Evenings at Five Read online

  The other word lately ascribed to her was more flattering to ponder: Gilbert Mallow’s calling her and Rudy “formidable.”

  Christina recalled the occasion last winter when the Mallows met Rudy. The local caterer, whom Rudy and Christina liked, was giving a small dinner party for his favorite customers. By then, Rudy was inking nyet all over his At-a-Glance diary, often as late as on the day of the appointment. Wasting time had become anathema to him. The prospect of being trapped in a boring gathering now triggered anxieties hitherto saved for being iced in on their hill or out of reach of 911. There was no bad weather forecast on the day of the party, but that morning Christina took the caterer’s explicit directions and made a dry run to his house so Rudy would not be worrying all day that they might get lost after dark.

  Rudy’s desk and watch

  As always, they showed up punctually (“Ponctualité est . . .”), which meant they were the first to arrive. Rudy made his bows to the host, accepted a glass of champagne, and staked out a firm chair with an upright back. Christina sat next to him. The other guests trickled in, among them the Mallows. Impressive hors d’oeuvres were passed in timely succession, champagne glasses almost too promptly refilled. A woman cornered Eve Mallow, recognizing her from the food co-op, and the two got into a conversation about the unusually large Brussels sprouts that year. Rudy smiled sourly at Christina and rolled his eyes. A few moments later he shot her a malevolent look, as if it were all her fault they were here, and rested his head against the chair back as if preparing to snooze.

  “Please, please behave,” Christina murmured, “I beg you.” Gilbert Mallow, the only person sipping water in a champagne glass, was watching them with fascination.

  “And their cabbages are also outstanding,” Eve Mallow had to say just then.

  Rudy sat bolt upright, and Christina felt herself lose control of his tight leash.

  “An outstanding cabbage,” said Rudy, pretending to address Christina alone, though he knew perfectly well that his basso profundo voice could silence a room, “would be a welcome addition to this gathering.”

  She had hated him fervently at that moment, so why was she now hooting with laughter until tears ran down her cheeks? The full force of his presence was often too much for her, especially when he was unleashing himself on his surroundings with that careless arrogance. But now the absence of that force she could never quite modify or control had left an excavation in her life that cried out to be filled with his most awful moments.

  “It would be better to take a pill,” Dr. Gray had said, “than to get blotto every evening. Better for your sleep patterns.” He had given her a prescription for Ambien. “Start with half a pill and if that doesn’t work, take the other half.”

  Christina abstained brilliantly for the three weeks until her next appointment. She had always responded well to a definite assignment. She took one or two of the Ambiens, then found herself falling asleep without them. When she went back to Dr. Gray, her blood pressure was normal and the CT scan results had come back negative and she had even lost four pounds.

  But Dr. Gray looked sad and she told him so.

  “I’m sad for you,” he said. “I know some of what you must be feeling. My mother died ten years ago and I still miss her terribly. My father has never gotten over losing her. Tell me something: do you believe in an afterlife, that Rudy is up in heaven?”

  “I did once, but I don’t now,” Christina admitted. “How about you?”

  “I believe my mother’s molecules are still part of the earth, and I know she lives on in me; she’s with me every time I think of her,” said Dr. Gray.

  “I think of Rudy a lot,” Christina said. “It sounds awful, but I pay more consistent attention to him now than I did when I had him right in front of me. I can hear exactly what he would say about so many things, the exact words and phrases and intonations. I must have absorbed a great deal of him in our years together.”

  Dr. Gray was watching her closely. “Look, Christina. Do you think you’re going to make it through this?”

  Christina considered a moment and replied honestly, “Yes, I think I am.”

  “We may never know what that blurred-vision episode was,” Dr. Gray told her. “It could have been extreme hypertension. Or you may have passed a clot. Do you miss the alcohol?”

  “Not desperately. I love the clarity, and I sleep better. But I’ll probably have a glass of wine with friends over the holidays.”

  “Enjoy a glass with friends, but if I were you, I’d be very careful when you’re at home alone” was Dr. Gray’s parting advice.

  Ralph the knife again

  Chapter Six

  Alcoholics Anonymous met at St. Aidan’s on Tuesdays and Saturdays at five. Christina had often eavesdropped on them while weeding the church’s perennial garden. If Rudy went along with her, he sat on a nearby bench, brooding fondly over her crouching form. Roars of applause erupted frequently from the open windows of the church hall. There was a certain exhibitionism about the proceedings, she and Rudy had agreed.

  “The Pope will have left a message on the machine,” Rudy would rumble complacently as they were driving home, about the same time that the AA group was having its coffee break, crushing out their cigarette butts in the newly weeded garden and hugging one another and tossing their Styrofoam cups and candy bar wrappers into the sand-filled clay urn the gardening committee had provided for their cigarette butts. Recently some abstainer had been taking out his rage on the folding metal chairs, bending them the wrong way till they broke, until Father Paul warned the group that if it didn’t stop, they would have to meet elsewhere, as he was running out of chairs.

  “I would rather die,” Christina told Gilbert Mallow, who had stopped by to offer support at her newly abstemious cocktail hour while Eve was at the chiropractor’s, “than stand up and give an accounting of myself to those people who stub their butts out in the church garden and abuse our poor chairs.”

  “There are more congenial groups,” Gil told her, sipping his herbal tea. “Or you may have the strength to go it alone. The one thing you cannot do, Christina, is make an exception—just that one little drinky-poo to get you through a party, the polite toast on someone’s birthday. It’s all over. Forever. Poison. You have to tell yourself that.” In his eighteen years of sobriety, Gil had sampled many AA groups, from urbane Columbia professors to riverboat pilots (his favorite group), but now he walked. He walked in the country, but preferred the stimulation of populated streets. He and Eve kept a place in Manhattan, and sometimes he drove down to the city just to walk. “The rewards will be worth it, Christina. You’ll find yourself getting words back. Whole rooms in your memory will open up.” Gil had been, by his own admission, “a fall-down drunk,” starting at age sixteen in prep school. Then when he was forty-nine he woke up one morning and couldn’t tie his shoes. His first wife tied them for him and called a taxi, as he had also forgotten how to drive. When he got to his newspaper job, he couldn’t connect the necessary mental circuits for laying out the pages. His paper had good benefits and he went off for six weeks to a renowned drying-out establishment and hadn’t touched a drop since. Still, Christina resented being told she could never have another drop.

  Gil brought photographs of his late mother’s sculptures; he was preparing a major retrospective at a Soho gallery. Christina was very interested in Gertrude von Kohler Spezzi since she was going to be buried next to her in the artists’ cemetery.

  “It’s hard to get the feel of my mother’s work in these eight by tens,” Gil said, lingering over each photograph. He sat next to Christina on the sofa, the hefty spiral portfolio resting on the coffee table with his cup of herbal tea and her cider and crushed ice with seltzer and lemon. At sixty-seven, he had smooth, childlike hands with almond-shaped nails gleaming with clear polish. The Italian stepfather, his favorite of Gertrude’s husbands, had taught him the importance of manicures. Gil with his high sloping forehead, raisin-brown eyes, and neatly trimme
d beard, who wore buttoned-up dark shirts and light-colored silk jackets, could have passed for a Mafia don himself, although his biological father had been an Anglican curate Gertrude had kept company with while studying stone reliefs in Romanesque churches in Sussex. “What is that funny-shaped vegetable on the altar?” Gertrude had asked Gil’s father at his church’s Harvest Festival. The curate, whose name Gertrude refused to share with her son, had replied, “It’s a mallow,” and so, back in Munich, when little swaddled Gil was presented to his mother in the lying-in hospital, Gertrude said he looked exactly like that funny mallow thing on the altar and put it down as his surname on the birth certificate. At this point, Gil’s audience would express outrage or disbelief, and Gil would reward them with a sweet smile and say, “Wait, it gets worse.”

  Only, when Christina first heard the story, Rudy, seated directly across the long table from Gilbert Mallow at the caterer’s dinner, had almost short-circuited things by rumbling, “Mallow? Isn’t mallow a flower?”

  Rudy’s phone and electric keyboard

  “That’s exactly what I meant when I said it gets worse,” Gil had adroitly countered, rescuing his story by making it seem as though Rudy had supplied him with the perfect transition. “It wasn’t until years later, after my Jungian analyst told me I should try to relate to my surname in a symbolic way since my mother refused to divulge the identity of my father. When I couldn’t find a mallow in any of the vegetable books, I finally confronted my mother. She was in her eighties by then and mad as hell because she had shrunk four inches and her stone figures loomed over her. She laughed when I told her about my research and then she said, ‘Come to think of it, Bertie, he might have said marrow, a vegetable marrow, that’s what the English call an overgrown zucchini. Also, as I recall, the curate had trouble pronouncing his r’s. Marrow might well have come out of his mouth as “mawwow,” and I thought I heard mallow. I wasn’t completely bilingual in those days, you see.’ “

  “That Gilbert Mallow, or Marrow, was quite entertaining,” Rudy pronounced as Christina drove them home from the caterer’s dinner, which, due to the seating arrangements, had not been a disaster after all. Thanks to the Mallows, Rudy, himself like a rotund but breakable sculpture strapped upright into his seat for safe transport, was completely satisfied with the evening. “She’s pretty, no fool, either, despite the outstanding cabbages. Of course, she’s southern. You southerners consider it a point of honor to be able to discourse gracefully on everything from cockroaches to cabbages. Quite a legume-y evening, wasn’t it? What a gorgon Gilbert’s mother was. I’ve known women like that. There’s only one way to treat them: laugh at them and walk away.”

  “Unless they’re your mother,” said Christina.

  “True. But they supply prime-rib material for their children to dine out on.”

  While Gil was making her a second cranberry cider and seltzer, Christina leafed ahead in the thick portfolio of Gertrude von Kohler Spezzi’s life-size sculptures of women, if you could call them that. At the worshipful pace Gil was taking, they would never make it through the portfolio. If the figures were this disquieting flattened on eight-by-ten glossy pages, what would it be like to stand in front of a three-dimensional one that was nearly six feet high? There was almost a fourth dimension of malevolence. You were always being warned by museum guards not to touch the Henry Moores, whose generous figures made you want to cuddle up beside them, but Gertrude’s football-shouldered, sharp-hipped Valkyries with their high, wide-spaced afterthoughts of breasts had their own built-in alarm system: touch me and turn to stone yourself, or see an analyst for the rest of your life.

  I am going to be lying next to that person, thought Christina. Actually I will be lying just below her on the slope, as Rudy lies below her third husband, Simon Newman. (Gertrude had kept her second husband’s name, Spezzi.) Rudy and I will lie side by side, his earthworms visiting mine. I can hear his voice coming through the side of my coffin as it used to reverberate through a closed door.

  “Well, my love, how’s your old girl today?”

  “Too quiet,” I might call back. “I’m worried. What if Gertrude’s starting to get depressed about all the love she missed out on while working so hard on her art? She’s more fun when she’s malevolent. How’s your old guy?”

  “Ah, poor Si. He refuses to get over how Whitmore junior beat him up and Mrs. Whitmore defended her son, saying he wouldn’t touch a Jew with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Well, but he’s got his revenge,” I would reply. “Look who’s in the Whitmore family’s faces now.”

  Magnus Whitmore was the notoriously anti-Semitic founder of the village’s arts colony in the twenties. Magnus’s grave, at the foot of the grassy slope, was topped off by an imposing six-foot Della Robbia bas-relief of the Madonna and child, with a stone bench on either side of her. But since the burials of Si and Gertrude and Rudy, the whole setup now appeared as though the Madonna was guarding their graves, which were directly in the line of her protective gaze. And whoever sat on Magnus’s benches would look up the rising slope and contemplate the stones of Si and Gertrude and Rudy, and one day Christina.

  Gil came back with Christina’s nondrink. “Oh, you’ve been looking ahead. I can tell you a story about that piece. When my mother was working on it—we’d emigrated to New York by then and I was home from my boarding school—in one of my pitiful bids for love I asked her why she hadn’t just aborted me after her study trip in England. You know what she said? ‘I didn’t know there was anything wrong with me for six months.’ She said she was always irregular from all her gymnastics as a girl, and when her body did begin to change shape after England she looked on it as an opportunity to experiment with more rounded forms in her work. She made dozens of plaster casts of her torso in the remaining months of pregnancy, but she said the results were too ‘pudding-y’ and she destroyed them. The subtext of that conversation was that in an artistic sense she did abort. But at least she credited me for saving her years of time. Because of me, she said, she found out early that roundness was to be avoided at all costs in her art. And then you know what she did? She took up her chisel and mallet and knelt down and started hollowing out the belly so that the pelvic bones would have those uncanny jutting edges so characteristic of her work.”

  Christina was imagining Gertrude von Kohler Spezzi’s grimace of disgust as she applied cold wet plaster to her pregnant body. But wait a minute—who had knocked it off when it dried? However, she didn’t think they had the time to go there, as Eve Mallow’s chiropractor hour was almost up. And also, Christina was dying to be alone with Rudy, even though it was only the present-in-his-absence Rudy.

  Rudy’s downstairs study

  Chapter Seven

  After Gil had gone, Christina decided to tackle some more letters of condolence, still coming in after seven months. She had them arranged in piles on Rudy’s downstairs bed. When Rudy could no longer climb stairs, he’d moved to the room they’d built in case Christina’s mother had to come and live with them when she was very old, but she had made a premature exit in a car accident. Yet they still called it “Mother’s room,” even after Rudy had been sleeping down there for five years.

  In the priority pile were the notes and letters that had been most instructive to Christina, either because they opened up new possibilities for her connection with Rudy after death or because they provided models for future condolence letters she would be writing to others. Her first prize, so far, in the possibility category went to a woman who had written:

  A widowed friend of mine told me recently that, in his experience, love operates at a higher frequency after the death of the partner, and so it’s easier to get through.

  First prize, so far, in the model category (say something that connects the influence of the departed with the future of the world) went to the wife of Dr. Gray:

  I remember several years ago at a concert I told Rudy about our daughter’s early attempts with the flute. He encouraged me to start her im
mediately with private lessons so she wouldn’t develop bad habits. Beth is now on her way to becoming an accomplished musician. Had it not been for Rudy’s prompting, I might not have acted so quickly.

  Christina picked out a deserving note from another fiction writer, a woman who had been at Yaddo the summer Christina and Rudy met and set fire to their respective lives in order to be together.

  The card, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a reproduction of a page of Chinese characters from a T’ang dynasty album. It was called “Spiritual Flight Sutra.”

  Dear Christina,

  This is a very late note to say how sorry I was to hear of Rudy’s death. I remember the two of you at Yaddo in the summer of 1972, seeing you walk around the lake with your arms linked. You two were the romance of the summer. Such a loss must be hard to bear and you have my sympathy. I hope and pray you will soon be able to write again.

  Christina took out a note card with her name engraved on it and covered the front and back of it in her slanty convent script, saying more than she had planned and having to write in the space up the sides.

  Dear Lauren,

  Thank you for your kind note. He was a big man and he leaves a big space. I miss having Bach played while I prepare dinner. You will be glad to hear I never stopped writing. It was what I did for twenty-eight years while he was making up music under the same roof and it is good to go up every morning and keep doing it, just as if he were still downstairs. I miss hearing his little bursts of melody and all the rest that goes with capturing it, but in a way I still do hear. Recently, I went looking for his metronome and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t the wooden pyramid kind I’d thought, but a little quartz thing the size of a remote control garage opener. Now it lives on my desk next to my ragged old thesaurus and before I boot up my computer every morning I turn it on. It’s still set at the tempo he left it on, his last workday in this house: 94, smack dab in the middle of andante. Pock-pock-pock-pock, like a lively heartbeat, with the little red light flashing. It’s very comforting, and I sometimes feel I am purloining some of the pulsing energy of his music and his strong personality.