Silent Retreats (15 page)

"I can't stand this," Angel says. Her eyes too are damp. "She just had a baby."

Roberta now has one arm through mine and one through Angel's. "That's Michelle's mom and dad over there," she says, indicating with an unobtrusive nod of the head. It's hard to see them, with the group of friends around them. "Howard'll come through this, don't you think? Maybe somehow he'll make it." Roberta is just saying these things. She doesn't really know what she's saying. She's just trying to say something. "He always says he's a survivor—Howard does."

Angel's looking toward the box. She says, "You know, Michelle wanted this baby so badly."

Roberta wears her hair frizzy, bookish, or like she's just been rained on. I notice that her nose, pink now along with her eyes, is fine, very delicate, much like my ex-wife's. This resemblance is a new revelation to me. We stand there together for some time, no one saying anything.

"Have you seen the note on that one bouquet?" Angel asks after a while. We haven't. "It's there on the end. The card says, 'Best Wishes for a Quick Recovery.' Is that ghastly?"

I look in that direction. Now no one is within twenty feet of the casket. The roses that had fallen are back in their place. Staring at the box, I try to picture this woman named Michelle in there. On a tripod next to the casket is a small studio portrait of her in her nursing uniform. But to take that picture and extract reality from it, and place that reality in the dark gray metallic casket. Hard to do for a stranger, let alone loved ones. Michelle. Embalmed. Ready for the grave. Good-bye.

We stand quietly for a while, looking at the thinning group. People are leaving the visitation in clusters, friends, families. I hear someone say they have to go to the grocery store now.

Roberta's head is down, and Angel tries to comfort her. "There's nothing any of us can do," she says. Then the three of us are in the parking lot—a damp spring evening. On the street at the end of the driveway cars are sliding by under the amber streetlights. Everything seems to have a sparkle and shine. Off somewhere I hear a cat fight.

"People always say that," my girlfriend says. "That there's nothing we can do. I'm going to figure out something. I'm going to do
something
." I don't know Roberta well enough to know what this means.

"Roberta, call me sometime, please?" Angel says. A gracious smile. "I'm over in Calistoga now. Won't you? Maybe you could come and play the piano for me. Have you heard her play, Daniel?"

"It's hard to think about now. But I'll call you," Roberta says. "I keep thinking of it, looking for an academic excuse."

"Come by and we'll discuss valences of some common ions," Angel says, and she winks.

"Good idea," Roberta says, with a grudging little laugh. "A little bad-grade humor," she says to me.

"Don't you have the periodic table?" Angel asks, her hand on Roberta's arm.

"You mean that chart thing?" Roberta is kidding. They both laugh quietly. "I have it, but I need to find and understand it."

"It's a date, then," Angel says.

The following evenings are difficult for Roberta. On a couple of them, she's at my place. She cries, and spends hours on the phone. She's back to smoking, which she'd quit a couple of years before I met her. I listen while she talks to friends, sitting at my kitchen table with the lights out and the long white cord of the phone stretched from the far wall. She occupies herself this way while I'm working in the darkroom just a few feet away.

The night after the funeral she calls Howard. "Hey, Howard," she says. "It's Roberta. You okay?"

"I know," she says.

The pictures I'm working with were taken from about two thousand feet. This particular work is for a developer who wants to tuck a mall into a hillside.

"Well, is the family gone?—not yet?" Roberta is asking Howard.

"Look, I didn't call to ask what I can do. Are you relieved and refreshed by that?" She laughs, all indications being that this struck a chord with Howard. "I'm gonna
tell
you what I'm going to do—little change of pace, right."

"Right," she says, levity subsiding. "I know, Howard.

The pictures I'm developing show highways and neighborhoods, the roofs of used-car places, an occasional line of traffic at a light. Even at so low an altitude, over a dense population, I don't see anything readily identifiable as a person except for maybe those small specks dotting the edge of a backyard pool. Staring down through the camera sometimes I imagine that I'm looking instead through a microscope, into a petri dish. There's a rough eruption of green mold in the corner, microscopic cauliflower—wait, it's a forest. At 2,500 feet, a cemetery is easy to identify, the stones in rank and file, an occasional canopy, an occasional burst of color from flowers. But you don't see many people. People from above are about the size of their hats.

"Look here," she says to Howard, taking a deep breath. "I'm carting in food tomorrow. Might last you a couple of days if you ration it."

I peer through the curtain, reminding her of the other offer.

"Oh yeah, and my friend Daniel—you've not met him yet. He's a professional photographer. If you find a picture, Howard—of Michelle, you know?—get it to me and we'll make it big and pretty, for posterity. That little girl of yours, someday she'll . . ." There's no way Roberta will make it through this sentence.

I look back out at her.

"I gotta go, Howard—right—I love you, too. Hang in there. Have your mom be sure to throw the door open wide around noon tomorrow. I'll be on the run."

"Okay," she says then, after a moment, and clicks off. She puts her head down on her arms on the table.

A few years ago I was doing a job for a surveyor. This was back in Illinois, and actually, completely without knowing it at the time, I recorded a stop-action sequence of an auto accident. It was all silently unfolding down there, inside the view of my camera, and I didn't notice. I was looking at something else, trying to fly at the same time as usual.

I noticed it in the darkroom while I was bringing the pictures up a few days later. I went through my pile of the week's newspapers trying to find out if anyone was hurt. Didn't find anything. I guess I could have asked the police.

A week after the funeral we're driving up Angel's long driveway in Calistoga. Being out in the car with Roberta makes me feel wonderful and guilty, like stolen moments. I have to keep reminding myself that my divorce is final. The change in my life is dizzying.

Angel, dressed in sandals with a little lift to them, a dazzling white, frilly blouse, and Levi's, is all the way at the back and waving us to drive around. The driveway comes around the house and blends into a large patio and garden. Angel's still holding the hose—she's been watering a terrace of flowers. Twisting the nozzle, she stops the water, drops the hose in the grass.

"You came!" she says when we stop, and her arms engulf Roberta as she gets out of the car. "I didn't think you'd come even when you called and said you were on the way."

"Why's that?" Roberta asks.

"Hello, Daniel," Angel says over Roberta's shoulder, over the top of the car. "Good to see you again."

She orients us, points in the direction of the Palisades to the east, then toward the Mayacamas, the direction of Santa Rosa, Bodega Bay. She takes us back to an area around the pool. She pours us a glass of wine. Roberta and I sit on wrought-iron patio chairs in the shade of a white canvas umbrella, and Angel is partly in the sun in an ancient, weathered rocking chair. Her black hair has silver in it. She has it gathered up in back.

"Do you know Napa wines, Daniel?" she asks. "This is a local chardonnay—you won't find better in California."

She must think I'm from North Dakota or something. I listen and smile. I like her is why.

"It's aged in oak casks. Like the reds. Tastes grassy; don't you think?"

"Dan's been up and down the valley in his time," Roberta says protectively. "He lives in San Jose."

"Ah, San Jose," Angel says.

"He used to live way farther north. When he was married. And Chicago."

"Are you divorced, then?" she asks me, the usual measured caution in her voice showing she's allowing for the chance that, like Howard, I might be a widower, best case.

"Freshly."

"Well. Welcome to the world. Don't become too discouraged for a while. It's an adjustment."

"Okay," I say to her.

"Then later let the discouragement get down inside of you and eat you in half like it does the rest of us," she says, laughing bitterly. She clears herself of whatever she means by that and says, "Well, then, how did you two meet?"

"Daniel likes photography," Roberta says.

"I'm an aerial photographer," I tell her.

"I have this vision of a man snapping photos from a high wire." Angel laughs.

"Not high enough," I say.

"No, but I'm getting there," Angel says, laughing her eyes bright.

"I mean, I have an airplane," I say.

She's already toasting us, her tough-woman laugh easing back into a warm smile. "To my friends . . ." Her bracelets slip to her elbow. "I'm glad you came. I hated that terrible visitation, didn't you?" She catches my eyes as well as Roberta's over the rim of her glass as she sips. Her mascara is very heavy on top, making her eyelashes essentially one thing. I can't get over the evenness of her beauty.

We're quiet for a moment. "You know, I've heard Howard is taking leave from work and trying to do the baby thing himself." She shakes her head, looks off toward the garden. Suddenly she's battling a wave of emotion. "You just don't imagine people like Michelle . . . this kind of thing happening to . . . not Michelle."

"I know. Not Michelle," Roberta says.

"Did you have children?" Angel asks me. "But of course it's different with men," she says before I can answer.

"I thought we were talking about a man—Howard," I say. "Yes, I have a daughter." But even as I say it I know she won't appreciate my daughter—my daughter won't be real to Angel today. I have a flash, then, of the comfort I used to feel just before falling asleep, knowing my little girl was happy and warm in deep sleep just a few steps away in another room. "My daughter's in Chicago with her mom," I say, to round out the detail, but Angel has moved on.

I watch her lips move, but I don't follow her drift. Since I left home the year before, this is the kind of people I've met continually. Well-groomed singles, making conversation, living in nice houses, surrounded by nice things they got the ideas for from each other or in magazines. Roberta is one, although she doesn't have a house but instead lives in a town house among many single nurses a block from the Davis Community Hospital.

Angel says to Roberta, "Donna came by, and Jackie, last week. She really likes you—Jackie does. Really. I mentioned you might visit me soon. She says you're pretty and bright. No argument there. Right, Daniel?"

"Right," I say automatically, and lift the glass as a small toast to Roberta.

"Jackie thinks Albert . . . do you know these people, Daniel?"

I nod and offer that I sort of know Albert.

Angel continues right over that. "She thinks Albert is still yours, Roberta. Yours for the taking."

"Did she say that?"

"Maybe she was just being charming."

"Well. Albert's
anybody's
for the taking," Roberta says.

"Albert and Roberta dated there for a while, Daniel—hardly a matched set, would you say?"

"Hardly."

Roberta has reached over and put her hand on mine on the table.

Then they talk about this person named Donna I've never heard of before, well into the second glass of wine. Donna has taken charge of her life, Angel says. She's not seeing men, and she's completely off pills. She is going to a female counselor in Davis and they seem really to have hit it off. Roberta and Angel talk about the celibacy article in
Cosmopolitan
.

I watch Angel. She's engrossed in Roberta. She brings us both along with her laugh, and once in a while there is a polite glance to me—to keep me included, but this visit is about Roberta. I'm very comfortable with that.

When we go in, I take the Chardonnay and Angel takes Roberta's arm. Together they walk ahead of me. They talk so quietly I can't hear. I flatter myself that they may be talking about me, or at least about men. I think I know better, however. In the house, made mostly of stone and glass, Angel shows us around. She lives alone.

In the kitchen, on the counter, is a textbook. From the front flap Angel pulls out a poster-sized periodic table. "For you," she says to Roberta, and Roberta laughs. "The text is old, so you're missing the eight or nine new elements. Maybe it's a collector's item by now, like a flag with twenty-one stars or something. Post it over the bathroom sink," she says. "You'll have it in no time."

Roberta plays the piano for Angel, who sits next to her reading the music. The room, the whole afternoon, fills with the sound of the piano. Roberta has some boiler-plate sections of classics memorized, including some of Rachmaninoff's second concerto, which I love, and Debussy's "Arabesque," and Angel has a lot of music. I find myself wanting to hear things all the way through, but each piece seems to go a while and then play out. They talk quietly, and sometimes rousing laughter comes across to me. For the most part, I can't hear them. Angel plays then, and she is very good, too. They land in a clump of show tunes, and Roberta sings in that hefty Karen Carpenter style of hers.

I've been in this situation before in my life, it occurs to me. Sometime. My wife and I had gone somewhere, perhaps to the home of a friend of hers from college. The kids would play outside, and I would find a good chair with a view. Maybe if they had a good bookshelf I'd pull some book down and page through it. And there would be music.

Through the glass wall from where I'm sitting I can see into the far reaches of the yard, well groomed and empty. And I can see the trees and flowers in a rock garden area next to a pond, moving in the warm, gentle wind. I possess the bottle of wine, and in time give myself over to it.