She turned her face to him again, she was happy, he could see this. “I’m just so glad you’re in my life,” she said. And he said, “Me too.”
He took a drag of his cigarette and said, “Lucy, I’m so sorry about seeing you in the store and—” But she was already shaking her head, and she touched his arm lightly and said, “Bob, please don’t give it another thought, I was just being a jerk.”
They sat there looking at the river. There was enough of a wind to make small whitecaps appear in the middle of it, and also the wind blew the smoke over Bob as he sat. But he did not get up, as he would have in the past.
Lucy was restored to him.
On the shifting sand they stood on.
“Thanks, Lucy,” he said, as he put the cigarette butt back into the pack.
“Of course,” she said.
Book Four
...
1
Jim Burgess squinted against the sun slanting sharply across the street and against the buildings on the block where he lived. It was a Saturday afternoon at the end of April, and the tulips on his block were in full bloom. Magnolia trees had earlier opened their blossoms to the world; in some cases, their petals were already falling off. The neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn was at full throttle: Children were on the sidewalk next to worried parents as they went off to a birthday party, or non-worried parents whose confidence was seen in their steps, or people just taking the hands of their children as they crossed the street. One young man—he seemed young to Jim, everyone seemed young to Jim—said to his two daughters, “Okay, let’s think what to get Mommy for her birthday,” and both girls jumped and clapped their hands and said, “Oh, let’s get her—” And Jim walked past them, thinking, God, they make me want to throw up.
He had left the house without his sunglasses.
What was he to do?
—
Helen. Helen. Helen. Helen. Helen. Helen.
This is what his mind did so often, and what it was doing now.
—
Oh Jim Burgess! What are we to do with you?
*
After Helen died—we are talking about the moment she stopped breathing and then when her body was taken from the house—after this transpired, what happened to Jim was this: He was silently catapulted into an entirely new country, one he had never known existed, and it was a country of quietness and solitariness in a way that he could not—quite seriously—believe. A terrible silence seemed to surround him, he could not feel himself fully present in the world, even as he dealt with Helen’s friends and with the occasional man who said, Let’s have lunch—throughout this, Jim understood that he had been exiled to a place that was, before, unimaginable to him. And yet it was now where he lived.
A woman friend of Helen’s gave him a book about a man, some minister, who had lost his wife, the book took place in the 1950s. Jim did not read it. But one night, out of exhaustion, he opened it and read the lines “Because his wife had died in summer, he waited for winter to come. And when it came, he saw that it made no difference.”
Jim thought: How did the writer know this? And he understood then that this was a private club, and a quiet one, and no stranger passing him on the street would know that he was a member, just as he would not know if they were a member. He wanted to stop people he saw, older people especially who were walking alone, he wanted to say— Did your spouse die? Now that Helen was gone, he was a panicked and petrified man.
*
And so Jim flew to Maine. It felt like the only place where he could have the tiniest sense of respite. He stayed with his sister in Shirley Falls. Helen had hated Susan, had hated the small house and the orange curtains that had been hanging in the kitchen windows for years. But now Jim felt the most minuscule bit of comfort in being here. He could have stayed at the hotel by the river, but he did not; he would test it out at his sister’s, and so he stayed in Zach’s room—Susan’s son had moved out years ago. He found it worked. As well as anything could work these days.
*
But if Jim had found the tiniest sense of refuge in the state of Maine, Pam Carlson, back in New York City, was having a time of it. To start with, we should note that Pam had thought she was doing pretty well. She had been sober for three months and had been acknowledged at her AA group for this; she had felt a real sense of pride, and also—relief. She could do this!
And then a few things happened: The first thing that happened was that Lydia Robbins stopped by Pam’s apartment on a Thursday afternoon. In the area of New York City in which Pam lived, no one just stops by. People call, or they meet somewhere, but when Pam’s buzzer buzzed and the doorman said, “Lydia Robbins to see you,” Pam felt so surprised (and mixed up) that she said, “Oh, send her up.”
Up came Lydia Robbins and in she walked, her glossy hair had grown longer, and she said “Pammy!” and gave her a hug, and then sat herself down on the pale green couch in the living room. She looked around and said, “I’ve always liked this place.” Then she said, conspiratorially, “You know, Itsie said one time that she thinks it looks like cheap Long Island in here, but I don’t agree. I love it.” And Lydia looked around at the pale green walls and the glass table in the corner while Pam tried to absorb this. Itsie McCullough had said that? And Lydia was telling her that Itsie had said that? “We all really miss you,” Lydia said now. Pam was very, very nervous, waiting, as she later told Bob, for the other shoe to drop, but it never did. Lydia chatted on: about different parties she had gone to, how she felt so comfortable in the Hamptons these days, it was surprising to her that she felt more comfortable there than in the city, and then she finally got up and kissed Pam on the cheek (which made Pam crazy, because Pam was still a germophobe) and then she left.
So, what was that all about?
The only thing Pam could think was that Lydia had come to see if Pam knew anything about her goings-on with Ted. And, while she was at it, to give her a jab about the apartment. It left a terrible taste in Pam’s mouth. She was furious with herself for letting the woman in, and then talking to her as though they were still friends. Although Pam had been slightly cooler to Lydia than she would have been months ago, she was not sure that Lydia had even noticed. Anyway, it was unsavory, the whole visit, and Pam did not go to her meeting that night. Why not? Sometimes she did not go on Thursdays, and that night she did not go.
On Friday she was to have met Daphne, a new friend from her AA group. Pam loved Daphne, she was a smoker and a little crazy and laughed a great deal, and she was about ten years younger than Pam, and Pam could tell her anything, like about Eric wearing women’s clothes, and Daphne didn’t care. Her own daughter had married a man in prison (!) and brought no end of distress to Daphne, which Daphne shared with laughs, and also with tears popping from her eyes. But this very daughter had called Daphne that morning and said she needed her, and so Daphne, with reluctance, went to spend the day in New Jersey with her. This left Pam alone. She went to a museum, and she felt lonely in it, because she thought: I am a woman alone in a museum in New York.
Who cared?
Well, Pam did.
And then Saturday night she went to her meeting, although not as many people attended on Saturday nights, and then on Sunday—Sunday descended with a quietness that Pam had long ago learned to distrust. It was awful. By one o’clock in the afternoon she had eaten two candy bars, and she knew she was in trouble. She should have called her sponsor, a lovely woman—a retired lawyer—who had been sober for thirty years. But Pam did not call her.
Outside, the day was glorious, sunny, and not too hot or too cold. The weather seemed to mock her. Pam walked through her apartment, and the quiet was dreadful. She gazed into her sons’ rooms, the trophies they had won, Eric from his debate team in high school, Paul from his lacrosse team, and she closed their doors. Then she went into her bedroom, a big square room painted white, and she thought now that it had little warmth to it, and she also thought about how Itsie McCullough had said the apartment looked “like cheap Long Island.” Pam thought, What the fuck. She went back down to the living room and sat on the sofa, and she thought, Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.
And she got her bag, found her keys, and walked to the liquor store in the bright sunshine, passing by people she barely saw. She bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of vodka. When she returned to her apartment, she drank the bottle of wine within half an hour and then took some gulps from the vodka bottle and then she fell asleep on the couch. When she woke up, she saw that she had urinated on the pale green couch. “Oh fuck,” she whispered to herself. “Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
In the shower she almost fell, and that scared her beyond belief, and so she made her way to her king-size bed, and she looked at the ceiling, which was spinning, and she thought: I should die now.
The next morning, she called her sponsor.
And then she called Bob.
—
