Frozen in Time

by Joseph Epstein

  Larry’s last years of teaching were his worst. He chose not to learn how to use a computer. He loathed the new regime in universities—the rise of feminism, multi-culturalism, affirmative action—and he couldn’t stop himself from making sly remarks in the classroom about how these changes were lowering the standards of higher education. One of his remarks—he claimed John Locke was not “what one might call a strong gynocentric thinker, he didn’t even know where the gynocentre was”—was reported to the department chairman, a Latina named Mary Rodriguez, who took it to the dean. The result was a letter of reprimand from the president of the university, an African-American. Larry responded to this letter by turning in his resignation, at the age of sixty-two.

  Not that retirement changed his life all that much, at least not outwardly. But Larry had begun to turn more and more in on himself. He began watching daytime television and would report to Deborah when she returned from work who had been on Oprah that morning. The backseat of his car was piled up with books and CDs. He would sit in the room he called his study and listen to Glenn Gould play The Goldberg Variations over and over. At night, he watched baseball or basketball games. He and Deborah had long ceased going to bed at the same time. He was always a restless sleeper, and had in recent years begun to snore. Deborah wanted to suggest that they sleep in different rooms—every day was a full day for her, and she needed her sleep—but she hadn’t the heart to do so, thinking it would only mean another rejection for him. She began to pity this man she had once loved.

  Now that Larry is dead, Deborah tries to remember why she let things drift. Could she have roused her husband to shed his bitterness, resentments, trivial envy? Would the threat of divorce have stirred and reignited his lost ambition? Although she had never allowed herself to think about divorce, there were countless times when she wished she had no connection with Larry. Going out with other couples, which they did less and less, was always worrisome. He would get going on one of his obsessions—the dopiness of feminism, the emptiness of African-American Studies programs, the awfulness of rock ‘n’ roll, the ignorance of the young—and invariably take things a step too far, coming across as a crank. Deborah waited at such moments to find a place to barge into her husband’s tirades to change the subject as smoothly as possible, which wasn’t always easy.

  She worried about him. She worried that he would embarrass himself, that others would see through him, that his act fooled no one. The act, of course, was that he was a superior person forced to live in a cheapened culture, where—the unspoken part—his own talents went unappreciated. She hated the notion that people would think him petty in his complaints, neurotic in his behavior, a fool and, yes, a loser. She didn’t take it well when her sister Sharon noted how remarkable it was that so lazy a man as Larry held such high standards. She could live with a husband who had turned out to be a flop. What she minded—more for him more than for herself—was that other people saw through him.

  The one thing in which Larry didn’t let her down was in his love for their children, which was unfaltering. He was proud of them, of their accomplishments, of how well they turned out. When their daughter Lisa told Deborah that she had caught Kenny, her husband, cheating on her, Deborah was surprised at Larry’s cool sense of command in taking the matter in hand. She heard him, over the phone with his daughter in Denver, ask all the right questions in an authoritative and yet calming voice: Did Lisa want him back? And if so, under what terms? Would she be willing to allow him, her father, to speak to Kenny, letting him know what was at stake and whether he understood what it was going to cost him to enjoy his little entertainments? How far did she want him, her father, to go? The next day he called Kenny and, as he told Deborah he would do, laid the lumber to him. He let him know that he was going to turn the case over to a tiger divorce specialist in his father’s old firm. When it was over, he told him, he would be lucky to have his Bronco season tickets left. As Deborah sat listening to him, he seemed masterly. This, she couldn’t help thinking, was more like the man she thought she had married. Her son-in-law returned to Lisa, all contrition, backed, no doubt, by the fear instilled in him by his father-in-law.

  But then Larry soon enough reverted to the griper and small-advantage man he had become. When he sprained his ankle, for example, he acquired a handicap parking sign that he continued to use long after the ankle was better. He would take in old clothes to the Salvation Army and ask large tax write-offs for them. While still teaching, he began secreting Jiffy book bags from the department at school, bags for which he had no real use. What, as the kids say, was that about?

  Deborah had never said a word about these things. She had felt the need to correct him, gently, only when she felt he was in danger of humiliating himself, which, with the passing years, became more and more frequent. When he would complain to her alone about the dismalness of his colleagues, the dehumanization of computers, the atmosphere of victimhood that dominated the country, she would let him, pretending to but not really listening; she had heard it all so many times before.

  And now Larry was dead, beyond hope, beyond correction. His death had been sudden, a stroke, brought on by his diabetes, suffered at a traffic light, in Chicago, on his way home from buying more CDs at a used-record shop he had found on Clark Street. Had Larry’s death been a slow one—a cancer death, say, or a disease of the nerves—they might have had time to talk about all this, about what had happened to all his brilliant plans, about whether she should have pushed him more than she did, and so much more.

  Years ago, at a dinner party, Deborah listened with interest when at table one of the guests, a divorced woman with a leathery suntan, claimed that love was never entirely equal. In every love affair or marriage, one party was more deeply invested in the relationship than the other, and that, this woman claimed, it was probably better to be the less deeply invested party. When she and Larry were first married, as she thought about it now, she probably loved him more than he had loved her—no probably about it, she was certain of it. Larry seemed the one more at ease in the world, a young man used to getting his way, the person who at a party had only to stand off in a corner for other people to come up to him. He had his brilliant future, and she felt herself lucky—privileged even—to be along for the ride.

  Slowly over the years, the balance changed. Deborah couldn’t say for certain that Larry loved her more than she loved him, but he grew more dependent on her, at first for small things, later for decisive ones. Although Larry outwardly showed a superiority to his colleagues, he had inwardly begun to lose his confidence, and he would come to Deborah to ask if he had behaved correctly in one or another of his many confrontations with deans and his department chairman. Often he hadn’t, or so she thought, and she felt that she had to let him know that his behavior was out of line. At first, she did so in the gentlest manner she could devise, but later she told him when he was wrong in the way a parent might correct a ten-year-old child.

  Deborah couldn’t help wonder if she had had a hand in Larry’s slow downfall. He had his flaws, God knows, serious ones, but was she too naturally competent, too impatient with dithering, too good at carrying out all her tasks, so that her husband left everything to her but his petty disputes and idiosyncratic interests? She was perfectly content to leave him in his room listening to his music, looking at catalogues from the Franklin Mint, reading (the better to mock) the published work of contemporaries whose success he despised, collecting his model cars, and cultivating his many grievances.

  There were times when she wished that Larry had had love affairs, one even strong enough to encourage him to leave her. What a relief it would have been! But his death, somehow, wasn’t a relief at all. She remembered the last line of a Noel Coward song called The Widow, which ran, “I’m wearing beautiful mourning, oh what a beautiful day.” But she felt none of that. What she chiefly felt was waste—and what a miserable mistake it had all been.

  Years ago, she had re
ad a short story—she couldn’t remember who wrote it—about a man who goes into a cinema and discovers that the movie is about the courtship of his parents. As his father, in the movie, finally asks his mother to marry him, the man shouts out something like, “No. Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” Standing there, before her dead husband’s closet, she imagines herself in the part of the man’s mother in the movie; like her, she had made the mistake of doing it, of saying yes to the wrong man, Larry Siskin. She couldn’t have known he was the wrong man at the time, but so he turned out to be.

  Deborah tries to remember when she had emotionally if not actually disengaged from her marriage to Larry. He probably wasn’t even aware of it; she herself may not have been. But disengage she did, once she began to sense that he wasn’t going to come through in any serious way, but would instead give his days over to playing with his toys and grousing and brooding on his stunted career. She had her professional life; she had her children. She has long ago achieved independence—financially and in every other way.

  Standing in front of her dead husband’s closet, Deborah tries to imagine the kind of husband she might once have wished to have had. That perfect man, kind, gentle, modest, thoughtful, successful, a patient and proficient lover, Deborah realizes that he probably doesn’t exist. Except for the modesty part, she supposes that, when she first married him, she held out hopes that Larry might turn out to be such a husband. A serious error, she decides, looking at the tired clothes in her Larry’s closet. Yet she also decides that in some sick way Larry was the perfect husband for her. She would probably not, with a less neurotically self-absorbed man, have been allowed to live her own life as independently as she has.

  Folding up Larry’s shirts for the ORT bag, Deborah wondered why her thoughts about her marriage seem to press so insistently on her just now. Surely, it was better, as the common wisdom had it, to forget all the negative things about the dead and remember only what was best about them. The fact is that, all the while she and Larry lived together, in a busy life she never stopped to analyze their relationship, at least not in a concentrated way. She could live easily enough with letting things drift. Why was it important she make a final, a definite, judgment now? Was she seeking—what was that dopey word?—closure? Whenever she heard anyone talk about “coming to closure,” she used to think of “closure” as an expensive spa in southern California. Welcome to Closure.

  Deborah has now folded up the rest of Larry’s clothes. She has decided to call in her son Steven, the cardiologist and the only one of her children living in Chicago, to deal with the Franklin Mint and railroad cars and football jerseys, baseball hats, the old records, the CDs, and the rest. She has also decided not to bother with the first edition novels; she’ll just give them to the Evanston Library for its next book sale.

  Larry’s clothes fit into four shopping bags, and Deborah loads them into the trunk of her Volvo. She feels a sudden urgency to get them out of the house. Driving from her house on Isabella, in northwest Evanston, she takes Sheridan Road, which leads into Chicago Avenue, where, near Main, ORT is. But then, at Church Street, she finds herself taking a left, and driving down to the lake. She parks, illegally, near a pier that divides a small boat launch and a dog beach. No one is at the dog beach at the moment; it is October and too late for small boats to be in the waters of Lake Michigan.

  Deborah removes the four shopping bags containing Larry’s clothes from the trunk of her car, and, carrying two in each hand, she walks out to the end of the L-shaped pier. She empties one bag after another into the choppy water. The clothes do not sink but follow the current heading southward, toward downtown, a clear view of whose skyscrapers is available from the end of the pier. Her dead husband’s dark blue down-filled coat, spread out in the water, looks, in the middle-distance, like a raft. She takes one last look at the clothes bobbing and floating away, gathers up the four empty shopping bags, and heads back to the Volvo. In the car, she turns on the ignition, looks into the rear-view mirror to check what the wind out on the pier has done to her hair, and discovers she is smiling. Not her usual, deanly, official, welcoming smile, but a smile with a slight smirk, and a touch, maybe just a touch, of the vindictive to it.

  Second Family

  A senior partner in the firm of Stone, Viner, Futterman and Waller, employing thirty-seven lawyers, partners, and associates, David Futterman has stayed late at the office this evening to go over the briefs for three different cases on which Stacy Shanahan, one of the firm’s paralegals, has been assigned to work with him. Ms. Shanahan is capable, quick, efficient. They finish at 6:45 p.m., and Futterman asks the young woman if she is free for dinner.

  “Just let me get a few things at my desk,” Ms. Shanahan says, “and I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  Ruth, Futterman’s wife, died four years ago, at sixty-one, of a heart attack while shopping at Crate & Barrel on a Saturday morning in the kitchenware section of the crowded Michigan Avenue store. He and Ruth had been married thirty-seven years. They married the year that Futterman graduated from Northwestern Law School. Futterman always thought of his and Ruth’s as a happy enough marriage; certainly it was a solid one.

  Careful, prudent, Futterman does not usually fraternize after hours with the help. Especially not with attractive young paralegals or secretaries, lest gossip result. He has nothing especially in mind in inviting Stacy Shanahan to dinner, except a break in his own boring widower’s routine—dinner alone on a tray in front of the television set—and to reward her for working overtime. To ensure that no sexual interpretation can be put on his invitation, he decides to take Ms. Shanahan to Harry Caray’s, on LaSalle Street, a far from romantic restaurant, noisy and masculine, a sort of sports bar with steaks and chops and heavy pasta dishes added.

  At dinner, Futterman learns that Ms. Shanahan’s father is a retired Chicago fireman. She is one of six children, two girls, four boys, brought up in Marquette Park, the neighborhood that gave Martin Luther King Jr. a rough awakening when he brought his Southern Christian Leadership Conference movement to Chicago back in the 1960s. Two of Ms. Shanahan’s brothers are now themselves firemen, one is a cop, and the other has a job at City Hall—a real Chicago Irish family. She had gone to Mother McAuley High School, and at one point, she tells Futterman, she considered becoming a nun. At Triton Community College she picked up what she needed to get a job as a paralegal.

  Stacy Shanahan is remarkably relaxed through dinner, or so Futterman thinks. Although she asks that he call her Stacy, she never refers to him as anything other than Mr. Futterman. She orders and dispatches a full slab of ribs, a baked potato, a large side order of coleslaw, washed down with a beer, food that suggests that she is not trying to beguile him with her feminine refinement.

  Futterman finds himself impressed with this young woman—with her independence, her taking control of her own life with, as far as he can tell, not much help from her parents. He is an old double-standards man, Futterman, at least insofar as he believes that life is harder for women than it is for men, that more traps and pitfalls await them. His own two daughters, by marrying young—one to a physician, the other to a man who has gone into his father’s lucrative dress business—avoided those horrors, and he is grateful that they have.

  Stacy Shanahan tells Futterman that she lives on Sheridan Road, 6300 north, and when dinner is over, he puts her in a taxi and slips two twenties in her hand, more than enough to pay the fare. She thanks him and thanks him, too, for a good dinner. Futterman makes a mental note to charge off both the cab fare and Ms. Shanahan’s meal for her working overtime.

  “We’ll do it again some time,” Futterman hears himself saying before closing the door of the cab, though of course he doesn’t mean a word of it.

  Roughly three months later, at the law firm’s Christmas party, Ms. Shanahan approaches Futterman. Holding a bottle of champagne, he has been walking around the large office conference room, a kind of peripatetic b
artender, pouring champagne for anyone he notices with an empty glass.

  “Hi Mr. Futterman,” Ms. Shanahan says. “How go things?”

  “Things go well, Stacy,” Futterman says. “The firm had a pretty good year. Hope you aren’t disappointed with your bonus . . .”

  “Not in the least,” she says. She has a good smile, he notes.

  Futterman senses that she is slightly tipsy, but fails to realize that so is he, having already drunk four glasses of champagne.

  “I’ve got some news,” Ms. Shanahan says.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “These are going to be my last two weeks at Stone, Viner, Futterman and Waller. I have a new job as an assistant office manager at Sidley Austin.”

  “A good firm, Sidley, an old firm. Also a huge one. I hope you’ll be happy there,” Futterman says. “We’ll miss you,” he adds, hoping he didn’t sound perfunctory saying it. Paralegals come and go, their departure no big deal.

  “I guess I’m an ambitious person,” Stacy says. “Sidley’s offering me more money. I also hope one day to be an office manager for a large firm.”

  “I think you’re doing the right thing,” Futterman says. “You’re right to go for it.”

  “I’m glad, Mr. Futterman, really glad you feel that way.”

  He pours her another glass of champagne, and one more for himself.

  “The coyote maneuver”—Futterman remembered Barry Spackman, a young lawyer at his firm using the term talking to a contemporary in the locker room of the gym at the East Bank Club. He asked what it meant. Spackman told him that a “real coyote” is what you call a terrible woman you have slept with the night before. When you wake up the next morning in bed with your arm under her head, you look at her and want to bite off your own arm, as coyotes are said to chew off a leg caught in a trap, to make your escape.