Age (3 page)

Recalling Christina’s first wedding at home here, and Francesca’s sexy monkey-face—and body—tipped outrageously toward all the young men, including the groom, with whom she may have been at a later date successful, I hoped against hope that Gemma would not accede. But of course she did, saying with the deprecation that always hid her joy, ‘She’ll probably arrive without a stitch to her name.’ Whereupon they would shop for her—Gemma all aglow with that intense mother-daughter intimacy for two days awarded her—as if Francesca was to be the bride.

This was how the girl would set her mother up for the next six months of ruinous conduct, from abortion money for what could only be obtained in—was it France?—‘You know Italy, Mother,’ to a disappearance in Ceylon—or was it Nepal?—in liaison with a supposed member of its royal house. Which did not save her from being ejected from that country for unseemly conduct in one of its temples. Finally came the imprisonment—was it originally in West Germany or East?—for what Gemma still believes was a political action, but I do not. She had to believe in Francesca all the way; I understand that. Or else cut her off—which for Gemma is impossible. Even now.

And I approved. In spite of outbursts of temper, my dear one, I knew I had to. Logic could not be urged. But more than that, you wouldn’t have been what you were to me if you had been able to cut people off. The girl herself—lingering on with us for weeks after that first wedding on the excuse that it had snatched her sister from us—I could scarcely address politely. It was her mischief and then her scheme, to make advances to me, in corridors, on picnics, and finally by sneaking into my study nude. I scared her, before I threw her out. ‘You will pretend to like me—just enough,’ I said. ‘From now on. No mischief. No stepfather enmity even, you poor slut. Your mother has had enough to bear.’

But a good kind friend we don’t see anymore had already come to Gemma to report. ‘That girl is driving Rupert crazy; he can’t get away from her. In your small house.’ The friend, who is rich, is said still to hear from Arturo, who at the time was her informant, writing her that Francesca had taunted him that she would get to me. ‘
Nonno
’
—
she called her father Grandfather because of his years—‘want to bet?’ She was his favorite. She tortured him too.

So you, Gemma, came to me, to let me hold you, not to reassure you—our faith in each other has been blind, some would say, if well warranted—but to reassure me. ‘You needn’t pretend about her anymore. To like her. Or to conceal from me what she is. I’ve told her. Be decent when you’re here. Or I will cut you off. And I will.’ And maybe it would have come to that by now if not because of me—if that stony-faced lifer now in Lubeck prison for her murder hadn’t done it for you, never revealing why. Her countries confused us until the end.

But that day I said: ‘You needn’t. I’ve scared her off

‘How? Tell me. You smiled your saddest maternal smile, unaware you wore it. ‘It might help me.’

It wouldn’t have. You were never in the army—where killing becomes possible to people like us. Perhaps you knew that. You didn’t press. And knew I spoke the truth, and never asked her.

‘Hate her for me,’ was all you said, shivering into me. ‘I cant.’

So, for that second wedding of her sister’s, Francesca brought her own equipment—a short white dress you were awed to find was from Fortuny—in whose spiral she moved like its black-eyed core, and the slippery young Roman, with a fat Hapsburg lip and a patrimony to match, who had bought it for her.

‘She wants to outshine the bride,’ I said to you. ‘She never will.’ She never could, though Christina was not to blame.

We watched the two of them, each with her chosen man, each of those as different as the two daughters. I saw that you were praying, your eyes blemished with hope. For Francesca was trying to make her friend see the analogy. Of weddings.

But he was watching Christina, straightforward in her gray second wedding-dress, accepting her ring with an upward look that was adornment enough, and I fear he did see what weddings were, his eyes on Christina, his fat lip wet with delight.

‘Today—I don’t hate,’ I said.

By then I was older. Who says the middle-aged don’t grow? Only the middle-aged themselves, who see that period of their lives as stuck in a swathe of life whose broad ribbon will merely advance, bearing them on. Age knows better. But who will speak for age? Do we only regress? Or do we grow too?

I began this entry intending to talk about the two of us as we are. Instead, all this wandering in the past, telling you what you already know. And telling myself. Do I hope that the story will change, mutate, in the telling? Or do I fear that the aged no longer have events—worth the telling?

You and I inhabit a present in which fewer and fewer are intimate enough with us to write or phone. Or if so, not forgetful of it. How does one chronicle that? The phone is so glumly mum now, and we have two. When it rings, we vie for it. How to write this side-by-side libretto, all of whose roles only one of us sings?

Approach it as a poem must be. It was never written before. My old age has no antecedent. No one’s has. Just as each one’s childhood is brewed fresh for the small, breathless sipper, and to any youth on his first river-haunted night, youth was never down by the river with a lover before, so age must sing its own voluntary, in a chorus of one.

Who speaks for me, sings for me, except this almanac—to an audience of one?

O
LD PEOPLE LIKE US
are the gardeners of the streets. Old male shoppers like Rupert especially, carrying home eggs as if they were also walking on them, their shoulder bags tremoring. Under the jaunty cap the face is its own beacon. Or sometimes there is an assistant presence, like me. These days I watch Rupert as if he is already alone. In a kind of gymnastic he is not aware of I practice being his companion ghost. Although I don’t believe in ghosts—or perhaps because of that—I feel reduced in size, almost Rupert’s child. Or perhaps because I cannot carry.

I note that the greengrocer is still kind, allowing Rupert to hover over the apples to pick out an especially cheeky flame, the mound of McIntoshes crumbling as he does so. Or to forefinger a scallion bulb with a secret rub, like a lover feeling a vulva. At that I giggle—I’m still alive. Mr Raso, the vegetable man, doesn’t watch us for stealing, as he tells us he has to do now with some senior pensioners. We are long-term customers who he knows shop at the supermarket only for soap powder and other neutrally packaged goods. And he knows I’m Italian, though he doesn’t see me at his church. But one day, when I pass there alone, I may hint to him, as I buy a lemon or so, that Rupert suffers from a slight nervous affliction of the hands. Which is true enough—ever since that day in the gallery.

‘Poor Raso,’ my husband says as we leave. ‘We’re his status now.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Once he was vegetable king of the neighbourhood, don’t you remember? To have him pick a honeydew for you was like an award. And now he’s only the last non-Oriental vegetable stand on the block. And the young don’t go to him.’

We pass one of those Korean stalls with a salad-bar electric down its center. Neon pimientos, lime and orange melon balls arranged like savory junk, the green fuss of chicory at the ready, sliced mushrooms jigsawed on pillows of bean curd. And at every other barrow of more ordinary produce, one of the anonymous artists of the clan is bent over some lesser nurturing.

We pass without buying anything. Yes, Raso needs us. He too is old. ‘Why did you giggle back there?’ Rupert says.

I tell him, doing it again. He joins me.

Can older people giggle like that and not be obscene? To that girl just passing for instance, in a swing of marigold hair blowing straight out behind her. It’s not the hair but her jointless ease that I envy.

‘See her?’ Rupert murmurs. And the whole windy street? Ah, I love the Village. You can have your twig-and-sand twiddlers.
This—
is environment.’

He says Greenwich Village is like parts of Paris, where over and over youth is the crop. But in Europe, much less Paris—I think—is it the only one?

Am I jealous? No—I have been ‘youth,’ and could not be so again, certainly not from within. Possibly not even in the joints, now that I am used to their familiar, even sophisticated grumbling. What youth does is to make me uncertain that I am still in the world. This world.

When we stop at the butcher’s I choose a brisket, savoring the experienced red of that well-salted meat, and I myself carry it home.

W
OMEN GET THEIR PAST
earlier than we do. And keep it longer. In spite of which they answer the world more from the flesh than we do. And are always answering themselves there.

I have known this almost forever—or since I began to know them. Yet yesterday was a shock to me.

We were just putting down our bundles from the stores. A sweet fragrance—of purchase and stability—rose from them. And I thought: worldliness is all. Enough that the meals spare as ours are, may come on as a clock turns, and rounded with a little sleep—that wakes. To a book lying open, that can expect to be finished. In these rooms where the abiding flame is the apple in the bowl, and the only war is with the ant. While the toilet gurgles toward tomorrow, and nobody in the obits is yours.

Then I see that she is standing with her arms half extended and the butcher’s brown bag still in their crook, in a pause out of Dali, or Magritte. They are not our style of picture.

‘Gemma!’

I had to call her twice.

Then the arms come down, but inching like a wound-up doll’s, and I have to catch the package before it falls. Those merry-Andrew eyes of hers—blank. For a long minute she did not know me. That sharp mind, the other half of my soul’s repartee—where is it?

I look to our kitchen for help. A hundred years ago, when tenements could still be respectable, the kitchens were often good-sized like this one, with walls tiled white halfway up, above the deep washtubs and the porcelain-knobbed iron stoves. We came too late for the tubs but not for the stove, on which two generations of a Sicilian clan once cooked. The fire-escape sun, still ours even if barred and gated, is our hearth. The best of our pictures hang above the tile—the Marsh, a Soyer, and the Hopper, whose sad misogynist porch I have marked to sell first, should we fall heir to those death costs, which are now called ‘terminal expense.’ All of them, including the not-authenticated Prendergast, are as truly owned pictures should be, a little darkened by the vapors of use. The long white-enamel table, rimmed with a milky blue where the zinc shows through, has two leaves in it, which when pulled out make a sound like a grandmother’s cough. I sit Gemma down at it. The sun splashes all with afternoon paint.

In an effort to keep ourselves more forward-looking, we have recently stored away the family photos. That’s as near to retiring to Florida as we care to go. I joke that perhaps Christina’s baby will want them. The first-born of a forty-year-old mother may well have such tastes. I am relieved that gone too is the snapshot clipped from Francesca’s high school yearbook, underneath it the printed comment:
Ambition: ‘To be a lovely baddie.’ Jeepers, Frankie, don’t we know!
Ambition achieved, I thought as I took it down—the German newspapers take excellent black-and-whites, even of alley manslaughter. Gemma’s face was hard as I did it, but not with hate.

And not surprisingly, that moment, as we took ourselves down from that gallery and packed us away too, was when our death dropped into our palms—to be scrutinized.

I think of women as suffering heart-wounds that even men who, unlike me, have had children, would not have. She would deny this, not because she’s proud, but because of my lack. She knows I would want everything my span could give, even to the wounds. As it is, I have assumed that our deaths, whatever the body cause, will in the body’s core be different. Now, holding her close, warming her eyes back to me, I am not sure. I had never dreamed that either of us would begin dying in the mind.

Then she snapped back. The package of meat is still in my left hand.

‘In the fridge, why don’t you?’ she says, in that voice which will housewife me in eternity, but before I can manage to put the package there with the hand that tremors, she snatches it. ‘No, why don’t I cook it now?’ she says. ‘Hand me down the peppercorns.’

I do that, with my right hand. As I do, she clasps both my hands and kisses them, the shaky left one more.

‘Since that day in the gallery, eh?’ she says, smoothing it. ‘But maybe it’ll pass.’

‘What day?’

‘You don’t remember? It was why you had the CAT scan.’

‘Oh, I remember that all right. Four hundred smackers out the window. What a waste of cash. But I suppose it’s routine.’

She looks at me so lost.

There was such a day, then. Must have been.

That is the shock.

We watch each other. But unevenly. There are times when one or the other of us is already alone.

W
E HAVE BEEN AWHIRL
in the world. I had forgotten—we both had—how absorbing of ills it is to be there—and that the world can be entered by intent.

Rupert bought us tickets to four plays, two off-Broadway and two on—one the kind of musical we are snobs about, on which we never splurge. How awesome it is that all over the city these convocations spring up, each one only for a night—as if the very seats hold spores of audience.

‘No other audience is the same,’ Rupert said, at the first theater. ‘So dearly bought—for some. So much a birthright—for others. People who
see
language. Who
must
have mimicry.’ And I know he is thinking, as he arches his white head and the neck tendons tighten: People who may still read me.

Perhaps somebody saw us—that old couple too stiffly in their Sunday best. For, as if by some sympathetic twitch in the tough city scheme, our phone began to ring. I was asked to testify at our community board on the merits of two projected high-rises in our area, and did well, the meeting being covered on TV. Within the month, two articles mentioned Rupert’s work.