Erica? he’d shout. Please?
I know, I know, she’d say. This old mouth!
Like a wet leaf stuck to his shoe. She had gone everywhere with him: to the Cosmic in the morning for his coffee and bagel (she sat separately with her orange juice, scrambled eggs, rye toast), for walks in Riverside Park, to the doctor, to the dentist, to the Y for his twice-weekly swims. She tapped on the door when he spent too long in the head. She was gone for only a few hours on Monday mornings, and when she left, she alerted the doorman, who was under strict orders from Tracy and Fil never to allow their father out of the building alone. He’d had no choice, then, but to get rid of her.
I’m calling her, Fil said, phone in hand.
Please do, Albert said. I have nothing to hide.
Before Erica moved in, Albert spent most of his afternoons in the study, radio tuned to classical WQXR, a box of Cohibas at his elbow, his mind slathered with lust. Christ, it was all he could do not to think of women. Surely this was a side effect of going senile, water pulling back at low tide to expose the dark rippled mud just beyond the pristine beach. He would never have believed that after so many years there’d remain such a stockpile of filth within him, and he resented not having done a better job of depleting it. The midnight erections were not unpleasurable. But his powerlessness during those empty afternoons, voids flooded by an endless procession of rooms, beds, creaking slats, the recurring image of a stateroom on an Atlantic passage, three portholes in the bedroom alone, which hadn’t been his (all he’d had to his name then was a shaving kit and a pinstripe suit), and the woman, who had at first been unfathomably old to him, a novelty, a married mother of four, white fissures in the flesh of her belly, and a lush, joyous way of pounding at him with her hips that transmuted the thudding noise from the ship’s engine room, ever-present in his own sardine tin of a cabin, so that for years it was impossible not to think of her when he saw a painting of a ship or caught sight of the docks from a cab on the West Side Highway, impossible not to think of pistons, oil, steam. He’d been on his way to England, 1931. There were others. A field in rain, a park at night, the streaking sun on a brilliant white wall, clouds against the blue through a farmhouse window. Another open window, Yorkville, the breeze blowing in—and how there’d been a fan in the room in Italy, it dried the slickness between them and he’d yanked out the cord, yanked the wire right out of the plug, and they’d sweated through to the mattress, the taste of the sweat in her armpits, the rivulets coursing from beneath her breasts, and the moans, the concentrated effort, all his energies focused on the perfect delicate movement, and afterward the sound of the flies knocking stupidly against the ceiling, none of it was lost to him, it all came back in the sagging stillness of the afternoon. Merry revels for an old man in his waning years? Not for Albert, for whom it was all distraction, grease on the lens when he was trying to train his eye on his punishment.
There was an element of mockery to it that enraged him—mockery of his intellectual weakness, his moral decrepitude. He couldn’t keep track of what day of the week it was, yet here was the girl he met in Berlin after the war, the light blue veins at the back of her knee, her leg draped so nonchalantly over his shoulder? That was thirty years ago. What was a body worth in those days? They would do it for a tin of beans, and what good was that? Slavery. A depraved, mechanical transaction that conjoined him to a catastrophe of a civilization, the utter debasement that had befallen the German people. A ragged, misbegotten country, deserving of all the malice the world had to throw at it. To fuck one of its daughters was to descend into a rotten, connubial malaise. How could there be such a thing as pleasure in a place like that? The girl had been lifeless as a rag doll, a receptacle to fill with the appropriate part of his own anatomy.
Sadistisch, sadistisch, she’d said. The infantry destroys. It’s those who come after, bearing accordion folders and documents, the shaved, pressed, and dressed, who conquer. Berlin, was it? Or Nuremberg? Why was he revisiting these things? What sadist was behind all this? Oh for god’s sake, don’t pretend it’s a punishment. What difference did it make who he thought about—he was nothing but an animal prowling old hunting grounds. No harm in it. They were pictures, not people. And then one day, in the doorway: Erica, as soft around the edges as a blurry photo, yet real, flesh and blood, a beating heart and a compassionate soul. God, how embarrassing, looking at her was like being caught peeping through a hole in the changing room wall, yet he kept catching himself doing just that. A little burst of shock and he’d turn his head, imagining himself to be disgusted. If nothing else, he had his iron will. Once that was gone, he was finished. He’d restrained his hands if not his eyes, and kept his comments to himself, and after she’d been with him a few weeks, the afternoon waters calmed. Sometimes he allowed her to sit in the room with him and read. She absorbed his loneliness, shuffling quietly through her copy of the Post, occasionally murmuring in dismay at a bus plunger or a smash-and-grab with casualties, and she made him feel that there was some life yet in the world. All those afternoons before her, his mind had gone to what was available in the archives, but now those memories had been sent back on their wheeled carts. He’d almost become fond of her.
More than fond. I know that he dreamt of being summoned to her room, where she would pull away the sheet and slide down the pillows, her parted fingers reaching for him in supplication, speechlessly beseeching as only someone unhitched from shame could, her body a pool of water for his thirst, her breasts, her belly, the dark saddle between her pliéd legs a feast, her thighs as thick as tree trunks, and she would be murmuring his name, begging for him.
The other memory, the one he meant to tend so carefully, was untethered and would arrive on its own schedule, flagellate him, evaporate, then reconstitute, a time-lapse shot of a cloud on an endless loop. The blue sky, the pool, the body. It came and went like the weather, and because when the memory was gone it left no trace, every time it reappeared it was a fresh pot of scalding water. This was the horror that he did not want to outlive.
When was it that he began to regard his inner life as nothing more than a slightly mysterious facet of his physical being? Love was an ache in the center of his mass. Lust, a hard-on. Sadness was a dragging, salty ache at the back of the throat, an emptiness like hunger. When emotions acted in a disorderly fashion, he put them in a headlock and choked them until they submitted to his will. He shoved them into the sunlight when he felt blue, whipped them when his courage failed, strangled his unmentionable desires, and applied exacting reason in those rare instances when he couldn’t force the stubborn beast to correct its course. When confronted with an undeniable truth about himself, a jag in his otherwise linear existence, he reflected the inquisitorial beam back onto his family, his colleagues, whoever happened to be available to lash to the pyre and torch in sacrifice to the gods of self-ignorance. Feelings! Gibberish language, a translation of a translation of a translation, distractions no sane person needed to spend more than the bare minimum of time wrestling into submission. Feelings were a tactic women invoked when they didn’t get what they wanted.
So inexperienced in matters of his own heart, he’d barely managed to develop a rudimentary language for the sorrow that came after the boy’s death, but then when Sydney died he had to create yet another lexicon of grief, and that was beyond even the great mind of Albert Caldwell.
Someone was slamming cabinet doors in the kitchen. Albert listened, looked around, and waited for his brain to make sense of it. Fil was at his desk, one hand full of unopened mail, the other flipping through the checkbook ledger—platter-sized, three checks per page, green pleather with an embossed gold border.