Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  Paulie asked him a lot of questions about diet and exercise, and I waited for her to say something about sex. When she didn’t, I hesitated for a couple of minutes, and then I did. Croyden smiled. “If that’s one of your normal activities,” he said. “Like everything else, in moderation at first.”

  I expected Paulie to make a nervous joke, something about cutting down to twice a day, but she only looked troubled and sad, and she didn’t say anything at all.

  Now, lying there, with Paulie sitting rigidly beside me, I wasn’t sure how to begin. Again, I wished she’d say or do something. She used to take the initiative pretty often, especially when I was feeling low. Her hand or her mouth would search under the covers and coax me out of hiding.

  Paulie sighed. “Well, I’d better get dinner on the road,” she said.

  I remembered that scene in Love and Death, when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are in bed on their wedding night and she says, “Not here.” It occurred to me that Paulie was probably terrified about putting any strain on my heart. “Nobody ever died of love, babe,” I said, to reassure her, and immediately thought of Romeo, and Cyrano, and Nelson Rockefeller.

  “Who said anything about dying?” Paulie said.

  “You don’t have to say it,” I said. “Look how tense you are.” I moved my hand to her breast and she jumped to her feet.

  I stood up, too, and put my arms around her. “Paulie, sweetheart,” I said. “We need to do this.”

  “Not yet,” she whispered into my shirt collar.

  “I want to start my life again,” I said. “I’ll be careful.”

  “It’s too soon, Howard. You’re not ready.”

  “I’m ready,” I said, and as if to prove it, I grew hard against her blue-skirted belly. I thought of how my readiness had once delighted her. But now she seemed upset and unwilling, as if I was some pervert pressing against her in the subway. “Sweetheart,” I said, and I began touching her the way she liked to be touched, slowly and rhythmically. I opened her blouse while I kissed her hair and her neck, and my mouth found its way home to her mouth, but it was closed against me. Her resistance seemed brave and foolish; she was one lousy border guard against a whole invading army. Oh, it was work, all right—how could I have forgotten? Soon I was breathing fast with the mean, sweet labor of it, and so was she. First her lips opened a little for my tongue, and for air, and she made a sound, more of a growl than a moan. Her nipples darkened and puckered from kissing. Then her back yielded to my hands—I could feel her vertebrae disappear, one after the other—and her trembling legs opened at the slightest prod of my knee. When I pulled her down with me onto the bed, her entire body dissolved under mine.

  After that growling sound, she grew quiet, except for the frantic hiss of her breath. She usually made a racket in bed—crying out and almost singing in some garbled love language of her own. When Annie was little, she was a light sleeper, with a sixth sense for when we were making love. She’d make her dazed, determined way down the hall from her bedroom to ours. “Tunafishy here,” she would comment, wrinkling her nose, and get in between us like a bundling board. Sometimes I’d ward Annie off by holding my hand over Paulie’s mouth. She would whimper and chew on my fingers, and later I would stand in the bathroom, examining the teeth marks with prideful pleasure.

  This time she moved differently, too, opening and closing in a slower, more deliberate tempo, like the automatic gate on a toll bridge. It was strangely exciting, and new. I rocked over her, in her, propped on my quivering arms, so I could look at her face, at her lovely, sprawling breasts. She grimaced and ground her teeth in concentration. I could hear my own heart booming, as if the volume was up too high. Maybe it always sounded like this and I just never heard it over Paulie’s cries. Jesus, was this moderation? It had to be more like running than walking. Boom! Boom! Boom! Oh, God. Oh, God, I was afraid, maybe I’d die! I didn’t care! Paulie shuddered once, furiously, and I collapsed onto her, letting her take all my weight, still thrusting. I couldn’t have stopped then for anything, for my life. “Oh, my sweet love, I love you!” I said, and pumped myself empty inside her.

  We lay there for what seemed like a very long time. I tried to regulate my heartbeat with the blinking seconds of the clock, but my heart raced ahead. Boom! Boom! When was it supposed to slow down? It was only later, after the throbbing had gone out of my ears and back into my chest, that I realized Paulie had remained silent throughout, and was still lying under me, as motionless now as a trapped animal playing dead. I eased myself off her and she moved onto her side, with her back to me. I leaned over and kissed each of her wing bones. “See,” I said. “I survived. We both survived. I told you it would be all right, didn’t I?” There was no answer. I thought that she had fallen asleep. It must have been as much of a workout for her as it was for me. And the weeks I was in the hospital had to be rough on Paulie, too, running back and forth the way she did, keeping up everybody’s spirits. I wasn’t the best patient in the world, either—scared shitless at the beginning, and then going stir-crazy once I started feeling better. A rush of love for her went through me, and I knew it wasn’t ordinary, post-coital gratitude. I understood that Paulie was good, in some essential and final sense of the word. And I knew that what I’d always liked least about her—her excessiveness, her insistence on happiness—had probably saved me, against my will. I was racked by regret then for everything and anything I’d ever done to hurt her, sorry for the reckless anger of words, for that time with Marie. And for Janine.

  “Paulie,” I said, curving against her in that perfect, lifelong fit. I touched her face and discovered that it was wet with tears. No wonder she hadn’t spoken. I felt like crying myself.

  7

  WHEN I GOT TO the library, a few days after Howard’s homecoming, I saw that Bernie Rusten was there, reading at one of the study tables in the back. He looked up from his book and waved at me. I waved back and decided I’d try to speak to him about Howard’s condition before he left. Bernie was a family doctor, recently transplanted here from Boston, who liked to read American history in his spare time. He said that he wanted to figure out how we’d gotten into this mess in the first place. I’d spoken to him often at the library, mostly about books, and La Rae and I had seen him at Friends of the Earth meetings. Someone there told me he’d been married for a long time, and that his wife had been killed in an automobile accident a couple of years ago, but he had never mentioned her to me. Whenever any of the other library patrons began coughing in the study section, he would glare at them with a mixture of annoyance and clinical concern. Bernie wasn’t our doctor, but I imagined he had a wry and sympathetic bedside manner. He reminded me a little of pictures I’d seen of William Carlos Williams when he was in his forties or fifties. Bernie wore similar wire-framed glasses, and he was starting to go bald in that same attractive, scholarly way. Maybe I was influenced by the fact that he was a doctor, too. And because I sensed that he took an intense pleasure in the company of women, the way Williams was supposed to.

  I’d told him about Howard’s heart attack soon after it happened, saying that he had never seemed like an A-type personality to me. I’d already taken out a stack of popular books on heart disease—Beating the Skipped Beat, Pumping Blood, You and Your Arteries—and was beginning to feel like an expert. Bernie had only one question: “What did Howard’s father die of?” When I told him, he simply said, “Aha!”

  Now I waited a reasonable amount of time before I set out purposefully toward him, using a cart of paperback romances as a blind. He was browsing in the stacks by then, in the Civil War section. I cleared my throat and said, “Good afternoon,” in my modulated library voice.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said, closing the book in his hand. “You caught me at Antietam.”

  “Antietam,” I said. “I’ve forgotten what happened there.”

  “Yeah, we all have,” he said. “That’s the problem. How’s your husband feeling?”

  “He’s better, he�
��s home,” I said, and to my dismay, I burst into tears.

  Bernie pulled a large handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me. It smelled as if it had been freshly ironed. “That doesn’t sound like such tragic news,” he said.

  “It isn’t,” I sobbed.

  “Then are these tears of happiness?”

  “No,” I admitted, “not really.” I picked up one of the books on my cart so I wouldn’t start twisting my fingers. Years ago, Howard used to grab my hands and put them in his pockets to stop me from doing that. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, and I looked down at the book I was holding, as if for inspiration. It was called Love in a Nutshell.

  Bernie followed my glance. “That would be a little crowded, wouldn’t it?” he said, and I had a sudden longing to throw my arms around him. Crying in the library, wanting to embrace virtual strangers—I was as bad as the wanton paperback heroines, all of them made lovesick and unstable by the rise and plunge of their hormones. Of course I laughed and said it was very complicated, and Bernie said, agreeably, “What isn’t?” But that was another reason to read history, he told me, because it helps put things in perspective. “Well, so does poetry,” I said. He smiled and reopened his book, and I walked away toward Fiction, pushing the squealing cart ahead of me.

  Howard was at home, taking a nap. That morning he’d puttered in the garden, pinching off the dead marigold and zinnia heads, but mostly just surveying things on our quarter acre of property, like the lord of a country estate. I’d watched him through the bedroom window while I was getting dressed for work. He’d whistled as he sauntered around, and I couldn’t stand his happiness any more than I used to be able to stand his depression. I kept thinking of the other day, of our love-making. When Howard had brought up the subject with Dr. Croyden, I’d had the wild hope that Croyden would order indefinite abstinence. And when he didn’t, I made vague plans for evasion. Nothing worked, though. I’d allowed myself to be coerced, bullied, seduced, humiliated. My hypocrisy was far worse than Howard’s. I hadn’t even felt lustful when he began touching me, only coldly righteous. And he’d thought I was afraid for him. “I’ll be careful,” he said. Exactly what he’d promised twenty-five years ago in the backseat of his car. I would have believed the most extravagant lies then. “No, yes, please!” I’d cried, in adolescent delirium. But the other day I was sensible and middle-aged, and determined not to fall for any cheap argument or ploy. The body has its own memory, though, its own mind. I shelved the paperbacks with distracted haste. The heroines on their covers smoldered, like me, while their men (some of them on horseback) commanded their passion.

  Ann and Jason and Sara had come to visit Howard a few hours after I’d brought him home from the hospital. I’d been sitting in the kitchen, writing a column on mildew—“Dear Dank in Deer Park, Get those smelly sweaters out in the sun”—when the doorbell rang. Howard was still asleep, so the four of us sat at the table, drinking coffee and waiting for him to wake up. I noticed right away that things were strained between Jason and Sara, but it took several minutes before I realized they weren’t speaking to each other, except in elaborate messages they conveyed through Ann and me. “Have some cake, Sara,” I said. “It’s coconut, your favorite.” And she answered sorrowfully, “I’m not hungry, thanks. But I’m sure Jason will have some.” Jason had already helped himself to a mammoth slice of cake. “She’s trying to starve to death,” he said with his mouth full.

  I searched my head for a suitable, peacemaking subject. “What’s happening with Blood Pudding?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Jason said, and at the same moment Sara said, “We have a couple of gigs.” She didn’t get flustered about contradicting him, as I expected her to, and say that he was right, a couple of gigs are nothing. Instead, she glared at him in defiance, reddened, and turned away. As for Jason, he shrugged and drank his coffee. “Same difference,” he told me. I tried to guess what he might have done to earn her wrath—she’d put up with so much until then, and with such angelic patience. I hoped he hadn’t found somebody else, that he wasn’t letting her go—for his sake, and mine. Plenty of groupies hung around even minor rock bands like theirs, girls who appeared to have no other purpose in life but to swoon with sensation and make themselves available. When Howard had played the clubs years ago, it was the same way. The jazz groupies wore a lot of black, too, but they’d dressed much more discreetly—I remembered berets and turtlenecks—and they tended to be older. But they were just as intensely charged by the music, and they were always, always there. I looked carefully at Sara. More than ever, in daylight, in my kitchen, her gelled pink hair and funky clothes seemed like a child’s getup. And her defiance was childlike, transient as a temper tantrum. Pain was more evident in her face now than anger.

  “Mom,” Ann said, “I’ve been thinking. You and Dad have a very significant anniversary coming up.”

  “Ann, darling,” I said, “you know that we both despise those things, so please don’t plan anything, okay?”

  “You may despise them,” she said, “but Daddy doesn’t. I spoke to him about it in the hospital, and he agreed that this time it’s different. I mean, now we really have something to celebrate.”

  “Yeah,” Jason said, “twenty-five years of bondage.”

  Sara looked shocked.

  “He means imprisonment,” I explained. “Marriage.” God, what was happening to the language?

  “Dad wants to go all-out,” Ann continued. “He said we’ll have to paint the town silver.”

  I had a flash of the Kip’s Bay walk-up, of covering the grimy walls with coats of glistening silver paint. And I imagined another scene, here in this kitchen, when I told my children the truth. “Anyway, this is all very premature,” I said. “It’s a long way off.”

  “Only nine months,” Ann said, and for the first time since they’d arrived, Jason’s and Sara’s eyes met—locked really, with electric tension. Jason glanced away first. “Is Dad getting up soon?” he asked.

  Ann looked at her watch. “I’m meeting Spence at Il Mulino at seven,” she said, “and I have to go home and get dressed first.”

  “That should take about two weeks,” Jason said.

  “Oh, screw you, Jason,” Ann said.

  “Let me take a fast peek at Dad,” I said. “Maybe he’s getting up now.”

  I tiptoed into the bedroom. The news was fading in and out on the radio, and Howard was flung across the bed in sleep. He looked pale and beautiful. His hair was a laurel wreath of curls, like Housman’s dying young athlete’s. But Howard wasn’t that young, and he wasn’t dying; he only needed a little sunlight and some convalescent care, which I would provide. I had a sense of tremendous power over him as I watched him sleep, as if his will had been magically transferred to me.

  When I reported back to the kitchen, Ann was on the telephone. Jason was staring out the window, and Sara was absently picking up crumbs of cake with a dampened finger and licking them off. “He’s out like a light,” I announced, wishing them all away.

  Once they were gone, though, the house was eerily silent, except for the erratic signal of Howard’s radio. When the phone rang, I was startled. It was my mother, calling from Brooklyn. She asked how Howard was feeling, and I said he was okay. “Okay?” she said. “Okay? I sincerely doubt that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “That after a heart attack you’re not okay, you’re not well.”

  “I didn’t say he was well, Ma. It’s just that he’s feeling much better. He’s sleeping now. I hope the phone didn’t disturb him,” I added meanly. There’d been a definite shift in my mother’s loyalties since Howard’s heart attack. One day, while he was in the hospital, she arrived at the house, unannounced, carrying shopping bags loaded with plastic containers of prepared food. She’d taken the subway and the Long Island Railroad and a taxi, and she’d brought all his favorites: blood-clogging lamb stew, sweetbreads in mushroom gravy, herring fillets in cream sauce. She advised me to stow
everything in the freezer for him, so he could put some meat back on his poor bones when he got home. I explained that Howard was supposed to lose weight, and anyway, that stuff was more likely to put plaque on his arteries. She was disbelieving and terribly hurt. As she stood near our freezer, perspiring, and holding a tower of perspiring Tupperware, it became clear to me that she had really learned to love Howard over the years. She loved his playful, teasing manner with her, his exaggerated flattery. In fact, he’d truly become her son. Once, he was the dark villain of our lives. When I’d told her I was marrying him, her screams must have carried to every apartment in the building. A musician! A gypsy with bedroom eyes! She recruited my mild father into her camp and they berated me in stereo. At Howard’s parents’ home, a similar melodrama was taking place. I think his mother even fainted as part of her argument. But the winning argument belonged to Jason, my enduring, silent swimmer, and for all their carrying on, his grandparents were given the gift of generations.

  “Take good care of Howard,” my mother advised on the telephone. “You only get one husband.” It was a confused variation on her usual, more logical theme, that you only get one mother.

  The phone hadn’t disturbed Howard at all. He continued to sleep while the sun moved westward and I prepared chicken tandoori and basmati rice. He even slept through two other phone calls. The first was another one of those nuisance calls, with nobody there. I knew it wasn’t her, but still it made me feel paranoid and helpless. Everything did lately. That morning, when I was packing Howard’s things up at the hospital, his creepy roommate kept getting in my way. I began to think he was trying to tell me something, or that he was going to throw his bathrobe open and flash. I had to get myself under control.