How to Talk to a Widower

by Jonathan Tropper

  40

  THE COCKTAIL HOUR HAS ENDED, AND THE GUESTS have all been herded outside, where five hundred folding chairs have been set up on a bluff overlooking the beach, facing a canopied platform through which you can see the sun setting over the ocean. Moths fly kamikaze missions into the bright standing lights that ring the area, and the sharp, recurring thwack of golf clubs hitting balls is faintly audible from the club’s driving range about fifty yards over, behind the tall wooden fence. By the time we make it down, the quartet is finished playing, the processional is over, and Debbie and Mike are standing under the canopy, flanked by her bridesmaids in elegant black gowns and Mike’s diminished pool of groomsmen. He should have chosen some alternates. I’m relieved to see that Dave Potter is not in attendance, because that would be somewhat awkward for all concerned, I think.

  Rabbi Gross, the rabbi of my parents’ temple and my mother’s go-to guy for all religious occasions, is officiating, and he’s just stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat. Since there don’t seem to be any empty seats, Russ, Stephen, and I stand at the back of the aisle, comfortably out of view.

  “Friends,” Rabbi Gross begins in his soft, gurgling voice. He’s a tall, angular man with silver hair and a Vandyke that makes him look like Sigmund Freud. “We are all honored to be here on this joyous occasion, coming together with Deborah and Michael as they celebrate their love. And before I perform the ceremony, I’d like to just take a moment and read a passage from Psalms that I think encapsulates all that we wish for these two wonderful people.”

  The rabbi clears his throat again and starts to read, and I’m watching so intently that it takes me a minute to realize that Debbie has spotted me. Her eyes grow wide and she leans over to whisper urgently into Mike’s ear. Mike turns to look back at me as well, and then Debbie grabs two fistfuls of her bridal gown, steps down off the bandstand, and starts running up the aisle. There is an audible gasp from the crowd, and the rabbi stops his reading in midsentence. And I have to admit, I feel a little self-conscious about being here. The brother of the bride has fucked another man’s wife and everyone here has indubitably been brought up to speed on all the salacious details, weddings being much more entertaining when there’s some juicy backstory. But my baby sister is getting married, so I mutter an impressively comprehensive slew of disjointed expletives under my breath to calm my jangling nerves, and start limping down the aisle to meet her halfway. When we collide softly, she’s laughing and there are tears in her eyes as she throws her arms around me.

  “You look great, Pooh.”

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she whispers into my ear. “I can’t believe you came.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it,” I say, suddenly finding myself short of breath.

  She grabs my hand and leads me down the aisle, back to the raised canopy. I can’t quite do the step up on my own, so Mike leans down to help me—“Hey, buddy, glad you could make it,” he says—and there’s a moment of excruciating pain as my torso stretches, I can feel the raw edges of my pierced tissue pulling and fraying, but then I’m up and Claire steps out of line to give me a hug. “I was summoning you all day,” she whispers, tapping her temple as she steps back into place. “Twin telepathy.”

  “Is everything okay?” the rabbi wants to know, his palm covering the microphone.

  “Perfect,” Debbie says, stepping back into her spot beside Mike.

  “I’m used to people walking out of my sermons, but when you start losing brides at their weddings, it’s probably time to consider another line of work,” Rabbi Gross jokes like an old pro, and the crowd laughs and we’re back on track. I locate my parents’ faces down in the front row smiling up at me, and I give them a small wave, feeling sweaty and exposed in the glare of the video crew’s lights. But then Mike is slipping a ring on Debbie’s finger, and she’s putting one on him, and I just watch my sister’s face as she stares up at Mike, and for the moment I am suffused in the warm glow of their unmitigated happiness. It feels like forever since I’ve felt something so simple and pure, and for the time being at least, everything else has faded to background noise.

  The wrapped glass is summarily crushed under Mike’s shoe, effectively ending the ceremony, and the guests applaud and catcall as the wedding party raucously follows the freshly minted couple up the aisle. Claire loops her arm through mine to walk slowly behind my parents, who are waving and nodding to friends as they go, and when we reach the back, Stephen is standing there, nervously wringing his hands as the crowd files past him.

  “Stephen!” my father says, stepping forward to give him a hug. “What are you doing here?”

  “Yeah, Stephen,” Claire says in a thin, sharp voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hi, Claire. I’m not here to bother you. Can we just go somewhere to talk for a minute?”

  “Here’s fine.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” I say, but Claire tightens her grip on my arm. “You stay right here.” Then she looks at Stephen and says, “Go ahead.”

  “Okay.” Stephen nervously clears his throat as the throngs meander past us, back toward the main house. “I love you, Claire,” he says. “I never stopped loving you, never stopped feeling lucky as hell to have you, but somewhere along the way I failed you. To be completely honest, I’m not exactly sure how, and this would be a much better speech if I knew, but I do know, in my heart, that I failed you, and I am truly, truly sorry for that. I’m not here to ask you for another chance, because I know how you are when you’ve made up your mind. If you’re going to divorce me, then that’s what’s going to happen, and I will make sure you’re taken care of. That’s our child you’re carrying, and I want things to be good between us so that we can at least be good parents together. But if, on the off chance, you’re having some second thoughts about all of this, then I just wanted to tell you that I want you back, and I swear to you, I swear to you, that I won’t fail you again.”

  Claire looks at him for a long moment. “I’ll just hurt you again,” she says softly.

  “It can’t be any worse than this,” he says.

  “Trust me,” she says. “It can.”

  He nods and clears his throat, and then nods some more. “Okay. Well, I said what I came to say. And, anyway, it was good to see your face again.” He looks over at me and nods. “You feel better, Doug.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You want me to send the limo back for you?”

  “Thanks anyway. My car is still here from last night.”

  “Okay, then.” He steps forward and kisses Claire’s cheek. “Good-bye, Claire. I’ll wait to hear from you.” Then he turns around and joins the crowd making their way up the lawn to the tall glass doors of the inn. Claire watches him leave, and I watch Claire.

  “What limo?” she says. “You brought him?”

  “More like he brought us.”

  “How does something like that happen?”

  “Well, he just happened to be in the room when I decided to leave the hospital, so he offered us a lift.”

  “Why would he visit you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Because I’m family?”

  She nods, looking up the lawn at his disappearing figure. Inside, the band has started to play “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, and the familiar horn riffs come floating across the lawn. “Fucking hell,” Claire says, shaking her head. “Fucking hell.”

  “Just go.”

  And then she’s off, running up the hill in her high heels, calling his name. There’s just enough time to see him turn around, to see her start yelling at him, and then they’re swallowed up by the crowd.

  It’s amazing, really, how fast a wedding is over. With all the anticipation and planning that precedes it, all the tension and excitement, you kind of expect it to last a week instead of six hours. We dance, we eat, and we dance some more. Mike makes a nice little speech about Debbie, and Max brings the house down with a drunken, borderline pornographic toast
that ends on a surprisingly emotional note. I sneak a few Vil Pills from my mother’s clutch, strictly for medicinal purposes, and then Rudy, all decked out for the occasion in a dark blue tuxedo, takes a break from standing vigil over my father to change my bandages in a bathroom stall. My mother gets hammered, sings a few showstoppers with the band, and seems prepared to stay up there doing encores all night until Claire talks her down, and then we’re eating dessert as the crowd begins to thin. Debbie and Mike make their farewells, hugging and kissing everyone in arm’s reach, pocketing envelopes discreetly, and then they’re off to their hotel. They’ll leave for Antigua in the morning. Then the band plays “The Wee Small Hours” and it’s just my parents, dancing alone to Sinatra, cheek to cheek in the center of the dance floor, while the caterers clean up and Russ, Claire, and I eat miniature chocolate truffle cakes with our fingers. Stephen is off to the side, trapped in a typically endless conversation with Uncle Freddy that will last until one of us gets off our ass to rescue him.

  “Shit,” Claire says. “I think I lost an earring in the limo.”

  “What were you doing in the limo? Oh. Oh!”

  “I know,” she says, shaking her head incredulously. “He knows I’ve got a thing about him in a monkey suit.”

  “Well, if it means anything, I like him a lot more than I used to.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “It doesn’t.” She leans her head on my shoulder, squeezing the fleshy part of my hand between her thumb and forefinger.

  “How does it feel to see him?” I say.

  “I don’t know. I’m too hormonally fucked to be sure of anything.”

  “It’s okay to be unsure.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m serious. Maybe the thing is to just take it slow,” I say. “Feel your way.”

  “I’m not exactly famous for my even keel,” Claire says.

  I lick some chocolate frosting off my finger. “People can change,” I say.

  Claire decides to come home with Russ and me, but arranges to meet Stephen for lunch tomorrow. Out in the parking lot, it’s gotten chilly, and the steam comes off our warm bodies as we say our good-byes. My mother hugs me and presses her forehead against mine. “It’s good that you came,” she says.

  “I’m glad I did.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. A few days, and I’ll be good as new.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she says.

  “I know, Mom. I’ll be fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She gives Russ a peck on the cheek. “You take care of my boy, you hear me?”

  “You got it, Mrs. Parker.”

  “For God’s sake, I think you can call me Eva by now.”

  “Okay, Eva.”

  My father looks tired, but happy. “Some party, huh?” he says.

  “It was a blast,” I say, stepping into his perfect hug.

  “You give Hailey my best,” he says, patting my back.

  I hold on to him for an extra few seconds and then say, “I will, Dad.”

  Rudy takes the wheel, and my parents climb into the backseat of the Audi. My mother rests her head on my father’s shoulder, and as they pull away, I see his tuxedo-clad arm emerge from the window, palm down, fingers spread to ride the wind as the car picks up speed and heads down the road, disappearing into the surrounding trees.

  41

  I HAD A WIFE. HER NAME WAS HAILEY. NOW SHE’S GONE. And so am I.

  A few weeks after Debbie’s wedding, on a soggy gray Monday, I sit down at my computer and type those words onto a blank screen. Kyle has negotiated a deal with a major house and, after a few days of soul-searching, I’ve decided that it’s time I got back to work. I have no outline, no guide other than the four-page proposal Kyle wrote and signed my name to, and the twelve columns I wrote for M that were the basis of the deal. A few days ago, I sat in a conference room high above the city while Perry Manfield, the acquiring editor, brandished a rolled folio of my columns and called the by-product of my ruined life “great stuff.”

  I won’t exactly be getting wealthy off the advance, but then again, I’m going to be wealthy anyway, and besides, that’s not really the point. I’ve got Russ to think about now, and even though we don’t need the money, I don’t think it would be setting a particularly good example for him if I sat around scratching my balls all day. The book will be a memoir chronicling the mess I made of things after Hailey died. I’m not terribly eager to relive that time, but in the final analysis, it’s the best way I can think of to keep her alive. Because I know now that the pain will inevitably fade, I can already feel it happening, like dying embers at the edge of a bonfire, turning a lifeless gray and disintegrating into the breeze. Knowing that there is a published record of us will go a long way toward helping me to let go, or that’s the theory anyway.

  So now I’m officially an author. I have a contract, an editor, a new laptop, a deadline, and no idea of how to write this thing. But it’s a strange and not entirely unpleasant feeling, having something to do again. I sit at the desk in my bedroom, with the hard autumn rain pounding on the roof, clattering like applause on the metal top of the air compressor on the side of the house, and I look out the window and organize my thoughts.

  I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she’s gone. And so am I.

  That’s all I’ve got so far. But I’ve got a year to write the rest, and it’s not like I have any shortage of material. I’ll come up with something.

  To celebrate the book deal, Russ drives me to the tattoo parlor, where I commission a smaller version of Hailey’s comet to be placed on the inside of my right wrist. This way, no matter where I am, I’ll be able to flick my wrist and see it and remember that she’s a part of me. I know that sounds corny as hell, but it just feels right to be marked by her. I explain my reasoning to Russ while the tattoo artist snaps on his latex gloves and starts scrubbing my arm with alcohol.

  “Makes sense,” Russ says.

  “Which begs the question,” I say. “Why did you put yours on your neck?”

  “I don’t know. It just seemed like a cool place for a tattoo.”

  “But you can only see it by twisting your neck in the mirror, and then you’re bending it out of shape.”

  “Good point. I’ll have to get another one like yours.”

  “The hell you will.”

  It’s a very respectable tattoo parlor, sandwiched in a strip mall between a bakery and a dry cleaner, and the tattooist looks like your grandfather, with a ring of white hair around his bald, freckled dome of a head, a kind, thin-lipped smile, and a lumber-jack shirt under his apron.

  “You have no tattoos,” I say, looking down at his pristine forearms.

  “The cobbler’s children go barefoot,” he says, powering up the needle. “How are you with pain?”

  Russ and I look at each other and smile.

  The nights can be rough. They used to be the easiest part of the day for me, the only time the pain would fade to a dull throb. There was less of a sense of the world continuing outside your windows, of people going about their lives, of time marching on, of you being sidelined from everything by the immense load of your grief. Also, by nightfall I was usually drunk. I don’t keep any booze in the house anymore. Pot, either, for the record. So now I’m a clean and sober stepfather with nothing to take the edge off the witching hour.

  I walk into Russ’s room and he quickly flips off his computer monitor. There is a girl now. I’m learning about her in small increments, but it’s still on a need-to-know basis. He’s not yet comfortable talking about her, and I don’t want to pry. I’m happy for him, but it’s little things like this, turning off his monitor when I walk into the room, that remind me that no matter how chummy we are, I’m still the guardian and he’s still the kid, and as much as we may blur the lines, they are still immutably there. I know that’s probably a good thing, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt a little. I’ve only
been his stepfather again for a few weeks, and I’m already sad about the little pieces of him that I’ll inevitably lose.

  “How’s it going?” I say.

  “Swell.”

  “Want to go to a movie?”

  “Can’t,” he says. “Homework.”

  “Fine. Be that way.”

  “Why don’t you call Ms. Hayes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why not?”

  “She made it pretty clear she doesn’t want to hear from me.”

  “You’re going to let a minor detail like that stop you?”

  I think about Brooke from time to time, and by “from time to time” I mean pretty much all the time. I look for her when I drive Russ to school, I deliberately drive past her Brady Bunch house several times a day, and I sit in the movie theater by myself, wondering if this will be the day she comes. I calculate the odds, days of the week, number of movies playing in the multiplex. It’s something of a long shot. I consider leaving her a message to let her know when I’m going and which movie I’ll be at, but then I see her expression when she said good-bye to me, and I can’t bring myself to dial her number.