Then she was gone. Oh, damn. He wondered, as he had the year before, if he could somehow spirit this tape away and take it home to watch in solitude. He would play just the frames with Connie in them over and over and over. He would dwell on the dear slope of flesh beneath her jaw and the cozily embedded look of the wedding ring on her finger.
The infant Jin-Ho arrived in her courier's arms and was surrounded and engulfed. Various Dickinsons and Donaldsons behaved like total fools. Then Susan flashed by now you see her, now you don't but Dave barely noticed that part. He knew there wouldn't be any more shots of Connie.
It was difficult to watch Connie, no? Maryam asked.
She stood nearby, on his left. The foreign intonation of her no? struck him as irritating. He felt so far removed from this random assemblage; he resented being dragged back to it. He kept his eyes fixed stubbornly on the TV screen (the credits rolling by in the original, copperplate font) as he said, Not difficult at all. I liked seeing her so healthy.
Ah, Maryam said. Yes, I can understand that. Then she said, I used to think that if someone had come to me out of the blue and told me, 'Your husband just died,' when he was in perfect health, I would have found it easier. It was watching him go down, down, down that made it so hard.
He looked over at her. He was often startled by Maryam's smallness someone so elegant should be statuesque, it seemed to him and now he had to lower his gaze a few inches to take in her profile, her eyes trained on the other guests and her fingers curved delicately around the handle of a teacup.
I thought, If only I could mourn the man I first knew! she said. But instead there were the more recent versions, the sick one and then the sicker one and then the one who was so cross and hated me for disturbing him with pills and food and fluids, and finally the faraway, sleepy one who in fact was not there at all. I thought, I wish I had been aware of the day he really died the day his real self died. That was the day when I should have grieved most deeply.
I'd forgotten his was cancer too, Dave said.
She was silent. She watched the others streaming out, the children heading toward the backyard and the grownups to the living room.
Connie in her final version was… very demanding, Dave said. He had started to say something else but changed his mind. Then he went ahead and said it after all. In a way, she was almost mean, he said.
Maryam nodded without surprise and took a sip of tea.
I guess it was inevitable, he told her. People when they're sick begin to feel something is owed them. They get sort of imperious. In real life, Connie wasn't like that in the least. I knew that! I should have made allowances, but I didn't. I snapped at her, sometimes. I often lost my patience.
Well, of course, Maryam said, and she set her cup back in her saucer without a sound. It was fear, she told him.
Fear?
I remember when I was a child, if my mother showed any sign of weakness took to bed with a headache, even I always got so angry with her! I was frightened, was the reason.
He thought that over. He supposed she had a point. Certainly Connie's decline had scared him out of his wits. But somehow he felt unsatisfied with this conversation, as if there were something more that needed to be set straight. He shifted to one side to let Siroos's son edge past him, and then he said, It isn't only her last days that I regret.
Maryam raised her eyebrows slightly.
It's her whole life. Our whole life together. Every thoughtless word I ever said, every instance of neglect. Do you ever do that? Think back on those things? I've always been such a concentrator; I mean, driven to concentrate on some project and let everything else go to hell. I remember one time I was wiring our house for a sound system I'd concocted. I wouldn't stop for lunch, wouldn't go with Connie to this movie she wanted to see… Now I'm sick about it. I think, What I wouldn't give for lunch with her now, or to be sitting with her at a movie!
You folks coming? Brad asked. Seconds on cake in the dining room.
Thanks, Dave told him, but Maryam didn't respond. She took another sip of tea and then looked down into her cup. Ah, well, she said. If we had been different, would they have loved us?
Pardon?
If you were not a man of many interests, enthusiastic about your projects if you had no interests except for Connie and followed her every footstep would she have chosen to marry you?
But she didn't seem to expect an answer, because while he was still considering her words she said, Jeannine! Hasn't Polly grown up this summer!
Yes, alas, she's a teenager now, Jeannine said. Heaven help us all.
Maryam laughed lightly and turned to accompany her out of the room, and Dave trailed after them. He did think he might want more cake. All at once he felt positively hungry.
September brought its smell of dry leaves that could so easily be mistaken for the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, and the neighborhood children returned to school with their giant book bags and the college students drove away in their overstuffed cars and the fact of Dave's retirement hit him in the face all over again. Never mind those fond goodbyes last June. Forget the yearbook dedication (To our beloved Mr. Dickinson, who made physics come alive for three generations of Woodbury girls) and the plethora of farewell parties yielding their gifts of clocks, mostly, which seemed ironic when you considered that he no longer had much need to know what time it was. This was the moment of truth: autumn, when the rest of the world was beginning anew but Dave himself was just going along, going along the same as in the summer. He had thought he couldn't wait to be done with it all. They had worn him out, those Woodbury girls! But now he found himself missing their shallow, breathy voices that ended every statement with a question mark, and their cataclysmic emotional crises that erupted almost hourly, and even their mysterious fits of giggles although he had often suspected that he was the one they were laughing at. They would already have forgotten him. He didn't kid himself. They were already going gaga over his successor, a debonair young man fresh out of Princeton. It was like walking down a red carpet and then turning to find the attendants rolling it up behind you. He was gone. It shook his whole view of himself to discover how much he minded.
Always he'd been a good putterer a competent repairman, woodworker, seat-of-the-pants inventor and this was why he'd assumed that retirement would come easy to him. But one day he was down in the basement replacing a three-way lamp socket and he felt all at once that he couldn't stand another minute of the gloomy, dank, earth-smelling air. The scummy little window above his head reminded him of the painted-over panes in derelict factories, and his workbench with its neatly hung tools, each outlined in white and arranged according to function and size, inhabited a chilly cube of fluorescent lighting with the dark pressing in all around even on this sunny afternoon. He imagined he couldn't breathe. He wondered how long he'd be lying here if he happened to have a stroke.
Up in the kitchen (airy and almost too bright), he gulped down a glass of water while he studied the replacement socket he'd unthinkingly brought with him. That was when it occurred to him that he could move his workbench upstairs. Well, maybe not the workbench itself, or the larger of the tools, but certainly the smaller items. He could take over the little room they called the study, which led directly off the kitchen and served as a sort of catchall for Connie's sewing supplies and the unpaid bills and the out-of-date magazines. There was no one to object, after all. He felt a flicker of his old zest bestirring itself. Something to do! He set his glass on the counter and went to the study to investigate.