The World Without You (23 page)

One time, she invited Wyeth along. She was testing him, she figured, though Calder was two at the time, willing to be held by whoever wished to hold him, and she wasn’t even sure what the test was, what constituted passing and failure.

They went out for coffee after class one day, and later, strolling down Telegraph Avenue near her apartment, she invited Wyeth up.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re raising your son smack dab across from People’s Park. How’s that for political indoctrination?”

“I’m raising him across from a fraternity,” Thisbe said. “He gets woken up by hooting in the middle of the night. I tell him there are owls outside his window, but he’s starting to know better.”

There were photographs of Leo all over the apartment; you couldn’t so much as walk a few paces without bumping into one.

“Shrine to the late husband?”

“I know,” she said. “It’s macabre.”

“How long has it been?”

“Four months.”

“Jesus,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“You didn’t know?”

“I knew it was recent. I just …”

“It’s okay.”

For a second he just stood there staring at the photos.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have invited you up.”

“No,” he said. “I’m glad you did.” He was wearing a gray T-shirt in the back of which was a small hole; she could see the movement of his shoulder blades as he walked through her apartment. His hair was the color of cork, and he had the beginnings of a beard, which was darker than that. His shoulders were expansive. All of him was; he filled up every room he entered. He was six foot three, so much larger than Leo. In bed with him for the first time, Thisbe was startled by how much of the mattress he took up; whichever way she rolled, she was pressed to him. She hadn’t imagined she’d end up with someone who looked like Leo, though in the months after his death everyone reminded her of him. Yet that first time with Wyeth, she hadn’t thought about Leo, and realizing this, she panicked.

That day in her apartment, seeing all those photographs, Wyeth said, “What better way to dissuade potential suitors.”

Yet he hadn’t been dissuaded.

The next day, Thisbe called Lily. Lily was the worst person she could have called: she was Leo’s sister. Yet Thisbe felt at the same time that Lily was the only person she could talk to; besides Malcolm, she was the one person in the world who knew both Leo and Wyeth.

“I went on a date,” she said. She didn’t even mention who the person was, but when Lily said, “Good for you!” she told her it was Wyeth.

“Does that make it better?” Thisbe said.

“Better, how?”

“That you and Malcolm know him? I figure I’m not cheating as much. I’m keeping it in the family.”

“Cheating?” Lily said. “I
want
you to date.”

“But it’s only been four months.”

“It’s not as if you’re getting remarried.”

No, Thisbe thought, it certainly wasn’t. But then one date became another became another, and because they were in graduate school and didn’t need to date—their life
was
a date: they saw each other all the time—their relationship progressed without their even noticing it. That, at least, is what Thisbe tells herself. Lily knows she and Wyeth have been seeing each other, but Thisbe hasn’t told her how serious it has become—hasn’t mentioned, for instance, that Wyeth has asked her to move in with him in the fall. She’s considering doing it, though she has asked Wyeth to wait until she gets back from this trip. With Leo’s memorial coming up, Wyeth—her whole life—has been put on hold.

She’s still sitting in the basement in her T-shirt and underwear while Calder remains asleep. She hangs up the phone, and now she sees Lily at the top of the stairs.

“Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“A couple hours ago you were in tears. Not everyone starts to cry in the middle of a parlor game.”

“What can I say? I’m extremely competitive.”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s what it was.”

And it wasn’t, of course, though Thisbe herself doesn’t know what it was. A year later, it still happens; she’ll be minding her affairs and she’ll start to cry. There are wells of sadness within her that even she can’t excavate.

“Let’s take a drive,” Lily says. “My parents will watch Calder.”

Then they’re in Lily’s van, and they’re driving the route Thisbe and Leo used to take, past Belvoir Terrace, the summer arts camp for girls. It’s late afternoon, but Thisbe can still recall those nighttime drives, the serpentine twist of the pavement, the smell of the woods as the rain comes through the open window, the leaves flapping like bats’ wings.

They enter the Historic Village of Lenox, established in 1767, as they’re reminded on every sign, though the history Thisbe recalls is a history of bad art, which continues, she discovers, unabated. The sidewalks are lined with metal sculpture—of donkeys, of elephants, of human figures playing the tuba and the trombone. They park on Church Street, across from Twigs, where there hangs in the window a child’s T-shirt that reads
I
’
M
ONLY
DOING
THIS
UNTIL
MY
BAND
GETS
SIGNED
.

Up on Housatonic, they go into the bar where Thisbe used to work. Walking past the patrons watching the Red Sox on TV, she half expects to see the waitresses she knew. But they’re all gone now, another generation of twenty-two-year-olds pouring beer and serving curly fries.

“Can you believe it?” Lily says. “It’s four in the afternoon and everyone’s already drunk.”

A girl in a pink halter top has draped herself over the jukebox. She’s fishing through her pockets for change. “This is where Leo and I met,” Thisbe says.

“It’s where everyone meets everyone,” Lily says. “There’s nowhere else to go in this godforsaken town.”

They’re sitting at the bar, where the drink specials are written on a chalkboard. Keno cards are lined up behind a set of salt shakers. Thisbe stares down at her forearms laid out on the table, the veins running through them, milky blue.

“How are you doing?” Lily asks.

“Okay, I guess.”

“Will you make it through these next couple of days?”

“Do I have a choice?”

A woman threads her way through the crowd, holding a pitcher of beer above her head, her T-shirt riding up her stomach. A waitress delivers a nacho platter, and a man shouts, “Waitress, taste my soup!” but there’s no soup for the waitress to taste and she just stares at the man dumbly.

“We could play pool,” Thisbe says. But now that she’s suggested it she doesn’t want to, and she stays seated at the bar, and Lily does, too.

From across the room, it appears as if someone is waving at Thisbe, but then a girl in tight jeans and a pink cutoff T-shirt emerges from behind her and waves back. A Doors song is playing on the jukebox, and Thisbe has a vague, unsettling feeling from long ago, the taste of beer and a first rock concert, everyone pawing each other. She has never been comfortable in bars. Beneath the surface lie the seeds of repressed violence; she’s always waiting for a fight to break out.

She flips through the menu. She used to take her customers’ orders and, without a pad or pencil, commit them to memory. Nine or ten customers, food and drink: she never made a mistake. It was her waitress’s legerdemain, the equivalent of balancing a ball on her nose, and she did in fact feel like a trained sea lion. But it earned her better tips and she needed the money. She was storing up cash for the winter, when she would drive to Middletown to visit Leo.

Above the bar, the chalkboard reads
EVERYTHING
’
S
BETTER
WITH
GUINNESS
. Thisbe’s holding a Guinness herself, and her fingers make stripes on the frosted beer mug. She taps her hand against the glass, the beat relentless, like Morse code. A peanut machine stands in the corner, and next to it a Chiclets machine. A hard-to-pinpoint sadness sideswipes her. She looks away, blinking, feeling as if she’s about to cry. On TV, a Red Sox player does something acrobatic in the field, and the crowd emits a collective roar.

“You should eat something,” Lily says. “Have a hamburger.”

Thisbe shakes her head.

“Potato skins?”

“I’m not hungry.” And she’s not, though she didn’t eat lunch and earlier she was famished.

Finally, she orders a turkey wrap, which she picks at like a rodent before leaving it uneaten at the side of her plate.

“I see you’ve kept your fast metabolism.”

“It’s more like I stopped eating.”

“When?”

She shrugs. She’s always been slender, but this past year she’s hardly eaten at all.

Pool is being played behind them, the balls clanking against each other like nunchucks. A kid in a backwards baseball cap drums his pool cue against his sneaker and a plume of chalk floats through the air. A waitress passes them holding a tray of discarded chicken wings, a gob of blue cheese dripping off it.

Thisbe goes into the bathroom, where she stands at the sink letting the water wash over her. A sign reads
EMPLOYEES
MUST
WASH
THEIR
HANDS
BEFORE
RETURNING
TO
WORK
,
but someone has crossed out the
h
in hands and changed the
d
to a
u.

“Come on,” she tells Lily. “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, it has started to rain again. She has an umbrella in the car and she thinks to go get it, but Lily is headed in the other direction.

On Main Street, they pass the public library and the wine store. Wine and art galleries and hideous puns, she thinks: that’s what Lenox is.

And now, sure enough, they walk past Tanglewool, where dresses hang in the window. A dismembered mannequin lies in the gutter. “Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater,” Lily says.

In front of Town Hall, they’re flanked on either side by the police station and the fire station. “Should we take a drive?”

“Where to?” Thisbe says.

“We can go to Stockbridge and see the Norman Rockwell Museum. We can continue on to Great Barrington.” Across the street, they can make out Loeb’s market and the health-food store.

“Actually, a museum doesn’t sound so bad. It’s better than going to Laos to sleep under mosquito nets.”

“Why?” Lily says. “Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“I’m an anthropologist, so I have to do fieldwork. Knowing me, I’ll end up with a case of dengue fever.”

“I’d make a terrible anthropologist,” Lily says. “I’m the world’s worst hypochondriac.”

“You can’t think about those things.” Though Thisbe does, in fact, think about them. She’s putting on a tough-guy act. It’s as if now that Leo has gone it has devolved upon her to be the reckless one. Merely getting a PhD could be considered reckless, the academic job market being what it is. She suspects Marilyn and David would have preferred she go to law school. Her own parents probably would have preferred law school, too. Everyone, she thinks, prefers law school, except for the people who actually go to law school; anyway, that was never in the cards. She’d been preparing to go to graduate school when Leo died, so she feels as if she’s following their plan, carrying out their joint venture.

“Would Wyeth go too?” Lily asks.

“Where?”

“To Laos. To get dengue fever.”

“Are you kidding me? He’d be leading the brigade.”

“Really? I don’t remember him being a daredevil.”

“No more so than any other guy.” So often it’s that way, Thisbe thinks, the man with his fantasies, his pleasing delusions, the woman left to draw the reins. She can see it even now with Wyeth, so different from Leo but who, like Leo, relies on her as ballast. “No, we can’t go to Belize for the weekend. It’s expensive and we need injections and I have a three-year-old to take care of.” Is that, she wonders, why women were created? To allow men to say “I would have done it if only she’d let me”?

They head to Lilac Park, where they walk down the hill past the benches and the gazebo. The rain has stopped, and a girl of about thirteen is sitting on the grass playing the flute. At the bottom of the hill is a thicket of trees, and as they wander past the brush Thisbe feels as if she’s on a camping trip, taken blindfolded on a Girl Scout treasure hunt. There are no sounds, just the rhythmic thumping of their shoes making their soft imprint in the dirt; no sights either, save for the occasional fugitive headlight illuminating them, then casting them back into shadows.

Lily makes a growling noise.

“Very funny.”

“I guess I’m not much of a mime.”

That had been Leo’s specialty. He could make the sound of a squeegee running up and down a window so that if you closed your eyes you thought he
was
a squeegee. And a vacuum cleaner and a garbage disposal and a popcorn maker and a blender. He did the world’s best cow; you let him loose in a pasture, and he would set off a chorus of lowing. “Me and my useless talents,” he said.

But they hadn’t been useless. Senior year at Bowdoin, she’d had an alarm clock that woke you to the sound of your choice—waves, wind, brook, hummingbird—and when the alarm clock broke, catapulted across the bedroom one night, victim of overexuberant sex, Leo himself took on the role of alarm clock, waking up early to make hummingbird sounds for her. He would even do them over the phone, calling her from his offices at the
Wesleyan Argus
, where he’d been up all night putting the newspaper to bed. On weekends he would come in person, taking the roads through New Hampshire and Maine; sometimes he’d show up on weeknights too, having prevailed upon a fellow editor to fill in for him. Thisbe saw his body when it came home from Iraq; she pulled back the sheet and looked at him. He had been flown to D.C., and afterward, walking on the mall, the Washington Monument suspended in the distance, she felt so dizzy she had to sit down. Why, she wondered, had she insisted on seeing the body? She didn’t have to be the one to identify him. But if she hadn’t done it, she’d have always wondered whether it had been a mistake, a different journalist killed, and perhaps this was another trick of his, a final act of ventriloquism by the grand ventriloquist, and maybe he would still come back to her.