Silver

by Hilma Wolitzer

  When I turned down our street, almost an hour later, I realized how tired I was, and how glad I was to be home. Two little kids across the street were chasing each other around the lawn the way Jason and Annie used to. Gordon Brooks, the guy next door, was working on his rosebushes. I tapped the horn as I turned into our driveway and he waved his spade at me. When we’d first moved in, we had some disagreements over the border shrubs, and about Jason cutting across his property on the way to school. We both thumped our chests a few times, and then, over the years, we’d reached a state of détente. The houses in our development were all identical, but we’d each made some mark of distinction, with paint or lawn ornaments or landscaping. Gordon had his fabulous rosebushes. The Castellis had their ceramic frogs. And Paulie and I had a red door, with a fist-shaped brass knocker she’d found in a flea market. I banged it three times—our old signal—and then I put my key in the lock.

  “I’m home,” I yelled into the cool afternoon shade of the house. It was eerily quiet in there, or did I just think that later? The only sound was the clicking of Shadow’s toenails as he came slowly across the kitchen floor to greet me. “Hello, you good boy,” I said, rubbing his head. “Where’s Mommy?” I went through the rooms, calling Paulie’s name, until I came around full circle to the kitchen. It was much too neat, like those kitchens in the model homes we used to look at on Sundays. There were no signs of dinner. Paulie should have been home from the library—she was usually slicing or chopping something on the cutting board by now. I let Shadow out into the back yard, hoping I’d find her in the hammock, sleeping maybe, or reading. She wasn’t there and I had a sudden moment of real loneliness, the way I felt some evenings when the grass and trees went black, and the cars became dark silhouettes in the driveways. I automatically went to the refrigerator and opened the door. I was still a little full from lunch and yet I ate a slice of cheese and poked the last few green olives from a jar. The salty brine on my fingers was stinging and delicious.

  The phone rang, and it startled me in that stillness. It was Ann, wanting to ask Paulie about the ingredients for a cake. “She’s not here, sweetie,” I said. “She must be taking a walk or something.”

  “With Shadow?”

  “No,” I said, and a nervous spasm grabbed my gut. “He’s out back, killing off the hydrangea.”

  “Mom told me about Sara, Daddy. What’s going to happen with them?”

  “I went to see Jason today, and we had a man-to-man talk. I think I convinced him to accept fatherhood.” I knew I was grandstanding, but it was Paulie’s fault—she should have been home to hear what had happened.

  “Jason? I can’t believe it. He’s still such a baby himself.”

  “Not for long,” I said.

  “And you’ll be a grandpa!” She said it gently, teasingly, and it certainly wasn’t news, but it felt like it anyway.

  After we hung up, I let Shadow back in and I wandered through the house again, as if I might have overlooked Paulie in one of the rooms. Where the hell was she? I wouldn’t call any of her friends; I hated it when she tried to track me down that way when I was late. I hated ever having to account for where I’d been. I didn’t have any pain, but I touched my breast pocket, where I kept the vial of nitroglycerin. The other cigar was still in there, too. I almost dumped it, but I changed my mind and tossed it into a carton of odds and ends on a shelf in the hall closet. As I was shutting the door, I noticed my saxophone case, way in the back on the floor. I took it out and carried it to the bedroom. I sat on the bed and opened the case; the sax glimmered on the dark blue velvet lining like buried gold. Without really thinking about it, I put my neck strap on. I wet the reed and pressed it against the flat of the mouthpiece, and twisted the pieces together. The first sounds I blew were rampant bleats, like the cries of an animal in pain. I was really out of shape—even my breathing was harsh and uneven. I ran up and down the scales and blew arpeggios and chords until I had more control. Then I played a few Getz numbers: “Over the Rainbow,” “Desifmado,” and “Early Autumn.” The room was noticeably darker when I finished. The telephone rang.

  13

  I THINK I KNEW who she was even before she spoke, although she might have been selling cosmetics door-to-door—she had that glamorous, glossy finish. But she was also coolly pale, small-boned and delicate, my opposite and Howard’s perverse passion. It wasn’t just her appearance that gave her away, though. It was also the way she eyed me, a private comparative study in which she clearly came out ahead. I saw her and I saw myself—queen-size and florid—at the same time, as if we were side by side, facing a mirror. “You’re Paulie, aren’t you,” she said. “My name is Janine.” Janine. I stepped backward, as if I’d been pushed, and she swished past me into the house.

  Marie had never presented herself this way. But I’d stalked her for days, riding up and down in the elevator of her apartment building until I saw her at last, with a whomp of recognition. How could I blame Howard for wanting her? She had the kind of body I’d always wished I had myself, and that no amount of dieting or exercise would ever give me. And her long hair was gloriously straight and lustrous. In those days, I set mine on juice cans to get rid of its stubborn frizz, but the moisture in the air would curl it right back up again. I’d tried not to even imagine this one—Janine—until it became bearable. When I told Howard my suspicions that night, I said I thought he had a lover. Now that seemed to be only a modern catchword, a false nod to equality between the sexes. Janine looked more like what we used to call a girlfriend, or a mistress. I followed her into my own living room, so invaded by sensation that the final effect was total numbness, except for the frantic bird of my heart. She sat down and I sat opposite her, wishing she had a sample case of lipsticks and blushers to display, that she wasn’t here merely to tell me the truth.

  “I met your husband … I met Howard six months ago,” she began. “I went to his studio to cut a demo. I’m a singer—not rock, though—slow, romantic ballads.”

  The nerve of her! What supreme vanity to think I’d care what kind of songs she sang! But I did care, the way my mother obstinately cared about the lives of her favorite soap-opera villains.

  “And then we just fell for each other. I mean nobody meant for it to happen, but it did.”

  She may have been wondering why Howard had never told her I was mute. I put one hand to my throat and felt all the unspoken words crowded together there.

  Janine sighed deeply. “He’s been in terrible conflict,” she said. “That’s what probably led to his heart attack. I saw him in the hospital, you know,” she added slyly. It was, oddly enough, the most intimate and terrible detail she could have revealed.

  “When?” I managed to say.

  “Right after it happened,” she said. “He sent a message for me to come, and I did.”

  “And when did you see him last?”

  “The other day. He came to Bloomingdale’s, in Garden City, where I work—I mean, just until I get my break as a singer.”

  “Why did you come here?” I asked her.

  “Because I don’t like living like this,” she said, “and I believe in being honest. I believe you should know what’s going on.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s very considerate of you.”

  For the first time, her confidence wavered. She wasn’t certain if I was being sarcastic or just stupidly sincere. To be safe, I guess, she offered a tentative, crooked smile.

  “So I’m going to be honest with you, too,” I said, erasing that smile. “I’ve known about you all along.” Wasn’t that really true? “And I’ve decided to end Howard’s conflict about us. He’s all yours.”

  She opened her mouth and shut it again, confused, as if she’d forgotten the words to a song.

  “There are a few things you ought to know about him, though. He needs a low-fat, low-sodium diet. And he’s not supposed to smoke,” I said, “or strain himself. You’d better keep an extra supply of his heart medicine in your purse.” Her nos
e and eyelids flushed pink and she’d turned even paler. Before she could speak, I continued: “He gets depressed on Sundays. You’ll have to ease him awake—I suppose you’re good at that. Oh, and watch out for his mother. She lives in Florida, but she’s a shark, she’s a long-distance swimmer.”

  “I don’t—” Janine began.

  “The children will hate you at first, maybe forever, but that’s Howard’s problem, isn’t it?”

  Janine stood up. I was going too fast for her. I was going too fast for myself; it was making me dizzy. “You’ll get to put the dog to sleep, I guess. What else is there? What else?”

  Janine headed for the front door, and I walked briskly behind her. “Don’t crowd him,” I advised. “He hates that. Remember, less is more, more or less.”

  She was on the front steps, and then she was tripping toward the curb. “I’m sorry you didn’t have time to sing for me!” I called after her. I shouted other things, but they were lost in the roar of the Mazda’s engine.

  I went back inside and sat in the kitchen, trying to catch my breath. Twenty-five years, I thought. Twenty-five years ago we weren’t missing two cups, one soup spoon, and three knives. Twenty-five years ago I carried Howard’s lagging spirit over love’s threshold, while my mother and father watched grimly from their own wedding bed.

  I dragged a suitcase from the garage—the weekender—and stuffed it with clothes and things from the bathroom cabinets. I hadn’t spoken to Sherry for a long time and I had to look up her number in the phone book. If she wasn’t there, or if she couldn’t put me up, I’d have to stay in a hotel. That would be expensive and lonelier than I thought I could stand. Sherry was a schoolteacher and would be home from work by now, if she’d gone directly home. The phone rang several times before she answered it. “Paulie, I was just thinking about you!” she exclaimed. “I dreamed about you last night, or was it the night before?”

  “I’ve been thinking about you, too,” I said, realizing that I hardly ever thought about Sherry anymore. She was part of some previous incarnation, that slow, glazed summer of our youth. Years ago, she squeezed her eyes shut and threw the I Ching coin to find the direction of her future. It rolled across her kitchen and disappeared under the stove. I wondered if she was still seeking practical answers from mystical sources.

  “Actually, I dreamed that you’d died,” she said. “But don’t worry, that only means I’ve added years to your life.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but right now I sort of wish I was dead.”

  I was able to tell Sherry everything in a fast synopsis—she knew so much about Howard and me already. Sherry had been my closest friend when I first met him, the willing audience for all my ecstatic confidences: Howard says, Howard says, Howard says … Despite her sympathy for our grand passion, she worried about the incompatibility of our astrological signs, and she was always surprised and amused by my monogamy. “You’re going to miss everything,” she’d say, and of course I believed that was true of her, with her many shortlived romances.

  For several years after she’d graduated from NYU, with a degree in elementary education, Sherry refused to apply for a teaching job. She worked as a temporary typist or receptionist, and as a part-time salesclerk at Macy’s during the Christmas rush—anything that allowed her lots of time to play. She even used to answer those ads in the Voice, for people to participate in psychological experiments for two dollars an hour and a free lunch. I remembered her mother’s anguish because she wouldn’t settle down. And I remembered Sherry’s small, smoky apartment, where people lounged among all the cats on her bare mattress, trying out marijuana and sex. Now Sherry’s mother was dead, and Sherry was a tenured teacher in the New York City school system.

  “Come and stay with me,” she said, as I knew she would. Even before she spoke, I was fumbling in one of the kitchen drawers for a timetable.

  I took a cab to the station, and waited among the homebound day workers for the 4:36. I hadn’t told anyone I was going, not even the children or La Rae. For one thing, I was afraid of being defused by argument, and for another, I had to leave quickly, before Howard came home. I didn’t want to see his guilty face, or listen to his feeble denials or declarations of remorse. I tried to write him a note, but every attempt was either inadequate to the occasion or hysterically illegible. Let him worry, I decided as the cabbie honked in the driveway, and soon I was on my way, the sun flashing at the train windows like the lost knives.

  The decor of Sherry’s West Village walk-up had changed over the years. The beaded curtains were long gone and the mattress on the floor had been replaced by a sedate-looking foldout sofa. There were only two cats now, elderly and arthritic females who hardly showed any interest in my presence. The place still stank of cats, though, as if the menagerie of a quarter of a century ago had left a permanent stench.

  Sherry herself appeared to be straddling her former life and the present one. There was something of the bohemian in her long, dark hair and something of the schoolmarm in her sensible shoes. Once I’d tried to persuade her of my domestic bliss, and she had pretended to be persuaded. “God, I love it in here” was her first comment about the infant Jason’s nursery, but she hit the road the minute he filled his diaper.

  None of Sherry’s many lovers ever won her mother’s heart or approval. There were married men who promised through their teeth to divorce, and homosexual men Sherry hoped to convert. In her late thirties, she was involved briefly with another woman—“A district supervisor,” she’d told me on the phone. “Even my mother would have been impressed.”

  After Howard left me for Marie, I used to sprawl among the freeloading, unpublished poets on her mattress, trying in vain to get high, to rise up out of my sorrow. Now we sat at her tiny dinette table, eating a Greek dinner right from those little foil takeout trays. “We’ll probably get Alzheimer’s from the aluminum,” Sherry commented, digging in, and I was flung back in time to our “dangerous” girlhood, when almost everything seemed like a worthwhile risk. “You only live once” used to be Sherry’s motto, and who could argue with that?

  “I’m going to find a place tomorrow,” I promised. “I’ll go to the real-estate agencies.”

  “What? And pay a fortune plus a commission for some rat-hole?”

  Sherry’s place, where she’d lived for almost thirty years, was rent-controlled, and she loved to upset everybody by mentioning how little she paid for it. Her landlord had tried desperately to get rid of her over the years, so he could acquire a new tenant and a substantial increase. He’d sent her phony eviction notices, refused to make repairs, and he’d cut off the heat and hot water for weeks at a time. Sherry said he once even sent someone posing as an exterminator, who let a whole new generation of roaches loose in her bathroom. She fought back on every front, and by now I supposed he’d resigned himself to trying to outlive her. “Well, I can’t stay here forever,” I said.

  “I wish it were bigger,” Sherry said. “But maybe you could get a larger share. We’ll look in the Voice.”

  “Sherry,” I said, “this isn’t a June Allyson movie. I’m forty-five years old, and I’ve been married for over twenty-four years—I couldn’t live with a complete stranger.”

  “Then we’ll find you a sublet. That way, you’ll get furniture and linens and dishes, and maybe a low rent, too.”

  “All right,” I said. And then I was suddenly exhausted, my moussaka-laden fork too heavy to lift. Janine. “Oh, God,” I said, slumping in my seat.

  Sherry reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Poor Paulie,” she said. A few minutes later she said, “What are you going to tell your kids?”

  “The truth—sort of. That we have irreconcilable differences, that we’re emotionally incompatible.”

  “That sounds right out of Divorce Court.”

  “Well, the sordid details are none of their business. They’ve witnessed enough in the past, anyway.” I thought of the day Howard left to live with Marie, how the children and I came
home early from my mother’s and caught him packing. It was like an opera without any accompaniment. We screamed at each other in soprano and baritone, and then I collapsed against his chest, begging him to stay. He groaned in misery and commiseration, and kissed me goodbye. The baby cried throughout the whole thing, and Jason kept yelling at us not to yell.

  After we’d cleared the table, Sherry brought in some school papers to correct. She taught the fourth grade, and this pile of papers was the result of an assignment to write a report on a favorite book. Were they still doing that? The sight of those lined sheets, the earnest, chubby, penciled letters made me nostalgic, not for my children’s school years, but for my own. I remembered the renewable pleasure of blank paper, the endless possibilities of inspiration. This was before rejection or writer’s block had ever occurred to me, before I’d learned that rhyme and meter weren’t enough, were sometimes too much. “Begin!” the teacher would say, as if we were runners at the starting line, and the pencils would scratch in chorus, sending up their dark, woody perfume. Words like “pandemonium” and “delphinium” were like rich cakes—only one to a page, I knew without being told, but, oh, how delicious! Of course I was praised for the puffed-up little poems I wrote on demand. And I was criticized for my creative errors in spelling and syntax.

  I picked up one of Sherry’s papers. A girl named Grace Lombardy had chosen a Judy Blume novel, the same one Ann had loved so much at the same age. “This is a god bok,” Grace had written. “It esplains abot life.” Well, what more could you ask of a bok? I grabbed Sherry’s red marker and scrawled a giant A+ across the top of the paper. Then I asked Sherry if I could use her telephone. “Of course,” she said. “Do you want me to take a walk?” There wouldn’t be any privacy if she stayed, but it seemed terribly rude to ask her to leave her own apartment. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll only be on for a few minutes.”