Leaving Lucy Pear(23)

Ira touched the pain in his chest. Vera wasn’t part of the story anymore, he knew. He had told her she could leave, her last night, to make it easier for her. He had never regretted that. Yet he missed her. He doubted he would live long enough to stop missing her. Whereas Henry, he predicted, would live forever and barely be cognizant of what he had, or lost, along the way. Ira watched a fishing boat trudge into the harbor, its gunwales low, laden. He heard the call of the new buoy. It didn’t bother him as it did Bea. He found it comforting, actually: that the buoy was out there, calling with the water and the wind, keeping Ira apprised of what was going on in the world. He let his eyes close.

Today Beatrice Cohn lives with her uncle, Ira Hirsch, on Eastern Point and he is uncertain that she will ever leave. He doesn’t want her to leave, for his own sake, but he wants her to want to, for hers. He would never say this to her. Also he would never tell her that even after all these years, he cannot tell if she is actually unstable, or just very sad.





Eight




And Albert Cohn, he wasn’t with another man. He was alone, in his underwear, at Bea’s writing table. He was a large man, and the table was very small, with fussy legs that knobbed into his calves and a sliding leaf—stuck for years in its fully extended position—that was slowly but steadily purpling his elbow. Albert could have chosen somewhere else to write his letter; the house on Acorn Street was full of horizontal surfaces. But the table helped solidify his resolve. It was like a perpetual pinch, urging him on.

He was writing to Bea, to tell her that he wanted to live alone. This was his first problem: his basic purpose was undermined by the fact that he already was living alone. He’d been living alone for months and could continue living alone, doing whatever in hell he wanted, until Uncle Ira died, or—if Bea decided to stay on in Gloucester, which she might, for all sorts of reasons, some known to her, some not—maybe forever.

So what was it he wanted to tell her? He didn’t even know what he meant: living alone. Everyone was always living alone, if you wanted to get depressing about it. If he didn’t live here alone, he would live somewhere else alone. If he lived with another man, as he allowed himself to imagine in the narrow crawl spaces that intersected rational thought, he would: (a) still be alone, because everyone was; (b) perhaps cease to exist, because he didn’t know any men who lived in this way; and (c) be miserable, because the man he wanted to live with had just last week told Albert he didn’t want to see him ever again.

Dear Bea, I’m so sorry

Dear Bea, I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing to say

Dear Bea, I’m not even sure that this will upset you, what I have to say, which makes it all the more confusing—to know how to say it, or even to know why I should bother saying it

Albert was hungry. This was another problem; he hadn’t left the house all week and was very, very hungry. He rubbed his calf. He traced the ridges the table leg had left in his skin. He was asking for a divorce, he supposed. But the word was so dramatic, and final; it seemed to belong to another marriage than theirs. He could imagine Bea reading it and bursting into laughter.

He released his calf, winced, took up another piece of stationery, made for Bea’s confirmation ceremony fourteen years ago. Lillian had chosen the shade of pink, and the embossed initials: BTH. Beatrice Theodosia Haven, Theodosia for Feigel, who had been Lillian’s or Henry’s grandmother, Albert couldn’t remember which. He also couldn’t remember how they’d gotten Theodosia out of Feigel (they had drawn the T from the Hebrew equivalent of Feigel, Tsipporah) but the distance between the words represented for him part of the problem. Bea was so attached, on the one hand, and so utterly unattached, on the other.

Even when they met, at Congregation Adath Israel’s Purim Ball, where Albert played one of Vashti’s handmaidens with such gusto and so much chest hair that he found himself attacked afterward by a herd of young women, Bea was not among them. It wasn’t until the party was winding down and Albert, having extracted himself, was walking toward the men’s room, that he felt a hand on his elbow and found himself being steered toward an out-of-the-way window by Beatrice Haven, who wasn’t known to bat her eyelashes at a man, let alone touch him. She started to introduce herself, but Albert smiled and said, “I know who you are. No Booze Beatrice. I’m Albert Cohn, who likes to drink.”

Bea did not blink. “But do you like women, Mr. Cohn?”

He unhooked himself from her arm. “Excuse me?”

“Do you prefer us?”

“That depends on the context.”

“In the context of marriage, Mr. Cohn.”

“I don’t prefer to be married.”

“And what if the woman, hypothetically, didn’t want to be married either?”

Albert, looking around the room, lowered his voice. “And why wouldn’t this hypothetical woman want to be married?”

“Let’s say she was strange. Or lonely.”

“If she were lonely, wouldn’t she want to marry?”

“That would depend on the nature of her loneliness.”

“I see.” Albert nodded, trying to look sober, but he’d drunk a lot of whiskey and the conversation was so far from anything he’d ever participated in. A kind of giddiness swept through him.

“Forget loneliness,” Bea said. “Let’s say she’d simply had enough of men.”