Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

  Daniel, still smiling, still seeming to be the most pleasant person you’d ever met, was holding the photograph out to Lev, as if he were showing Lev who Lev’s own children were.

  For a moment she felt sure he was going to stuff the photograph down Lev’s throat. It was so vivid a premonition that she could see him doing it. It was almost as if the sight of the two men was less vivid than her imaginary picture of them.

  Lev was now holding one cracker in each hand again, and you could almost have thought that he was trying to ward Daniel off with them.

  Greta had finished saying whatever it was she’d had to say—or so Janine assumed, since Janine hadn’t heard any of it. Now Greta was talking to someone else, and Janine moved over to the bar and ordered a soda so as to appear to be engaged in something while she observed the two men.

  They were still—slowly, gradually—moving.

  Daniel was still holding the photograph near Lev’s face. She remembered some spy movie she’d seen, where the bad guy slit someone’s throat with a credit card.

  They were all the way in the corner of the room now. Lev was standing against the chair. Daniel took one more . . . No, he didn’t take a step. He just leaned.

  Lev seemed—or was this in her imagination?—to be swaying. Then, slowly, heavily, inevitably, he went down into the chair.

  He looked as if he didn’t quite know how he’d gotten there. He was still holding his two crackers. Daniel was leaning over him.

  She saw her husband put the photograph in Lev’s breast pocket and clap him on the shoulder, as if they were the best of friends.

  Daniel looked around the room and spotted her and came toward her, smiling, shaking his head.

  “Great guy,” he said. “Solid-gold guy. Great sense of humor.”

  She felt as if she were being toyed with on some Zen level.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said. “Call me if you need a ride back.”

  He headed toward the door. She followed him, and once they were in the hall, she grasped his arm.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. What was that?”

  “We were just chewing the fat,” he said.

  Chewing the fat. A solid-gold guy. He didn’t even sound like himself.

  “I just want you to know that I’m not impressed,” she said. “I’m not impressed by your Dennis Rodman bullshit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This alpha-male bullshit. It’s so juvenile. It’s so beneath you. If you thought I was impressed by it, you really don’t know me at all.”

  A stillness came over Daniel. His features, which for the last hour had been lit up by a false good humor, finally relaxed, and she saw the face of the man she knew.

  “I’m not asking you to be impressed. I’m not expecting you to be.”

  He was looking at her directly, running his eyes over her face. She didn’t look away.

  What can you say about the face of the man you’ve been married to for twenty-three years? It was a well-lined face, and it wasn’t a face you’d call handsome, but it was a strong face. Usually she thought of it as strong, calm, kind, but she couldn’t see the calmness or the kindness now.

  And what, she wondered, could be said about her own face? What did he see as he looked at her?

  Without saying goodbye, he walked toward the entrance and into the parking lot. She ran out after him, but once she was there, standing with him at the car, she still didn’t know what she wanted to say. Again they just looked at each other.

  “I’ll be heading back on the fifteenth,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “What are you talking about? I thought we were going to talk about this.”

  “We’re talking.”

  “I mean I thought we were going to talk it over before we decided anything.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  He had this habit that had always gotten under her skin. When you said something that didn’t, in his opinion, merit a response, he wouldn’t say anything at all. As you waited for him to respond—you kept thinking he’d respond, no matter how many times he’d done this in the past—your original remark would hang there in the air, and would seem stupider and stupider, even to you.

  “When were you planning on telling me?” she said.

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “So you’re just making this decision for all of us? You’re just going home and expecting that I’m coming back with you?”

  “I didn’t say that. Everybody’s free here. You’re a free woman.”

  He got into the car and closed the door, and then he was gone.

  100

  Janine got a ride back from the conference. It was almost midnight by the time she put her key in the lock.

  She could hear Daniel’s snoring all the way from the foyer. She’d kept urging him to get tested for sleep apnea, but he kept putting it off.

  She hadn’t been able to pay attention to anything anybody’d said all day, and she was still agitated and unhappy.

  During much of the day, she’d been thinking that she should just get rid of both of them, Daniel and Lev, find a room of her own somewhere, and spend the rest of her days in a state of wise and noble manlessness. Fish without a bicycle, etc.

  But that wasn’t really her. It was nice work if you could get it, but it wasn’t her.

  Emily was in the living room, on her laptop.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know. Wandering the web.”

  Janine sat across from her. She couldn’t remember when she and her daughter had last spent time alone.

  “How’s your summer been?” Janine said.

  “How has my summer been,” Emily said.

  “Yes. I’m asking you a simple question. How has your summer been?”

  “It’s been fine. I’m getting to know the grandma.”

  “Do you still think she’s just an old windbag?”

  “Did I say that? Yeah. No. She’s not an old windbag. She’s the warrior from the Bronx.”

  “Have you learned anything from her?”

  “Have I learned anything from her?”

  “Don’t just repeat everything I say to make me feel stupid. Answer my questions.”

  “You know that saying ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer—’”

  “‘Everything looks like a nail.’ Sure.”

  “Grandma’s a woman with a hammer. Maybe there’s a lot she doesn’t get. Maybe there’s a lot she doesn’t see. But she’s not your average lady.”

  “Anything else going on?”

  The lights in the room weren’t strong enough for her to be sure whether Emily was blushing.

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  Emily was silent.

  “Is there a boy?”

  Emily was silent.

  “Is there?”

  “There was a boy,” Emily said.

  “I didn’t even know.”

  “Some things are unknowable,” Emily said.

  “Did you end it? Did he end it?”

  “I did it all by myself.”

  “How do people break up these days? Do you just change your status on Facebook?”

  “That’s right. That’s how I let him know. I blocked his tweets.”

  “No. Really.”

  “You know me, Mom. I’m an old-fashioned girl. I let him know by carrier pigeon.”

  “Was it hard to break up?”

  “Is it ever not hard?”

  Janine was wondering where her daughter had acquired such wisdom. Or maybe it wasn’t wisdom. Maybe it was something everybody knew.

  “I’m sorry,” Janine said.

  “It wasn’t as hard as it could have been, because I studied the master. I studied the art of the hammer.”

  “You watched your g
randmother break up with someone?”

  “I just imagined how she’d do it. I started calling him by the wrong name.”

  That was all she was going to get out of her daughter. Janine keenly wished her son were there with them—her voluble son, who would tell you everything that was on his mind whether you wanted to hear it or not, and whose talkativeness somehow freed everyone else to talk more. When he was seven or eight he’d sometimes come into Janine and Daniel’s bedroom in the morning and say, “Can I chat with you for a minute?” and if they said yes, he would slide between them and tell them about everything that was going on in his world: the latest battles of his Lego armies; his latest reflections about Star Wars; his critiques of all the kids in his class.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” Janine said. “Are you okay?”

  “I am. Thanks, Mom.”

  At her bedroom door, Janine stopped and turned around and said, “What was his name, by the way?”

  Emily smiled. “You couldn’t pronounce it,” she said.

  “That’s . . . what? Star Trek? Friday Night Lights? Jane Austen? It’s from something, right?”

  “You’re getting there, Mom,” Emily said. “You’re getting there.”

  101

  Daniel’s snoring filled the room. Usually, when he was snoring like this, she prodded him onto his side, a position in which he snored a little less, but now she just let him go on.

  She’d been angry at him all day, but it’s hard to be angry at someone who’s asleep.

  She still couldn’t be sure what he knew or didn’t know. She wished she could just peer into his mind. It was even possible, for all she knew, that he was upset because of something he hadn’t even told her about, and his antics in the morning had had little to do with her.

  It wasn’t likely, but it was possible.

  Early in their marriage, she’d had to train herself to respect his privacy. She’d always been a snoop, so it was difficult, but she’d succeeded in curbing her impulses. It had been years since she’d gone through any of Daniel’s things in search of clues about his inner life.

  She went quietly to his dresser and picked up his cell phone. She scrolled through the list of calls he’d made and calls he’d received, and none of it seemed revealing. She checked his voice mail for saved messages, but there weren’t any.

  Also on the dresser was a stack of papers: bills, receipts, torn-out pages on which he’d scrawled whatever you scrawl on torn-out pages. The light from the street was enough for her to see by. She picked up his Visa bill. Nothing unexpected. They were still paying off Emily’s braces, somehow, and they were still paying Mark’s bills from Reed and Emily’s from Oberlin. It depressed her to look at the bills.

  Watch repair receipt, article clipped from the Times, taxi receipt. At the bottom of the pile was a sheet of blue paper that looked promising, but she wanted to proceed methodically. Cell phone bill, cable bill, hospital bill, car insurance bill.

  Hospital bill?

  Her first thought was that it concerned Mark. Mark had hurt himself again, and Daniel had covered it up again. Daniel was a pain in the ass about that. When Mark was in high school, he played three different sports, and—

  But this wasn’t about Mark.

  There was a host of terms and items and charges, most of them giving little clue of what he’d been in for, except that it was clear that he’d received a lot of tests, and that some of the tests, at least, had involved his heart.

  Each procedure was accompanied by a date. He had been in the hospital for three days, three weekends ago. When she was spending the night with Lev, he was spending the night in the hospital.

  She picked his cell phone back up, to see if he’d called anyone during those three days. Nope. He hadn’t called Emily, and he hadn’t called Mark, and he hadn’t called her.

  The tests weren’t tests they would have given him for something less than serious. And he had told her nothing.

  It was hard for her to take this in.

  Daniel, on the bed, seemed to be dreaming. His eyelids were fluttering. She had no clue as to whether it was a happy dream or a sad one.

  You travel side by side through the life you share, and you come to think you know each other all too well. But if each of us enters the afterlife alone, and is asked to give an accounting, asked to speak of how one lived and what one lived for, then the accounting Daniel gave of his life might involve trials of which she knew nothing, sufferings of which he’d never spoken and that had left no outer mark.

  The hospital bill had shaken her up so much that she’d forgotten about the blue sheet of paper at the bottom of the pile.

  After she heard Emily close the door to her room, she went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee, and stayed at the kitchen table for a long time.

  102

  The next evening, as it was growing dark, Emily was in the living room, Skyping with her brother, and Daniel was a few feet away from her, on the couch, reading a magazine and putting in an occasional comment or two.

  Daniel and Emily had visited Bard and Sarah Lawrence that day, and driven back through a rainstorm. The storm was still fierce, and the temperature had plunged. It was August, but the evening had the bite of fall.

  Janine was in the bedroom. From where she was sitting, she couldn’t see Emily, but she could hear her. She and Mark were talking in their own language, a mélange of shared references and private jokes.

  “The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play,” Mark said.

  She could see Daniel. He was leaning back against the cushions; he had a sort of glow of honest tiredness about him; he was taking a pure, relaxed pleasure in his children.

  The rain was battering the windows. It was the kind of night when you realize how lucky you are to be warm and indoors, how lucky you are to know that your children are happy and thriving and safe.

  There was something in the oven; Daniel went into the kitchen to check on it.

  Janine followed him into the kitchen.

  “What are you making over there?” she said.

  Daniel looked up at her quickly, as though she’d said something unusual, which she hadn’t. Maybe there was something in her voice.

  “Just something for the girl. Nothing complicated. Are you aware that in a previous life I was a short-order cook?”

  “Yes, I am aware of that. In a previous life I sampled your flapjacks.”

  She came over to the oven.

  “That smells good. Is it vegan?”

  “No. Actually not. I’ve decided to play a trick on our daughter. I’m sprinkling in little pieces of bacon. Bacon bits.”

  “Good, good. Why?”

  “I’m not philosophically aligned with veganism.”

  “And so you take it as a mission of sorts to undermine vegans wherever you encounter them?”

  “Of sorts. Does that bother you?”

  “No. On the contrary. I was hoping you’d say that. I was trembling with anticipation.”

  “I noticed you trembling. But I didn’t know what was causing it.”

  “Anticipation.”

  “I thought it might have been because the room was too cold.”

  “No. It’s warm as toast in here.”

  “I thought it might have been a sort of ‘trembling before God.’”

  “No. It wasn’t. I do occasionally itch before God, but I don’t think I ever actually tremble.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. God’s done too much damage to the world. A little itching now and then is all he deserves.”

  “By the way,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re probably one of the few police officers who’d use the phrase ‘philosophically aligned.’”

  “Actually, that’s a misconception,” he said, and they both laughed.

  103

  When Daniel called Florence to tell her that he’d be going back to Seattle soon, she found it hard to contain her delig
ht.

  “We should get together. I want to say goodbye to you all.”

  “I’m not sure it’s all of us you’ll be saying goodbye to. I’m going home. I’m not sure what anybody else is doing.”

  “That’s unusual,” she said. “That’s unusual for you and your tribe.”

  “Yes, it is unusual for us. But we’re a modern family. I would have thought you’d approve.”

  “I do approve. I approve of modernism in all its forms. I’m just surprised. Is Janine planning to stay here?”

  “Janine has to make up her mind. She’s enjoying the work she’s doing. And her fellowship, as you may know, since we’ve mentioned it about five times, lasts until the end of December.”

  “So you’ll be a commuting couple? You’ll have what my students call an LDR?”

  “We used to call it an LDR when I was in college. I doubt they’re calling it that now.”

  “And Emily?”

  Emily was the one she truly wanted to get rid of. Janine was no threat. Despite how adhesive she wished to be, Janine had not proved difficult to shake off. Emily was the one to worry about.

  “Emily makes her own choices. Anyway, you’ll remember that Emily’s a college girl.”

  “Is she going back to Kenyon?”

  “Oberlin. And I don’t know. She’s thinking about transferring to Bard.”

  “All your women are leaving you.”

  “I suppose that’s my fate,” he said, and she wondered if he was taking some kind of dig at her. It was so hard to know with Daniel. For a moment she felt a breath of respect for her son. He kept his feelings as tightly regulated as she did, which, she knew, was an accomplishment.

  “Well,” he said, “why don’t we have you over for a farewell dinner anyway, even if we’re not sure how many of us are actually leaving.”

  “I’ll say farewell to anybody who’s there to say farewell to,” she said. To her own ear, she sounded giddy, and she wondered whether this was what the coming months were going to be like—a series of giddy leave-takings, rendered sweeter by the fact that no one would know that they were leave-takings except her.