IT WAS DIFFICULT LIVING with Sherry. She thrashed around in her sleep and the sofa bed’s foam mattress bounced like a trampoline. I ended up folded in half on her love seat most nights. I’d be stiff and cranky in the morning, and Sherry quickly matched her mood to mine. One small room was terribly confining for our disparate tastes and habits. She kept the blinds drawn, making the room seem even smaller and more confining, and if I opened them she squinted and threw her arm across her face, like Dracula surprised by sunrise. We got on each other’s nerves, and were viciously polite in our efforts to deny it. “Excuse me … No, excuse me,” we’d say as we bumped hips going in and out of the narrow bathroom.
Sherry watched an inordinate amount of television, and like Howard’s last hospital roommate, she kept it on even when she wasn’t actually watching it. Sometimes she read while the television was playing. “Could I please shut that off?” I’d ask, because I was trying to read, too, and couldn’t concentrate, especially during the supercharged commercials. Sherry would say, “Why, of course, be my guest,” and throw me a murderous glance. I had to remind myself that I was her guest, that it was truly generous of her to have taken me in in the first place. It was up to me to make concessions to her peculiar habits, to be grateful for every favor.
But we didn’t even like the same foods. Howard and I had always eaten sensibly, or at least I had. When she was younger, Sherry had gone dangerously gaunt on a macrobiotic diet, and now she seemed to eat only overly rich ethnic dishes. One morning, I went to the market while she was at school, and brought home salad greens and fresh fruit. “Don’t give me any of that,” she said, with a little shudder of revulsion, as I tossed the salad that evening.
She left her answering machine on until she came home, and when I was in the apartment I heard the messages as they were being recorded. Almost all of her callers were men. “Sherry? Ralph here. I’m really glad you liked my picture. Why don’t we get together this weekend?” … “Hi there, babycakes, this is the Lone Ranger—501-3420. The vibes are good for a meaningful relationship, so give me a call.” One of them just sang a few bars of “I’m on Fire” at the sound of the tone and then hung up. Howard called several times, too, and when I heard his voice I stopped whatever I was doing and listened in miserable silence.
Sherry played back her tape every afternoon, scribbling numbers and names on a note pad. Finally she told me that most of her calls were the result of an ad she’d placed a few weeks before in the personals section of The New York Review, and she showed me a copy. “SWJF looking for a soul mate. Are you ready for a literate, luscious, liberal, lovable, lunatic Libra? I’m 38 years young in heart and body—who are you? Photo, please. NYR Box 365812.” She’d received over two hundred responses so far. Some of them were clearly unacceptable—raving anti-Semites and plain old garden-variety psychopaths. Three men sent nude photos of themselves; five requested the same from her. Another, whose letter was full of misspellings and food stains, claimed to be a noted surgeon who would give medical discounts to her family and friends. Sherry had answered several of the more reasonable letters and these telephone messages were in response to her replies.
“I think you’re crazy, Sherry,” I said. “How do you know who any of them really are?” Some of the photos she’d been sent looked like mug shots to me. I read a few of the other ads on the same page as hers. “Listen to this,” I said. “‘Into good times, Dutch treat only.’ That sounds like a euphemism for something sexual and weird. Maybe he wears wooden shoes to bed.”
“Mmm, I hope so,” Sherry said, and giggled.
“And this one. ‘Tall, dynamic poet laureate.’ Poet laureate of what—the Bronx?”
“Maybe just of his building,” Sherry said. “Oh, Paulie, you haven’t changed a bit. You’re still so cautious, still such a little mouse.”
I was shocked and offended. Was that the way Sherry saw me? Did other people? I’d always thought of myself as adventurous, even somewhat reckless. Hadn’t I taken a tremendous chance on life twenty-five years before? But maybe I hadn’t ventured much out of the safety zone since then. Safely married, safely suburban. Once it had seemed like a death-defying act, Howard and me dangling over the center ring without a net. But who was Sherry to be so condescending? A middle-aged woman sending out love notes in a bottle, like a starry-eyed adolescent. “Literate, luscious, liberal”—all that alliteration had a desperate ring to it. And she’d lied about her age; that struck me as both foolish and pitiful.
I simply had to get out of there—I had to find my own place. It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. I’d taken Sherry’s advice and looked for a sublet, but none of the ads I answered worked out. Either the rental period was too brief, or the rent was exorbitant, or the tenant wanted sleep-over privileges. One woman expected me to care for ten uncaged parrots, who shrieked their reciprocal alarm as soon as I walked into the room, and shook out a blizzard of feathers.
I began to worry about money, too. Of course I’d resigned from the Port Washington library, and there didn’t appear to be any openings in the city system. The personnel people I managed to see all complained about government cutbacks. “We sure could use you,” the woman in Sherry’s neighborhood branch said, wistfully, “but we can’t afford you.” And she was talking about the minimum wage! An older man shelving books nearby looked at me with fear in his eyes, as if I were about to steal his daily bread. There was a big glass jar chained to the checkout desk, for contributions to the library, and I threw some change in on my way out.
I still had the income from my column, but I definitely needed to augment that with something else. I began to scan the want ads as well as the real-estate pages. By lying about my previous experience, I was able to get some freelance work, proofreading engineering abstracts for a professional journal.
During the day, I continued to look for an apartment and a more suitable, permanent job. At night, Sherry and I sat opposite one another at her table. She graded papers and I tried to make sense of unfamiliar technical terms, while the television competed shrilly for our attention. Whenever the phone rang, I’d listen carefully while Sherry answered it, my blue pencil poised over words like “gravimeters” or “electro-plastic.” I could tell instantly if Howard was on the line, by the belligerent and didactic way she spoke to him. “Yes, she is,” she’d say. “But I believe I’ve already told you that she doesn’t want to talk to you.” Didn’t we learn that yesterday, class? When one of her mail-order men called, her voice changed; it became syrupy and seductive, like a telephone solicitor’s. She would wander into the bathroom with the long-corded telephone, and ripples of affected laughter filtered through the noise of the television.
I’d called my children from a pay phone the day after I moved in with Sherry. Jason hardly seemed to react to my news, as if he’d been expecting it all along. But then Sara took the phone from him and murmured her surprise and sympathy. I asked her how things were going between them, and she whispered that everything was pretty much the same. “Try and be patient. He’ll come around,” I said, although I had no reason to believe that. When I asked her if she’d told her parents yet about her pregnancy, there was a long, troubled pause before she said that she had, and that they’d decided to disown her. I was appalled, and bewildered—how did you disown your own child? The instant I saw my newborns, even before the cord between us was severed, I knew we were joined forever. I changed the subject, asking her what hospital she intended to use, and she said she’d decided to have the baby at home, and be attended by a midwife.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
“It’s cheaper,” she explained, “and a lot more natural.” I remembered my own months of training in a natural-childbirth class, and then, during labor, yelling like a madwoman for gas, for anything to ease the astonishing pain. My mother had warned me I’d do exactly that, and I was tempted to pass the warning on to Sara, but I didn’t.
“We have to take a course. Jason is supposed to be my labor coach,” she said disconsolately.
“When he was born,” I said, “Howard was right there, too, cheering us on. He said it was the most thrilling experience of his life.” I didn’t mention that he’d grown faint when I crowned, and had to put his head down between his knees.
Ann answered her phone in a grief-stricken voice. “Mommy, you don’t live at home anymore,” she wailed, and I knew that Howard had gotten to her first.
“Well, neither do you,” I said, but she didn’t think that was a fair comparison.
Sara and Ann both invited me to stay with them, offers that touched and pleased me, even if they were totally unsuitable. Young people are resilient, I told myself; they would all weather this. The one I’d really dreaded dealing with, though, was my mother, and my worry was justified. She carried on as if I’d killed Howard, not just left him. “How could you do it?” she demanded. “Such a sick man! Such a wonderful man.”
I couldn’t help reminding her that she’d once passionately disapproved of him, and of us together. “You and Dad didn’t even want me to marry him, Mother, remember? You said he was bad news, you said he had bedroom eyes.”
“Spilled milk!” my mother cried. “Water over the bridge!”
“Well, there it is,” I said, impervious to every mixed-up maxim.
“You’ll be alone,” my mother said.
“No, I won’t. I have my friends, I have my family.”
“You’ll be alone,” she insisted, “and it’s no fun.”
Fun! It was a word outside her usual vocabulary. For the first time in a while, I thought about my mother’s life, the daily rituals of housekeeping and television watching. Lately there’d been a rash of deaths among the elderly widows in her building. For all the fuss she made over less significant events, she remarked on those deaths with gentle and dignified acceptance. “We had a little excitement here today,” she’d say, and that’s how I learned of Mrs. Wasser’s fatal stroke during a game of Rummy-O, and Mrs. Stein’s quieter passing in her sleep. Maybe my mother feared that my separation from Howard was going to leave her more alone, her circle of family members diminished by one.
“Paulie darling,” she said. “Listen to your mother. Have I ever lied to you?”
What an opportunity! But I let it pass. After all, I was using a pay phone on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-third Street. Cars and trucks were roaring past and the pedestrian traffic milled around me. My quarter was going to run out soon, anyway.
“If you love each other in your hearts,” my mother said, “you can work the rest out. You have your whole lives to do it in. And life is short,” she added, confounding her own argument.
The quarter dropped, and a bus that had stopped for a light began wheezing loudly. “My time is up!” I shouted. “I’m out of change, Ma, I’ll call you!” And I hung up.
Two weeks later, I found a sublet. The building, a few blocks from the pay phone I’d used, had an elevator, a locked lobby door, and an intercom system. The three-room apartment was on the fifth floor, facing the front. It was noisy, but light, and seemed safer than the apartments in the back. The current tenants were a young engaged couple named Mary and Jim. Jim, who let me in, said that Mary had left a month before to start teaching in the English department of a small Midwestern college. They were sharing the position, and they had a one-year contract. “Maybe we’ll even be renewed,” Jim said, “but the year is definite.” He was going to join her there as soon as the sublet was settled. I was lucky, he said, because their friend who’d agreed to take the place had changed his mind at the last minute.
The living room was modestly furnished. There was a cheap brown velvet sofa and a matching love seat—the kind that are always advertised on buses—and a couple of shaky tables. But there were hundreds of books on built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves. Jim was going to take some of them along, but he said I’d be free to read anything he left behind.
I wandered into the bedroom alone and immediately felt that I’d be able to sleep there. There was a peaceful aura that went beyond the modest decor, the slanting sunlight on the worn patchwork quilt. Although I didn’t believe in ghosts, either malevolent or benign, I thought it had something to do with the happiness that had been experienced in that room. The first apartment Howard and I lived in had been vacated by a married couple who were splitting up. I used to sense a leftover sadness there that had to be dispelled by the prosperity of our own marriage.
“I’ll take it,” I said to Jim, back in the living room, imagining him gone and myself falling onto the bed among the pleasant disorder of pillows.
The last week with Sherry was easier; with the end in sight, we became more generous and more tolerant of one another. On my final night at her place, I saw her off on a date with someone who’d answered her ad—a guy with white socks and a Cro-Magnon forehead. He could have been a serial killer, for all I knew, but I blessed their evening like a fairy godmother. “Have fun!” I called gaily after them. As soon as their footsteps stopped echoing in the stairwell, I phoned Howard. It was something I knew I’d have to do eventually. A divorced woman I’d worked with at the library had told me that she and her ex-husband were great friends now, which wasn’t ever possible during their marriage. They met for dinner regularly and talked on the phone all the time. I couldn’t envision any such social ease between Howard and me. While I was dialing our number, my heart bumped and lurched, but I managed, somehow, to sound cool and efficient. Howard’s voice was rusty, as if he hadn’t used it in years. At first he played the game—he let me state my business, and we even exchanged a few superficial, civil remarks. Then, suddenly, he began begging me to talk to him. I knew that if we did really try to talk, I’d wail and scream and cry, and I couldn’t afford to lose control like that. I couldn’t stray the tiniest bit from my plan. I made Howard promise to stay away the next day, so I could pack my belongings in peace and privacy.
La Rae picked me up at the Port Washington station at noon. Katherine was going to meet us at the house later on. As we drove into the development, I had an unexpected and confusing flood of feeling. “Oh, I can’t look,” I said, covering my eyes. “I don’t blame you,” La Rae said. “It’s pretty ugly, isn’t it?”
Howard had kept his promise—his car wasn’t parked on the street or in the garage. I noticed that the pin oak had started turning red while I was away, and the sugar maple near the front door almost seemed to be on fire.
I was surprised at how neat things were inside the house. It wasn’t at all like Howard to be orderly on his own. Could she have been there? Or was this some new tactic of Howard’s, his way of saying, See, I can change if you’ll only give me a chance? Shadow was so delighted to see me he danced around in clumsy circles and squirted my ankles and shoes. I patted him, and then I hurried past the artifacts of my old life and began taking clothing from the closets and the drawers. Katherine showed up after a while, and the three of us worked steadily and with hardly any conversation. We filled three suitcases and then began stuffing things into the cartons La Rae had brought from the supermarket. We didn’t bother with the tissue paper and plastic cleaners’ bags I advised my readers to use when packing their clothes, to prevent creases.
I took my notebooks, my box of rejection slips, and some of the framed photographs from the dresser top. I hesitated and then I threw in a few of our record albums—who was to say who they belonged to? I even took my favorite painting off the living-room wall, an impressionistic seascape we’d bought right from the artist on the beach in Montauk one summer. But it left a conspicuous square of lighter paint, so I put it back. Finally, we were finished, at least for now. I’d have to return sometime in the future, maybe after we’d sold the house, and go through the junk in the garage and the basement. I hugged the dog, crying a little.
We loaded both cars. I rode with Katherine because there was more room in her station wagon, and because she asked me to. When our little caravan started out, I looked behind me, forgetting what happened to Lot’s wife, and I saw the house and the lawn and the trees rush away.