David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

I hadn’t seen Sophia for three years when she paid me a visit last month before flying to Germany, bringing the boyfriend as a buffer. Since my time, she’d had a piece of metal, like a tiny dumbbell, installed in her eyebrow, to show the world she’d been wounded. They sat together on the sofa and turned down my offer of a gin and tonic. “I’m trying to picture what your life is like now,” she said.

“I can help you with that,” I said. “First you picture a hand coming out from under the piano lid.”

“I guess you were always funny,” she said.

“Until I wasn’t.”

“I’ve let that go,” she said.

The boyfriend had wandered over to the piano. He played a scale with his right hand—I watched the thumb spider up under the fingers—and then grabbed a two-handed diminished chord. The only kind of chord of which my piano is now capable, one might say, if one were still funny. “This is an amazing instrument,” he said.

“Well then,” I said. “Oblige us.”

“I don’t really play.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Sophia said. “Eric’s band is going to Scandinavia next month.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, give my regards to Norway.”

He went back and sat on the sofa. She got up and said, “We’re going out on the porch for a little, okay?”

“ I can go out,” he said.

“No, you sit.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “the gin’s in the freezer.”

I followed her out; she sat down in an Adirondack chair and tucked her feet under her. I lowered myself into the chair next to her, bracing on its arms like an old man. “Why are you being a prick to him?” she said.

“I thought I was being self-ironic. I guess I’m not used to being around people anymore.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?” she said. “This was Mom’s idea, you know?”

“I’m just glad you came. And I had wanted to meet your friend.”

“Well, now you can check that off.”

“Since you’re here, I should probably show you a couple of things. This house is going to be yours someday, so—”

“Oh,” she said. “Lucky me. What, are you making plans for an early exit?”

“Okay,” I said. “Believe me, if I were in your shoes? I’m sure I’d feel the same way. I just want to do what little I can at this point.”

“What am I supposed to say? ‘I’m sorry I was such a handful’? How about this? When I’m getting ready to check out, I’ll forgive you.”

“I thought you said you’d let it go.”

“So I guess I was lying,” she said. “I studied under the master, right?” She stood up. “We’re going.”

“Could I just make one thing clear?” I said.

She opened the door to the living room and looked back at me. “What?”

What indeed?

“No, nothing,” I said. “I’ll let you have the last word.”

—

By the time Mrs. Gartner died, Deborah had been living in Cambridge for a year. But she’d kept in touch with a couple who live on our road—my road—and who no longer keep in touch with me , you’ll be surprised to hear. She called me the night before the funeral to say she was renting a car and coming up. “I just wanted to forewarn you,” she said. “I promised her.”

“Now you’ve shamed me into it,” I said.

“ That would be something to see,” she said. “Your shame.”

“Oh, it’s on permanent display,” I said. “It’s become one of the local attractions.”

“Good you still have your sense of humor,” she said. “It must be getting quite a workout these days.”

You see? I always let them have the last word.

It was the third week in August, still hot, though while driving to the church I noticed a red leaf on a maple tree. I took a seat in the back, next to Deborah—how could one not? She gave my hand a quick squeeze. Could it possibly be? Might I possibly want it? I spotted the granddaughter in the front row, sitting with a white-haired couple and an old lady with a walker. Jessamyn (I remembered the name) had to be forty now, though she still had that chopped-off hair, with a new tinge of maroon. I saw that her cheeks had gotten pudgy, suggesting she might be both appetitive and attainable—ah, this was just one of those reflexive thoughts that still intrude, as a corpse’s hair and fingernails are said to keep growing. I’d given up pursuing students, belatedly you’ll say, after a collegial talking-to from my department chairman, and—since I have no secrets from you—after taking a young woman to bed and being unable to follow through. Still, back in May, at the end-of-the-semester party, I drank too much—that is, I drank—and kissed one of my students good night, on the mouth, though I knew she’d been aiming for my cheek. The next day, to try to head off another complaint, I emailed her an apology for what I called “an excess of good cheer,” and she wrote back that she’d been “amused”: the midpoint, I took it, between “offended” and “saddened.”

After the service, I walked out with Deborah and touched a hand to the back of her arm as we went down the steps. “There’s Marcia and Walter,” she said. This was the couple I was telling you about. “I should go say hello.”

But Jessamyn was walking up to us, patting sweat from her forehead with a bandanna handkerchief that looked out of keeping with her black dress. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said. I saw she wasn’t wearing a ring.

“Of course,” Deborah said. “How are you holding up?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s not like I wasn’t expecting it. Actually, I have a favor to ask? I wonder if I could come out this afternoon and see the house one more time.”

“I’m probably not the one to ask anymore,” Deborah said.

Jessamyn looked at her, then at me. “Oh. I guess I stepped in something.” I remembered her fetchingly harsh little voice.

“That would be fine,” I said. “We were going to grab some lunch, but maybe three, three thirty?”

“That works. I’ve still got all this to deal with.” She looked over her shoulder at the white-haired couple getting the walker lady into the front seat of a minivan. “Thanks.” I took care not to eye her as she walked away.

Deborah said, “Aren’t we amicable.”

“ Would you like some lunch?” I said. “Let’s say hello to Walter and Marcia, and then we can go over to the Pine Grove.”

“I think I’m just going to run along,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll have your hands full.” False ending. “Anyhow, I don’t want to weigh down your afternoon with any more nostalgia.”

—

Sooner or later I’d been bound to get a DWI; I suppose I was lucky it happened while Deborah was still in the picture. After teaching a theory class one evening—this would have been February of last year—I went to a bar in the South End with my students, then headed up 93 listening to Hope in the Night , where gentle June Hunt gets callers to invite Jesus Christ into their hearts. Somehow I made it as far as Manchester before getting pulled over. For the rest of the term, Deborah drove me down to Concord once a week to catch the bus to Boston; only when they reinstated my license did she announce she was leaving. After she moved I had to unplug the phone at night, since the sainted Deborah—and I’m not saying she didn’t deserve Walter and Marcia’s sympathy—had developed a little problem herself. One night I forgot; I let the machine pick up and I heard her say, “You’re just up there waiting to die.” One of these days I need to set that shit, don’t you think? Just mezzo and snare drum—you hear the six-eight rhythm? “March from an Unwritten Opera” we could call it. Might end up becoming my little out-of-context keeper, my “ Treulich gëfuhrt ”—“Here Comes the Bride,” to you—or my Ride of the Valkyries. Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!