After Melanie

by Gloria Goldreich

She nodded, and for the first time she entered the bedroom he and Sylvia had shared. It was a large room, the long windows covered with draperies of a sheer material, the floor carpeted in gray, the single silver-framed painting on the ecru papered wall was Picasso’s Woman in White. A satin coverlet in muted tones of gray and violet was spread across the king-sized bed. One corner was turned down but the other side was undisturbed. Judith marveled that Jeffrey Kahn did not reach across the bed as he slept, in search of his vanished wife. But then perhaps he did and immediately smoothed the linens. That was her own habit on the rare nights when David slept away from home.

  Shades of pale lilac covered the bedside lamps and a small mound of medical journals littered his bedside table. There was a single volume on Sylvia’s side. Judith opened it with a shock of recognition. Jeffrey’s wife had been reading Nellie Sachs as she lay dying.

  Vials of perfume and small pots of rouge, tightly closed compacts and tubes of lipstick were neatly arranged on the dressing table. It did not surprise her that Jeffrey had not removed them. Sylvia would forever be absent, but her presence lingered in the room they had shared. Her scent was a comfort he would not easily surrender.

  Photographs in matching pewter frames were arranged on the bureau. Jeffrey and Sylvia on their wedding day, he in a tuxedo, she in white lace, looking at each other in wonder, as though startled by their new-found happiness. Portraits of their daughters in academic cap and gown flanked their wedding photo. Judith had known Beth and Amy Kahn when they were small girls. Amy had been gangly and thin, Beth plump and awkward. It seemed wonderful to her that they had morphed into such fair-haired, confident young women, aglow with achievement and confidence.

  In her own bedroom, hers and David’s, on their bureau, there was Brian’s graduation photo and a portrait of Melanie, each set in matching frames of pale wood. The school photographer had captured Melanie in mid-laughter, her arms outstretched, her nascent breasts straining against the pink cashmere cardigan.

  Staring at the portraits of Jeffrey’s daughters, Judith felt a surge of sadness. She would never know how maturity would have sculpted Melanie’s features. Would they have become as sharply defined as David’s, or would her cheekbones, like Judith’s, have become more prominent? What would she have looked like at sixteen, at seventeen, at eighteen? Once, watching a television show about abducted children, she had seen computer-generated images that showed how a child gone missing at seven might look at thirteen, how a runaway teenager might look as a young adult. Judith had thought, wildly, absurdly, that perhaps she might send that last photograph of Melanie to the company that did such computer imaging and request a likeness of Melanie at nineteen and perhaps it could be updated with each passing year. The idea had shamed her and she had thrust it away, but it resurfaced as she stared again at the Kahn daughters grown into womanhood.

  She turned away from their smiling faces, went into the bathroom where she washed her face with very cold water and then picked up the silver-backed hairbrush that rested on a low table. It was Sylvia’s hairbrush. She used it to brush her own dark hair and then examined it and removed a single tendril that clung to the bristles. Back in the bedroom, she opened Sylvia’s vial of Madame Rochas and dabbed a drop of the fragrance on her wrist. The door opened and Jeffrey Kahn stared at her.

  ‘I wondered if you needed anything,’ he said. ‘A towel or something.’

  I need my daughter. The words, unspoken, lodged in her throat.

  ‘No. No. I’m fine,’ she replied aloud, and then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t.

  Once again, as on the previous evening, a torrent of sorrow ambushed her. She was racked with sobs; hot tears seared her cheeks and she swayed dangerously from side to side. Swiftly, he caught her, steadied her, held her close and led her to the bed. She lay on the gray and violet satin coverlet and covered her face with her hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it just overwhelms me, the loss, the finality of it all. My daughter. Your wife. The loneliness.’

  ‘Yes. The loneliness.’ He echoed the word, his voice strangely resonant. ‘The loneliness,’ he repeated.

  He sat beside her, his hand resting lightly on her forehead and then very gently stroking her hair. She relaxed into the tenderness of his touch and lifted her head. His lips met hers and he stretched out beside her. Slowly, very slowly, they undressed. Their lovemaking was swift and silent, their embraces tender. It was comfort they sought, not passion. They did not speak. He rolled away from her, his hand resting on her arm and then falling to his side. Within minutes they were both asleep.

  When she awakened, she was alone in the room. He had covered her naked body with a light sheet and placed a bath towel at the foot of the bed. She glanced at her watch and marveled that only an hour had passed. Swiftly, she showered and dressed. Once again she used Sylvia’s brush and stared into the mirror, surprised to see that her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. David had always touched her face lightly after they had made love, rested his fingers upon her eyes.

  ‘So that they won’t blind me,’ he had murmured more than once.

  ‘David.’ She whispered his name. ‘Oh, David, what have I done?’

  She realized that it was not guilt that she felt but sadness, sadness and love commingled with regret. She yearned to feel David’s hand upon her face, to hear his voice, to claim not his forgiveness but his understanding. She would explain that the moment had overwhelmed her, the need for touch and consolation had been overpowering; they had, she and Jeffrey Kahn, surrendered to the confluence of loneliness and longing. And she knew, turning away from the mirror, that she would explain nothing at all to David. How could she? Why would she?

  Jeffrey was in the kitchen, the table set with blue ceramic plates, the brie and the focaccia on a wooden board, oil-soaked obsidian olives in a small bowl, a salad of arugula and red onions on a flat ceramic dish. The chilled wine was uncorked and ready to be poured into rose-colored glasses.

  It surprised her that she was ravenously hungry, the very first time she had felt really hungry since Melanie’s death. Brian had remarked worriedly on her lack of appetite. David, regarding the uneaten food on her plate, would shake his head wearily. Evelyn had advised her that her appetite for food would return when her appetite for life returned. Perhaps she was right, Judith thought as she placed a large wedge of brie across the crusty bread and took a deep swallow of wine. Certainly she felt more alive at this moment than she had felt during all the months of her mourning.

  ‘You brought a lovers’ picnic,’ he said.

  ‘But we are not lovers,’ she replied gravely. ‘I love my husband. David.’

  ‘Of course you do. I know that. I understand that.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked. ‘I’m not sure what I understand.’

  ‘We must try not to overthink what happened between us,’ he said in the tone she imagined he used in his consulting room. ‘We were both tired, both entangled in grief. I was just so in need of togetherness and touch. It was my fault. I did not think. I am sorry. So sorry.’

  His voice broke and she feared that he might weep.

  ‘I’m sorry too. But what happened was no one’s fault,’ she said softly, matching her tone to his. ‘Not yours. Not mine.’

  Sadly, calmly, they acknowledged the accident of their intimacy. It was solace that they had offered each other, the brief and transient comfort of tenderness and touch. Only that. They could forgive themselves. They could forgive each other. What had happened would not happen again. It was not passion that had moved them, she assured herself, but rather tenderness born of need. The words satisfied her. Tenderness born of need.

  She reached for the salad, relishing its crispness and color. She told him how she loved wandering through farmers’ markets, how she and David would drive miles out of their way in search of ramps or morels. It pleased her to speak of David so softly. It was important that Jeffrey Kahn understand the depth of her affection, the expansiveness
of her love.

  ‘You have a good life with him,’ he said and immediately steered the conversation into safer precincts.

  He spoke of his visit to California, the beauty of the Bay area, his disappointment in the quality of the papers presented at the medical conference, his pleasure at seeing how close his daughters were to each other.

  ‘Yes. That’s wonderful,’ she agreed and suddenly remembered an evening when Melanie had been nestled between Brian and Denise on the sofa as they planned their trip to the Amish country. Their conversation had turned into a tickle-fest with brother and sister attacking a laughing and defenseless Denise. She and David had smiled at each other, in appreciation of that sweet gaiety, that togetherness.

  ‘Our children, Brian and Melanie, were also close in spite of their age difference. Brian loved being a big brother and Melanie adored him. That made us – David and me – very happy.’

  She would have Jeffrey understand that theirs had been a contented family, that her marriage had the steadying ballast of memories shared, of love enduring.

  She refilled her wine glass and looked out of the window. A cardinal feasted at the bird feeder and then flew away, his scarlet wings scissoring their way skyward. Within seconds a dun-colored female was beside him and together the winged couple soared beyond her view.

  ‘Do cardinals mate for life? Like swans?’ she asked. ‘And are they always happy together?’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t think birds worry too much about happiness. Only human beings are blessed – or cursed – with that capacity,’ he said. ‘Yes, swans do mate for life. I don’t know about cardinals and, sadly, we both know that human beings do not.’

  Judith nodded. ‘So many sad stories,’ she said and immediately thought of Suzanne Brody who wore a jade ring on the ring finger of her left hand, which almost obscured the pale circlet left by her discarded wedding band.

  ‘Too many sad stories,’ he agreed. ‘There was a time – I think it was when Amy and Beth were in middle school – when Sylvia and I thought divorce had become an epidemic. Couples we knew were suddenly uncoupling. We used to speculate about who would be next. Which husband would disappear into an affair, which wife would discover she was a lesbian, who would abandon their children and slam the door on a newly built split-level? We made a game of it, perhaps because it bewildered and frightened us. We ourselves could never imagine a life apart from each other.’

  ‘It never bewildered me,’ Judith countered. ‘It was familiar, perhaps because of my teaching and research. I had read and written so much about the attitudes of women writers toward marriage. Even my unmarried writers – or maybe especially my unmarried writers – had singular opinions. It was Jane Austen who wrote that happiness in marriage is entirely a game of chance, a gamble. Perhaps that was why she broke her own engagement and never married.’

  She looked across the table at Jeffrey. She had thought to amuse him, to introduce an anecdotal lightness into talk that had become dangerously serious. She realized at once that she had failed. His avian face was a mask of sadness. His folded hands cupped his long chin. When he spoke at last, his voice was so low she strained to hear him.

  ‘If, as your Jane Austen wrote, marriage is a matter of chance – a gamble – then I think Sylvia and I won the jackpot. We were so very happy, our life together a miracle. That is why I am so devastated by her death. I am so lost without her. Lost and lonely. And that is why I am so grateful to you. For your help. For what we have shared,’ he said.

  He reached across the table and took her hand in his own. ‘Shall we go on working together?’ he asked. ‘Can we?’ His fingers, pressing hard upon her palm, were very cold.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘We would have to be careful. Very careful.’

  ‘I promise that what happened today will not happen again.’

  ‘I need time to think about it,’ she whispered. She pulled her hand free of his grasp.

  ‘Of course.’ Disappointment dulled his voice.

  She glanced at the clock. It was late, much later than she had realized. ‘I must go,’ she said, turning away. ‘I’ll get my bag. And there’s the carton for the thrift shop.’

  ‘I’ll carry it down,’ he said, and they mounted the stairs very slowly to the dressing room, now shrouded in the gathering darkness of early evening.

  She glanced at the closet. Despite all their efforts, it was still half filled. The fitted drawers overflowed with gently used shirts of the softest cotton, with sweaters carefully encased in plastic bags, handbags whose linings were dusted with amber-tinted face powder.

  ‘You see,’ he said sadly, his gaze following her own. ‘There’s still all this to deal with. You know that I need your help. I cannot manage without you.’

  She stood very still, her eyes averted, not daring to meet the plea in his eyes.

  ‘Can we go on? Can we finish?’ he asked.

  The desperate sadness in his voice melted her resolve. She trembled and leaned against the wall. ‘Of course, we must finish,’ she said at last.

  Driving home, she struggled against uncertainty and regret. She knew herself to be venturing into dangerous territory. What if what had happened that afternoon in that bedroom, so seductively furnished in melancholic shades of gray and violet, should happen yet again? Neither his promise to be careful nor her determination to avoid such a repetition was a sufficient guarantee, she knew. What would that mean to her life with David, their years together, the children who had been born to them, the orderly pattern of their days, their carefully organized home? And their love?

  ‘Love. Our love. David’s and mine.’ She said the words aloud as she steered the car around a dangerous curve.

  How strongly she had felt that love, threaded though it was with regret and sadness, as she had stared at herself in the mirror, clutching Sylvia Kahn’s hairbrush.

  ‘Our love. David’s and mine.’

  She repeated the words more fiercely, as though they could combat her surging unease and banish any confusion. She would not think of those few moments when Jeffrey Kahn’s breath had been moist and sweet upon her face, his touch so comforting and tender upon her flesh.

  Tenderness, born of need, was what she and Jeffrey Kahn had offered each other. She repeated the reassuring words. There had been no love between them. Love was her life with David. Could she tell him what had happened that afternoon? Could she expect him to understand that what she had shared with Jeffrey had mysteriously, inexplicably, intensified her feelings for him? She did not understand it herself.

  Of course she would say nothing to David. He had never recovered from the infidelity that had poisoned his parents’ marriage. She would not, could not, reignite his pain. What had happened that afternoon would not happen again. She had Jeffrey’s promise. She had her own determination.

  Her trembling hands gripped the wheel too tightly and she drove too fast. The car veered dangerously out of lane. She willed herself to calm and she continued on very slowly, her decision made.

  She pulled into their driveway, behind David’s car. A single light burned on the second floor in the room that had been their daughter’s, but even as she stared up at it, the golden window darkened. She spoke his name softly when she entered the house, but she knew that the strains of the last movement of the Brahms Requiem obscured her voice. She did not seek him out but went very slowly up to the bedroom, relieved to be alone.

  SIXTEEN

  David wakened early that morning and dressed quickly. Judith was still asleep. He ate a solitary breakfast, went upstairs and kissed her gently on the forehead. She stirred but did not open her eyes. He wanted to apologize for his late arrival the previous evening. He knew she had been disappointed, although she had said only that she had thought that they might have had a picnic supper. He had seen the salad and the brie in readiness for that supper in the refrigerator. He should have explained the urgency of the deadline he was rushing to meet. He sighed. Another mistake but not irrem
ediable. He would make it up to her.

  He reached the city, as always, before the cacophony of urban life began and walked toward his office, his face lifted to the soft spring wind. He had always loved the teasing onset of the season of warmth, when the chill of early morning was brushed away by slowly emergent golden sunlight.

  A wave of nostalgia washed over him and he walked more slowly, caught up in memories of seasons past, the early spring of their courtship when he and Judith had wandered through the forest that bordered their campus. The shadows of newly unfurled leaves had dappled her bare arms, and her sunlit face had been radiant as they sprinted across the soft yielding earth to a favorite cove beneath the wide-winged oak tree they called their own.

  He struggled to recall what they had talked about, lying there in each other’s arms. Probably their programmed progress into a beckoning future. Judith had surely spoken, with dreamy confidence, of how she planned to organize their meager budget and manage meals during those whirlwind days when they raced from the university to their part-time jobs. They were aiming high and had no time to waste. And he, as always, had been quiescent, seeking only to please her, knowing that she sought only to please him in those, their halcyon days.

  And yes, he remembered with absolute certainty, she had recited poetry. Probably Emily Dickinson, her favorite then. The words were lost to him. He had never really registered them; it was her voice rising and falling in a musical cadence that had soothed him and filled his heart with love. That love meant honesty, revelations.

  There were no secrets between them. Their pasts were revealed – her lonely childhood, his parents’ marriage embittered by his father’s brief and regretted infidelity and his mother’s inability to ever forgive it. He had promised that she would never again be lonely. She had said there would never be bitterness between them. They had assured each other of absolute fidelity.

  ‘I will love only you. Always,’ she had said, and he had repeated her words.

  That mutual promise had been sealed with a gentle kiss. How soft her lips had been, how sweet her breath.