“You just lost me.”
“We’ve already established that, silly. No, it goes back to what you said about my weakness for the dramatic. The charge is true enough. But don’t you see, it’s so much more awkward to part on good terms. Neither party ever knows when to get off the stage. Much simpler with a lot of door slamming and name calling. Still, we ought to be able to work something out. I think I have it. You play the piano. And sing, I do want to hear you sing. I’ll miss that. You play and sing, and I’ll sit in a dark corner listening to you. Before you quite finish I’ll have gone upstairs, and when you finish you may steal off into the night.”
Bert started to say something, then changed his mind. He seated himself at the piano and studied the keys. Softly he said, “What would you like to hear?”
“Oh, are you taking requests tonight?”
“Just so long as it’s not ‘Melancholy Baby.’”
“Lord. No, you’re better far than I at matching songs with moods. Something that achieves sorrow without reaching slush.”
“Smiling through tears? That effect?”
“Winking through tears.”
He knew it from the first bars of the introduction and thought that Bert had chosen wisely. “Just One of Those Things.” Yes, that was right, every line in it was right. It described a romance that burned itself out quickly, and theirs had been neither that intense nor that brief, and yet the song was singularly appropriate.
As the bridge ended, he got to his feet and slipped silently from the room. He waited out of sight on the stairs and listened to the song’s last verse:
He stood motionless on the staircase until he heard the front door drawn quietly shut. The Volkswagen engine caught, and he listened to Bert driving off. Then he climbed the stairs and went to his room.
He had wanted to make sure Bert did not stay the night. Had he done so, he would have learned that Anne and Robin were there. While his knowledge would have been dangerous only in the sense that any unnecessary complication was a hazard, that had been reason enough to make the break an immediate one.
And so he had pretended pain and bitterness that he had not felt at all. It was not a lack of feeling for Bert, he knew. It was simply that he was under too much other pressure to feel much.
Of course he had shed tears during the song. A statue could not have done less. It was fun while it lasted; and it was just one of those things. They both did nicely as epitaphs. For a love affair or for a life.
Hugh sat looking at the typewriter. There was only one more page to write, and he knew precisely what it would say. He had written it dozens of times in his head in the course of the past few months, had mentally edited and shaped it over and over. Now all he had to do was put the words on the page.
When he began to type, the words came slowly. He measured each phrase. He wanted to get it just right, and at the same time he was reluctant to write the words at all, because once they were written the book would be finished. He wanted to be finished and yet he did not want to be finished. He had thought in the past that it was not unlike sex — you wanted to come, but you didn’t want to come right away. He wrote:
And so it was over. A man had died, and living men had opened the earth for him and closed it over him. A life which had begun at one specific point in time had ended now at another specific point in time. Lives, like books, have beginnings and endings, first chapters and last chapters.
But the endings of human lives lack the precision of the endings of books. If death is a last chapter, there is still an epilogue to come.
For even physical death is a gradual process. The body itself dies piecemeal. Hair and fingernails continue to grow for a time, their functions like the reflexive twitching of a headless snake. Until they too are done.
A man had died, and was dead. But two women had known him, each in her particular way. Neither knew him as he had known himself. Perhaps their knowledge of him had great gaps in it. Perhaps in certain ways it exceeded his knowledge of himself.
But all that matters is that they did know him. And as long as either of them is alive, the man will not be utterly dead. It is not merely that he will live metaphorically in memory. His life — and now the event of his death — is a fundamental component of each of these two women. The man he had been is a part of all that they are or will be. Their lives are his epilogue.
Of course the converse is just as true. Now that the man is dead, neither the wife nor the daughter will ever be wholly alive.
He took the final page from the typewriter and read it through. It did not seem quite right, but he knew that it would not have seemed quite right no matter how he had done it.
He looked at his watch. He decided that it was not too late to call Linda and was reaching for the telephone when he remembered that it was either far too late or far too early to call Linda Robshaw. She had seemed quite important to him for quite some time, but now that he had finished the book he was unsure if her importance had been more than temporary.
He fixed himself a drink. He had finished the book, and he ought to be able to tell someone as much. He wanted to talk to someone but there was no one he wanted to talk to. Mary Fradin would be glad to know that the book was done, but there was no earthly reason to call her in the middle of the night. Karen was at Melanie Jaeger’s house and he did not want to call her there. And who else was there? Anita? There had been times, shortly after the divorce, when he had had to fight the desire to call her. He had outgrown the urge long ago, and she came to mind only to complete the list.
The women in his life. And did they know him as the dead man had been known by his wife and daughter? No, he was not going to think about such things now. There were many personal truths in this book, truths he had not known until he wrote them into his consciousness, and he had carefully held them on the edge of thought while the book evolved. The Edge of Thought. Yes, he liked that title, liked it far more now than before.
He was working on a second drink when Karen came home. Her enthusiasm took the edge off his own depression. She insisted on reading the manuscript immediately, wouldn’t wait until morning.
“It’s not that late,” she said. “I’m not the least bit sleepy. I couldn’t sleep now, not knowing it’s done and just waiting to be read.”
She had a drink with him first. He told her she could read in the study where the light was good.
“I was never allowed in there,” she said. She kissed him suddenly, her arms tight around his neck. “I’m so proud of you.”
“Will you still be proud if the book’s lousy?”
“I know it’s not.”
“Well, I’m going to bed,” he said.
She closed herself in the study and he made one more drink and took it upstairs. He did not want to go to sleep. He wanted to sit downstairs and wait while she read the book. His mind was full of thoughts, rolling in and falling back like waves.
His mind was also exhausted, weary at the end of a half year’s labor. Its hyperactivity now was an illusion, like the growth of hair and fingernails after death.
He finished his drink and got into bed, and it was not long before the thoughts softened into dreams.
Twenty-eight