ONE NIGHT IN AUGUST, understanding all at once why I’d been so sad, I decided to leave Howard. This was the real thing, not just the fireworks of battle or some transient post-battle blues. We hadn’t even had a decent argument for months. And I wasn’t giving Howard up the way he kept giving up cigarettes. I mean that I meant it. But do we ever know what we mean? Light-years before, when I still believed we had mated for life, like wolves, Howard left and went to live with another woman. After a while he came back, and the children and I made room for him in the kitchen and the bedroom, ready to forgive, if not forget.
I wish I could say that I had fallen in love this time, that I was rushing from the house with my skin on fire, and that Mr. Wonderful was going to roll me across the lawn and put out the flames. It wasn’t like that, though. Howard and I were getting ready for bed, as we’d done for most of more than twenty-four years, moving through our old ballet of dropped shoes and emptied underwear. I realized that we didn’t look frankly at one another’s nakedness anymore. Waning interest made us glance away, and shyness of how we were changing. I guess Howard saw me the way I saw him, in hasty flashes of softened flesh before the lights went out.
“Good night, Paulie,” he said, yawning hotly on my shoulder, making me shiver. “Whatever you do, don’t wake me up tomorrow.”
It was Saturday night, about ten o’clock. We used to laugh our heads off when our parents went to sleep that early, all worn out from the effort of their indifference. “Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week,” I sang, but Howard was already gone, snoring lightly, his hand a ballast on my hip.
He’d always hated waking up to Sunday, especially if he’d played a late gig the night before. Sometimes he would fall into bed as the room was getting light, still wearing his tuxedo trousers, his starched shirt front bruising my breasts. A few hours later I’d have to rescue him from the gloom of Sunday’s Hopper stillness. It was my job, my very mission. I would clear the static from a radio sermon or an opera and turn the volume up high enough to startle the dead. I would dump him out of bed like a rowdy nurse, lure him back to life with waffles and coffee, and with a restorative drive into the countryside.
Lately I just let him sleep. For one thing, we lived in the country now, or at least in that purgatory, the Long Island suburbs. If he wanted to look at flowers and trees, he could go to the window and open his eyes. For another thing, I’d learned to be moody on Sundays myself, and I didn’t have the heart to cheer him on anymore. In the old days, when the children were young and still in captivity, it was a family project to make Daddy happy and whole again. I tended to get carried away at times, and Howard would become headachy from the commotion of my zeal. “Calm down, for God’s sake,” he’d say. “You’re not waking Lazarus.” But when he said it, he was upright, and almost resurrected from his depression.
For several months before that August night, I’d suspected he’d been seeing someone else. But until then I was only going on intuition. I wasn’t the ardent girl detective I’d once been, sniffing out sexual scent, tuned to his metabolic rises and falls. He wasn’t even acting nicer to me than usual, which my friend and colleague, La Rae Peters, says is always the first sign. That night I simply knew that what I’d suspected was true, and that I’d known it for a long time. But like Scarlett O’Hara, I had put off thinking about it until tomorrow or the next day. As I lay there, random repressed clues fell into place with fatal clicks. Those phone calls with nobody there when I said, “Hello? Hello?,” not even a breather. The crazy diets Howard started—the Protein Purge, the Wheat Grass Fast—and broke with bouts of gluttony. (That very evening, right after supper, he’d stood in the light of the open refrigerator eating a whole pound of sliced ham, as if he were feeding coins into a slot machine.) The scratches he’d had all over his neck once, that he said was a rash, an allergy to the laundry detergent. Those long showers he took after working late, the water pounding and pounding against my denial. And when had we last made love with rapture and invention?
The terrible thing was, I didn’t care very much. There were pangs of something like jealousy, an itch in my throat I couldn’t scratch, and that was all. I missed my lost, crazed self, the indulgence of genuine rage and grief. When Howard went away that time, I went after him armed with murderous love, and he came back. Now he lay beside me in our bed, where he belonged, and I made up my mind to go. Why not? I wouldn’t miss this house, in which I’d always been a sort of visitor. And my friends and I would never lose one another, no matter where any of us lived. Katherine, La Rae, and I would travel by dogsled, if we had to, to sit in somebody’s kitchen and talk and eat.
I could be a part-time clerk in some other library, and I could write my column anywhere at all. I mailed it into the paper, anyway, since they’d moved their offices to Westchester, just as I used to mail my poems to famous and obscure magazines. Was “Paulie’s Kitchen Korner” the culmination of all that literary ambition? I hadn’t written a poem in ages, but sometimes I broke up a few lines of copy before I sent it in: To remove those white / Rings from your favorite / Table, try applying / Toothpaste, the abrasive / Kind, with a damp cloth, and / Later, polish clean. And I still kept the big box of rejection slips. It had once held a pair of Jason’s fuzzy sleepers, and blue lint clung to all of the slips, like mold.
A few years ago, I’d seen a picture in the newspaper of a seventy-year-old woman graduating from college in the same class as her twenty-year-old granddaughter. Never too late, the caption read, and under it the article said that they both planned on entering law school in the fall. Reading that, and looking at their smiling faces, made me want to try and finish the education I’d interrupted to marry and raise a family. That afternoon, without telling anyone, I drove to one of those schools that give you credits for life experience and let you work quickly and independently toward a degree. I sat next to a plumber’s helper who wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and filled out the forms, listing housework and child-bearing, all the jobs I’d ever held, and the two years of college I’d completed. Suddenly, it seemed pointless—I’d wanted to be a poet, not a lawyer or an engineer. I knew that learning enriched poetry, but there was no law against being self-taught, and I had thousands of books at my disposal at the library. I even managed to read between the stacks as I was shelving them. And if ordinary life experience—preparing hamburger a hundred different ways and nursing sick children—was good enough for college credit, its ultimate worth to a writer was infinite. I would join a poetry workshop, instead of matriculating, and I’d carry my notebook everywhere again, in case of inspiration.
I never got around to any of that, though. La Rae and I took the Great Books course at the library, and that was about it. If you didn’t become what you’d expected to be, it had to be someone else’s fault. Howard never said that he blamed me for the breakup of his combo, the loss of his free and jazzy night life, but I knew that he did. And I blamed him for one thing and another. How coldly I reasoned everything out, while he slept on in guilty innocence. Our twenty-fifth anniversary loomed ahead, next June. Although we both disdained all those greeting-card occasions, we observed them, anyway. Children trap you with their pure faith in sentiment, with the valentines made secretly in school for their first loves. I can still feel the heft of the construction paper, the hidden clumps of damp paste. Howard would hand me the requisite roses in exchange for the requisite tie, the transaction taking place over the children’s heads. “Now kiss Mommy,” Ann would command Howard, and he would. She’d never let any anniversary go by uncelebrated. She and Spence traded gifts a few times a month, to mark the day they’d met, became engaged, got married. The possibilities of this milestone year would drive her to extremes. I had to get out before Hallmark unfurled the tinfoil in a roll of thunder, before the mockery of a party with everyone jumping out of closets yelling “Surprise! Surprise!,” bearing gifts of silver we’d have to return before they’d had a chance to tarnish. Who could be more surprised than Howard and me that love, along with lust and eternal friendship, could ever escape our vigilance? Hi-yo Silver, away, away.
Never mind, we had set the right examples for our children already, had shown them the value of anger and of conciliation. Now they were on their own. Jason was living in the Bronx with Flame, his rock group’s lead singer. That wasn’t her real name, of course—it was Sara Lynn Bartlett. I’d caught myself thinking of Sara/Flame as my actual child, she reminded me so much of myself at her age. She was half beast, half tamed creature, with both halves dying to please Jason. Her pulse was probably synchronized to the beat of his drums. I understood her obsession—hadn’t I followed the golden notes of Howard’s golden saxophone all the way into this life? When Flame sang with Blood Pudding, in her affecting, croupy style, she clutched the phallic mike as if her hand were joined to it by an electrical charge, and her pink, spiky hair stood on end.
Despite their talent, she and Jason didn’t earn very much, and they seemed to take turns getting mugged in their neighborhood. I sent them a few dollars whenever I could—for taxis, I said, for the treat of dinner out. Young love needs to be spared the false romance of poverty. Mimi dies of it, in La Bohème, and Rodolfo has to throw his manuscript on the fire just to keep warm. In real life, nobody would have been singing. And nowadays his manuscript would have been backed up on a soft disk. From what I could tell, Jason and Sara only bought pot with the money I gave them, but she would send little thank-you notes, decorated with those inane, noseless smile faces. “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Flax, Jason and I want to thank you very much for your thoughtful and generous gift. We will enjoy spending it on something special, and think of you when we do. Fondly, Sara.”
Jason looked a lot like Howard. They both had the swarthy, redeeming beauty of gangsters, and what my mother once disparagingly called “bedroom eyes.” Jason had experimented with various guises, including the current modified Mohawk that didn’t quite work with his ringlets. He wore a tiny gold hoop through one earlobe, which Sara had pierced for him with a sterilized sewing needle. At fifty-two, Howard had developed a Kennedy jowl and Onassis pouches under his bedroom eyes, and he sucked in his gut whenever he surprised himself in a mirror.
We could work out the finances of separation—Howard was doing well at the studio, and a few months before, my column had been picked up for syndication. We’d made some good investments in the past, and Ann’s wedding was almost paid off, our only debt beside the dwindled mortgage. She and Spence were married a little more than a year. They lived in Larchmont, along with their Swiss housekeeper, in a house about twice the size of ours—only a few miles and several worlds away from Jason and Sara. Spence was a junior partner in his father’s brokerage firm, and Ann was in the M.B.A. program at Columbia. She had insisted on having one of those horribly lavish weddings, like the coronation of the Shah. God, the fittings we’d suffered, the agony over the color scheme, the menu, the type style on the invitations! How had we raised such a shallow little materialist? But I wept on cue when she appeared in the doorway of the chapel on Howard’s arm—our blond darling, our confection of light. As she glided in slow, triumphant motion toward her blood-drained groom, I wiped my eyes and wondered if she’d ever get there. I’d never taught her to move like that. Howard and I had hurried breathlessly to the altar, with Jason our invisible witness. Howard had to force the ring over my swollen knuckle, but I practically shouted, “I do! I do!” I wouldn’t think about any of that now, I wouldn’t be sidetracked by nostalgia. There was nothing to hold me back.
I certainly didn’t have to stay married for my mother’s sake. Divorce was no longer a stigma in her crowd. Most of her friends’ children had been through it at least once. And she didn’t live with us, the way La Rae’s father lived with her and Frank, so there’d be no awkwardness of eviction or custody. My mother was still in Brooklyn—that borough of widows and yuppies—dead-bolted inside her apartment, wearing her Med-Alert beeper. My news would only confirm what she had known from the moment I’d burst in with that other news, twenty-four years ago—that it wouldn’t last. It just took longer to end than she had expected. She would have loved to tell my father she’d been right all along, but it hadn’t happened in his lifetime. Over the years, though, she’d grown grudgingly fond of Howard, or used to him. He changed her burnt-out light bulbs, moved her furniture back and forth across the room, and praised her heavy-handed cooking.
We would have to let the dog choose between us.
It was a hot and humid night, and the crickets must have been carrying on out there, but we were sealed in, with the air-conditioner going full blast. I began having one of those aural hallucinations I’d often get in that maddening hum. It was an old Harry James number that Howard’s combo used to scramble into riffs and flourishes. I heard the melody straight this time, and started to silently mouth the words. You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it, you made me—
Next to me, Howard stirred and groaned. His hand slid upward from my hip to my breast. He muttered something. Oh, no, I thought, not now. It wasn’t like him to become horny in the middle of the night. Not recently, anyway. I turned carefully away until his fingers were merely grazing my spine, and thought that maybe we should make love this last time, as a ceremony of conclusion. La Rae had something about that in her lonelyhearts column a few weeks ago. What was the heading? Regrets Sex With Ex. No, this was different—I was still married to Howard, even as I planned not to be.
“Paulie,” Howard said, and I whispered “No!” into my pillow as fervently as I’d once cried “Yes, yes!” into his hot and hectic mouth. Then he said, “This pain. Boy.”
“What pain?” I asked, and he took so long to answer I thought he’d spoken in a dream or had gone right back to sleep. I turned to look at him. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could see that he was on his side, facing me, his errant hand on the fur of his own chest. “Here,” he said. “Wow.”
“Howard, wake up,” I told him. “You’re having a bad dream.” And then I saw that his eyes were open. I put my lamp on and looked at him more closely. He hadn’t moved at all, not even the hand, and he was frowning. He seemed about to make a heartfelt speech. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Are you okay?” But it was clear that he wasn’t okay. He was moon-pale and there was a sheen of sweat on his face and torso. The room was freezing; the music in my head had stopped.
“Oh, shit,” he said, and belched deeply. “I shouldn’t have eaten that lousy ham.”
I got out of bed and brought him some Gelusil, thinking that Howard’s father and grandfather had both died of heart attacks, and that profuse sweating was a sure symptom. Wasn’t nausea, also? Men Howard’s age, even those who ate sensibly and didn’t smoke, dropped dead every day, playing tennis or just sitting at their desks. I didn’t know how to suggest any of this to him; mortality is Howard’s obsession, but it’s not his favorite subject.
“Listen, Howard,” I began cautiously, “maybe you should see somebody … maybe it isn’t indigestion.”
He looked at me in terror.
“Just to be on the safe side,” I said.
“It might pass soon,” he said, without conviction. His voice had altered, grown thinner and hoarse, as if he were parched.
I wiped his face with the edge of the top sheet. I took his clammy hand between mine. “Let me call Stuart,” I said. Stuart was an internist Howard saw from time to time, mostly on the softball field.
“California,” Howard said. “Convention.” It was becoming difficult for him to speak, to unclench his jaw and let the words out.
“Well, then,” I said, “I’ll just call an ambulance.” I said it casually, as if I were about to call a cab.
But Howard wasn’t fooled. “No!” he gasped. His face was shiny again.
“You have to check this out, Howard,” I said sternly. “Please.”
“Car,” Howard said.
“You want me to drive you to the hospital?”
He squeezed my hand in affirmation.
It was a long walk from the bedroom to the garage. All the way there, I silently instructed him not to die. Nothing was settled between us. Don’t you dare, I ordered. We have unfinished business, you bastard. Suddenly I wanted to know who she was, and how it had happened, and why. Had there been others? I was afflicted with jealousy; I’d forgotten its stunning pain, the way it rides the lining of the body, frantic for release. Howard leaned heavily against me as we started out, slowing our pace. We went past the collage of photographs on the dresser, our own smiling faces blessing our journey. I watched us go by in the big mirror. I’d pulled clothing for us both from the floor and the closets without taking my eyes off Howard. Now he wore an open tropical shirt over gray sweatpants, and I had a wrinkled pink sundress on, inside out.
We paused in the kitchen, so he could rest. Our old black Labrador, Shadow, half rose from his mat near the door. He wagged his tail with mild, sleepy curiosity. Was it morning already, time for his walk? When it came down to it, he would choose Howard, with whom he set out every day to rediscover the neighborhood.
There were our places at the table, the sturdy appliances letting us pass. In the garage, Howard’s garden tools hung on the pegboard, next to his red satin softball jacket. It was a setup to get me, stage props of touching personal effects. The smells of grease and gasoline, the decaying spears of grass in the teeth of the rake. I helped Howard into the car and went around to the driver’s side. When the automatic garage door lifted, like a theater curtain, I saw a portion of blue-black summer sky through the rearview mirror, and a handful of stars.
On the way to the hospital I tried not to talk, but I couldn’t help it. I said anxious, stupid things. “Look,” I said, “the Castellis are having a party. We weren’t invited.” I did seventy-five and eighty on the Expressway. Howard usually hated being my passenger, but this time he didn’t complain or start pumping his imaginary brake. He didn’t stir or say a single word, not even to let me know he was still alive. So I had to keep glancing at him, veering out of lane, with the horns blaring all around us.
At Nassau General, I pulled into a just-vacated space near the emergency-room entrance. “Well, that was lucky, anyway,” I told Howard as we got out. The reception area was brightly lit and busy, and most of the rows of orange plastic chairs were filled. There were parents with crying or sleeping children in their laps; a young couple in evening dress, holding hands; a hugely pregnant woman, who was reading; and an elderly man in a bathrobe, watching a baseball game on the ceiling-mounted television set. I led Howard to a seat and went to the inner doorway, where a security guard stood watch under a sign that said: Have Your Insurance Cards Ready. I hadn’t even brought my purse with me. I peeked inside the doorway and saw two clerks typing. The triage nurse was sitting at her desk, taking a man’s blood pressure. He had a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his other arm, and he was chatting gaily with her about the Mets. “Excuse me,” I said. “My husband is having chest pains.”
I expected her to leap up in concern, and maybe the bleeding patient, too. They continued sitting there. She wrote something on a chart; the man winked at me. If we had come by ambulance as I’d wanted to, Howard would be inside by now, attended by doctors. I’d given in and driven him, honoring the old contract of compromise we’d made after he came back to me. I had to back off—to give him air, he’d say, as if we were talking about an accident victim—and he would be faithful. When the nurse finally looked up to acknowledge me, I was practically dancing with anxiety. “My husband,” I repeated carefully, the way you do with a foreigner, or a lip reader. “He has chest pains.”
She signaled to the guard and he ducked into the room behind her and came back with a wheelchair. “Which one?” he asked, and I indicated Howard, who was paler than ever and watching the ball game, it seemed. He looked absurd and pathetic in his improvised outfit—a dying Hawaiian jogger. The guard wheeled him away, holding me back with a raised hand when I tried to follow. “We’ll call you,” he said, with the insincerity of a casting director.
I remembered going to the hospital in Queens to give birth to Jason. They wouldn’t let Howard go up with me at first, even though I told them he was a Participating Father. We had practiced our breathing for months, but no one had taught us how to say goodbye. “We’re in this together!” Howard called after me, and we waved and blew volleys of kisses until the elevator door closed between us. Hours later, when he showed up in the labor room, haggard with waiting and worry, I snarled that he was a filthy, stinking liar, that I was in this alone. Now I waved at Howard and he didn’t wave back.
One of the clerks beckoned me inside the office. I sat at the side of her desk and filled out the medical and insurance forms. Why did they need all that information? Why did they want to know Howard’s religion and his mother’s maiden name? I wondered if I should call her. There was no way to break anything to her gently; she had an uncanny instinct for disaster. I’d say, “Hi, Henrietta,” and she’d start screaming, burning up the wires all the way from here to Miami Beach. I had nothing to tell her yet, anyway. Any minute, Howard could come walking out, his lips white with Gelusil, swearing he was going to watch his diet from now on.
It was so quiet back there. A city hospital would have been jumping on Saturday night, with victims of gunshots and stab wounds staggering in, and people OD’ing on everything from crack to vanilla extract. Oh, why did we ever move? We wouldn’t have grown bored there, or so isolated from one another. We’d have been forced into intimacy because there wouldn’t have been enough room to have such secret, separate lives. In Port Washington, Howard had the whole back-yard jungle to escape into, and I had my choice of two and a half bathrooms in which to sulk. I knew this was not rational thinking. After all, Howard had first betrayed me when we’d lived in that tiny apartment, and you could die of loneliness lying right next to someone in the same bed. Our move out here twenty years ago had symbolized our growing maturity—irresponsible kids don’t take on mortgages and school-budget referendums. We told ourselves and the children that we had done it mostly for their sake, that we wanted them to live in nature, to know about trees and grass. One day, when Jason was about fourteen and still being chauffeured everywhere, he growled from the backseat of the car that it was the wrong kind of grass. Ann had adjusted quickly, showing signs of suburban matronhood before she was three.
I handed over the completed forms and the clerk stamped and stapled them and told me to wait outside until I was called. I took a seat next to a sleeping man, after grabbing a handful of magazines from the rack on the wall. The baseball game was still in progress, and the couple in evening dress were still there, the camellias browning fast on her wrist. The young woman smiled at me and rolled her eyes, and I rolled mine and smiled back in exasperated sympathy. What a way to spend Saturday night!
I thought of calling our children, not to scare them, of course, but to let them know what was happening, and for their company. But Jason and Flame were playing a dance on the Lower East Side, and Ann and Spence were at a fancy dinner party in Katonah. And they would be scared, especially Jason. When he was little and didn’t want to hear whatever we were telling him, he’d race around with his fingers stuck in his ears, chanting “Liar, liar! Pants on fire!”
I opened one of the magazines on my lap. It was a copy of Sports Illustrated from June 1984. The lead article was about surf-casting off the coast of Ibiza. The magazines were all soiled and tattered, like the ones in the laundromat. This place was like the laundromat—the orange chairs and the trapped cigarette smoke and that oppressive sense of humanity. I shuffled through the pages, unable to read anything. They should have let me stay with Howard—we were in this together.
One of the clerks came out then and called a name. A whole family rose like flapping birds and rushed after her. Why hadn’t she called me? I was here first. A woman went to the pay telephone near the magazine rack. She said, “Henry? I’m still here. He doesn’t look so good. You know, yellowish. We’re waiting for the doctor.”
As soon as she hung up, I called La Rae’s number, collect. It rang and rang, but no one answered. I sat down again and began working my fingers together nervously. Howard hadn’t looked so good, either. Bluish. Jewish. Mother’s maiden name: Henrietta Gold. She was a bride once, and then—bang!—a widow. Well, not that fast, really, but maybe it seemed that way to her. What was going on in there, anyway? I tried to think of something else. That man with the bloodied towel around his arm, a chef, probably, or a butcher who’d missed with his cleaver. To remove bloodstains from fabric, soak in cold water and coarse salt for several hours …
The sleeping man next to me came awake and said, “Well, hello there.” I moved two rows over and looked up at the ball game in time to see an instant replay of a home run. The pitcher wound up with excruciating slowness. The ball moved from his hand in a languid course to the plate, where the batter swatted drowsily at it. It arced across the diamond to the rim of the left-field wall and the outfielder leaped, as if for joy, and watched as it passed his glove and disappeared into the stands.
The clerk stood in the doorway and called another name. I couldn’t make it out for a moment, and then, when no one else responded, I realized it was mine. I followed her past the offices into the inner sanctum, an enormous room partitioned by curtains into cubicles. Someone was moaning loud and fast in one of them. Not all of the curtains were drawn, and I saw bare feet, sheeted bodies, and bleeping heart monitors. Everyone looked like Howard. The clerk motioned me to a middle cubicle and there he was, behind the curtain. Or somebody pretending to be him. His hair had thinned a little; he’d lost some weight. He had clear tubes up his nostrils for oxygen and something clear dripping in through his taped hand. A jagged line went up and down across the screen of his monitor, like the profit-and-loss chart of a company in trouble.
“Howard,” I said. “It’s me, Paulie,” as if I, too, had changed while we’d been apart and he might not recognize me.
He lifted his free hand; the wrist was banded with a plastic I.D. strip. “Paulie, I’m having a heart attack,” he whispered. “This is it.”
The moaning patient began to scream, and a baby cried somewhere with ascending rage or panic. “No, no,” I said. “We don’t know that.” I looked around behind me for a nurse or a doctor, someone to refute what he’d said, but they were all busy elsewhere.
“Myocardial infarction,” Howard said, and I knew he hadn’t made that up; it had the terrible ring of truth. Why hadn’t someone told me first? Then a doctor appeared. He looked very young, about seventeen or so, with recent acne scars and big, goofy-looking ears. “I’m Dr. Forman,” he said, and he shook my unwilling hand. “We seem to be having a little problem here.” He unhooked the chart from the foot of Howard’s bed and glanced at it. “From what we can tell, your husband has suffered a small myocardial infarction.” Howard’s eyes blazed with victory before they dimmed with despair.
“Oh, small,” I said, insisting on the bright side of things—my worst fault, according to Howard, after my inability to be serene.
“We’re admitting him, of course,” the boy-doctor continued, “to our cardiac care unit.”
How could he know anything about it? I imagined him carrying a toy doctor’s kit, like the one Jason once had, with a little play stethoscope and a jar of pastel candy pills inside. But a real stethoscope hung from his neck, ruthless rubber and stainless steel, and he leaned over Howard to listen to his heaving chest with solemn, grownup interest.
I watched the erratic line of Howard’s monitored heartbeat. It flattened out completely once, and an alarm buzzed for a few seconds before the line moved into peaks and falls again. “That thing’s not working,” I said to the doctor, and he smiled at me and patted my shoulder before he left.
An aide came and told me I could take Howard’s personal belongings home. After I’d signed a release, she handed me a plastic bag. I opened it and took out Howard’s shirt and sweatpants. They were sopping wet; he might have gone swimming in them. At the bottom of the bag, I found a smaller bag with his watch in it. He always wore it, even to bed and in the shower, as if he might be cheated of precious time if he didn’t keep careful track of it. “Here, you’ll want your watch,” I told him, and I fastened it above the plastic wristband. My hands were trembling and I could hardly see through my brimming eyes. “Do you know what time it is?” I said. “We haven’t stayed up this late in years.” Shut up, I told myself. Stop twinkling, you dummy. It was cruel to be so cheerful at the bedside of someone who was sick and frightened. Was I still that angry with Howard, even now? I took his hand and brought it to my cheek. I wasn’t really cheerful. Even as I blathered I felt like weeping, and my own heart had squeezed into a fist that wouldn’t open. “Sweetheart,” I said. “I’ll stay here with you.” And I did, until two orderlies showed up to take him to the cardiac unit. Again, I tried to follow, wishing I were smaller and less conspicuous. They told me to go home and come back the next morning. “Go home, Paulie,” Howard echoed bravely. When I began to protest, the tears spilling onto his hand at last, he said, “The dog.”
Of course. I’d have to walk him in a few more hours so he could water the world. I’d have to feed him, too. Life goes on, I thought. That’s the way it goes. As if my mother had taken control of my brain and was stuffing it with clichés. I kissed Howard and went back through the reception area and out into the parking lot, shocked by the heat and darkness after that brilliant, air-conditioned chill.
I drove home with Howard’s limp clothing on the seat beside me. He might have been removed from them by a wicked spell, and could be restored by the incantation of the right words. I stayed in lane and didn’t exceed the speed limit, as a replay of the night’s events began to unreel behind my eyes. I saw us getting into bed again, Howard’s hand moving to my hip. Everything that had happened—my thoughts about leaving him, his pain, the whole hospital drama—seemed as inevitable as that home run I’d watched on television. I couldn’t have stopped any of it, any more than the outfielder could have stopped the home-run ball. And I would have left Howard—I really would have—but he couldn’t leave me. Not this way, not yet.
At home, Shadow barked twice, a complaint more than a warning. You again, his glance seemed to say, but where’s Howard? I petted him for our mutual consolation, and endured his breath while he lapped my face. In the bedroom I turned on the air-conditioner, knowing I’d hallucinate Harry James again in that hum, and hear the phone ringing all night with bad news, and my own voice practicing to say goodbye.