Elizabeth and I stared at each other for what I’m sure seemed to both of us like several days but was, in fact, three or four seconds. I lowered the sundress from my face, decided I could escape this whole awkward situation by saying something witty and clever, so opened my mouth to do just that. Instead, as I said the words “This may look bad, but…” I totally lost control and began sobbing. Deep, lung-choking, horrible-sounding noises that came out like some combination of wild despair, an asthmatic attack, and a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound goose trying to warn his mate that danger was imminent.
Elizabeth hurriedly stepped into the closet and took my arm. She gently guided me to the corner of the bed and not so gently pushed me down into a sitting position. I didn’t resist or say a word. I just kept sobbing, now sitting, holding the sundress to my chest as if it were a dishrag.
“I don’t know who you are, but I think it’s safe to say this is the most humiliating moment of my life,” I said.
And here’s the thing about having a relationship like the one I had with Anna: I knew that if this tall, sharp-featured woman had been Anna, she would have said, “I hate to say this, but it’s going to be even more humiliating when you find out who I am.” That would have made me laugh, and also would have made me curious. The combination of the two would have made me stop crying and would have relaxed me into being at least fifty percent over my discomfort and embarrassment.
But this woman wasn’t Anna. So at first Elizabeth didn’t say anything. And when I didn’t say anything back, she took my hands in hers—her hands were not soft and warm but rather rough and scratchy, as if she spent much of her day nervously picking at them—and said, “There’s no reason to be humiliated. Sadness should never be humiliating.”
“How about pitied?” I said.
She didn’t smile or even bother to answer that one. Instead, she put a hand on my back and began patting me as if I were a small child. It was strangely intimate. I instantly felt as if I’d known her for years, although of course I’d only met her minutes before and didn’t even know her name.
After several dozen gentle pats on the back and a gradual reduction of cries and gasps and wheezes, it seemed appropriate to have a formal introduction.
“I’m Bob Heller,” I said.
“I know. I’m Elizabeth Gold.”
“Oh, Jesus!” I said. “Tell me you’re a total stranger who just happened to wander in and has the same name as the Elizabeth Gold who works at Cornell.”
This stumped her for a second. I came to know that Elizabeth did have a sense of humor, but it was a slow and subtle one. She had to absorb things before finding them funny. So she just peered at me for a moment, then released a slight upturn of her lips.
“I’m afraid I’m the Cornell one,” she said.
I nodded and murmured something along the lines of “Just my luck.” Then said, “So is this the strangest job interview of your life?”
She pondered a bit. Then said, “I was interviewing a woman once who told me that she was a transsexual. I thought that was pretty strange. Especially because I hadn’t asked and, in fact, it was illegal for me to ask in the context of the interview, even though I suspected that was the case.”
“What made you suspect she was a transsexual?”
“She looked like a man who’d put on a dress and stuck a mop on his head.”
“So are you saying that was a stranger interview than this one?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. But this one is way more interesting, if that makes you feel any better.”
I said that it did, if just a little. Elizabeth explained that she found the whole situation interesting, partly because she knew about Anna’s death and had heard all sorts of wonderful things about her from, among others, Marjorie. She also told me about her job at Cornell, and a bit about her past, and I talked a lot about Anna and our marriage and her death and my life in the three years since she’d died. I talked about our animals—after three years I still spoke in the plural when it came to everyday life—and how they had coped with Life After Anna.
We spoke about all sorts of things into the early evening and then late into the night. We did the same thing the next night: dinner and long, involved conversation, talking about nothing in particular this second time, just about movies and television and animals and work. She came down to New York the following weekend, and we had dinner twice. Being with her was remarkably comfortable and easy. Neither of us felt any awkwardness during the inevitable silences, neither of us felt any disorienting electric spark. (At least I didn’t, and I got the distinct feeling that Elizabeth was not about electric sparks; she was about quiet affection and being interested in people.) She didn’t come down the weekend after that, and I missed her. I had dinner with the guys—Rocky sat on the table, a couple of the dogs sat on chairs; Waverly sat by my feet, as he used to do with Anna; Larry hopped about the apartment swearing—and I felt a chilling sort of loneliness. The next weekend Elizabeth did come down. Friday was dinner at a restaurant. Saturday, I cooked. Nothing fancy—pasta and salad and a nice bottle of wine—and after dinner we went into the bedroom and made love. It was not urgent lovemaking; it was languid and tender and tentative on both our parts, and it felt natural and unforced. This was not the first time I’d made love since Anna died, but it was the first time I felt better instead of worse when it was over.
Elizabeth Gold and I began seeing each other after that. I went up to Cornell when I could, and she spent every other weekend, sometimes more, in the city, staying with me. I think it’s fair to say that she genuinely saved my life, nursing me back to mental health and bringing me to a point where I was able to not just live in the present but appreciate it again. Even hunger for it. She worried about me and nagged at me in the most pleasant way when she thought I was working too hard or not eating well or not exercising enough. She granted me the kind of emotional privacy I needed, understanding that I could not and did not want to let go of the past completely. I know she fell in love with me, but even so she understood that she could not be a replacement for Anna and was simply the next step in my recovery. It does not sound particularly romantic, I realize, but in its own way it was. It was romantic in its solidness and its strength and in the way Elizabeth remade her life to prepare for a future with me.
In exchange, I cared for her deeply and did my best to be as kind and good to her as I could be. I tried to love her. Instead, after three and a half years, I broke her heart.
Life is a constant surprise, a constant throw of the dice. And any time there’s gambling involved, there are regrets and unpredictability and surges of excitement bouncing off flatlines of despair. And, of course, whenever there’s gambling, there’s also a lot of losing going on.
* * *
I didn’t have hordes of people descend on me after Anna died. What I did do, for the most part, was stay close to the people in my life who really mattered.
Even before it hit me where I live, I’d always believed that grief is something intimate, much like love. I would never go on national TV to bounce around like a spinning top, declaiming my passion for another person and exulting in the beginning of something stirring and delightful. Nor would I go on CNN to talk about my personal tragedy if a loved one was killed in a surprise terrorist attack or crushed by a wayward meteor. If love is a gradual acceptance of the opening of a special relationship—and I would define love as a constant opening—then grief is a gradual acceptance of the closing of that relationship. They are equally personal to me. I don’t need mass understanding of either. I just need to share a bit of both with people who know me well enough to appreciate and understand the joy as well as the pain.
Phil came down to the city immediately. He didn’t call or e-mail, he was just there, the morning after Anna’s death. He showed up at my apartment around six A.M., knowing I’d be awake, even knowing that I was planning on going downstairs to work at the clinic, which opened at eight. He walked in my do
or and said, “Don’t be an asshole. You’re not going to work.”
I started to protest, said something along the lines of “It’ll help me; it’ll take my mind off it.”
Phil said, “Anna died yesterday, pal. Your mind’s not gonna be off it for a long, long time. I already called Lucy, and she’s already got a vet lined up to replace you for a couple of weeks. So sit down and let’s dive into this.” By “this” he meant a huge bottle of Gran Patron Platinum tequila.
“It’s six o’clock in the morning.”
“The whole fuckin’ world turned upside down last night. Day is night. God is the devil. The Knicks are division winners. This is new territory for everybody. All good things are gonna be for shit for a while. So what the fuck difference does it make what time it is? We should get drunk. I sure as hell am going to.”
And that’s what we did. We sipped from the bottle and talked. The alcohol relaxed me and clouded my brain, which needed some serious clouding; it also sent a warm glow of melancholy throughout my entire body. Phil talked about himself for a while, partly as a way of distracting and entertaining me, partly because Anna’s death was causing great pain for him, too, and he needed to let some of it escape.
Ever since I’d gone off to college, Phil and I had spoken on the phone nearly every day; more recently, we’d also exchanged e-mails several times a week. But staying in touch wasn’t the same as sitting across the room from each other, face to face, with a tequila high and Anna’s ghost hovering between us. As he often did, Phil talked about how life sucked, and the thing about Phil was that he absolutely meant it. Yet the suckiness didn’t really matter to him: He was a guy who saw the glass as three-quarters empty, but he got an extraordinary amount of pleasure from gulping down the remaining quarter of whatever liquid the glass held. That day he told me new stories about his life and the bowling alley and his latest girlfriend, whose name was Darlene, though she wasn’t the same Darlene he’d brought to our wedding. He made me laugh and provided a relaxed solace with both his cynical view of life and his subtle insistence that everything, and I mean everything, had to be kept at a distance, because otherwise you’d lose the essential awareness that life, at its core, was one grand, miserable, painful, ecstatic joke.
Eventually he got around to Anna. “Not all jokes are funny,” he said. “And anything truly funny comes from something tragic. Just keep that in mind, will ya? Everything that seems tragic at the time ultimately becomes part of the cosmic joke that’s being played on all of us.” Then, with no attempt to make sense of the transition, he said, “Hey, when was the Old Testament written?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Before my time.” I almost said, “That’s the kind of thing Anna knows, ask her,” but I caught myself.
“Two thousand years ago?” he asked.
“Sure. Let’s call it that.”
“Okay, a fuck of a long time. You want to know what I learned? And this is no bullshit—just in case you thought I was brilliant and that I always know the right thing to say. I do my research.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I learned something about your hallowed religion. Isaac—he was one of the patriarchs of the Jews.”
“If you say so.”
“Jesus, you’re a bad Jew. Don’t you even know who Isaac is?”
“I thought he was one of the Chipmunks.”
“Not a bad guess, actually. But no. Isaac, or Yitzak, as you people say—you want to know what the name means?”
“Sure.”
“It means ‘jester.’” He said this as if it were some sort of momentous announcement. I didn’t quite see the momentousness.
“So?”
“So?” he said. “The patriarch of the entire Jewish people is named Jester! It means that right from the beginning, God was planning on fucking you over!”
“You don’t even believe in God.”
“You’re missing the point. I mean, it’s like if we found out that ‘Jesus’ means ‘Bozo’ in whatever the hell language ‘Jesus’ is. Or if it meant ‘lying scumbag.’ Come on! Jester? You’re fucked. And everything makes sense once you put it in context!”
“You’re an asshole,” I said.
“Right! So imagine if I was the fucking patriarch of the Jews! Exactly my point.”
While we talked, the guys came and gathered around us. Rocky sat on my lap, as always. Margo sat by my feet, occasionally reaching out her paw to touch my ankle, as if to let me know that she was there if I needed her. Scully, the little sweet cockapoo, sat by my side, too, occasionally trying to displace Rocky, to no avail (he was obviously frustrated by his inability to be of more comfort). Che, the three-legged Havanese, cuddled up to Phil. Larry, for the first time in memory, stayed reasonably quiet. Every half hour or so he’d mumble “cocksucker” or “fuckin’ a-hole,” but it was almost a whisper compared to his normal boom.
Only Waverly, who worshipped Anna—she was Anna’s dog and merely tolerated the rest of us—stayed separate from the group. She paced and whined, as if waiting for Anna’s return. It was heartbreaking; I couldn’t seem to offer her any real solace. Of course, I was not in great shape myself and so probably not the best person to provide solace. Once, I got up and petted her and tried to tell her that Anna wasn’t coming back but I’d take good care of her. But I started to cry, so I returned to my chair and let Phil go back to talking about life back home. At some point, I knew, I’d be able to stop crying and could help sweet, sweet Wave cope. Phil knew it, too, which is why he didn’t feel the need to either encourage me to let the tears flow or help me stop.
Phil stayed with me until two days after Anna’s funeral. He checked into a hotel a few blocks from my apartment—I’m sure he wanted to give me some space but I’m even more certain he needed to periodically escape the suffocating grief that was emanating from the brownstone—but each day he was at my place when I woke up, and he was there when I passed out from exhaustion at night. The day after the funeral, we sat together in silence for a while, the late afternoon shadows creeping around the living room. He looked into my eyes, told me he knew I’d be okay, and said he’d decided he could go home. When I asked him how the hell he knew I’d be okay, he said, “Because I know you. I can already see that you’re beginning to understand that you’re going to be deeply sad for a long time. In some ways, maybe forever.”
“And that makes you think I’m going to be all right? That I know I’m going to be sad the rest of my life?”
“Sadness is normal, pal. If you weren’t sad, you’d be insane. And a few days ago, that’s what I thought you were—insane. You weren’t sad, you didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Now you do. So whatever happens from here on in, you’ll deal with it.”
“I’m not just sad, Phil. I’m overwhelmingly sad.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Me, too. Not like you, but everybody else is, too. But you can survive that. Deep down, you know you’re going to survive that.”
“Oh god. I sense a bowling metaphor coming on.”
Phil nodded. “Life is like a seven-ten split. It looks ugly and fucks up your game, but every so often, you luck out and make the spare.”
“I don’t think that even makes sense.”
“You want the gutter ball one instead?”
I shook my head. We gave each other a half handshake, half hug, and sat around for the rest of the night talking about our childhoods, our families, and Anna. The next morning he headed back upstate to Darlene and life among the rented bowling shoes.
My mom came down the same day as Phil, but later in the afternoon. She didn’t make much of a fuss; she just appeared, straightened up the apartment, made enough food to last several lifetimes, and paid attention to the animals, all of whom seemed happy to be petted by someone who wasn’t trembling or tearing up. Even Waverly perked up; she began following my mother wherever she went and insisted that my mom and only my mom take her for her thrice-daily walks. My mother moved into the guest
room, and the nicest thing about having her there was that she never asked me how I was; she acted as if she knew. She became my mom for the first time in a long, long time and just took care of me.
Marjorie Paws came up from Florida. She stayed for two weeks, living in the small top-floor apartment where Anna and I had started, which she still maintained. She roared back into action at the clinic, working full-time and continuously shuttling back and forth to my apartment, complaining about the climb every time she came up and sighing about the steps every time she went down, insisting that it was the damn steps that drove her to Florida. She was like a backup mother: She touched me constantly—the back of my neck, my arm, my cheek—and her rough, callused hands were remarkably soothing. Her touch conveyed warmth and life, and I understood, yet again, why she was so wonderful with animals. I saw why a cocker spaniel who’d been hit by a car or a German shepherd with bone cancer would immediately calm down when she put a hand on their back. Her touch helped lift the pain and promised eventual relief. It was an extraordinary skill, although it probably shouldn’t be called a skill. Better simply to call it being Marjorie.
Part of being Marjorie was to fuss over me and ask me questions no one else would ask (except Phil, who rather than asking usually just told me what I was feeling and thinking). Another part of being Marjorie, possibly the best part, was that she treated me as if nothing all that unusual had happened. She asked me about animals she was treating at the clinic, testing to see if I’d kept up on the latest research and theories. She nattered on about the weather and the traffic. And she asked me about Anna, which no one else did: why she had done certain things; why the spice cabinet was arranged the way it was; how she had handled the pain of her cancer. To Marjorie it was all of a piece. Just because my wife had died, that didn’t mean I could get away with drinking milk out of the container when other people would be sharing it.
The clinic contributed its share of mourners and sympathetic hand-holders, too. Lucy was magnificent. She set herself up as a one-woman barrier: If you wanted to get to me for any reason, you had to go through her. If she decided you weren’t supportive enough, you didn’t have a chance. She was like a tiger ferociously protecting her wounded cub. But she knew when to let through the various eccentrics who populated the clinic, all of whom had had some connection with Anna: Antoine the fake Frenchman; Paige, a seventy-year-old actress who hadn’t actually acted in forty years; Leslie, a line chef at a nearby restaurant who looked alarmingly like her Afghan, whom she even more alarmingly had decided to also name Leslie; Victor, who owned a pair of beautiful Siamese cats and who’d been in love with Anna from afar (he’d send her charming notes, admiring her beauty and style, attached to strange presents he’d bought for her—inexpensive salt and pepper shakers, a necklace made out of old presidential campaign buttons, a DVD of an old movie he thought she’d like, usually starring Donald O’Connor). There were others: Francis, Elaine, Rosy, Mike, and Bernie, cat and dog and snake owners all. I came to understand that they thought of me as part of their family circle, their inner family circle, and part of their daily lives. From time to time I had helped ease their pain over the past several years, and now they were eager to reciprocate. It was amazing to me that these people—who I too often took for granted, who interested me, yes, even touched me on occasion, but who had all seemed so replaceable—were all insisting on being key participants in my restructured world. They all wanted to help with my care and feeding and regeneration. They all wanted to make me part of their family.
Ask Bob: A Novel Page 16