A Permanent Member of the Family (7 page)

“So weren't you guys happily married? I always thought you were happy together. Like me and Frank.”

“Well, sure, Janey! A lot like you and Frank. Better keep that in mind, girlfriend,” she said and laughed.

 

J
ANE WAS TOUCHED
by
how neatly George had arranged his clothing. She could picture him taking his clothes out of the dryer and carefully folding each item. His socks were rolled and lined up in rows by color, shirts folded and stacked in their drawer by color and fabric, neckties racked in the closet by stripes, patterns and solids, suits, sports jackets and slacks hung by color and material from light to dark, thin to heavy, shoes lined up in pairs on the floor beneath his suits and jackets like the front paws of large mammals, brown first, then black, then sneakers. Even his underwear was folded and stacked for easy access, as in a men's clothing store. “George liked to say he did it so he could dress in the dark if he had to,” Isabel said. “But he never had to.”

The files that George had shipped down from Keene for the winter, so many that he'd installed a two-drawer cabinet in their bedroom to hold them, now filled four banker's boxes. Isabel said he was a pack rat who carried his pack with him. She'd decide next winter which files to keep and which to shred, she said. Most could go. For now she would hold back only the papers and records she'd need for negotiating the purchase of the condo. She'd close on it in the summer, after George's estate and insurance were settled. To get the paperwork started she had already scanned and e-mailed digital copies of George's death certificate to Ron Briggs, his attorney in Lake Placid, and Tim Lynch, his insurance agent. The reading of George's last will and testament could not occur until Isabel met with Briggs, who had drawn it up and had amended and revised it annually according to George's changing instructions. She did not know what was in her husband's will and had never had much desire to know. It was like his investment portfolio—not really her business—more his hobby or a low-intensity obsession than money management, just something he enjoyed poring over, rearranging and reconfiguring on his computer late at night before coming up to bed.

The two women loaded the boxes into the convertible, filling the trunk and backseat, and drove to the Public Storage building, where they placed George's personal belongings and papers in Unit 1032, clicked the lock and left. The process left Jane feeling dazed and dazzled, inexplicably thrilled, as if she and Isabel had successfully pulled off a crime, a burglary or bank robbery. In the car on the way back to the condo, Jane shouted above the rush of the wind, “We should've put George's ashes in the storage unit with all his stuff! His cremains! Is that really what they're called, ‘cremains'?”

“Yeah, according to Digger O'Dell. But you're right! We should put George in storage with his other stuff! The urn's still at the condo, on the sideboard. I completely forgot to pack it.”

“We should get him now,” Jane said. “The ashes. I mean, it. The urn.”

“George.”

 

I
SABEL PLACED THE WOODEN URN
on the dining room table, drew up a chair and sat down. She slowly unscrewed the top, but did not remove it. “I don't know why, but this is suddenly making me nervous,” she said. “It's like this is the last time I'll ever see my husband. Or maybe it's the first time. As if all those years married to him I never truly saw him, and now what I refused to acknowledge is inside this jug.”

Jane said that didn't make any sense. There was nothing inside the urn but a half pound of ashes. “Okay, human ashes. George's ashes. But it's inert matter, Isabel. It's not George.”

“I know, I know. But since he died, I've been feeling high, almost stoned, more excited by my life than I've felt in years. Maybe ever. I guess that's been obvious. But now all of a sudden, after not giving a good goddamn, I'm almost ashamed for not having acted properly bereft and mournful. Of not even feeling bereft and mournful. And I'm fucking scared, Jane. It's like George, pissed off and vengeful, is trapped inside this wooden jug like an evil genie inside a magic lantern, and by taking off the top I'm freeing him to torment and haunt me.”

“You don't have to open it. You can leave the evil genie locked away forever,” Jane said and reached for the urn. She grabbed it by the neck, but Isabel held on and pulled back. The cover flipped off, and both women let go at the same instant, and gray and white ashes emptied onto the table. The urn rolled away and fell onto the tile floor.

“Oh, my God!” Jane said. “I'm so sorry!”

Isabel said, “My fault. It was my fault.” She pushed her chair back from the table a ways and, still seated, leaned forward and examined the pile of ashes closely. Extending her right hand, she drew her forefinger through the spilled ashes, moving her finger back and forth, spreading the heap across the table, as if searching for a lost ring, some small remnant of her marriage, or an omen that would tell her how to live her life in the future. What she uncovered were six steel buttons, which she gathered one by one into her left hand. “Look!” she said and held them out to Jane.

“What?”

“These are U.S. Navy buttons. At least, I think that's what the anchors signify.”

“So?”

“They're not George's. He was never in the Navy. He was a conscientious objector during Vietnam and worked at McLean, the Boston mental hospital. Then went into teaching. He never wore a military uniform. He never owned anything with buttons like this.”

“So this isn't George?”

For a long moment the two women looked at each other in silence. Finally Isabel shook her head and said, “I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm actually relieved this isn't George. Of course, it isn't. These ashes aren't anybody!”

“Should we return the ashes to Digger O'Dell, the Friendly Undertaker?” Jane asked. “Or just vacuum them up and when the job is done toss the vacuum cleaner bag down the rubbish chute?” Jane started to laugh, a tight little giggle at first, then larger, long laughs that made it difficult to speak. Isabel joined her, and soon both women were bellowing with laughter, nearly choking with it, tears streaming down their cheeks. The absurdity of it, the ridiculousness, the idiocy of thinking the ashes were not just George's ashes, but were actually him, George Pelham himself, come back to haunt his newly emancipated widow!

When she was finally able to brake and slow her laughter, Jane said, “You realize that somebody out there has your George in a jar. But if we take this jar back to the Digger, if we demand that he exchange it for George, assuming he even knows who he gave George to, what the hell good will it do?”

It was pointless to try to exchange these ashes for George, Isabel said. Pointless, and cruel to whoever actually had George and did not know yet that they did not possess the cremated body of their husband or father. Probably by now George had already been cast from the stern of a boat into the Gulf Stream or scattered across the green waters of Biscayne Bay, Isabel reasoned, or else he was enshrined on a living room altar, surrounded by votive candles, statues of saints and orishas, baby shoes, cowrie shell necklaces and hen's feet. Which would really piss George off. “I'm starting to love thinking the ashes are actually a person. A stranger.”

“How do you know these are a man's ashes, though? Someone's husband or father,” Jane asked.

“Oh, I can feel it. You can always feel it when a man's in the house. They tend to soak up all the available energy.”

“So what are we going to do with them? We can't just vacuum them up and toss the vacuum bag down the chute.”

“Why not?”

“Yeah! Why not?”

 

L
ATER, THE TWO WOMEN SAT OUT
on the terrace sipping white wine, once again watching the sun set behind the Miami skyline. From somewhere inside the apartment, Jane's cell phone rang. “That would be Frank,” she said. After waiting half a minute, she sighed, put down her glass and left the terrace to answer it. The phone was in her purse on the bed in the guest room, and she managed to get there before call answering kicked in. It was Frank.

She knew instantly that he was angry, though he tried to hide it. “Glad I caught you,” he said. “Thought you and Isabel might be out on the town tonight.”

She said no, they were going to stay in and watch a movie. She asked him if he'd killed his deer. She had learned years ago to ask that way, not to ask if he “got” or “shot” a deer. And it was
his
deer, not
a
deer.

He said yes, a 127-pound six-pointer, butchered, wrapped and already in the freezer. “Killed him over on the north side of Baxter with a single shot at fifty yards. So when are you planning to come home?” he asked. It was more a directive than a question.

She said, “Unclear.” Which was the truth, she realized as soon as she said it.

“Yeah, well, okay. But that night security job at Whiteface Lodge, it finally came through. I have to start tomorrow at midnight. The house is a mess,” he added.

“Well, clean it up, then.”

“I won't have time. On account of working the night shift. I was just letting you know in advance, in case you come home tomorrow night. I was hoping you could get back up here soon. Your boss, Dr. Costanza, he's been calling from the school. He left a couple messages asking if you planned on resuming work soon. That's how he put it. I didn't return his call, since I didn't have an answer for him. You want me to call him?”

She said no, she'd take care of that herself. She sat down on the bed, placed the phone on her lap for a second, then put it back to her ear.

He was in the middle of saying, “So when are you coming back?”

She didn't answer.

Isabel stood in the guest room doorway, wineglass in hand. She looked at Jane with a steady, unblinking gaze and mouthed the words,
Stay as long as you want.

Jane looked intently back and nodded. She said to her husband, “Frank, I really don't know when I'm coming back.”

“That doesn't sound so good. Is it on account of Isabel, or on account of you?”

She hesitated, then answered, “Both.”

Frank was silent for a moment. He said, “It's supposed to snow this weekend, according to the Channel Five guy, Tom Messner. Up to a foot. It was minus ten this morning. It's minus five here at the house right now. ”

“It was eighty here today, and sunny. It's pretty much like that every day here.”

“Wow. Except for hurricane season, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Except for hurricane season.” She said she had to go, it was time for the movie. She wished him luck tomorrow at his new job. He thanked her, and they said goodbye to each other and clicked off.

Isabel set her glass on the bedside table and sat down beside Jane and put her arms around her. It was almost a motherly gesture at first, comforting, consoling, the kind of embrace Jane had expected to give to Isabel, not to receive from her. It made Jane believe for a moment that she could be fearless, as fearless as Isabel, that she could be reborn as someone else, as someone unformed, and that, like Isabel, she could become an adolescent girl again. She laid her head on Isabel's shoulder and smelled her perfume mixed with sweat, and a chill like the shadow of a cloud passing below the sun moved over her arms and shoulders, and when the chill had passed, it was as if the sun had emerged from behind the cloud, and a great warmth covered her body.

For a long moment they held their positions, as if each were waiting for the other to decide what they both would do or say next. And when neither woman decided, they both let their arms drop and turned toward the open door and the living room beyond and beyond that the floor-to-ceiling window and the terrace, the bay twenty-two stories below and the city at the far side of the bay and the setting sun bursting scarlet at the horizon like a fireball, painting the ragged gray clouds above the bay with cerise stripes.

For a long while neither woman said anything. Finally Isabel spoke in a voice barely above a whisper. “I would be happy if you stayed here.”

“Until?”

“Until you decide what you want.”

Jane stood and walked slowly to the door. For a second, she stopped at the door. She knew that tomorrow morning she would leave for home, for Keene, for the wintry north, for her husband, the father of her two grown daughters, her dour companion and the permanent witness to her remaining years. She turned around and looked back at Isabel, who was standing next to the bed, watching her, and realized that she had already said to Isabel everything that needed saying.

BIG DOG

The afternoon of the day the director of the MacArthur Foundation called to tell Erik that he'd won a MacArthur, Erik and Ellen were scheduled to have dinner in Saratoga Springs with four close friends. The director instructed him to keep the news confidential until it was released to the press, but Erik decided to announce it tonight anyhow to Ted and Joan and Sam and Raphael.

Ellen didn't agree. “Don't you think you should wait? Like he asked?”

“Naw, they'll keep it to themselves if I tell them to.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold can of Heineken. “What do you think, Sam's going to announce it at a faculty meeting? Ted'll put it in the paper?”

“No, but they might mention it to someone who would.”

“I'll tell them it's strictly confidential. Christ, Ellen, I want to celebrate! This is fucking life-changing!” He cracked open the Heineken and knocked back three quick swallows and wiped his chin with the broad back of his hand. “Damn! A fucking genius grant!” He grinned and slung an arm around Ellen and hugged her with it.

She gently pushed him away as if they were dancing and the music had stopped. She switched on the electric teapot and shook out a teabag and dropped it into a mug. “Why don't you feed the dogs now, so you won't have to do it in the dark before we go out?”

He studied the two Siberian huskies sleeping by the woodstove. “Yeah. Good idea.” After a few seconds, while she watched her tea steep, he said, “Why do I think you're slightly displeased by this very good news?”

“No, I'm happy that your life will be changed by this, Erik. Really. It's what you want and deserve. I'm just not so sure I want my life changed by it.”

“That's up to you. Nothing in your life has to change if you don't want it to. In my case, however, in a few days, as soon as the press release goes out, it's going to be out of my control.”

“Poor guy,” she said. “Poor genius,” she added, and quickly laughed and touched his forearm with her fingertips. “But you deserve it.”

Ellen was not alone in believing that Erik Mann deserved a MacArthur. He was an artist who built elaborate installations the size of suburban living rooms out of American Standard plumbing supplies and kitchen and bathroom fixtures that he bought new in bulk through Spa City Supply in Saratoga Springs. He had taught at Skidmore College for over twenty years and was famous locally. Though his work was little known to the general public and was not collected or exhibited widely in the United States, it was admired by many of his more famous fellow artists and certain respected critics. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, had won prizes and fellowships—nothing till now on the scale of a MacArthur, of course—and had an enviable reputation abroad, mostly in Germany and in Japan, where he had recently been given a retrospective in a jumbo-jet hangar at Narita International Airport. The show had boosted his international standing and the prices his work commanded. Because of the scale and theatricality of his installations, however, few of them were ever actually purchased. Nonetheless, whether exhibited or not, their construction from conception to completion was documented, photographed and filmed, with the materials archived at Skidmore's Tang Museum, where the archive itself was regarded by critics and scholars as a major work of art.

The award was for half a million tax-free dollars spread over five years. One did not apply for a MacArthur. A layered network of anonymous recommenders and jurors decided whose life and career was about to be suddenly embellished. Based in Chicago, the foundation granted barely a dozen fellowships a year, usually to cutting-edge social scientists and mathematicians, little-known poets, writers of esoteric or experimental fiction and plays, and scholars tilling fields like the history of Paleolithic dance or the hermeneutics of hopscotch, marbles and other children's games, fields too obscure to have a conventional academic home. They were popularly referred to as “genius grants.”

MacArthurs rarely went to visual artists, and when one did it was usually to a conceptual artist whose work more closely resembled theater or dance than something actually made by human hands in a studio. All the more reason for Erik to celebrate. He built his outsized bathroom and kitchen installations by hand in a vast, high-ceilinged studio on the first floor of a mid-nineteenth-century mill. The factory sat on the bank of the Hudson River in the once-thriving town of Schuylerville, ten miles east of Saratoga Springs. He had bought the building for less than a year's salary a decade ago when he was promoted to senior professor and given tenure. He had renovated the derelict mill himself, stripping it back to the brick walls, replacing the huge windows, jacking and leveling the chestnut-timbered floors, installing electricity, plumbing and central heat, sanding and varnishing the floors. He viewed the entire renovated building—the first-floor studio and his and Ellen's living quarters on the second floor and Ellen's weaving studio up on the third—as perhaps his most ambitious installation. He called the building “the mother of all installations.” By design, the process of constructing this installation was ongoing and endless and, unlike the rest of his work, was without irony. It referred to nothing other than itself.

On their way to Ted and Joan's they stopped at the Wine Boutique in Wilton and bought two bottles of Dom Pérignon. It was snowing in thin, gauzy sheets, slicking the roads slightly, and Ellen reminded Erik that he'd drunk three Heinekens already and told him to slow down. “If it keeps snowing, we may have to spend the night at Ted and Joan's. Especially after champagne and whatever else they serve with dinner. They like to keep your glass filled,” she said. “It lets them keep their own filled without anyone noticing, I guess.”

“I detect a note of judgment in that. What would your master say?”

“My teacher.”

“Right, your teacher.” Ellen was a Buddhist, or as she said, a student of Buddhism. Erik was emphatically neither and enjoyed poking her for her devotion to her studies and practice and her
roshi
. Though they'd never married, Erik and Ellen had been together thirty-two years, nearly their entire adult lives. They'd met when they were in their early twenties in New York, when she was a design student at Pratt and he was living on the Lower East Side, the son of a plumber and grandson of a carpenter, a recent graduate of the Boston Museum School inventing himself out of whole cloth as an artist. From the start they were sexually liberated bohemians, and their life together had at times been turbulent and troubled. He had his love affairs and she, in revenge, had hers, but as the years passed it became evident to both that no one else would ever understand and accept them as thoroughly as they understood and accepted each other. They had no children, and the only thing that they periodically quarreled over now was how to train and care for their two female Siberian huskies. Ellen was maternal toward them, but Erik was the alpha in the pack—Ellen's nickname for him was Big Dog.

When they arrived at Ted and Joan's, the other two guests, Sam and Raphael, were already settled on the long, low sofa in front of the fire, drinks in hand. The men had married in June, not long after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, and were still acting like newlyweds, rarely taking their eyes off one another. Sam liked talking about being married, especially in the company of married heterosexual couples. “Five years of living together, and every morning I wake up and look across the bed, and there's my husband, and it's brand new! But a little déjà vu, too,” he explained. “Like, hello? Haven't I been here before?”

In his early fifties with a steel-gray buzz cut and trim, flat-bellied body, Sam looked more like an aging triathlete than a photographer of color landscapes that deliberately evoked the pastoral paintings of the Hudson River School. His photographs were the size of picture windows and sold individually for many thousands of dollars. Erik didn't much care for them, however. He thought them soft, too easy on the eyes.

Sam's husband, Raphael, had recently turned thirty and had been a student of Sam's at Skidmore. He was writing a novel and had been at it since graduation, but thanks to Sam didn't need to earn a living while he wrote it. Tall and slender, he was handsome in a dark, intense way, with a long aquiline face and pale skin and a mahogany mane of curly hair. He was an ostentatiously intelligent young man with a weakness for sarcasm that everyone knew was only a cover for his insecurity. It was not easy being married to a man like Sam, despite—or perhaps because of—his generosity and warmth, the unashamed pleasure he took from his well-tuned athletic body and his undeniable success as an artist and teacher. Ellen often defended Raphael this way.

Erik found Raphael's sarcasm, what he called the young man's smart-ass negativity, irritating, avoided sitting next to him on any occasion and spoke to him only when he had to. “If Raphael was a girl instead of a boy, a female ex-student living with Sam, and living off him, I might add,” Erik once pointed out to Ellen, “you women wouldn't cut the kid so much slack.”

She had responded that if Raphael actually were an attractive female ex-student and not an attractive gay man, Erik would be interested in her opinions and would think she was witty instead of sarcastic. Erik said he couldn't argue with that.

Ted took their coats, and Joan carried the two bottles of Dom Pérignon to the kitchen. “I better get down the whatchacallits, the flutes,” she called back. “What's the occasion, anyhow?”

Ellen said, “I'll let Erik tell you. Though he's not supposed to,” she added and followed Joan into the kitchen.

Sam and Raphael and Ted all looked over at Erik, and Joan spun around and returned to the living room still carrying the two unopened bottles of champagne. Ellen waited just inside the kitchen door.

“Well?” Joan said. “Let's hear it, Big Dog.” An endearment, coming from her. She liked Erik more than any man she knew, except for Ted, and Erik liked her back. They teased each other playfully and often. She felt warmed by his attention and charmed by it and showed him her pleasure, as if she knew it aroused him sexually. Joan was a certified touch healer, and Erik regarded her work as a self-deceiving hoax, but she didn't seem to care. She had enough faith in the theory and practice of touch healing to treat almost any form of skepticism or disbelief as merely silly and defensive, and Erik's stubborn, insistent materialism amused her—which sometimes led him to exaggerate it. “People have been healing others with the touch of their hands for millennia,” she often explained. It was a skill that could be taught, even to a man like Erik, who would probably excel as a touch healer, she pointed out, given the strength and sensitivity of his hands. She had offered him free instruction, but he did not take her up on it. She was a good-looking, full-bodied woman with thick red hair, and he knew where that would lead.

Ted handed Erik a glass of red wine, refilled his own and waved him toward the easy chair by the fire next to Raphael. Erik took the rocker in the corner instead, as if to avoid the limelight. No need for it when you're the one everyone wants to hear. He took a sip of his wine and said, “Yeah, it's true, I received some great news today. But you got to promise you won't say a word about it to anyone else. Not till they release it to the press.”

“The press?” Ted said. “Excuse me? That's me, for Christ's sake! Are you releasing this great news right now, man? Or is it strictly off the record?”

“It's off the fucking record, Ted! That's what I'm saying. Otherwise I'll stop right here and let you read about it in
The New York Times
next week.”

“Of course, it's off the record, Erik,” Joan said. “Please! Teddy has great . . . what? Journalistic integrity!”

Erik wondered if she was already a little drunk. He knew that Ted and Joan had a drinking problem, but suspected that he had a drinking problem himself, so he ignored theirs in order to ignore his and left the gossip and expressions of concern to others.

Ted and Joan were Erik's and Ellen's oldest friends in Saratoga Springs. They had two grown children each from their first marriages and a handful of grandchildren whose framed portraits and summer camp and holiday photographs were all over the house, on walls, shelves, and on top of the Steinway where late at night Ted played Chopin, badly, usually a little drunk. Ted had begun as a reporter for the local newspaper,
The Saratogian,
the year Erik was hired at Skidmore and rose steadily to become its publisher and owner. He and Joan had a more than casual interest in the arts. They owned two of Ellen's woven wall hangings, for which they had yet to find a proper wall, and three of Sam's landscapes, one of which,
Moonrise over Lake George,
hung in the living room opposite the fireplace. Ted had twice brought up the subject of buying one of Erik's installations and donating it to the permanent collection at the Tang, but because of space restrictions it could only be exhibited when there was no other show up, so Erik was reluctant to part with it. He wasn't sure Ted was serious anyhow.

“Okay, I got a call today from the MacArthur Foundation,” Erik began. “Out of the blue.” He recounted his conversation with the director as close to word-for-word as he could remember. No one interrupted him, and by the time he'd finished, their faces were glowing with pleasure, Erik noticed, even Raphael's. Apparently it was cool to have a friend who was a MacArthur. And to judge from Ellen's proud, uplifted gaze, to be a MacArthur's lifelong companion and helpmate was even cooler.

“Wow! That's the most exciting thing I've heard in my life!” Joan exclaimed, and rushed over and kissed him moistly on the mouth.

Sam stood up, crossed the room to Erik's chair. He quickly knelt, took Erik's left hand, and kissed his wedding ring as if it were the pope's. “My first MacArthur,” he said, then stood. “Seriously, Erik, congratulations! I'm truly happy for you.”