Luck (21 page)

In a way, although not in a literal way, this feels like their last supper. It’s not that Philip is here among them, but by dinner-time tomorrow he will be entirely, heartbreakingly, thoroughly gone. A handful of dust. “Oh,” Nora says into the middle of silence. Sophie is gazing out the kitchen window into the backyard, remote and presumably absorbed in her own thoughts. Beth wriggles like a child in her chair. Whatever is the matter with her? Philip never liked her. “I have no time for women who
drift,”
was one way he put it.

He wouldn’t like Nora much at the moment, then, would he?

They’ve made a minor mess, the three of them, with crumbs and casserole debris, bits of icing and cake that tumbled from the server en route to their plates. All from the offerings of townspeople bold enough to come to the door with their kindness and old customs. Goodness, generosity, thoughtfulness, courtesy, maybe affection for Philip, maybe respect. Maybe shame, maybe guilt—too bad it’s too late to know, and really too late to care.

A
nd so winds down the long second day of Philip Lawrence’s remarkable absence; an absence now recognizably final, no more imagining he’s just out for a few hours or gone for a couple of days, no more sensing his presence either dispersed through the universe or overhead and observing.

Second days tend to be given over to practical arrangements—funeral plans, flower orders, ministerial consultations—and the less diverting but onerous burdens of coming to grips. Absorbing new information. In another sort of household, survivors might turn to each other, hold each other up, join in mutual grief and consolation. In this household, not so. On the second day they have turned away from each other instead, into their own notions, memories, and even some hopes.

Tonight Nora is back in her own bed. Well, for one thing she is disinclined to ask any more favours of Beth, whose fervency about granting those favours has made Nora, perhaps for no good reason, uneasy. Anyway, she has to learn sometime to be alone in this room. A couple of nights ago she
made the mistake of sleeping with her back turned to Philip. Now, too late, she lies facing the flattened space he formerly occupied. If she stares long enough, will flatness come to seem normal, or will she always be conjuring Philip’s bulky shape in the night, and would that be comforting or go on being a hard, heavy, constant lump of sorrow? She faces, too, a bewildering kind of solitariness that contains no breathing except her own after so many years of mutual inhalings, exhalings.

This is crushingly, silently, lonely.

Still, is it shameful that while shocked and unconsoled, she is no longer quite surprised? At some point today the empty spaces—Philip’s chair at the table, his place on the sofa, silences rather than voice, laughter, footsteps—have grown less startling. It does seem to be the case that the quality of Nora’s disbelief has become smoother, rounder, less knife-like.

On her second day of widowhood she has had a frenzy of sorting Philip’s possessions and drawing sketch after sketch of them. She has been reminded, yes, that there are a few people outside these walls who perform right, or at least appropriate, acts, and as a result she, Sophie and Beth have some decent food in the house. After dinner, Beth made a pot of tea, naturally, and Nora and Sophie killed another bottle of wine. Nora heard more about the funeral home as Sophie saw it today, and the fellow who runs it, whom Sophie seems charmed by, given that in a low-key, low-voiced way it must be his job to be charming. Sophie remarked that the funeral home is not unlike this house, in that it is large and high-ceilinged and old, and that she thought Philip would have liked Hendrik Anderson’s own living quarters within it; but whatever was she doing in the man’s apartment?

All this has occurred in its unfolding way, but if Nora were going to illustrate and summarize the day with colour and texture, the resulting canvas would be wholly flat black. No shiny glimmers, no glossy hint of a way to see through or lighten it, just a huge, blank, bleak, wall-sized painting, neither absorbing energy nor casting it.

This is unbearable, but there’s no way around bearing it anyway.

Beth is just down the hall, back in her own bed. She should be sleepy after that long walk and, by her standards, an unusually full meal, but instead she is wide awake and alert. Her skin, well creamed, smells like flowers. It also seems to her that there’s some hint of Nora remaining on the pillowcase, in the air of the room.

Yesterday’s orgy of toast, tonight’s casserole and cake and those enormous chocolate chip cookies—they went down like butter. Maybe that’s why Sophie eats—because of things bubbling up that need tamping down, drowning under the weight of pastas, cookies and cakes. Beth runs her hands up her body and feels her hipbones protruding, her collarbones jutting like the wings of a plane. She is still beautiful. In a way it’s Philip who makes her prospects possible, although he wouldn’t have intended to do her this favour. Do unintended outcomes count? Not a good question.

Amazingly, she is hungry again. After the others are asleep, she can creep back downstairs to the kitchen and quietly forage through the leftovers. And then there’s tomorrow. Is this anything like how Nora feels all the time, seeing pictures, building them up, decorating them and filling them in? Won’t Nora be surprised! This is almost intolerably exciting. Maybe that’s what’s making Beth hungry.

Patience, patience. Even if Nora’s just down the hall, it’s
best to wait for the happy, right time, when it comes. Beth will know when that is. Possibly tomorrow, when surely it will be time for everybody to perk up and start to look to the future.

And Sophie?

What about her? She doesn’t matter, she’ll be out of the picture, just
poof.

Sophie’s bed, where Phil rarely was and never slept, is soft in the centre, her body having made its deeper and deeper cocooning impression over four years. Except in deepest winter, when cold winds can whistle through walls and window-frames that aren’t nearly as solid as they appear, Sophie sleeps naked because it’s enough to be sunk into this mattress without pyjamas or nightgown touching off more painful sparks on her electrical skin. A condition soothed by that human salve, Phil.

Hard to say exactly when today Phil’s attention wandered off. Maybe while she was talking to Hendrik Anderson—Phil might have found theoretical discussions of death tedious when he was in the midst of the thing itself. He might have wanted to pipe up to change the arrangements, or correct misapprehensions about eternity, and drifted off frustrated and bored when he could not do any of that. So where is he now? Still out there somewhere, maybe saying,
Oh, no
, and
Are they forgetting?
and putting his hands over his eyes? Does he have hands, does he have eyes?

These are not answerable questions.

In Sophie’s mind, he has hands. This is her accomplishment on the second day of his absence: if she closes her eyes she can see each line, ridge and callus. If she concentrates hard she can feel each one, too. A certain light of anticipation has recently kept her aloft. Now what will she do? Still, she may be soft, collapsed at last in the embrace of her bed, but
there’s also a hardness that builds up around death; like Phil’s calluses, the frictions of repeated mortality create a padding of toughness, given time.

Has there been enough time?

Thoughts are often exaggerated and dark in the night. Spirits sink hard. That’s why people all over the world—even Phil—are most vulnerable to death in these hours. Even in the refugee camp this was true. Tomorrow’s going to be a long, hard, strange day, and Sophie ought to be getting some sleep, but there are risks to that, too.

What does Sophie dream of when she dreams badly? What causes her to rear up, waking the household, sending her to the wicker sofa on the front porch a couple of months ago with a glass of sedative wine, to be joined by a man she’d wakened, with a sedative six-pack of beer?

The nightmare part is sharp and precise: the sudden, unshakeable grip of narrow bones on her wrist. But around that moment there is, like smoke or ill-will, a surrounding story that is so known and smelled, seen and felt that it scarcely needs telling, and therefore, in the nightmare, is scarcely told.

It was, as Nick promised (and what has happened to Nick, has he by any chance had his heart broken, his purposes defeated, his aims injured as well? Given all that can happen to a person in a relatively short time, it’s entirely possible that by now he’s a dark-haired, wiry, keen-eyed stockbroker; an unrevolutionary insurance agent concerned with risk-avoidance rather than risk; a dutiful suburban father of two), anyway, it was as he said it would be, a two-year package of time. A package Sophie tries to keep unexamined and wrapped, except for the habit of pointing out, irritatingly as she is well aware but can’t help herself, the
gentle and beneficent sway of this place and time compared with the vicious, unearned cruelties of other places and times.

Because people don’t know how lucky they are. Careless, lackadaisical Nora, for instance, who not only no longer bothers to clean up her own kitchen or answer her own telephone or for that matter arrange her own husband’s funeral, but also couldn’t be bothered weighing her whims against the angry sensitivities of real humans. Fine for her, becoming famous, not so nice for Sophie, having her shoe spat on in the bakery, stepping out in the morning to shit on the doorstep, rude words on the fence—“We’ll keep an eye,” the cops said. “But it’s just minor vandalism, no real harm intended, just kids.” So it most likely was, but kids don’t come out of nowhere, they have adult permission, spoken or silent, backing them up. They should see how other kids have to live. They should have to bear down on their own survival, not be free to make mean, grotesque mischief.

As should Nora.

Or look at Beth, surrounded by plenty and able to survive on the back of her own beauty, without a notion of real deprivation, and what does she do but deliberately, unnecessarily shrivel herself. Sophie has seen elsewhere this business of thinned, scant flesh dribbling off a jutting framework—of course Beth makes the perfect Christ on a cross, of course she’s a good martyred saviour at a last upchucked or uneaten supper, no question her eyes convey the right remote and redemptive expression to offer salvation. The woman is starved—and how must she feel tonight, with a normal amount of food in her belly for once?

When people are starving, they have to be introduced to nourishment slowly and cautiously, one tiny morsel at a time. Otherwise they get sick and may even—oh, the irony—die.

With the exception of details like smell, dirt, fear, corruption, courage, despair, music, death—those small aspects of life in the camp—Nick’s description of the work they would do, which Sophie actually did, was fairly accurate. Unskilled mainly, but necessary to freeing up those more vital, doctors and nurses and even administrators who knew best how to bargain and cajole and threaten and pull strings and make do and save. What Sophie could do was dole out portions of water and food; help dig toilet pits; clean minor wounds; distribute, under supervision, minor medicines; hold children while mothers’ wounds and illnesses were being treated, embrace mothers whose children were injured; watch for the endangered, and watch out for the dangerous; help wrap bodies, and help bury them.

Healing or blistered stumps hung where legs or arms used to be. For these she offered crutches and creams. All this was best seen with slitted eyes, blurred, not too close, which she imagined worked more or less both ways: that to residents of the camp, she and the others were mainly ghosts drifting past, stopping here and there, doing this and that, while their own real lives hovered close to the ground. Because she didn’t expect to be particularly noticed, it startled her to catch a youth, a woman, an old man regarding her briefly but certainly with the purest raw hatred.

Who could hate Sophie, who was doing her best?

Anyone might hate Sophie, who was lucky, and had had insanely irrelevant thoughts of doing good deeds, and who had chosen to be there, but could choose to leave.

In the nights, sometimes people sang. When there was laughter, she wondered where in people’s hearts songs and laughter came from.

She was also surprised by the people she worked with.
They’d arrived from all over the place, but mainly European countries and North America. Some were volunteers, like her, others were professionals: the doctors, nurses, administrators, full-time employees of one aid agency or another. Nobody was actually old, or very young, but otherwise there was a range of ages from twenties to fifties. What was surprising was that by no means everyone was there for the reasons that in the beginning seemed most obvious and essential to Sophie. They might be brisk and efficient, or frustrated and angry, but they sang, too, in the evenings, and there was laughter in their quarters also. When, early on, Sophie blithely spoke of doing good in the world, they grew wary. The word
good
made them nervous. They were there for reasons of needs they perceived and brutalities they were shocked by, but they shied back from
good
as if it were bad.

Even Sophie became too busy to be conscious of virtue for long. There was far too much real life, and real death, to deal with moment to moment. And moment to moment was the only way to respond. Seasons changed, wet to dry and back to wet. Many of the people had been farmers until driven by various marauders with various vicious purposes out of their homes. They were unaccustomed to charity, and to the unvaried, unfresh diets of charity. They were as shocked as anyone could be at the overturnings that had occurred in their lives. Acts of grace and generosity among them were not as common as might have been hoped. Sophie tried to stay focused on only one wound, one spoonful, one life at a time. Two years go slowly that way, but more manageably, too. “Don’t get too involved,” was one theme of staff meetings, “or we can’t work effectively.”

But what was
too involved
, exactly? Was it
too involved
to tell a story or two to restless children, or to teach and be taught a
few songs, or to lift a howling child from the ground, or applaud a teenager taking his first one-legged steps on crutches?