“Hmmm.” He was falling asleep. “I love you, Patsy,” he said. “It did work.”
“You’re going to have to go see a doctor tomorrow about your nose and your back, Saul.”
“Hmm.” He was lying in bed in a fetal position.
“Not that I don’t admire you, Saul, for trying to help those kids out.”
“Hmmm. Love you.”
“The baby’s been moving a little tonight. Guess I can’t blame him,” Patsy said.
“Hmm.” He was almost asleep by now.
“As for you, I love you more than you will ever know. By the way, Saul, what did you bury back there? What did you use for those ashes? The ones you said were Gordy’s? What were they?”
Part Four
Twenty-five
At certain times, particularly on the days when she was working at the Baltimore food bank — it didn’t take much more than a certain cast of light in the office or the connected warehouse to cause her to be plunged into these moments of thoughtfulness — Delia would involuntarily remember her late husband, Saul and Howie’s father, and a picture of him would rise up in her mind, usually a random mental snapshot in which her husband was getting dressed for work, knotting his tie or making an effort to get the lint off his suit before he kissed her goodbye and left the house for the firm where he labored as a patent lawyer, and at such moments it occurred to her that now, twenty years after his death, she thought of him more than she ever had when they were married, a marriage that at the time had felt more like a business arrangement than a real marriage, lacking as it did much of any real passion on either side, or so she thought. They were both ready to get married when they had met as seniors at the university and a year later had married each other out of convenience more than anything else, though she had pretended to be crazy about him with her friends and family for the sake of appearances, and because she thought she should.
With many women she knew, especially the divorcées, the memory of the husband just faded out through an act of will. Men left behind their objects; women left behind the memory of their looks.
But with Delia the process had been different. You could sometimes love someone, as it turned out, after that person was gone, though not before. One of life’s larger ironies, its habit of making what was absent, visible. That was what had happened to her, and this odd recognition had followed lately from the fling she had had with that boy, the young man who had worked on her yard. Perhaps this paradox was commonplace, but she doubted it. The death, the absence of her husband, sweetened the memory of the life. Sweetened it almost intolerably. In life her husband might have been, well, exasperating and bound by habit and, on occasion, repulsive: now and then he would rub his scalp, for example, then examine his fingertips for dandruff, and, if there happened to be any dandruff there near the fingernails, he would, if he thought no one was watching, slyly slip the fingertips close to his nose, for a smell. Awful. In life, it was a disgusting habit. But now, long after his death, picturing it, Delia felt tender toward it, and him. It pierced her. The gesture made her see the child in him, which, all day long, he was at pains to conceal.
Another odd feature of her long-dead husband’s remnants, her memory of him, was that whenever she thought of him, her thoughts were accompanied by no name. In death he had seemingly lost the name he had had in life. He had turned into a man, into him, into the images she possessed of him, and his smells, and his gestures, his curiosities as a human being and as her companion, and the ways — pokey and tentative — he had touched her as a lover and husband who, truth be told, did not linger much over the niceties but who sometimes cooked for her and brought her breakfast in bed on Sunday mornings, all these images and smells added up to the memory of the man she had married and had known. She recognized that he had been utterly faithful to her because women as a gender and group and class simply did not occupy his thoughts very much. Somehow, you could detect his obliviousness to other women just by looking at him — he did not have a roving eye. As an adult man, his thoughts had turned completely to the schematics of providing for her and their two children, without, really, much conversation at the dinner table except for expediencies and plans, and then, one day, he was gone, before the conversations might really have started. He wanted, more than anything else, to be a utility-husband and a professional at business, and then he was professionally dead, slumped over the steering wheel, blocking traffic. His life had appeared to have had no purpose except as a husband and father and a lawyer. Nevertheless, he had helped to ease Delia through this life by being her companion and being, in his way, considerate and thoughtful. Now, in death, he had lost his name, though she said it from time to time when she was by herself, mostly in order to preserve it, so that someone here on Earth would still say it: Norman. A plain old name. But he wasn’t Norman anymore. He was those images he had left behind, and their accompanying gestures, and the associated scents, and he was also the father of the two children he had, with her, helped to bring into the world. He had become real once he became imaginary.
Working in the food bank, she wondered sometimes what it felt like to have a coronary thrombosis, whether you even knew what had hit you before you were out of this life, gone.
She had loved, in a very different manner, having an adolescent boy lover because now she knew what that experience was like to go through, once you were a full-grown adult. She had gotten it out of her system (again). Really, the whole experience had been an exercise in nostalgia, at being in high school one more time, and being desired. And loved, a little. It was a wonder to her that the boy had wanted her at all, even for a few weeks. The experience had left a few traces for which she was grateful — it was as if life had arranged something like a cookout for her at the top of a mountain — but now, back to her normal routines, working during the day and going back to the house at night and fixing dinner for herself and pouring her nightly glass of Merlot, she was newly reconciled, first, to herself, and, second, to the idea that she might meet someone else, someone more her age, or she might not, ever, and anyway the meeting or not-meeting would not make much of a difference, one way or another. She was through with the belief that having a relationship, or relationships generally, would in any way validate her life. She liked living alone.
She had wanted to convey this truth to her son Saul. She didn’t feel jealous of Patsy, but she just didn’t appreciate the way they had been married to each other and still were married to each other. He was — for this behavior of his there was an old word that no one used anymore — uxorious. They were always touching each other and telling each other how much they loved each other, and they did this routine in public, and it got tiresome after a while. Delia especially didn’t like to see her son doting over his wife. She would have liked it better if they had been able to take their love for each other for granted, as if it were permanent and assured, and, similarly, she would have liked it if he could keep some of his emotions to himself. He should make certain adult assumptions, as everyone did, and then get on with things.
Delia had never heard a man say “I love you” as often as Saul said it to his wife, in front of her, Delia — in front of everybody. Delia supposed that some women liked that. They became used to the sweet talk and expected it as if it were their birthright. But you didn’t cast out that phrase in public where everyone could hear it.