Louisa Meets Bear (34 page)

Had she noticed anything strange about César? he asked.

“I hardly saw him. The last time was in April, when I came in on a weekend to meet a locksmith, but it had been several years before that.”

“How did he seem?”

“Fine. I mean, it was hard to tell. He was vacuuming.”

“Did he talk with you?”

The sound from the TV stopped and Bill came into the room, taking a seat opposite her. There was a look of disapproval on his face, as though he deemed her too forthcoming or not forthcoming enough.

“We talked about the keys. He'd lost his set. One of them needed a card to make a copy and I couldn't find it so I had to change the cylinder. He was very upset about it. I tried to reassure him that mistakes happen, but he seemed inconsolable.”

Bill's stare hardened. She hadn't mentioned what sort of repair she was having done that morning because it hadn't concerned him, but also because she hadn't wanted to hear him tell her that she should have been more careful with the card and César should have been more careful with the keys. Now she felt a surge of anger at Bill's disapproval—that the cylinder and César were none of Bill's business, that they were both, literally, her business, paid for out of her business account. That she'd had it with walking on eggshells not to stir his ire.

“What was the cause of death?” she asked.

“Can't say until the autopsy. Looks either like a coronary or an overdose.”

Ilana absorbed the information. The vacuum cleaner had been out in her office. All afternoon, while she'd seen her patients, the question had moved in and out of her mind: Had César had a heart attack while cleaning or had he cleaned her office and then killed himself?

Either way, it occurred to her now, there'd been a broken heart.

Forbes looked at his shoes. She wondered if he'd been trained to allow a few minutes to pass after delivering this kind of news. He glanced at her, proceeding, perhaps, because she was dry-eyed. “Do you know anyone else who knew him?”

“He had a girlfriend when I first met him, but I don't know her last name or how to reach her.”

“Maybe Jen knows,” Bill said.

With Bill's intrusion, Ilana again felt a surge of anger. It was insulting that Bill would think she hadn't already considered whether Jen would know how to contact Evelyne. Nearly two decades had passed since Evelyne had been Jen's sitter, a job that had hardly lasted a year. It struck Ilana as invasive, almost aggressive, after all of this time of not talking with Jen herself, to subject Jen to a call from the detective. Now with Bill's comment, though, Ilana was obligated to give the detective the phone number she had from years ago for Jen.

After the detective left, Ilana checked on her daughters and then returned to the dinner dishes, caked now with food detritus. Her aunts had debated whether anyone had actually seen her father get into the hearse or if he'd instructed the driver to let him out before they reached the cemetery. All anyone knew for certain was that by the time he showed up back at the house, long after the relatives and other funeral guests had eaten the platters of smoked fish and pastrami her aunts had provided, he was smashed.

*   *   *

Three weeks later, the detective called her office. It was one of the two days she worked late, and she was just packing up her things to go home.

“Dr. Green?”

“Yes?”

“Detective Forbes, about César Punto. I'm sorry to disturb you again, but rules and regs require I check with you. No one's come to claim the body. I reached your former neighbor, but as you thought, she didn't know how to reach the ex-girlfriend or anyone else who'd known Mr. Punto.”

Forbes hesitated. “If no one shows up by next Friday, we'll have to remove the body from the morgue.”

Ilana could hear Forbes's discomfort, his wish to protect her. People who didn't know her often felt this way with her, as though emotional hardiness correlated with body size.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, I don't want to be too graphic about it, but basically we discard the corpse.”

“I hardly knew him.”

“I'm not suggesting. We just have to inform you.”

*   *   *

When she got home, Nona had already given the girls dinner. Ilana put Janey in front of a video, settled Sarah at her piano practice, and ran a bath. In the nine years they'd lived in the apartment, she'd never taken a bath.

On their honeymoon, she and Bill had taken a bath together in the claw-foot tub in their Paris hotel room. Bill had washed her fine hair and told her how adorable she was. Even then, on her honeymoon, she'd been aware that he'd not said
beautiful
, the way she imagined he would have with Louisa in response to what she envisioned to be Louisa's Botticelli face and dancer's body. Their sex life, by then well established, was tender and mutually satisfying, but never had she felt that Bill deeply wanted her. He admired her for being a workhorse like himself, he cared about her and had grown, she was certain, to love her, but never had he fallen in love with her, never, as she was certain had happened with Louisa, could she have broken his heart.

She'd not asked the detective what claiming the body would entail. She assumed it meant making arrangements with a funeral home to pick it up and to then have a burial. Money aside, it seemed bizarre that she would bury someone she'd hardly known. And yet, how could she let the body be treated as trash?

The crypts beneath the Santa Maria church had been decorated, she'd read, with the remains of over six thousand persons: Roman paupers and Capuchin friars whose bones had been transported from one church to another following the financial woes and triumphs of various orders of monks. Other than the Barberini princess, no individual was identified. The bones had not even been kept together, pelvises and shoulder blades and vertebrae joining other pelvises and shoulder blades and vertebrae to form hourglasses and rosettes and crowns.

*   *   *

After the girls were asleep, Ilana sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and pad and opened the yellow pages. In some of the ads, the prices were listed: interment, cremation, domestic shipping, international shipping. MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Major Insurance Plans Accepted.

Would César have wanted interment or cremation? He'd taken off his shirt because he was hot. Was there a clue in that?

She thought about the pit where her mother's body had been left. How barbaric it had seemed. Yet, if she had César's body cremated, what would she do with the remains? It seemed inconceivable to her that she would keep them. But what if a relative did eventually appear from Colombia? How could she say there was nothing left of César?

She selected Package C: pickup from the morgue, a pine coffin, transportation to the cemetery, a ten-minute graveside service.

“Do I need to be there?” she asked the woman taking the information.

“You're the customer. We do the job either way.”

*   *   *

When Bill arrived home, he found her still at the kitchen table with the yellow pages opened to funeral parlors.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm going to bury César.” There was a steeliness in her voice that surprised even her.

Bill sat down. He put his elbows on the table and leaned in to look at the open phone book. She thought about his college nickname, Bear. Always she'd associated it with his size, with something endearing about him. Now she saw that it also captured something intimidating about him, an underlying growl that was always there.

“He loved me. More than my father ever has. More than you ever have.”

Bill reached for her hands but she crossed them over her chest and tucked them in her armpits. He placed his own hands flat on the table. In the bright kitchen light, she could see the thicket of veins branching out from his wrist.

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“I'm not going.”

She pushed back her chair and stood. It seemed to her the first time that she'd ever looked down at Bill, at the white circle of scalp visible at the crown of his head. “César's dead. I have living people to take care of.”

Her father believed that there was nothing rational about commemorating death. It either happens at an expected time, in a way that surprises no one, or it does not. Her father felt the same way about birthdays, which he refused to acknowledge. What's to celebrate about the calendar cycling through another year? There's no accomplishment in that. After her mother died, her own birthday had disappeared. It had taken her a long time to understand that the corollary to her father's logic is that life merits no special consideration.

She slept on the living room couch. Had she slept in their bed, Bill would have wrapped his arms around her and kissed her hair and told her it was not true that César had loved her more than he did. If she had to live with his saying that, she knew she would not be able to stay with him, with her girls, to continue doing what she had already decided she had to and wanted to and would in fact do.

 

2009

 

Nate in Bed

You would be surprised to learn that I am happily married, and have been for twenty-two years. I married a few months after I last saw you. My cousin Lizzy—do you remember her? she had a baby not long after we met, a daughter she gave up for adoption—and Corrine—you won't have forgotten her—walked me down the aisle after my father canceled coming east. Corrine's daughter, Conchita, just one, sprinkled rose petals from a white basket. Esther, my mother-in-law, baked the wedding cake: eight tiers with edible silver beads and pink freesia on top.

When we last saw each other, you were bolting east across Columbus Avenue toward Central Park for a Saturday afternoon run and I was walking west, toward the Italian glass store on Amsterdam where I'd bought you a pen for your twentieth birthday, the first birthday we celebrated together. You stopped, right in the middle of the street, and grinned at me. It was winter but you were in only a loose parka, without hat or gloves, and you put your bare hand under my elbow, abandoning your run to guide me the rest of the way across the street, ducking your head slightly, as though you were smelling my hair. You didn't ask me, you just led me to a back table at the café catty-corner from the Museum of Natural History. You ordered a scotch for yourself and a spritzer for me, as though you were certain despite the four years that had passed since you'd last seen me that you still knew what I drank.

Every life contains a watershed moment. This was mine: tipsy from two wine spritzers and you leaning forward on your elbows to push my hair off my forehead and tilt my chin up. If, as you do, I could believe in a benevolent God, he or she must have been watching over me, guiding me so that I veered back into my lane. Did not go to a hotel with you, you betraying a woman to whom you were then engaged, me betraying Paul, my future husband, though I did not know that at the time, whom I'd come across the country to visit, still doubting it possible that anyone as talented and funny and good-looking-enough could be so big-hearted.

What I would not have told you, even if I had gone to bed with you that afternoon, is how on the day Paul walked with his sax case under his arm into the Berkeley bookstore where I had been working since I left you and graduate school and moved in with Corrine, I could sense the joy within him. It was not your guys' guy enthusiasm for everything carnal: for greasy sausage sandwiches, for your racing heart as you caught a football or dove your bare torso into an oncoming wave, for, at one time, me—an enthusiasm that turned itself inside out into brooding, vengeful rage. No, my husband-to-be emanated a deeply settled happiness, granted to him from parents who do not consider personal ambition worth tending. A father, Herb, who for half a century has run a business—helping home owners after fires, rectifying smoke and water damage, renovating with sprinklers and fireproof drywall so the people whose houses he salvages can sleep with peace of mind—that he now shares with his son. A mother—
Esther Sweetie
, his father has always called her—who believes a home requires a freshly baked cake on the kitchen counter, children need to lick icing bowls, and husbands must have warm cookies with their evening tea.

*   *   *

You are on my mind this morning as I unlock my apartment door, too early for the Sunday
Times
—it is not yet six—but intent on checking nonetheless. Perhaps it is Paul's absence, in Great Neck to stay with his mother while his father is in the hospital for the first time in his eighty-two years, perhaps a dream fragment wiped out between bed and door. Either way, it surprises me, since I rarely think about you these days, decades having passed since I thought about you all the time, all day long, every experience narrated to the you that had taken up residence in my mind as I debated whether I'd saved or ruined my life with my move three thousand miles away from you, the answer shifting in those first weeks almost hour to hour and you not helping by at first refusing my calls or, if I reached you on the trading floor, the only place where you would answer the phone, saying in your husky voice, “Louisa, can I call you right back?”

I would lie there, in Lily's old bed with her lavender sheets that Corrine had insisted on keeping and that I'd washed six times to remove the vomit and bloodstains and her troll collection on a shelf mounted on the wall, waiting and waiting for your call. And then, maybe ten hours later, after you'd been out with the coworkers you played basketball with at nights—Irish boys who'd gone to Catholic colleges and night school for their MBAs,
the Toddlers
, you called them, feeling yourself more like them in their grit and hunger to make it than the guys from your Princeton eating club who'd had every door opened for them—your muscles still taut and pulsing from the exercise and your skin warm from two beers and a steak and creamed spinach, you'd sprawl on what had been our bed, naked save for a towel wrapped around your middle, and then call.
Baby, I miss you, just come back
, you'd say in your gravelly bedroom voice.