Evening. Nessa Rapoport
Laurie said.
Last night I stared at the phone, willing it to ring. Throughout the evening people called; I delivered the funeral arrangements mechanically. At midnight, in defiance of a code I didn’t know I lived by, I picked up the receiver and called Laurie again.
“I thought it was too late,” he said. He knew about Tam: What could he do to help?
The timbre of his voice had an extraordinary effect. I entered an idyll of our lovemaking so tactile I could dispel it only when he repeated my name.
Astonished, I invited him to come to the house before the funeral began, an idea unconventional enough for him to question it and then decide aloud that whatever might comfort me, the mourner, must be right to do.
Since I’ve come home my mind has been running frantically in and out of the past without transition. Nothing I think about seems to hold still long enough to catalogue it in its appropriate tense.
And so it has been more disconcerting than usual to return to my mother’s house. Although I am under the roof beneath which Tam and I grew up, the decor reflects my mother’s endless faith that physical transformation will produce a more profound change, as if interior design were a spiritual term. This conviction has sanctioned her to redo the living room with unsettling frequency. I can never be sure where I’ll be when I walk in.
Several years ago, I had entered a subtle space of unbleached linen and dun-colored cotton, the summer house of an industrial magnate. At the start of Tam’s illness, the room hardened to glass and metal. But on the morning of my sister’s funeral, I find myself waiting for Laurie in an English sitting room, not unlike the parlors of Nana’s youth.
Nana and I face each other on matching velvet sofas, accompanied by oversized cabbage-rose chairs. Braided tassels cinch the draperies, released onto the floor in moiré splendor.
Today, Laurie is the curiosity I have allotted myself. Nana used to like him, until she knew we were sleeping together. She grew up with his grandfather, children of the only two Jewish families to summer in their tiny Ontario town. The connection was all that protected me from her wrath.
Not that she and I, ever, said a word about sex. It was not proper form for a woman born in the reign of King Edward VII. We are ten years from the millennium, but Nana is unable to shed the post-Victorian constraints of her childhood.
The look on her face when she acknowledges that Laurie is on his way recalls instantly the silences that would descend upon Nana and me.
I want to tell her not to worry. I am braced for the nice man with an incipient paunch who will offer condolences to both of us. My ear is alert for the doorbell when Laurie appears, conjured, in the archway of the living room.
Laurie was a boy when I loved him, his youth an emblematic condition representing not only his chronological age but an essence, a nectar I could imbibe to counter my persistent sense of dislocation in this city. He was wholly of his place and era, belonging in Toronto, where he would inherit his father’s business or go into law, as, in fact, he did; marry someone from his neighborhood and live happily ever after, while I sought grandeur and danger in New York.
But when Laurie steps inside, “boring and suburban” are hardly the words that come to mind. Tam and I must have different taste in men, I think. My hands, folded decorously in my lap, are already tracing the planes of his face as if I were eighteen and still in love with him. My fingers are inside his mouth. His clothes fall away, and I see what he looks like naked.
I feel myself color at my imagination’s transgression and lower my head. When I look up, I can read his face. He was never as articulate as I, and in my clairvoyance I know that he is struggling to say something to Nana and me, and that he is too full of feeling to say it.
When he clasps Nana’s hand, a final surprise overtakes me. I begin to cry, mortifying myself and embarrassing my grandmother. Laurie moves away from her to me and lifts me up.
My body reads every muscle I intuited moments ago. Although my tears, unconnected to my volition, will not stop, I am alight with desire, not the easy flirtation I foresaw but the real thing, the encounter of memory and chemistry that happens rarely and seems irresistible.
Is he feeling it as well? In my experience, “vast,” says Tam within, the body cannot lie. Laurie steps back as if scorched, and his voice, formal, discreet, inquires after my mother and my father, civility restored. But I know something is going to happen. And I hear Tam, confirming that I’m right.
Since Tam’s diagnosis, I have had a recurring dream, one I used to have as a child that my unconscious filed and then retrieved for this emergency.
I am in the bedroom of my grandmother’s cottage, the one overlooking the lake. The room is softened by light; sky and water are a placid gray. The lake is lapping quietly at the narrow beach, encroaching so incrementally that at first I do not realize the beach has disappeared. Now the water is at the wooden back steps. Now the steps are hidden. The lake is rising, inexorable as it climbs the house, blind, remorseless, until the wall of water reaches the roof. From inside, all I see is the merging of gray lake and sky until the cottage is engulfed.
Sex is the only antidote to death that I’ve discovered, but even Simon’s dexterous lovemaking in my apartment or his does not prevent the dream from coming back—memorably, twice in the same long night. Psychologists like to debate the question, Does insight lead to change? No insight would lead to the change I require: that Tam’s decree be reversed, like a rented movie scurrying backward in order to be returned the next day, its plot already forgotten.
TWO
I AM STANDING AT THE GRAVESITE OF MY SISTER, dreaming of plums. The ripe, rose-colored ones with the blushing flesh within, the kind I would bite into greedily while Tam looked on, half appalled, half envious of my gluttony.
Beneath the soles of my boots, the unyielding cold of the ground punctures my summer reverie. For once, I have dressed like a grown-up, in a coat conservative enough for Tam’s wardrobe. As a result, my teeth are chattering in an exaggerated fashion and I cannot feel my feet. I want to wrap my arms around myself, but Ella, Tam’s daughter, is squeezing my gloved hand with insistent fingers.
Above, the sky has the blank look of imminent snow. I am enclosed by my family: My father in a stiff hat, towering over everyone; my mother at my side, crying so hard she does not know I’m here. Tam’s husband, Ben, is composed, a rebuke. In from Vancouver, my uncle Gil leans on Nana, who is erect as a monarch on an old coin.
There are scores of people, many from Tam’s television world, the adult life she created in Toronto. It is not tasteful to look around so avidly, but I do, despite the horror, the open rectangle before me.
I recognize some of Dad’s partners, crimped with empathy. I haven’t seen them in many years, but I know each face nonetheless, like a police illustration that heralds what someone who is missing will look like decades later. I can visualize the hall of offices on the way to my father’s, the blue ribbon of Lake Ontario in his window. In my mind I am still a child, running soundlessly down the pale carpeting to surprise him.
Now he is here, stricken. One of the men in tweed overcoats who surround him must have closed his office door to sit with Tam while she reviewed her will. She never would have left this world without one.
What secrets is she taking with her, I find myself wondering, as the dismayingly small box is lowered into the depths.
Tam had a secret drawer when we were children. The skull-and-bones warning on its face taunted me from the day she proclaimed that the drawer was forbidden to anyone in the family.
One summer evening, I waited until the upstairs was empty and tiptoed