How to Talk to a Widower (12 page)

18

RUSS LOOKS UP WHEN I STEP BACK OUT INTO THE
hallway. “So?” he says.

“So,” I say, sitting down next to him.

“How'd it go?”

“Not really what I expected.”

“I know. It's almost worth being a fuckup, getting sent to her office every week.”

“You're not a fuckup. You're the brightest kid I know.”

“I'm the only kid you know.”

“So you're it by default. You still hold the title.”

“Whatever,” he says with a shrug. “Am I suspended?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” he says. “Paid vacation.”

“But who's paying?”

He pulls his hair off his face and runs his fingers over his swollen eye. “Look at my face, dude. It's already paid for.” He stands up and lifts his hands over his head to stretch his back. “Let's get out of here.”

“Where to, exactly?”

“I don't know, but I'm driving.”

Outside the sky has filled with thick ash-colored thunderheads, and as Russ adjusts the driver's seat and mirrors, the first droplets of rain start to fall onto the windshield.

“Check your mirrors before you pull out.”

“I did.”

“You didn't signal.”

“Nobody signals.”

“You'll fail your road test if you don't signal. Two hands on the wheel, please.”

“I drive better with one.”

“Well, I ride better with two. Look out!”

A van swerves around our protruding hood, honking angrily. Russ casually flips the bird out the window. “I saw him,” Russ says.

“Of course you did.”

“Should I get on the highway?”

“Sure, but stop at this red light first.”

He stomps on the brakes and we skid to a stop, bouncing hard against our seat belts.

“She's pretty cute, isn't she?” Russ says.

“Who?”

“Ms. Hayes.”

“If you like that look.”

“Everybody likes that look.”

“I guess I was too busy hearing about how you got your ass kicked to pay attention. What was that fight about anyway?”

“He made a crack about my tattoo.”

“What did he say?”

“I didn't actually hear the whole thing.”

“But you hit him anyway.”

“He had it coming.”

The light turns green and Russ accelerates a bit too hard, jerking me back lightly against my seat. “Easy.” The rain is starting to come down harder, beating noisily against the windshield. Russ flips on the wipers and turns onto the entrance ramp of the Sprain Brook Parkway. “Have you driven in the rain before?” I say.

“Don't worry about it,” Russ says, merging onto the highway and gunning the engine.

“Watch your speed.”

“You watch it. I'm watching the road.” He moves into the left lane and levels off at sixty.

“Where are we headed?”

“You'll see.”

Ahead of us in the center lane is a tractor trailer, its wheels churning out a furious spray of water. Russ speeds up, trying to pass, but the truck keeps inching over into our lane. “Move it!” Russ says, beating down on his horn.

“Just slow down,” I say. “You can't pass him here.”

“The hell I can't.”

Up ahead the highway turns, and as we enter the curve, Russ accelerates into it, inching up alongside the trailer, which shimmies noisily much too close to my window, obscuring our windshield with the thick blanket of mist coming off its immense wheels. “Russ!” I shout at him.

“Shut up!” he yells.

I can feel our tires sliding on the rain-slicked blacktop as the force of our turn pushes us within inches of the trailer, its mud flaps cracking like bullwhips, and our screams are drowned out by the bellowing horn of the truck as we slide toward the trailer's undercarriage. And then, a second before impact, Russ floors it and we zip out ahead of the truck, who yanks on his horn and machine-guns us with his high beams.

“Jesus Christ, Russ!” I say, still braced for the collision.

“That was pretty bad,” he admits, eyes wide. “But at least we know for sure that you don't want to die anymore.”

“Very funny.”

He signals right and moves across the lanes toward an exit.

“Where are we going?” I say, but I already know.

Russ looks at me and smiles. “To tell Mom the good news.”

         

I've learned that visiting the cemetery just doesn't work for me. I'm simply too caught up in the morbid physicality of it all. In the weeks after Hailey's death I tried to get used to it. I would come and sit on the lawn beside her grave and make halting attempts at one-sided conversation, but I just couldn't make myself believe there was anyone listening, and even if I could, talking to the grave never made any sense to me. If there's an afterlife, and they can hear you, shouldn't they be able to hear you from anywhere? What's the theory here, that talking to the dead requires range, like a cell phone, and if you go too far the call gets dropped? I know that if I were a spirit, the last place you'd find me haunting would be my grave, watching my body rot. I don't like looking in the mirror on my best days.

And so, without fail I would end up looking into the grass, picturing her coffin six feet below, its lacquered surface, once buffed to shine like a Cadillac, now caked with dirt and grime. And that would lead to trying to visualize the contents of the coffin, so instead of communing with Hailey's memory, I'd find myself picturing the gruesome remains of what was once my wife. I don't know what we buried, but between the impact of the plane and the subsequent immolation, it couldn't have been more than a few pieces of her, splinters of bone and charred flesh and hair, all fused together in some grisly collage, some horror movie prop resembling nothing remotely human. If there's one thing I've learned from this whole experience, it's that cremation is the way to go. It's clean, efficient, and, most important, leaves nothing to the imagination. We could turn all the cemeteries into forests and playgrounds.

Russ and I stand solemnly in the rain, surrounded by white and gray tombstones that rise out of the earth like jagged teeth as far as the eye can see. We peer doggedly at the etchings on Hailey's as if looking for edits or amendments that might have been made since we last were here.

“I can't believe it's been over a year already,” Russ says.

“I know.”

“Sometimes it feels like a week, and other times it seems like so long ago, like I can't even remember what life was like when she was here.”

“Do you come out here a lot?” I say.

“When I can get a lift.”

“You've never asked me.”

Russ nods, his hair slick and matted with rain. “I didn't want to bring you down.”

“That would be a neat trick, considering where I am these days.”

“Do you ever talk to her?”

“I hear her in my head all day.”

He turns to me. “But do you talk to her?”

I brush the rain-soaked hair out of my eyes. “Not really,” I say. “No.”

“Well, I hope you won't mind if I do.”

“Of course not.”

Russ steps forward, brushes some leafy debris off the small, square-trimmed hedges at the foot of the grave, and then kneels, leaning his head against the stone, eyes closed. He does this without a trace of his usual self-consciousness, and I know that hearing him speak to her will be more than I can bear, so I step back a few paces and turn around. A funeral procession has just arrived on the other side of the cemetery, and I watch the small parade of red and black umbrellas bouncing almost jauntily among the graves, following the pallbearers as they make their way across the geometric landscape of glistening tombstones.

I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I.

I watch the funeral for a little while longer, until I hear a rasping sound behind me, and turn to find Russ weeping violently against Hailey's tombstone, his face twisted into a mask of anguish, rocking back and forth like he's in the grip of unseen gale-force winds. “Russ,” I say, stepping over to him. “It's okay.” But of course it isn't, and he knows it, and he presses his fingertips desperately against the stone, desperate to feel something more than just the cold, wet granite. I bend down, unsure of how to approach him, but as soon as I touch his shoulder he collapses into me, pulling me down to my knees in the soaked grass, burrowing his face into the crook of my elbow, clutching my arm as he lets out a long, shuddering cry. And as my body shakes along with his, I look down to where his wet hair is falling away from his neck, and I can see the tattoo of Hailey's comet glistening on his drenched skin, staring right up at me like an accusation, and I decide that, afterlife or not, it's high time I had a talk with Jim.

19

THE PUBES IN THE WASTEBASKET HAD BEEN THE
first clue.

Hailey stood naked in her bathroom that morning, poised to step into the shower, when a ball of fur in the wastebasket caught her eye. She let out a small, startled cry, thinking it was a mouse, but even as she did, she saw that the mound of hair, resting in the basket on some discarded soap packaging, was not moving. She peered down into the wastebasket, still half asleep, trying to comprehend what she was seeing. At first she thought it was a Furby, one of those toy creatures that had been all the rage a few Christmases ago. Maybe Russ's had broken and he'd thrown it out. She crouched down to get a better look, and only then did she see that the strange pile was actually a mound of pubic hair. More specifically, it was Jim's pubic hair. It made for a perplexing picture, Jim standing naked over the wastebasket, shaving his pubic region. She stared at the dark, kinky mass, which, she now observed, had reddish highlights. She'd been married to Jim for almost ten years, and had never noticed that his pubic hair had red highlights. Was this a spousal failing on her part? Did other wives notice things like that? She stood back up, frowning slightly. Why was Jim, after all this time, suddenly shaving his pubic hair? The options played out before her like a standardized test.

A. He had too much and it irritated him.

B. He had somehow contracted crabs or lice.

C. He wanted his penis to seem bigger.

D. None of the above.

She felt a knot forming in her stomach. Since she was fairly certain that A was not the correct answer—Jim was not a terribly hirsute person—and since B, C, and D all seemed to point to the same highly troubling scenario, she stepped out of the bathroom to grab her cordless and call her friend Sally.

“Oh God!” Sally said, panting on her StairMaster.

“What do you mean, oh God?”

“He's having an affair.”

“I don't think so,” Hailey said.

“Is Jim small down there?”

“Excuse me?”

“I'll apologize later,” Sally said. “You didn't call me for polite conversation.”

“No,” Hailey said, after a moment. “He's pretty normal sized.”

“So why does a happily married man suddenly feel the need to look bigger?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, either he's doing porno, and I think we can rule that out, or he's looking to impress someone, and, honey, he doesn't need to impress you anymore. Oprah did this whole thing on cheating spouses, and a conspicuous change in grooming habits is definitely a red flag.”

Hailey frowned into the phone. There was no reasoning with Sally once Oprah had been invoked. “There could be a million other reasons.”

“That's true,” Sally said, her voice clenched from her exertions. “But, Hailey?”

“What?”

Sally paused. “Nothing.”

“What?” Hailey demanded. Over the phone she could hear the stair machine stop as Sally stepped off, breathing heavily.

“I don't know,” Sally said. “It's just that he's done it before.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake, that was before we were even married.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Well, don't,” Hailey said hotly, her eyes filling with tears. “That was an isolated incident, an old girlfriend he hadn't quite gotten over, and we worked through it. We've been married for almost ten years, and I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt.”

“He's probably counting on it.”

“You are being such a bitch!” Hailey shouted at her.

Sally sighed. “Listen, honey, if you were looking for someone to just reassure you that everything was fine, you should have called Laney, and she would have talked you down. But you called me, and you know that's not my thing. But I'm not the person you should be calling, either. So why don't you ask yourself why you didn't just call Jim to ask him?”

So Hailey had called Jim and Jim told her that he'd been suffering from some bad jock itch, and that was that. Except that he'd never mentioned it before. And Jim always complained about the slightest ailment, a hangnail, a pulled muscle, allergies. And there were no fungus creams or powders lying around their cluttered bathroom. She sat down on the toilet seat cover, the cordless clutched in her fist like a weapon, and that's where she remained all morning, naked and shivering, staring at the brown hairs in the wastebasket for a very long time.

         

All this Hailey reported to me after the first time we had sex, an event which came off much better than advertised, what with her self-consciousness about her thirty-six-year-old body and my not inconsiderable performance anxiety. I was supposed to be the young stallion, after all, fit and virile and ready to fuck her sideways into tomorrow. That was exactly the kind of pressure that could play with your head if you let it, that could lead to the “it-happens-to-everyone-sometimes/not-to-me-it-doesn't” conversation.

We'd been dating intensely for over a month by then, and it had already taken on a life of its own: long, confessional phone calls fading into whispers as the hour grew late, roses and flowers and cute e-mails at work, making out for hours at a time in her car before she drove home. On days that we'd be going out, Hailey drove to work instead of taking the Metro-North, ostensibly because she didn't want to take the train so late, but the car, parked at the fire hydrant in front of my building, became the perfect venue for our extended good nights, so much more comfortable than groping at each other in my stairwell, which was poorly insulated and smelled of feet and spoiled milk. I couldn't recall the last time I'd spent so much time just kissing someone. It always seemed to me that any kissing that didn't advance to naked foreplay after the first ten minutes simply grew stale from lack of direction. But Hailey and I could go at it for hours, until our lips were swollen and chapped, tongues numb, jaws locked, and afterwards I'd climb back up to my apartment to ice my aching balls, with the taste of her delightfully lodged in the back of my parched throat, her scent inhaled so powerfully that it penetrated my brain behind my eyes in lavender cloudbursts. It seemed juvenile, really, a man my age barely getting to second base, but there was something undeniably exciting about it too. And while we knew that sex was inevitable, was the driving force behind the whole process, the fact that I was dating a single mother made me feel particularly responsible about introducing sex into the relationship before I knew I was committed. Also, she was a beautiful woman who'd been with the kind of men who routinely score beautiful women and, frankly, I was scared I wouldn't measure up.

But innate horniness will always prevail, and soon enough we ended up naked and sweaty in my bed, venting a month's worth of pent-up desire in a wild, unprecedented session that left no sexual stone unturned. When it was finally over, we lay motionless and panting beside each other on my wrecked sheets as the sweat cooled and dried on our skin, like two wounded soldiers left behind on the battlefield. “Oh my God,” Hailey gasped softly, her eyes wide and incredulous in the dim light of my darkened bedroom.

“Who knew?” I agreed.

“Well, I had my suspicions,” she said, turning her head to lick the sweat off my neck. I reached over for her and she rolled easily into me, throwing her thigh over mine, her head resting on my chest. “We fit perfectly,” she said, and as I kissed her scalp, I felt the tears inexplicably come to my eyes. I knew from having been on the other end that crying after sex can send a bad message, so I closed my eyes and hoped Hailey wouldn't look up. She seemed to know, but instead of questioning me, she pressed her lips against my chest, her fingers splayed out over the line of hair bisecting my stomach. After a minute she said, “You okay?”

“I'm just a little more in love than I thought,” I said, surprising us both. First tears, now love. I could practically feel the testosterone evaporating through my pores.

She nodded, and kissed my chest again in a way that made me shake. “Don't let it freak you out.”

“I won't if you don't.”

She looked up at me and grinned. “After what Jim put me through, it would take a lot to freak me out.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

She slid up to rest her head in the crook of my neck. “Our story begins with the pubes in the wastebasket,” she intoned softly, like Alistair Cooke.

“As such stories so often do,” I said, and she shoved me playfully, and we both laughed. And it was good.