WORLD WITHOUT END by Linda McCullough Moore
The invitation was a slender reed, offered with a shaking hand. I wrote it on tablet paper – lightweight, blue-lined, low-grade expectation – and sent it the three blocks by mail. I took some care with the stamp. Jake collects stamps.
“I’m writing to ask if you might like to come for dinner Wednesday?” I wrote. “Julie told me you’re moving south. I’d like to say good-bye. We could ignore our birthdays together.” More trim expectations.
When we were married, and anybody marveled that we shared a birthday, he would say, Yes, and we have the same wedding anniversary too. It never once did not confuse someone, and he said it a fair number of times.
If he comes to dinner, this would be our third encounter in a dozen years. The first was two years after our divorce, when with virtually no contact between us, I heard from a neighbor that Jake had had a heart attack. I went to the hospital twice a day for sixteen days running, never once another visitor in sight. Our daughter Julie was in Indonesia. He was cavalier about the cardiac complications – some pretty wild anomalies that seemed to freak the stolid nurses – he, the patient, showing only a detached, clinical involvement with the science of the thing, reactions reminiscent of his interest in our marriage.
The second flurry of contact came when Julie was to receive her doctorate and to speak at the convocation. Jake offered me a ride to the airport. Even though it was early May, the temperature had climbed to almost eighty. There was a fuzzy layer of silt on every surface in Jake’s car, a finer kind of fluff thickened the hot air, the blower blasting well-aged dust from every vent. Once in the car, I tried not to breathe.
“Do you have the heater on?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Did you want it on?” For the next ten minutes Jake tried surreptitiously to turn the heat off, red to blue, tiny notches at a time, sneaky, like a guilty kid who imagines reality is whatever he pretends. But, red is still hot, blue is still cold. There are some things even divorce doesn’t change . . . no matter how good your lawyer is.
In the stifling car that day, Jake was wearing a jacket I had bought him one early, hopeful Christmas – clothing lasting longer than the several lifetimes we spent together. Things do that. They outlast us. A can of Campbell’s tomato soup waits – not impatient – on the pantry shelf, to survive the last survivor on the day the world ends.
We were flying Southwest Airlines to Julie’s graduation that day. I like Southwest best because you choose your seatmate for yourself – I, ever imagining myself life’s brilliant chooser, when in fact an airline might have chosen me a far more fitting spouse. That day I – who always pays extra to board early – had saved Jake a seat. I spotted him and called his name, three times, each more loudly, till he stopped pretending not to see me seven inches from his elbow. I pointed to the empty seat beside me. He frowned, then scowled, then shook his head. He ended up, finally, two rows in front of me, where mid-flight I could see him take his wheat bread, slightly flattened PB&J out of his plastic briefcase. It was a carbon copy of the sorry sandwich I sat holding in my hand.
Once we landed, in the bathroom mirror in the ladies room I spotted a mean red bump on my lower lip. Walking to baggage claim I asked Jake if he would stop and tell me if it looked infected. He’s a doctor, and I always did seem to experience some life-threatening symptom whenever he was near. When we were dating he would slip me tiny pills for every symptom. Dilaudid: lovely miniature narcotics; paregoric: that camphorated tincture of opium. I gulped and chowed them down, no questions asked. These days I’m afraid to take a Tylenol.
These days I would be afraid to marry anyone I wasn’t married to.
At Julie’s graduation, Jake took a million photographs. Afterward, when I asked for a shot of Julie and me, he said he had deleted all of them, making an unattractive moue and shaking his head as though the pictures of me had been alarming.
Not our first brush with photography. On a newly-wedded trip to Toronto, we stayed once in a motel with mirrors on the ceiling. Today, assigned to such a room, I would sleep in the corner in a chair, convinced the ceiling bolts or super glue would give way in the night and bury us in splinter shards. Back then, I posed for pictures in the arms of that young version of this husband; he, lying there with the camera to one eye, holding me, his leg and arm a flesh bikini. Nothing visible except the certainty that we lay naked on the water-bed – the soft slosh only now remembered – beautiful beyond disputing, not so much sexy as lovely, not so much daring as young and fine and pleased to be reflected. Those photos disappeared, were looked for, never found, then finally forgotten once we reached the stage where their reappearance would have only made us cross. I hadn’t seen them in twenty years, till standing in my cluttered kitchen one rainy morning, opening the mail, they fell out of the posted envelope I held in my hand. The man who’d bought our house enclosed a note with their return. He said he found the photos tucked in the back far reaches of the bedroom closet, and he wondered if perhaps they might be anyone we knew.
Should I show those photos to Jake? I’ve been unable to destroy them, imagining if I only study them enough I might break the code, lay bare some message we might make some use of.
Tuesday night, 7:15 sharp, I open the front door to an old man, and it hits me: I had been expecting someone thirty-three, someone who might leave me dancing around the idea of a second date. Jake showed up the night of our first dinner together with two artichokes, the first I’d ever eaten. Now here he stands – wearing a sweater I’m almost certain I remember buying – empty-handed. What did I expect? Something, apparently. Wine, flowers, a handwritten apology for grievous injury spanning twenty years?
“I would have brought wine,” he says, “but I didn’t know what you were making for dinner.”
“Salmon,” I say.
“Then it would have been white.” He doesn’t move to hug me or to kiss my cheek.
Jake never kissed me during the first nine weeks we dated. I kept count. He didn’t touch me, didn’t shake hands, never grazed my arm in passing. (The future of life on the planet could be tidily reordered if we one time paid attention to the portents we are given.) Prompted by a friend, I finally asked him why no touch, and that night he stayed over. “We’ll be having sex now, every time we get together,” he said. And, we always did, and it was always good . . . until it wasn’t anymore.
I invite Jake to the table. No ceremony. He’s never been inside this house.
“Nice kitchen,” he says, sitting down at the table we bought at an antique shop when we decided at one point to eat dinner in the kitchen. “Did you remodel?” Together we did over three kitchens in a row, three frantic installations of the latest counter tops – they kept changing what was mandatory – light hardwood floors, and always the same cabinets: white frames, mullions, glass fronts. They cost the earth.
“Have you heard from Julie?” I push the bread his way. He shakes his head.
“No bread?” I say. “Or no word?”
He looks befuddled. About the time he decided he was leaving me, he started leaving the stove burners on, once scorching the wall; he forgot the water was running outside, flooding the backyard. I wondered then if he had dementia – if perhaps he always had. Tonight he hardly looks on top of things.
He was such a remarkably bad husband. I was nobody’s idea of an exemplary wife – or human being, come to that – but he was so very awful I never really could compete. Marriage is like football: You play as well as the other team allows you.
“I read in the paper there’s a hearing Tuesday about the parking lot regulations near the bike trail,” Jake says. We slept in the same bed for 24 years, raised a daughter, together removed asbestos from three different basements, and now he’s moving away forever and this is what he’s got to say to me.
Wispy tendrils snag on memory. I can recall a party we attended early on. We stood chatting with a long-haired couple – hippies, only better, thinner, wilder, more successful – and somehow without encouragement or reason Jake began to hold forth with some long and tangled explanation of why the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion had so many members. The hippies frowned and moved away. It was the sort of thing that passed for conversation in our marriage.
But in the early days, early years, I would discount every single thing Jake said, and thought, and did, as each a one-time aberration. A thousand times I said, “That is so unlike you.”
Fair warning, life whispers in my ear.
Shut up, I say, out loud.
Jake ignores this, or he doesn’t hear. He’s clearly not sure why he’s here.
I’m not sure myself if I have brought him here tonight to feed, or tell my secrets to, or hold him to account. I would love a chance to ask him about his marriage: the one I was the wife in. But, if he couldn’t tolerate that conversation when there was still a family and people’s lives to save, I’m guessing he would rise and leave the table and the house, if I so much as hinted any interest. I will not ruffle his brittle-boned and time-worn feathers. Across the table now he looks not unlike a bird, one of some variety that lives a long, long time. Jake was born the day that Germany invaded Poland. I’m just saying.
“How do you think Julie is doing?” I say. “I wish that she were married.” I doubt that we have ever spoken of our daughter without my saying this.
“She’s doing great,” Jake says. “Her work is great. She’s great. She’s got a new cat.” I take a deep breath; it hurts my chest. No matter that Jake is a man, I think, without a soul; still, there are words I can’t seem to say. There is a story of our daughter I can’t tell. Jake loved Julie always, with a love that seemed beyond him. She adored him. Hers was love he could take in.
Jake reaches out and helps himself to a second helping of salmon, and pours himself more wine.
He eats with concentration, always has.
“How’s your car running?” he says. “Julie says you’ve got a problem with your catalytic converter. We had that problem once with the blue Volvo.”
What he says is true. My catalytic converter’s shot, which means it sounds like a hot-rod lawn mower on a sharp incline, the same broken muffler noise we had in the car I drove one fateful weekend so long ago. The facts are all so very fact-like. Jake and I had been trying eleven times a day for several years to get pregnant. I had gone off for the weekend by myself to see my mother who was ill. Turned out she was well enough to yell at me and tell me I was selfish because I refused to have a child. She told me she never wanted children, but she had made the sacrifice, why couldn’t I? I ran out of the house that night, more upset than I remember ever being, and I ended up in a bar where I drank more than I’d ever drunk before or since. A stranger I met in the bar drove me home. To his home. I slept with him that night, the night that I conceived a child, our Julie. I never saw that man again, not once. Jake never knew. There are probably more elaborate ways to tell the story, but the sharp-point facts stick out the same no matter how you tell the thing.
I returned to Jake the next day, chastened, determined to be the wife I’d never been, to make it up to him. It lasted about twelve hours. It lasted until Jake said, in that pinched and wincing way, “I can see that you are trying.” That slender knife blade striking spine. That man who would not notice if I swung in some multi-polar splendor from the chandelier, that same man noticed my discreet attempt to be a better person. “I can see that you are trying,” he said, and on the morning of the last day of the world when we are made to answer for all that we have done and left undone, I will be called upon to say how it was I did not throw the cast iron skillet at his head.“Julie has a chance to go to Moldova on her sabbatical next year,” Jake says. “My sister’s two sons are both there now. She could stay with her cousins there.”
But these men are not her cousins. I look across the kitchen table at Jake sitting here, as I imagine, on the last night I will ever see him.
“Did you ever wish we’d had more children?” I have never asked, not one time, never hinted, never lingered long in any room where this question might be spoken.
“No,” Jake says, then shakes his head as if to soften the speed and sharpness of his reply, as though even he, even at this late date, might feel some need to preserve the silence that has served us for so long. I’ve never known if it might have made a difference had we ever tried to talk. We didn’t. I didn’t – that much, I own.
To ever ask about a second child would have been to dynamite that sealed, well-guarded vault; it would have felt like I was asking, Shall I go off to Pennsylvania and conceive again?
Was Jake sterile? We’ll never know. After Julie, we used birth control, even after there was no longer any need. Of course, he might be a father unaware; for all I know, he might be a father well-aware.
Did I bring Jake here tonight to redefine the thing his life has been, to take from him a daughter in whose face he’s seen his features; in whose walk and stance he’s recognized his mother’s gait; this daughter, in whose eyes he has surely been a man worth being? No. I think the agenda for tonight should be to find the proper slot in which to slip a quarter of a century of my life. Our first date was April 23 – my grandmother’s birthday – and we went to court for our divorce on April 23, exactly twenty-five years later: a lifetime, a heartbeat. A person needs to find a way to think about an interlude like this, so neatly boundaried, so poorly understood.
“Are you still working?” I say. I know for a fact the answer’s yes.
“Why do you ask?” he says; a variation on the smartass: Who wants to know?
“I figured I could sell the information for a lot of money,” I say.
Gentlemen, start your engines.
“You haven’t changed,” I say.
“You have,” Jake says.
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You don’t seem as fearful, not as terrified.”
“There’s less to lose,” I say. I expect he’ll draw back into his shell any second. “What was I like?” The words come quickly.
“Worried. Scared. Afraid, I think.” He looks out the window on the darkness. “What was I like?” he says.
“Not worried,” I say. “Not scared. Unafraid.”
“I had less to lose,” he says.
He did. Power tools, his sports, his self-sufficiency – all held so lightly. Julie, he couldn’t lose. They were a pair. I, shut off in some compartment. Did I keep myself apart from Julie, did I try always to protect her from her mother?
“Did I understand you?” I say.
“Not at all,” he says. “Say, I could use a glass of water.” That can wait.
“Did you ever wish we’d stayed together?”
“No,” he says.
Why did he come tonight? I do not ask.
He came because it did not matter.
Life does not happen to us; that’s a myth. We bring it on ourselves. If tonight Jake betrayed a slivered fleck of interest, if he ever one time stuck his cold little nose outside his burrow to sniff the evening air, or let the thinnest question pass his tight lips, ever asking, “So, why did you really ask me here tonight?” I might answer, perhaps even finding as I spoke another reason, better, nobler, something good for us to know, if this is indeed the last time we will ever meet.
But we were married for a hundred years without Jake’s wondering: “What are we doing with this lifetime we swore to live together?” That question might have cracked the hardest rock – the kind that married people have inside their hearts – and caused an opening to be, where light and air could penetrate, change everything.
“May I offer you dessert? I made the mocha mousse you like. It’s been a while since I have separated egg whites, let me tell you, but I think it might be pretty good.”
“No thanks. I’ll pass.”
“Could I offer you some blueberries?” It is entirely possible to be charitable when you know it’s for the final time.
“Blueberries would be great. Seems I have a little touch of diabetes.”
And what if I had lived into a marriage where I was not tempted to throw plates at his head whenever he refused my mousses? What if I had offered him something that he was capable of accepting?
We talk some more. The blueberries indigo his teeth; no matter. I taste the mousse. It’s lumpy, but the flavor is magnificent.
At the door I reach out to help him with his coat, and he allows this.
I open up the door and smile at him with my eyes. It is the last time now.
Jake walks back into the night from which he came.
“I don’t think we’ll meet again,” I send the words into the darkness, his profile now a shadow on the scrubby lawn. “This is probably it,” I say.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he says, to him no difference either way. “It’s not over till the fat lady sings.”
The silly phrase, old long before Jake and I were even born, brings tears to my eyes. The first person who ever said it, so wanting to believe there might be always one more chance.
“Well, good-bye.” My voice scratches each word. “Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for having me,” Jake says.
And that’s the way the world ends.
When it is all over, when that lady takes her final bow and, no matter how fat, disappears behind the curtain, and the house lights come up and cast us all in mean fluorescence, we every one of us will find out that only one thing in the world is true. It is this: No matter how many ways you might imagine that your life will go, it goes some other way. I’ve imagined Jake at my funeral, and I at his, a hundred different times, the scene fleshed out a hundred different ways. But I have never – not once – seen us standing like two crumpled statues at the graveside of our child. I’ve never seen us fighting like two frightened monsters in the kitchen of the house where she will die, both prepared, entirely willing, to kill each other ten times over if it might keep her living one more day. The cancer ate her bones like giants in a fairy tale, like demons in a devil tale; cracking if she moved, they splintered if she breathed. I could hear them from a block away, I could hear them in my dreams, I hear them now: bones cracking, disguised as mean, frozen rain on a tin roof in a bad storm; long-dead twigs snapping underfoot; God’s fingernails, impatient, tapping on a wooden table made from pieces of the ark just after He destroyed the world. I stand beside my daughter’s grave with all illusion gone. I have seen the black of thunder, I have smelled hard granite stone and heard the smolder heat of hell. I know that life cannot be borne.
“Can you hear that?” I would ask Jake, over and again. Bones breaking in soul’s wake.
“No,” he says.
“Yes,” he says.
A year has passed. I am not Jewish, Jake is barely Jewish, or only Jewish stripped of Jewishness, but he sends me a note and asks if we can go together Tuesday to the grave to place a stone on the marker of the place our daughter lies. I go there all the time alone. I stand and hold my breath and listen; a resounding silence now has come to take sound’s place.
Tuesday morning, I get to the cemetery a little early, but Jake is already there. He’s found two pebbles on the ground, and reaches out and hands me one. I hold it like Christ’s body pressed by some fervid priest into my hand, pressed hard: homemade stigmata. I clench the pebble in my palm, wishing it had sharper edges, weren’t worn so smooth by years of time and weather. Jake looks worn, his shoulders hunch, he seems to shiver though the day is warmer than it has right to be. There’s sun. I don’t know what to do with that.
Jake leans over and places his stone, then I place mine; though I don’t seem to want to let it go, for if we give a marker to the year that’s passed, then more years will only come to take its place and move us further from our little girl, for so she has become, the woman now more distant, less distinct, than the child she was.
“Remember her blond hair?” I say.
“I do,” Jake says, perhaps the kindest words I’ve heard him speak, for he and I alone in all the world can close our eyes and see her, hear her giggle at the ducks. Did anyone love ducks so much?
“The ducks,” I say.
“I know,” Jake says and takes a breath that’s jagged, seems to cost him something. Then he turns to face me. “Margaret, I know.”
His words allow for no confusion. They’ve come from far away, from finally the place where truth has been burned free – what is the phrase? Refiner’s fire. It seems that understanding is the only thing remaining.
“I know,” Jake says. “I wanted you to know.”
I can’t speak. I may never speak again.
“I knew something when you came back from visiting your mother.” Jake speaks slowly. The words have waited a long time. “You were changed. Then when Julie was born, I knew she didn’t come from me. She didn’t come from mine. And what that meant was that she could be free of all that. She just was. So I could love her. She is probably the one person in all the world that I have loved.” He looks up. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. It’s not exactly new information that Jake loved Julie and not me, but it is new: that a person might have a child who carries not one burden life has laid on you, that a person might be told the world is giving you a start again. Not a do-over, but a do for the first time in the history of the world. That must be what Julie was for Jake.
“She loved you with her whole heart,” I say. “Most in all the world.”
And it hits me with some force that this is true.
“The only thing that mattered,” Jake says, “was that Julie never know, and that meant never telling you. If you found out I knew, I thought then you might tell her.”
No matter how long I will puzzle this, I’ll never figure what’s the story our lives tell. I haven’t got a clue. But standing here this morning, surrounded by the dead whom Jake will join in half a year – I too, though not for many years – the fat lady, the very one, throws her head back and starts her song like she might sing her heart out.
And still, it is not over.
That’s the part they never tell you. It never ends.
Fifteen years will pass before God makes an auburn autumn afternoon, this one out of scraps and pieces of odd days, tail-ends of dreary seasons, and I will spend it sorting boxes of the things that Julie left behind. After she died, I packed up all her papers without looking at a thing. I couldn’t throw them out. I couldn’t look at them. The sight of just her signature on a page could make me gasp with certainty that she was still alive, could make me rampage, running room to room to take her by surprise, to hear her say, just once, “You didn’t think that I was really dead,” to hear myself reply, “Of course not.” This fantasy blurred with reality once she was gone, the line between the two smudged by the thumb of God, the boundary separating the imagined from what was only real becoming indistinct.
So it is not until today, until this afternoon as I am preparing for a move that I am certain is to be my last, that I come upon the stacks of cardboard boxes I packed up with my eyes shut tight, right after we had put our daughter in a wooden box. These boxes hold a mix of bills and memos, notices of things announced and said to happen in the future – a lie: they are all in the past and perhaps not even now remembered.
I find a couple of postcards from her dad, the messages not worth the stamp. No messages from me. Newspaper clippings, a page ripped from a magazine, but I will need to wonder was it for the article about the scarcity of water, or the other side, a section of a story about a man who drove his MG-T4 100 miles an hour the day that JFK died, rolled the car, and walked away. At the bottom of the box is a letter to her dad in Julie’s hand, written in a scribble with so many words crossed out and arrows pointing to the margins and the reverse side of the one, lined page.
I start to read it greedily. She never wrote to me.
Dear Dad,
I don’t think that you will ever see this. Don’t know if I want you to. I’m pretty sure that we will never meet, not as long as my other dad’s alive. I know that it would kill him, but I know that I will meet you. That’s the only thing that’s sure to me.
You probably want to know how I know about you. I’m not sure how the conviction grew, but in the first grade a girl named Molly Robinson said her mother wondered how come I looked a little like my mom, but not a whit – she said that: not a whit – like my dad. I told her she was stupid. . . . I told her she was fat. I stopped being friends with her. But she planted an idea that never let me go. I loved my father, but I knew that he was not my dad. I always knew.
A million different times I almost asked my mom about you, but I was afraid that she would lie to me. . . . the way a lie is my whole life. What I wish is that . . .
I pick up an old T‑shirt from the floor and wipe the box off. I don’t know how it got so dusty, I don’t know how my life got cold. I don’t know when my heart got frozen over. I open up my mouth to say to Julie all the things I never said, but my jaw won’t work, my lips are prickly, numb. It will have to wait until tomorrow. When I’m feeling better. I will tell her that regret was there before I made a start. She will tell me that regret will not redeem us, that it is puny and pernicious in the face of sin. I will say I know.
Linda McCullough Moore is the author of the novel The Distance Between (Soho Press); a collection of linked stories, This Road Will Take Us Closer To The Moon (Thornapple Books); and an essay collection, The Book Of Not So Common Prayer (Abingdon Press). Her stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train, The Boston Globe, Queen’s Quarterly, and The Southern Review.