Evenings at Five Read online

  On the seventh day after Rudy’s burial, Christina had been sitting alone on the ruined leather sofa with her gin, the spring sun pouring in at the exact spot where Rudy always had to shield his face at this time of year. She kept a sharp watch over the yahrzeit candle. It sputtered out at 7:43, and she stumbled tipsily out into the blue-green dusk, just in case Rudy’s spirit was attempting a subtle getaway to spare her the wrenching pain.

  A full-grown black bear was sitting with its back to her on the lawn. Hearing her intake of breath, it rose with magnificent insouciance and loped off into the woods with its sleek high-bottomed gait.

  And now it was November, and Christina, at first a faithful and then an increasingly immoderate observer of the ghostly cocktail hour (the 1.75-liter blue bottles with Queen Victoria’s brooding three-quarter profile were replaced weekly now, with sometimes a 750-milliliter junior size in reserve in case she should run short on the weekends), was hours away from a nice little health scare.

  Soon it would be seven months exactly from the April day when the undertakers lowered Rudy’s coffin into the grave and the mourners formed two lines and took turns shoveling earth on the plain pine box with the Star of David on top.

  In the Catskill hamlet where Rudy and Christina had settled, the artists (and their families or significant others) had their own cemetery. Odette, now resting there next to her novelist husband, had told them about the “ah-tists’ cemetery” back in 1976 and encouraged them to buy their plots right away, as space was running out. They had procrastinated, of course, and were saved only the day of Rudy’s death by a new couple from Christina’s church who made her a present of their two plots.

  “Gil has decided he definitely does not want to be buried next to his mother,” the wife had told Christina.

  Five o’clock sharp. Completely dark in November. “Punctuality is the courtesy of kings”: Rudy always quoted his father’s maxim in French and then translated it for her, as if she might not remember from time to time.

  Secure that her full glass (lime but no mint in the winter) with the ticker tape awaited her on its cocktail napkin, Christina paced herself, lighting some candles. The yahrzeit one wasn’t back from the store yet. She walked to and fro across the rugs, gazed up at the high ceiling, remembered how they had stood like awed children watching the great bluestone fireplace being laid, stone by stone, by masons who knew what they were doing. Neither of them quite believed they were causing a house they had imagined for themselves to come into existence in the real world. And the builder and all the workmen took care of them like children, pointing out the advantages of having the house face southeast instead of northeast, tactfully suggesting that a bathroom door open not directly into the kitchen but into the hallway just outside.

  “It’s splendid, but are there enough closets?” Christina’s literary agent asked when the house was being framed.

  “Oh, Lord, closets,” said Christina. “I guess we need some more.”

  Their one requirement, when the builder was making sketches, was that Rudy’s studio would be downstairs on the northeast side of the house and Christina’s study would be upstairs on the southwest side.

  “I can’t stand for anyone to overhear me composing,” Rudy explained to the builder. “Even when they say they don’t hear.”

  On some level of consciousness, Christina thought, I must have heard all those years of Rudy’s compositions forming themselves phrase by phrase, probably even note by note, but I told him the truth when I said I didn’t hear, that I was scrunched into some dark soundproof chamber behind my eyeballs, straining for flashes of images that then had to have words matched to them. And he believed me because he had caught me not listening so many times. But then, later, when I heard something of his played at a concert, I could remember hearing it come into being. Sometimes I even had a visual memory of what the day had looked like outside my study window when he was downstairs in his studio plinking and plonking toward a certain sound and then suddenly bursting into a fully realized cascade of melody. And then the scrape of the piano bench, the transfer of his body (thur-rump) into his leather desk chair, followed by alternating solos of metronome and electric eraser. I heard without knowing I was hearing all the outer sounds of a work being captured.

  She switched on the lamp, sank into the clawed leather with a sigh, crossed her ankles on the pillows, and—still not yet reaching for the frosted glass—dipped into Rudy’s 2001 At-a-Glance appointment diary, the only record of himself he kept.

  Bathroom outside kitchen

  This was the final one, with entries—doctors’ appointments, upcoming concerts of his music, dating six months beyond his death. (“How I love being the only one on the program who still has a dash after his birth date,” he always said at concerts when his music was played along with that of the classic composers.)

  The other appointment diaries, dating back to 1973, the year they had moved in together, lay tumbled beside her on the sofa. Her stash of elliptic Rudy chronicles to carry her through coming nights. In earlier years, Aspen, Geneva, Tel Aviv, all their trips together, the final one being to Stockholm, and the faculty meetings, recording sessions, rehearsals, premieres, and then more and more doctors began to fill up the pages until the final ones looked like these:

  10:00 Allis

  2:00 Dr. Donnelly

  C in NYC

  10:00 Allis

  11:30 Justine

  3:00 Drugstore

  11:00 Dr. Paolini

  C in Chicago

  11:00 Bud (shots)

  10:00 Allis

  3:30 Dr. Ladd

  C in Washington

  Cocktails Rosens NYET

  Dr. Salzman? NYET

  10:00 Allis

  C home

  Allis was the seventy-seven-year-old Norwegian nurse who came three times a week to give Rudy his Procrit injection and neck massage. She also stayed overnight when Christina was away on speaking engagements. Allis had spoiled the cat by letting him sleep with her and putting out a short personal glass of water for him on the night table so he wouldn’t get his face caught in her tall one: a practice Christina now continued. The lovely Justine, a dancer, was Rudy’s exercise therapist, although he couldn’t do much, but he always came home feeling revived because he had a little crush on her. Dr. Donnelly was Rudy’s oncologist and hematologist, Dr. Paolini was his kidney doctor, Dr. Ladd his cardiologist, Dr. Salzman his ophthalmologist. Bud was the surviving cat, now in his own seventies in cat years, and nyet (“no” in Russian) meant Rudy had canceled.

  Christina leafed through the last appointment diary. Red ink was reserved for beginning or finishing a work (“Began Job’s Muses in earnest. Finished Epitaph for an Artist. Finished Insomnia”). The only other entries inscribed in red were Rudy’s transfusions or his chemo. Bone marrow biopsies and skeletal surveys got only black or blue ink. Christina herself (“C”) had never rated Rudy’s red ink. Ah-tists could be severe when it came to priorities. The longest of all of Rudy’s red-ink entries was in the 1997 At-a-Glance, during a week of chemo treatment for his multiple myeloma.

  Positive but not exuberant

  Resigned but not depressed

  Finished piano quintet

  Did the adjectives refer to the mood of his quintet or to his state of mind that day? Now listening to the quintet more carefully than she ever had before—his most somber, but with glimmers of pure tranquillity—Christina concluded it was probably a conjunction of both.

  She sipped her drink and thought of how she had been so eager to get home before dark when Rudy only had twelve more hours left in the world. She sipped and sobbed like a child. If only she had known, she would have stayed in his room till the ICU nurses kicked her out. If only she had stayed. But she had gone home and read a novel late into the night, imagining Rudy either asleep or reading his Muriel Spark.

  Back in the kitchen for a refill—Bud had emerged from somewhere and was sitting expectantly in front of his dish—she felt a
rush of affinity with Queen Victoria as she cradled the heavy blue 1.75-liter bottle and studied the monarch’s gloomy countenance. Well, what did the queen have to smile about? Even though she continued to have his clothes laid out every evening, her beloved Albert was dead, and she was fat from all the state dinners, and what was left?

  When Christina had lived in London in her twenties, she had gotten to know the servants’ chef at Buckingham Palace. He’d taken her on a grand tour of the servants’ wing and introduced her to his colleagues. One of them had told her that Queen Victoria’s nightly bottle of Black Label had continued to be delivered to her quarters until 1956 because no one had thought to rescind the order.

  The phone rang in Rudy’s studio. After four rings, his voice, which a conservatory student once described as “an octave below God’s,” came on.

  “This is Rudolf Geber. Please leave your name and number, and your call will be returned as soon as pos-sible.”

  “As soon as pos-sible” took a playful leap up the scale, ornamenting the concept of what was possible with typical Rudy-ish melisma.

  Christina slugged back her drink, some of it spilling down her chin.

  “Damn it, Rudy, you could probably materialize in that chair if you wanted to. So could you, God. I don’t know why I bother with either of you. Damn you both, my heart is broken.”

  Christina’s bedroom phone, with clock, cat’s short glass, and her tall glass

  Chapter Four

  At some point she lurched up to bed, Bud weaving in front of her as they climbed the stairs.

  “Don’t cross over like that,” Christina slurred irritably. “That’s the way cat owners break legs.”

  The night was a horror. Dry mouth. Racing heart. Nausea. Dizziness. Ugly faces leered on the insides of her eyelids. Coming attractions of her future, perhaps near future, played themselves out. Who was that old novelist who fell in the toilet when she got drunk, and her faithless young protégé spared no details in his popular memoir after her death? Christina thrashed around in what was left of the king-size space, Rudy’s former half being littered with books and papers, until Bud got disgusted with rearranging himself and went downstairs in a huff. Each time she dozed off she was awakened by ringing in her ears or stabbing in her eyeballs or after-images of flashing lights, as if someone had been taking nonstop pictures of her while she slept. For the tenth or twelfth time that night she checked the digital green numbers on the bedside clock.

  Only this time there were no numbers, just a watery green blob. She sat up and turned on the lamp. Everything in the room, even the precise English landscape paintings on the wall three feet away, swam behind a thick gluey scrim. Faint with fright, she made her way to the bathroom, holding on to things. The face in the mirror was so indistinct it didn’t have eyes or a mouth. She sat on the toilet, head in hands, and planned the rest of her life. Learning Braille. Having to depend on others for rides, having to pretend to be a good sport. (“The worst thing, for Christina. Why couldn’t it have been her hearing? But we can’t choose those things, can we? And she’s taking it so well.”)

  She could not bring herself to call 911, though she had done it five times for Rudy. The rescue squad certainly knew their way to the house, and she knew the drill: oxygen first, then the EKG, the questions, the radioing in to the ER, Rudy’s deep voice behind the mask barking orders for Christina to pack his medicines from the kitchen shelf in the Ziploc bag that would accompany him to the hospital, calling them out with his magnificently rolled r’s: “Toprol, Procardia, Zestril . . . “ She knew most of the squad members by name and where they worked in town.

  On Rudy’s final trip, six of them transported him out the door sitting bolt upright on the stretcher. “You look like Pharaoh being carried forth on his litter,” Christina said, making him smile behind his mask as they bore his noble bulk to the waiting ambulance, its red lights already flashing. He told them he was feeling a little better already from the oxygen.

  Christina’s bed

  But now, crouched on the toilet, Christina knew she would not be rousing the jeweler and the IBM couple and the retired stockbroker from their beds or be summoning the young policemen from their night patrols. If the best of her life was over, she preferred to postpone facing it for a few more hours. She did go so far as to drag herself over to the sink and swallow an aspirin, remembering the TV commercial of the man collapsing on the tennis court and his son whipping out a Bayer. Then she felt her way back to bed and lay down and closed her eyes and breathed in and out, using the ujj¯ay¯ž breath her yoga instructor had taught her.

  By morning her sight was normal, and she went to church. Though the Cope had palled since Rudy’s death, she continued to go because church was something she had grown up knowing how to do. And she looked forward to Father Paul’s extemporaneous sermons. Startling things sometimes came out of his mouth as he stood in the aisle in his alb and chasuble with no notes: “we just have to accept our inseparability from God” had been a recent one. Also the parishioners at St. Aidan’s comprised the bulk of her social life. Important human dramas were in progress there: the retired sea captain who was losing his memory, the little boy fighting cancer, the lovely young teacher who had been proposed to by two men on the same day. Also, Christina liked to dress up, and today was her Sunday to read the epistle.

  After church, the Mallows, the couple who had given Christina and Rudy their plots at the artists’ cemetery, invited her to brunch and were so solicitous of her that she burst into tears and confided she might be going blind. They insisted on driving her to the emergency room. Gilbert told her about the time last summer he had been reading the paper and all of a sudden there were little colored explosions on the page. He drove himself to a specialist, who steadied his head in an apparatus and while telling him the plot of a novel flashed something at Gilbert’s eye. “There, all fixed,” the specialist said, having lasered together a retinal fissure. If necessary, the Mallows would be glad to drive Christina to the same specialist, even make the appointment for her. They remained with her in the ER all afternoon while she underwent tests. A CT scan ruled out a brain tumor. The doctor on duty guessed she had suffered a migraine and wrote her a prescription in case she felt another coming on. By then it was time for dinner and the Mallows took her to a fish restaurant by the river. Christina thanked them profusely all the way home.

  “Oh, it was fun hanging out with you,” Eve Mallow said.

  Gilbert added, “When Rudy was alive, you two barricaded yourselves, which was understandable, with all his health problems. You were both formidable, though you seemed the more accessible of the two.”

  The idea of sharing Rudy’s formidability did not displease Christina at all.

  Rudy’s medicine shelf

  Chapter Five

  Christina’s primary-care physician, Dr. Gray, sent her immediately to an eye doctor, young and thorough, who ruled out detached retinas and glaucoma but booked her for another kind of CT scan, because her left eye protruded and he wanted to check out whether anything was behind it. Meanwhile, Dr. Gray said, her blood pressure was way too high; this wasn’t an easy time for her, he knew. What had she been doing in the evenings, how had she been coping? He had a way of looking at her as though he already knew, but he was a gent and let her confess in her own style. Because Christina liked her assignments in writing, he gave her a prescription slip on which he had printed in large block letters STOP ALL ALCOHOL, and told her to report back in three weeks.

  “And I wouldn’t worry too much about the protruding eye. A lot of people have one eye that sticks out more than the other, but he’s got to check it out. However, if you can’t get your pressure down, we’ll have to do something.”

  Back home, Christina took down the New Yorker cartoon that had enjoyed pride of place on their kitchen bulletin board long enough to have gone brown and curly at the edges. A couple sitting side by side on the sofa, drinks in hand. The man’s free arm encircles the woman, who has k
icked off her shoes and leans into his embrace. “I love these quiet evenings at home battling alcoholism,” the woman is saying.

  Christina tacked up Dr. Gray’s block-lettered injunction in the vacant spot. She made herself a cranberry cider with crushed ice and seltzer and a carefully sliced circle of lime. Needing a ritual to signify her intention, she lugged the heavy blue gin bottle from its freezer home and poured its contents down the drain.

  “Farewell, Your Majesty. It’s time you completed your Scotland mourning and returned to your duties in London.

  “Arrivederci, John Paul.”

  But she would not throw away the cartoon.

  Now to get through the rest of the evening. She cleared out Rudy’s medicines from the kitchen shelf to the left of the sink: the Lasix, the Toprol, the Procardia, the Zestril, the pain killers, the Nitrostat, chronicling in her memory what had led to what in the fifteen-year-long saga of Rudy’s organs betraying one another and breaking down. The costly Procrit, still lying flat in the refrigerator, for when his kidneys, protesting the multiple myeloma, started to fail. She retraced the insidious transition, beginning in his sixties, when he went from being the one who dashed ahead up mountain trails and paused indulgently when she needed to stop and catch her breath until that sad afternoon when they were doing their back-and-forth walk across the flat causeway over the reservoir and he urged her to go on and finish alone: “I’ll wait right here for your return.” Off she went, while he sat on the causeway railing behind, keeping her in his sight. She walked quickly so she could reach the end faster and turn around and have him in her sight to walk back to again.

  Dr. Gray had used the expression “blotto,” which left less room to wriggle out of than the euphemisms she had grown up with. The lady who had spent the night under the piano at the country club in a pool of vomit had been tipsy. Dear Judge So-and-So, bless his heart, had been three sheets in the wind again.