Lavender （2016） #2
Saturday, April 30, 2016, Janus—“Take what you want,” I told Jackson, not caring.
“I’ve sold the house.” In the end, he took nothing but clothes; his comic books; his dozen or so oversized “coffee table” books with their glossy photos and large font text, which I am sure will be a splendid addition to Kitt’s half-dozen or so obscure feminist poetry collections; the collection of elegant timepieces—“They’re too beautiful, too expensive to be called watches,” he’d insisted—I’d created for him over nearly forty years; and his collection of stopped clocks.
I wondered if he had one marking the precise time he’d decided to break my heart.
Kitt came with him, I suppose to keep him from jumping into bed with me, to keep him from admitting she had been a mistake, an aberration.
Jackson disappeared into our bedroom, leaving Kitt and I to stand in awkward silence, avoiding eye contact. She spoke first. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you?”
“Do what?” I asked, hating her—this horsewoman of my personal apocalypse—more than I’d ever hated anyone; more than I hated my grandfather, more than I hated Reverend Jack.
“Pry Jackson from your grip.” When I said nothing, she continued in that taunting way of hers, “It was surprisingly easy. I know you used you laugh at me.”
“Well, your crush on Jackson seemed preposterous at the time.”
Watching me, seeming to take my measure, she asked, “Know where you fucked up? You were always the hero—his hero. It never occurred to you that just once Jackson wanted to be your hero.”
No one ever understands he is the one who saved me.
She continued, “Every man wants to feel like a hero, no matter how big a fuck-up he is.”
Jackson reappeared. “I’m done. The movers will be here tomorrow?”
I nodded. “The estate agents will be here to prep for the sale on Friday the thirteenth. The sale is on the fourteenth and the fifteenth. Whatever doesn’t sell, they will arrange to donate to Habitat for Humanity.
The movers are scheduled for the seventeenth.
Settlement is Thursday the nineteenth at ten. ”
“I’ll be there—”
“We’ll be there,” Kitt said, taking his arm.
“No, not you,” I said. “When Jackson and I started our life together, it was just the two of us. When we end it, I’d like it just to be the two of us.”
Jackson shot her a look, silencing her. “I’ll be there.”
“Come on, Jack,” Kitt said, tugging on his arm. I waited for Jackson’s decades old retort: “My name is Jackson, not Jack. Jack is my father.” When he didn’t say anything, I wondered if I’d known Jackson at all.
Saturday, May 7, 2016, Janus—“Hello, Sweetie,” Perils said, hugging me.
“I’m so sorry. I brought chocolate,” she added, handing me a beribboned box with the logo of her family’s restaurant emblazoned across the top.
Perils is the CEO of her family’s restaurant, and under her leadership, they have opened chocolate outposts in a few cities on the East Coast and are rumored to be opening other outposts in California.
“Are there any pralines in there?” MJ asked, edging around Perils to kiss my cheek.
MJ had pried Perils from the exurbs to come help me pack, though I suspected they were here more to check on me and lift my spirits.
“It doesn’t look like he took much,” MJ said, looking around.
“He only took some clothes, his three books, his clocks, and his watches,” I told her.
Perils rocked back on her feet as if I’d dealt her a blow. “I told you about buying him watches! I told you time and again. Never buy a man a watch or shoes. If you do, you’ll ‘watch’ him walk away—”
“What?” MJ interrupted. “Where’d you hear that? I’ve never heard such a ridiculous—”
“Terpe told me.”
“Who’s Terpe?” MJ asked like a detective stumbling on a clue, or more accurately, a news reporter sniffing out a false story.
Perils sighed dramatically. “I’ve told you before. Terpe was my mother’s housekeeper when I was a kid, and she helped raise us. She was from the Virgin Islands and the smartest woman I’ve ever met.”
Terpe’s even wiser grandmother, a gifted obeah woman, had passed this dire warning on to her when she was eleven or twelve, Perils confided.
MJ smiled indulgently at Perils, which Perils didn’t appreciate.
“Go ahead, laugh. My friend Mona didn’t believe me either and she kept buying her husband shoes, even though I kept telling her not to. ”
“What happened?” I asked, getting sucked in despite myself.
“He died,” Perils said, a hint of triumph in her voice.
What did you give to your husband? I wanted to ask Perils, she who had married and divorced the same man—a professional football player—twice. Instead, I said, “For forty years, I ate overcooked fish.”
“What?” MJ and Perils asked in unison.
“Jackson always overcooked fish. He was afraid he’d get food poisoning unless the fish was ashes and cinder,” I said.
“I know. That’s why I never came over for dinner on Fridays,” MJ said.
“For forty years, I ate overcooked fish,” I repeated. “For us to end? Like this?”
It wasn’t until I felt their arms around me that I realized I was crying.
“You know,” MJ said when I’d stopped crying, “I’ve never wanted what you and Jackson had, as perfect as it was.”
I knew she didn’t. MJ is fiercely independent and essentially a loner. As she moved into her thirties and people would encourage her to find a husband, she would snap, “The only men I need permanently in my life are Oren and my father, possibly in that order.”
“But,” she continued, “you two breaking up has cut me to the bone.”
“I know,” Perils said, opening the box of chocolates. “It’s as if the world started spinning in the opposite direction. It just doesn’t seem possible.”
“So, Jackson is straight now?” MJ asked.
“I don’t think so,” I answered slowly. “That’s not how it works. Orientation isn’t a sex act or lust. It’s a pattern of attraction. And as far as I know, Jackson has never been attracted to women—any more than I.”
“Then what happened? What is this?”
“I don’t know. Jackson doesn’t seem to know either—or at least, he can’t explain it to me when I ask him to. He’s never been good at communicating. It’s the one thing that I found frustrating about him.”
“I don’t think Jackson is a bad communicator,” MJ said tentatively.
“You and I are excellent communicators, but then it’s what we do for a living, isn’t it?
Also, you are far more articulate than Jackson.
Back in school, whenever someone confused the two of you, DAX would say, ‘Jackson is the pretty one. Oren is the articulate one.’”
Full of chocolate and having drunk the two bottles of Brachetto d’Acqui I’d found in the cold pantry, we set about the business of packing in earnest. We started in the kitchen, packing the cookbooks and French copper pots and the Foley mill and the citrus knife and the poultry shears and the lemon zesters and the steak knives.
Moving to the living room, as I handed them CDs, I thumbed through our collection, the soundtrack of our lives, the thrumming of our contentment: Michael Jackson; Prince; The Village People; Donna Summer; Grace Jones; Sugar Hill Gang; Aretha…
I’d already packed up the hundreds of books in the library.
So next, we tackled the last of the dinner services: vintage Rosenthal China we’d bought at auction; maximalist Emma Shipley porcelain; sterling flatware we’d discovered at an estate sale.
So many dishes, we’d converted the breezeway between the garage and the kitchen into a butler’s pantry to house it all.
I emptied the art deco sideboards, reverently packing the napkin rings, tortoiseshell and alabaster and Bakelite, wondering at the life that had required such things.
We’d hosted so many dinner parties, starting in college.
I remember at the beginning, in our first apartment, MJ and Sue P and I cooking all day.
And Perils would bring dessert and wine.
Others would bring six-packs of beer. Once, someone brought an enormous watermelon cut in half and filled with sangria.
To participate, you only had to bring a cup, a plate, and a point of view—the entire party revolved around conversation.
Word spread, and more and more people showed up each month: a friend would bring a friend, and that friend would bring a friend the next month.
The party grew, spilling into the hallway of our building and eventually into the courtyard outside our apartment; food and drink and conversation were passed through the open windows.
“Earth to Oren. Calling Oren.”
“Huh,” I said, coming back myself.
“You were so far away. Where were you?” MJ asked with concern.
Lost in yesterday, and disgruntled to find myself in today, I wanted to answer but did not, shrugging instead and reaching for another packing crate.
Saturday, May 14, 2016, Janus—The first day of the estate sale was today.
I was there against the advice of the estate agent running the sale.
I assured her I’d be fine, wouldn’t disclose who I was or change my mind about anything that was for sale.
She relented. It was strange to see our house full of strangers—strangers sitting in our chairs to try them out, strangers touching our stuff, judging it, discounting its worth.
One woman fondling a Basalt Ware bowl we’d found on an anniversary trip to Newport, asked who would give this up?
“Isn’t it beautiful? And it’s in perfect condition,” one of the sales agents said brightly.
The woman looked at her, eyes wide. “Did the owners die?”
The estate agent looked around and, lowering her voice, confided, “Worse. They’re getting divorced.”
I left then. Sitting in the car at the end of our driveway, I wished Jackson had had the decency to die. My heart would have still been broken, but at least I wouldn’t have been humiliated.