Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  I made a brief inventory of our sideboard: four mismatched crocks holding wooden spoons and spatulas and broken chopsticks, a flower pot spilling over with ancient receipts, a set of candlesticks from Mariette’s mother, dishtowels and stamps and two bottles of wine and a set of Tupperware still encased in plastic. I touched each thing in turn, and they in turn touched me with something akin to pity. “Look at this, Drew,” I said. I heard his chair scrape back. “Look how we’ve crammed this place with stuff. Do you think maybe we did this to make it harder to leave?”

  “I thought we were just bad housekeepers.”

  “Look at all this effort, though. How hard we were trying. The whole time we were fighting about Boston and feeling miserable and blaming each other, we were filling up this house as a kind of insurance policy. It would take a really long time and a thousand packing boxes to leave this place.”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  “Drew, I don’t know how to begin looking for him.” I meant to say that I had lost two essential men, my first love and my last; I didn’t have the heart to look for one until I found my way back to the other. “Maybe I don’t want to know why he didn’t come back. Maybe it was just—easier—for him to stay gone.”

  “Lizzy,” Drew said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave me.”

  I whirled around.

  He said, “You think I don’t know you’ve been furious?”

  He said, “You forgive the ones who leave, and you blame the ones who stay.”

  He said, “I stayed.”

  I lifted my arms. He crossed the room and collapsed against me. It was my turn to hold him up. So I did, rocking him a little: my husband, my sweetheart, my injured one.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  My uncle now lived in the world someplace, but it was Drew I moved toward.

  I took the day off. Good, excellent, Rick said, take all the time you need, nothing ever happens on Fridays. Drew canceled two portraits, and because it was the first day of December—drought season for weddings—he had no brides to immortalize over the weekend. We unplugged the phone, feeling like fugitives holing up for the duration. I felt willing, even glad, to drop out of the stream of hours for a while, to let my life go on without me. To pause again, but on purpose. With purpose.

  By Saturday afternoon we’d lost any sense of routine, eating at odd hours, sleeping when we felt like it. We watched some television—sitcoms and game shows and animal documentaries—and dug into Drew’s store of old movies. We ate meat. We played Scrabble. We made a chocolate-meringue cake, the blind leading the blind, that required six separated eggs and a double boiler. We made a stew with beets and potatoes and a pound of beef. We made love. We made a bubble of time.

  “We’re on vacation,” Drew said.

  “How do you like it?” I put the cake in the oven. It was one in the morning, between Saturday and Sunday. We’d done our sleeping in the afternoon.

  “I feel stranded,” he said. “Like in a mountain cabin after an avalanche.”

  I licked the spoon. “We’ve got cake. Stranded people eat tree bark.”

  “I’ve never been stranded before,” he said. Which, metaphorically speaking, was not true. “How about you, Lizzy? How do you like it?”

  “Actually, it feels just like rehab. Except it doesn’t hurt.”

  Drew said, “Maybe he was afraid if he came back you’d hate him for leaving you in the first place.”

  All weekend it had gone like this, Father Mike popping in and out of our ongoing conversation, seemingly at random. “I wouldn’t have hated him,” I said. “If he’d shown up, say, at my college graduation, I would have been so happy.”

  “What about now?”

  I’d been happy to see him in the hospital—I could still conjure that feeling of revelation—but then I’d believed he was speaking to me from an unreachable place. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Just knowing he’s out there is so—jarring—that it’s kind of hard to imagine the next step.”

  “You don’t have to start looking right away.”

  Where is he where is he where is he where is he where is he?

  “It’s entirely possible,” I said, “that he died anyway, that it really was a figment I saw, or a hallucination, and that sometime between back then and now his heart gave out after all. Do I want to know that?”

  “If it were me? I’d want to know.” He’d been whipping frosting in a bowl, and now set it aside to paw through the Yellow Pages. I peered over his shoulder at two columns of names under the heading “Investigators.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Who is everybody looking for?”

  “Makes you wonder,” he said. “Do you want to call one of these guys?”

  I shook my head, tears welling, bludgeoned by the notion of Father Mike in an actual place—not in the chiffony anywhere of Earth, but in the bordered somewhere of Denver. Chicago. Honolulu. Marseilles. For the moment I preferred my uncle in his half-imagined state, the specter who had appeared to me in my hour of need.

  We ate our cake on the living room floor and watched another movie, a depressing, handsomely shot indie film in which the six windburned sons of an Italian patriarch sleep with each other’s wives and ruin the family winery before expiring one by one in the Second World War.

  “The point?” I asked, which is what I used to ask.

  “Of life?”

  “Of the movie.”

  “Oh, that,” Drew said, lying back on a heap of cushions and easing me down with him. “It’s a rotten world.”

  “That’s the point?”

  “That’s always the point,” he said. “Why else do you think people watch these things? To confirm their core beliefs.”

  We lay there a moment, fingers twined. “It isn’t a rotten world,” I said.

  “Actually,” Drew said, “it is. What with war and famine and jerks at intersections.” He kissed my temple. “You didn’t like the movie?”

  “Which part? The pretentious story line or the zombie acting?”

  “That long vineyard shot at the end was something. They filmed it in black-and-white, then colorized it afterwards.”

  “Really? They did?”

  “It was subtle, my friend. Not for the casual observer.”

  He blushed a little then, having inadvertently let slip his desire to become a cinematographer, a secret he’d confided when we first married but hadn’t mentioned even obliquely in quite some time. Not to me, at least. Maybe he told the woman at the wedding as she canted her heart-shaped face and pursed her engorged lips and bestowed upon him the grace of being seen.

  “That one shot was worth the whole price,” he said.

  When we were first together and going to a lot of movies and art openings and makeshift theater productions of Beckett and Ionesco—when we were, in other words, courting each other by borrowing from lives whose darkness appeared artful and therefore necessary—Drew always salvaged something that was worth the whole price. A brush-shaped paint stain on the artist’s leather skirt. A hummable, apologetic soundtrack behind the final credits. The toupee tilting off Estragon’s existential head at curtain call.

  I sat up. “My God. Drew Mitchell, you’re an optimist.”

  “Am not. You are.”

  “Ninety minutes of the film equivalent of gall-bladder surgery and you think forty seconds of camera voodoo is worth—what did you pay for this thing? Twenty bucks?”

  “You work with teenagers,” he countered. “On purpose.”

  “There’s that,” I said, thoroughly trumped. “Touché”

  Our house, at that wee-morning hour, felt still and shuttered. There was something reminiscent about the turn our conversation had taken. We used to argue all the time about things like the relative rottenness of the world. Good arguing, I mean; not the kind of arguing that started after a couple of years in Hinton.

  “This reminds me of Boston,” I said softly.

  He smiled. “Boston’s a fine town.”
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br />   I gave Drew a haircut. He painted my toenails. Like two animals from the same pack keeping tabs on each other by smell, we padded around the house, sitting in all the chairs and lying on all the beds and handling each other’s things. Sometime before dawn Drew crumpled candy wrappers into balls and tried to teach the cat to fetch, which made me laugh, and then Drew laughed, too, really hard. Clouds parting, water giving way, fences collapsing, such a sound. We looked at each other, startled, a little ashamed. How had we gone so long without laughing like this?

  At sunup we unearthed Drew’s photographs. His “work,” that is. We propped them against books and lamps and windows, arranged them into groupings on the floor, and sat in the double chair, surrounded by all manner of human misery. A drunk tottering out of a wrecked Corvette. A second-grader being loaded into a strobing medi-van. A woman in a bathrobe embracing a two-hundred-year-old chestnut tree as its companion tree falls under a chain saw. Drew had caught these people, every single one, at the exact moment when Before becomes After.

  “My worldview definitely needed some freshening up,” Drew said, surveying the photos.

  I put my legs over his legs. “No,” I said. “I was wrong.” These bruised people shored me up, and I wanted them near me, not because misery loved company but because the business of human striving felt common to us all. In this was the presence of God.

  Well. I had married a religious man. Here was news.

  In all, we lost three days. Or, found three days.

  We hardly slept, and when we did sleep, one of us would wake every so often, and, in the manner of the woman and her chestnut tree, embrace the other as the last tree standing.

  On Sunday, midmorning, I said, “I bet there’s still a ten-thirty at St. Bart’s.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Mass? Seriously?”

  “I want to see the church again. The inside, I mean. It wouldn’t kill either one of us to say a prayer.”

  A week earlier he would have talked me out of it. He would have looked at me funny. Now, he shrugged on his coat, saying, “Next stop, the distant past.”

  It had snowed a little overnight, the first snow of the season, a weak sheen that nevertheless rendered the morning as a white light that had to be blinked back. Already the snow was melting away; we didn’t even need a shovel. We had reached the end of a season of benevolent weather that had not yet yielded a deep frost.

  Standing on the porch, I squinted into the daylight. “Where have we been?”

  “Staying married, I hope,” Drew said. Our sequester finally over, we escorted each other to the car, entwined. Our town seemed deserted and coiled in that Sunday way that never changes. Inside the car, I felt protected from the outside quiet and its intimation of something about to spring.

  “I wonder if it might have been a relief for him to land in Baltimore,” I said. “Maybe it felt a little like this. Everything on hold.”

  “Maybe,” Drew said, easing the car into the street. “People take comfort from the damnedest things.”

  What had it felt like, wearing a cotton bathrobe and terrycloth slippers, eating three squares a day on a Formica tray, shuffling downstairs for individual therapy in the morning, group in the afternoon, at night sitting around with other damaged clergymen watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show? A nervous breakdown, the bishop called it, but I preferred the notion of suspended animation, found time, a reprieve of the sort you might get in jail or at boarding school or inside a forty-three-hour sleep or during an isolated weekend with your husband of five years, a stop-time in which you cease trying to connect the before and the after, because in fact you are balanced on the point of connection. All weekend I had thought of my uncle this way, precariously balanced, a form of suspension that a growing part of me felt loath to disturb.

  Drew steered us through town, driving slowly. “Hey, isn’t that whatshername?”

  So it was. Andrea Harmon, strolling past Hinton Variety, squashed against Glen Seavey like a sock stuck to a shirt in the drum of a dryer. “Pull over for a sec,” I said, rolling down my window.

  “Hey, Mrs. Mitchell,” Andrea called, waving mightily, which was quite a trick considering the restrictions imposed by the straitjacket of Glen Seavey’s forearms. The sight of Andrea, a living reminder that I’d managed to do something with my life besides wait, pleased me. Not that Andrea Harmon was the greatest exemplar of my success, but she proved that at least I’d been trying, and against long odds.

  “They’re up early,” Drew said. “Don’t teenagers sleep till noon?”

  “Up late, is more like it,” I said. “To them it’s still Saturday night.”

  Approaching the car, Glen twisted Andrea’s unblemished jaw skyward so that he could kiss her, ostentatiously, for my edification—you can stuff your “in loco parentis,” lady—before allowing her to proceed.

  “Long night?” I said. Andrea’s lips looked mauled, and Glen’s grip gave her the lopsided bearing of a hostage being lugged out of a held-up bank. The fact that Glen was wearing fatigues under a long black coat didn’t help.

  “We’re looking for Glen’s truck,” Andrea said cheerfully.

  “Blazer,” Glen corrected her.

  “Ty Sprague borrowed it around three-thirty but we forgot where he said to come get it.” Andrea looked cold, and as usual didn’t have enough clothes on. High thirties under icy sunlight, yet there she was, bare-legged beneath eleven inches of fake-leather skirt, her vinyl jacket flapped open to reveal a scalloped tank top and a tattoo of a bleeding heart lodged between her breasts.

  “My burka was in the wash,” she said, reading my mind.

  “Hell of a party over at the Dusons’,” Glen offered, his lip curling in that way I hated. “Music sucked, though. Destiny’s Child all night long. Andie likes girlie-bop music.”

  “I do not,” Andrea squeaked, banging flirtily on his chest with a lightly closed fist. Glen’s medallions rattled like padlocks.

  “Girlie-bop, girlie-bop,” he chanted. I detected a low growl from Drew, who was watching all this with his hands still on the wheel.

  “Quit it, Glen!” said Andrea, in a whiny, squealy, girlie bop way.

  “It’s Andie’s birthday,” Glen said. His eyes went tin colored and mean.

  “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “It’s not till January, we’re just pretending,” she said, giggling—buzzed, obviously—then Glen laughed, now that I had duly noted the pharmaceutical provenance of their expansive spirits. He looked straight at me as his hand roved beneath Andrea’s half-zipped jacket. Then he turned his face and licked her ear, his other hand clamped against her backside as if palming a basketball. If they’d been in school I’d have sent them both home.

  “Quit that,” Andrea snarled, pulling away. She looked momentarily irritated, and even had the grace—or the minimum required sobriety—to look embarrassed.

  “Well,” I said, “much as we’d love to see the whole show, we’ve gotta scoot.”

  Andrea looked at me. “Where were you on Friday?”

  “Away.”

  “Are you sick? You kind of look it”

  I shrugged. “After thirty you start aging in dog years”

  Drew leaned across me and said to Glen, “Offer the girl your coat, for chrissakes.”

  Astonishingly, Glen shed his coat on command, dropping it onto the frail rack of Andrea’s shoulders, then stepped away from her to cross his arms.

  To Andrea, Drew said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Drew,” I said softly

  So he pulled away. Before I got the window rolled up I heard her laugh again, a falsetto ripple so full of desperation that I had to count the seconds until it vanished in the distance.

  “You missed your calling,” I said to Drew. “Rick could use you in the office.”

  “Guys like that make me sick. What is she, twelve?”

  “Fifteen. She breaks my heart.”

  He put his hand on my knee. “Who doesn’t?�
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  I watched Andrea recede in the side-view mirror, looking more and more wretched as her image diminished. She seemed to have been standing there both a very long time and no time at all. Her image was getting smaller but more present, and we seemed to be driving both slow and fast, and the laws of time and space lost their authority, as they had so often since my accident. I was sitting here in the car with my husband and our new beginning, and I was also standing on the sidewalk with Andrea, my arm around her where Glen had taken his pointedly away, and I was also lying in my childhood bed, listening to my uncle and the cats move safely through the house’s well-remembered rooms. Like childhood itself, this moment of simultaneous experience lasted and lasted.

  The church at St. Bart’s had been painted inside, everything an uneven, sickly yellow—walls, ceiling, trim, baseboards—the obvious result of a close-out sale. Probably the Improvement Committee had hoped to spread sunshine, but the result looked more like jaundice. St. Bartholomew himself, standing at the entrance in life-size plaster, had undergone a political correction, blue eyes dyed brown, fair hair painted over in a more Mediterranean hue. As before, his robe glinted gold and red, and a symbolic flaying knife rested ominously at his feet. The face-lift made him look slightly less smug about having led his brother to Christ and slightly more mindful of his imminent death by skinning. The patron saint of surgeons and tanners looked more like a Hebrew with second thoughts than the vaguely Nordic know-it-all from my childhood.

  “Surgeons and tanners?” Drew said. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “Nope. Some books add taxidermist to the list.”

  “Didn’t your uncle think it was kind of gruesome, booking this guy as the maitre d’?”

  “Maybe. Nobody ever mentioned it. I figured St. Bart died like all the other martyrs—a pleasant little burning at the stake. I thought the knife was a bookmark that dropped out of his Bible.”