Obituary Writer (9780547691732) (16 page)

Margaret took Joe's thick black glasses out of his hands, folded them, and placed them in her dress pocket. The estate sale browsers cleared a path, and with her arm around his waist, she led him back to the patio, closing the door behind her.

"He's my brother-in-law and he's limited. It was an accident," Alicia told the man who had complained. "Thank you for your help, but everything is under control now."

I went to get a dustpan and broom out of the kitchen and swept the vase into the trash. It was a lovely vase, white with orange and blue flowers and a gold band around the neck. The price was twenty-five dollars, though it must have been worth at least a couple of hundred.

"That was one of their mother's vases," Alicia said when we had both returned to the kitchen. "Joe gets incredibly tense whenever Margaret and I are in the same place. He can't stand it."

"Has it always been like that?" I asked.

"No, everything used to be fine."

"Well?" I prompted her.

"Well, Margaret used to live here. She and Arthur were roommates, I guess you could say, before Arthur and I married. She lived in the back bedroom, the pink one." Alicia sighed, as if she'd been over this too many times before. "I used to tell Arthur that bigamy was illegal in the state of Missouri, that he couldn't be married to both me and Margaret at the same time. He was never too amused by that."

"I thought you said everything used to be fine," I said.

"Fine until I insisted that she leave. She stayed on in the house for the first few months of our marriage before getting her own place nearby. I think she really believed that I was going to let her stay here." Alicia shook her head.

From the window, I watched Margaret open the passenger door of her small car and Joe lower his large frame into it. She reached across his lap to fasten the seat belt, then closed the door and walked around to the other side of the car. Without looking back, she settled into her seat, started the engine.

Joe had stopped crying and he stared straight ahead.

Margaret gave him back his glasses, which he put on with both hands, sitting up so that his head grazed the roof. She checked behind her, and as she turned the car around, putting on her blinker to make a left onto Kingshighway, Joe reached out and gripped the dashboard.

I HAD BEEN MEANING
to move the triptych to my apartment—its walls were mostly bare, and I thought the painting would bring some life to my living room—but every night after work I'd go directly back to Alicia's house and every morning we'd get out of bed too late for me to swing by Soulard before nine o'clock. So the painting still sat in the pink room. I'd look at it twice a day as I passed by.

On the Wednesday morning after the estate sale I noticed something that I hadn't seen before. Mostly I had been looking at the nude's profile, the first third of the triptych—soft and ethereal, gazing out of the portrait as if half asleep. It was what had drawn me to the painting in the first place: the model's face, her lifelike skin, so real I wanted to touch the canvas, but with an eerily distant expression.

The night before, I had left a dustcloth hanging over the frame of the last third of the painting: the model's legs from the waist down. When I lifted the cloth off in the morning, I saw on the nude's inner thigh a triangular birthmark the size of a quarter.

My stomach dropped.

Alicia had a triangular birthmark on her inner thigh. She called it her "dolphin fin," a blue-gray triangle near the top of her left leg. I had kissed that dolphin fin.

I waited for Alicia to get out of the shower. Even as I sat on her bed, listening to the steady rush of water, I thought,
This is a terrible idea. Everything has been perfect. Why ruin it now?

She walked into the bedroom.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Of course, sweetheart." She unwrapped the towel that was around her hair.

"You know that painting I wanted, the one that's in the room with your things?"

The corners of my mouth felt heavy, my skin weighted down.

"That's you in the painting, isn't it?"

Her slim body glistened, back-lit by a naked bulb in the closet. Drops of water fell from her hair, catching her waist, streaming down her calves. I tried to capture this picture permanently in my mind, thinking,
From this moment on, nothing will be the same.

"Yes, that's me in the painting." She slipped on a pair of yellow underwear.

"So you posed nude?"

"Yes." As if it were nothing. "I used to know a painter who was quite good. He did a number of portraits of me."

"Where are the other ones?" I felt nauseated—there were more.

"Oh, I don't know. He sold most of his stuff in New York and Washington, galleries on the East Coast. I only recently had that one framed. I don't know why."

She wiggled into her jeans and slipped a shirt over her head. Lately she hadn't been wearing a bra. I loved to come up behind her in the laundry room or at the kitchen sink and slide my hands under her shirt.

"Did you pose for other painters?"

"No, just Jerry. There weren't many painters in Tucson."

She sat at her dressing table, the only piece of furniture left in the room besides the bed, and turned on the blow dryer.

Miserable, fighting not to let it show on my face, I stood up and went to Margaret's old room to finish getting dressed.

I knew how irrational I could become, all the terrible scenarios that my jealousy might conjure. In the car I turned the radio way up and sang along, trying to erase the possibility from my mind that she'd been with more than one man before me.

At work, I stopped by Research and asked one of the librarians to do a Lexis-Nexis search for any articles out of Tucson in the last ten years about a local painter whose first name was Jerry.

"I won't even ask," the librarian said, smiling. "This one might take a while."

Soon after I had sat down at my desk, Thea called.

We had spoken only twice in the past couple of weeks. The first time, I had halfheartedly offered to visit her father in the hospital, but he wasn't doing well so we postponed it. When I called back after that weekend, expecting her answering machine, she picked up, saying he had been transferred out of Intensive Care and might soon be headed home.

This time, she sounded upset.

"I tried you at home last night but couldn't reach you," she said. I could tell that she'd been crying. "I feel terrible asking you this, Gordie, but my father's having open-heart surgery this morning. I'm at the hospital."

Ritger arrived at his desk, setting down his briefcase loudly, and took off his trenchcoat and tweed cap. I hunched over the phone.

"I'm sorry," Thea said. "I thought I could handle it, but he had another heart attack. Now he's in the operating room."

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Still at the VA," she said.

"What floor?"

"I'm in the family waiting room next to Recovery. It's on the third floor."

"I'll be over as soon as I can."

I found Ritger down in the cafeteria, spooning sugar into his jumbo coffee mug.

"There's been an emergency and I'm going to need the day off," I said. I had never asked for a whole day off before, had only taken an occasional morning or afternoon, had a perfect sick record. "The person I was on the phone with is a good friend, and her father is having open-heart surgery. I'm sorry, but I have to go to the hospital."

Ritger stirred his coffee, then nodded his head.

The Veterans Hospital was surprisingly modern. I had expected to find a World War II-era building with pea-green walls and hulking equipment, but instead the place was bright and spacious, six stories high, with living plants and wide windows and young doctors striding around.

Thea was reading the
Independent
in the waiting room.

"You're here sooner than I thought." She looked surprised. Her eyes were red and swollen. "It's sweet of you to come, Gordie. I can't tell you what a wimp I am. Last night I went to bed telling myself, 'Don't call him. Please don't call. It's not fair to do this to him.'"

I leaned over and put my arms around her. "Don't be silly," I said, rubbing her back, which I couldn't help but notice was longer, less narrow than Alicia's.

Thea excused herself, taking her handbag, saying she'd be back in a minute.

I picked up the front page of the paper, concentrating on the news to keep my mind off the painter from Tucson. I hadn't been paying much attention to the world lately. Since my humiliation in the conference room I'd done little more at work than write formulaic obits, punch in, punch out. I told myself that every journalist goes through phases like this, but nevertheless it worried me.

My primary news source these days had been Alicia, who liked to call me at work to compare what she'd seen on CNN with what was coming over the AP wires. The situation in Eastern Europe had captivated her. She bought all of the news magazines as well as the
New York Times
and even the
Wall Street Journal
for its speculations on how the fall of communism might affect world markets.

The lead story today came from East Germany, where in Leipzig half a million people had gathered for peaceful demonstrations, calling for the ouster of Egon Krenz, the hard-liner who had recently replaced Erich Honecker as president. Alicia and I had talked about Honecker in the days following his resignation, and for a moment I had been tempted to tell her about the advancers—Honecker had been the last one I'd worked on before the Bette Davis fiasco—but I realized that she wasn't ready to hear the truth, and I wasn't ready to tell it.

Thea returned looking improved. She had thrown some water on her face, and much of the redness was gone from her eyes.

"All better," she said. "I just needed a little stroll through Intensive Care to cheer myself up."

She had two cans of apple juice from the vending machine. She looked pretty in her orange rayon dress with white flowers, and oddly enough, much better rested than the last time I'd seen her.

"What an amazing year it's been," she said, handing me a can. "I can't think of a better time to be working at a newspaper." She was friendly, as usual, eager for a change of subject.

"Yeah, I guess it has been pretty exciting. We've got a half-dozen reporters in Eastern Europe right now."

"Any chance they'll send you?"

It seemed such a distant consideration that I had to laugh. "I don't think so."

Ritger had told me that Marshall Holman might be the next reporter sent, possibly to Bulgaria, where a civilian coup against Zhivkov was growing more likely.

"Well, it must be great to work there," Thea said.

Soon we were joined in the waiting room by a white-haired woman, probably in her early sixties, who had the powdery look of someone much older. She sat in the chair nearest the door and opened a book of crossword puzzles.

It was past noon. Thea had said her father's surgery could last until three or four o'clock. Already I was growing restless. I had left the
Independent
so abruptly that I'd forgotten to call Alicia to tell her I wouldn't be reachable. We had fallen into a routine of talking several times a day, and now I worried that Ritger might pick up my line and say I was gone before I had a chance to tell her myself.

"I should probably check in with the office," I told Thea.

"Of course. Don't feel you have to stay, Gordie. I just panicked this morning. I'm much better now."

I sifted through my pockets for a quarter but was out of change. Thea handed me some coins.

"What got me most last night was when they shaved his chest," she said. "That's when I called you. My dad's an ape. He's got a really hairy chest, so it took them forever." She laughed, then turned serious. "He was flat on his back. It was pretty late. The way the nurses were standing over him—I've seen this picture a hundred times, but it really gave me the chills."

Out in the hallway I thought of my own father, whom I had not been allowed to see in the hospital when he was dying. It was important for Thea to be nearby, and I realized that I envied her for it. I knew there was nothing that I could have done back in 1972, a five-year-old boy in an ICU waiting room at some hospital in Chicago. But it hit me now just how much being nearby mattered.

I needed an excuse for Alicia. If she had told me she was taking the day off to see an old male friend whose father was in the hospital, I knew it would make me crazy. I'd been on the verge of crazy just this morning. I decided to tell her that I was out doing interviews—but she wasn't home.

In the waiting room, the white-haired woman had left behind her crossword puzzle. I looked to see how many squares she had filled.

"She's no Lorraine Hatch," I whispered across the room.

Thea laughed.

I sat down, and she looked at me intently. "So what went wrong that summer, Gordie?"

I was caught off guard. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, what happened to you? We were having such a nice time together, then suddenly you didn't want to see me anymore."

Not long ago, I might have confronted Thea.
You cheated on me,
I might have said, or
I thought we had an understanding that it was just the two of us,
but now I didn't know what to say. Four years was a lifetime ago. Even last month was a lifetime ago. It seemed not to matter anymore.

"I really don't remember. I think I was anxious about starting college." I wasn't looking at her, but I knew that she didn't believe me.

"It was so sudden, Gordie. I'm not resentful. It's just that I've never understood. I've always admired you, and I think I know you pretty well—except for that silence which I swear came completely out of the blue."

I didn't want to talk about this.

"I'll tell you what I think it was. This whole thing was my fault." I looked her in the eye. "I felt very attached to you that summer and I knew you were going to Brown, a thousand miles away, and I wasn't going to see you for a long time. I guess without realizing it I was trying to distance myself."