“Maybe there wasn’t anything important in that package,” he tells me, “almost definitely nothing important, something delayed in the mail, that’s all. But I couldn’t help but think that it was some type of sign. A message from Cleve, you know. Something that belonged to him and that rose up out of the void for me, as if he had sent it. Look, I’ve never been superstitious or religious; I don’t even believe in heaven, or ghosts, none of those things. But Cleve’s death left me grasping in the dark, looking out for signs. He also left me with a head of gray hair and nervous tics, and I think I’m even more stupid. Grief kills neurons, you know. That’s a fact; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to live through it. Maybe the hunch about the package was superstition, if you want to call it that. But in the face of the death of a loved one there’s no other choice: either you give in to it, which is impossible, or you begin to believe things, to be guided by signs that are beyond reason. Who knows? Maybe everything was much simpler: that package could contain some information about Cleve, some detail that would help me understand. Something like finding someone else’s love letter, or reading through a stranger’s e-mail.”
The day the package arrived had begun like any other, and Ian Rose had already gone through his daily dawn routine, standing by the window of his bedroom and taking in the whole of the landscape, except for a corner in which a stretch of road appeared; ever since Cleve’s death the sight of the highway upset him, disrupting his fantasy that he lived in a place where no one could enter and no one could leave. He had begun his day dressing without bathing and putting on his Taylor & Son boots that he had worn for years. He was fond of those boots; the leather had become almost like a second skin with wear. Later, he’d taken the dogs out for a walk in the woods. He liked that. In fact, it’s what he liked best, what still gave meaning to his days. Strolling through the woods with Otto, Dix, and Skunko allowed him to forget everything for a few hours, and he let go, becoming like a dog among his dogs for a couple of hours and sometimes longer, actually each time longer; lately, he worked less each day and the walks became longer. Nothing serious, he was retired anyway, living off a pension, and if he clung to work, it was because he liked it more than anything. He no longer took on large projects, satisfied with craft work and helping out a neighbor if the septic tank got clogged, the dishwasher was leaking, or the irrigation system in the garden needed fixing.
Because it was cold, when he got back home Rose split a big pile of wood, took a hot shower, and put on what he always wore: a pair of baggy pants, a white T-shirt with an unbuttoned lumberjack shirt over it. Then he had breakfast, tea with toast and some fruit. That first tea of the day was always Earl Grey with a cloud — what his English mother called a drop of milk poured into the middle of the golden liquid.
After that he fed the dogs their Eukanuba — Eagles’s widow delivered it these days, with treats and a Scheiner’s sausage for each of them — and had gone to the front room to start a fire. It never ceased to amaze him, seeing that fire domesticated in a corner of the house, peaceful and purring like a good cat, when it could rear up if it wanted, madly turning everything into a useless pile of charred bones and ash. Sometimes Ian Rose thought it wouldn’t be a bad thing, to be turned into nothing. But the dogs would have no one, so he persisted with the tasks of the day.
Every once in a while, he’d reminisce about Edith, his ex-wife, Cleve’s mother. As a bachelor, Ian Rose had been no playboy, not good with the ladies at all, so he felt lucky when Edith had been willing to go out with him. From his perspective, she was a marvelous and inaccessible creature who played the cello in a university group called the Emmanuel String Quartet, while he saw himself as a handyman, some novice technician who helped with the Friday concerts in the school auditorium and sat in the audience to listen to her. And to look at her, because he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was a true sight, that woman with a strong large body, with that curtain of dark hair that fell theatrically over the fairness of the face as her knees pressed the sides of the cello. It was big, that cello, no junior model, but the official full-size, on which the incomparable Edith produced a mewling that was almost human and that set him on edge, and not metaphorically. Edith could give him erections with her cello. But he didn’t dare approach her. He found the very thought of going to her dressing room with a bouquet of roses or some such other ridiculous gesture absurd.
Once, during one of those concerts, in the darkness of the audience, Ian kept his hands busy playing with the silver lining of a pack of cigarettes as he concentrated on the music, or more specifically on Edith. His hands moved on their own, folding the paper until they had created a tiny star. And as it happened, after the performance, Ian went into a bar near the auditorium and almost fell over backward when he saw the magnificent Edith come in. She was alone, her beautiful mane of hair in a ponytail. She had removed her makeup, making her fairness look even more spectral, and had exchanged her evening dress for a pair of jeans and a leather vest. Edith sat on a stool at the bar and ordered a dry martini. Ian, who still had the silver star in his pocket, chugged down a whiskey to work up the nerve, walked up, and handed it to her.
“Who are you?” she asked. And in a burst of showboating that she’d still chided him for years later, he responded: “I’m the star giver.” He blushed immediately afterward, hating himself for speaking like such a fool, and to make matters worse, Edith, from her superior position seated on the tall bar stool, regarded the insignificant object in her hands and said, her head tilting to one side, “Come on, now you’ve put me in a spot; now I don’t know where to toss this thing you’ve given me.”
So for Ian Rose it was a miracle that in the middle of that fiasco with the paper star, when he had wanted the earth to open up and swallow him, Edith had asked him to have a drink with her. And not only that, but she had agreed to go out with him the following week; and not just that she had gone out with him, but in less than a month, she had fallen in love with him. So when they married and swore eternal fidelity to each other, Rose was a hundred percent sure of what he was doing and committed to keeping his vows. During the honeymoon, he performed admirably from a sexual perspective, even Edith was well aware of this, and from then on he devoted himself, body and soul, to the role of a married man. He kept his commitment and passion the entire length of the nineteen years of his marriage. Every morning, his eyes still closed, he stretched out his arms to touch Edith’s body, happy to confirm that she was still there by his side. Because Rose was the kind of man who was born to be married, and married specifically to this wife and none other. Although Edith had long before stopped playing the cello, Rose felt that he was first Edith’s husband, and second everything else: Cleve’s father, hydraulic engineer, employee of the British company that had transferred him with his family to Colombia, where he got paid double the salary for working in a location classified as extremely dangerous. Not once during his worst sleepless nights, nor on occasions when they had to be apart because of travel, nor during their domestic squabbles, did it ever cross Rose’s mind that Edith could conceive of their relationship any differently than he did. For Rose it was evident that if he was before anything Edith’s husband, Edith was before anything his wife. That is why he failed to make any sense at all of that night in Bogotá when he came home from work. She had stayed in bed all day suffering from one of those colds she got so often in that cold rainy city, ten thousand feet up in the Andes Mountains.