Things Withered (13 page)

When she got home from work that night, she smelled the spaghetti.

“This is great,” she said, coming into their little kitchen, where the counters were wiped clean, most of the prep dishes already washed (foreplay starts in the morning), and the sauce was bubbling on the stove. “Maybe I should keep you at home. Make you my bitch,” she said. He took this as encouragement and grabbed her around the waist, kissing her thoroughly on the lips. She kissed back, and that was all he needed to know. His planned, off-handed comment (prepared in the event of another shopping trip) to be expressed casually and hopefully jokingly over dinner, of, “You’d think if we were going to be married, I’d actually get to see you sometime. . . .” would go unsaid. So far she had said nothing about shopping and the phone had not rung.

David poured her a glass of wine—
Oh, wine, too! Can I pick ’em or what?
—and she took it into the bedroom with her. The bathroom was off the bedroom and in a moment he heard the sound of the shower, which caused him to start humming as he put water in the pot to boil the noodles. He hummed some Barry White and then another song that was just stuck in his brain until he realized it was a Justin Bieber song, and he deliberately went back to Barry White. He heard the shower turn off just as the water was ready for the spaghetti. He heard the bathroom door open and suddenly wondered if he should really be starting the spaghetti or just turn everything down. (Or if he should just put the spaghetti in and—but that was a bad idea.)

So he turned the sauce down to minimum and shut the water off completely. He stuck the spaghetti back in the box with limited success. He breathed into his hand, and it seemed all right to him. He took a sip of wine from his glass and put it back on the counter before quietly making his way to the bedroom. The door was slightly ajar, the wonders inside just out of his sight, just tantalizingly close enough. He pushed it open, slowly, drawing out the anticipation.

“Oh baby—” he started and then he saw her.

She was laid out flat, sideways across the bed, where she’d fallen. The towel wrapped around her wet hair had come loose and partly covered her face. Her arms were stretched out sideways from her body, limp.

Dead.

“OH GOD!” he screamed, and dropped to his knees. “Not MYRA!
MYRA!
”

And she jolted up, eyes wild, “What!
What!?
”

David’s head went light, the room swam. He fainted, crashing to the floor.

He came to with Myra waving a peeled clove of garlic under his nose. He opened his eyes and she was staring down at him, the towel gone from her head, her hair hanging in wet tendrils down her face.

She bent close to him. “You fainted,” she said. “You’re not pregnant are you?”

He closed his eyes again and exhaled with relief. Of course she wasn’t dead.

“I thought you were dead.”

Myra lay down beside him, propped on one elbow. “That’s kind of nuts, David.”

He hadn’t told her about what had happened at the hospital. He rolled over on his side, and propped himself up. Myra’s robe had slipped open. He could just about see one of her breasts.

“Never mind,” he said and, tugged at the robe, giving both breasts a bit of air and Myra let him. He was grateful to have something else to do, and they both worked at taking his mind off things, nicely and slowly. Near the end, he caught Myra staring up into space, as though she had something else on her mind. But it all ended well.

David found a job two weeks before the wedding. He almost had his pick of two jobs. He had applied at another warehouse, this one much closer to home, close enough that he might have been able to walk to work most of the time. He’d also applied at the on-line catalogue branch of a major department store, working in the basement, filling orders for delivery, not very far removed from a warehouse job, but because it involved retail goods, it paid slightly worse. He would have to drive. He ended up taking the catalogue job, because at his final interview for the warehouse, he told them up front that he would require three extra days off the week of his wedding. He and his bride were going on a short trip, he’d said, although that wasn’t entirely true. Myra and David had decided that in lieu of a honeymoon (and having lived together for four years already it was almost unseemly to spend their wedding money on a trip somewhere), they would each take a few days off work and do things in the city that they never got to do. They would go to the museum and the racetrack and splurge on a single night in a local hotel with room service. Myra got the time off without question.

(The day she handed out the invitations they’d made on the computer—a comic couple wrapped with ropes, the caption reading, “We’re tying the last knot!”—she had lots of input:
I dunno if I can come: I’m too young to die
; and
Is it BYOC? Bring Your Own Coffin?
Someone asked if they could give the eulogy. Hysterical.)

So David had to take the catalogue place. Primarily staffed by women, including the one who interviewed him, they seemed much more sympathetic to the idea of a honeymoon trip.

A few days into the countdown to the wedding, his mother showed up at his new job at lunch time. “David,” she said, “we have to talk.”

He took her to the diner around the corner from his building where he ordered a BLT and fries and she had coffee and toast.

“If you’re still set on getting married,” she said, “then it’s time to get serious about your life.” He stopped in mid-chew. What did she mean? Now?

“Yeah,” he said, his mouth full of toast and tomatoes.

She reached across the table and took his hand. She said, “You can’t work in a warehouse for the rest of your life. You’re young enough now that you can still go back to school.”

The word
school
conjured up such a conflicting set of emotions that for a moment, David couldn’t swallow. On one hand, school was safety, home after school, chocolate cake and cold milk from the fridge;
Friends
in reruns on TV until five. On the other hand, school was endless amounts of paper and reading, strange calligraphy in meaningless order.

“What are you talking about, Ma?” he finally said.

“If you agreed to go back to school, get some kind of trade, I will pay for it.” She leaned back against the cracked red vinyl of the booth, folding her arms across her chest.
My work is done.

“School?” It sounded drastic to him.

His mother leaned forward, “What are you making at the warehouse?”

“It’s on-line shipping,” he said.

“It’s a warehouse. How much are you making?”

Reluctantly, he told her. She grimaced.

“Do you know what a machinist makes?”

He shook his head and she paused. “Well, neither do I. But it’s not an hourly wage, I’d bet. I bet it’s an annual salary. An annual salary allows you to plan for expenses and to save a little money.

“How do you expect to open doors for yourself, if you refuse to turn the knob?”

Of course, with that turn of phrase, she lost him. The ends of his fingers tingled with the sensation of turning doorknobs, followed by the hollow-throat feeling of a rising scream.

“What?”

It took all of the lunch hour, but David finally agreed. He would look into going back to school. He had no idea what Myra would say. His mother’s expression was victorious. As if it was a final reward for his pliancy, she told him she’s made an appointment for him to be fitted for a tuxedo.

“One of my wedding gifts,” she winked, implying that the other was the schooling. She had him. Myra might not like the schooling idea, not right away, but she’d lately been in a tizzy over what to dress him in for the wedding.

He went the next day to be fitted, right after work. Mr. Rabbinowitz was the name of the tailor and he was a tiny little guy, with quick movements. You had to keep your wits about you, David found, because if you didn’t, you were apt to get stuck with a pin, or find him with his hand up your crotch, measuring something.

It turned out he was pretty close to a standard size. He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, but it did mean that his tux would be ready in just a couple of days.

“Pick it up Tuesday,” the little man said, very quickly; in fact, “Tuesday” was the only word David actually heard. But the beaming smile from the man indicated that not just anyone could pick up their tux on “Tuesday”; he was bestowing a gift of some sort and David felt compelled to be appropriately gracious. He thanked him profusely and asked him if there was a picture, like in a catalogue or something (he was used to catalogues now), that he could take home to show his girlfriend.

As the man was digging something out from under a long cutting table cluttered with bolts and pieces of fabric he said, “Not girlfriend for so much longer, eh? Wife, next.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, and took the proffered illustration of his tux from the man.

Wife.

Driving home he felt a kind of urgency, for the first time.

He had opened the conversation about school with the tux. He gave Myra the picture and told her that his mother had offered to pay for it. He’d expected—with all her fuss about dressing up—that she would be pleased, and maybe better.

“A tux?” she shrugged. “Buying or renting?”

“Buying,” he said.

She shrugged again. “Really? When will you ever wear it again? Her money, I guess.” But he could see her calculating in her head what else could be done with that kind of money.

David shrugged too, as though he didn’t care. He wondered about bringing up the prospect of school, and thought maybe he would be better off to just feel it out first. He said, “You know, I’m starting to really get into this marriage thing,” he said. The plan for the next bit was going to be something about
responsibility to a family,
and maybe the phrase,
getting somewhere in the world.

But Myra interrupted him: “Why doesn’t she pay for the food? Now that would help.”

“I dunno,” David said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about the future—”

“Or flowers. Or why doesn’t she split that cash and help me pay for my dress? What’s a bloody tux
cost
, anyway? It’s gotta be nearly a
grand
.” She threw her hands up into the air and then covered her face and started to cry.

David floated, paralysed, unsure as to what had happened, but fairly certain he shouldn’t bring up school. At least not right away. Maybe after the wedding. Myra was sobbing on the couch. Nerves. With his mother, it was often nerves. He put his arms around her and told her that everything was going to be all right.

It felt good to be on top for a change.

On Tuesday he left work a half hour early to go and get his tux. The women at the catalogue centre were fluttery with excitement for him.
A wedding
, they kept saying, without adding anything else, as though it were a thought all on its own. There were lots of sighs and dreamy looks.

He was glad he was taking off early.

The little bell over the door tinkled when he walked in. He thought he recognized his tux hanging on the rack, covered in plastic. But then, they all looked alike.

The door to the back was closed, voices coming through, muted and insistently cheerful. He wondered if someone was getting fitted and contemplated waiting.

Instead, he knocked on the door.

“Mr. Rabbinowitz? It’s David Hoffman,” and he pushed open the door. The minute it met with resistance, he knew exactly why; without even looking down, he knew what he would see.

He looked down anyway, and his eyes met what was becoming a familiar sight.

What he saw was the top of Mr. Rabbinowitz’s head, his bald spot a grey circle in a patch of dark hair. From inside the room a voice said,
“For lovers only, here’s Frank Sinatra’s beautiful ‘From the Bottom of my Heart.’ . . . Sing it Frank—”

“Oh fuck,” he said. “OH FUCK!”

It had been a brain aneurysm. “These things aren’t always picked up, David,” Myra told him.
It’s not your fault
, she meant. And of course it wasn’t, but who was to say?

David had gone into a kind of shock after finding Mr. Rabbinowitz. Much more so than when he found Mr. Harris or Aunt Beddy. He had closed the door and went to the phone on the counter and dialled 911.

“Mr. Rabbinowitz is dead,” he told the operator. “I found him.” He gave the address and then, in a repeat of Beddy’s terrible last day, he waited on the steps for the ambulance to come. He called Myra and she came and got him, driving him home in her car, even remembering to take his tux with them, her face white and grim. She didn’t say much.

He didn’t pay for the tux, he told her later. “I just saw it there and pulled it off the rack. Then—you know.”

“It’s all right,” she said, grim and all. “It’s all right, David.”

David spent his time on the couch. He didn’t go back to work. Someone had called them and he tried to explain why, but in the end it was just too complicated.
Well, see, I guess I’m the spectre of death. . . .

Myra had remained white and grim for a few hours, sometimes suggesting to him that it wasn’t his fault, that it was just bad luck, and he should just sleep it away. But then she would switch over to telling him to just snap out of it. Like Cher in
Moonstruck
, when she slaps Nick Cage. Myra didn’t slap him, although she looked a couple of times like she might.

He wondered if he and Myra would still get married. Whenever he thought of getting married, he remembered shoes. Myra came home from work on the Friday and saw him using a black felt-tip marker on his running shoes.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, impatiently.

“I don’t have any shoes for the tux.”

“Your mother bought you a pair. She brought them yesterday.
You tried them on.
”

“Did I? Oh,” he said. He capped the marker and put it on the coffee table.

Myra crossed her arms over her chest in a remarkable imitation of his mother. “You better snap out of this, David. We’re getting married tomorrow. We’re going to dinner with everyone in four hours. Get drunk or something, but
get over this.
”