Connected

My dead husband called at an inopportune time, so I hung up on him. It was just like the Louis I knew in life—always interrupting, always talking out of turn. He'd go hours without speaking, storing up pointless facts, deliberately waiting until I was on the phone or in the toilet. "The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows," he'd announce. "The longest name in the Bible is Mahershalalbaz." He never participated in conversations—all those years setting pins at Boulevard Bowl destroyed his hearing. But that's no excuse for cutting in with cold front updates and foolish questions: "What weighs more, your liver or your heart?" We loved each other—not in the moonlight and roses sense, not like some of the couples here in matching windbreakers that smooch on the elevator—but I never mothered Louis like some of these women do their men. I never cut his meat or fetched his pills or pressed his hankies. Most of the time we were like sparring partners, circling the ring, trading blows. Other times Louis was a punching bag.

It was Friday and Bonnie the home-health aide was going through my change jar for quarters for the laundry room. Louis and I moved to Ten Eyk Towers after my heart attack. We'd owned a home in Bellevue, but lost it to back taxes after Louis lost his job at Boulevard Bowl. The manager had caught him napping. It wasn't the first time. He'd been warned. The owner thought he was doing Louis a favor, giving him a head start on his retirement, but we were broke. Louis found work as a janitor, but the mall paid minimum wage. A year later I found a shoe box of delinquent notices under the bed.

I should've been angry with him for keeping me in the dark, but I wanted to believe his silence was a sign of strength. He'd fix it. He'd make things right. For the first time in my life I counted on Louis to get us through. I found out about the auction when our daughter, Marty, came tearing up the walk, the Sunday paper in her fist. In the listing our house was overgrown with weeds, the storm door coming off its hinges. That was what struck me as shameful. I tossed Louis his shoes and told him to get to work.

As I searched my purse for another quarter, the phone rang. I figured it was a telemarketer wanting me to switch long distance or buy a magazine for charity. The phone was across the apartment, on a stack of TV Guides next to Louis's recliner. A year ago I would've asked Bonnie to get it, but since Louis's death, I've slimmed down. I'm not exactly agile, but I can move around without getting winded.

"Hello," I said. The line was all crackle and hiss, the end of a record when the song is over. I switched the receiver to my good ear and lowered myself into Louis's chair. My old body used to spill over the arms. Now there's enough room for two of me. "Hello?"

"Beast?"

The voice was far away and small, but I knew it was him. Only Louis called me Beast. I wasn't scared, or even surprised. After he died I spent a month on the couch, and I used to hear him shuffle from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again. Now it sounded like he was calling from the payphone at the grocery store, questioning something on the list. The call seemed so ordinary that when the static kicked up and Louis said, "Can you hear me?" I glanced at Bonnie snooping through my mail, said "No," and set the receiver back in the cradle. "Wrong number," I said. When Bonnie left with the laundry basket on her hip, I dialed star-sixty-nine. A recording said the line wasn't equipped for that service.

What could I have said with Bonnie standing there listening in? What happened to the suitcase of girly magazines you used to keep in the closet? Remember how, after we retired, we were going to take the Love Boat to Fantasy Island? I'm sorry I wasn't nicer to you when you were alive?

I could see Bonnie stopping by the lobby to announce that Vee Eisner in 219 was talking to her dead husband. At Sunday brunch, they'd watch me like they watch Joy Leveroni who puts tinfoil in her microwave and strolls around the building in a half-slip. I may repeat myself, or forget I've left soup warming on the stove, but that's only natural when you've outlived your graduating class, need three hands to count the number of presidents you've voted for, forget that no one calls oleo oleo anymore. The call wasn't a sign that I'm coming unglued—it was a reminder that I'm still connected.

My grandmother had the power to stanch wounds. She saved a boy who lost his arm to a thresher by placing her hands on the stump and singing a prayer in French. When her husband slaughtered livestock, he'd send her to town for the day. Once she came home after he'd strung a dozen chickens from the clothesline, and her presence was like styptic. After three generations, the gift's watered down, the prayer forgotten. As a waitress for Harvest House, the only thing I ever healed was a cracked o-ring on a fruit punch machine.

I used the story to work up to telling Marty her father called. Every other Saturday, while Jack's off playing poker at the garage, Marty rents a movie and I spring for pizza. Over an eight-cut sausage and mushroom, I tell her how it happened, why I had to let Louis go.

"That's your father for you—always butting in. A real buttinski," I said.

"Ma," she said, "it could have been anyone."

"You think I don't know your father?"

"That's not what I'm saying." She reached across the table for the pizza box. When Louis was alive, I'd eat half a pie. Now, after one slice, I push my plate away.

"What are you saying?" I said.

"I'm saying the person might've sounded like Daddy."

"Fine. Don't believe me. He didn't call you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

I got up and went to the kitchen for a glass of ice water. Behind the refrigerator door, I flipped her the bird. Back at the table, Marty was gnawing a crust, staring at the bare white wall above the sofa. Behind the sheet rock is a layer of steel and then cinder block. If a tenant sets his apartment on fire, it's contained. I've got a closet full of oil paintings—stormy seas, decrepit barns, a matched set of cornucopias —but not even Jack can figure out a way to hang them.

"It means you're too practical," I said. "He wouldn't waste his dime."

Marty's face rumpled. "I'm sorry, Ma," she said. She threw the crust in the box and closed the lid. "We believe what we need to."

"Like you? Believing your husband's out playing poker with the boys? Wise up, Marty. Your father was a weak man, but he never strayed."

"Daddy was faithful because he was afraid of you."

"Then he was smarter than I thought."

Louis was never too swift. We met in the Marines, in a beer garden in Cherry Point, during one of his crying jags. Louis's buddies were torturing him with stories about the Sons of Neptune, about piercing his ear when he crossed the equator. I told Louis to lay off the shots and dry his eyes—they'd plug the hole when he got back.

"I don't bully Jack," Marty said. "That's not how a good marriage works."

"If you think you've got a good marriage, you're a bigger fool than your father."

Marty shook her head like something was in her ear. She gets that from Louis. Everything about that face rubs me the wrong way. I pulled Marty's plate out from under her and said I was tired. I didn't feel like watching a movie. Maybe we should call it a night.

I've toned down in my old age. Used to be when Louis gave me that scowl, I'd bean him with whatever was handy. I'd harp on him about little things, like not taking a bath or breaking wind at the table or changing the channel in the middle of my Westerns, but for some reason I always let the big stuff drop. I didn't harass him about swilling beer from noon till night, losing his job with Boulevard Bowl, losing our home. In all fairness, though, Louis never once asked where all those jelly donuts and tubs of tapioca from the Harvest House went, never uttered a snide comment when I got too big to tie my shoes.

Toward the end I laid off as best I could. The last fight we had was over oxygen. Louis was hooked up to a portable tank that he towed around the apartment like a wagon. I thought he was getting too dependent on it. Louis had an addictive personality. The Tuesday before he died, I caught him in the tub, the bath water gone cold, playing with the oxygen knob. He was already going through two tanks a week. "You don't need to be turning that up," I said, readjusting the dial.

"I can't breathe." He handed me a cloth to wash his back, then made a grab for the tank.

I slapped his hand. "You're never going to get off that stuff. You've got to start breathing on your own."

He fussed with the plastic tube strung under his nose, then balled his fists and sobbed. I gave Louis a good scrubbing, then went down to get the mail. When I got back, he was in a heap on the bathmat, his skin the color of bluebonnets. It's strange how my husband came into and went out of my life crying.

After Marty left, I watched the movie she'd rented. It was a romantic comedy with two actors who used to be soap stars. I put on a nightgown, took my pills, and sat by the phone to wait. At eleven, right when the news started, it rang. I turned off the television and settled down in Louis's chair before answering. There was a whooshing sound, like wet tires on pavement, and then a click.

"I knew you'd be up. I wanted to ask you something." It was Marty. "Do you think my marriage is really in trouble?" She asked this in a way that made me believe I had the power to confirm or relieve her fears.
I know Marty loves him, but Jack's a lousy excuse for a husband. When my son-in-law's not at the garage, he's at his favorite donut shop, drinking coffee till all hours of the night. Even if he's not cheating, he spends more time with his buddies than with Marty. They never fight, but they're never together. Louis, on the other hand, was always happy to be home. He said so every time he walked through the door. "Beast," he'd say, "It's good to be home." No man greets his wife like that for fifty-two years unless he's comfortable with their differences.

Instead of giving Marty a yes or no answer, what I really wanted to ask her was this: Thirty years from now, when your husband's gone and you've stopped worrying about all the time you have and don't have, after you've replaced all the muumuus you sent to Goodwill with landscapes you learned to paint from a TV show, would you, through years of static, recognize him if he called? When you're no longer afraid to be alone with a good meal, an empty pillow, your own thoughts, would you want him to call if he could?

" No."

© 2005, Barbara Stewart