But I saw Eli—“my husband,” as I thought of him—once more when Princeton was already ancient history. I’d driven down to LA to help move Hector out of the sober-living place he’d been in for eighteen months. I’d had a key made for our house. I thought it would do him good to live in the room where he’d crashed half his childhood. He’d been happy there. Boop Two was living in her old room with a bunch of animals. She was planning to go up to UC Davis for vet school in a year and then we’d need somebody to look after the place. Our mother had bought the house from Einar Nelson. He’d given her a good price.
Hector had become very clean. He woke up early his first day there, a Sunday morning, and scrubbed the whole kitchen with lemon and white vinegar. He told me those were the kinds of things they drilled you on in rehab.
I gave him these pages and told him he could do what he wanted with them. I’d talked to Kat and Philip and arranged with Hershel for Hector to take my old job. Two Sleuths was still selling; Hershel said he could promote Hector to manager if he liked the work. He could have gotten hours at the doughnut place, too, but he actually found work with a real bakery that he had to get up at four in the morning to go to and knead.
And with his fancy degree, he started school all over again at Santa Monica City College, the best community college in the country. And he told me he’d been lucky and found the right teacher the first time out. A cartooning class. At night. He walked in late to a room where a woman who looked like a guy from behind was writing on the blackboard:
The only tools required for this course are:
Paper
Pencil
Life
Those and these pages from me. He said he’s been reading them. He’s made notes and amendments. He changed all our names. He’s made private jokes. So it’s a collaboration again.
He told me, Remember how Sare used to say with a kind of rueful grin that was so Sare, Yes, beginnings are hopeful? Well, this beginning feels hopeful.
When I was leaving to drive back up north, I stopped in Westwood at a Whole Foods parking lot where a bunch of cages had been set up to give away rescued pets. Boop Two had told me she thought she’d seen Eli there.
And sure enough, there he was. My husband. His wife wasn’t with him or his kid either, though by then Timmy would have been at the end of high school or in college. Eli sat on a foldout chair on the sidewalk. He looked older, small and fidgety. His khakis were frayed, washed too many times and yanked up with a belt. I felt guilty all of a sudden for the lie I’d told him. I wanted to keep walking. He probably wouldn’t recognize me, I thought. I could get away. Still. I stuck my arm out and said, “Miles Adler. Eli?”
He stood up to hug me and held on, pressing me hard. I wondered if he knew it was me who’d delivered animals to his yard. Then I thought: I never found out who ratted on my soup selling and I didn’t care at all anymore. I must have been the distant past for him. Maybe his son had read Two Sleuths along with a hundred other comics without a flicker of recognition. Hector and I had written Two Sleuths, we’d put mean scared animals on his lawn and watched the shadows of his family move inside the windows, but we couldn’t make him give the Mims the dream that he’d conjured and she treasured. You and your family romance. Dreams had expiration dates, too.
I couldn’t help but stare. His hair was still black. My father had told me that anyone his age who didn’t have gray in his hair was dying it.
“How are you?” he asked. We stayed standing there in the sun.
“I’m sorry I lied to you that time I said she’d killed herself. She never would have done that.”
“I understand,” he said before I was even finished. He was rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. He said he loved this weather and shuddered—you could see him literally feel the sun on his arms. The Mims wasn’t like that at all. I doubt that she’d ever even noticed warmth or light on her skin. Maybe together they’d had that kind of slow pleasure, on the few days she had away from us. I knew a little by now about the way time bends for two people in a room.
“Did she, did she,” he stuttered. “Did she find—” Then he stopped again.
“Do you mean happiness?” I asked.
He nodded, gulped, as if he couldn’t get the words out.
“Yeah. She found a guy who cherished her. She died in his arms.”
He nodded, absorbing that.
“I suppose she hated me.”
“I think she was grateful. Eventually.”
He opened his battered, creased wallet. He had two pictures and a license in it, and a few dollar bills. The kid looked like a normal-enough kid with acne. From behind that, he pulled out a picture of my mom. “Hers will be the last face I see.”
We exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses, but that was the last time I saw Eli. I never heard from him, up until now.
That felt like the right ending, though I’d lied to Eli again. Sort of.
Ben Orion remained my mother’s constant friend, through five years of chemo and remission. They never talked about marriage, so far as I know. There was a fizzy summer quality to the Mims during that time. It’s hard to explain, but some of what she got from Eli, that wide smile, a way of turning up a sleeve, wearing skirts and canting her leg, she kept. Every few months she came home carrying shopping bags, one dress for herself and one for each of my sisters. When she first had chemo, she didn’t wait for her hair to fall out; she shaved it. She told us on the phone from the salon and Boop One cried. But when the Mims walked in the door, Boop One said, right away, Oh, I was wrong. It looks amazing. Our mom, she claimed, had a great-shaped head. After the chemo, when her hair grew back, she kept it very short, half an inch at most.
She laughed with Ben Orion and picked at his shirts. She and Marge said more than once that they were giving each other the best years of their working lives. I never heard anything more about a family romance.
What I learned from those months of grave illness was the smile. She had a smile. Before, of course, the Mims had smiled, but when I try to remember her face in joy, it wasn’t the same; the expressions I could conjure were quick, fleeting movements, a tight-lipped See.
This was different. It was a gift. Her whole face was in it, like a nodding sunflower. She’d look at you and smile and keep holding it there, for you to take in all of her. She gave you her face smiling for what seemed stopped time; it must have been two or three slow minutes. You wouldn’t forget. And that had an ending, too, a soft ending that was an apology for leaving. A regret for the inevitable.
The last day wasn’t like anything I’d expected. We laughed. We ate on her bed, watched all of Star Wars, which she’d never seen before. Ella brought us food. My mother died at home, of metastasized breast cancer, with her three children, two friends, her ex-husband, and a dog.
Acknowledgments
Without Michelle Huneven’s wisdom and humor, my writing life would be too solitary and much less fun. I’m grateful to Lorin Stein for an early reading and central, valuable advice. Marina Van Zuylen, Sally Singer, and Jeanne McCulloch helped me immeasurably, tinkering with sense, scenes, and sentences. Yiyun Li read the book deeply and productively, following the voice and gently identifying its wrong turns. Alexander Quinlin, Eliot, Sam, Ezra, and Lucas have left their vocal fingerprints everywhere on these pages. Andrea Bertozzi was incredibly patient explaining the romance of math and the steps of an academic career. I used Ian Stewart’s Letters to a Young Mathematician shamelessly. His ideas are strewn throughout. To learn to cartoon, I studied Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti, and I’ve lifted his blackboard message and given it to a female California professor. I talked to Mike Miller, a Los Angeles private detective, mystery shopper, and loss preventer, and his line “Everyone loves the firemen” started the character of Ben Orion. I’m indebted, as always, to my family—Grace, Gabriel, Richard Appel, and Elma Dayrit—for our peaceful household.
I’m grateful for the honest advice and spot-on s
uggestions—for my books and my life—from my agent, Amanda Urban. And I’m steadied daily by the abiding friendship and collaboration with my quietly brilliant editor, Ann Close.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MONA SIMPSON is the author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, and My Hollywood. Off Keck Road was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California, and teaches at UCLA and at Bard College.
Mona Simpson, Casebook: A novel
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