In a few days they drove her to the bus. Embraces all around, like other families. “I put the chromite in Fido,” said Chloe.
Ingrid looked at her for a while. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll use it. And on my spring visit I’ll bring it back to you.”
She boarded the bus. They waved and waved. She twisted her neck and watched them until the first curve took them out of her sight. Then, she guessed, Lynne and Chloe got into the car, while Chris kept his arm uselessly in the air.
Her Cousin Jamie
At their annual convention—they were both high school teachers—Fern and Barbara always got together at least once for coffee. Last year they had graduated to gin. Now, on the final night, they installed themselves at a little table in the hotel bar. They talked about this and that—about the decay of classroom decorum, of course; and about the tumblings that took place at this convention, once-a-year love affairs that saved many a marriage.
“Like emergency medication,” Barbara suggested.
“Relieving the flatulence of wedlock,” Fern expanded.
Fern in her fifties had a broad, unlined brow, clear gray eyes, a mobile mouth. She was fit, and her blondish hair was curly and short, and she wore expensive pants and sweaters in forest colors: moss, bark, mist…Really, she should have been considered handsome; she might even have been admired. But those athletic shoulders had a way of shrugging and those muscular lips a way of grimacing that said she expected to be overlooked. As for Barbara—wide face, wide lap—she was the kind of person people felt safe telling their stories to. Fine: she liked to listen.
No story had ever come from Fern, though. None seemed to be forthcoming tonight. The two women might have finished the evening in amiable silence—Earth Mother and Failed Beauty, drinking—if a certain colleague hadn’t walked swiftly past the bar toward the elevators.
Fern leaned forward. “Jamie!” she called, apparently too late. She leaned back again. “Oh well.”
“Jamie,” Barbara repeated. “That Jamie is the most scrupulous-looking woman I have ever seen. Pulled-back hair. Round glasses. Pale lips. Every day a clean white blouse…You’re related, aren’t you?”
“We’re cousins. She’s my Cousin of Perpetual Penitence.”
Barbara sipped. She sipped and sipped. “Does she have cause for penitence?” she asked at last.
Fern said, “Oh, I couldn’t.” And then she did.
Decades ago, Fern began.
Remember the fizz of those times? The era, they call it now. Women and blacks, upward and outward, not exactly hand in hand except for certain instances. Well, this was an instance. Jamie was just out of college, doing an assistantship in Lev Thompson’s think tank. Fern had been in New York too, she said, student-teaching children who might as well have been orphans—whose parents noticed them only to knock them around. She and Jamie shared an apartment.
Lev Thompson. A figure. He’d passed his sixtieth year; he’d packed those six decades with admirable activity. He’d been a doctor, a civil rights leader, the head of one national organization and adviser to others. Now he spent most of his time on the lecture circuit. His voice wasn’t one of those fudge-rich bassos, no; it was soft and grainy. His skin was the color of shortbread. His mother was a teacher, Fern said, like us.
Jamie’s face was too thin and her shoulders too narrow. But her blue eyes were shot with golden glints; and then there was that head of hair: lots of it, mahogany. He liked to hold a thick strand of her hair between his fingers, she told me. She told me everything. He held her hair as if his fingers were tongs, and he slid the tongs down to the end, and then he started again from the scalp.
A flat chest; and her two front teeth overlapped. Some men were wild for such defects, who knew why. She and Jamie came from a certain sort of family, Fern said. You know, Connecticut—money so old that it’s gone. Anyway, Jamie, no boobs, too aristocratic for orthodontia—she appealed to him. He was populist, he had more than a streak of the preacher; but there was nothing coarse about his tastes. The first woman, the one he’d married when he was a young doctor—she was a person of refinement. Their three kids were a credit to them both. The second wife was a Gabonese surgeon—they had a daughter he doted on. The third was a German tennis player—he was still married to her when he and Jamie got together. Class acts, the lot of them. Sure, he’d played around some, he told Jamie, who told Fern. But just a little: Jamie was only his second affair this marriage. Schmidt, the tennis player, was on the road a lot, and at his age he didn’t like to be alone.
Fern stopped, ordered another drink. Barbara did too.
He needed company, Fern went on. He probably could have done without the sex. But Jamie was in love, just like her predecessors—in love with his voice, his skin, the way he had of shrugging and waiting in argument, palms turned outward, as if he had all of God’s eternity to spend until the other person came around to his way of thinking. The kindly smile—you saw it across the room, stretching his tawny face, and you ached to see it hanging over you, and you on your back…The hair on his chest was silver, Jamie reported. Sometimes, before they happened upon licking, she was slow to come. “So what?” he whispered into her ear. “I’m a patient darky.” Well, you know, only a man like that can say a thing like that.
His apartment was books and leather and wood, and there were pictures of his wives and children, including a life-size photograph of Schmidt returning a backhand. Jamie stayed there infrequently, and of course only when Schmidt was on tour. Schmidt liked other women, Lev told Jamie in that tolerant voice—liked men too, liked riding him as if she were a circus performer, her knees up around her ears, her arms stretched diagonally toward the heavens. “Want to try it that way—me the tired old horse, you the young rider?”
Sure: anything for him. But what she liked best was to lie beneath him, to let him envelop her, to raise her own knees only slightly, to listen to his labored grunts and at last his sharp intake and his final sigh and his heart thudding against her chest. His lips, so soft on hers, slid down the side of her cheek and kissed the white pillow.
Together they went to this function and that. Jamie, usually wearing a skinny red dress he admired, hung up his coat, held on to his briefcase, hunted up a can of ginger ale if the event’s organizers had provided only water. “My Stepin Fetchit,” he’d say later, licking the underside of her chin, her labia, the backs of her knees; and whenever he licked, wherever, her inner tumblers rolled helplessly until they locked one to the other in shuddering orgasm. He could lick her earlobe in a taxi with the same quick effect. Jamie said a year later it occurred to her that her own tongue might perform that useful office, and, alone in an elevator, she pressed the inside of her wrist against her open lips and knew her skin’s salt and her stringy tendons, mm, oh.
He could give a speech on anything. “Filth as Thou Art” was the title of his lecture on Caliban and nature and the need to protect the damaged by a kind of enslavement. “Watch Him While He Sleeps” promoted the tithe over the progressive tax. His reputation had been made by a book that likened the underclass to the population of a late medieval city during the plague. But these later days he talked about a variety of unpopular things: about the right to be rescued—this at the time that mental hospitals were pouring their inmates into the streets; about God, the living God, not a forgiving deity or a righteous one, but a God you sat wrapped up in like an overcoat. He refused to appear on television, saying that the medium itself, no matter how high-minded its content, was a scourge. He returned letters to their senders—even letters of praise—with corrections of grammar in the margins. His enemies included Action for Children’s Television and some noted psychiatrists. They allowed that he was a good man. His wives said the same. The first two marriages had ended because each wife in turn had wearied of the causes, not of the husband. As the Gabonese doctor put it in a farewell note: Your attention, dear Lev, is forever elsewhere.
And that summer night in his apartment, Fern said,
his attention was certainly elsewhere. The grooves in his face had become furrows, Jamie had noticed during the lecture he’d given earlier. His voice was raspy. His amber eyes had retreated into their lined surround. The public was demanding too much of him. In the cab afterward she asked him: “Should I go on home? You seem tired.” But she didn’t mean the offer—Schmidt would soon be back in town.
“Perhaps that would be…” he began. Her fingers in his cold wet hand twitched. “No,” he reversed. “Come up to my place.”
He sat in his easy chair for a long time, looking over some papers and drinking several cans of ginger ale, belching uneasily. He took forever in the bathroom. She was dozing when he finally got into bed. He turned his back in what she suspected was a common marital maneuver.
Fern looked at Barbara. Barbara nodded at her to continue.
But Jamie would not be denied, Fern said. She touched Lev’s shoulder, played a little tune on it, and, slowly, he turned toward her. That nimble hand of hers now entered his pajama shirt between the buttons and tweaked his nipple. With a sigh he heaved his body onto hers. He waited a few moments. She should excuse him tonight, she thought…but there it was, his erection, making its way through the fly of his pajama bottoms. He kneeled, still clothed, and entered her. A thrust, another thrust, and he fell—so quickly! And she not half begun; he had forgotten to apply his tongue. His face as usual kissed the pillow and his heart thudded against hers.
Only it wasn’t thudding. She held her breath. Perhaps he was holding his breath too. She exhaled. He did not exhale.
Five minutes to midnight.
Staring at the ceiling, she remembered that he had had a heart attack in his fifties. His father had died young, and his uncles and his one brother, all of the same thing, he had told her. It ran in the family, sudden fatal infarctions. There were worse ways to go, he’d insisted. Those pills he sometimes took, waving away her concerned flutterings—they must be in his jacket. She leaped out of bed, found the vial, shook it at him. She could force the tablets into his mouth. She could force them into his rectum. What was the rhythm of CPR? She had taken a workshop in college, practicing on a puce dummy. She remembered almost nothing. Four minutes to midnight.
She rolled him onto his back. Loosen clothing, she recalled: she unsnapped his pajama bottoms. His penis lolled. She pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. Nothing. She knocked on his chest. Nobody home. She placed her mouth on his and blew, and raised her head, and lowered it and blew again. His mouth was foul—hadn’t he brushed his teeth during that long stint in the bathroom? Still, there was something encouraging about the terrible smell and taste. His personal bacteria were still alive. She blew one more time, and then reached for the telephone and dialed 911. Three minutes to midnight.
By the time the police and the ambulance came she was again wearing her red dress. She had broken one of the straps in her haste to put it on. He was wearing his trousers. Flat on the bed, his bare brown feet below the pinstripes, his rumpled pajama top above, he looked like a melancholy minstrel.
The ambulance men were so deft, with their oxygen and their resuscitation attempts and their gurney. The police were so kind. One of them was female. What a fine career for a woman, Jamie thought. Yes, she told them, she was his assistant. Yes, he’d given a lecture. They had returned here to work on his next speech, it would be in Chicago…it would have been in Chicago. How had he seemed? Oh, preoccupied. “Infarctions run in his family,” she confided.
They drove her home. Fern had been awake, she said, planning the next day’s lesson for her wretched students, when the police delivered Jamie to her. An unfortunate incident was what they said. They left. Jamie threw herself onto her bed, still wearing that red dress, and gagged her story into the pillow.
“I turned her over,” Fern said, “and got the unbroken strap off her shoulder and rolled the dress down her body. I was sure that reporters would show up any minute and would seize on the dress, would call it scarlet. I slid an innocent nightgown over my cousin’s head. I threw the red heap onto the floor of my own closet.”
But the reporters didn’t come. Except for one tabloid, the papers left Jamie out of the story. Lev’s biography filled their articles; the work he might yet have done interested the pundits.
The staff went as a group to the calling hours at the funeral home. Jamie had planned to wear the red dress but Fern talked her out of it, she said. Jamie wore a black suit instead, with a very short skirt. In the coffin, she said later, he looked rested and handsome. Of course she could not give him a special good-bye, but her gaze traveled through the clothing and snuggled right next to his noble heart. And then she went into the next room to offer her condolences to the mourners.
They were sitting in a semicircle. The mother: that severe chignon, pewter tinged with bronze. “She grayed in an eccentric manner,” Lev had told her. “She never did do things like other people.” The first wife, queenly despite an unflattering beige outfit, and her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, all solemn, sad—grief-stricken, you might say. One son looked just like him. Did he also have a heart that would fail too soon? Jamie wondered. The stunning second wife, wearing a silver pendant that resembled a stethoscope. Her teenage daughter, Thalia was her name, whose kneesocks and trashy novels Jamie had found here and there in the apartment. Schmidt, sobbing. Thalia was holding Schmidt’s hand. Another older woman—who? Oh yes, the wife of the dead brother.
Jamie, her quick eye sliding from face to face, her fingers tapping her own thigh, her tongue thrumming behind her crossed teeth…she counted them. Nineteen. Nineteen broken hearts. Well, eighteen: the sister-in-law was perhaps unaffected. Eighteen people who had lost a loved man husband ex-husband father grandfather son; who had lost him to sudden death; who had lost him because of an assistant they were glad to tolerate, no one minded his little failing; who had lost him because the upstart assistant had fastened onto him, exhausted him with her demands, driven him over the brink; and then, scared out of her silly wits, had shaken pills as if they were castanets, and weakly punched his sternum, and breathed fecklessly into his mouth, and wriggled a pair of trousers onto his uncooperative legs for the sake of his earthly reputation, or hers. To cover their shame.
The sister-in-law burst into tears.
Nineteen people, then.
“Jamie left New York after that,” Fern wound up. “She got a master of arts in education at a state university, and she married a good dull math teacher who gave her two good dull sons. She scraped her hair back, and renounced contact lenses, and bought a lifetime supply of white blouses.”
Silence for a while. Then Barbara said, “So she’s up in her room now, hair loose, glasses off, reliving it all, drenched in guilt.”
“Yes,” Fern said. She was staring at the olive in the bottom of her glass. “Some people have all the luck.”
Blessed Harry
I.
On the first Monday in March Mr. Flaxbaum received the following e-mail:
Distinguished Myron Flaxbaum,
I am Professor Harry Worrell from King’s College Campus Here in London, UK. We want you to be our guest Speaker at this Year’s Unanticipated Seminar which will take place Here. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking. The Venue is as follows: King’s College campus in Strand, London, UK. The expected audience is 850 people. The duration of the speech is one hour. The date is the 31st of May this year. The topic is “The Mystery of Life and Death.” We came across references to you on the Internet, and we say you are up to standard. A formal letter of invitation and Contract agreement will be sent to you as soon as you honor our Invitation. We are taking care of your travel and hotel accommodation expenses and your speaking fee.
Stay Blessed,
Professor Harry Worrell
King’s College Campus
Mr. Flaxbaum reread this epistle, removing his glasses for the second perusal. “I’m invited to give a lecture,” he mentioned to the three boys, who, th
ough hurrying off to school, paused to look at the invitation. “Fab,” “Wicked,” “Steamy,” they agreed one after the other; and, one after the other, backpack following backpack, left the flat, their departure as usual causing a small conflagration in Flax’s heart. “Awesome,” added Felix over his shoulder, revealing for a moment the abbreviated nose and one of the blue eyes inherited from Bonnie. Bonnie had already been at work for several hours—she was a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital—but she would affirm late that afternoon that the Unanticipated Seminar would be elevated by the presence of her Myron. (No one except Bonnie called him by his first name; even his sister called him Flax.) Bonnie would bend her blond, large-chinned head toward the screen and review the topic—“The Mystery of Life and Death”—and then stand erect again, an oversize woman, authoritative as a Roman aedile though she wore pants and sweater and sturdy shoes rather than toga and sandals. “Darling, you could even do it in Latin.”
Now, in Bonnie’s absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys—in the presence only of the Flaxbaums’ peculiar houseplant—Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled himself.
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