Darling? (30 page)

“Depression killed him,” he said, “same as cancer, or stroke.”

“Let the family through, please,” said Polchikov, having assumed the role of usher, and set a hand on Cecile’s shoulder, guiding her down the aisle toward the second pew.

“We’re not family,” Drew said, but Cecile had seen Tim standing up front all alone.

“Actually we are family,” she said, suffering Drew’s murderous glance and feeling for him. He’d been so resolute in solitude, fathering no children, keeping even his lovers at arm’s length, and still he found himself enmeshed, every flinch and shrug pulling at the human web …

“Because Tim
needs
you,” she answered the unspoken question.

“Needs…,”
he said—was there no end to the modern bathos? Martha was just behind them, the organ had begun. He was caught; he sat down, and Polchikov edged in beside him. “Of course, my father’s coffin was draped in the flag,” Polchikov said as Martha ascended the altar with her eulogy.

She might have been addressing Warren’s commencement. He was “a hunter, fisherman, artist, an individualist who preferred bear meat to steak, who knew his way in the wilderness…”

… and only lost it, Cecile thought, among men. Martha ought to write for
GQ,
she thought—could she not say one true thing?

“It was Warren’s life, and he lived it, and ended it, as
he
chose,” she went on, so Cecile wanted to jump up and object. Though she supposed a mother might be forgiven for suffering a failure of honesty while eulogizing her son. She’d have liked to blame Martha, despise her, and forget her—and forget Warren’s death from despair.

Tim went to the altar—to say how he’d looked up to his younger brother—and Cecile started to cry. That was the absurd truth of it: Tim who was steady and capable, a lawyer with a marriage and soon a child, had admired Warren, who fumbled through in terror, collecting women and unemployment, taking on the glamour that always fills a vacuum. Yes, we die after long lives during which the brave admire the fearful and the strong envy the weak! Amazing, when she thought of it, all the hours and days one spends
without
weeping, considering that none of us really knows the other, mothers are blind to their own children, eulogies sound like press releases and … Polchikov gave her a Kleenex; she blew her wretched nose.

Martha, who had turned around to face the congregation, glanced back with fond sympathy at the sight of Cecile weeping openly for her son.

Anyone who wished might speak. “I’m … I
was
Warren’s girlfriend,” a girl in a leopard-print coat said, and another jumped up and fled out the back door. Beth sat across the aisle, holding an old lumpy jacket around herself as if she was freezing. Every few minutes she’d sigh and her face would go more numbly haunted as she stared intensely at the floor. A man in a tweed coat stood up and read from a typed sheet: “I’m Ned Fisk, a professor of Warren’s, and I speak for all of us at Ramsey when I say what a promising artist we’ve lost. His work was
juicy,
you could really
feel
its effect, and at the same time it had an intelligence, a …
walking interiority
that we at Ramsey are always searching for and
very
rarely find.” A bubble in Cecile’s throat broke from giggle to sob—no wonder Warren had fled. But Martha crossed the aisle and took Fisk in her arms.

“I’m not as eloquent as the professor,” the next man said, “but I’ve done some hunting in the north country and I can tell you that I have only respect for a man who can bring the mighty bruin down.…”

They were, all of them, reminded of the shape of their own lives. Everyone spoke from his own grief or pride, Polchikov telling about his father, and Nita Schorb whose son had bullied Warren all through school and was in the county House of Corrections now, describing the deep bond she and Martha would always share. “There are
so many
ways to lose a child…,” she said.

“I’m an artist myself,” someone else was saying, “and even though I’ve been much more successful … acclaimed … than Warren, I…” Cecile wanted to jump up and shriek at them, that they were supposed to be talking about Warren, raising him as a real, whole man one last time. But it was too late, he would live only as an actor in other people’s dramas now. If she’d walked home with him, kissed him instead of Drew … but who could know?

A man in the back pew stood and laced his fingers under his gut. “I never had the pleasure of meeting Warren,” he began. Cecile sank into her seat. “But he sounds very courageous, and his exploits seem to have meant a lot to his family and friends. Maybe he suffered something out for all of them … us … He looked straight at something the rest of us turned away from.…”

Wizz stood and motioned to the reverend for the benediction. The pallbearers came silently up the aisle. The ground was frozen; Warren would have to go into the vault.

*   *   *

The rest of them crowded into Drew and Cecile’s little house. They’d taken the paintings down: the storm at sea, the glimpse along the grass alley were replaced with Warren’s wild sweeps of color. It was as if they’d turned inward from the narrow windows they were used to peeping out of and realized they’d had their backs to a great vista all this time. The room was full as a rush hour subway so they had to brush against each other, absorb each other’s warmth, and Cecile felt herself passed embrace by embrace through the crowd, hardly knowing whether they held each other for consolation or only because death had given them license.

Whatever, she accepted it—she wanted to take every man and woman in her arms, feel them, smell them, kiss their mouths, make love to them … they were alive, all of them, and each with his own allure, the vision that arises from a glimpse … the woman whose fat braid fell against a heavy sweater, who no doubt had a soup simmering on her woodstove at home; the two ancient bohemians with their Gauloises; the kids, as Drew called them: Tim and Fiona and the others Cecile’s age, looking pale, sweet, and yes, so much younger than she.

Warren’s friend Eli appeared, wearing Drew’s socks and carrying a white lily.

“It’s beautiful, Eli, thank you!” Cecile said, going to kiss him.

He drew back. “It’s … it’s for Martha.”

Of course. Still, she was stung, and imagined suddenly that Warren had taken pleasure in the thought of these people scraping his brain out of the dresser drawers—he’d left no note because he wanted them to reckon with his flesh finally, with no veil of glamour, of language, between them. Well, she would take up his cause now, hate them in his stead.

“I’ll put it in water,” she said, but the stem was too long, and when she went to cut it the knife glanced off and sliced her finger. Blood spattered over the lily, dripped through the fist she held the finger tight in—she couldn’t bear to look.

“What an idiot!” she said, laughing anxiously, looking across the room for Drew. Who returned her gaze with what she could only feel was hatred. To
bleed,
now, here? And then to laugh? He turned back to the woman he’d been talking to, lecturing her with angry animation while Eli led Cecile through to the bathroom, keeping her hand in the air. As they passed Drew, she heard him say something about Thomas Hardy, loudly, as if he was talking over a rude distraction. Better to have married a fat man, she thought, who would try to stuff the inner void with cream puffs, than this one, who took only bread, water and knowledge in order to remain above the ordinary longings of men.

“Thank God you’re a doctor,” she said as Eli taped the wound.

“It’s research,” he said. “I never actually touch a human being.” In the mirror behind him she saw herself smile joyfully because he was touching her, and looked away ashamed.

“Go, give Martha her lily,” she said. “I’m fine.”

A thin gray man came in and tapped her shoulder with timid urgency, like a child tugging at its mother’s dress. His wine, had she seen it? He’d brought a whole case.…

“Maybe someone put it in the basement,” she said, and seeing he needed company descended the stairs with him, imagining for some reason that he’d embrace her there. Warren had shattered the boundaries, anything was possible—but the man sank on the bottom step with his head in his hands.

“A whole case,” he said, nearly crying. “Where can it be?” They were face-to-face with a painting of Warren’s—a leering face with slashes of red and blue—that they’d decided not to hang, and behind it, the peaches Cecile had put up last summer. An advertisement, to say
“Here, I am fruitful.”
And stored them in the dark here so as not to show off.

“I lost a son myself,” he said, so lightly she took it first for aimless conversation; then she remembered it from the paper: he’d fallen from a highway overpass. Fallen or jumped, they couldn’t be sure.

“When was that?” she asked, to pretend she hadn’t known.

“1961,” he said, which would in fact have been the year the boy was born. It was true, she thought, some people
are
lost from the start. What to say? It reminded her of the time she met the author Haldor Laxness: he knew so much, had thought so deeply and lived so long, she hadn’t really believed he’d be able to see something so small as herself. Grief might have the same effect as wisdom: this man lived in another country, a place she didn’t know.

“Where can it be?” he asked, peering into the darkness with anger and disappointment as if this were only the latest of the series of thefts and losses that made up his life.

“Who brought it in?” she asked.

“Oh, my God, of course,” he said, and ran up the stairs two at a time. “I left it in the car.”

Coming up behind him she could hear that the party had passed some milestone and abandoned restraint. Polchikov had claimed the sturdiest chair and was attacking an immense plate on which a filet of smoked mackerel trembled atop a molded salad. Behind him two men were discussing the largest of Warren’s paintings, wherein several bright buoyant shapes bobbed in a thick atmosphere.

“You can see,” one man said, “there’s a breast, an ass, and these are like two legs spread wa-a-ay out over everything.”

“It’s a terrific piece,” the other said.

“If I’d
known
he could paint this way…,” Drew was saying, and Cecile remembered she’d discouraged him from going to see Warren in Maine. He might have seen the paintings then, might have gotten closer to Warren, but she’d wanted to wrest him free of the other family.

Someone fitted candles into wine bottles and lit them; afternoon darkness was closing, and Martha sat on the couch, mistily drunken, while the timid man rubbed her feet.

“He’s here,” Martha said as Cecile filled her glass again, and leaned back with a drowsy, beatified smile. “Everyone feels it. They want to stay here, with Warren.” She gazed at Cecile fondly, a mother opening her heart to the new daughter-in-law.

“You loved him, too,” she said. “I know. I could see.” Cecile shifted uncomfortably. “And he’s here, Cecile, he’ll always be here with us now.”

“Drew, these people have to go,” she said, as soon as she could get him alone. “They’ve been here since noon.”

He looked at her with amazed contempt.
That’s right,
she thought,
I’m a shrew. Mean and hungry, all teeth. I don’t care.

“I want to go to bed,” she pleaded.

“Then
go to bed.”

“Eli’s asleep there.”

“Eli?”

“Warren’s friend.”

A vague consternation crossed his face until he placed Eli—among the kids.

“Push him over,” he said, and turned away.

*   *   *

There was a soup bowl of cigarette butts on the bedside table. Cecile took it into the hallway, but the stink would last for days. Eli was sound asleep, his hair a mass of dark, contrary waves. She pushed a pile of coats onto the floor, turned down the quilt, and got in.

*   *   *

Sometime later she awoke in his embrace. He seemed asleep still, but his arm was around her, pulling her tight against him. The room was pitch-black, and she could hear Jethro Tull playing downstairs—songs she’d used to get stoned to when she was fourteen and mad to smash her way into the gorgeous, terrifying world. It would have been the same for Warren—the same music, same rolling paper, same sense that all want would be fulfilled in ecstasy now they were grown. She took Eli’s hand, and an immense warmth came over—every cell changed so she was entirely soft, a thing in nature like an anemone pulsing in the tide. It occurred to her that she didn’t know him, but of course they must have the essential things—despair and longing—in common. It seemed he could carry her back, accept her as a prodigal sister returned, finally, to her own generation; the generation Drew and Martha and their ilk had wronged. She lifted Eli’s hand to her mouth and kissed his palm, and he turned her toward him as if a long and careful courtship had reached its culmination.

Pushing his curls back, she saw his features were so strong they were almost frightening. His mouth curved as if sculpted and without the glasses his eyes seemed immense and raw, open as if he wanted her to fall in. She tried to return the gaze in its intensity, but it overwhelmed her and she closed her eyes to kiss him, finding the image of Warren in the dark of her mind.

A few minutes later they heard steps on the staircase and by silent agreement feigned sleep again. Tim came in and shook Eli.

“Come on, old buddy, we’ve got to give these good people their bed,” he said. Cecile lay waiting for him to go so she could lose herself in the kiss again, but Eli jumped up as if he was relieved.

“How long was I asleep?” he asked, and Tim said it had been hours. Cecile watched through half-closed eyes as they left, Eli looking quickly back at her. She’d frightened him, as she had others—her boundaries would dissolve suddenly so she spilled over, out of her life, her marriage.… She wasn’t properly civilized; she frightened herself, too. Had she really dreamt she might have a love of innocent discovery, with a man her own age? When Drew finally came to bed, she made love to him in an anguish of longing, thinking how alike they were, wraiths who hardly knew a wake from a wedding, vandals poking their fingers through the membrane that contained them into the cold dark outside. She locked her legs around him to push him farther inside her; bit his shoulder to urge his thrust—if death was real, if it might really arrive any minute, then the old agreements were void: ambition must be deeper and she would need more love—much more.