by Rita Ciresi
“But what?”
Soon enough I got my chance to call him plenty of other names—many loving names, and some, I’m afraid, decidedly not. Because we never got around to taking that walk. Instead, we sat down on the bed, holding hands, each of us staring at our shoes, shy and kind of embarrassed. He finally broke the silence. “In your living room—on the floor—I noticed you’ve been reading War and Peace.”
“Dodie—my cousin—was reading it. He came to visit the weekend before he died. But he got bored with the battle scenes—and the lack of romance—and he threw it on the floor.” I hung my head. I started to cry. “I dared him to read it all the way through without once falling asleep—and now he’ll never finish it—or go to Italy, we were going to go to Italy—and nobody he worked with even came to his funeral—and his father kept shoveling dirt onto his coffin—and he was like my twin—he sat in front of me in junior-high homeroom, and I memorized the back of his neck!—and he left me all this money—and how am I ever going to do anything good with it, I owe it to him to do something good with it, but I wish I could just throw it all into the ground, I’d throw all the money in the world into a hole if I could just bring him back—”
“Of course you would. I feel the same way about my father.”
“But it’s not the same thing. Your father had a chance to live—and have you—”
“It’s all luck, isn’t it?” Strauss paused. “Either that, or a faulty management plan.” He reached into his pocket and got out his handkerchief. “This isn’t completely clean, Lisar—”
“That’s all right. I like your germs. I’ll take it anyway. Thank you.”
I blew my nose—more than once. Even for me, the sound was spectacular—loud as the orchestra horns warming up before a concert—and just as wild and strange as a mother elephant trumpeting to her young. Strauss seemed relieved when I was through.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ll finish War and Peace for him.”
“You?” I asked, wiping my eyes.
“Why so surprised? I read all of Anna Karenina.”
“Did you like it?”
“The ending was so tragic.”
“I thought that might appeal to your imagination. The adulterous woman who gets creamed by a train.”
“But it didn’t appeal to me, it saddened me, that she wanted nothing more in life than to be loved.… Well, who dies in War and Peace?”
“In their hearts or on the battlefield?”
“Keep it,” Strauss said, when I tried to return his handkerchief He held my hand and smoothed my hair, and listened to me sniffle some more.
“I’ve never thought of it,” he said, “but I’ve never been in your bedroom before.” He looked longingly back toward the lace pillows fluffed against the headboard. “God, I’m exhausted.”
“I’m tired too,” I said. “Let’s lie down.”
We took off our shoes and stretched out on the bed. Then I got up, turned off the light, and snuggled into his arms, my head on his chest so the thumping of his heart began to lull me into slumber. “This room seems a bit frilly for you, Lise,” he whispered, right before we fell asleep.
We fell asleep.
That, more than anything, seemed to prove we’d grown older—and wearier, if not wiser. Only when we woke, our faces crinkly and my left hand numb with pins and needles, did we use something other than words to move through the unspoken questions of whether this sort of thing was good for us? (maybe it wasn’t, but too late now) and whether you could trust love that had been resurrected from grief? (well, sometimes good children came from bad parents).
I was prepared—and he also was prepared—to play it safe. But the moment he pulled it out from his wallet—I could have told him you weren’t supposed to keep them there, because body heat made the latex wear thin—we got awkward and goofy as a couple of kids kissing for the first time. I didn’t know how to use it. And neither, apparently, did he, because it was the devil to get it on him, and far too easy to get it off.
Oy God, Lisar, he said, when it broke. I’m sorry.
I wasn’t sorry. At least at first. But this, I’m afraid, is the beginning of another long and sometimes sad story—which I might start writing as soon as I stop feeling so nauseous and Eben stops hovering over me worse than he fusses over his father, who finally turns toward me in his hospital bed and asks, “Baby or no baby, are you sure you want to marry this old lady?”
Rita Ciresi is the author of Mother Rocket, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Blue Italian, Sometimes I Dream in Italian, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You. She teaches at the University of South Florida and lives with her husband and daughter in Wesley Chapel, Florida.