by Unknown
Michael cleared his throat. He said, “Was your husband’s death very sudden?”
“No, he had leukemia.”
This answered Michael’s question, all right, but now he realized it wasn’t what he’d wanted to know. What he’d meant was, had she loved her husband? Did she still miss him? He cleared his throat again and drew a line through the dew on his beer bottle.
“We met during the war,” she told him. “I guess shortly after you and Pauline got married. I remember you two couldn’t come to the wedding because Pauline was too pregnant to travel.”
“Oh, right,” Michael said, although he had no recollection of that.
“Are you and Pauline still close, at all?”
The question was so like the question he’d wished he could ask her that he felt a little flicker of hope. He sat forward and collected his thoughts. “No, we’re not,” he told her. “Of course, we’re in touch. We have to be. We have our children and their various, you know, events; not to mention Pagan. But I look at her sometimes and I think, Imagine! Once this woman and I were married. It seems so odd, as if . . . oh, as if I’d been another person back then. I’d been this distant acquaintance I’d heard of who married a woman named Pauline a long, long time ago.”
What he was saying was the truth, as accurate as he could deliver. So why, all at once, did another thought occur to him? He thought of a day last spring when he had dropped by Pauline’s office—something about a check or a signature that she’d needed in a hurry. There she’d been, behind her little window in the waiting room, conversing cozily with two other receptionists as she sorted a stack of folders. “If that is not just like you!” she’d been saying, with a chuckle beneath her words, and in the instant before she’d raised her head and caught sight of him, he had had time to wonder how it could be that he’d once felt that he would suffocate if he couldn’t get away from this woman. She wasn’t evil, after all. She hadn’t cheated on him, abused their children, drunk too much or gambled. In fact she was better than he was, in some ways—kinder and more open, the one who had friends. Had their troubles been solely his troubles?
As if she had read his mind, Anna said, “I always did admire Pauline.”
He considered that word, “admire,” reflecting on its possible undertones.
She said, “I didn’t actually know her that well, though we went to the same high school. She belonged to a different crowd. But I liked her peppy spirit, and she never snubbed the rest of us the way some in her group did.”
“You were with her the day she and I met, though,” Michael reminded her.
“Oh, yes, on account of Pearl Harbor. Wasn’t that a time? We were all in it together, seems like; all caught up in it. What we didn’t know yet! I lost my brother in that war.”
“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I don’t think I ever heard that.”
She gazed down into her sherry glass. Her face was a series of ovals, Michael noticed—an oval itself containing long brown oval eyes and an oval mouth without that central notch in the upper lip that most people had; and then there was the smooth oval of her head with the hair turned under so neatly all around. He had never before considered what a restful shape an oval was.
Anna said, “Pauline, and Wanda Bryk, and . . . who was the other girl that day?”
“Katie Vilna.”
“Katie. Yes. She and Wanda stopped to help after Pauline cut her forehead.”
“They’re still around,” Michael told her. “I think Pauline still gets together with them every so often.”
“And how about you?” Anna asked.
“Me?”
“Do you keep up with your old neighbors?”
“Oh, not so much. I see something of my friend Leo, and from time to time I check on Mrs. Serge, who used to live next door to us. I’m not really very sociable, though.”
“Me neither,” Anna said.
“You’re not?”
“You’re my first guest since I’ve moved here.”
“Is that a fact,” he said. He glanced around the room. He thought now he should have paid it some compliment. “You’ve done a fine job settling in,” he said. “I’ve lived in my place six years and I don’t even have any pictures up.”
“Do you not want any pictures?”
“Oh, yes. It’s just that I don’t know what I would hang.”
She tilted her head and looked at him, and he felt he could guess what she was thinking. She was thinking that she would know what to hang. Pauline, in the same situation, would have stated as much; Pauline was always so sure that she could set other people’s lives straight. But Anna kept her own counsel. It was Michael who said, finally, “Maybe you could advise me?”
“Well,” she said. “Maybe.”
And then, a moment later, “I’m not sure if it would work, though.”
She probably had no idea why he smiled at her so warmly.
The next Saturday afternoon, when her daughter’s visit was over, Anna came to Michael’s apartment and they walked through it together counting up the number of walls in need of pictures. Then they went to a shop in Towson that sold inexpensive framed reproductions. Pagan went too, since this was one of the days he stayed at Michael’s. He didn’t seem to find it odd that a member of the Maestro music faculty was helping his grandfather buy artwork. Anna said, “What about you, Pagan? What would you like in your bedroom?”
He said, “A James Taylor poster? I just saw a super one at the record store in the mall. You think I could get it, Grandpa?”
“I don’t know why not,” Michael said.
He wished he were so clear himself about what he wanted. He was afraid of looking ignorant, choosing something lower-class. He kept glancing toward Anna as he considered different pictures, but she just gazed back at him with a receptive, neutral expression that offered him no clue. “Why don’t you choose?” he asked her finally. “I don’t know what I like. I don’t have any opinions.”
“There’s no need to make up your mind this very afternoon,” she said. “We’re not in any hurry.”
When he opened the door for her as they left the shop, he set a hand lightly on her back where her shirt was tucked into her slacks. And later, as they were pulling into his parking lot, he asked if she would like to come up for a drink. But she said no, thanks, she had errands to run.
Monday afternoon, he returned to the shop alone and looked through the pictures all over again. A ruddy, pink-haired woman who hadn’t been there on Saturday was standing behind the counter, and he asked her, “Which is the best of these? To put up over a couch, for instance. This one? This?”
“The Chagall is nice,” she said.
He followed her gaze and saw that it was nice—whimsical and dreamy, with people floating across the sky in an unsurprised manner. He bought it, along with van Gogh’s sunflowers and another van Gogh of a bedroom, and an antique French liqueur ad and a Grant Wood landscape that he chose on his own because he liked the peaceful effect of the lollipop-shaped trees dotting the green hills. As soon as he got home he hung his purchases—more of a job than he’d anticipated—and then, still sweating from his labors, he telephoned Anna and invited her to come see them the following evening. “I know it’s a school night,” he said. (He knew very well. It was a night when Pagan wouldn’t be present.) “But I could make you supper so you wouldn’t have to cook after work. An extremely early supper, I promise.”
“That would be lovely,” she said.
The next day he left the store in mid-afternoon, laden down with groceries. He came home and roasted a chicken, boiled some potatoes, and put together a salad. It was the simplest of menus (the salad dressing was bottled; the dessert was a cake from the bakery counter), but it seemed that he made every possible mistake, and by the time he’d finished his preparations the kitchen was a wreck. Pauline, he knew, could have produced the same meal without even thinking about it. No doubt most women could. He sent a helpless look toward the pile of soiled pans
in the sink, and then he went off to shower and shave.
His couch (the landlord’s couch) was upholstered in beige vinyl. His coffee table (also the landlord’s) had some sort of wood-grained Formica surface. He should have bought furniture, too. He should have bought rugs to hide the beige wall-to-wall carpet, and clocks and vases and thingamajigs to give the place some character.
This was all too much for him. Too much. He sank onto the couch, making sure to adjust the creases in his carefully “casual” khakis, and tipped his head back and gazed despairingly at the ceiling. A single long thread of a cobweb hung almost down to his nose. What a ridiculous idea to have invited Anna here!
But he would have to say that it had been years since he had felt the way he had these past few days—so alive and energized. Anna was his first thought every morning and his last thought every night. Even in his sleep she seemed to drift across the dark background of his mind, radiating a soft, warm glow and a sense of quiet contentment. In fact, had he ever felt this way? Even in his youth? Maybe he had forgotten, but it seemed to him that all of this was new. His life was just beginning, and the heavy summer air felt rich with promise.
If it turned out she didn’t love him back, he would still treasure the knowledge that he was capable of such feelings.
She arrived exactly on time, wearing a plum-colored skirt instead of slacks, which made him happy because it implied that she viewed their supper as an event. With her she had a bottle of wine and a round, crusty loaf of bread. “Did you bake the bread yourself?” he asked as he took it from her, but she laughed and said, “Goodness, no. It came from a little place on Falls Road.” Then she glanced toward the picture above the couch. “So you bought the Chagall!” she said. “It looks perfect there. And I like how the sunflower print picks up the yellow in your curtains.”
“Let me show you the others,” he said.
He led her through the dining alcove (the French liqueur ad) and into his bedroom (the second van Gogh and the landscape). “Do you think the landscape is corny?” he asked. “I know it’s not . . . abstract or anything.”
“No, no, it’s an excellent choice.”
She sounded as if she meant it. And she gave no sign she had noticed that his bed lacked a bedspread, or that his bureau held no knickknacks except a mayonnaise jar full of pennies.
In the living room he offered her sherry, bought especially for the occasion, and he poured one for himself even though he’d never liked the way sherry clung to his tongue. He settled in the armchair at some distance from her; he didn’t want to look pushy. Because there wasn’t a table anywhere near his chair he kept hold of his glass, rotating it between his palms as he sat hunched forward with his elbows on his knees. Anna, the picture of poise, occupied the very center of the couch, her own glass placed thoughtfully on a folded paper napkin just as if the coffee table were made of actual wood.
“I ran into Pauline this afternoon when she came to pick up Pagan,” she told him. “She says he’s begging to transfer to the Maestro School full-time as soon as he reaches ninth grade.”
“He’s been talking to me about that, too,” Michael said. “But . . . well, no offense to the Maestro School, but would he get an education there?”
“Oh, they have English and math and all that during the year,” Anna said.
“And then, you know, music is not exactly a profession,” Michael said. “For a boy, I mean. I mean, guitar music. Well, unless you’re some kind of genius or something. I mean, I realize music has worked lot you, but . . .”
He seemed to be digging himself into a hole. “So, anyhow,” he said, “did you happen to tell Pauline you’d be seeing me tonight?”
“No,” Anna said, “it didn’t come up.” Then she flushed and said, “Also, I wasn’t sure whether or not she would mind.”
For the first time, it occurred to Michael that maybe Anna too was considering the possibility that they might become more than friends. Maybe this was not just his lone, self-deluding fantasy. She was looking at him steadily, her cheeks still pink, her chin raised in an attitude that struck him as almost defiant. It was his turn to be flustered. “Oops!” he said. “Dinner!” And he lunged to his feet as urgently as if he had something in the oven, although he didn’t.
His kitchen was a mere strip of appliances in plain view of the living room; so he had no excuse not to continue their conversation. Luckily, though, Anna took over, asking him easy questions from her seat on the couch. Was cooking a hobby of his? Did he cook for himself every night? Did he ever go to restaurants?
“I’m a terrible cook,” Michael said. “The only way I managed this meal was to start at four p.m. so that I could get a handle on things. Or try to get a handle. I do eat in, mostly, but I just have a peanut-butter sandwich or tuna straight from the can. I don’t go to restaurants much because I feel like such a fool sitting all alone at a table.”
He set the bowl of potatoes on the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room. Then he looked across at Anna and gathered all his courage and said, “I might start eating in restaurants if you would come with me, though.”
She still had her chin raised in that forthright way, and she said, “I would like very much to come with you.”
And that was how it began.
They went to Martick’s, and Marconi, and a place down on St. Paul Street that made good soups. The place on St. Paul became their favorite and they always tried to get the same table there, a little round one near the window; and if one of them ordered the gizzard soup the other had to order it too because it had so much garlic. They were kissing each other good night now—just tentative, cautious, restrained kisses as of yet—so garlic was an issue.
They went to movies and held hands; her hand was muscular and solid, no doubt from piano playing. Her hair smelled like butterscotch. At suspenseful moments during movies she had a habit of not breathing, and Michael always found himself not breathing either, in sympathy.
They went to concerts, but holding hands there seemed inappropriate because Anna was so focused and entranced. Michael would send her sidelong glances to find out when to applaud. A kind of veil would clear from her eyes when a piece was truly finished, and then she leaned forward and clapped generously.
They ate sometimes at his place (ready-to-eat foods from his store, cold cuts and salads picked up at the deli counter) and sometimes at hers (take-out Chinese or pizza). She wasn’t much of a cook. She lacked the most basic equipment—a sieve or a set of measuring cups—and showed no interest in acquiring any. This struck Michael as refreshing. He was impressed as well by her self-sufficiency. If they had a date nearer his place than hers, she would suggest meeting him there rather than expecting a ride, or she might even offer to pick him up. She never rang his doorbell empty-handed; she always brought wine or flowers. She never telephoned him at work even though he wanted her to. And there was something noticeably adult in her dealings with her daughter. No scenes or sulks or silent treatments, or none that she mentioned; just a cheerful, courteous, mutually respectful relationship.
She made no fuss about being alone—spending an evening alone or attending some event alone—and she capably arranged for her tire rotation and her washing-machine repair and the removal of raccoons from her attic. To Michael (who was still taking Pauline’s Chevy in every three thousand miles for its oil change) this seemed remarkable. To Anna it was hardly worth notice.
Unlike most dating couples, they saw more of each other on weekdays than on weekends. Pagan was there on weekends and Michael felt uncomfortable about combining the two parts of his life. Gradually, though, as June gave way to July and July to August, he became so accustomed to having Anna with him—so dependent, really—that he began inviting her to various activities on Saturdays and Sundays. She went out with them for burgers or ice cream; she swam with them in the rooftop pool, wearing a dignified one-piece black knit swimsuit that somehow managed to be the most alluring piece of clothing Michael had ever laid
eyes on. The tops of her breasts were tanned and freckled like her arms, but they paled where they met the cloth and he had the impression of moon-white, cucumber-cool globes. The slight swelling of her thighs where they emerged from the legs of her suit cried out for the touch of his fingers, and it was all that he could do to look away toward Pagan’s back flip.
And had Pagan mentioned Anna to Pauline? Well, he must have. Her name would have had to come up, at some point. (“When me and Grandpa went to Anna’s house for lunch . . .”) But Pauline said nothing about it, and Michael saw her often enough so she had plenty of opportunities. Maybe she knew and didn’t care. Maybe she was glad for him, even. For once, perhaps, she was being a grown-up.
Anna said she’d had no more than the briefest contact with Pauline—the chitchat mere acquaintances exchange when they meet in passing. “After I first moved back we talked about getting together,” she said. “She phoned me about the Maestro School; Belle Adams from our old church had given her my number. We said we’d have to have lunch, but you know how those things go. And now it’s just as well, because I think it might be awkward.”
Might? She didn’t know the half of it. She seemed to assume that everyone was as sensible as she was.
Once when they were driving on I-83, Michael started telling her about an accident he had had at that very spot. His brakes had failed and he had slammed into a laundry van. “The funny thing was, this thought popped up when I realized what was happening,” he’d said. “No control at all, the pedal sliding clear to the floor without the slightest effect; and what occurred to me was, Whee! Not that I said it aloud, or even had time to. But, Whee! I thought. I’m crashing! Splat! All hell is about to break loose! And this enormous sense of relief rushed through me.”
“Relief!” Anna said. “Do you mean you were wishing to die?”
“No, no . . .”