Age

by Hortense Calisher

  ‘I think the National Health charges now. But of course the pound is down.’

  Would that be their epitaph? Among friends who knew them well?

  ‘They would have heard,’ Gemma said suddenly. ‘The car motor. That old Volvo. In that small a house. Sound rises. Oh, Rupert. How could they?’ Her hand searched out mine. ‘No, it was an accident. How could they have borne to hear it?’

  We rode for a while, thinking how they could have, all considered.

  Then she said: ‘No—we forgot. Sherm was going deaf. But Kit—that face she turned on me in the bathroom. Could have borne it.’ She released my hand as if hers might burn it. ‘So—it was her.’

  I watched the people getting out at Fourteenth Street.

  I think it could have been otherwise. I think that a double venom kept so long on the simmer might find the joint will to do what love might not. I don’t forget Sherm’s face when he said that the storm windows had ruined the design of the house. He never cared for the house proper, or the windows, or woman either, except as she served. What he cared about was design—himself in the woods the way people saw him, and on the podium. What’s courage, what’s compromise, to a man whose life is losing its design? And gradually. Which may be the worst.

  Maybe he struggled to get up after all, to recant. Sherm was a struggler. But he was old. Too old to rally enough muscle power to change his mind.

  Grand old fakers, the two of them, always getting too much for free. I see them driving doggedly home all that day, in order to welsh on Gertrude, who maybe gave them too much. For last company, they wanted their own. I see them closing the house for good, so restoratively tight. Sherm wanted twin beds years ago but Kit wouldn’t give up the antique one. How was he persuaded? A Pennsylvania piece, he said to us. Not New England at all. But I paid for it.

  That monoxide turns one a dreadful twentieth-century color. Maybe they forgot that.

  I see them lying together as they had placed themselves—their faces tinged with that unearthly blue.

  Their bed a sleigh.

  WHEN WE FINALLY GOT home we were both so tired we sat in the front room without speaking. Tired to death with death, from death. Oh Rupert—have I made a triolet? I’m so low. Where’s the bright world?

  I know it is somewhere. If we can reach. We’re still together. And that is the way we should reach.

  In the front room I always sit on the sofa that faces the hall. When the cable about Frankie came I went to sit there. When we came in from the bus I flopped down there, Rupert in the old barrel-chair he calls his hutch. From there we can both see the kitchen beyond. Seems to me that if I try I can start up the world again—or stop. The cups out there, hanging so benignly on their hooks, will fly down to help. The oven, when lit, will give out its comfortable first yearn. We all have darkened together with the years, like the Prendergast. I want no other provenance.

  And the man sitting opposite me isn’t Sherm. He’s Rupert—tired as he is, a man who has stuck to his truth all his life. What do such men think when their wives are thinking: What shall we have for supper—one more supper—tonight?

  His life has exhausted him, his wives too. One of those tall, spare men, built to bend not to break. Who married all my family concerns along with me, lowering his shoulder to the wheel to take up Arturo’s slack—a man he never even met. All those years ignoring the prizes due, while the Sherms strutted the pulpits.

  He smiles at me now; is he thinking: That’s my Gemma, in a minute she’ll bring me a cup of tea.

  In Bridgeport the grandmothers of my childhood used to wrap the dying in great poultices of cloth the same dimensions as the body and tinged with some European medicament. It wasn’t done for cure but for comfort. I saw one of my uncles done so. The face above the grayish wool had a satisfied mildness, like a baby that has been crying not for milk but attention. I should like to wrap Rupert that way at the end, as warm and tended as I have sometimes done. But with no corner of him and his love ignored as I have sometimes done. Then, in the moment before it happens, I should like to creep in there with him. To lie with him, in the box which has no corners. But that’s the puzzle, how to put two in that box at the same time.

  A woman like me is domestic no matter what else she is.

  —he’s right about that. I’m no Kit, but I’ll find a way for us. It’s the women who wrap.

  I know what we must do.

  Then you moved, Rupert, not to me, not from me, but rocking left-right, left-right. Asking yourself: What now, what to do?

  And I cry out. Did you twitch to the thought: She’s mad now; she’s gone the way domestic women go?

  I cry: ‘Oh Rupert, it’s all going to be all right. I have a roast.’

  WE ARE IN THE bedroom, this broad end-room stretching across our opposing string of smaller rooms like the top of a letter T. Strait is the gate to our private times, Gemma’s and mine—and we’ve never minded that our nest hangs over the alley between us and the next clutch of people, and has no view. They have less; their building’s wall on that side is blank. I have little pity for them. I love that blank wall; all my desk work has focused on it, and the only human noise in this room is ours. While behind me, in a room scattered with our cottony orts and wastes, impregnated with the mucosa of all our cavities, is the view I must have.

  No weekly cleaning, on which Gemma guiltily insists, will remove that odor which is not sex, not snot, but the powerful scent of time passing. The years converge and convene here; the air is full of our syllables. My pen breathes them.

  Sometimes I write in bed, as now. When the girls were young, each needing a room, I gave up my small study down the hall; it isn’t much. Christina, who took it, kept my books as they were and the dictionary on its stand. My desk came in here, but set in a corner as it is, I use it only for letters and bills. The best view of the wall is from here. And from here, as I mused, I could hear even through a closed door the bubbling chorale of the girls with their mother—in those days a convent sound, all seeming well with them.

  Meanwhile the bed itself thanked me, growing this hump at the knees, this nurturing rise at the small of my back. Inside the hollow worn in by the two of us. If it grows a lectern I’ll move out, I said to Gemma in apology. But though Christina was long gone, I never did. Maybe the bed is protesting, I said to Gemma not long after. Like a foot grows a bunion. But she said—No, it grows with us. Our bed, made with our knees and backs.

  Last night we did have a roast. She had put it in the oven as we dressed to go to the Plaza, taking it out just as we were leaving, and before it was done. I don’t doubt that some of her myth about Gertrude and me went in and out of the oven with it, and lurked there on the counter in the roasting pan until our return. What did she say to it when she heated it up and brought it out again?—Finished. And I am still in charge …? For I could see that she was finished with something.

  I find myself staring at that browned meat as if it were the Eucharist. As I get older, the vocabulary of piety takes on a beauty that its possible truth never held for me; I suppose that even for unbelievers this may be the norm. Although the position of the agnostic, bare in the midst of the chaos that tumbles all of us, stripped as the boniest Christ in a pieta but slapping back all sweets or shelter in order to stare at the unknowable, seems to me to earn the most merit of all faiths.

  ‘Center cut,’ Gemma says, staring too.

  I should have thought that the roast would be dead-beat, like us, but apparently one can do what she had even with veal—‘If one has the poetic touch,’ I said, and toasted her in the last of Mr Quinn’s bottle.

  She in turn toasted my prize.

  ‘Our prize—’ I say.

  She smiles like a woman who receives too fulsome a compliment. I can’t blame her. Who but the pen and its owner believes that what it writes is made of meat and bed and voices heard through a door—and an accommodating wall. And a kitchen, where gamey shadows merge decently.

  Where, as I b
rew the coffee I make better than she does, she can tell me, instruct me, on what she has in mind.

  She’s not good at that.

  She had put up her hair, to meet Gertrude. I hadn’t commented. But now I touch her hair, smooth it, in the grossness of being alive. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Give it up,’ she says, tucking in her chin, away from my hand. ‘I want to give it up. This monster habit of ours. That lives in the house with us. Like a Saint Bernard that has to be fed. When we are only mice.’

  I laugh, of course. What a way to say it. For her to be the first to say—that hurts, though. For how long has she thought our sexual life ridiculous? ‘That part of us. That—companionship. You want it to stop?’

  ‘Our two lives,’ she says. ‘That’s not companionship.’

  A husband asked for a surprise divorce must feel as I did. I say foolishly, ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘What do you mean—“then”?’

  What did I mean? ‘I thought that we would fade. One knows that. But never give up.’ Until the blow falls. On the ant.

  ‘I want to give it up. I’ve been wanting to. After today—I’m sure. I don’t want to go on. I won’t. I can’t.’

  What I heard—and in a way am sure I heard rightly—is that she half wants our whole lives to stop. People do half want that at times. And do ask it of circumstance. Even people like us, or rather like us. Friends. Friends of friends.

  When I shake her the combs and hairpins fall. She bends to pick them up. ‘I’d slap you, Gemma. If you weren’t too old. And if I weren’t.’ I know whom I’m shaking. Myself.

  She’s never been sensitive about her age—at any time of it. But for such a peace to steal over her, calming that stretched mouth, spreading the fingers of the clenched hand. ‘You’ve said it. Time to say it. That’s not giving up.’

  When I take her in my arms her body feels both light and still, like after sex. Turning in my arms she speaks in the submerged voice we have then. ‘Yes, let’s stay here. Stop here. This is where.’

  I do understand. Though I can’t look at our gas stove quite that tenderly. This kitchen is where we have loved. And can admit we are old. Can say—now let it stop.

  How seductive it could be—to decide for oneself. In the rhythm of that kettle, such a charming advanced one, which not only whistles, proudly clear, but then turns off both its sound and its heat. With someone sure to say, seeing the kettle’s cardboard box still on the counter in the brief drama afterward: ‘This was surely accident. They bought that kettle only the week before.’

  But that person would most likely be poor old Quinn. And gas seeps. No—a man like me, people like us, would do better than that. Thank God we have no car.

  The argument—that ultimate subversion—seeps in slowly. A dallying. Is it more? For a moment I have us rocking in that contrapuntal dream.

  ‘Then—you will?’ she says dreamily. ‘Give up the almanac? It’s our lives—but not our life. It never was rightly named.’

  SO WE’VE QUARRELED. BECAUSE I wouldn’t say why. Or couldn’t.

  ‘Why should we stop?’ he says. ‘Or give up—anything? Why be so doctrinaire?’

  That’s a word he always uses in argument.

  ‘All that word means is—argument,’ I say.

  ‘So it does.’ He smiles, just a bit superior—as he always is with me—on words.

  ‘No. What it means here is—we’re arguing.’

  ‘A word does change in context,’ he says, delighted with himself. As Heidegger would agree. No—excuse me.’ For a minute he looks lost. ‘I meant—Wittgenstein.’

  ‘I’ll excuse you.’ I haven’t used sarcasm on him—since when?

  ‘Both the same period of thought, you see,’ he says. But his forehead is pink.

  ‘I see—and I don’t see,’ I say. ‘I merely hang the pictures in this house.’ It is true that he can’t hang one properly. Never could.

  ‘True,’ he says. ‘You’re the builder. Or used to be.’

  ‘True. You always had to encourage me.’ But ought he to say? ‘Throw that in my face.’

  ‘You never encourage me—’ he says.

  ‘To write? No use.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Throw that in my face. But then—why cut me off—when I do?’

  Is that why he was doing the almanac? ‘But that’s not you writing,’ I say. ‘That’s us.’

  He is silent for a while. Then he says, in that diagnostic voice of his which always flicks me: ‘Is it, Gemma? Is it really?’

  ‘True—’ I say after a while. ‘No, I was doing it for me. That—record. And so were you. Doing it for you.’

  ‘True—’ he almost yells. ‘And what’s wrong with that? Maybe you think I should do the poems in tandem too!’

  ‘No.’ I can’t enter there. He knows I know that. ‘But maybe poems also bleed away life.’

  I said this last so low that for a minute I didn’t see the slough I’d fallen into.

  Slough—that’s from my first marriage. The word on which that marriage fell. Arturo, sent for two years to a British prep school, transacted for by mail, that had turned out to be not Church of England but Wesleyan, had picked up the word there. ‘I am in the slough of Despond,’ he would say, when needing to explain his idleness: ‘The sla-ow of Despond. Spell-ed “sloof.”’ Charm, when sifted on one over the years like gold dust, can make one shriek—and I finally did, yelling how it was there he was happiest—bumming off. So I learned what that slough is for me. Or should have learned. It’s where you say what you should never think.

  A minute before, Rupert and I were only what any infighting couple is. Two angry sofas shouting True, True across a square of rug. But he and I have lost the knack of light quarreling. Of casual traitordom.

  We had it once. When we were young.

  And what does he say in this white-haired quiet?

  ‘No. Poems bleed.’

  Then I’m down on my knees to him. The knees are no longer that serviceable. How did I make it, to this floor? ‘I’m sorry. If we weren’t in the parlor I would never have said.’

  He knows what I mean. The parlor is where a middle child, lying under a middle-sized and not too good baby grand piano, can tally the family falsities. And acquire them.

  From below he seems like an Eiffel Tower, topped by a face. Slowly nearing me. ‘Oh be careful!’ I cry. Of his neck? His knees? His head? What must he be most careful of?

  Then he is on the floor with me, cradling me. As I cradle him.

  ‘We shouted,’ he says. ‘Do you remember?’

  The girls had been with us six months. We two walked on eggs, cooing like the turtledoves we must always be. We must be ideal, true, blue, never blow our cool; we wanted them. Solemn little pie-faces poking from the school bus quick into their bedrooms, we could not get to them. ‘Manners like contessas,’ Rupert growled—what had Arturo done to them?

  Then one day, a rainy Saturday, the two mousegirls in their hole and we two in the parlor—the sofas blew.

  ‘Can you recall what we fought about?’

  ‘No—except that we both kept bellowing: “True!”’

  And by evening—we were four.

  Tea for Two, the girls confessed they had nicknamed us. ‘It’s hard when your parents are lovers,’ Christina said, surprising us at her age. And Frankie said to me, her mother—‘It’s easier with nonno. To be against.’ Turning my heart black with congested love.

  Rupert is watching me. He knows where the thoughts go. ‘Look at us, on the floor,’ he says too gaily. ‘Hope nobody comes in.’

  Look at him, biting his lip. He knows what he’s said. Shall I answer him? Yes, I must.

  ‘Oh Rupert,’ I say. ‘Nobody will.’

  Then it’s on us, that fear we never had before. To be in the blind city, under the blank stair—in an empty house.

  ‘Nonsense—’ I hear him say, faraway at my ear. ‘We’re on the floor.
It must be that we’re young.’

  ‘Not unless we can get up from it.’

  Using each other like handgrips, we manage it.

  ‘Shall it be the kitchen, then?’ he says. ‘Or the bedroom?’

  ‘I don’t care which. If only this love will stop.’

  What’s got into me? I am saying everything.

  ‘It’s only—that I’m—too weak for it,’ I say.

  He’s pale. ‘So am I.’

  But it helps to say. We are no longer shivering.

  ‘Have we had supper?’ he says.

  I can’t recall. The kitchen will tell us, though.

  It doesn’t. We may have cleaned up.

  ‘Soup on a tray, then,’ I say. ‘That can’t go wrong. Never has. And the avocado I was saving for Quinn.’

  ‘Soup on a tray—’ you echo. ‘Better than laurels. And Quinn can’t have everything.’

  ‘And a hot bath.’

  ‘And a hot bath.’

  AND HERE WE ARE now, ourselves again, in bed, with all our known humps. Let the kitchen sulk.

  ‘We mustn’t ever again, you know,’ he says. ‘Neglect the food.’

  How cozy it is though, in the center of all our medicaments. I have moved my word processor to your desk. You have lent me this pen.

  ‘We must move with the times, they say.’ You are looking over at your desk.

  I am afraid we are.

  I hunt the bedside table for some old familiar to hang on to. The nose spray will do. ‘Then I can tell you, shall I? Why that dialogue must stop.’

  ‘The what?’

  I see that I have named it. After so long.

  So does he.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. It’s because of the suspense. As to which one of us—will stop first. Or be left.’

  ‘That too—’ I say. ‘But we had that before. That’s not all of it.’ My left hand is empty. What shall it grasp? Not the Kleenex—too little. Not his book—too much. The neck pillow, ah there.