His Wife Leaves Him

es, he’s a successful writer, so has the means, while you’ll be struggling for years.” Met her at a health-food co-op in Berkeley. Diana he was fixed up with by a friend in New York. Eleanor he also met at a party in SoHo, but so far east it might be called something else. Sharon was behind him on the checkout line with three items in her hands: an unsliced loaf of millet bread, a can of inorganic garbanzo beans and a square chunk of tofu in a little plastic bag tied with a tab and almost filled to the top with water, like the kind one carries home a goldfish in from a pet store. Remembered how the bag always stunk from fish feces when he opened it. How’d he get the fish into the bowl without the feces? It was so long ago. When he was a kid. He gave them names. One was “Goldie.” The fish kept quickly dying, never lasted more than a few days, so he must have done it several times before giving up on owning a fish. Probably emptied the bag out into a container of water first and then picked the fish up with his hand or a net and put it into the bowl. “If that’s all you have,” he said, “—even if you have more”—he was immediately attracted to her as he was to Gwen—“go in front of me. I’ve got a lot more than you.” She said “No, thank you. I’m in no hurry. And what I have is hardly weighing me down.” “Put everything on the counter then,” and she said “The water could spill and I didn’t bag the bread.” “Of course,” he said. “I should have realized that. I don’t know what’s making me so dense, but you’re right,” and he couldn’t think of anything else to say and she looked away from him, so he turned to the front. Outside the store, he tied and retied his shoes, waiting for her. When she came out, same three items in her hands, he stood up and patted his pants pockets as if he were searching for his wallet or keys or just wanted to make sure they were there. Then he looked at her as if he had only just noticed her and said, “Oh, hi. Just thought I lost something, but as usual I didn’t. Wait a minute. None of my business, but you going to carry that bread home or to somewhere, not in a bag?” She said “I have a bag for it in my bicycle but forgot to bring it in with me,” and she unstrapped one of the saddle bags on a bike in a bike rack in front of the store, got a paper bag out of it and stuck the bread in. “So you slice it each time?” he said. “With a breadknife,” she said. “The loaf always falls apart when I do it that way, even with a breadknife, which is why I get it sliced.” “It stays fresher unsliced,” she said, “and will stay even fresher if you put a few raisins in the bag.” “Raisins?” and she said “Take my word. Try it.” Then she put her three items into the saddle bag, the tofu wedged between the beans and bread and something else holding it straight — a rolled-up hand towel, it looked like — so it wouldn’t move around and burst or spill. “Very ecological,” he said. “I should do more of that. I try, in other ways — biking instead of driving if it isn’t raining hard and the distance isn’t too great and if there isn’t an enormous steep hill along the way, since my bike’s only got one speed, unlike yours — but I never thought to bring my own bags to a store. I’m afraid I’ve only used them for my garbage till now.” “That’s putting them to good use,” she said. “You’re being ecological by not buying garbage bags, which would probably be plastic.” “I suppose. But what if I first used the bag to carry home goods from a store and then used it for my garbage?” “You could do that. Doubly useful. What an odd conversation this is.” “Well, you get into things, you never know where you’re going to go, but we’ll get out. Unfortunately, I’m almost inherently discursive and digressive. My father, by the way — am I holding you up? I shouldn’t say that, because I’m enjoying the conversation,” and she said “I’ve got a few minutes.” “My father was practicing ecology or environmentalism or whatever the right word for it is, long before most people, it seemed. But more out of thriftiness, which I’m sure came from his family being very poor when he was a kid, than saving the planet or preserving it a few years more than the global experts were giving it because of our planetary profligacy, I guess you can call it. As an example, and he’s retired now and disabled and quite sick so he no longer does this, every day for lunch he took a sandwich to his office wrapped in the same wax paper he used for the entire work week. That is, if it didn’t get too messy or tear, and by the way he wrapped the sandwich and refolded the paper after he used it, he made sure it wouldn’t. He probably would have used it the following week too but had no place to keep it over the weekend. My mother I know wouldn’t have allowed him to stash it in the refrigerator someplace because if anyone saw it, it would just seem too cheap, and if he kept it out for two days the paper would stink and parts of it maybe rot by the time he used it again Sunday night. Same routine with the paper lunch bag he carried the sandwich in, if it also didn’t get too greasy or start to come apart. Folded the bag carefully along its natural seams after taking the wrapped sandwich and paper napkin and that day’s whole fruit out of it — apple, orange, tangerine, etcetera. Napkins he used came from the dairy cafeteria he treated himself to lunch to about every third week, maybe also to restock his napkin supply. Would grab a couple of handfuls out of the dispenser and stuff them into his jacket and coat pockets. Where he kept them at home I don’t know, but he took me to lunch there once or twice and I saw him do it and figured out that’s where his never-ending supply of napkins came from.” “Outside of the napkin part, she said, “it seems he knew what he was doing, reusing what other people indiscriminately throw away.” “I guess, but I’m not certain, though I like your idea of looking at it in a good light. When I was growing up, though — even till about five or ten years ago — I saw it the way my mother did: that he was cheap. But to really exhaust the point and also to see this segment of my father’s life, since it is sort of a story, to the end and then I’ll stop, though I’ll stop sooner if you want me to, he made the sandwich right after dinner, or right after he smoked his cigar after dinner — wouldn’t allow anyone to do it for him — usually from a few slices of that meal’s meat leftover. If it didn’t look like there was going to be any meat left over, he saved a slice or two already on his plate and made the sandwich from that. What I’m getting to here is that if he only ate half the sandwich the next day, he brought the other half home with him, or whatever was left of it — even meat and bread scraps — in the same wax paper and bag he took the sandwich to work in and gave it to our dog, no doubt, in his mind, to save on the dog-food expense and, looking at it the way you do, to cut back on waste. He certainly didn’t do it because he liked the dog. He called her ‘public nuisance number one.’ The only thing I can think of now working against taking the sandwich half and scraps home is that it gave the wax paper and lunch bag one less chance of surviving the entire week. After the dog died from something she ate — it wasn’t from the sandwich but something she managed to claw out from behind the stove — I don’t know what my father did if he didn’t eat the second half of the sandwich, and there had to be times he didn’t, since he never brought it home. Okay, that should do it, and did I go on? This is the classic tale of a stranger telling a stranger his family history and life story, but much more than she bargained for or ever wanted to hear.” “No, I didn’t mind,” she said. “I kind of liked it. You’re a funny guy. And I bet everything you said was intended to be funny, so a successful funny guy. So, not only amusing but interesting, your delivery and material, in a sort of time-capsule way. What was your dog’s name?” “Penelope. I named it before I even heard of Homer. I must have got the name from a character in a comic book, which at the time was all I read for diversion. Anyway, enough of me. I’d like to shut up now. You might think that impossible, but I’m really not much of a talker and don’t know how I got started rattling on so much. I’d much prefer hearing some of your life story and family history, but over coffee if you have a few spare minutes. More if you have more but a few if that’s all you can spare. I’d also like to know what you meant by my delivery. But could we do that?” Please, please, he was thinking, and she said “I don’t see why not. My bike’s safe here even without a lock — the co-op manager once told me they never had a bike stolen — and what little food I have won’t spoil. To save time, should we go to the snack bar they have here?” They went back inside, split a warmed-up buttered corn muffin and had herbal tea, his first. She ordered it for herself and he told the counterperson “I’ll have one too,” since the store had no regular coffee — not even in pound bags on the shelves — just grain coffee, which he didn’t like. He thought he spoke more articulately and his mind was clearer and he said more intelligent and clever things when he drank caffeinated coffee with someone, at least when his was real coffee and black and strong. That was then; not today and not for years. Now he doesn’t think it makes a difference, with or without. He’s become somewhat inarticulate and often unintelligible, when he was almost never that way, and gets lost in what he’s saying or breaks off his speech in the middle of a sentence because he forgets what point he was trying to make. There’s a long word for it he always forgets. Starts with an A or O, he thinks, and when he finally remembers it, he forgets how to pronounce it. What happened to him to make him like that? Age; again, loss of confidence and resistance to doing anything new or to change. Not that so much or much of it at all, but just things repeating themselves. Page after page, section after section, novel after novel, and so on. Same job and same workers at work and same bed and same newspapers and same news and same things to eat and drink and clean up and same dawn. Wait, what’s he missing? Gwen getting sick, that changed things, but ended up being the same day-to-day tasks taking care of her. Ah, why worry about it? He’s not worrying, just thinking. But to get back. And why’s he going on so long about Sharon? Could be because she reminds him of Gwen so much, more than any woman he’s been close to. The quietness and education and intelligence and serenity and sense of humor and modesty and the way she smiled and spoke and her soft voice and the soft features and other soft things and that she always had a book with her and read a lot of poetry. Both also wrote poetry. Sharon, he later saw, published some of hers in literary magazines and may have even had a book or two of her poems published, while Gwen never sent hers out. “It’s not that I fear rejection,” she said, when he said if she doesn’t want to do it, he’ll send them out for her, he knows the market. “They just never seem ready.” Maybe he can put together a collection of her poems, he thinks, with help from a poet friend of hers and the kids. Might take some doing, retrieving them from her computer, but the kids are probably whizzes at that. Also, how he met her. No, not even close, so why’d he think it? Gwen was by the elevator, after his eyeing her at the party for so long and she a few times catching him doing it, though she denied it. Sharon on the checkout line, when he looked around, as people waiting to be taken care of will do on lines, and saw her for the first time — she was looking around too and didn’t for several seconds see him looking at her — and was instantly, he could say, as he was with Gwen when he first saw her, attracted to her. That didn’t happen to him with many women, maybe just those two. And Terry, actress he saw almost every day for a couple of months — his first real girlfriend, really, meaning the first one he went with a while and also slept with — till she fell in love with an actor she was doing a love scene with in acting class. Her he also first met at a party — New Year’s Eve, vast West End Avenue apartment, enormous tall paintings on the walls and smaller ones leaning up against the bookcases and chairs of elongated male and female nudes by the mother of the guy who gave the party, same day or day before Batista fled Cuba and Castro’s forces were filtering into Havana for the final takeover of the island. He was elated at the news and then disgusted soon after when the revolutionaries, no doubt on Castro’s orders, or maybe not, but anyway he didn’t stop them and it went on for weeks, began lining up police and suspected Batista sympathizers and such against walls and shooting them. And Frieda, but should he really count her? He was sixteen, she fifteen, when he went with his friends to a dance at her all-girls’ private high school on the Upper East Side and first saw her, dancing the Lindy, he thinks, with another girl in the gymnasium turned into a seedy nightclub. She looks like a model, he thought, so beautiful and slim and dressed so well and sophisticated looking. “Hands off,” he told a couple of his friends who were also admiring her. “She’s mine, or at least give me a clear shot at her before you horn in.” She was the first girl he was in love with. It never came to anything, and he never told her how he felt but knew she knew by the way he acted toward her, other than for a number of dates, all but two of them on Sunday afternoons and a Jewish religious holiday during the week and one big long kiss at her apartment door at the end of their second and last evening date and a few French kisses in the Loew’s 83rd Street movie theater. Just “Loew’s 83rd” did they call it? He said on the phone weeks after she stopped going out with him “Didn’t those kisses we did mean anything?” She said “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I may have, but I’m new at it and was just practicing.” He went over to her and said something like “Hi, I’m Martin and I wonder if I could have the next dance,” and she said “I don’t see why that couldn’t be possible. Jessica.” “Hi, Jessica.” “It’s actually Frieda, but I’d like it to be Jessica.” They danced several dances in a row. He was surprised no other guy cut in on him, and told her so. She said “Oh, I’m a very unpopular girl,” and he said “Tell me another one.” She seemed to be having a good time with him — laughing and joking and whispering something in his ear he couldn’t hear — and he found himself falling for her. She had a nice smell about her — carnation or something. It didn’t seem like perfume or cologne — not as strong — so probably from soap. Wherever it came from, he thought, it was intoxicating, as they say. He imagined sitting in a movie theater, her head on his shoulder, and he was smelling that smell. When the Charleston was announced over the loudspeaker as the next dance, he said “Darn, I don’t know how to do that one. But my aunt, who tried to teach me it, was one of the six original dancers in the George White’s Scandals to introduce it to America.” She said “You’re making that up,” and he said “I swear,” and put his hand over his heart. “We can call my mother right now — it’s her sister — and ask her,” and she said “Okay, I believe you. It’s not a man’s dance anyway — you don’t have the legs for it. It’d be like a man dancing the cancan. It’s my favorite dance, though — I’m so glad it was brought back — so I’m going to dance it with my best girlfriend, if you’ll excuse me.” He said “In case my friends suddenly drag me out of here, can I have your phone number?”—she had her own phone, in her bedroom, something he’d never heard a girl her age having — and called the next night for a date and she said “Thursday’s okay, but it’ll have to be an early night; I don’t want to be too tired for school Friday.” They went to Radio City Music Hall. Took the Broadway bus down and then walked the two blocks to Sixth Avenue. But a cab back because he didn’t want her to think him cheap. Weekday afternoons and all-day Saturdays he work