people. My name was there and “stern creature??” and after it, “sad.”
I scolded myself and put the book in the approximate position in which I found it, partially covered by the bed linens. When I pushed it perhaps a shade too far, its corner made an object roll, a glass from the sound of it—a wineglass in fact, on its side. A trail of dried red led out of the glass. I got on hands and knees to locate the stain, the extent of it. I made out one great drop the size of an Indian dollar deep as blood in George’s tan Kashan rug. I put my finger on it, could feel a trace of stickiness. I could get it out, if I was permitted. I carried the glass to the kitchen and slid it into the soapy water. I looked for it to settle, listened for it. Waited.
I did not want to go—I half-willed her to walk in and discover me in the apartment—mine by rights and more so in George’s absence. Maybe I’d say I smelled gas or maybe I’d stand there in the middle of her tide and let her see it as I did, rising and rising unmindful of charts or the lives of others.
* * *
Back in my apartment an unfamiliar male voice greeted me. I went for my golf club, one of my father’s old drivers, until I put together that my voice mail, provided by the phone company, must have been full so the call had gone to my phone’s old answering system and was recording, out loud. The voice’s cadence and inflection was Bay Ridge or Staten Island and glad to be aligned there; it never-minded g’s at the end of words and rolled through consonants like they were buttery things in its mouth.
It was a police officer. He was calling to “ask some questions about a Mr. Joseph Coughlan, to confirm specifics given to me by Jeanette Coughlan, about her father’s disappearance.” He spoke quickly so by the time I ran to the phone and picked up the receiver, the voice was gone, already on to the next call, the next set of inquiries. A checklist. Pro forma.
I gripped the hard of the phone’s plastic in my hand and went blank, listening to the dial tone. There in that drift I saw myself call my husband’s sister, to tell her things that I had not. Did she know my husband had believed we would live in Umbria’s Valnerina or on Lake Como, maybe do a stint in Turkey or Greece one day? Where we’d raise children who spoke in English fizzy with foreign words? Or when we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge that he’d touch the Brooklyn-side stanchion, every time, to thank the bridge, reassure it?
She certainly couldn’t know that the last book I read to him when he was still healthy enough to follow it was Lady into Fox, a slim fantastic story about a woman who transforms into a fox during a walk in the woods with her husband. Not a masterpiece but unexpected and sweetly mournful, so delightful to us both. I had the very copy, bought secondhand—it still smelled of the white bean soup he’d always make, that I prepared for him that day. I’d trapped it all, the book, its garlic aroma, in a Ziploc. And did she know how many times he’d asked me to restore him, healthy again, in my head and heart, giving not a cell, an inch, nothing to the wasting man who had, as he put it, only one good trick in him? No, she didn’t know.
Neither did my mother.
What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice just then. She’d be walking the beach or dancing or preparing to do one or the other. Heat coming off her skin.
She drank for a time after my father died in his golf club’s bar seven years ago. He had loved golf and the one drink that he allotted himself after his eighteen holes—a Manhattan or a vodka martini depending on the season. He died of an aneurism before he finished it so my mother finished it for him over and over, for about ten months, with dedication, until without much planning she decided to fly to Florida to see a high school friend. She went dancing at a supper club early into the visit, went again. She stopped drinking the next day, and when
I scolded myself and put the book in the approximate position in which I found it, partially covered by the bed linens. When I pushed it perhaps a shade too far, its corner made an object roll, a glass from the sound of it—a wineglass in fact, on its side. A trail of dried red led out of the glass. I got on hands and knees to locate the stain, the extent of it. I made out one great drop the size of an Indian dollar deep as blood in George’s tan Kashan rug. I put my finger on it, could feel a trace of stickiness. I could get it out, if I was permitted. I carried the glass to the kitchen and slid it into the soapy water. I looked for it to settle, listened for it. Waited.
I did not want to go—I half-willed her to walk in and discover me in the apartment—mine by rights and more so in George’s absence. Maybe I’d say I smelled gas or maybe I’d stand there in the middle of her tide and let her see it as I did, rising and rising unmindful of charts or the lives of others.
* * *
Back in my apartment an unfamiliar male voice greeted me. I went for my golf club, one of my father’s old drivers, until I put together that my voice mail, provided by the phone company, must have been full so the call had gone to my phone’s old answering system and was recording, out loud. The voice’s cadence and inflection was Bay Ridge or Staten Island and glad to be aligned there; it never-minded g’s at the end of words and rolled through consonants like they were buttery things in its mouth.
It was a police officer. He was calling to “ask some questions about a Mr. Joseph Coughlan, to confirm specifics given to me by Jeanette Coughlan, about her father’s disappearance.” He spoke quickly so by the time I ran to the phone and picked up the receiver, the voice was gone, already on to the next call, the next set of inquiries. A checklist. Pro forma.
I gripped the hard of the phone’s plastic in my hand and went blank, listening to the dial tone. There in that drift I saw myself call my husband’s sister, to tell her things that I had not. Did she know my husband had believed we would live in Umbria’s Valnerina or on Lake Como, maybe do a stint in Turkey or Greece one day? Where we’d raise children who spoke in English fizzy with foreign words? Or when we walked over the Brooklyn Bridge that he’d touch the Brooklyn-side stanchion, every time, to thank the bridge, reassure it?
She certainly couldn’t know that the last book I read to him when he was still healthy enough to follow it was Lady into Fox, a slim fantastic story about a woman who transforms into a fox during a walk in the woods with her husband. Not a masterpiece but unexpected and sweetly mournful, so delightful to us both. I had the very copy, bought secondhand—it still smelled of the white bean soup he’d always make, that I prepared for him that day. I’d trapped it all, the book, its garlic aroma, in a Ziploc. And did she know how many times he’d asked me to restore him, healthy again, in my head and heart, giving not a cell, an inch, nothing to the wasting man who had, as he put it, only one good trick in him? No, she didn’t know.
Neither did my mother.
What I wouldn’t give to hear her voice just then. She’d be walking the beach or dancing or preparing to do one or the other. Heat coming off her skin.
She drank for a time after my father died in his golf club’s bar seven years ago. He had loved golf and the one drink that he allotted himself after his eighteen holes—a Manhattan or a vodka martini depending on the season. He died of an aneurism before he finished it so my mother finished it for him over and over, for about ten months, with dedication, until without much planning she decided to fly to Florida to see a high school friend. She went dancing at a supper club early into the visit, went again. She stopped drinking the next day, and when
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