Ezra nodded. “She could really use a friend right now.”
“Exactly. And who can’t?” She gazed at Ezra with sympathy. “I’ll talk to her, I promise. I’ll be very tactful.”
He scoffed. “You can try. But a heads-up—you know how Maggie is. She’s been trying to figure out why this illness has been given to her.”
Larissa shrugged. “Oh, not that again. Why does there have to be a reason? Why can’t it just be given?”
“Given by whom?”
“Isn’t that the eternal question?” She laughed lightly, becoming more animated. “But why can’t Pozzo in Godot be right? One day he woke up and he was blind as Fortune. Why can’t we get sick because of dumb blind fortune?”
“You know that Maggie doesn’t believe things just happen.”
“Not even headaches?”
“This isn’t a headache. It’s total body misery. And it affects her life, her entire family. She feels responsible.”
Larissa chewed her lip. “But look, she’s asking too much of her body. She didn’t get kidney disease on purpose.”
“‘Course not. But she’s trying to figure out”—Ezra tightened his mouth as he continued—”if this is Thomas Aquinas’s warning or an Epicurean struggle for her to work harder to achieve the absence of pain.”
“Epicurus seems to be losing.”
“No kidding.”
“What did Aquinas write?”
“He wrote,” said Ezra, “that pain is given to us by God so that we can protect our material body and stop doing whatever it is we are doing that’s causing us pain, and thus, by protecting the material body, we protect our immortal, immaterial soul.”
Larissa was thoughtful. “Immaterial, like not important?”
Ezra chuckled. “You would ask that. No. Immaterial like standing outside matter.”
“But didn’t your Epicurus say that nothing exists outside matter?”
“Yes, but Maggie is suffering. She needs to come to terms with this transformation of her body and consequently her entire life.”
“But why can’t it be nice and plain? Why can’t blind Pozzo be right?”
“Because she’s not getting better, Lar,” said Ezra. “And this causes spiritual suffering for her. Maggie thinks that her pain means she’s breaking some boundary, transgressing laws put into her mortal body by a life-creating force. Perhaps she’s been careless or overindulgent. She’s not a naturalist, Larissa. She doesn’t obey random laws of nature. She is an ethicist. She obeys the laws because she sees in them a divine source.”
“Careless?” Larissa shook her head. “That’s not Maggie.”
“She likes her food, she likes salt, doesn’t drink enough water, hates cranberry juice.”
“Oh, Ezra. You don’t get punished with kidney disease!”
“She thinks she did.”
“She just got a lousy set of genes from her parents. What does that have to do with her?”
“Because it’s her life that’s being altered,” Ezra replied. “And mine.”
“Well, I don’t know how blaming herself is going to help,” said Larissa firmly. “I’m sure Epicurus agrees with me.”
Ezra smiled. “Sure, to swirling atoms all this blather about ethics is meaningless.”
“There you go. Isn’t that more comforting?”
“Maggie doesn’t think so. But she is trying to work toward the Epicurean model.”
“A fine goal to shoot for,” Larissa agreed brightly. “What does Epicurus say about the soul?”
“Oh, brilliantly, he says we ain’t got one.”
No soul! Larissa widened her clear eyes. “No soul, really?” She mulled. “That means no God?”
“Right. In his day it was gods, but same difference, yeah.”
No, God, no soul!
“Wouldn’t that be easier for Maggie,” Larissa asked, “to live in a soulless universe?”
“Would it?” Ezra shrugged. “Without a soul, the here and now would be all you’d have, all you would ever have.”
“Exactly!” Larissa became lively, encouraged.
“But in the here and now, Maggie’s body is sick,” said Ezra. “If Epicurus is right, and the only thing she has is her body, her body is failing her. That doesn’t provide as much comfort as you might think.”
“I guess.” Deflated, Larissa palmed her coffee cup. “But you know what? If there’s no soul, there is no God, and if there’s no God, there’s no judgment. And if there’s no judgment, with a little bit of hard work, there could be no conscience.” No conscience! “No moral boundaries, no ethical laws, see? No consequences means no punishment. Tell Maggie that. Then you don’t have to suffer. You just have to feel better.”
“How?”
“I’ll talk to her, Ez. I’ll set her straight. I’ll tell her that if God doesn’t interfere with nature, he doesn’t interfere with man’s mortal body. If there’s no God, it means you can reason yourself out of anything.” Or into anything.
“Reason yourself out? But by what method, Larissa? The swirling atoms?”
“Right! Because atoms can’t reason.”
Ezra smiled. “Exactly. Matter must somehow learn to stop contemplating itself. That’s a neat trick. Maggie hasn’t mastered it yet. Have you?”
“Well, it’s not easy,” Larissa agreed.
“Yes, because first you have to explain by what method you manage to examine yourself in the first place. Molecules can’t, can they? Atoms can’t reason. They’re neither naturalists nor ethicists.”
“Right, they’re nothing. Just nothing,” she said. “Why isn’t that comforting? I feel better already. Tell Maggie to drink some cranberry. It’s miracle juice for the kidneys.”
“She hates cranberry juice. Perhaps I forgot to mention it.”
Larissa suddenly jumped up. She grabbed her lunch plate and cup like an efficient waitress.
“Where are you going? It’s only noon.”
“Gotta get stuff and do stuff. Who’s going to go food shopping while we sit here and contemplate our molecules? I don’t have cleaning people anymore.”
“You don’t? What happened to Ernestina?”
Larissa waved her hand across her throat. “I had to let her go.”
“What? Why? When?”
I hear them walking, walking. I want them to stop, I have to get the phone in case it rings, but I can’t open my door, and they’re always knocking, every two seconds, asking me if I want coffee, clean sheets, if they can do my bed now, clean the bedroom, if I need anything at the store, where the paper towels are. I’m going to go crazy. They’re outside in the hall bathroom, they’re in the hallway, vacuuming, every time I turn around, they’re right there. One, another, a third. I tried to switch them for a different day, not Mondays, but they have no openings. They come to my house at 8:30, the children barely having left for school, and they’re already knocking.
“I’m getting ready, no, no, thank you. I don’t need anything.”
I hear them like mice, like squirrels outside my door.
“Look, how nice you look! Where you going, Miss Larissa?”
“To the school, Ernestina. I’m directing a play.”
“Look so nice. So pretty. You dress up for the store like I dress up for my boyfriend.”
Larissa shrugged. “I was tired of them being in my house, Ezra. Besides, I think one of the girls might have been stealing.” This wasn’t true. It was just to end the conversation.
“Really? So what are you doing now?”
“Cleaning my own house.” When Ezra looked at her incredulously, Larissa said, “What, you don’t think I can do it? Think I’m afraid to get my hands dirty?” She rushed out of the cafeteria.
“Larissa, wait!” Ezra caught up with her in the hall. “One more thing.”
“Quick, Ezra. I gotta run.”
“I don’t want to do Saint Joan unless we agree on the lead. She has to be right.”
“Okay. How about Megan?”
/>
“Megan! You’re joking. You’re not paying attention to me.”
“I am.” She was nearly running.
“She is pampered and overweight. How is she going to be the dynamo that frees France and restores the King to his throne? She is round!”
“What, round people can’t be martyrs?”
“Larissa, you’re not taking this seriously. Megan is wrong for the part.”
Larissa shook her head, speeding up. “How about Tiffany?”
“No Tiffany!” Ezra called to her departing back. “No running in the halls!”
She was running out.
“Megan will be fine, Ez,” she called back to him, waving. “You’ll see. We’ll play her against type, she’ll be fantastic. Soft and chubby on the outside, lethal on the inside.”
She was early, and he was late. She sat in her car, and waited, wondering if she should use her key and go in.
What’s the key for? Jared had asked a few weeks ago and Larissa replied she didn’t know. Huh, he said. Odd. A nervous Larissa was going to give it back to Kai, sensing trouble brewing, but he said, no, don’t give it back. It’s your key. I can’t give you jewelry, cars, pretty things. I can’t give you anything. But I give you the key, like a key to me. As long as you have it, you know that my door is always open. If she could’ve put the key around her neck on a gold chain, she would’ve. The best she could do is drive around clutching it between her fingers. She bought a gold-plated key ring for it, with red Swarovski crystals, and when Jared saw, he said, “Is that Swarovski?”
“No, darling. Costume jewelry at the trinket kiosk at the mall.”
“Ah. Looks pretty authentic.”
“Doesn’t it, though.”
But what if I used the key to come in when you’re not home? she had asked Kai.
“And do what? Snoop?” He grinned naughtily. “That’s so hot. What are you looking for? Naughty things?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“What do you want to find? Old love letters?”
More like new love letters, she replied quietly.
His mouth was in her neck, his hands in her hair. “Well, tell me,” he murmured, husk, husk. “Have you been writing me much?”
So now Larissa waited. It had been snowing and freezing for two months. Yesterday they had their ninth snowstorm. Today was fifteen below. After another minute, she heard his Ducati revving up on Samson. He pulled up next to her in the driveway and hopped off, helmet still on, a ski cap under it.
“Man, it’s freezing out. Come on,” he said, smiling. He kissed her through the open window. “You’re like my good luck charm. I sold three Jags today, last one just five minutes ago. That’s why I’m late. Couldn’t leave. I have another appointment with the couple right after lunch.” He worked full days at the dealer in the frigid winter, taking a break from masonry. From his small trunk he produced a large paper bag and a bouquet of supermarket-bought flowers. “For you,” he said. “Also the sushi.”
“I have things for you,” she said.
She had a box for him, beautifully wrapped at Neiman’s.
She had a cake for him, his favorite, a cheesecake. She wanted to make it, bake it with her own hands, but since that was out of the question, she went to the best bakery in Chatham, bought the cheesecake and left it in the back seat of her Jag. She brought candles, and matches to light them.
They didn’t eat first. They never ate first. Afterward they ate, still in bed, naked, the sheets pulled up over her, pulled down on him.
“Now,” she said, taking the matches from her purse. “You’re finally old enough to drink.”
“Isn’t that awesome,” he said, popping open the Cristal. Champagne and strawberry cheesecake for his birthday lunch. She bought him an Armani jacket, classy greige, size 42 long. She thought with jeans and a white shirt he would look splendid.
“Blow out the candles with me,” he said when she asked him to make a wish. The cake was on the bed, between their legs. And after the blowout, with champagne on his lips, he asked her what she had wished for.
“It’s not my birthday.” She was lying in his arms, rubbing her hair against his chest. Seventeen minutes left. “What did you wish for? To be able to shave?”
He pinched her. “I do shave, smarty-pants. If you ever saw me in the evening, you’d see my five o’clock stubble.”
“No, wait, I know. You wished to be able to rent a car.”
He pinched her again.
“My mistake. You have to wait four more years for that.”
“Extra funny today, are we, Mrs. Stark.” He tickled her, not allowing her body to tighten. “You want to know what I wished for? There’s a town, in New Mexico, off Route 66. To call it a town is almost unfair, it’s a street with no name, a gas station, a general store…I want you on my bike behind me, and I want us to see it. I want to stay in a tiny bed and breakfast, all dusty and strange, and wake up where the sun is out three hundred days a year.”
“That’s a fun wish.”
“You on my bike, Larissa,” he whispered, climbing on top of her, “holding on for dear life to my leather jacket.”
“Okay.” Like a breath out.
Twelve minutes left.
“Or,” he said, his body gently rubbing up and down against her, rubbing his naked chest against her breasts, “I want to show you Maui. The red flame trees that grow in the spring on the black volcanoes. We’ll get up at dawn and take our bikes up the mountain, into the Maoloa.”
“Will you take me for a demon ride too, Kai?” She moaned, the nerves in her body raw with him, from him, spine tingling, skin burning.
“If that’s what you want. Would you like that?”
“So much.” She closed her eyes, not to see the merciless clock. The blue birthday balloon burst over her head.
I wish we could go to the movies, she said to him. I wish we could go to dinner at the swank Italian place down the street, and then bar hopping. I wish we could stay at the Madison hotel, white like a wedding, like a dream. I wish…
Don’t be sad, Kai whispered to her. I told you, I’ll take you any way you want to give yourself to me. And if this is how you give me you, then that’s how I will take you. Is this ideal? Many things are not ideal. What is ideal, though, he said, is you. To have you, I will have this. If you said to me, it’s either this way or it’s nothing, I would choose this over nothing. It’s not sex with you I want. Don’t you understand? All I want is you.
All I want is you.
Eight minutes.
Six.
Three.
She got dressed as she was. She washed at home.
Kai put on his faded jeans, black boots, a white crisp shirt, the Armani jacket. He looked splendid.
Wetting his hands in the sink, he slicked back his growing-out kinky hair and smiled at her, ruefully.
“That is what I wished for, Larissa,” he whispered to her back, as she was running out. “I wished for you.”
Emily had a cello lesson at four and voice at 4:30. Michelangelo trooped along for his karate at 5:00 in Chatham. Asher was playing with his buddies in a basement band until six. On the way home, the kids discussed a teacher who pushed a kid, and Emily had forgotten her lunch and was starving hungry, and Michelangelo forgot his karate robe and they had to go back. The kid on the morning bus was, apparently, “simply vile” and Emily didn’t know how he was still living.
That night they had take-out Indian for dinner; Jared was happy to eat Tandoori and talk to her about Jan at work, who was just promoted to deputy company secretary, and Jared didn’t know what that was about, declaring Jan not yet reliably off the sauce, but whatever. They talked about their plans for the weekend, which apparently included going to South Mountain Reservation with Doug and Barbara on Saturday (“For some reason, Doug’s insisting we drive in his car. I think something may be up”), and on Sunday driving to Greenwich to have brunch with Jared’s boss, Larry Fredoso and his new wife.
The kids were in bed by ten, and Jared had some work, thank God. Larissa sat in the den with her cup of tea, her hands shaking, and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the fire Jared built, or her books, or the house. She sat on her couch, legs drawn up, head thrown back on the pillow, squeezing shut her eyes so tears wouldn’t spill down her face like rain.
“Larissa?”
Opening her eyes, she found Jared standing, staring at her with concern. “You ‘kay? What’s the matter, tush?”
“Oh, nothing. Just tired.” She tried to smile.
“What?” he perched next to her. “Did the kids do something?”
“Of course not.”
“Did I do something?” he chuckled, with the giggle of a man who says the most ridiculous thing he can think of, because he knows he is beyond reproach.
Reaching to touch his face, Larissa shook her head. “Of course not, darling.”
“I’ll be just another couple of minutes; almost done paying the bills. Want to watch Seinfeld at eleven?”
“Very much.”
And they did. She didn’t laugh once. Upstairs, Larissa spent so long in the bathroom that Jared was asleep by the time she stepped into the bedroom. She lay down, careful that no part of her would touch any part of him, and stared at the ceiling to find some answers there.
She had no one to turn to. All her friends had drifted away one by one, departed from her, detached. With them she had the regular things. My kid is flunking math. Do you want to see a movie? Can I borrow an iron; mine broke. I’ll tell you if your dress looks good, if you’ve got a tag sticking out, if you’ve got lipstick stuck to your teeth. This is what friends do. But when you come to me because you actually need my help, I stop hearing you. I become deaf. You’re talking too low and asking too much of our friendship. I’ve got my own problems. You want to complain no one listens to you? Boo hoo. No one listens to us either. Join the fucking club.
That’s what it was. No one listened to anyone. At the heart of our life, we all walked around with our head hung low, or our eyes raised high, begging for someone to hear our prayer, to hear us speak to the deepest sorrow in us, to our deepest longing.
Dear Larissa, my friend,
I want to tell you about my life.