Sheila caught his eye and, just as quickly, looked away. “This is not how I wanted our ‘date’ to go,” she said. Bronfman heard the quotation marks around date but wasn’t sure what they were supposed to mean.
“Our date,” he said, without the quotes, validating as best he could his deepest secret hope: this was a date. He was dating her. He had a date.
“Sometimes I just … plummet. For absolutely no reason at all. The thing is, I’m actually a really happy person! But there’s always something else, hovering around. Cloud cover. People are complicated. Relationships. It seems so hard sometimes. God, I know I shouldn’t be sharing this with you, on our first … whatever it is.”
“Date,” he said.
“Opportunity to spend additional time together.” She almost laughed. “But I don’t want you to think that it’s you, because it’s not. At all.”
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks. Really. No worries.”
She turned to him. “Do you ever feel that way?”
“Which way?”
She paused. It was hard to put a feeling into words, he knew that well enough. “Like there’s no way to escape the world.”
“Sure, I do,” he said. “All the time.”
“All the time?”
“Not all the time,” he said. “But some of the time. Probably a third of the time.”
Or more, he thought. Probably more. Outrunning shadows, evading a pervasive sense of loss, suppressing memories and mysteries—that’s what she was getting at. His life growing up with uncles who weren’t his uncles. Mostly alone. And now his mother, the only person in the world who really knew who he was, was leaving it, and him, behind. This was too sad to even think about for very long. Because now here he was, a thirty-four-year-old man. And who was he? Where was that? Where was he supposed to be? He didn’t know. He knew only that where he was, where he found himself—single, alone, a functionary at work—wasn’t where he wanted to be. But then not everybody can save the seals, prevent fracking, pick up refuse littering the side of the road.
“Sometimes my mother calls me at three o’clock in the morning,” he said. “Usually asking me to do things for her. Clean her sheets, turn off the oven, cut the grass. Right then. She wants me to do it right then.”
“That’s funny and really weird,” Sheila said.
“She has dementia, actually.”
“Oh. That’s not so funny. Before she died, my grandmother had dementia, too, so I know what that’s like. What do you do?”
“I used to try to explain to her that she was being unreasonable, that it was the middle of the night and she should go to bed, but she would insist, so now I tell her I’ll be right over, but she forgets, so when I don’t come it doesn’t matter. Once,” he said, in a near-whisper, as if he were telling her a secret that if overheard would put his life and the lives of others in danger, “once I didn’t even pick up the phone. I pretended that I wasn’t home. I watched it ring and ring and ring. The answering machine picked up, and she said, “Edsel? Edsel? Edsel?” Over and over. And then she hung up and called back and said, “Edsel? Edsel? Edsel?,” and then I watched it ring again. She could have been lying there bleeding to death on her bedroom floor. I just thought, I can’t do this now. She called back seven times. I didn’t sleep the entire night.”
Bronfman stopped, unsure of what had just happened. Had he been hypnotized? Given a truth serum? Had he ever said anything remotely like this to another person in his life? He looked at Sheila. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why—”
“No,” she said. “I want to hear. Couldn’t you have unplugged the phone, or—”
“I should have,” Bronfman said. “I wish I’d thought of that at the time. She stays in bed most of the time now and yells at her aide, who is the nicest person. My mother goes to the Kmart in the sky.”
“The what?”
“The Kmart in the sky. She’s not doing well.”
Sheila stared at her feet. She was even sadder now. “I know we barely know each other, Edsel,” she said. “And we may never see each other again. I hope we will. But if you know me when I’m old and if I’m like that? Crazy and even a little mean? Out of my head, at the Kmart in the sky? Push me off a cliff. Please.”
“Will do,” he said, and laughed.
“Thanks, Bronfman,” she said, but she didn’t laugh at all.
Instead, she placed her hand on top of his, like a piece of bread on a sandwich. Bronfman had small hands, but Sheila’s were a little smaller. He could see the tips of his fingers just above hers.
Then she stood. “Walk with me?”
They walked. They walked in silence beneath and between a hundred giant skinny pine trees. Bronfman imagined (why did he imagine these things, especially when things were going so well?) that he and Sheila were fleas on a dog’s back, wandering among hairs. He almost told her that this was what he was thinking about, but he didn’t. Too soon.
“I’ll give you a million dollars,” she said, “if you can name just one bird in this place.”
“A million?”
“One. Million. Dollars.”
She winked at him and laughed, laughed as she had the other day, the day she dumped tea into his lap and made the joke, later retracted, about the benefits of being handicapped. But she was serious now. She wanted him to name a bird. This wasn’t really a test—or it didn’t feel like one. She wasn’t the kind of person who set a person up to fail. But, at the same time, he knew that he had to name a bird. Naming a bird would change something. In a good way. But if he couldn’t name a bird he would become the person who couldn’t name a bird. For as long as they knew each other, this would become part of the way she’d think of Bronfman, and Bronfman wanted more than that.
So he looked up. They were everywhere all of a sudden, an alphabet of birds; it seemed as if any bird you could ever think of was there, but his mind was a blank—a total blank. The pressure was killing him. Even when he saw a bird that was blue, the name of that bird escaped him. Deeply frustrated, he looked down at his feet and discovered his salvation.
“There,” he said. He pointed at a brown-and-black-and-white bird hopping around in a pile of pine straw. She looked at the bird. She looked at Bronfman. “That’s a rufous-sided towhee,” he said.
She looked at the bird, and sort of scoffed. “You’re making that up,” she said. “Nothing has that name.”
“No,” he said. “That’s a rufous-sided towhee. It’s interesting … it’s one of those birds that make their nest on the ground.”
“What? Why would a bird make its nest on the ground? That doesn’t make sense. Isn’t that the best thing about being a bird, not to have to do that? For God’s sake, it has wings.”
“It always struck me as odd, too,” Bronfman said. “But it’s true.”
“How do you know that? Are you getting lines fed to you through one of those Bluetooth earpieces I’ve been seeing on television?” He shook his head. She looked at him skeptically, held her gaze, seemed convinced, nodded. “Well,” she said, sighing, “I guess I owe you a million. It might take me a while.”
“I’ll wait.”
They kept walking, lapsing into silence again, until, for some reason he couldn’t fathom, she looked up at him and smiled and then pointed ahead. “Look,” she said, and as she said it the forest ended and they were standing on a sandstone outcropping, peering down at the city below—far below. The entire city. Wow. This was what he actually thought: Wow! The little metropolis they lived in looked even smaller from here, like a city made of scraps of steel and concrete Legos. The sky—blue and white and silver in the distance—surrounded it and everything, even them, completely. He felt as if they were inside a bubble. He had no idea such a place existed, such a view; a brand-new way of seeing the world. He almost told her that, but it was impossible to talk now, impossible to try to put words to something like this. Words—even the perfect words—would spoil it, make it
less than what it was. But this much he knew: it was totally romantic. He had never been involved in anything remotely as romantic in his life. She didn’t take his hand. She didn’t even look at him, and he didn’t look at her and they did not fall into a kiss, nothing as radical as that. It was better to do what they were doing, sharing this view, holding in their eyes this same picture of the world. They didn’t know each other at all; they were almost strangers. But it was so easy for him to imagine them here fifty years hence, a real couple, outrageously old and a little crazy, coming to that fork in the road of their lives where both forks led to oblivion, just different kinds of oblivion. He would be holding on to the back of her wheelchair, having rolled her—slowly, and not without effort—down the same trail they took today, and, having finally arrived (and pausing, taking it in, this miraculous view), he would lean over, brush a wisp of hair from her face, and kiss her cheek, her lips, and she would kiss his. Then, with whatever strength was left in him, he would push her off the overhang. He’d push her off the way she’d asked him to, and he would follow her, jumping as far from the overhang as his old legs could carry him. Watching her fall this way and then him falling after, imagining the two of them together in the air like this, he had never been happier in his life.
DAY
FORTY-EIGHT
ONE
Five days later, they had a second date. They went out to dinner at Red Lotus, probably the best of the pretty-good Chinese restaurants in Birmingham, where you could still get an entrée and an egg roll and a cup of sweet-and-sour soup for $9.95. Bronfman passed on the chopsticks. She appeared to be a chopstick professional, however, deftly removing peppers and bite-size chunks of chicken with ease. Bronfman watched, astonished.
“How do you do that so well?”
“Oh, I was raised in China,” she said. “Spent the first fifteen years of my life there. I could snatch a fly out of the air with these things.” She clicked the sticks in the air.
“China? Really?”
She hedged, shaking her head as if she had not quite said what she meant to. “Not really. I’m … exaggerating.”
“About what?”
“Both things,” she said. “I’ve never been to China. I was raised in Indiana. My parents were investors—very Caucasian, in a way that has never been interesting to anybody anywhere. And I don’t think I could snatch a fly out of the air with a … fly-snatcher.”
“That might be more than an exaggeration,” he said, delicately hazarding an opinion.
She nodded. “It’s like what an exaggeration becomes when it grows up,” she said. “A tale. A flight of fancy. A half-truth.”
“Not in a bad way at all, though,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”
He corralled some rice with his fork.
“Of course not. It can be a problem, though. For me, anyway. Becoming so fond of a story that … the truth seems irrelevant. Or irksome.” Pause. “Love that word.”
He nodded, though he wasn’t sure that’s what he meant or what she meant. No feather-ruffling: Edsel Bronfman’s motto from the day he was born.
“What about you?”
“Me?”
“Your life story.”
“I was born here,” he said, “and I lived here until I went to college, then I came back.”
“That sounds very true.”
He sensed disappointment. He strained, flexed unused muscles in his brain, gave it a shot. “College in Sweden, of course. Became fluent in Swedish. Got a Swedish dog. Some Swedish fish. And so on.”
She nodded, thoughtfully considering his emendation. “Nice,” she said, “for a first try.”
In this way, they revealed themselves to each other, little by little.
When she excused herself to visit the ladies’ room, Bronfman looked around the dining area. There were families here, a few college kids gathered about a circular table, laughing. But everybody else came in twos: men and women, women and women, men and men. All of them to one degree or another together, coupled up, romance in their eyes and in their actions, a mutual gentleness, a bighearted admiration. Fleetingly he thought he saw Serena Stanton, in her streets clothes, with an older, balding man. But on closer examination it was just another sturdy blonde enjoying her kung pao chicken. For a moment, he thought what he’d always thought when he saw these loving unions: How can I get that? How would I even begin? But then he realized that if anyone here had taken a look at him and Sheila they would be thinking what he thought when he looked at them. Look at them, a man and a woman, together. He was part of their club.
He had begun. They had begun.
They went for a walk afterward, around the block—a stroll, you might call it, slowly, aimlessly, pausing before shop windows, pointing at funny shoes and mannequins that reminded them of someone they knew, and even though it was only the second walk they’d taken together, it felt as if it was already becoming a thing for them, a thing they did, their thing. Walking. Sheila and him.
Bronfman, it goes without saying, had never had a thing before.
Sometimes she listed against him, as if in a breeze, and he felt the skin of her arm against his.
DAYS
FIFTY,
FIFTY-FOUR,
FIFTY-FIVE,
FIFTY-SEVEN
ONE
It shocked Bronfman, how easy all this was. There was nothing to it. All he had to do was answer the phone, be in a certain place at a certain time, slip into the passenger seat, and let Sheila drive, both literally and figuratively. She got carsick when he drove, he had a heavy braking foot, and her car was nicer than his by a decade—and it was all fine with him. Had he known it would be this easy to be in a relationship with a woman, he might have tried harder to make one happen before, but if he had tried harder it wouldn’t have been as easy as it had been with Sheila.
Five dates.
Dates had themes, like the sections of a big Sunday newspaper: News, Politics, Arts, Sports. Apart from Chinese food, they had Italian and Greek and pizza and cheeseburgers. Did it matter that she liked British comedies and that he didn’t even know there were such things as that? That she took pictures of everything, or everywhere they went and what they did when they got there. Politically, they appeared to agree on almost everything—they were both Golden Rulers, though Bronfman was a moderate on social reforms. True, there were times when she withdrew. Unaccountably (to him), she would suddenly fall silent, the darkness would descend, her furrowed brow reflecting some inner turmoil that she could not or would not share. But the freedom she felt with him to be able to do that heartened him. He was her secret sharer, her sharer of secrets, even when the secrets remained unspoken.
And, just like that, they were closer to each other than Bronfman had ever been to anyone in his entire life. It felt so sudden, and yet it had taken thirty-four years. It was like evolution: one day you were a fish the way you’d been a fish forever, and then you woke up one morning and you had legs, and you were walking around as if you’d had them since the beginning of time.
DAY
FIFTY-EIGHT
ONE
And then this. This. This.
Sunday evening after a long day together. They walked. They ducked into the art museum when it rained and were pleased to see a Rosenthal retrospective on view. They skipped dinner and went straight to dessert, she having heard of a new place that had opened up downtown serving nothing but ice cream and cheesecake, all different kinds of cheesecake, which she said was exactly what she’d imagined heaven to be—full of fat happy people, and this made them feel naughty, eating cheesecake and ice cream, and they laughed so much at themselves and their bravado. They drove back to Cedar Court. He accompanied her to the door of her apartment, where they stood, Bronfman knowing what he should be doing but not doing it, unable to break through the waxy casing of who he was, of who he had always been and feared that he might forever be. “Well, good night, Sheila,” he said, and, somewhat reluctantly, she turned to go.
> “Wait,” he said.
She stopped, turned back, her face a question. He took a half step toward her.
“Not good night,” he said.
She smiled. “No?”
“No,” he said. “No, ‘Good night, Sheila.’ This … this is where I kiss you. Here, now.”
“Is it, now?”
“It is,” he said.
“How do you know?” She was playing with him, but sweetly.
“I don’t know how I know,” he said. “But I think that’s the way it is. You don’t know, but you know.”
She took a deep breath and waited. Suddenly she was very serious.
“I know,” she said. “I know exactly the same.”
So this is what he did. He went to her. He put his right hand on her left shoulder and brought her toward him. He was taller than she was, so his lips came in an angle. He felt her warm cheek first. Then the corners of her lips. Then full-on, grazing the soft, warm, naked flesh. Her mouth opened, welcoming; his did, too. He felt her wet breath. Their mouths were drawn into each other’s like symmetrical vacuums. Gentle at first, the kiss continued with a vigor that surprised him. And when his tongue slipped into her mouth and explored it with an avidity he had never known for anything he had ever done in his life, he almost stopped to think about what he was doing and what she was doing to him. But he didn’t. The kiss lasted an entire minute, and he didn’t breathe the whole time, and he realized that what sometimes feels like love, crazy love, might be no more than a lack of oxygen getting to the brain. But this was love. He felt his heart becoming that thing that was more than a heart, that was just an idea of a heart, different but performing the same basic function: keeping him alive.