Thank You for the Music (9 page)

Jude sighed. It was the sigh that said he wasn't getting enough attention.

“Before Peggy it was Michael Bent. Michael Bent turned out to be a bit of a Nazi. I suppose that's irresponsible of me, using that term when he really did nothing at all. But his eyes had me constantly on the alert. I'd never seen such icy eyes. The eyes of an imprisoned soul. The only time I saw pleasure in those eyes was when he was giving shots. Before Michael Bent it was Darren Sedgewick, a very short, witty man in his fifties who quit a big corporate job to be my assistant, and then after three weeks died of a heart attack one evening in my car. I'm sorry to go on like this. May I go get myself another beer?”

Griffin ran to get her one; now he was back.

“Tell them about Emily Donnerbaum,” said Griffin, enraptured, a child hearing stories he already knows.

“Yes, do tell us about Emily Donnerbaum,” said Jude, “and then, why don't we start planning your wedding?”

A silence fell.

“How many children will you be having, Griff?” Jude said, smiling, his arms still crossed.

Griffin moved even closer to Berna. He rolled his eyes and gave his father a look of exasperation.

“You think I'd even consider bringing children into
this
world? You think I'd want them sucking down the energy of global terrorism? And as I mentioned to you a few years back, the fact that we have enough children on the globe
already
makes a
difference
to me. I'm not so big on
propagating
my own genes to gratify my own ego, which I know you think is too big, and you may be right, in fact I
know
you're right, but at least I'm trying to
subdue
it. Not to mention stray animals without homes. Why does everyone I meet have this nineteen fifties American thing about having kids?”

Griffin spoke with such passion that Jude looked at him for a moment with love. We hadn't seen any passion from Griffin for a few years. We'd seen composure. We'd heard descriptions of what he called “his practice.” His practice was sitting on a pillow and counting each one of his breaths for two hours a day, before going to work as a telemarketer for Greenpeace. (He'd quit his very lucrative computer job.) His practice purified his thoughts, he said. It helped him deal with “afflictive emotion.” It allowed, I suppose, for un-American transcendence.

“And we'll have a house full of animals, that's for certain,” Berna said, in a voice that was soothing no matter what she was saying. “I have four cats now, and two dogs, and I've managed this restraint only because it's difficult for one person to have more than this. More than six and you start cheating them out of a superb life. But with a man around the house, especially a good man like Griff, there's no telling how many we'll be able to take in.”

“Our grandchildren,” I mumbled, and barked out a laugh in spite of myself.

“Actually,” Berna suddenly said, looking at Griffin, “it's not in my nature to lie this way. Nor is it in yours. What were we thinking, Griff? We'd let them down easy?”

Lying?

She looked at us. “Look,” she said, holding up her hand to show us the ring. “We're already married. I'm your daughter-in-law now, all right? There will be no big wedding.” She smiled over at Griffin.

“Okay,” said Griffin, “now you know. Bern, tell them about Emily Donnerbaum now! You gotta hear this!”

That night, after they left, I lay in bed in our dark room and started to laugh. Jude sighed, exasperated with me; this wasn't funny. In fact, each time he closed his eyes he said he pictured them in bed, naked together, and it made his skin crawl. At this I laughed harder, then settled down to scold him.

“Jude! That's rather unkind,” I said. “She may be getting on in years, but she's not disgusting. Her face is beautiful. Those cheekbones I'd like to have.”

“Naked,” Jude said. “I keep seeing her naked, and it
is
disgusting. It's like a fairy-tale image I can't shake. I guess this marks me as pathetic and shallow. I always said you'd eventually discover this.”

“No, not pathetic, Jude, but a little harsh. And in ten years I'll be her age. Will I be a fairy-tale image?”

“You'll be you.”

“I think old bodies are beautiful,” I said, and smiled to myself, my eyes on the twisted black branches of the tree that scraped our window. I had never really thought this before. In fact, I'd always found old bodies disturbing, male or female, but especially female. As a young woman I'd been one to sit on the beach and cringe at the old ladies walking by, I'd been one to promise myself that I'd always stay covered up when I got up in years. But in the darkness that night, remembering Berna's vivid vet stories and my son next to her, holding her hand and waiting to be alone with her, a clenched fist inside me opened up. I lay there remembering my son's waiting—the feel of his waiting—everything was boring to him near the end of our night because he wanted her, he wanted her alone, and in bed. How long had it been since Jude had experienced that sort of waiting? Waiting to have
me
? Ten years? Twenty?

“Jude?” I said.

“Mmmm?”

“I think we need to put aside our bias and learn to love Berna. She's highly intelligent, and graceful, and actually quite funny. And she brings out the
life
in Griff. Whether we like it or not, she's going to be part of us.”

“You're losing your mind,” he grumbled. “A young man doesn't marry a woman thirty-five years older than him. Thirty-five fucking years! If he does, the parents should step in and interpret it as mental illness, and begin looking for appropriate institutions.”

“Jude! He's always been different, but he's never been mentally ill.”

“I'd rather him have brought home a little bald Buddhist girl,” Jude said. “If I were him right now, some part of me would be hoping my parents would step in.”

“Jude, he's an adult, and he's married. We have no power anymore.”

“He's a good-looking kid missing out on beautiful young women! He's missing out on the best life has to offer! He's trading all that in—the best years of his life—for an eccentric brain whose dogs probably sit in chairs at the dinner table.”

Jude sat up and flicked on the light.

He looked around the room as if he'd never seen it before.

“Why would he do this?” he said, to the wall. “I bet she buys the dogs plaid raincoats like that woman we knew in Sea Isle.”

“No, Jude. Berna is not the dog-raincoat type. You know that.” I was exhilarated. I was, moment by moment, growing more proud of my son, and less interested in my husband, who I knew I could taunt right now—I knew I could talk to him about all the men he knew who'd left their wives and married women half their age (we had two very good friends, in fact, who'd done this, and we'd gone to their pretty, hushed, little weddings, and despite my initial cynicism I'd felt moved and happy for everyone). And I knew I could bring up Anita Defranz, a talented twenty-year-old painter he'd had an affair with eight years ago, a girl he brought to dinner after confessing the affair to me, wanting it all to be in the open, wanting me to like the girl, and I did, I did like her quite a bit even as I wanted her to vanish, even as my face grew hot at the thought of her. But I never told Jude that something ended for me during that dinner, nothing dramatic—but some part of my story with Jude
ended
as Anita Defranz told me how delicious the casserole was. “May I please have the recipe, please?” she'd said.

Jude had so trusted me to understand him, to understand his longing for Anita Defranz, who indeed was beautiful, with perfect skin and long, shiny dark hair, that I felt oddly touched by that trust, almost as if Jude were a child whose neediness made him a little dense. And now, in bed, feeling Jude's protest fill the room, feeling his confusion thicken the air in the room, I again saw him as a child, a child who could not see beyond its own sense of things. I felt sorry for him, really, and hated that pity, because it was pity that catapulted him from the realm of anyone I could unequivocally desire. Maybe I'd pitied him ever since Anita Defranz in her red silk shirt had sat so primly at our table.

“I'm going out for a walk,” Jude said, pulling on his jeans. “I need some fresh air to help me figure this out.”

After he left, and I was alone in the room without his protest, suddenly I was protesting myself. My one boy! This would be his life? This? How sad! Fundamentally sad, and it all must
mean
something sadder. And what kind of woman would do this? Such presumption! She was crazy, no doubt.

My sentimental visions of going to stay with his young wife after the birth of their first child, a girl, of course, the girl I'd never had myself, pressed in on me.

I wept stupid tears knowing I'd stop all this just as soon as Jude came back with the energy of his rant.

I'm a reactor, Griffin once told me, not an actor.

Jude had vaguely obsessive tendencies; it showed up in his painting (one year he painted nothing but unremarkable gray rooms with brown floors), it showed up the year he drove two miles every morning at five
A
.
M
. to get a cream donut and black coffee from Winnie's Diner, in the way he had worn only black canvas shoes by day and construction boots in the evening. He was a man who went on kicks—and I could look back over our life and organize my memories around them.
The tofu jogging year. The gambling year. The year he understood Republicans. The year of Ancient Greece books.

And now he could not stop visiting my son and his new wife.

“Come on,” he'd say, “let's go on out and see what they're doing tonight.”

“We should call ahead of time.”

“No,” he'd say. “I want to see what they do when they're not prepared.”

“That's not polite,” I'd argue, but somehow we'd be on our way by then, in Jude's little Chevy, his head almost touching the ceiling, the radio tuned into a sports show—the one kick he never abandoned—and me looking out the window at the starless city night.

We'd drive nine miles into the country dark, into the wild array of brilliant stars, then up along their bumpy dirt driveway, and we'd see the one lighted window in their house—a kitchen window—and invariably we would find the two of them on the Murphy bed—you know, those beds that fold down out of the wall, they had one in their kitchen—someone who'd owned the house long ago had nursed an invalid. So we'd look in through the window and knock and they'd call, “Come in,” having no idea who we were. They were fearless; I suppose their love had rendered the whole world benign. Or maybe Berna had always been that way.

We'd step into the dimly lit kitchen. They had a Franklin stove filled with fire for heat. The air felt good. Charged, somehow, with good, unspeakable things. With spirits and spices. Both loved cooking. Griffin, I'd always thought, should have gone to chef school. He'd always seemed most happy at the stove.

“Hi,” we'd say, “just thought we'd drop in and say hello.” I'd look at Jude regarding them. His face looked so troubled, all mixed up with criticism and deep interest and profound bafflement.

The two of them would be on the Murphy bed in old flannel pajamas and surrounded by three or four cats. They were always so bright-eyed, and tucked under quilts made by Berna's mother, a woman who we'd learn had joined the Peace Corps when she was seventy-four, after teaching mentally retarded adults for thirty-eight years. (My heart lurched forward, hearing this.) They'd quickly slip out of bed, smile at us and tell us to sit down at the table. In the soft light of that kitchen, with the old, creaking wooden floor and the white lace curtains and the enormous spice rack and the big cheap painting of the wild ocean, Berna looked beautiful, I noticed. Not just beautiful for an older person, but
beautiful.
Griff, who always looked perfect to me, was more so. Under the table, a black dog usually slept, snoring quietly. In the room just beyond the kitchen, a chameleon lived in a plant that touched the ceiling. To feed the chameleon Berna kept crickets in egg cartons on the solar porch in the back; she fed them powdered milk and fruits. You could always hear their song. When you closed your eyes it was as though the memory of a peaceful August night from the heart of childhood had been brought to life.

“Can I get you some tea?” Berna asked us, moving toward the cabinets.

“Tea would be good,” I'd say. She had long, bare feet, and her nails were painted, which surprised me, since she wore no makeup.

“You haven't had tea until you've had Berna's,” my son said.

She'd serve us ginger tea in small blue flowered teacups, with lemon and bamboo honey. It was true, the tea was better than any we'd had. She'd put the teapot on the table, and sit down. Again, I noticed how she never sighed, or groaned as she moved about, as she sat or got up from chairs. (I'd begun groaning in my late thirties.)

“So,” Jude wanted to know one fall night, “where are you from, originally?”

“Nova Scotia,” she said, her teacup in her hand. She had wrapped herself in an orange-and-yellow afghan.

“Nova Scotia!” he said. “Such a beautiful place.”

“Indeed. I miss it every day, even as I'm utterly rooted here.”

“I was there once, in my twenties,” Jude said. “We hiked, and slept near the coast, and swam in the lakes. It was stunningly
gentle
land. That's my memory of it. Damn, I'd like to go back. And that wild water. Nova Scotia! I'll be damned.”

“You never told me about that,” I said. “I thought I knew everything.”

Jude smiled at me, from a Nova Scotian distance.

Was it my imagination, or did discovering that she was from Nova Scotia change everything for Jude? He was mysterious that way—unpredictable just when you started to feel his predictability too keenly.