The Year of Pleasures

  Enough! I read the Chicago Tribune someone had left behind and walked around reading descriptions of various kinds of coffee beans. Then I read again the signs posted on the window. The massage place was a little ways down the street, and the rates were much cheaper than in Boston; maybe I’d make an appointment. The last time I’d had a massage was shortly after John’s diagnosis, and I’d wept with huge, racking sobs that embarrassed me. The masseuse was a very short and peaceful-looking woman who wore chopsticks to hold up her long hair, black and shiny as crows’ feathers. She said, “It’s good for you to cry, don’t be shy, just let it out, let go.” She told me I had an aura that glowed, she could see it, and she promised that great joy would soon come back to me. But I felt terrible; I cut the massage short, gave the woman a huge tip, and fled.

  No one had torn off a tab with the phone number for the room for rent, and I saw that the amount had been lowered to $275. The word furnished had been inserted before bedroom.

  I sat at a nearby table and looked at my watch again. I wondered if I’d be able to wait until I got home to look at the photos—probably it would be better if I did. The door to the coffee shop opened, and the young man I’d seen arguing with his girlfriend came in. He nodded at me, a bit embarrassed, and I nodded back. He ordered an espresso and then walked toward me, his hands in his pockets. “How you doing?” he asked, and I said, “I was about to ask the same of you.”

  “I’m good. Really.” He smiled, then looked behind me at the ad for a room. “No takers yet, huh?”

  “No. I see they’ve lowered the rent, though.”

  “Yeah, we did. It’s my house; my roommate and I are the ones looking. We’ve got a place a couple of blocks from here. We’re kind of desperate because . . . well, one of the guys we started out with didn’t work out. And now, the girl you saw me with? She moved out, too. You need a room?” He laughed.

  “I’m tempted!” I said, and then, when he looked hopefully over at me, I said, “No, no, I’m just . . . well, I had a bad night. I just moved here, my husband just died, and I’ve never . . . I think I need a big dog. Or an alarm system. Or something.” Too much information. Like a woman I once met in an airport bookstore. We were talking about one of the bestsellers when she suddenly said, “My husband just died. I’m carrying his sweater in my suitcase. I take it everywhere. I sleep with it.” I had no idea what to say, and finally managed, “I’m sorry.” She became flustered and said, “I don’t know why I told you that.” I said it was fine. But then we moved apart, unable, anymore, to talk about books or even to stand comfortably next to each other. I was newly married, the rings still a miracle on my hand.

  I smiled brightly at the young man. “Anyway, just . . . you know, a lot to get adjusted to!” I felt like a falsely cheerful host on a children’s show: Can you say mourning?

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know how that can be.” No, you don’t, I thought. You have no idea. We are geological ages apart.

  “Espresso!” the woman behind the counter said, and he went up for his drink. Then, coming back to me, he held out his hand. “I’m Matthew. O’Connor.”

  I told him my name and then shook his hand. There was a deep scratch on one of his knuckles. “Cat?” I asked, pointing to it.

  He looked at it as though seeing it for the first time. “This? Nah. My roommate tried to put a bone down the garbage disposal, messed it all up. I must have cut myself fixing it.”

  “You’re lucky you know how to do that!”

  He blew on his espresso, then took a sip. “Pretty easy.”

  “Easy for you, maybe. My husband was very handy; I don’t know how to do anything. If I can’t repair it with duct tape, I’m out of luck. I don’t even know how to hang pictures properly.”

  “You live near here?”

  I nodded.

  He took a napkin from the dispenser and wrote down a phone number. “If you ever want some help, just call me—this is my cell phone. I’m pretty good, and God knows I could use some cash at the moment. I’ll charge you fifteen dollars an hour to fix almost anything. If that’s not too much.”

  “No, that’s not too much at all.” I put the napkin in my pocket, looked at my watch. “I’ve got to go—I’ll see you again, I’m sure.”

  “Okay.” He sat down and pulled a book out of his backpack. Just before I was out the door, he said, “Excuse me? I just wanted to tell you, you can call anytime, even late at night. I’m always up. So . . .” The top of his ears turned red. Last puppy in the cage. I nearly hired him on the spot to carry my purse. Instead, I said, “I’ll definitely call you.”

  On the way to get the pictures, I felt for the presence of the napkin in my pocket. Neighbors who seemed nice. A good-priced handyman—apparently available twenty-four hours a day. Lorraine. Into my looming empty basket, I laid these gifts. There was the sun, shining through the bare limbs of the trees, making it warmer than I’d thought. I wondered if Matthew could do carpentry. In my mind’s eye, we lifted up the pieces of wood resting in the corner of the store and began crafting a perfume bar, where you could use essential oils to create your own scent.

  Though I had decided to wait until I got home to look at the photos, I found it impossible to do so. I paid for the film, then tore eagerly at the envelope to look at the first offering before I was even out of the store. But the shot was only one I had taken of laundry. Laundry hanging in Paris, I remembered, so the film was over two years old. There were bedclothes, lingerie, colorful little bits of children’s clothing. I remembered telling John when I took that picture that I would love to have a big fat coffee-table book of laundry on the line. I loved looking at laundry on the line. There was a kind of romance to it, a comfort, I’d said. And then I’d told him to move so that he wouldn’t block anything.

  “Something wrong, ma’am?” the man behind the counter asked. “Are the pictures okay?”

  I smiled at him and said yes, then I shoved the pictures into my purse and walked quickly toward home. I told myself that surely a picture of John was in here somewhere. I also told myself I would look at a picture a week, and that way they’d last longer. But the real reason I was going to delay looking was that I was afraid. I was afraid of finding one of John and reopening a tender, healing place; and I was equally afraid of not finding one, of coming face-to-face with the fact that the last picture I’d seen of him was indeed the last.

  When I got home, I checked for a message from Lorraine—nothing. I picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone, just as I used to when I was impatient for a boyfriend to call. I tried her number and got her voice mail—not her, but a mechanized voice saying that the party at this number was not in. If I cared to leave a message . . . I hung up.

  I made the pie and put it in the oven to bake, put in a load of wash, and ironed a few blouses. There were still things to unpack, but instead I sat at the kitchen table and dreamed. I thought of how my store could have shelves of heavy pasta platters from Tuscany, roosters from Paris for the kitchen, antique keys from who knew where strung from long lengths of satin ribbon, drawing paper and charcoal pencils, verbena soap and antique buttons. I felt myself being pulled more and more strongly in this direction, with no practical sense at all of how it could come to be. And little courage to do it, if truth be told. But was I not here, after all, in an entirely new place, entirely on a whim? Could you not in fact dream some things into being? As much as I wanted to honor the past, to take the time necessary to fully grieve what I had lost, I wanted to lift the lid off the future.

  It was what John would want me to do, wasn’t it? I tried to think of him sitting across from me here, thought of how he might advise me, but instead saw him at an outdoor café in Paris where we ate lunch one cloudy afternoon. It had been cold; the tables had been deserted. But it was a pretty place—we’d liked the deep red color of the chairs contrasted with the creaminess of the marble tabletops and the white cut-lace café curtain. Behind the curtain there’d been a young man looking out the wi
ndow lost in thought, a cigarette in his hand. He had one of those timeless faces, one that you might see in paintings from hundreds of years ago. He would have fit as a muscular angel at the top of the Sistine Chapel or as a white-stockinged, ruffled-shirted lord in blue velvet breeches—he had tangled curls on his head, full lips, a patrician nose. Above him, scallop-shaped ceiling lamps glowed golden, like a practical benediction. I remembered that John had wanted to take his picture, but just as he’d lifted the camera, the man had moved away. “C’est la vie,” we’d said together, then laughed.

  Before we ordered, it had started to rain—the kind of spitting, misty rain you feel foolish putting your umbrella up against. But we’d stayed at our table, determined to eat outside anyway, and an agitated waiter came to take our order—he wore a white apron tied over a belly so round he appeared pregnant. The pencil he used to write our order was stubby and chewed-on, and looked to have been sharpened by a knife. We liked this; we agreed that it added a kind of authenticity. We ordered cheese, fruit, bread, and wine—so predictable, our waiter seemed to think—but we enjoyed it, marveled as we always did at the texture and the taste of even the plainest of foods in France. I asked for butter at one point—I wanted more bread, but buttered—and when I asked shyly for du beurre, the waiter scowled and asked, “Pourquoi faire?” I sat silent, unsure of how to answer, and John came to my defense, saying in emphatic English, “She would like to eat it, if it’s not too much trouble.” John did not often suffer rudeness, even if it was built into the contract, as it often seemed to be in Paris.

  We’d gone shopping afterward. I bought two small plates for us to have breakfast on: they featured roosters, and were in the Gallic colors of yellow and blue. Just this morning I’d put them away in their new place. John had bought himself a vintage watch at an antiques store, and for me, a fiery opal bracelet; after he put it on me, he turned my hand over and put his lips to my wrist.

  The mantel clock struck five, startling me from my reverie. Outside, night was beginning to suggest itself. I moved to the kitchen window and watched the movement of clouds across the sky, then the lazy revolutions of a falling maple seed just outside the glass. It looked like a tiny pair of discarded angel wings, browned with age. It turned around and around all the way down, as though looking to find something of which it might ask an essential question. And then it landed without sound onto an earth that would take its time in transforming it. John and I used to talk about that sometimes, transformation—about what would become of him after he died; we shared that bravest and most sorrowful of intimacies. Mostly, though, I would say that we talked in silence. In the language of lying in the dark and moving one’s hand to the other’s hip for a specific kind of anchoring. That’s how we talked most. Even before.

  The buzzer on the stove sounded. I took the pie out and put it on a cooling rack, closed my eyes, and leaned in to smell. Then I headed upstairs to find something to wear tonight. I would bathe, rest, dress, and go to search out the company of others, bearing the gift of fruit in pastry. What did we do here but pull ourselves along in this fashion? Never mind our various life circumstances, what I believed was that we had all been flung into the water without having been taught to swim. We ate, we slept, we formed our kaleidoscopic relationships and marched ever forward. We licked chocolate from our fingers. We arranged flowers in vases. We inspected our backsides when we tried on new clothes. We gave ourselves over to art. We elected officials and complained. We stood up for home runs. We marked life passages in ceremonies we attended with impatience and pride. We reached out for new love when what we had died, confessing our unworthiness, confessing our great need. We felt at times that perhaps we really were visitors from another planet. We occasionally wondered if it was true that each of us was making everything up. But this was a wobbly saucer; this was thinking we could not endure; we went back to our elegant denial of unbreachable isolation, to refusing the lesson of being born alone and dying that way, too. We went back to loving, to eating, to sleeping, to marching and marching and marching along.

  I was almost out the door when the phone rang. Lorraine, I thought, and rushed to answer it. But it was not Lorraine. It was Ed Selwin. “Remember me?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I was the guy sold you the yogurt.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, if you remember that, you might also remember I asked if you’d like to be on my radio show?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “How did you get my number, Ed?”

  “Oh, I ran into Delores Henckley. She comes in all the time, she’s a fool for that vanilla-chocolate twist. That’s what she says, that she’s a fool. We got to talking and she told me she’d sold Lydia Samuels’s house to a woman from Massachusetts. So you moved here, just like I predicted, remember?”

  “You know, Ed, you caught me at a really bad time; I’m just on the way out, and I’m late already.”

  “Doesn’t take long to give a guy a yes or a no, does it? We can work out the details later.”

  “Fine,” I said, thinking, I can always get out of this later.

  “That’s the spirit!” he said. “I’ll call you tomorrow, we’ll find a day. Now I can’t promise for sure, but it could air as soon as next week.”

  Carol Pacini was a single mother. After Benny went to bed, she and I cleaned up the kitchen together. There is something about shared labor that makes people more easily open up, and while she washed the non-dishwasher items and I wiped them, she told me her story. She married at nineteen because she got her cheerleader self pregnant by the star quarterback, who she quickly came to realize had not much going for him but football. “He was sweet,” she said, “and real nice-looking. But did you ever dive off the edge of something and hit the bottom way too soon?” She was divorced before Benny was born, and now here she was. Her father had given her the down payment for the house, and she was struggling to keep it—she worked full-time at an insurance company and occasionally supplemented her income by working as a cocktail waitress in a club the next town over. There was a natural kindness to her, and a practical strength I very much admired. “Benny told me about your husband,” she said. “I’m really sorry. I just wanted to tell you, if there’s anything you need . . . I mean, even if you get nervous being alone at night and want to borrow Zeke.” She was referring to her huge black dog, now lying on his back in a corner of the kitchen. “He’ll sleep with anyone,” she said.

  “I might take you up on that,” I said, and told her about the nightmare I’d had. I was nervous doing this—when a relationship is so new, everything one says has disproportionate weight and staying power. But it felt good to unburden myself by telling her the whole story, unedited.

  “That’s a terrible dream,” Carol said. “You probably had it because of evil residue left by the old bitch who lived there before you.”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious!” Carol said. “She was awful, I couldn’t stand her, but she was sort of weirdly powerful. Believe me, I was always very nice to her! Why don’t you go ahead and take Zeke home with you tonight? See how you like having a dog.”

  I looked over at him, snoring now in a light, ruffled way. “I always wanted a dog,” I said. “But my husband had allergies.”

  “Try him out,” Carol said. “If you like having him, we’ll share him.” She yawned, then apologized.

  “I should go,” I said. “Thanks for dinner. And maybe . . . can I really take Zeke?” His tail thumped at the mention of his name, though he did not rouse himself.

  “Absolutely,” Carol said. “Hey, Zeke, want to go out?” He leaped up as though he’d been shocked. One ear was turned over on itself. He came to drop his muzzle in her lap, rolled his eyes upward, martyrlike, and she scratched behind his ears. “He does have a way about him, doesn’t he?”

  On Carol’s advice, I walked Zeke to the curb before I went in. He took a long, contemplative pee, then trotted off toward home. Sho
rt of his own house, I pulled him into mine. I took his leash off and he sniffed eagerly around my kitchen, his tail wagging slowly in a way that I thought meant he was happy, but very busy. I filled a bowl with water and put it in the corner. Already I felt better, having him there. I crouched down and called him to me, showed him his water. He took a quick drink, then wandered away to check out the other rooms.

  The message light was blinking. Surely this had to be Lorraine. And it was. “I’m at the airport,” she said. “United, flight five twenty-four. It arrives in Chicago at ten forty-nine. Where are you? . . . Okay, I’ll take a cab to your place.” I should have known when she asked for my address that this might happen.

  I looked at my watch. Ten-thirty. I stood still for a long moment, then went upstairs to put linens on the bed in the guest room. An extra blanket—Lorraine always used to complain of cold. She used to paint her toenails in ten different colors. She kept all her clothes balled up in one dresser drawer, ate peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches, sat at the edge of her bed and played her guitar for hours, and at such times she was unreachable. She almost never went to class—she held all but one of her humanities professors in contempt—yet her grade point average was just under 4.0. She drank double scotches when she went on dates or at any other time she wasn’t paying, and she put them down as smoothly as if they were water. Her penmanship was beautiful—very artistic, and she favored peacock blue ink in fountain pens. I remember once watching her make out a check for her share of the rent, and later trying to imitate her style when I wrote out my own check. We each paid $32.50 a month, and it was always hard to come up with the money. Once, after I’d paid the rent, I had one dollar to last me two weeks. I spent it on a rose, which I later left on a rock at a park as a public offering, and then I ate Cheerios until the next payday. Another time, I’d given blood to get money for groceries, and after I walked home with my heavy bag, I passed out in the middle of the kitchen floor. I revived in time to save the ice cream from melting. So many memories were coming to me, one on top of the other. Maybe it would be good to have Lorraine here; there’d be no sudden spasms of sadness or fear. In addition to the memories we would surely uncover and hold up like treasures from a trunk, there was no doubt in my mind that Lorraine still had a way of taking up all the room in a room.