The Beginner's Goodbye (19 page)

“Whatever,” the other man said. “Anyways, we’re finished,” he told me. “Hope you like how it all turned out.”

“You mean you’re
finished
finished?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Nothing more needs doing?”

“Not unless you say so.”

I looked around me. The place was spotless—the living-room walls a gleaming white, the new bookshelves in the sunporch just waiting to be filled. Somebody had swept up the last traces of sawdust, and the paper cups and the jar-lid ashtrays had disappeared, which made me feel oddly forlorn.

“No,” I said, “I can’t think of a thing.”

Gary straightened and laid his brush across the top of his can. “Now, don’t go walking on this, you hear?” he said. “Not for twenty-four hours. And then, the next few days or so, keep your shoes on. You wouldn’t believe how many folks think they’re doing a floor a favor to take their shoes off and walk in their stocking feet. But that’s the
worst
thing.”

“Worst thing in the world,” the other man agreed.

“Heat of your body …” Gary said.

“Linty old socks …”

“Bottoms of your feet mashing flat against the wood …”

They were still moaning and shaking their heads when Gil opened the front door. I knew it was Gil because he always knocked before he let himself in. “Hey there, guys,” he said, appearing in the living-room archway. He wore his after-hours outfit: khakis and a clean shirt. “Hey, Aaron.”

“Hi, Gil.”

“How we coming along?”

“Just finishing up, boss,” the man with the carton said.

Gil walked over to inspect the sunporch floor. “Looks good,” he said. “Now, give it twenty-four hours before you step on it,” he told me, “and then for a few days after that—”

“I know: not in my stocking feet,” I said.

“Worst thing in the world,” he said.

He saw the men out to the hall, then, clapping Gary on the shoulder, reminding them both they were due at Mrs. McCoy’s early Monday morning. (I felt a little twinge of sibling rivalry.) Then he returned to the living room.

“So,” I said, “I hear you’re all done here.”

My voice echoed hollowly in the empty room.

“She’s good as new,” Gil told me.

“Actually, better than new,” I said. “I appreciate the care you took, Gil.”

“Oh, any time. God forbid.”

“God forbid,” I agreed.

“Monday I’ll send a couple of men to move the furniture back. You want to be here for that?”

“No, that’s okay. It’s pretty cut-and-dried, in a house this small.”

He nodded. He pivoted to survey the living room. “And window washers,” he said. “You’ll be needing those. We’ve got a list of names, if you want.”

“I’m sure Nandina knows someone.”

“Oh,” Gil said suddenly.

He clapped a hand to the right front pocket of his khakis. A certain staginess in the gesture caught my attention. “By the way,” he said, falsely casual. He pulled a tiny blue velvet box from his pocket, clearly a ring box.

“Oho!” I said.

“Yeah, well …”

He snapped the lid open and stepped closer to show me. (I caught a strong scent of aftershave.) The ring was yellow gold, set with a little winking diamond.

“That’s really pretty, Gil,” I said. “Who’s it for?”

“Ha ha ha.”

“Does she know about this?”

“Just in theory. We’ve had the talk about getting married. Gee,” he said, “I guess I should have asked you first. I mean asked for her hand or something.”

“Take it,” I said, and I gave him a breezy wave.

“Thanks,” he said with a grin. He looked down at the ring. “I know the stone is kind of small, but the jeweler claimed it’s flawless. Not the least little flaw, he said. I had to take his word for it. Would I know a flaw if I saw one?”

“She’s going to love it,” I told him.

“I hope so.” He was still studying it.

“How did you know what size to buy?”

“I traced the band of that opal of hers when she was in the shower once.”

He reddened and glanced up at me, maybe worrying he had revealed more than he should have, and I said, “Well, great. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have for a brother-in-law.”

“Thanks, Aaron.” He closed the box and returned it to his pocket. “There’s a wedding ring that matches it, but I figured I should make sure Nandina likes this before I buy it. I already know she wants
me
to wear a ring.”

“Yes, that’s how people do these days,” I said. I started to raise my left hand to show him my own ring, which I still wore, but then I thought—I don’t know. It seemed that might have been tactless, somehow.

No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one’s ring from a nurse or an undertaker.

It was kind of a nuisance having to wait till Monday for the furniture moving. I started doing some of the work ahead of time—dragging the living-room rug into place and unrolling it, setting
a few of the lighter-weight objects where they belonged. And on Saturday evening, when the sunporch floor was dry, I fitted what books I still owned into the new bookshelves. I carried the photo albums from the kitchen and lined them up in order, oldest first. Even the most recent wasn’t all
that
recent. The last picture in that album—my mother’s butterfly bush in full bloom—came immediately after our wedding photo, so I’m guessing it dated from late summer of 1996. Or ’97 at the latest, because my father died in early ’98, and he was the one who took the pictures in our family.

This business of not labeling photos reminded me of those antique cemeteries where the names have worn off the gravestones and you can’t tell who is buried there. You see a little gray tablet with a melted-looking lamb on top, and you know it must have been somebody’s child who died, but now you can’t even make out her name or the words her parents chose to say how much they missed her. It’s just so many random dents in the stone, and the parents are long gone themselves, and everything’s been forgotten.

Even my mother’s butterfly bush struck me as poignant, with its show-offy clusters of blossoms in a vibrant, electric purple. Although in fact that bush still existed; it stood right there in Nandina’s backyard, where I could see it every time I took the garbage out.

In our wedding photo Dorothy did not, of course, carry her satchel, but her dress-up purse was almost equally bulky and utilitarian—a heavy brown leather rectangle with a strap that crossed her chest in the same theft-deterrent fashion. She had said, “Would you like me to wear a white gown? I could do that. I wouldn’t mind. I could ask if our receptionist would take me
to this place she knows. I thought maybe something, oh, not strapless or anything but maybe with a scoop neck, white but not shiny, not lacy, just a
lustrous
white, you know what I mean? And I was thinking a bouquet of all white flowers. Baby’s breath and white roses and … are orange blossoms white? I do know they’re not orange, although it sounds as if they would be. I’m not talking about a veil or anything. I’m not talking about a long train or anything like that. But something elegant and classic, to mark the occasion. You think?”

“Oh, God, no. Good Lord, no,” I said.

“Oh.”

“We’re neither one of us the type for that, thank heaven,” I said.

“No, of course not,” she said.

In the photograph her blue knit was not very becoming, but in real life it had looked fine, as far as I can recall. (Photos have a way of
frumping
people; have you noticed?) Anyhow, I had never paid much heed to such things. At the time I was just glad that I’d landed the woman I wanted. And I believe that she was glad to have landed me—the diametrical opposite of that needy “roommate” who had demanded too much of her.

Then why was our marriage so unhappy?

Because it
was
unhappy. I will say that now. Or it was difficult, at least. Out of sync. Uncoordinated. It seemed we just never quite got the hang of being a couple the way other people did. We should have taken lessons or something; that’s what I tell myself.

Once, when we had an anniversary coming up—our fifth, I believe—I invited her out to dinner. “I was thinking of the Old Bay,” I told her. “The first place I ever took you to.”

“The Old Bay,” she said. “Really. Are you forgetting that we couldn’t even see to read the menus there?”

“Oh, okay,” I said, but I felt a little disappointed. For sentiment’s sake, at least, you would think she could have agreed to it. “Where, then?” I asked.

“Maybe Jean-Christophe?”

“Jean-Christophe! Good grief!”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Jean-Christophe is so pretentious. They bring you these teeny froufrou bites to eat between courses, and you have to make a big show of being surprised and thankful.”

“So
don’t
make a show,” she said. “Just fold your arms across your chest and glower.”

“Very funny,” I told her. “What on earth made you think of Jean-Christophe? Is this another one of your receptionist’s ideas? Jean-Christophe didn’t even exist, back when you and I were courting.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize it had to have historical significance.”

“Dorothy,” I said. “Would you rather just not do this?”

“I said I would, didn’t I? But then all you can come up with is this fusty old place where your parents used to eat. And when I question it, you fly into a huff and turn down everything else I suggest.”

“I didn’t turn down ‘everything else’; I turned down Jean-Christophe. It just so happens that I dislike a restaurant where the waiters require more attention than my date does.”

“Where
would
you be willing to eat, then?”

“Oh, shoot,” I said, “I don’t care. Let’s just go to Jean-Christophe.”

“Well, if you don’t care, why do we bother?”

“Are you deliberately trying to misunderstand me?” I asked her. “I care that we have a good meal together, preferably without feeling like we’re acting in some kind of play. And I was thinking it might be a place with associations for the two of us. But if you’re so set on Jean-Christophe, fine; we’ll go to Jean-Christophe.”

“Jean-Christophe was just a suggestion. There are lots of other possibilities.”

“Like where?”

“Well, how about Bo Brooks?”

“Bo Brooks! A crab house? For our anniversary?”

“We did go to Bo Brooks a couple of times while we were dating. It would certainly meet the ‘associations’ criterion.”

“Yes, but—”

I stopped and looked at her.

“You really don’t get it, do you,” I said.

“What don’t I get?”

“Never mind.”

“I’m not
ever
going to get it if you refuse to discuss it,” she said, and now she was using her doctor voice, her super-calm, let’s-be-reasonable voice. “Why don’t you just begin at the beginning, Aaron, and tell me exactly what you envision for our anniversary dinner.”

“How about what
you
envision?” I said. “Can’t you be bothered coming up with any ideas of your own?”

“I already offered an idea of my own. I offered two ideas, as I recall, and you rejected both of them. So it’s back in your court now, Aaron.”

Why am I telling this story?

I forget.

And I forget where we ended up eating, too. Someplace or other; I don’t remember. What I do remember is that familiar, weary, helpless feeling, the feeling that we were confined in some kind of rodent cage, wrestling together doggedly, neither one of us ever winning.

I was rinsing vegetables for my supper, and I turned from the sink to reach for a towel, and I saw Dorothy.

“You’re here,” I said.

She was standing next to me, so close that she’d had to step back a bit to give me room when I turned. She wore one of her plain white shirts and her usual black pants, and her expression was grave and considering—her head cocked to one side and her eyebrows raised.

“I thought you might never come again,” I said.

She appeared unsurprised by this, merely nodding and continuing to study me, so that it seemed I’d been right to worry.

“Was it the cookies?” I asked. “Were you upset that I ate Peggy’s cookies?”

“You should have told me you liked cookies,” she said, and I don’t know why I’d ever doubted that she actually spoke on these visits, because her voice was absolutely real—low and somewhat flat, very level in tone.

I said, “What? I don’t like cookies!”

“I could have baked you cookies,” she said.

“What are you talking about? Why would I want you to bake cookies? How come we’re wasting this time discussing
cookies
, for God’s sake?”

“You’re the one who brought them up,” she said.

Had I lived through this whole scene before? I felt tired to death all of a sudden.

She said, “I used to think it was your mother’s fault. She was such a fusser; no wonder you fended people off the way you did. But then I thought,
Oh, well: fault
. Who’s to say why we let one person influence us more than another? Why not your father?
He
didn’t fuss.”

“I fended people off?” I said. “That’s not fair, Dorothy. How about how
you
behaved? Wearing your white coat even to go out to dinner; carrying your big satchel. ‘I’m Dr. Rosales,’ you’d say. Always so busy, so businesslike. Bake cookies? You never even made me a cup of tea when I had a cold!”

“And if I had? What would you have done?” she asked. “Swatted the cup away, I guarantee it. Oh, it used to bother me when I saw what people thought of me. Your mother and your sister, the people in your office … I’d see your secretary thinking,
Poor, poor Aaron, his wife is so coldhearted. So unnurturing, so ungiving. Doesn’t value him half as much as the rest of us do
. ‘Shows what
you
know,’ I wanted to tell her. ‘Why didn’t he marry someone else if he was so keen on nurturing? If I’d behaved any other way, do you suppose he and I would ever have gotten together?’ ”

I said, “That wasn’t why we got together.”

“Oh, wasn’t it?” she said.

She turned away to gaze out the window over the sink. Earlier I’d switched the sprinkler back on, and I could see how her eyes followed the to-and-fro motion. “I had a job offer in Chicago,” she told me in a reflective tone. “You never knew that. This was one of my old professors, somebody I looked up to. He offered me a much better job than what I had here—not better paying,
maybe, but more prestigious and more interesting. I felt honored that he even remembered me. But you and I had just gone to our first movie together, and I couldn’t think of anything but you.”