Perfection (3 page)

The year before, Cathy had arrived at our party and, while shedding her coat, announced quietly, “I’m going to get shitfaced.” She made good on her promise, downing beer after beer for the remainder of the evening, laughing too loudly. She spent the first hour of 2002 vomiting violently in the bathroom while our daughters slept entwined on the living room rug.

I sincerely hoped that we would not witness a repeat performance this year. Her appearance suggested the opposite. She was dressed in a simply cut, knee-length purple dress with a high, round collar, black pumps, and stockings. She looked ready for a Sunday church service.

I wondered if the recent trend of weekly church attendance was more of a plea for social acceptance than a genuine attempt to connect to a higher power. Henry told me about a car trip with the girls during which Amy cheerfully sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” complete with too-cute hand gestures. An agnostic girl of vaguely Jewish upbringing, I had sung that song too, at my Episcopalian summer camp.

I wanted to raise Liza differently. Cathy and Steve often invited Liza to attend Sunday services with them. But our daughter was turning out to be a skeptic just like her parents. If you couldn’t see, smell, or hear Him, then how could God exist? And why was God a He anyway?

Henry told me abruptly in June that he no longer wanted to spend time with Cathy and Steve. “She is narrow-minded and the most conventional person I know,” he announced. I was surprised—but relieved—and didn’t press him further.

But in September, on the school playground, Cathy started
crying, upset that we had pulled away. Amy missed seeing Liza for playdates, she said. I didn’t miss spending time with Cathy, but it seemed unkind to cut her off in such a brutal way, unkinder still to hurt her daughter. I arranged a playdate for the girls, and as the holiday season drew near, I urged Henry to invite Cathy to our annual party. I secretly hoped that Liza would make other friends.

The New Year’s Eve banquet continued noisily. Henry, ever the eager host, roamed through the rooms, carrying champagne bottles, refilling glasses. At last he seemed to be reviving his bon vivant self.

One family had brought a telescope. While Henry entertained our guests, I escaped for a peaceful moment outside with father and stargazing son to peer through the lens at the full moon. The son eagerly explained to me that there was an unusual alignment of the moon and planets. It was a clear night, the lunar craters brilliant in the cold air.

After the midnight toasting, parents gathered up their children. While I helped them search for hats, gloves, and snow boots, we made vague plans for the last vacation days before school began again and declared the party a complete success.

The energetic promise of New Year’s Eve
was short-lived. Over the next few days, Henry slumped into lethargy, slept frequently, and began to complain of breathing problems, possibly related to his asthma. His inhaler, though, didn’t help. He told me he had scheduled a doctor’s appointment. I was surprised—I usually had to force him to see a doctor.

January 6. With my workload light and Liza back at school, Henry encouraged me to take a break with him that afternoon. We wandered upstairs to make love. I had always loved the light in our bedroom. The walls were painted a gentle mushroom gray. Low winter light filtered through the layer of dust on the windows onto the rumpled sheets and the carved headboard, a family heirloom. As we moved into our bed, the moment felt tender, calm, and familiar. I knew when I would come; I could count down the final seconds before liftoff in my head. We lay quietly in bed.

“You are a beautiful woman and I love you very much,” Henry told me. Lying next to him, my head buzzing, I believed him.

The next morning was Tuesday, January 7, garbage day. As I prepared Liza’s Cream of Wheat, Henry’s boots crunched in the snow and gravel outside, and the garbage cans scraped along the asphalt driveway. He reappeared on the back porch and struggled with the sliding door with an effort that seemed odd. He lurched into the house, hunched over, took a few stumbling steps, and fell forward flat onto the wooden floor.

He came to as I reached him. Ignoring his protests, I hustled Henry and Liza to the car. I dropped Liza off at school and drove straight to the doctor’s office, earlier than his scheduled appointment. His EKG and blood pressure were normal. His doctor arranged an appointment with a cardiologist for the following Monday, six days away.

I wanted the appointment to be sooner.

“Oh, Julie, stop fussing,” Henry said, brushing off my concern. I tried not to worry. But worrying is in my nature.

The shock of the morning kicked Henry into action. He spent the evening cleaning out his office while I read a work manuscript
in bed. By midnight he’d set three bags of trash outside his office door alongside filing boxes filled with neatly organized papers. He looked tired but satisfied. “Tomorrow, I will be ready to begin my book,” he said, with a weary grin.

I recalled this exhaustion
as Emily drove me home from the hospital, leaving Henry behind on the gurney. Matthew, who had been close to Henry’s family for twenty-five years, and my friend for sixteen, decided it would be best to tell the news to Henry’s family in person. He offered to drive up that evening and left straight from the hospital. I feared my own task ahead. Liza was still at a friend’s house, completely unaware of what had happened that afternoon.

It was now dark. Anna had arrived at my house. I had called her from the car on the way to the hospital, but she had heard the news from the bookkeeper we shared, whose son was, coincidentally, one of the paramedics who came to our house.

Irena, a close friend from Brooklyn, my parents, brother, and sister-in-law had driven up from the city. A small group of local friends who had heard the news had come over as well. Anna and Irena greeted me at the door. I was grateful that Irena had managed to extract herself so quickly from her busy city office. Her normally exuberant dark curls were tamed in a hair tie without her trademark feather accents. A head taller than I, she had always been sisterly with me, and I suddenly realized how badly I needed someone who would tell me that everything would be all right. Irena walked me over to one of the couches, where I collapsed. Everyone had gathered on the other couch and the chairs in front of the fireplace, creating an odd preparty atmosphere. Even
with my sheepskin coat on, I was shivering. I grabbed a blanket from the back of the sofa and draped it over my shaking legs.

Just after 8:00
P.M
., Liza returned home from the playdate Emily had hastily arranged that afternoon, when we still hoped that everything would turn out okay. Liza looked around, smiling awkwardly, looking for Henry, wondering why her grandparents and so many others were visiting. It was a party, she thought. But where was the food? Where were the other kids? She joined me on the couch, hopping onto my lap.

“Mama, why are you still wearing your coat?” The room was quiet; everyone waited.

“Lizzie, do you remember how Daddy wasn’t feeling well—how he fell down in the hall the other day? Well, he fell again today, in the afternoon, while you were at school. I called an ambulance right away and they took him to the hospital—the doctors tried to do everything they could to save him. But he died.”

Liza listened to me—a few seconds of complete silence—then she wept while I held her in my arms. She cried for a long time, deep, brokenhearted sobbing. I was too drained to cry.

When she stopped crying, Liza sat quietly on my lap for several minutes and looked around at the adults, many of whom were quietly weeping. I could see her thinking, her eyes scanning the room—now she understood why everyone was in our house.

With a sudden sense of purpose, Liza jumped off my lap and walked to the shelf where we kept the ashes of Chester, our dear dead cat. She took down the small metal box, opened it, and walked around the room showing everyone the ashes.

“Chester, our tabby kitty, was very sick. We got up one day and he was just lying on the porch and he wouldn’t eat or drink or get up, so we had to take him to the doctor right away, but the doctor told us that Chester was too sick to live. So he said he
would have to give him a shot to make him sleep forever, but it wouldn’t hurt him at all.”

Chester’s death a year earlier had served a most poetic and instructive purpose.

Irena stayed overnight.
We slept next to each other like school-girls.

Matthew, Anna, Emily, and Tomas appeared early the following morning to make arrangements for a memorial. I lay in bed while Irena and the others busied themselves in Henry’s office, across the hall from our bedroom. I heard distressing sounds, bursts of heated conversation and a woman’s muffled scream. I got to my feet and stumbled into the office. Something was wrong. Anna led me back to my bed and quietly tucked me in. I was grateful to lie down again.

Later, I heard Cathy’s voice calling for Matthew as she climbed up the stairs. She disappeared behind Henry’s office door. More muffled voices, but I could not understand the words. Henry’s door opened again. I sat up in bed and looked into the hallway. Cathy rushed quickly down the stairs.
Why didn’t she stop in to see me?
I lay down again, drifting in and out, my first widowed day dreamlike, foggy, unreal.

We arrived early at the funeral home
for the viewing so that Liza could spend time alone with Henry. She boldly walked up to the open coffin, positioned for adult view on a platform.

“Mama, can I have a tall chair?”

We found a high stool.

“Mama, look, you can’t move his fingers. Daddy’s lips are chapped. Can we put some stuff on his lips?” I rummaged in my bag and found a tube of lip balm, which Liza applied with care. Cathy’s daughter, Amy, came over, and we found another tall stool for her. The two girls sat near each other and talked and gestured at Henry. The ease of their friendship comforted me as I watched from across the room, greeting guests. Henry’s family arrived and sat quiet and stunned in the seats near the front. Townspeople arrived, some just acquaintances, many complete strangers. Henry’s high school friends came together in a pack to greet me. One of Henry’s former girlfriends sadly shook my hand.

I glanced over, searching for Liza near the coffin. I saw Cathy in her place. She was weeping hysterically, her head and arms draped over Henry’s lifeless torso. Steve stood next to her, stoic, uncomfortable. When she lifted her head, her face was red and wet with tears. Not even I, the widow, had allowed myself such public emotion. A woman from our wider circle of acquaintances, her face set with concern, walked over quickly to speak with Steve while Cathy wept on. Finally, Steve gently drew Cathy away from the coffin. The awkward moment passed. I watched with relief as everyone returned to handshaking and quiet conversation.

I lay in bed the morning after the wake,
my mind still soft and dreaming, in a tangle of sweaty sheets, light filtering through the dusty windows, obscuring the mountains and fog-draped river. Henry was dead; I was a widow. Irena lay sleeping next to me, her steady breath a small comfort. But soon she would have to go back to the city and I would be left here with Liza. Henry was gone.

A cloud gathered above my body, vaporous fingers extending and reaching around my torso and into my secret internal spaces. My mouth was pried open tenderly but insistently. He was invisible but present, an essence that seemed to hold me firmly on the bed. I allowed him to wash over me, enter me, enfold me.

He wanted something from me—to tell me something important, to be with my body. But he had no body; maybe he didn’t understand that yet. Irena stirred and opened her eyes. Now my arms were reaching up to hold him.

“Are you okay? What’s happening?” Irena murmured.

“It’s Henry, he’s here.”

Why was Henry here? What did he want to tell me? He needed a body, but he was floating now without one. I felt anguished for him that he didn’t understand what had happened to his body, that I couldn’t speak to him and explain. Suddenly, I was floating too.

My body felt light and airy in the bed while he visited me each morning after that first time, the intensity of the visits gradually softening. I floated through my days. People spoke to me, and I realized I wasn’t really present. I floated in the icy wind, wishing I could pass into his world, though I was unwilling to leave my child. I was in some in-between place, a dreamlike landscape where the horizon line vanished in a whiteout snowstorm.

The memorial service took place
on January 12. I stood before an overflowing crowd at the lectern of a local church that had kindly offered their space for the ceremony.

“Henry was the love of my life,” I told the crowd, “but also a completely impossible person.” Nervous laughter. I had assumed
the audience would be intimate with Henry’s love of excess, his trademark lack of restraint. Surely some of the hundreds of friends, family, and local acquaintances packing this local church knew what I meant. Henry never liked to do anything small. Everything—from his romantic marriage proposal to his dinner party menus—was executed in grand gestures. A reserved twenty-seven-year-old when I met him, I had been drawn to that exuberance and to his forceful love. I had never before received such unabashed love from any man, and I’d welcomed it eagerly.

Snapshots came to mind: our meeting sixteen years earlier at a winter party; a day during our first spring together when he positioned me under a blooming cherry tree to take a photo; Henry cooking one of many amazing dinners for me on the humble stove in our apartment; Henry handing me a ruby ring over a warmly lit restaurant table where we celebrated our third wedding anniversary; a meal in a Paris restaurant where I tasted blinis for the first time; Henry sighing over the delights of a rabbit stew he prepared on a trip to Italy and the afternoon siestas we enjoyed on the warm afternoons in that Tuscan farmhouse we’d rented with friends. More images: Henry squeezing my hand as I pushed Liza into the fluorescent glare of the hospital delivery room; Henry and I as we walked through Prospect Park with our new baby. And recent images: Henry outdoing himself with a three-course lunch for ten women in honor of my fortieth birthday—grilled figs wrapped in pancetta, fresh pea soup with truffle oil, braised quails with pomegranate sauce. One of Liza’s birthday parties, as twenty families and their children gathered around our swimming pool while Henry, in his favorite apron, presiding over the grill, beamed proudly. Henry throwing Liza and other delighted children into the water and swimming after them, as happy as a
golden retriever playing with a litter of eager, squealing puppies. Yet another image as Henry showed Liza how to stir a sauce at the stove.