Please stop. I don’t want to talk about Luna,” said Renee. “I can’t talk about this.” Her face was drawn. As she pushed hair behind an ear, I saw her hand shake.

  I grabbed Renee’s hand to steady it. “How’s work?” I asked. “How’s Jonathan? Tell us.”

  Renee gave me a half smile. Jonathan’s retablos were selling well, almost too well, she said. He could barely keep up with production. He’d been invited to a residency in Rome by the American Academy; she would lecture at a hospital there, returning to New York every other week to consult with the lung transplant team. This was when we first heard the name Melanie Jacobs, thrown by Renee into the discussion as an example of how punishing the transplant surgery was on the human body, most of them ravaged already by disease and months of waiting.

  “Melanie was so funny,” Renee said. “Like stand-up-comic funny. She’d had cystic fibrosis since she was thirteen, and I suppose humor was how she coped.” Renee paused. “I hate losing any patient, but I really hated losing Melanie.”

  There was a certain degree of melancholy in her voice, but I didn’t view it as extraordinary. It had been too long since I’d communicated with Renee for me to judge what was normal professional concern and what suggested something deeper. Later I came to understand that Melanie Jacobs had been different for Renee.

  Renee told us that she and Jonathan had recently bought the apartment next door and were planning to knock through the dividing wall, expand Jonathan’s studio, add a guest bedroom. And they were building a sauna, a small room of cedar.

  “You guys will have to come over,” Renee said, leaning forward, grabbing my hand. “I got so hooked on them when we were in Finland last year. Twenty minutes on a winter’s day. It’s life-changing.”

  “You’re lucky, Renee,” Caroline said then, almost like an accusation. “I mean—I know how hard you work. Lucky maybe isn’t the right word.”

  Renee shrugged. “I guess I am,” she said. “I’ve been very lucky. In some ways.”

  Caroline rushed on. “I mean, I know I’ve been lucky, too. I love my kids. They’re healthy, they’re happy. But ever since Joe, I have this dread, even more than before. Worse than the normal parenting dread. This terror. What if something happens? It’s like having your heart walking around outside your body, no protection, just at the mercy of the world. It’s awful.” Caroline laughed. “I mean, don’t worry. I’m on Xanax. I’m not going to lock them in a closet or anything.”

  “Can the kids come to my next reading?” I asked. “KGB Bar in two weeks.” They were all teenagers now, frequent visitors to the city, Caroline had told us, urbane and generally bored with life in the suburbs.

  “Yes, they’d love it,” Caroline said, and then she grimaced. “I can’t believe I’m the only one with kids.”

  “Don’t look at me,” I said, and held up my hands. “Will’s already had the snip.” I made a scissoring motion with my hand, and Caroline laughed.

  We both turned to Renee, but she wasn’t smiling. “No,” she said, and slowly shook her head. “Jonathan and I decided a long time ago. We’re too busy. And besides, I think becoming a parent would limit me.” Renee said these words carefully, thoughtfully. She was looking at Caroline with a clinical, cold eye. An appraisal of all the decisions Caroline had made and all that Caroline stood for.

  Caroline said nothing, but her cheeks flushed red as though she’d been slapped. There seemed in her a sliver of shakiness, as though one side of her face had been drawn by a child. It would never disappear, never entirely. Today marked the first time I became aware of it.

  Renee must have seen it, too. “No.” She held out a hand to Caroline. “I don’t mean it that way. You’ve . . . you’ve adapted to it. The kids are so wonderful. For you the sacrifices are worth it.”

  Renee was just digging the hole deeper, I thought. Caroline still looked stunned. I worried that she might cry or run out of the restaurant, that we would return to how we’d been—separate, silent, the three of us alone. But Caroline looked down at her lap, shook her head, laughed.

  “Renee,” she said, and she was truly smiling, a wisdom there. A tolerance. “Becoming a mother is the most expansive thing you can do. But it’s an experience you can’t really explain. I won’t even try.”

  Then she turned to me and clapped her hands fast and said, “I’m going to plant a tree. A tree for Joe.”

  “What kind?” I asked.

  “Lilac,” Caroline said. “It reminds me of Joe. It’s tall with these big clumps of flowers that smell so good. Purple and green. Those were the Mavericks’ colors, remember?”

  I nodded. Of course I remembered. Joe in the Mavericks uniform, tight green pants, purple baseball cap with that slanting M in bright green. Yes, a lilac tree. That was perfect.

  We left the restaurant, blinking into the light of the day as though exiting a casino, recognizing what we had almost lost. We swayed a bit, from the wine and emotion, and then formed a tripoint hug in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Jesus, ladies,” a man barked as he walked around us. We ignored him.

  And so three weeks after our lunch, on a beautiful morning in June, Will and I met Jonathan and Renee at Grand Central Station, and together we took the train to Hamden.

  Caroline served us all wild salmon and a salad made from lettuces she and the kids had grown in their own raised beds in the yard. We sat outside, the long patio table set with Caroline’s colorful napkins and yellow tablecloth. There was wine, lemonade, a cake—Joe’s cake—that Noni and Caroline had baked together. Louis, Beatrix, and Lily threw a Frisbee and helped Caroline in the kitchen.

  That year I had published my first book of poetry, The Lasts, and it had done well, at least by the low-achieving standards for a poetry book. As part of the tree ceremony, I read one poem—“The Last Tree Climbed”—about the locust in Noni’s front yard that, at the age of twenty-eight, the last Christmas before the accident, I had climbed with Joe on a bright, cold day.

  And then Caroline, Renee, and I took turns with the shovel, digging the hole, maneuvering the young lilac into place. Already it had begun to flower, not the weighty purple clumps Caroline had been hoping for—those would come in later years—but even these delicate blossoms produced the most intoxicating scent.

  Chapter 17

  For a decade this was how we were: Renee and Jonathan in their West Village apartment, both of them sought after in their fields, frequent travelers, spending layover weekends in Berlin or London or Hong Kong. They became glamorous, in a sensible, intellectual way, she in medicine, he in design. They spoke at benefit galas and before groups of the young and talented. The travel and work, the possessions and experience—Renee had been lucky, so much luckier than she ever imagined she’d be. Caroline was right.

  Will and I remained determined in our careers and committed in our marriage. We moved out of New York City at last and into a farmhouse, of all things, in the quaint commuter town of Croton-on-Hudson. Deer in the backyard,
snowshoes at Christmas, a refrigerator in our basement that held only wine. I continued work on The Love Poem, the book that would define my career, publishing some pieces first on Instagram, where I found a vibrant poetry community and, over time, hundreds of thousands of followers. After Homer’s retirement, I was made editorial director of ClimateSenseNow!, and I felt at home in the role.

  Caroline began acting in small regional productions, and then Off-Off-Off-Broadway plays. She excelled. She amazed us. In Playboy of the Western World, she developed an Irish brogue that convinced us all, and the following summer she turned coquettish and sly as Blanche DuBois. The work paid nothing, of course, but Nathan supported them financially. What else could he do? This was his family. For the first years after the divorce, Caroline cycled through a supply of boyfriends, all of them without fail similar in disposition and looks to Nathan, until she met Raffi: bearded, sarcastic, a chef with a belly who one night prepared for us a plate of pappardelle with spicy sausage and mushrooms that to this day appears in my dreams. Louis went to Wesleyan, Beatrix to Berkeley, Lily to Hamden College on a faculty admission, Caroline confessed. All three of them kind, generous young people who provided their parents with a great degree of joy without ever intending to do so.

  It was in the year 2022 that Renee woke one morning to a call from the fertility clinic. She was alone. It was a Monday. That semester Jonathan was teaching at RISD and spent three nights per week in Providence.

  “Dr. Skinner, you’re listed as the contact for a collection of oocytes harvested from Melanie Jacobs. We check every five years to clear space and renew the storage agreement. Are you planning to use them?” The nurse’s voice was calm, routine, but it provoked in Renee a sudden heat that rose to her cheeks.

  Renee was fifty-two years old. When she looked in the mirror, she greeted the lines, the bagging around the upper cheeks, the shadowed creases with a clinical eye. Yes, she was aging. Some might even call her old. There on the phone, the nurse waiting patiently on the line, Renee considered the question of Melanie’s eggs. When Carl came to see her that day, the idea of potential motherhood had shocked her. Scared her, even. A heart walking around outside your body. So soon after Joe’s death, Renee knew she could not sustain that kind of vulnerability. It would have shut her down.

  But now Renee could assess the idea with distance, with a certain passivity and recognition of her own strength. The limitation problem no longer worried her; she’d already surpassed all the goals she’d set for herself. It had taken decades, but Renee no longer felt reverberations from the Pause. She no longer ached for Joe every single day. And there, as she stood in her kitchen, clutching the phone to her ear, an image of Melanie Jacobs came to Renee, shocking in its specificity. An exchange they’d had soon after Melanie had been admitted full-time to the hospital: Renee leaning in with her stethoscope to listen to Melanie’s heart, their faces nearly touching. She saw the lift of Melanie’s eyebrows, the collection of small brown hairs, plucked into thin parentheses, and there, just beneath the arch, a white scar on the left brow bone. Fell as a kid, Melanie explained, touching it with an index finger, the nail painted a cherry red. Split it wide open on the curb. My parents were so worried, but look at it, just a little thing.

  Now in the kitchen, Renee saw again that stubborn scar, no longer than the white cotton end of a swab. She heard again Melanie’s cracked, husky voice.

  Something inside my sister shifted: it was a tectonic, abrupt change that fell upon Renee altogether and all at once. With an urgency that defied all common sense, all rational thought, Renee wanted a baby, Melanie’s baby. Those eggs. Good from bad. Intimate recycling.

  “Yes,” Renee said to the clinic nurse. “I am planning to use them. When’s your next appointment?”

  * * *

  Three months later Renee lifted groceries onto the counter. Her shoulder ached. Her muscles were strong, her body whole, but the parts did not fit as smoothly as they once had. The joints stuck, the bones complained. Renee, Caroline, and I often discussed the indignity of it, the ambush of aging. A woman’s body had so much more to it than a man’s, so many more curves and crannies where gravity did its awful work and so quickly! All at once you had fallen.

  It was June. Today was a rare day, with no call shift, no meetings, no events. Renee had woken late, eaten a bagel, and walked to Citarella, where she roamed the aisles, examining each item carefully before placing it in her basket. Today Jonathan was due home from a sourcing trip to Bangkok.

  Today was the day.

  Jonathan had consented to the use of his sperm. Consented, after months of cajoling, counseling, discussion. He agreed, he signed the papers, he jerked off into a plastic cup. (“The porn just made me feel old,” Jonathan had said. “It was all stuff I’d already seen.”) And then, little by little, day by day, he withdrew. First from their apartment as he took on more international work, more far-flung commissions and residencies, and then from her life: fewer phone calls, e-mails, meals together, events. He was so busy with the retablo commissions. Clients flew him to summer homes on Harbour Island to take measurements. They arrived at the initial consultation with personal assistants, girlfriends or boyfriends half their age. One with a small Pomeranian that sat on the man’s lap throughout the meeting and watched Jonathan, he later recounted to Renee, as though he would soon be eating Jonathan’s face for dinner.

  Renee remembered once early in their relationship watching Jonathan work on a chair, a captain’s chair made of cherrywood with curved armrests, a low broad seat, a back that carried the swoop of a wave. This had been in those first months after Joe’s death, when Renee saw herself as a walking tender bruise. But as Jonathan sanded the wood in clean, even strokes, moving in the direction of the grain, his face intent with the seriousness of the task, Renee had forgotten, for a few precious minutes, her own distress. The client was a friend of theirs, a woman Renee knew from high school in Bexley, not a close friend but someone who had talked to Noni months earlier about wanting to commission a piece, something special, she said, for her husband. The couple had come to Joe’s memorial service. Jonathan had worked for months on that chair. When the woman first saw it, she burst into tears.

  Recently Jonathan had finished a large retablo for a Greek shipping magnate, a ten-foot-tall wooden secular altarpiece with a series of carvings and small sculptures that evoked the life and family of the client. Finished, it operated more as extravagant spectacle than furniture or art, which Renee supposed was the client’s intention. These were the kinds of things Jonathan did now. Gone were the tables and chairs and tall, elegant mantelpieces. Nothing utilitarian, nothing useful, only more and more of these personalized, quasi-ceremonial pieces, enormous and, to Renee’s mind, reflective of little more than his clients’ own outsized narcissism.

  It was nice, Renee admitted, to have the money. Her medical-school loans gone. The entire brownstone theirs. They traveled widely and well, when their schedules allowed, and had offered to help Noni on numerous occasions (What about a nicer house? You and Danette don’t have to stay at youth hostels anymore!) though she’d always refused.

  Renee glanced at the clock. She pulled the milk from the bag. She set the glowing red tomatoes onto the sill. Today the egg (Melanie’s beautiful, special egg) would meet Jonathan’s rangy, lab-pummeled sperm, and two would become one. Would become four, sixteen, thirty-two. On and on and on. In five days Renee’s body would receive the cluster of cells (the embryo, the nurse informed her, the size of a petit pois) and she would be pregnant.

  Renee placed an eggplant into the vegetable drawer. She put a hand on the refrigerator door. There were still things that could go wrong. Things could always go wrong.

  A door slammed. Jonathan was home.

  Renee had bought flowers, a great bouquet of yellow and red tulips. She took them to the door to greet him. “Jonathan,” she called, and already he was there in the kitchen doorway. His eyes caught on the flowers, and instantly Renee felt silly. This
day was nothing. It might be nothing. Why mark it with so much fanfare? She placed the bouquet beside the sink.

  “Hi,” Renee said. “How was the flight?”

  “Long.” He glanced at the bags on the counter. “Did you get wine?”

  “Yes. A nice pinot gris. Harold recommended it.”

  “Great. Tonight, you know. The thing at Nan’s.”

  “Yes. I’m not going. Remember?”

  “Why?”

  “I need to rest. I can’t drink.”

  “Renee.”

  His voice was solemn and she paused before answering. “What?”

  “I don’t want this.” Jonathan was still wearing his jacket. His packed suitcase was still in his hand.

  “They’re just flowers,” Renee said, although she knew what he meant. The only surprise, she realized now, was that it had taken this long.

  “I mean. This. The egg. The baby.”

  “It’s not a baby yet.”

  “It will be. You heard what they said. You’re a great candidate.”

  “Still. Anything could happen.”

  “I don’t want it. The change, the disruption. I like us the way we are.”

  Rene studied Jonathan: graying, a shadow of stubble, older than she was. He still wore the same glasses, the same types of shoes as he had when they first met. Jonathan was loyal, there was no denying that, when the subject of his loyalty remained constant. But Renee: she had changed.

  “We’ve been over this, Jonathan. With Betsy. With Dr. Petarro. This is what I need. But if you want to go, go.” Renee waved him away and turned back to the sack of groceries; there were still items to unpack.

  There followed a minute or two of silence from Jonathan. Renee refused to look at him as she moved around the kitchen, finishing up. It was his choice to make. She would not try to convince him. On some questions the need for persuasion meant you had already lost.