In one very poor town near the Falls, he said, there lived an old couple. She was dying of an old-age disease, and her husband was taking care of her. I pictured an orange afghan, a half-drunk cup of tea, a room with olive paint so peeled it was as if the walls were shrugging out of their skins. I pictured a bent old man in suspenders, hovering over a tiny woman, all bones.
The narrator continued, saying that one morning, after the woman had had a very bad night, the couple’s son stopped by on the way to a night shift. He found an empty house, no parents, everything tidy. He grew alarmed and drove to all of their places: the diner, the theater, the library, the hospital. They weren’t anywhere. He didn’t know where else to drive, and at last, to pull himself together, he drove to the Falls. It was almost dawn now; there was a pink cast at the edge of the sky. When the son climbed from the car and went to the fence at the edge of the Falls, he found two pairs of shoes polished to a brilliant shine. The tiny black shoes of his mother, the cordovans of his father, pointing, eloquently, toward the water.
The old man had taken his wife in his arms, hot, sick; he had stood there in the dark predawn with her in his arms. He looked into her old face. Then he jumped.
I had to pull my car over because of this story, because of those lonely four shoes at the annealing edge of the Falls, right where the water hesitates and seems to catch its breath before shattering downward. And, later, during that long winter when you made me come home, I thought vaguely of this story, again and again. Not because I wanted to die, of course. But because I thought I had found exactly that, someone to take me to old age, someone who could take me beyond, if it were necessary and right to do so.
There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.
Sir Fleeting
THE WINTER IS INESCAPABLE HERE. HALF OF my walls are glass, opening to a Central Park vista of naked trees with branches like grasping fingers, and down in the courtyard, even those floozies, the cherry trees, have turned spinsterish in the cold. In my modern apartment their bare limbs are doubled upon the shining walls, the stainless-steel kitchen, the mirrors. What doesn’t reflect trees reflects my face, which is not always a welcome variation. Last week, for instance, after my granddaughter visited, full of plans for her wedding and honeymoon in Argentina, I showed her a picture from my own trip so many years ago and upset her; after she left I stood for a long time palpating my cheeks, watching the woman etched in the steel elevator doors do the same.
I don’t know why I said what I did. I suppose I was piqued when she held the old photo by its edges, and said, “Oh God, Nana, you were so beautiful.”
I took the picture from her. That eighteen-year-old idiot, squinting in the Argentine sun? A pretty face, yes, a girl with a clever hand at dressing well with no money. But fat. A Wisconsin farm girl raised on apples and whole milk, a body carved out of a slick ton of butter like those statues at the state fair.
“Darling,” I said, “I was a ball of lard.” My granddaughter, bless her heart — she’s nothing close to the pudge I was — actually hissed at me. “No,” she said loudly. “You were beautiful,” and she stood to go, and I couldn’t press the check into her hand before she left.
Afterward, I watched that lady reflected in the elevator door and I didn’t like her much. Whatever it was I’d had in that picture had seeped away over the years, a rubber tire with a long, slow leak. In the days that followed, I tried to push that image in the elevator door out of my head and go about my life — the yoga, the hairdresser, the charity luncheons. The photo stayed where it was, facedown on the glass table, for days, until it woke me up in the middle of the night and insisted that I look at it again.
I walked through my dark apartment and flipped the photo over to see it in the moonlight. There she was again, that bride, beside her new husband, leaning on the hotel’s Corinthian columns. Buenos Aires, 1956. I could feel the warm sun on my face, my first husband’s hand in my own. It was spring in Argentina, and the city was full of flowers, great washes of buds bursting open, red hibiscus on our balcony, roses and bougainvillea in the parks. The day of the photo, a fluke of wind from some distant jungle had carried a gigantic cloud of iridescent blue butterflies into the city, and we had run outside to see them. The city seemed to pulsate under the beat of those many wings. In the black-and-white picture the butterflies are blurry streaks behind us, though one creature has settled on my husband’s breast pocket like a boutonniere. He is scowling in the sun and I am grinning, not at the butterflies or even my new groom, but, rather, at the man holding the camera.
Once in a while, I like to say the name aloud: Ancel de Chair. That name alone seems to bring warmth to this wintry city. We overlapped for only a short time in Argentina when we first met, but a sort of static cling brought us together again and again throughout our lives. My husband and I had already been in Buenos Aires for two weeks by then, though I don’t believe we did much during those weeks save eat enormous, glistening steaks and run back upstairs to bed again where we had discovered, to our virginal disbelief, our own bodies. Before marriage we had fallen into an itchy sort of lust, and, good children, we had waited until we were married to scratch it. On our honeymoon, sex was still strange to me: the awkward fittings of parts to parts, my poor husband sobbing after his every achievement, me wide-eyed and wondering if there wasn’t something I might have missed in those few frenzied minutes. I’d found my most voluptuous tenderness in stroking my husband’s furry ears, and hoped there was more to learn in what I thought would be our eternity together.
How sophisticated we’d thought ourselves then, we innocents. I’d had a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, a farm girl with six sisters, a talent for sewing, and a sharp brain for math, and had spent my freshman year lonely, refusing dates, taking the train home on weekends to help with the chores. When I met my first husband in a social theory course and heard how well the man could argue, I was like a match sparked alight. I used to long to lick his face in the middle of class.
Poor man; I believe he is still alive somewhere like Scottsdale or Santa Fe, an old immigration lawyer turned fat and wheezy. But when I met him he was a child from a New York family that I, with my scant knowledge of wealth back then, thought inordinately rich. He had a cashmere coat and smoked pipe tobacco constantly, something my father was able to treat himself to only once a week, at most. My husband had blazing eyes, an attractive nervous energy, and a passion for justice that transmuted, over time, into a Communist zeal that eventually broke up our little union. When my first husband told me his family drank wine at meals, argued about books, and had a strongly Socialist bent, it took my breath away, daughter as I was of a farm wife with chicken blood on her hands and a stony Libertarian with one penny in his pocket that longed for a mate to jingle with.