“Can I use the phone to call my son?” I said that first day. “It’s a local call.”
“Mom, I’m fine,” Robert said, impatient. “We were in the middle of something.”
“I’ll be home soon,” I said, hearing in his voice, in his breathing, impatient little snorts, that he didn’t care, that part of his great slow sinking into normalcy was to go about the business of being a boy with everything that was in him.
“I’ll be honest, sweetheart,” Mrs. Levitt said in her accented English. “I can sure use the help with Irving here. But it’s also a pleasure to have someone to talk to. Not that Irving’s not someone. But you were never a wonderful conversationalist, even before, were you, Irving?” She winked at me, lifted a hand to her woolly hair, stippled white and gray, which looked as though it had been permed and then left to get by as best it could for the duration. “Florida, Florida, he says as soon as he starts thinking about retiring. Everybody’s going to Florida. What am I going to do in Florida, Irving, I say, but next day we woke up and there was a foot of snow. Oh, boy, I said to myself, that’s that. Next thing I know, he’s got the house on the market. Look at this.” She heaved herself out of a mahogany chair, using the beautifully carved and curving arms for leverage, and motioned me over to a broom closet in the hallway between living room and bedroom. Inside there was a vacuum cleaner, a quilted gold garment bag that smelled of mothballs, and a set of golf clubs.
“You golf?” Mrs. Levitt said. I shook my head. Lots of cops golf, a slightly more athletic variation on the theme of sitting together out on the patio talking about how the transit cops are morons and the patrol cars all need new shocks. Bobby lifted weights instead. His forearms felt like a boneless rib roast before defrosting. God, he had a beautiful body. “You got nothing to complain about, Fran,” one of the cop wives had said to me once at a PBA clambake in Hampton Bays, looking from Bobby to her husband. “Baby likes beer,” her husband used to say, patting his belly.
Mrs. Levitt gave the golf clubs a kick with her bedroom scuff. “He says he’s going to take up golf. Seventy-one years old and he thinks he’s, what was his name, Arthur Somebody, big golfer. Weren’t you, Irving? All that handicap nonsense you picked up from Bernie Meerson and his gang at the swim club. Do you think I should put an ad in the paper, try and sell them?”
“The golf clubs?”
Mrs. Levitt nodded, went back to her chair, the tea and cookies. She leaned toward me and lowered her voice. “What would happen is this,” she said, squinting at me. “Somebody’d buy the clubs, Irving would wake up or come out of this”—she waved her hand toward the corner as though to indicate the whole mess, the adjustable back of the bed, the box of diapers, the catheter bags—“and he would say, Selma, where the hell are my clubs? You sold them? What, Selma, you thought I was going to die?” She shrugged, her pillowy torso rising and falling with certainty and resignation. I looked over at Irving, a yellow mummy with rheumy dark eyes, his fingers twitching, his breathing the closest he came to conversation. The bed was angled so he had a panoramic view of the cluttered random landscape of Lake Plata, one small roof after another broken only by the skeleton supports of the water tower and the boxy sprawl of the Wal-Mart and Kmart, but he seemed to see nothing, hear nothing. Perhaps he could still feel the drumbeat of his heart beating in his body; who could tell? It was hard to imagine him demanding his nine iron.
“Never mind,” Mrs. Levitt said. “What do you think about this girl went missing in Orlando? The boyfriend killed her, you take my word for it.” Oh, I believed that.
Listening to Mrs. Levitt talk about Irving was like sitting out back at a barbecue talking to the other cop wives the way I’d done dozens of times during my marriage. Sometimes, on those summer afternoons, I’d think Bobby was right, that I exaggerated things. I’d sit in the backyard of Bobby’s friend Buddy’s split-level out on Long Island, and listen to Buddy’s wife, Marie, and her sister, Terri, who was also married to a cop, and Marie’s neighbor Annmarie, whose husband was a firefighter, and they all made it sound like marriage was the Stations of the Cross, like that was the natural order, trial by husband.
“He can sit out there like Father of the Year, but God forbid he should bathe one of them or buy them a pair of shoes,” said Marie.
“A pair of shoes?” said Terri. “What are you, dreaming? A pair of shoes? What about putting the goddamn mayonnaise away after he makes a sandwich?”
“He makes his own sandwich?” said Annmarie, and we had to laugh. Had to.
Oh, lord, the stories they told, and all of them funny and sharp, like Mrs. Levitt’s. About how Terri was so tired from the kids one night that she fell asleep in the middle of sex. About how Buddy showed up at one of the girls’ birthdays drunk and passed out on the couch, where the party carried on without him, around him, how someone put a butter-cream rosebud on his nose and he never even stirred. About Annmarie’s husband, Kevin, and the toast he gave at his brother’s wedding that was so full of profanity and references to the groom’s previous girlfriends that the bride burst into tears.
“Honest to God, it’s like having five kids, and the girls are easier,” Marie said.
The working girl, they all called me. Hey Fran, they’d say, what’s up in the real world? And I’d tell stories about the hospital. About the girl who came into the ER ten centimeters dilated and named her baby Benedetto because she kept staring at my name tag, yelling and cursing and using her long toes against the laminated footboard of the bed for leverage while she pushed. About the gunshot victim who tried to grab the bullet as a resident held it high on the blade of his retractors and raised a ruckus when we wouldn’t let him have it for his collection. “I got five of those suckers on the headboard of my bed, man,” he moaned. “Five, all lined up nice. Gimme that one.” About the couple who came in hemming and hawing and finally managed to say that somehow the condom got lost. A female resident put on rubber gloves and retrieved it. “You’re supposed to unroll it as you put it on,” she said to the guy.
“Damn,” he said.
We’d sit in the kitchen and I’d tell those stories and they’d howl, those women. Never the men. The men sat on the patio under the awning in the summer and downstairs in the finished basement during the football season. They got the big screen TV, we got the kitchen table and the fridge.
I don’t think I exchanged more than five words—“Fine, thanks,” and “Take it easy”—with Buddy in all the time I knew him. We were barely inside the door, Bobby and me, before he’d go in one direction and I in the other, to the kitchen with the women. It was like we were different species.
None of the women worked. None of their husbands wanted them to work, they said. They all said it as if they were a little curious, like they wondered how come Bobby let me, like they’d discussed it among themselves, like they were waiting for me to let them in on the secret. None of them knew that there were ways in which Bobby made me pay for the luxury of working my butt off at South Bay five, sometimes six days a week.
“I got enough to do around here,” said Marie.
I remember wondering whether that was it, whether if I stayed home and made silk-flower wreaths and decoupage boxes Bobby wouldn’t be so mad at me all the time. Except that it didn’t seem that Bobby was mad at me, exactly, just that he was mad, and I was the one who happened to be there.
Annmarie went home early one evening, before the rum cake and the coffee, and Marie leaned toward us and said, “That poor girl, I tell you. He’s had someone on the side for two years now. She thinks his family is still pissed about that toast at the wedding, but they can’t look her in the face because he knocked the girlfriend up.”
“Get out!” said Terri.
“Swear to God,” said Marie.
“Why doesn’t she leave?” I said.
“Where would she go?” said Terri. “She should screw up her life because her husband is a pig? She just repainted the whole house. She papered the hallway.”
/> I told them about Patty Bancroft, too, when she came to the hospital. They’d already seen her on television, talking about how a woman could get lost in the great expanse of America with a little help from the right people. “We’re better than the Witness Protection Program,” she said on one afternoon talk show.
“All Buddy would have to do would be to raise a hand to me once, and I’d knock him on his ass,” Marie said.
“You don’t know,” said Terri, and I looked at her, looked at her brown eyes with their thick fringe of mascara, like spiders around them. She didn’t look back at me, and I wondered. But wondering was all any of us would ever do. We’d put on silky cocktail dresses and blow-dry our hair and walk into the weddings and christenings and confirmations, our husbands checking the coats, slipping the tickets into the pockets of their suit jackets, and we’d look like happy couples, and some of us maybe were, and lots of us likely weren’t, but none of us would ever talk about it. I’d been stupid when I got married, figured it was just like an extended dating relationship, one dinner and movie after another, sex in a real bed or even on the kitchen floor. I should have known by the way the photographer made us behave for the wedding pictures—“Now look down at the ring … look up at him … hold up the flowers”—that a lot of it would be putting up a good front, day after day, week after week. Until if we were lucky, if there wasn’t cancer or a car wreck, our grandkids would someday toss us a fiftieth anniversary party in a catering hall and toast us, their eyes wet, for the simple fact of our stubborn marital longevity, confusing it with love.
And yet, and yet. At Robert’s First Communion party Bobby and I sat side by side at the table as our son thanked everyone for coming, solemn at age eight in his little navy blue suit and his first tie, red-and-blue striped, and my right hand found Bobby’s left, and I looked at him and saw the father of my son, the beginning of my grown-up life, the person who slept every night on the right side of my double bed, whose shorts I’d folded in a plastic basket for fifteen years. It was like there were two Bobbys, two Frans, two couples, and one was sitting at that table, knee nudging knee, breathless with love for our child and so, by some process of osmosis, for each other. The other Bobby and Fran stayed home, waiting for nightfall, she afraid of saying the wrong thing, he—well, I never knew what he felt.
Sometimes when I went to Cindy’s house I looked at the pictures of her and her husband, Craig, and wondered whether there were two of them, too, the daytime and the nighttime couple, like masks of comedy and tragedy. And Mrs. Levitt and Irving. And strangers I saw in cars, sitting next to each other at stoplights, looking straight out the windshield, never at each other, living parallel lives.
“That princess and prince now?” Mrs. Levitt said. “There’s a marriage that spelled trouble from the very beginning. And now, all of a sudden, here’s the girlfriend and who knows what else.”
“Remember how wrinkled her wedding dress was when she got out of the coach?”
“The princess?” Mrs. Levitt raised her hands to the sky in mute entreaty to some greater power. “I said to my friend Flo in Chicago, I said, Flo, you sit on silk and look what happens.”
If Irving hadn’t had his stroke only three weeks after they’d moved into the Lakeview, if she’d had time to make friends with the other women in the building, Mrs. Levitt would have gossiped about the super and the single woman on the ground floor, the dry cleaner and his nasty wife. Instead she talked about the people in the papers: the princess and her divorce, Streisand and Sinatra—“not a happy woman,” Mrs. Levitt said about one, and “not a happy man” about the other—the president and the first lady. Mrs. Levitt got the tabloids when Mrs. Winkelman down the hall left them with her recycled newspapers; she would listen on Tuesday evenings for the sound of the Winkelman door and then sneak down to the incinerator and ease the Star and the Enquirer out from the twine bundle. “Look, Irving, here’s that one you liked from Dallas,” Mrs. Levitt would call across the room. “She’s not holding up too good.”
“Irving,” she would say as she smoothed the blankets, “you remember how you lost all our vacation money in Vegas on half an hour at the blackjack?”
“You think I didn’t see you that time with Mamie in the wet bar of their place?” she said as his mouth gaped.
“You were always cheap, Irving,” she mused as she went into the drawer and took out fresh pajamas, laundered so often they were soft as silk. “Twelve years it took me to get a decent stove. And even then I had to hear about it for the next twelve.”
Sometimes Mr. Levitt made a sound like a groan or a wheeze, and she would say, “Yes, yes, yes.” And something in the way she said it made me believe she had been saying it for years, that she had said it when her husband said, “Look at how fast that crazy man in the Chevy is driving,” or “It’s gonna pour any minute,” or “This is one tough piece of meat,” that Mrs. Levitt had replied “Yes, yes, yes” just as she did today. I hate to say it, but the two of us ignored Mr. Levitt, paid him less mind than the television set or the coffeemaker. But I had the feeling Mrs. Levitt had been doing that for quite awhile.
“You listening, Fran, or am I talking to myself?” Bobby would say sometimes, late at night. God, how I wanted to say, you’re talking to yourself, Bobby. But I wouldn’t have dared.
“He was a good worker,” Mrs. Levitt said as I irrigated and then reconnected Irving’s catheter, both of us looking dispassionately at her husband’s slack penis. “He made a good living. Sales. He sold automobile parts. I never even learned to drive. Too busy to teach me, right, Irving?” She smiled. “Something like that,” she said. “You want tuna on toast for lunch?”
“You don’t have to go to any trouble for me,” I said.
“It’s no trouble. I made lunch for the last girl, and she was colored. Not that I minded, but I think Irving wasn’t so happy about it.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a loaf of wheat bread. “Were you, Irving?” she called into the other room, and put the bread in the toaster. “But I have to say, she wasn’t rude. We had one before her, she handled Irving like a sack of potatoes. I called the agency, I said she had to go. I think they sent me the colored girl for spite. Not that we minded, right, Irving?”
“Do you need anything?” I said as I was leaving each day, and Mrs. Levitt said no until I’d been there two weeks. I suppose by then she’d decided she could trust me. She put her head to one side, a girlish gesture, put one finger beneath her chin. Then she reached for her purse, a black tote bag with big white polka dots. “I’ll give you the money, you’ll bring People magazine,” she said.
“I’ll get it,” I said. “Don’t worry about the money.”
“And some other time you’ll bring a Big Mac,” she said. “Big Mac is Irving’s favorite fast food. Big Mac and senior coffee. A large coffee and only a quarter if you’re over sixty-five. Which we are, right, Irving?” She straightened his covers, tucked him in as though he was a child. No children, Mrs. Levitt had told me, making a vague motion toward her midsection and moving on to some movie star’s marriage. Just her and Irving, forty-eight years and counting.
The supermarket on the strip up the street from our apartment was as big as a football field, so brightly lit that it bleached out the skin of even the tannest women pushing their kids around the aisles in carts. Jets of water sprayed the peppers and plums so they seemed irresistible, more like art objects than produce. In one corner was a pharmacy, in another a bank, in a third a bakery section that gave off the smell of cinnamon unexpectedly as you came upon it, like one of those perfume inserts in a magazine. It was as though they’d put an entire American small town in an airplane hangar and then arranged and lit it to best advantage. It made me think of how I’d imagined heaven when I was a kid, white light and something for everybody. People were always hollering to their kids to find a second cart, as though they had been seduced into soup and cheese and instant pudding without meaning to be.
Robert and I could only buy a
s much as we could carry, but for the two of us that was usually plenty, and I was careful about how I spent my money. We’d been in the apartment for almost three months and I still hadn’t paid any rent, didn’t even know how much it was. It was another one of Patty Bancroft’s mysteries; “We’ll take care of that end of things” she’d said when I asked how long the rent would be taken care of. So I opened a credit union account with the home-care company, putting away some money every week just in case. I wore my uniform and my hand-me-downs; mainly I spent money on treats for Robert, trips to the arcades with Bennie, weekend fast-food lunches, sometimes a shirt or a comic book. I didn’t want him to feel deprived, to feel poor as well as rootless. Twice he’d had nightmares and I’d sat with him until he fell back suddenly into sleep; he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say much about the dreams, just that there were bad guys, that he was running, that there was darkness, falling, fear. Twice he’d asked to stay home from school with a stomach ache. Once beneath his bed I found a piece of looseleaf paper: “Dear Dad” in his scratchy, back-slanting penmanship, “I bet you are very surprised to—” Then, nothing. Perhaps I’d told him dinner was ready, knocked at his door. Perhaps he’d heard Bennie calling from downstairs. I threw the paper away.
“You hungry?” I said as I found a cart whose wheels worked. Robert shrugged. He shrugged a lot, too, these day. Are you tired? Shrug. Do you want to watch a movie? Shrug. How could he care about anything at all, when in an instant it might disappear, when the outlines of our life were as faint and transparent as the picture on the old television in the living room. It was like that Etch-a-Sketch he’d gotten from Santa, year before last. You drew the picture and then turned the toy over, and the image was gone, nothing but gray, waiting for the next one, just as fleeting.