Chapter Thirty-one

IT IS ONE HELL of a soup to die in a bubble bath. The body exacts final revenge on the now-neutered brain, purging it all, from the large intestine to the soul itself. Soup to nuts. It was Charlie who found his mother, aptly surrounded by bubbles and a bottle of her beloved 1976 Roederer Cristal Brut Millesime, which bobbed next to her, the livelier of the two. Charlie had returned home from France. Martine’s had been closed due to a kitchen fire, although gossip had it that Martine was in some sort of trouble, something about a young girl. He took a moment alone with his mother, kneeling next to her, leaning in, hoping there were sparks left in the eyes that could capture one last look at her baby boy. Jee-Jee was in the kitchen, melting Brie, decanting the dinner bottle, selecting the CD, tweaking the lights—what joy it had given him, these last three decades, to be early-evening rich with his wife. And now as Charlie approached his father, so awkwardly, so carefully, Jee-Jee dropped the cheese knife. He saw and knew, touched Charlie’s face before making his way upstairs.

*

“Jews are excellent at death,” said John.

They were sitting shivah. Charlie, Jee-Jee, and Angelina, who had flown in with her ancient mother, who now wore her daughter’s apron in the kitchen, plating sandwiches and making lemonade for a hundred. But there were no visitors; adult alcoholics exhaust their friends at a breakneck pace. There was one other guest, also in the kitchen, dutifully assisting Mama: Monica Miller. Somehow she had heard the news, maybe read the obituary, or just sniffed out the demise. John was right. Jews are amazing at death. Monica Miller knew just what to say. Just how to touch him. She was the one who ordered the food and who cleaned the tub.

“You know,” said Monica Miller, offering her very few guests mini pastramis on rye, “we will all be with Rose in eternity soon enough, so it’s probably in our best interests to make the most of our time here, before we are all reunited.”

She wore a sleek pantsuit. Slimming and conservative. She looked great. A real twenty-year-old. Firm, and firmly in control.

“Thank you, Monica,” said Jee-Jee. “Rose always liked you for our strange Charlie.”

Charlie didn’t mind the designation. He was floating. The death of a parent is a little forgiving that way, at least at first. You float, like in a Chagall painting, while staring at the Chagall painting that hung above the fireplace. Sometimes Monica Miller would put her hand on his head. Sometimes she would bring him a glass of water. Or put a blanket over his napping body. In just seven daylight hours, she had become the woman of the house.

*

“Come here, Charlie,” said Angelina. She’d grown younger. More cosmopolitan. Chic, even, with a silk scarf tied around her neck, and the Jackie O sunglasses she’d inherited from Rose Green.

“I am proud of you,” said Angelina. “You became a man so quickly, I can tell. We were worried if you would ever become a man, and now you have. Mother wrote me many times about you, and the girl you met. She was proud of you. But now you must do even more. This is your family now.”

“John’s taking care of all the will stuff.”

“Your brother is sweet, but he is permanently a child. And children should not have children. He will never be a papa. You. You must give Mother a grandchild so that she can rest in heaven.”

“Huh?”

“This chica Monica, she turned out nice.”

With that, Angelina licked a finger and, for the very last time, rubbed a mustard smudge from Charlie’s cheek.

So that’s the plan, thought Charlie. A life with Monica Miller, who would give us a child, and the Green name will withstand the death of the matriarch. Got it. Fuck, he thought, feeling for his beeper.

“Are you happy?” he asked Angelina.

“Only sometimes,” she said.

“I understand now,” said Charlie.

*

It was Rose Green’s wish to be cremated; her ashes poured off the back of a Bateaux Mouches tourist craft into the Seine. Jee-Jee called a friend at the French embassy, and it was confirmed: Errol Flynn had kept his promise. Charlie was on a list of American citizens forbidden to enter the motherland.

“I’ll look after him,” Monica Miller told Jee-Jee.

“Thank you,” said Jee-Jee. “You know, Monica, I see Rose in you.”

Mother comparisons? The kiss of death, thought Charlie. But he needed her now, so he clung to her, like he’d clung to Angelina as a child when she’d led the way in the Haunted Mansion, a walk-through attraction at the Jersey shore, his eyes closed, his fist full of his nanny’s blouse, while college kids dressed as demons popped out at them.

“Estupido monsters. Vamos, Charlie.”

A dead mother was the mother of all monsters, and she’d visited him the last several nights, in nightmares, wearing a dress train full of empty vodka bottles, like Jacob Marley and the clamor of his chains. Jews can suffer A Christmas Carol, too.

“Did your mom like Paula?” Monica Miller asked Charlie. They were in his bedroom while his family packed for the Concorde; Jee-Jee had even booked a seat just for his wife’s ashes.

“Do you think the urn will wear a seatbelt?” Charlie asked.

“Maybe. Was she really pretty?”

“Who?”

“Um, Paula?”

He was lying in bed, Monica Miller behind him at his desk. The arrangement struck Charlie as psychiatric, a configuration he used to generate non sequiturs and avoid answering questions about Paula. He hadn’t thought about how it would feel to return to New Hope. Paula might never return. Before, he’d held daily hope that the beeper would sound, but now it just felt impossible. Or perhaps the death of his mother cast a pall of impossibility over everything, except Monica Miller.

“Do you want me to make you a snack?” she asked. “Angelina gave me free rein over the kitchen. Can you believe it?”

Jee-Jee had asked Angelina and Mama to join them on the trip, and they’d agreed.

“I think Mama will like the Concorde,” said Charlie. “Although I think Mama complains even more than Angelina. Angelina never got to meet Paula.”

“You still love her, don’t you?”

“I think I’d like another mini pastrami on rye.”

*

“Give me a hug,” said John.

Jee-Jee was loading luggage into a hired limousine, in which Angelina and Mama waited. Charlie could make out Mama’s stoic profile through the tinted glass. The chiseled bones of Dignidad.

Mom would have liked the limo, he thought. It was so rectangular, so vitally 1978.

“A hug?” he asked John.

“Yeah, we should do that stuff more often. You’ve been through a fucking lot. Hey, you want anything from France? Sucks that you’re blackballed, but trust me, girls will find that sexy. A whole country versus Charlie Green. Hot.”

John left without giving Charlie the promised hug. Jee-Jee, an expert hugger, came through.

“We will be back in one week’s time,” he told Charlie. “Your Maman left you and your brother some things. Quite a lot of valuables, cash too, Charl, and we should discuss this when I get back. Will you be here, or in Pennsylvania?”

“I’m not sure.” He watched Mama play with the automatic tinted window, opening and closing, opening and closing.

“Mama sort of looks like Sitting Bull,” said Charlie.

“She is a good friend, your Monica.”

“I think she’s taking a shower.” The thought excited him. A naked girl. But only for a moment, then back came death.

Jee-Jee kissed Charlie on his mop of wavy brown hair and got into the car, in the seat next to the driver. Jee-Jee always sat next to the limo driver. He’s humble, Charlie thought. He grew up poor, in a good way. A very good way. I hope I have some of that in me. Then went back inside and shut the door. He’d never been alone, or at least without family or Angelina, in the five-story town house. He could hear Monica Miller in his shower. Without the noise of water, he’d hear the sound of death. A still tub holding a dead body. What did Hemingway write? “Death in the Afternoon”? Shower longer, Monica Miller. Shower forever. But soon enough the shower ended, and he fainted.

*

Charlie awoke in the arms of Monica Miller.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Just a few seconds.”

“It felt like forever. My Mom’s gone.”

“Everything will be okay. I’m taking off from school so I can be with you.”

“I don’t think I can be in this house. It’s awfully silent here.”

“We can go wherever you want, even New Castle.”

“It’s New Hope.”

*

New York City girls are so easily impressed, thought Charlie, watching Monica Miller shake her head in awe of the Delaware River. Then again, so had he been. He remembered that first time on the banks of the river with Paula, how the rural sun kissed the golden hair of her arms.

“God, I love little antique stores,” said Monica Miller, whose arms were perfectly hairless, devoid of clues.

She’d bought an antique broom for twenty-five dollars. Wealthy New York City girls who never use a broom buy expensive brooms they will hang on a wall. In a hundred years a Monica Miller will buy a Dustbuster for display.

They’d been there a week, at Charlie’s house; they’d slept in Charlie and Paula’s bed. Charlie was sure to sleep on Paula’s side, and they didn’t have sex. Although he could tell she wanted to. He could tell she was wearing him down. In full girlfriend mode. Nurturing, sweet, available. She even slept in the nude, which struck Charlie as savage and impressive.

“You know,” she’d said, “I have plenty of room in my apartment at NYU. I mean, it would be so easy for you to transfer. This New Hope is a little slice of heaven, but it feels like the type of place you leave on your way to New York or maybe Philly, you know?”

He saw New Hope through her eyes, her brown New York eyes, and tended to agree. With Martine’s now closed indefinitely—Martine was being sued by the parents of a fifteen-year-old girl—and with the absence of Paula, New Hope felt unalive. A place without yellow cabs. A place without a central park. No pigeons. No Plaza Hotel. Bad pizza.

*

After it was decided that Charlie would move to New York, to Monica Miller’s fifth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, they began making love, and she began making plans: the bar they lived above would serve them their famous cheese fondue; her best friend’s boyfriend would become Charlie’s best friend, and then they could order the fondue for four.

“We’ll smoke cigarettes on the fire escape late into the night,” she’d told him. “And listen to the sounds of the city that never sleeps, our city, where we were born. At the same hospital in the same year.”

Charlie didn’t mind her forecasts; it was all cozy enough. Even their perfunctory sex was comforting. The biblically scaled nights with Paula should be retired forever, he thought, like how great baseball players retire their number. Lou Gehrig’s number 4. The luckiest man on the face of the earth, Gehrig had said, despite terminal illness.

“I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Charlie had told Monica Miller. She knew nothing about baseball, so didn’t get the reference. She didn’t know that lucky Charlie needed to feel for his beeper when another girl exuded the scent of Paula’s shampoo. Not being with Paula is my Lou Gehrig’s disease, he’d think, then hug and kiss Monica Miller. It’s just what people do. They make concessions. Small talk over fondue. Missionary style. The bass line from Snap’s “I Got the Power” finding the open fire escape window while she smoked her postcoital Marlboro Light.

*

Martine opened the bar for Charlie’s farewell party. He’d invited Francis and the Lacrosse Girl, leaving them a message on their answering machine that they didn’t return.

They’ve moved on, he thought. Good for them. No, great for them. We’ll catch up in a future decade, a recessive decade when my hairline will have receded. Life prepares you for death, slowly but surely. It’s the singular job of life: death. But Francis and the Lacrosse Girl will be immune to this fact. They will be happy. I will be balding.

“Whatever happened to that girl?” they’ll ask.

“What girl?” I’ll ask, Monica Miller tethered to my arm, our faceless children cowering behind our adult legs.

Ah, well. Things got interesting for a little while there, back in 1987, 1988. Now it’s time to settle in, get comfortable. A middle-aged paunch inside an argyle sweater. Let life work its deadly magic.

*

Miss Pettibone, Gary, and Monica Miller were the only attendees at Charlie’s party. He’d also invited Mrs. Henderson, who would have attended, but she was already on her way to Italy on a Perillo Tour—thirty-five Mrs. Hendersons and the Tower of Pisa—which would conclude with her visiting Paula around Thanksgiving. Mrs. Henderson didn’t know the part Charlie had played in her daughter’s open-ended expatriation. He didn’t want Paula to know; if she thought she was taking a French girl’s job away, she’d put an end to her lavender reverie and move to another country, a less safe one, like Tommy’s Italy. She was safe amid flowers. She had earned her paradise.

“You want me to tell her anything, Charlie?” Mrs. Henderson had asked. “About your mom, or anything?”

“No, I’ll write her a letter and explain things.”

But he had no intention of telling her about his mother’s death. She’d pay me an unnecessary sympathy visit, he thought, and then go back to her color purple. A kiss on the cheek? Unbearable.

“Well, I’ll tell her you say hello,” said Mrs. Henderson.

As far as Mrs. Henderson could tell, Monica Miller was just a family friend visiting New Hope during a tough time. “You Jewish people stick together, don’t you, Charlie? I think it’s real sweet. Plus, maybe this Monica likes you? You should ask her. I won’t tell Paula. You deserve your happiness, we all do, but especially my Paula. Sorry, hon, but she comes first.”

“I tend to agree with you, Mrs. Henderson.”