Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

She rolled him onto his back. Loosen clothing, she recalled: she unsnapped his pajama bottoms. His penis lolled. She pressed her fingers to the side of his neck. Nothing. She knocked on his chest. Nobody home. She placed her mouth on his and blew, and raised her head, and lowered it and blew again. His mouth was foul — hadn’t he brushed his teeth during that long stint in the bathroom? Still, there was something encouraging about the terrible smell and taste. His personal bacteria were still alive. She blew one more time, and then reached for the telephone and dialed 911. Three minutes to midnight.

By the time the police and the ambulance came she was again wearing her red dress. She had broken one of the straps in her haste to put it on. He was wearing his trousers. Flat on the bed, his bare brown feet below the pinstripes, his rumpled pajama top above, he looked like a melancholy minstrel.

The ambulance men were so deft, with their oxygen and their resuscitation attempts and their gurney. The police were so kind. One of them was female. What a fine career for a woman, Jamie thought. Yes, she told them, she was his assistant. Yes, he’d given a lecture. They had returned here to work on his next speech, it would be in Chicago…it would have been in Chicago. How had he seemed? Oh, preoccupied. “Infarctions run in his family,” she confided.

They drove her home. Fern had been awake, she said, planning the next day’s lesson for her wretched students, when the police delivered Jamie to her. An unfortunate incident was what they said. They left. Jamie threw herself onto her bed, still wearing that red dress, and gagged her story into the pillow.

“I turned her over,” Fern said, “and got the unbroken strap off her shoulder and rolled the dress down her body. I was sure that reporters would show up any minute and would seize on the dress, would call it scarlet. I slid an innocent nightgown over my cousin’s head. I threw the red heap onto the floor of my own closet.”

But the reporters didn’t come. Except for one tabloid, the papers left Jamie out of the story. Lev’s biography filled their articles; the work he might yet have done interested the pundits.

The staff went as a group to the calling hours at the funeral home. Jamie had planned to wear the red dress but Fern talked her out of it, she said. Jamie wore a black suit instead, with a very short skirt. In the coffin, she said later, he looked rested and handsome. Of course she could not give him a special good-bye, but her gaze traveled through the clothing and snuggled right next to his noble heart. And then she went into the next room to offer her condolences to the mourners.

They were sitting in a semicircle. The mother: that severe chignon, pewter tinged with bronze. “She grayed in an eccentric manner,” Lev had told her. “She never did do things like other people.” The first wife, queenly despite an unflattering beige outfit, and her sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, all solemn, sad — grief-stricken, you might say. One son looked just like him. Did he also have a heart that would fail too soon? Jamie wondered. The stunning second wife, wearing a silver pendant that resembled a stethoscope. Her teenage daughter, Thalia was her name, whose kneesocks and trashy novels Jamie had found here and there in the apartment. Schmidt, sobbing. Thalia was holding Schmidt’s hand. Another older woman — who? Oh yes, the wife of the dead brother.

Jamie, her quick eye sliding from face to face, her fingers tapping her own thigh, her tongue thrumming behind her crossed teeth…she counted them. Nineteen. Nineteen broken hearts. Well, eighteen: the sister-in-law was perhaps unaffected. Eighteen people who had lost a loved man husband ex-husband father grandfather son; who had lost him to sudden death; who had lost him because of an assistant they were glad to tolerate, no one minded his little failing; who had lost him because the upstart assistant had fastened onto him, exhausted him with her demands, driven him over the brink; and then, scared out of her silly wits, had shaken pills as if they were castanets, and weakly punched his sternum, and breathed fecklessly into his mouth, and wriggled a pair of trousers onto his uncooperative legs for the sake of his earthly reputation, or hers. To cover their shame.

The sister-in-law burst into tears.

Nineteen people, then.

“Jamie left New York after that,” Fern wound up. “She got a master of arts in education at a state university, and she married a good dull math teacher who gave her two good dull sons. She scraped her hair back, and renounced contact lenses, and bought a lifetime supply of white blouses.”

Silence for a while. Then Barbara said, “So she’s up in her room now, hair loose, glasses off, reliving it all, drenched in guilt.”

“Yes,” Fern said. She was staring at the olive in the bottom of her glass. “Some people have all the luck.”

I.

On the first Monday in March Mr. Flaxbaum received the following e-mail:

Distinguished Myron Flaxbaum,

I am Professor Harry Worrell from King’s College Campus Here in London, UK. We want you to be our guest Speaker at this Year’s Unanticipated Seminar which will take place Here. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking. The Venue is as follows: King’s College campus in Strand, London, UK. The expected audience is 850 people. The duration of the speech is one hour. The date is the 31st of May this year. The topic is “The Mystery of Life and Death.” We came across references to you on the Internet, and we say you are up to standard. A formal letter of invitation and Contract agreement will be sent to you as soon as you honor our Invitation. We are taking care of your travel and hotel accommodation expenses and your speaking fee.

Stay Blessed,

Professor Harry Worrell

King’s College Campus

Mr. Flaxbaum reread this epistle, removing his glasses for the second perusal. “I’m invited to give a lecture,” he mentioned to the three boys, who, though hurrying off to school, paused to look at the invitation. “Fab,” “Wicked,” “Steamy,” they agreed one after the other; and, one after the other, backpack following backpack, left the flat, their departure as usual causing a small conflagration in Flax’s heart. “Awesome,” added Felix over his shoulder, revealing for a moment the abbreviated nose and one of the blue eyes inherited from Bonnie. Bonnie had already been at work for several hours — she was a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital — but she would affirm late that afternoon that the Unanticipated Seminar would be elevated by the presence of her Myron. (No one except Bonnie called him by his first name; even his sister called him Flax.) Bonnie would bend her blond, large-chinned head toward the screen and review the topic—“The Mystery of Life and Death”—and then stand erect again, an oversize woman, authoritative as a Roman aedile though she wore pants and sweater and sturdy shoes rather than toga and sandals. “Darling, you could even do it in Latin.”

Now, in Bonnie’s absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys — in the presence only of the Flaxbaums’ peculiar houseplant — Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled himself.

His name came up just once, as he had known it would: on the website of Caldicott Academy, Godolphin, Mass., the private girls’ school where he worked. In a photograph, taken several years ago, Flax’s hair was retreating but not yet fleeing. His upper lip had not yet put forth its slim mustache. His plump cheeks did not show the two vertical creases that appeared whenever he produced a smile, and his glasses concealed the considerate gaze that had made many a slipshod student called in for a conference feel suddenly worthy, though worthy of what she could not have easily said. Maybe worthy of a conference with Flax; maybe that was enough. Most students responded to their conversations with Flax by paying more attention to their Latin grammars, by finding something intriguing in the ablative absolute, by renouncing their trots — one girl actually burned hers in a little ceremony behind the gym.