The Opposite of Love

by Julie Buxbaum

  “Thank you for telling Andrew to wait, Grandpa,” I say, and adjust the tiara so that it sits straight on his head.

  “Thank you for waiting for me to be ready. I’m going to be okay now,” I say, and fix the blanket so that he is warm and tucked in tight. To keep his molecules in place.

  “I’m ready if you are,” I say, my voice cheery, like we are about to do something fun, like jump off a diving board.

  I move the uneaten tray of food into the hallway.

  “I miss you already,” I say, when Grandpa Jack doesn’t respond and his eyes no longer focus.

  “I love you,” I say, again and again.

  Later, when my grandfather slips back into sleep, we somehow know it’s for the last time. The air feels different. Heavier and expectant. We listen and wordlessly count his breaths. One two. One two. One two. Am I ready for him to stop? He’s ready. He’s ready. One two. One two. I’m ready.

  When Grandpa Jack stops breathing, when that two does not come, the room is still. A suspension of time and sound, as if the universe takes a moment to adjust to the loss of another soul. It is the end of a symphony all over again.

  And though my father and I want to do anything else, anything but wait here—run from the room, scream, yell, maybe even clap—we don’t; instead, we force ourselves to sit and absorb the silence.

  Forty

  It’s about six-thirty in the morning, and although it’s the dead of winter, the sun still shines through the windows, the light sharp and cutting. It slices the floor into long strands of pointed triangles. If I were to walk across the room, I would go from shade to light, light to shade. I am tempted to get up and wander back and forth to warm and cool the bottoms of my feet. To stand up next to the bed and watch Andrew breathe.

  “Hey there,” Andrew says, when he wakes up and notices that my eyes are also open. I am curled up against him, with my back to his stomach, and Andrew rests his head on his elbow so that he can see my face. He takes his other arm and tucks me in closer.

  “Hey,” I say in a whisper, and smile up at him. “It’s early. We should go back to sleep.”

  “You okay?” he asks, and kisses me lightly on the bit of my neck that rests just below his jaw.

  “Yeah.” I close my eyes and open them again. “I am.”

  “I wish I was there with you the other day.” He pulls the covers over my shoulder. A protective gesture, one that says I would have tried to make it hurt less.

  “I know, and thanks. But it was probably better that it was just my dad and me. Just us saying good-bye.” I still whisper out of respect for the early hour, the word “good-bye” too harsh to say with force.

  “I understand.” Andrew puts his nose to the spot where he kissed just a few moments ago. The movement makes me wonder if he remembers by smell. Is this his way of memorizing me?

  “Are you ready for today?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “At least your suit fits this time. Hopefully no wedgies.”

  “No, no wedgies. And this time you’ll be there with me. That’ll make it easier.” I lean up to give him a kiss on his shadow of a beard.

  And then I close my eyes and go back to sleep, for just a little while longer.

  I don’t listen for Andrew’s breath, though. I know it’s there.

  The funeral, unlike every other funeral I’ve ever been to—and I’ve been to quite a few in my day—has a distinctly upbeat vibe. Yes, we are in a church in Connecticut and we wear black suits and we hear talk of Resurrection and the like, but the tone isn’t particularly sad. Instead, all of us are abiding by an unspoken agreement that today should be a rockin’ celebration of Grandpa Jack’s life.

  My father arranges to have music playing throughout the ceremony. Music from the 1940s, the kind that makes you want to slap your knee in time to the beat. The church fills with trumpet and trombone and piano. With wistfulness and energy and optimism. It plays softly in the background, loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to distract. It’s music unafraid of silence or of sentimentality or of mourning.

  The place is crowded, so much so that a group of people is forced to stand behind the pews, cooling the back of their heads against the church walls. I recognize some of them, but not all. From the predominance of white hair, I can tell they are mostly friends of Grandpa Jack from Riverdale. When the minister finishes his eulogy, he invites up anyone who would like to say a few words about my grandfather. A line immediately forms up the aisle to the pulpit.

  The first to speak is an older gentleman with a bush of nose hair. He recites the stand-up routine that Grandpa Jack performed at the talent show in Riverdale, recounting it word for word. The jokes are childish and simple—an Indian had a cup of tea before he went to bed, and in the morning he drowned in his teepee!—but he hits every punch line. Teepee! The laughter and the clapping make the air lighter in here. Afterward, he walks slowly back down the aisle to Maryann, who greets him with a kiss on the lips.

  When it’s my turn behind the pulpit, it becomes clear that all that eulogy practice in my head did little to prepare me for the real thing. I say a few things about Grandpa Jack, about how much he was loved and how much he will be missed, though my words are neither poetic nor original. I don’t say anything that hasn’t been said before about someone loved and lost. I tell the crowd that he was loved more, though—more, more, more—but it sounds unfairly flimsy. There are things I want to say but don’t: that Grandpa Jack was both my father and my mother during the times when I felt like I had neither. That even as an adult, I believed that Grandpa Jack was my own personal superhero. That I will not say damn in front of children.

  It doesn’t matter, though, that I don’t speak these words out loud. They are still mine to keep.

  “I met Jack when I was an old woman, after my husband died, when I thought a huge part of me had died too,” Ruth says, when it’s her turn at the pulpit. “But Jack changed that for me. He taught me that there is humor in loss and even in death. That those we love stay with us long after they are gone, in a form beyond memory and in a form beyond consciousness. Thank you for teaching me that and for making me laugh every day.”

  When Ruth says “Good-bye, Jack, we know you are now here within us,” the entire congregation bends its head forward and repeats it with her again. It becomes a collective wish, a prayer, a farewell.

  A man with a combed mustache and a green polyester suit steps up to the pulpit after Ruth. He looks nervous to be in front of the crowd, and he takes out a handkerchief to wipe sweat away from his temples.

  “I work in the diner in Riverdale,” he says in heavily accented English. “Jack was the most generous person I have ever met. He was always friendly and always left a twenty-five percent tip. Always. Except when he just came in for coffee. Then he would leave double the price of the cup. A one hundred percent tip. Even when he stopped recognizing me, he still remembered to give twenty-five percent. Let me tell you, there are few people in this world who always leave a twenty-five percent tip, even when it’s raining. Did you know people tip less on rainy days? They do. Once he left me thirty dollars on a two-dollar bill. It was snowing. I thought it had to be a mistake, so I ran after him to give it back. He said that there was no mistake. That he had won it in a poker game and that he knew I was putting my Irena through college. He said, ‘Here, take the thirty bucks. I like to pass things along.’ I am proud to have known someone who likes to pass things along. I will miss him. Thank you for your time.”

  There it is. The perfect eulogy. Better than anything I have ever scripted in my own head. The invisible hand behind all those pickles and cups of coffee and strawberry milk shakes, someone I have met over a hundred times and never met at all—it is he who captures for the congregation who Grandpa Jack was. Someone who likes to pass things along. Someone whom we are all proud to have known.

  When it is my dad’s turn to speak, he doesn’t go up to the pulpit. Instead, he relies on the music to sp
eak for him and turns the volume up as high as it will go. He plays a medley of my grandfather’s favorites—Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, the Ink Spots, a little Duke Ellington. We all close our eyes to listen, and for a moment it feels like the entire place is huddled around an old radio. Together, we are all young and scared and hopeful. Already nostalgic for today.

  After the funeral, my dad offers to take Ruth, Andrew, and me into the city for dinner. There will be no post-service gathering back at the house. The funeral was our good-bye. It was perfect, and now it’s over. When my dad says that he’s craving barbecue, Andrew leads him to that fated restaurant on Third Avenue, the one with crayons on the table and peanut shells on the floor. The one where I broke us.

  We sit at a table far too large for four people but close to the jukebox, which we feed constantly with quarters. I am not sure if it plays any of the songs we request, but we hear some more Ellington, and some Radiohead, the Beatles, Lynyrd Skynyrd. I compose an iTunes shopping list in my head so that I can re-create the soundtrack should I need to rely on it one day.

  “That was a fun funeral,” Ruth says. “Am I allowed to say that? I hope you don’t think I am being disrespectful.”

  “Of course you’re allowed to say that. You are allowed to say anything you want in this family. It’s the new rule,” my dad says. We are a family, I think. He knows that we are a family.

  “You are absolutely right. It was a beautiful funeral. Exactly what Grandpa Jack would have wanted,” I say.

  “Definitely,” Andrew says, and lifts his beer for a toast. “To Grandpa Jack.”

  “To Grandpa Jack,” we repeat, and clink our glasses.

  “And to a Happy New Year, because he would have wanted that too,” my dad says.

  “To a Happy New Year,” we repeat, and clink our glasses again.

  The waiter brings over a platter of hot wings. We dig in, ring our mouths with sauce, burn our lips until they swell, wear bibs like babies, tied around our necks. We feel pride as they get finger-painted red. We feel no fear when the waiter brings over a second batch with extra hot sauce. Though we don’t compete to see who can eat the most, we don’t surrender to the meal either. We conquer it.

  After we have stuffed our stomachs and run out of quarters, after we leave nothing behind but a thirty-dollar tip and a pile of chicken bones, after I feel full for the first time in as long as I can remember, we walk out into the swill of Third Avenue.

  We line up, shoulder to shoulder: my father with tousled hair, condolence kiss marks still on his cheeks, Ruth, her wrinkles capturing years of expressions on a single face, Andrew, his fingertips circling my hip, and me too, watching and waiting.

  There is no camera, so there will be no picture. But for once I am not worried about forgetting. This I will remember, this overlapping of moments, the four of us standing together, the four of us caught somewhere between holding on and letting go.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, thank you, thank you to my agent extraordinaire, Elaine Koster, who guides me with honesty, patience, and kindness. I am eternally grateful. And, of course, many thanks to my editor, Susan Kamil, who consistently astounds me with her insight, wisdom, and sense of humor, and who has managed to make every step of this process pure pleasure. I feel blessed, reassured, and incredibly lucky to have landed in Elaine’s and Susan’s capable hands.

  Francesca Liversidge and the whole Transworld team, I am so grateful for all of your support.

  Special thanks to Chandler Crawford, David Grossman, and Helen Heller.

  I am grateful to my first readers who were willing to wade through a very rough first draft: Pamela Garas, Lena Greenberg, and Mark Haskell Smith. MHS, thanks also for being such a fantastic mentor.

  Special thanks to Laurie Puhn for her extreme generosity with time, advice, and direction.

  And though the list is endless, many more thanks to: Megan Dempsey, Melissa Fien, Meredith Galto, Marion Goldstein, Seth Greenland, Halee Hochman, Scott Korb, Liz McCuskey, Jenna Myers, Jonathan Pecarsky, John Schowengerdt (who coined the term “funemployment”), and to Walt and David Zifkin.

  Thanks to the Flore family, and Sunny, of course, who gets a special shout out—don’t ever say I don’t keep my promises…

  Endless love and thanks to my father, Fred, and my brother, Josh, for not telling me I was insane when I decided to quit my job to write. Your support is everything. And though anyone who knows my dad already knows this, let it be said, once and for all, that he in no way resembles the fictional father in this book.

  And finally, there aren’t enough words to express my gratitude to my husband, best friend, and partner in crime. Indy, I love every last one of your molecules.

  By Julie Buxbaum

  After You

  About the Author

  Julie Buxbaum is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School. The Opposite of Love is her first novel. Visit her Web site at www.juliebuxbaum.com.