“And how are you?” I asked.
“Hysterical,” he said calmly. “A mess.”
We drove to Jonathan’s parents’ condominium in Jonathan’s father’s car, an enormous blue Oldsmobile. I had never seen Jonathan drive before. He looked both childlike and paternal behind the wheel of that big car. He held the wheel with both hands, as if he was steering a ship.
On the way he told us how his father’s heart attack had struck him on his way to the mailbox. He explained that fact in particular. His father had had asthma and then emphysema. So his death by heart failure seemed to make everyone feel as cheated as they would have had he been in faultless health. Bobby asked, “On his way back from the
I put on my sunglasses and watched the shopping centers pass. They shimmered in the heat. Between them lay open country, reddish-gray, studded with cacti. Arizona was the first place I had ever been that turned out to look exactly as I’d pictured it. As we drove along the blindingly bright highway I felt powerful and competent. I was an older woman in sunglasses who’d come to help a couple of confused men contend with their grief. I thought at that moment that I would leave Bobby and have the child by myself.
“I’d written him a letter,” Jonathan said. “The first one in at least a year. I hadn’t gotten around to mailing it, though. It was still in my jacket pocket when I heard.”
Jonathan’s parents’ condominium was part of a sprawling, mud-colored complex several miles from a shopping mall called Teepee Town. A sign beside the entrance said “Choice Units Still Available” in faded blue letters. Jonathan parked. He led us up a crushed-gravel walk to one of the buildings, past the mailbox, a conventional one painted brown to match the adobe-like substance. I suspected the adobe had been sprayed on with a hydraulic gun. I wondered what sort of people would want to live in a place like that.
The inside of the condominium was dark and cool. Instead of Indian rugs and pottery, there were wing chairs, ferns, family photographs in chrome frames. The only evidence of death was the flowers. There were a half-dozen arrangements in vases and foil-wrapped pots. A white porcelain shepherdess stood on a round polished table between two bouquets, serene and alarming as a bone. Before we had had a chance to acclimate ourselves to the interior darkness, a small, deeply tanned woman came out of what must have been the kitchen. She wiped her hands on her jeans.
“The prodigal returns,” she said with a hint of a Southern drawl. “Welcome to the reservation.”
“Hello, Alice,” Bobby said.
She took Bobby’s chin in her hand and turned his face one way and another. She examined it as keenly as an anthropologist checking the completeness of a skull. Suddenly I knew where Jonathan had picked up that stiff, politician’s embrace.
“Hello, beautiful,” she said. She planted a tight little kiss on his lips.
Bobby stood with his arms at his sides, as if struck dumb by her. Jonathan had to introduce me. Alice scanned me with a scientific eye and shook my hand. “Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Thank you for having me,” I said. It seemed like the stupidest possible thing to say to a woman whose husband had just died.
“I’m so sorry about Ned, Alice,” Bobby said. He had put one of his arms uncertainly over Jonathan’s shoulders.
“I know,” she said. “I am, too.”
“Are we the first ones to get here?” I asked.
“Well, we’re not making a big party of it,” Alice said. “I’m expecting Ned’s brother from Muncie, and a few of the people from around here. We decided to keep it intimate.”
“Oh,” I said. I had blundered again, obscurely, and rather than go on worrying over my behavior, I decided to just give in and dislike Alice. New widow or no.
“How about a drink?” Jonathan said. “Does anybody want a drink?”
Everybody agreed to want a drink. Jonathan made himself busy, getting them. I realized that was probably how he grew up, ushering things along, proposing drinks or Scrabble games or walks in the park. I could picture him at two, frantically interrupting with a new word he’d never spoken before, to draw his mother’s attention away from herself. Now, at thirty, he was turning into her. He administered dry kisses in airports. He was cultivating a life as orderly and cut off as his mother’s Early American living room.
After we’d had drinks and dinner, Alice announced that she was spending the night in a motel. Bobby and Jonathan objected. But she had made up her mind. “There’s not enough room to swing a cat in here,” she said. “The last thing anybody needs in quarters this close is to have to try and respect the privacy of an old lady.”
Bobby insisted that he and I should be the ones to go to a motel, but Alice wouldn’t budge. “My bag is already packed,” she said. “I’ll be back in the morning, before any of you are up.”
“But it isn’t right,” Bobby said. “We don’t want to put you out of your own house.”
I gave his knee what I hoped was a discreet squeeze. Couldn’t he see how much Alice wanted to spend the night alone? I knew just what she’d do. She’d step into the scoured motel room, turn the air-conditioning on high, and lie down on an impersonal bed. She’d have a few hours outside her life. I’d done that myself, when a romance ended and my own apartment seemed suddenly too personal. Whether or not Bobby caught the meaning of the squeeze, he soon gave up on his protests. Alice got herself out of the house, promising to have Belgian waffles made before anyone stirred in the morning. I said a brisk unapologetic goodbye, which might or might not have telegraphed the fact that I knew Alice wasn’t doing anybody any favors. That although I understood the impulse it didn’t make me like her any better.
Then she was gone. Then we were alone together, with no idea of what to say or do. Although I’d been through plenty of departures, I hadn’t had any direct experience with the death of the body. My parents were still alive. My grandparents had all died discreetly, in other states, when I was very young. Whatever sense of competence I’d felt in the back seat of the Oldsmobile had evaporated. In its place was nothing but a feeling of vague stupidity, and irritation at the prospect of sleeping in an unfamiliar house and going to a stranger’s funeral.
“Anybody want another drink?” Jonathan asked.
We had another drink. We arranged ourselves in the wing chairs and on the ugly colonial sofa. If I’d ever imagined the process of mourning I’d pictured it as an untrammeled exchange, flowing freely as tapwater between people who either loved one another without reservation or were so depleted by their loss that the little daily differences and old grudges spiraled down the drain. But here, sipping tonic in a cheaply furnished, formal little parlor, I didn’t forget my ordinary meanness and vanity. I couldn’t feel the shock of the father’s death. I couldn’t make the desolate condominium complex seem like anything other than a place where death was logical and somehow appropriate. A mild surprise the residents were only too well prepared for.
Jonathan said, “I’m sorry we have to be seeing each other like this. I suspected I’d see you two again, but I’d imagined different circumstances.”
I knew he had to strain to make a direct statement like that without adopting someone else’s gestures and inflection. It was Jonathan’s overriding instinct to act as if all were well. As if we were having the time of our lives.
“It’s not what I pictured either,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t at all sure if I should come. I’m still not sure I should have.”
He nodded. He didn’t reassure me.
Nearly beside myself with nervousness and bile, I said, “I’m sure your father was a wonderful man.”
Bobby said, “Ned was great. He was really, you know,
“Well, I’m sure I would have.”
A silence passed. The ice cracked in Jonathan’s glass.
I said, “Listen, Jonathan, I don’t know why you did what you did. I suppose you needed to. We should probably just try to forget about it as long as we’re here.”
“I told Bobby,” he said. “I tried to tell you, too. I can’t seem to have a life around you.”
“Do you have a life now?”
“A sort of one. They wouldn’t take me back at the paper, but they helped me get an editorial thing at
