“Really?” I felt a small spark of hopefulness flare in my chest.
“I just wanted to let you know,” he began, and his voice dissolved into harsh, ragged sobs. “My father died this morning.”
I don’t remember what I said then. I remember that he told me the details: He’d had a stroke and he’d died in the hospital. It had been very fast.
I was crying, Bruce was crying. I couldn’t remember when I’d felt so horrible about something. It was so unfair. Bruce’s father was a wonderful man. He had loved his family. He had even, I thought, maybe loved me, too.
But even as I was feeling horrible, I felt the spark growing. He’ll get it now, a voice in my head whispered. Once you’ve had a loss like that, doesn’t it change the way you see the world? And wouldn’t it change the way he saw me, my own fractured family, my own lost father? Plus, he’d need me. He’d needed me once before, to rescue him from loneliness, from sexual ignorance and shame… and surely he would need me again to help him get through this.
I imagined us at the funeral, and how I’d hold his hand, how I’d help him, hold him up, be there for him to lean on, the way I wished I could have leaned on him. I imagined him looking at me with new respect and understanding, new consideration, with the eyes of a man, not a boy.
“Let me help. How can I help?” I said. “Do you want me to come over?”
His reply was dismayingly instant. “No,” he said. “I’m going home, and there’s a ton of people there now. It would be weird. Could you come to the funeral tomorrow?”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course. I love you,” I said, the words out of my mouth almost before I’d finished thinking them.
“What does that mean?” he asked me, still crying.
To my credit, I recovered fast. “That I want to be there for you… and help you any way I can.”
“Just come tomorrow,” he said dully. “That’s all you can do right now.”
But something perverse in me persisted.
“I love you,” I said again, and left the words hanging there. Bruce sighed, knowing what I wanted, and unwilling, or unable, to give it to me.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry, Cannie.”
PART TWO. Reconsider Me
FIVE
Thinking back, there was probably some way I could have felt worse at Berna rd Guberman’s funeral. Like if I’d killed him myself.
The service started at two o’clock. I got there early, but the parking lot was already full, with cars backed down the driveway, spilling onto the highway. I finally parked across the street, dashed across four lanes of traffic and straight into a cluster of Bruce’s friends. They were standing in the vestibule, in what were surely their interview suits, hands in their pockets, talking quietly and looking at their feet. It was a brilliantly sunny fall afternoon – a day to look at leaves, to buy apple cider and build the first fire of the year. Not a day for this.
“Hey, Cannie,” George said softly.
“How’s he doing?” I asked.
George shrugged. “He’s inside,” he said.
Bruce was sitting in a little vestibule, holding a bottle of Evian water and a handkerchief in his right hand. He was wearing the same blue suit he’d worn on Yom Kippur, when we’d sat side by side in temple. It was still too tight, the tie still too short, and he was wearing canvas sneakers that he’d decorated with drawings of stars and swirls during some particularly boring lecture. The second I saw him it was as if our recent history fell away – my decision to ask for a break, his decision to describe my body in print. It was as if nothing was left but our connection – and his pain. His mother stood above him with one hand on his shoulder. There were people everywhere. Everyone was crying.
I went over to Bruce, knelt down, and hugged him.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, coolly. Formally. I kissed his cheek, scratchy with what looked like three days’ growth of beard. He didn’t appear to notice. The hug his mother gave me was warmer, her words a marked contrast to his. “Cannie,” she whispered. “I’m glad you’re here.”
I knew it was going to be bad. I knew I’d feel terrible, being there, even after our parking-lot breakup, even though, of course, there was no earthly way I could have known that this would happen.
But it wasn’t just bad. It was agony. Agony when the rabbi, whom I’d seen at Bruce’s house at dinner a few times, talked about how Bernard Leonard Guberman had lived for his wife and his son. About how he’d take Audrey to toy stores, even though they didn’t have grandchildren. “Just to be ready,” he’d say. Which was when I lost it, knowing that I was the one who was supposed to produce those grandchildren, and how much the kids would have loved him, and how lucky I would have been to have that kind of love in my life.
And I sat there on the hard wooden bench in that funeral parlor, eight rows back from Bruce, who was supposed to have been my husband, thinking how all I wanted was to be beside him, and how I’d never felt farther away.
“He really loved you,” Bruce’s Aunt Barbara whispered to me as we stood washing our hands outside the house. There were cars double-parked in the cul-de-sac, cars circling the block, so many cars that they’d had to station a policeman outside the cemetery for the burial service. Bruce’s father had been active in the temple, and had had a thriving practice as a dermatologist. Judging from the throngs, it looked like every Jew or teenager with a skin condition had shown up to pay their respects.
“He was a wonderful man,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “Was?”
Which was when I realized that she was talking about Bruce, who was still alive.
Barbara wrapped her maroon fingernails around my forearm and dragged me into the immaculate, Downy-scented laundry room.
“I know you and Bruce broke up,” she said. “Was it because he didn’t propose?”
“No,” I said. “I guess… I just felt more and more that maybe we weren’t a good fit.”
It was as if she hadn’t heard.
“Audrey always told me that Bernie said how happy he’d be to have you in the family,” she said. “He always said, ‘If Cannie wants a ring, she’ll have a ring in a minute.’ ”
Oh, God. I felt tears starting to build behind my eyes. Again. I’d wept during the service, when Bruce stood on the bimah and talked about how his father taught him to catch a ball and drive, and I’d cried at the cemetery when Audrey sobbed over the open grave and said, over and over, “It isn’t fair, isn’t fair.”
Aunt Barbara handed me a handkerchief.
“Bruce needs you,” she whispered, and I nodded, knowing that I
