Perfection (31 page)

I rouse myself and find Will still in the bathroom brushing his teeth. I brush my teeth, change into my warm flannel robe, and hop under the bedcovers while Will does his stretching exercises, recommended for a back injury some years earlier. I remind him of the first time he stayed over. I observed him doing his exercises on that evening with great fascination, intrigued and pleased that he was disciplined enough about his exercises to do them even when another man might have had more pressing desires, like getting my clothes off. We didn’t even have sex that night. It was part of the Plan to take things slowly. But now we are old hands, so to speak.

Liza comes in briefly to tell me that she has finished Book 18 of the Boxcar Children. I congratulate her and give her another bedtime kiss. Will wishes her good night and tells her he loves her. She offers a muffled response. She is still finding her way in this new situation. It will take time for her to find out what will be good for her.

I resettle Liza in her bed and return, closing the bedroom door, before climbing back into the warm bed. I am always cold, and Will’s body is warm under the covers. He’s a good size for me, trim but not overdone in the muscle department. The legs of a cyclist taper gently to sculpted knees, well-proportioned calves, slim ankles, and well-defined feet. His torso is slim but filled out nicely at the shoulders. He has a slender neck, a small chin cleft, a large and angular nose with a dent from his days as a junior boxer. And those very blue eyes. And his elfin (or are they Vulcan?) ears. And now, not much hair. His arms are surprisingly strong for his slim build. He lifts me up into a playful toss—the brief seconds in the air are thrilling. I am relieved to land solidly on the bed with a bounce.

Now we are facing each other with our legs overlapped under the covers. He is wearing a T-shirt and a pair of green Christmas boxer shorts, decorated with wee reindeer. I am still wearing my flannel bathrobe. He seems dreamy and tired, and I think maybe we’ll just enjoy this and we won’t make love. We embrace and draw each other tighter. His hands wander around under the covers, touching me on my waist and in the space between my lower back and the rise of my bum. We kiss and he sighs and I sigh. He says I am a sex bomb. This is a good thing for a woman to hear when she is forty-five. I am thinking
dayanu
—it would have sufficed—the refrain from the Jewish Passover prayer. If God had just brought us to the desert for forty years and not given us
manna, it would have been enough. But he did give us manna. Life is good, even for a heathen Jewish girl, who can’t remember any of the other words of this Hebrew prayer. Off with the flannel robe, off with the T-shirt, off with the Christmas boxer shorts.

Later, we drift off to sleep, pulling the warm covers back over and nestling in tight like furry, hibernating animals. Sleep is overtaking, my eyes are closing, and my final thought is
yes
. A big, bold word in bubble letters with outlines and drop shadows in shades of hot pink, red, and orange, and an animated John Lennon prancing in Pepperland, the people waking up from their paralyzed, gray sleep, and the Blue Meanies relenting at last with the opening trumpet blasts of the sampled Marseillaise, and then the music softens, the letters collapse softly, and the room is peaceful darkness.

2005–2007

Many days after
that perfect one were full of difficulty. One evening during the spring of 2005, my mother called me. She’d felt unwell, and her physician had found fluid in her lungs. My dad had taken her to the hospital for a biopsy.

“It’s cancer,” she said with her trademark frankness. I was devastated. My parents, in the tenth year of a well-deserved retirement, were about to leave on a long-planned trip to France.

My mother didn’t want to talk long that evening. After she said good-bye, I did the only thing that felt useful. I Googled “mesothelioma,” carefully typing out the unfamiliar word, and arrived at a BBC website. In the course of thirty minutes, I learned that mesothelioma is an unyielding cancer. After exposure to asbestos, even a tiny amount, small tumors grow in the patient’s
lungs over many years. The disease is therefore usually diagnosed in a late, inoperable stage. While other lung cancers respond to chemotherapy, mesothelioma is unresponsive in most cases. Life expectancy from the time of diagnosis is twelve to eighteen months. After this brutal crash course, I felt like I had been kicked in the chest. My mother was going to die from this disease. The question was only how soon.

My mother, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, was a tough survivor, and she tackled her treatment options with determination, though she was already weakened from the growing tumors. My parents canceled the trip to France and consulted specialists. When surgery was ruled out as a possibility, my mother’s oncologist urged her to try chemotherapy. He talked about life extension and quality of life. After my research, I wasn’t convinced, but I accepted my mother’s wish to try anything that might help. My father took her for months of chemotherapy treatments, which only depleted her further and had little effect on the tumors.

Meanwhile, I packed up my house slowly, waiting out the last of Liza’s school year. Our family drew closer during this time, even as we watched my mother fade away. When my brother and I visited my parents for the July Fourth holiday weekend, our worst fears were realized. My mother was wasted and pale, her bald head wrapped in a scarf, her hands shaking. I had seen those advertisements for antinausea medications featuring Grandpa or Grandma chasing grandchild on a gorgeous soft lawn. In my mother’s case, the antinausea drugs were mostly ineffective. On a good day she sat in a chair, got down a bit of food and tea without vomiting, stared into space, read a few pages, drifted in and out of sleep.

Her life during chemotherapy was like pressing the Pause but
ton during a disaster movie when you need to use the toilet. When you return and press Play, you are right back where you left off. The plane is still going to crash; you just froze the frame for a short while. None of us who witnessed her ordeal would have called this a good quality of life, and neither did she.

“What did I do in my life to deserve this?” she asked my father. He told me this later, when it was almost over.

Moving Day, June 30, 2005, arrived in the midst of this family crisis. The real estate transaction I’d attempted had gone seriously south, which meant we’d all be moving into Will’s one-bedroom apartment till we could find something else. After the moving trucks left us behind in our empty home, a couple came over with their kids, which softened the hard edges of the morning. Liza took a last swim in the pool, where she’d attempted her first doggie paddles as a three-year-old. I took a photo of her, dripping wet, her swim goggles perched on her forehead like the flying goggles of a World War I flying ace. The image captured her brave cheerfulness as we prepared to head off to a new life that very afternoon. She was losing a lot—friends, belongings we’d had to pass on, a school where she had been nurtured, and now the home she loved. She had repeatedly made it clear that she was not happy about our move.

As the afternoon drew to a close, we piled our last luggage into Will’s Honda CRV. We pressed our four complaining cats into their carriers. Loaded to the rooftop, we pulled out of the driveway for the last time and headed to Brooklyn.

It was not the glorious reentry I had hoped for. I wished we were moving to the new apartment I had tried to purchase, but New York City is always a wondrous creation on a clear summer evening. We crossed the Triborough Bridge, and I admired the
sparkling sunset over Manhattan. Despite my disappointment, I was happy to be home, almost ready to kiss the grimy sidewalk on Seventh Avenue.

From that first night, as we unpacked at Will’s apartment, I was relieved by the possibility that I would never have to see Cathy again. I hadn’t realized how pervasive her presence had been, even though I rarely saw her in town after the Halloween parade.

I had forced myself to drive by her house a week before our move. Will sat next to me as I piloted onto her street. I saw her, reading a book in her hammock, just as she’d been the July morning I had confronted her. She looked up, our eyes met. She turned away.

“There she is,” I remarked sullenly to Will.
And perhaps there she will stay. Maybe now I can leave the ugly thing they did together behind me. Perhaps one day it won’t be the first thing I think about as I wake each morning.

The rest of the summer passed in a blur.

While getting Liza settled in a new school that fall, I tried to juggle parenting, work, apartment hunting, and visits to my parents, but plans frequently deteriorated—sometimes just doing the minimum was too much. During that time, it was helpful to remember that life could offer flavors other than sour and bitter.

What I had was companionship. During the first and the subsequent move and my mother’s illness, Will managed to find lightness on dark days while tirelessly schlepping our stuff to and from storage units in rented vans. He parented with pleasure, eagerly attended parent-teacher conferences, and helped Liza with
her math homework. While feeling upended and homeless, I also felt supported.

By December, my mother had had enough of the chemotherapy. “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” she remarked with gallows humor. “I don’t really want to leave, but I’m ready to leave.”

Her last family Christmas dinner, at our new apartment, was a bittersweet meal. At least the chemo was over. She enjoyed the lamb stew I made, a glass of good red wine, and some chocolate truffles. I hadn’t seen her eat with such pleasure in months.

During a brief respite before the inevitable final decline, her hair reappeared as short gray fuzz and the color of her skin refreshed. She could walk with effort to a local restaurant, or sit on the porch of their weekend house and enjoy a summer breeze. By the end of July, she had grown weaker again, and in early August she decided she wouldn’t get out of bed anymore.

She died on October 22, 2006. At the end, she was just a ghost in the bed, cared for by two hospice nurses who traded shifts during her last three months. She left peacefully, and we were grateful for that. But I still wish I could rewind the movie. In my version, she would refuse the chemotherapy and head instead to the jetway for the night flight to Paris, to enjoy a last adventure with her partner of fifty-nine years.

In the days after she died, we began looking through her drawers. I found a well-used child’s toothbrush, three metal diaper pins, and two pieces of enamel jewelry I had made for her at sleepaway camp. I found a bag containing my childhood hair ribbons and the white cotton gloves she made me wear when we went to concerts or to see
The Nutcracker
at Lincoln Center. My brother found a leather tube with straps, something like a finger
glove. He recognized it after a few puzzled moments as the protective covering he wore in 1965 after I squashed his left ring finger in our toy cupboard door, “accidentally on purpose.” I remembered getting in big trouble for that one. In one of her coat pockets, I found a small black pebble, like the ones I have collected on Maine island shores. In a yellowed plastic bag, I found what was possibly her wedding bouquet—the dried roses disintegrated on contact—and a small keepsake book filled with notes in German from friends and family in Austria. The entries were from 1938 to 1940, dark times in Vienna. My father and I wondered how many of the signers had made it out alive; my mother’s escape with her family in 1940 was already perilous and miraculous. My father said he’d never seen the book before. My mother had her secrets, though I wish I could ask her about that little book and her childhood friends. As a mother, I know why she kept the eclectic mementos of her childhood and ours. As Liza once said, memories are good, even painful ones.

During the last months of my mother’s illness,
my father and I ate a good number of meals in a restaurant near their apartment. He needed time away from the sickbed.

My father, vigorous at eighty-two, is well known for his fantastic memory. He remembers the scrawny sandwiches he ate at a picnic seventy-five years ago during the depths of the Great Depression, songs and jingles from the 1940s, baseball scores from the World Series in 1956 or any other year. So I was not surprised to discover during one of our dinners that he had a vivid memory of a day I had completely forgotten.

Liza was about two and a half. We’d just moved away from
Brooklyn, so this was possibly one of our first trips back to visit family. My parents met us at Grand Central Station. My father recalled his delight as he spotted Liza on the platform, running up the ramp toward him. Then he looked beyond her and saw Henry and me walking slowly behind her.

“Liza’s face was so full of joy, she was running up that ramp with her arms stretched out, but you two looked so miserable,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going on, but we were very upset to see that.”

My father told me about his growing suspicions that Henry had lost his way and that something was wrong in our marriage. My parents never spoke directly to me about their fears. For a long and happily married couple like my parents, it must have been heartbreaking to see me unhappy. And in the end, I doubt that I’d have been able to listen to them, any more than I would have been able to hear Irena’s more direct evidence.

I was glad that my father remembered. His memory was now mine again. After he told me the story, I was able to recall the day, though I could not remember the fight Henry and I must have had on the train as we traveled to the city.

I was ready to see other forgotten days.
I had some home movies, films Henry shot on a long-gone Hi8 camera, transferred to DVD. I was curious to see those years again, through his eyes. Me feeding Liza strained beans, me giving her a bath, the scintillating material only new parents record and view again. One clip, a bit of film I’d never watched, showed a birthday party at Cathy’s house, for her daughter, Amy, who was turning four. The cake is presented, the song is sung, and Amy blows out her candles.
Packages are unwrapped to the drone of too-cheerful oohs and aahs over gifts that will soon be forgotten. Cathy winks and sticks her tongue out at Henry behind the camera. Now I could understand the body language, the suggestive glances, and Henry’s coy comments. I am occasionally on camera, distracted, focused on Liza.

I was able to watch the film with the curiosity of encountering my past self. When I saw Liza in her party dress, I smiled with pleasure. I was even able look at Cathy without feeling injured.

I don’t keep much of Henry out in the open. One photograph of him looking at me fondly with a blurred two-year-old Liza in the foreground is positioned discreetly on my dresser, usually well concealed behind piles of clothes I have forgotten to put away. The gold claw ring clasping a piece of coral and our wedding rings rest in my jewelry box, objects for Liza to consider when she gets older. I do cherish the copy of
Macbeth
with illustrations by Salvador Dalí, though I wonder if I shouldn’t donate it to a rare books library, where more people could appreciate such a unique work. The menu he wrote for my fortieth birthday party is tacked onto the side of our refrigerator. On days when I still wonder about the nature of the love he had for me, I consider that well-planned menu. Though Henry aimed to impress my friends who attended, though he flirted with all, though Cathy was present at that gathering, I believe that the effort he put into the preparation of this meal represented a genuine love I can now appreciate without anguish.

During one of my long talks with Will,
early in our relationship, he said something that I knew was difficult but correct: “You have to forgive him, for us to move on together.”

Forgiveness is a wonderful thing, the only truth that saves us from eating ourselves alive and causing damage to everyone we love. I continue to work on forgiveness. I do not, however, wish to forget any of this.

I cannot forget what Henry did. Nor can I forget Cathy’s part in such a layered deceit, though the pathetic absurdity of the fruit salad she left in my refrigerator now summons up something softer than outrage.

I have concluded, in the aftermath of everything, that I am a terrible judge of character. My friends laugh and assume I am joking when I declare this, but it is not a laughing matter for me. The problem is those brief fits of exuberant optimism that sometimes cloud my first impressions. I won’t always see through the beautiful smile, the clever remark, or the practiced gesture. I find that I need to allow myself many meetings to take the right measure of a person.

Cathy and Henry remain in my mind toxic persons, the likes of whom I hope I will never encounter again at an intimate level. I believe that I have, at last, learned to identify other such persons. I see them now at parties, in shops and restaurants, at school gatherings. I try to observe their confusion, and connect it to my own confusion as another struggling human. I can engage such people in polite conversation if required, but I do not want them in my life.

When I think about Christine, Ellen, and especially Eliana, I experience different emotions. These women briefly crossed a terrible line. They never knew me until after Henry’s death. They never ate in my home or pretended to be friends. Confronted, they did not run away from me. We struggled as best we could and learned something. We were able to make changes in our lives. I am proud of the effort we made together.