Chapter 5
5
The next morning, as I sleep in the chair next to you, you reach for my hand. Abe? you say. For a moment, I forget the last year. For a moment, we are just waking up together. Life to live. Errands to run. And yet, here we are. Medicine to give. Bedpan. Juice. Isn’t it something, I think, how sleep can betray even reason, even time.
And yet, your eyebrows and lashes—who knows how they’ve clung on?—haven’t changed since you were twenty-three. It isn’t poetic to say horselike, and yet.
Today you are wearing pink-and-white-striped pajamas, a bib on your chest. I will not remember you this way. As if it is a choice. As if you can avoid closing your eyes and fending off a cliff or a body if that is what appears, if that is fate.
Before Bernie, the nurse, comes, you say you want us to do more remembering. You once said that the nurses break a certain seal on the house.
You remember introducing me to Bea, whom you’d met at Cooper Union, who started with the bottlecap forms way back then. You remember meeting my friends from camp, from Wharton: Lee Cohen, Jacob Rosen, Matthew Goldman. A doctor, an accountant, and a lawyer walk into a bar. Every one of them, you said, so adult, and already in the suburbs. Didn’t that seem a waste to me? It did and also it did not.
Is it any surprise that they loved you more than me? Is it any surprise that they told me not to lose you, whatever I did?
I remember how many weddings we went to, how you slipped your foot into a high heel, dabbed lipstick on your bottom lip, braided your hair down the side. How fully formed you were even then. Like concrete, cast. I remember how you sucked on lemon wedges, touched everyone on the arm, danced with people much older than us. I remember how you made them feel younger but it wasn’t just that. It was as if you gave everyone rhythm. Even me. I remember from across a crowded room, you called my name: as if you threw it into the air for me to catch. I remember how you always reminded me to bring a notebook. And you always brought a pen in your pocketbook for us to share.
In those years, we told each other everything, except whenever I talked about work, you covered your ears. Abe, it is time, you said. If you really want to be an artist, you have to act like one.
It was our fundamental rift, wasn’t it? Where we came from, and therefore where we felt compelled to end up. I know, I’d tell you. And I did. Still, I had responsibilities that you did not, though I didn’t know how to put them to good use. You, on the other hand, used your grief like momentum. It carried you, compelled you.
I just asked you to wait. I begged you.
You remember it was 1970 when I told you I’d bought a brownstone near the Park. I’d borrowed money from my parents. I remember not telling you that—the part about my parents. I gave you a set of keys. We stood in the foyer, sipping champagne. You remember herringbone floors, stained-glass windows, the “maid’s quarters” with beautiful north light. I told you it could be your studio, if you wanted.
You remember fighting it at first—it wasn’t money from art—but taking the keys anyway. You had been fired from another restaurant job. You were painting pearls and also finches. I remember how you made beaks so small and quick they were like heartbeats. You remember feeling, for the first time, that they might be something. They might be really something. You just needed more time in your head. Restaurants were demanding, demeaning places. I bought you an easel, a terra-cotta planter for your brushes.
In the meantime, I signed up for a class.
You remember trying to make a deal with me: you’d move in when I quit, when I really, really quit. Move in now, I said, and if things were the same in eighteen months…
It didn’t feel like lying. It felt like hope that things might sort.
I remember our love making me feel lighter. You remember it making you feel more solid. You suggest a metaphor here. Feet in the sand as the tide goes out? Yes, you say. I write it down but there is no rhyme or reason to this work.
You get tired. Today you are happy. It was a good day. You close your eyes. It does not feel like surrender. It isn’t mine to give up.
Remember, Jane, that time we rented a tandem bicycle? I ask just to keep you with me. It was years later. Remember how fast we went down that hill in the Park near Ninety-Third? You nod, but so often, you just do.
I’m not really asking you these things. You couldn’t answer anyhow. But it’s habit: the expectation of your response. Like catching an apple that you’ve batted my way. The satisfaction of that. The sacred code.
Sometimes, when your eyes are closed, I cover my face. Sometimes, my greatest accomplishment in a day is to not wish desperately to go first.