“What am I telling you? It’s not as if you didn’t know things were a shambles here. I’m telling you that all the years I was his wife, part of me was elsewhere. All the years I stayed home and did homework with the children and took his mother to the doctor and was the partner’s wife at so many tedious banquets, and the years I helped with his wine parties, and the summers we all traveled together, and the nights I slept by him at the hospital after they’d scraped him clean of everything he had, poor man — all this time my heart was elsewhere.”
“Now you tell me?”
“Now I tell you.”
My mother stands up and fills a bowl with pistachios, obviously they’re meant for me. She brings another bowl for the shells.
“What is it that you two had that was so special?” I finally ask.
“We had the real thing. Or the closest to it — maybe even better.”
“And what’s that?”
She takes a moment, then smiles.
“Laughter. That’s what we had.”
“Laughter?” I ask, totally baffled.
“Who’d have known. But it was laughter. Right now we’re feeding off old jokes. In a few months we’ll find them stale. But put us in a room together and we start laughing.”
She stands up to put our cups and saucers in the sink. All that stands between us now is the bowl of pistachios and the bowl with shells.
The years she stood by him at the annual party and helped order the food for guests she couldn’t have given a damn about, and the years she beamed when he delivered his annual speech in rhyming couplets before the chime of twelve, the years and years of it without laughter.
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
“Why are you asking me like that? Of course I miss him.”
I look at her. She averts her eyes. I must have offended her. “Now look at you, you’ve managed to clean out this entire bowl in less than five minutes.”
She takes the emptied bowl and the one containing the shells. I thought she was going to empty the bowl and leave the other on the counter. Instead, she replenishes one with pistachios.
Left alone in the dining room, I stand up, open the glass door, and step onto the balcony. A mound of snow makes the passage difficult. It makes me want to summon old times for a second, see what it was like back then when we had guests and chilled the wine out here. Were those better days because he was still alive, or were they better because they belonged to the past? I want to think that Livia is with me now, or that he is right outside with me here in the cold, baring his soul about the grandchildren he wants, all the while looking past the windows into the living room, spotting his bickering wife catering to everyone but him, and beyond our windows to the neighbors’ party in the other tower. He had always known about her, though God knows if he’d ever cared or been able to put his finger on the demon that snuffed out his life but kept him alive so many decades later. And I’m thinking of the other Livias in my life as well, Alice and Jean, each trying to help with the wine tasting as best she could, laying out the bottles on the balcony after they’d helped me wrap the mystery labels around each one, while some of the guests kept guessing, the blind test always getting out of hand, which happened every year, the crowd agreeing that bottle no. 4 was as good as no. 7, but that no. 11 was the best, the usual suspects always disagreeing with everyone else, Father refereeing, some people no longer really caring, because the test was always a success, would always be a success, was just another way of putting a good spin on the certainty that part of us always dies in December, which is why it was the only holiday he celebrated each year, because the part that didn’t die by year-end was as thrilled with the extended grace period as he was that something like love had not entirely run out of his life, though where he went scrounging for it and where he found it, if find it he did, no one knew or wished to know; the black snows of yesteryear, I didn’t miss them a bit.
If I were a better son, I’d do what the father of that dying princess promised he’d do for his daughter each year. I’d bring out his old bones so that he might feel the winter sun again and shiver at the thought of good mulled wines and thick, warm butternut soups sprinkled with diced chestnuts, bring out his body to savor the elegy of moonlit snow as he dreams of an old Weihnachten world that went under and of a love that addled before its time. It didn’t addle, it never happened, he used to say, and for all he knew, the other woman never knew she was the light of his one short, unfinished life — a love most chaste, a love most chaste, Your mother never knew either, and no point telling her now.
Mother asks me not to dump the glass bulb down the chute. I lie and say I’d never dream of such a thing. How empty the apartment looks with all the doors shut now: How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow. I must bring Clara here.
One day, I’ll come to clean the place out, picking up the shards of her life, of his life, worse yet, of my own life here. God knows what I’ll find, what I’m not prepared to find. His alarm clock, his address book, his pipe tools. A large ashtray bearing his yellowed meerschaum pipes with their engraved turbaned Turks scowling like two bookends who can’t stand each other’s sight. His vintage Pelikan pen and Caran d’Ache silver pencil lying, like camp inmates in the same bunk bed, head facing toe, like a dessert fork and spoon, his lacquered lighter, and, first among them, waiting cross-armed, running out of patience, his horn-rimmed specs, probably folded ever so warily, yet abandoned without false pretenses at the last minute when he said, Okay, let’s go face that witch doctor now. I can just see the resigned admonition in his gesture when he placed his glasses right smack in the middle of his emptied, clean glass desktop, meaning, Now watch the fort and be good to others, which reminds me how he’d take out a twenty-dollar bill and tuck it under an ashtray before leaving a hotel bedroom, meaning, You’ve been good to me, now be good to the next fellow. He was good to things, good to people. Listened, always listened. Somewhere, I am sure, Mother has stowed away his wine tools.
I remember the care with which he laid them out one by one on the sideboard in the dining room, cleaning and polishing his huge collection of antique corkscrews and foil cutters, Mother saying in front of everyone he reminded her of a mohel laying out his tools for a bris. Last time I laid out my tool, tell me, where, in which land that was — Someone immediately interrupts and cracks a joke about Abélard’s tools and Abélard’s love. It was Héloïse did the deed, I know wherefrom I speak, my father says, Héloïse and wedlock. Laughter, laughter, and all the while we’re laughing together, there she is two-timing him, while sorrow addles his heart for someone he’d met decades elsewhere, a love most chaste. These were the words with which he marked time in that private little ledger where we measure what we lose, where we fail, how we age, why we get so little of what we long for, and whether it’s still wise to hold out for something as we sort the life we’re given to live, and the life not lived, and the life half lived, and the life we wish we’d learn to live while we still have time, and the life we want to rewrite if only we could, and the life we know remains unwritten and may never be written at all, and the life we hope others may live far better and more wisely than we have, which is what I know my father had wished for me.
“Who is this man?” I ask my mother.
“You’ve met him before.”
“What’s his name?”
“If you want to know, come before midnight.”
She smiles, but she still won’t tell me. There is nothing to say.
“Are you going to be all right?” I ask.