He did die. He died a few days later, alone, in the middle of the night, when a series of infarctions began and he went into a major arrest and the staff came in and performed heroic measures (because he said hell no to that living will crap. No way. No how am I gonna sign that? You’ll put me under for Christ’s sake. Why should I trust you morons after the way you jerked that fucking balloon out of my leg?), giving him a zap with the jelled electrodes, pumping him full of anticoagulants, working a sweat up over the guy.
Seven days of mourning without the hard leather of shoes, and during Shiva only once was the crazy guy mentioned; brought up by Stanley — who in his grief had gone downstairs twice, out onto the sidewalk along Riverside Drive to take in the fresh air off the Hudson and to sip single malt from one of those little bottles he’d bought on the flight over; he was on his third bottle. He was back inside the apartment, on the floor, talking softly with Saul, a buyer for the hardware chain, and in passing other subjects, sliding through them in his buzz, he sadly mentioned the Gentile who’d stumbled out into the hallway half alive, filling the air with his foul curses; it was the way he leaned into Saul; it was the way he tried to flatten his voice out from his Hebraic to an Ohio twang (and trying to whisper at the same time, too)—Shut the fuck up for Christ sake you babbling idiots; go back to where you came from. It was the form, not the content, that got the men laughing, just as Tara’s father came down the stairs, arm in arm with his wife.
Out the tall windows the Hudson glinted flecks of white light, and spread before them was a view embracing New Jersey across the river all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. When Tara died, the word went out via optical fibers, calls made to Israel, making sure everybody who had to mourn knew of her death so that no one would be called upon to begin mourning later, because from the moment the news was heard, those so obligated had to observe the laws and customs as set down in the Talmud. The ritual washing of the body, Tahorah, had been performed because none of her injuries, all internal and concussive, had drawn enough blood to soak her clothes, in which case she would have been buried in the bloodied garments. After the funeral they went to the cemetery, pausing the seven times to recite Psalm 91,
He that dewlleth in the secret place of the Most High
Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
before spreading the dirt over the coffin.
While Stanley recounted the story of the crazy man in the hosptial, upstairs in the bedroom her father had been been ripping up all of his ties, one by one, and piling them aside. He rent each one apart, yanking hard and wide, skinny narrow ones from back in the early eighties, wide ones from the sixties with huge stripes, and semi-wide ones from the nineties. He tore them down the middle, if he could, and he tore them apart from the center, opening them up, plying apart the silk backing and ripping down the sides. His hands were dry and cracked and caught the silk. When his wife went up to see where he was, he was nearly finished, seated on the side of the bed next to a jostled pile of twisted fabric spilling over the edge of the poplin bedspread, doing one last tie, a Calvin Klein with deep blue triangles set in a lighter blue background beset with swirls and splats à la Jackson Pollock that Tara had given him for the holidays two years ago. Pollock had been her favorite artist. Maybe once every couple of weeks, for a year, he wore it, and then put it aside in favor of ones he had picked out himself, more conservative patterns. He had performed the standard Qeri’ah at the funeral, rending the tiny strip of ribbon pinned to his left lapel, but apparently that act hadn’t been enough. Stop, his wife said. Stop. Stop. Stop. And he did, bowing his head into his palms and heaving out a long cry, kicking his heels into the carpet, cradling what was left of the tie up to his lips.
“Come downstairs with me,” she said, placing her hand along the curve of his neck.
“All right. For you, I’ll go downstairs,” he cleared his throat and got up and slowly lifted a few strands of neckties onto the bed.
The faces seemed to have answers for him as he walked down the spiral stairs into the Shiva; people hunched down talking softly, moving food up to their mouths; he would remember seeing each face in turn: the tight lips of Erma, his wife’s best friend, holding a sob; his business associates looking away, casting glances out over New Jersey; the kids obliviously playing with dolls near the entrance to the kitchen. But what he would remember the most, what he centered on later, was the strange, twisted smile on his brother’s face, a blessed smile that seemed to go way back to their childhood secrets; it was the way Stanley smiled when he was trying not to smile, the tightness in the corners of his mouth that led to two half-moon dimples; a wonderful grimace and smirk combined; and seeing it, something lifted slightly. It was only the first bit of weight off of his grief but it was significant in that it was the first; he went over and the two men held each other, tighter and tighter.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“The foolishness of the world,” Stanley said.
Out the windows the afternoon was waning. Beams of orange cut back between buildings in Jersey. The elongated shadows of buildings pressed behind the view.
It was never spoken of again, that scene, that moment in the hospital corridor. It didn’t go down in family lore. It didn’t go anywhere except for that moment into the smile on Stanley’s face, the thing Tara’s father saw when he entered back into the Shiva.
THE GESTURE HUNTER
I’M INTERESTED in how people go about their daily lives. You know, how they bide their time, what they fill all that time up with. Not the big motions but the little ones, I suppose: someone hanging clothes on an old-fashioned line, breaking with the convention of the gas dryer, the fluid motion of her arms lifting the sheets, a wooden pin between her teeth, the sway of the line, laden with windblown sheets, in relation to how she bends up to it in greeting; a guy at the gas station helping the full-service customers, his foot on the black slab of rubber bumper, leg jittering hard as he pumps, the car rising and falling gently while his oblivious eyes stay cocked to some lost point on the horizon and he plucks at the stains under the arms of his green sweatshirt. I’m a gesture hunter. I seize moments. I care fully about them.
It was one of those days typical to our town, which is along the Hudson, just twenty-odd miles up from the city. I mean that the day had settled into the town and the town into the day — clear and sunny with just an edge of cool to the wind, which ruffled the surface of the river white and was strong enough to cause a few waves to curl up but not really break. (Most of the waves on the Hudson have a certain pathetic quality: weak-lipped, shaky. So do the boats, working the strange wind patterns, mainly from the north, trying to buck the tidal currents, coming about and then landing in irons in mysteriously dead winds beneath the Tappan Zee Bridge; nothing fluid or graceful about any of it.) It’s odd that I can’t tell exactly if it’s the day coming into the town or the town coming into the day when I start out on these searches, especially in the morning — I start early sometimes — when the light is still low and silvery. But as I said, this was, it seemed, nothing but a typical day on all accounts, except that it was morning and I had started out rather early. I can’t say now that I felt at that moment — as I made my first slow sweep through the center of town, taking Broadway (doesn’t every town near the city have its own futile Broadway?), driving my usual five miles an hour — that I felt any sense of betrayal; I mean that I did not think the day had anything betraying in it destined for me. But days do that. A day can betray you. You invest in it and it gives something back you didn’t expect. I saw from the corner of my eyes a man leaving the police station; he had a slow, elderly walk — very much like mine — a pale yellow shirt, and one of those crushable canvas hats you might use for fishing; he was moving with his slow gait down the wheelchair ramp. Along the other side of the street, in front of one of the many antique shops (those scandalous resellers and repackagers of the past) that have given our town a place on the map, someone, lifting something, was halfway through the door. I saw just the back end of the man: his Wrangler jeans, his hip, and the edge of whatever he was carrying, dark oak maybe, and the buffed metal frame of the door. Nothing worth noting. A gesture, certainly, but not the kind I wanted. I needed the whole thing, united and graceful and, most of all, full of revelation, stark wonderful revelation; a young man carrying a table into a shop didn’t cut it. Ahead, the light was green; farther ahead, maybe a block or two, one of those big, bulky, stupid emerald four-wheel beasts that roam our streets.