After Melanie

by Gloria Goldreich

  The vividness of that memory surprised him. But, of course, his conversation with Brian had thrust him back in time and forced him to think about Judith, about the nuances of their past and the shadows that darkened their present. Brian was right. He and Judith had to talk openly and honestly, as once they had, as they surely could, and would, again. They could not allow their grief to suffocate their love. Pausing on a corner for a light, he thought about how he could make that happen.

  The light changed and he strode toward his office, juggling ideas, approaches, his professional training asserting itself. But he abandoned all such thoughts and reminded himself that he would not be conducting an arbitration; he would be talking to his wife. A conversation too long delayed.

  He envisioned sitting opposite Judith in their lamp-lit living room, the windows open to the scent of newly blooming lilacs. That lilac bush had been their first purchase for the house which they had thought to fill with children. Children. A seminal item on Judith’s dream-bound agenda.

  ‘We’ll have a boy. We’ll have a girl,’ she had said on that long-ago day as they lay side by side in that sunlit cove, planning their future. ‘Maybe two boys. Two girls.’

  He had not forgotten her words, nor, he supposed, had she. He would not remind her of them. Of course not. But he might ask her why she had stopped reciting poetry. A question meant to disarm her, although the answer was clear to him. Leisure had been lost to them as they raced through their lives. They rushed to harvest advanced degrees, to enhance resumes that would assure professional success, aiming tenaciously for security. The house in the suburbs, a nest egg in the bank, a future under control. They created a rigid schedule for themselves and they met their own expectations. Brian was born a month after Judith completed her dissertation, a year after David won his first major arbitration.

  He remembered how they had juggled their hours after Brian’s birth, rushing through their days at work, willing themselves to wakefulness after sleepless nights, dependent on daycare centers and unreliable babysitters, but always delighting in their small son, marveling at his laughter, delighting in his antics. Brian was an easy infant, a happy toddler, and they were at ease with him. Poetry was abandoned. Nursery rhymes and improvised stories prevailed. Judith told old favorites and created new tales. She was a queen, David was a king, Brian their enchanted princeling. They wore crowns fashioned from the rims of pizza boxes and spoke in sonorous royal accents. Brian laughed and plucked off their crowns, saving them to wear to nursery school on dress-up day.

  They were happy. Life was good. She was on a tenure track. He was in line for a partnership. They bought a home with four bedrooms and a playroom. It was time, they agreed, for a second child, and then, perhaps, a third. Only children both, survivors of solitary childhoods, they longed for a large family. For Brian’s sake and for their own.

  But Judith did not become pregnant. Anxiety robbed their intimacy of passion. Indifferent doctors who spoke of body temperature and ovulation suctioned all pleasure out of what had been their sweetest moments. Lying beside each other, conditioned to disappointment, they dared not speak. Silence offered them refuge.

  That corrosive silence had been wonderfully shattered by Melanie’s birth. They relaxed into joy, reveled in delight as she tumbled through childhood. They soared on dreams of the happy future that awaited her, awaited them. With her death, the dream morphed into nightmare and they plummeted into a quicksand of grief.

  ‘A quicksand of grief.’ He said the words aloud, startled that they had occurred to him, startled that he found what Judith might call ‘a useful metaphor’. He waited for the traffic light to change, possessed of a new determination. They would emerge from that quicksand, he and his Judith. They would pull each other out. That was what they had to do. That was what they would do. The light turned green and he hurried across the street, newly invigorated, newly hopeful.

  He reached his office and thrust all emotional pondering aside. There was work to be done. A new project for an important client demanded extensive research. Nancy had already ferreted out relevant information and they worked together throughout the day, organizing a PowerPoint presentation.

  He marveled at Nancy’s quiet competence and watched as her slender fingers flashed across the keyboard, her head bent so that sheaths of her silver hair swept across her cheeks. He concentrated on writing his analysis, consulting her notes, breaking off now and again to dial Judith’s cell phone. Each call went at once to voicemail but he left no messages. She had mentioned resuming her work with Jeffrey Kahn, but had she planned to do it so soon? He could not remember. It was of no importance. He went back to work, finishing just as Nancy placed the folder with the completed printouts on his desk.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I never thought we’d finish today. I owe you.’

  She smiled. ‘I might just call in that IOU,’ she said, and he heard the hesitation in her voice. She did not easily ask for favors.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Lauren. She’s in a panic about a math test tomorrow. She asked if you could help her tonight and I told her I didn’t want to impose – you’ve been so generous with your time.’

  ‘You’re not imposing.’

  He glanced at his watch, dialed Judith’s phone again and this time he left a message.

  ‘I’ll be home late. Probably very late. Something came up. Tried to reach you earlier. Sorry.’

  ‘She won’t mind?’ Nancy asked. ‘Your wife?’ She rarely mentioned Judith by name, creating her own boundary to their intimacy.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, and she hurried to her office to gather up her things.

  He waited, the certainty that Judith would mind nagging at him. He realized, with a surge of guilt, that he wanted her to mind. He wanted her to miss him, to express regret, to glow with happiness when he arrived, forgiving his lateness in her relief at his presence. He would promise her an al fresco dinner and then, seated at a candlelit table, he would follow Brian’s advice and, at last, tell her about Nancy, about the innocence of their friendship and the relief it offered him. Judith would understand. Of course she would.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Nancy said, and, abandoning all thoughts of Judith, he followed her to the elevator.

  Lauren was waiting for them when they arrived at the apartment. Her sweet impish face was puckered with anxiety, her fair hair neatly braided, each plait carefully tied with a pale-green ribbon that matched her sweater, the colors chosen perhaps to match her large eyes. David thought her very pretty and imagined that one day she would be beautiful.

  She smiled as they entered and stood on tiptoe to kiss her mother, then held her hand out to David with grave solemnity. She was an affectionate child, a polite child, conditioned to loneliness, eager to please and be pleased.

  ‘Thank you for coming to help me,’ she said demurely.

  ‘I’m glad to do it,’ he replied and followed her into her bedroom.

  Her math book was open on the little white desk that had been Melanie’s, her index cards were neatly arranged on the uncluttered surface, her notebook open to neatly copied problems, the numbers marching down the page in careful columns. While Melanie’s bedroom had always been a scene of cheerful chaos, Lauren’s room was tidy, the floor clear, everything in its place.

  Lauren – quiet, fatherless Lauren – was a latchkey child, who came home each day to an empty apartment. It occurred to David that she craved order and imposed it on her own small space, creating a fortress against dangerous carelessness. It had, after all, been carelessness that had killed the father she had never known.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ he asked, faking a casualness he did not feel.

  He sat down beside her and she showed him the worksheet, the index card on which she had tried to tackle the problem, and pointed to the text which he decided actually complicated a very simple procedure. Quietly, patiently, he explained it to her and watched as she licked her pencil and began to work, making an
error, recognizing it, beginning again and then turning to him, her face wreathed in a triumphant smile. He set her another problem. She grinned and solved it.

  ‘I see. I see,’ she exclaimed.

  Her delight delighted him. They exchanged hugs and he remembered Melanie’s hugs, her special way of scrunching up her face to make him laugh as he held her close. He banished the memory and looked down at Lauren. Her expression was grave with gratitude.

  Hand in hand, her fingers pressed tightly against his own, they went into the kitchen where Nancy had set the table for three. Her hair was coiled into a loose chignon and her cheeks reddened with the heat of the oven as she pulled out a casserole. They ate with quiet pleasure, a pseudo family, safe in their pretend world.

  ‘This is so nice,’ Lauren said. ‘I love it when you come here.’

  He nodded. ‘I like coming here.’

  ‘Then you should come always. Tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Lauren. I have a wife. I have a home.’

  ‘But I think you like it better here,’ she said daringly. She smiled and leaned closer to him. ‘You like us, don’t you? You like me. You like my mother.’

  Her words, her sudden movement, startled him. She was, he realized, playing the nymphet, seducing him on her mother’s behalf.

  He was silent. He knew that whatever he said would be wrong. She was just a child, a fatherless child, spinning out a dangerous fantasy.

  ‘Lauren, that’s quite enough,’ Nancy said reprovingly and flashed David an apologetic glance. ‘Time for you to go to bed.’

  Obediently, she gave her mother a goodnight kiss and held her hand out to David. ‘Thank you,’ she said, once again the submissive and grateful child.

  David and Nancy carried their coffee into the living room and sat in uneasy silence.

  ‘She doesn’t understand,’ Nancy said at last. ‘She didn’t know what she was doing.’

  ‘But you and I both know what she was doing,’ he replied quietly.

  ‘She’s just a child. And you’re not seducible.’ She hesitated. ‘Are you?’

  He looked at her, her silver hair tumbled loose and caping her shoulders, the color rising in her angular face. She was flushed with the temerity of her own question. He thought to tell her how very beautiful she was at that moment, both her strength and vulnerability revealed in the steadiness of her gaze, in the sadness of her eyes.

  ‘No. I am not seducible. Nor, I think, are you,’ he said at last and took her hand in his own. Her fingers were very cold. ‘But I am fond of Lauren. It would be nice to take her out somewhere, perhaps to a show or a museum. To show her that what we have – you and I – is a very special friendship.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘A friendship.’

  ‘We must not endanger it,’ he cautioned.

  They needed no words to explicate what that danger might be.

  ‘I know.’ She spoke in a whisper and wrested her hand free.

  He rose to leave and she walked him to the door. They stood on the threshold for a minute in the dim light of the hallway and then, too swiftly, he hurried away, not daring to look back, knowing that she stood there still, wreathed in longing and loneliness.

  He was relieved to catch a late train and relieved, when he arrived home, to see that Judith was asleep. He touched her shoulder. A smile played at her lips, but she did not awaken. This was not an hour for explanations. He lay down beside her and inhaled the scent of the newly blooming lilac bush as it wafted through their open bedroom window. A new season meant a new beginning.

  SEVENTEEN

  He slept surprisingly well and awakened as dawn broke. Judith did not stir. He did not disturb her. They would talk that night. He dressed quickly, moving quietly through the wide-windowed room bathed in the milky half-light of a day not yet begun. He had purposefully gifted himself an extra two hours before he had to catch his train to the city. It had become his habit to do that at cautious intervals, always triggered by the impulse to visit Melanie’s grave. And this morning, with the thoughts of the previous night still fresh in mind and memory, brought that impulse.

  Closing the front door very softly, he went outside and paused beneath the lilac bush, heavy with blossoms. He broke off a slender branch and placed it on the seat of his car.

  He drove through the empty streets of the sleep-bound suburb, reveling in the quiet and the gathering brightness as the sun rose high in the cloudless sky. He reached the highway, took the familiar exit and within minutes arrived at the imposing iron gates of the small cemetery. The gates were still padlocked, but as he approached, a sleepy-eyed groundskeeper arrived, keys in hand.

  He was an old man, a long-time synagogue employee and familiar to David who had seen him at too many burials. On such occasions the caretaker wore a suit, shabby but well pressed, a white shirt and a tie, but on this morning he was dressed in jeans and a blue cambric work shirt.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning,’ David replied in turn. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be around this early.’

  ‘Lots of folks come early in the morning,’ he said. ‘I guess because it’s quiet. Because it’s private.’

  ‘Yes. Quiet. Private,’ David repeated. That was what he was in search of. Quiet. Privacy.

  He parked his car and, holding the sprig of lilac, he walked along the gravel path to a new section of the cemetery. He paused at the small pink marble gravestone that Judith had chosen with such care. Emergent rays of pale sunlight played across his daughter’s name, so deeply engraved, and the Hebrew acronym inscribed beneath it. The rabbi had explained that the letters meant Love is Stronger than Death, a quotation from Psalms. He had accepted the inscription, although he had thought the psalmist wrong. It was a mistake to underestimate the power of death.

  He saw that there were tightly furled buds on the dwarf rose bush that Judith had planted and he wondered when they would burst into full blossom. He placed his hand on the gravestone. Its surface was cold to his fingers despite the gathering brightness of the morning sun. Gently, he placed the lilacs upon it.

  At a neighboring grave, a black-coated man swayed in prayer but David offered no prayers.

  ‘I’m here, sweetheart,’ he said softly. ‘I’m here because it’s a beautiful morning. I miss you. We miss you. Your mother and I. Both of us. Together. We love you. We miss you.’

  Suffused with a new calm, he turned and walked back to his car, pausing at the entryway to place a ten-dollar bill in the charity box that stood on a stone bench. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he could easily catch the next train. The sun was high now, the cloudless sky ablaze. He was ready for the new day, eager for the advent of evening.

  Judith too was energized by the advent of a new warmth. She willed the brightness of the passing days to banish the darkness of her mood. She would not think about what had happened with Jeffrey Kahn, yet the thought recurred. Again and again, she assured herself that their coming together had been transitory, based only on the need of the moment, the overwhelming mutuality of their mourning. They had, each of them, acknowledged as much. It had happened, it was over, it would not happen again.

  Driving down suburban streets, she saw children dancing through the rainbow-rimmed sprays of sprinklers that rained down on newly green, sweet-smelling lawns. Women in summer dresses and men with their jackets slung over their shoulders walked slowly, their faces lifted to the gold-streaked sky. She forced herself to smile. Struggling toward normalcy, she returned the wave of a crossing guard, sounded her horn lightly at a small boy who darted into the road. She relaxed and reminded herself of how much she loved the season of sunlight.

  Fans whirled in the thrift shop, piercing the shafts of brightness that shot through the unshaded windows, spangling the counters and sending motes of dust across the overladen racks.

  Each day of the new season brought a new cast of volunteers. Empty nesters arrived, middle-aged women who sought to
dispel the summer lassitude with self-righteous forays into volunteerism. Feeling useful and virtuous, they reorganized the shelves and decorated the dangling price tags with smiley faces and small hearts. They trained false smiles on the customers who wandered in.

  Judith arrived later each morning and left earlier. She automatically folded and refolded garments that had been cast carelessly aside, hurried from one bin to another in search of a wanted item, manned the cash register, counting bills, wrapping coins for deposit. The orderly chores countered the uneasiness that still assaulted her when she thought of Jeffrey Kahn, when she thought of David, when memories of Melanie surfaced unbidden.

  On this morning, a pale woman wearing the uniform of a hospital aide joyously claimed a brand-new royal-blue bathing suit, the Bloomingdale price tag still attached. Judith wondered when she would find time to swim and how she would crowd her fleshy body into the flimsy Lycra suit. But the suit was not for herself, the woman explained. She was buying it for her daughter, to cheer her up because her husband had recently left her. He was a drunk. It was just as well. Her daughter deserved better.

  Judith nodded, marveling at the confidences that were imparted with such ease in this cluttered room. But then all secrets were safe here, all revelations secure. They all lived in different worlds and, like itinerant airline passengers, would never see each other again. She herself could safely tell this poor pale woman that she had allowed a man who was not her husband to make love to her. A barely contained hysteria suffused her at the absurdity of the thought.

  The proud man who had so scrupulously reclaimed his IOU purchased three neatly pressed short-sleeved shirts. It was very hot in the mail-room where he worked, he told Judith.

  ‘But I’m not complaining,’ he added.

  He would not complain. He had a job. He had the money to pay for the shirts which Judith assured him were in excellent condition. He made a great show of counting out the bills.