of the long, tunneling flat. An early fall breeze blew through the open windows at the front of the apartment. The yellowed trees rocked their boughs gently. They rested in each other’s arms. She told of her disappointment with her parents, and he told her about the confrontation and then the break with his father. She wept. Then they were kissing and embracing desperately. Clothes came off as if of their own volition. At some point they were both naked. This was the point when they normally paused and saw to their precautions.
But now, in the swirl of anger and desire, he wanted nothing between them. Nothing—no parent, no law, no withholding thin skin—nothing could keep them apart, not by a millimeter or a million miles. She was no less caught up in desire than he, but not so angry. There was a moment when she started to say something, but then his hips were cradled by her opened legs, and she could not and did not want to stop it. For months and years later he would look back on that first instant when he was fully inside her. He would want to forget it, but he knew that at that moment he felt an onrushing ecstasy and yet held back a piece of himself, reserving it for anger, for spite of his father. The ecstasy rolled, gained momentum, then crested and broke over him like a wave. It washed away the anger and engulfed him in the love he shared with this woman. But still, it was clear and undeniable that he had interrupted their fusing and tainted it with the dishonoring of his father.
What was it about a man, he wondered as she drifted off in a nap, that made him turn love against love, working death in himself by that which is good? He decided he should not completely trust himself. He turned to her with a resolve to build and fashion a love that was pure, that did not rely on spite or hatefulness or any kind of exclusion for its definition and animation. He reclaimed her and them on the basis of this resolution, poised like a marathon runner with eyes on the distant goal of pure love.
≤
But then, barely two months later, she was gone. That was what people said about people who had died. They were “passed away,” “departed,” “no longer with us”—in short, finally and irrevocably “gone.” His life, like a calendar hinged on the advent of a new millennium, pivoted on this before and after. The before was when she was not gone. Those were the days when it was not too hard, usually, to imagine God smiling on creation: in spring sunshine, in soft rains, in the raucous play of children and the full gallop of a fine horse. The after was when she was and would always be gone. In the after he was numb to the surrounding world, rain or shine, imploded into the black hole of himself. His laughter, when it came, rang hollow to his own ears. Eventually he forgot how to cry. For all he would let anything touch or move him, he might as well have been walking about in an astronaut’s suit. He imagined exactly that sometimes. Helmeted and carapaced, he was insulated, invulnerable to whatever toxicity (or perfume) other people released into the atmosphere he did not share. He breathed in only the fumes of his private despair. Like a floating spaceman, he drifted along on the momentum built up in the before part of his life.
Here was the bitter story Val’s parents told: With them, she had gone downstate to visit her cousins. One warm but not too hot afternoon, the cousins decided to hike a nearby riverside forest. It was a beautiful place, with impressive draws cut into limestone, their walls glowing with an emerald light filtered through the foliage of trees and vines. A well-worn trail led by these small canyons, then climbed up and up, until green gave way to blue and you burst out atop towering cliffs. Far below coursed the river. Like a placid beast of burden, it carried felled trees and resting waterfowl and massive barges. In the air above it, hawks spiraled high on thermal currents. As cozy and secure as a forest might be, there was something liberating about working your way through a dense enclosure of woods, onto a promontory from which you could see as far as forever.
Maybe it was this sudden and exhilarating sense of freedom, they said, that impelled Val to venture out on the edge of the cliff. In all events, she was nearer the rocky cusp than either of her cousins. Then the soft stone crumbled and broke away, and just like that she disappeared. Or, to be more precise about how the witnesses put it, she was “gone.” Reluctant to move any closer to the cliff’s edge, the pair of cousins shouted out her name. Only echoes of their own calls returned to them. Eventually one cousin made brave and crawled, then wriggled on her stomach, so that she could look over the drop. All the long way down, plunging into greenery below, she saw no sign of her disappeared relative. She returned to her sister’s side, then the two retreated hastily back the way they had come. They breathlessly accosted a ranger at the park’s lodge office. The ranger questioned the panicked cousins, then enlisted a colleague for the rescue.
Her body was found two hundred feet below the point where it fell. It had struck at least two abutments on its drop. That and unyielding tree branches, to say nothing of the force of final impact, had horribly bent and mangled her. Three hours later police escorted her father to the mortuary. He came back out in shambles, a much older man than he was when he entered. His daughter’s broken body and ruined face were so horrible he advised his wife against viewing it. She had never seen her husband so ravaged, and finally she relented. Since they were forgoing an open-casket funeral, they had her cremated in the downstate mortuary. They returned home a week later, bearing their only child in an urn.
At her interment her ashes, safe within a toy-sized and ornate casket, were reverently placed in a hole three feet deep. A few of the bereaved, those closest to her, grimly formed in a single file line for a turn at dropping a handful of soil into the grave. Al, still shell-shocked from the news of her death, stood in line behind her parents. For several excruciating moments, her father and mother awkwardly looked at each other. Neither wanted to commit the terribly final act of beginning to close the grave. Then her mother stepped forward brusquely, knelt on both knees, and scooped at the small earthen pile. She managed to grasp a fistful of soil and move her hand above the hole, but then her hand would not open and release the dirt. She breathed deeply and stifled her sobs. She bent down, her arm extending in the grave until her knuckles brushed her daughter’s casket. Then she opened her hand, withdrew her arm, and struggled to her feet, with a relative sidling up to assist her.
Next her father dragged himself forward, as if to his own execution. He took hold of a couple of clods and straightened up over the grave. His hand trembled, so violently that the clods jostled and crumbled in his loosely closed fingers, sifting out beside the grave as much as into it. “Oh, Jesus!” he cried out. Solicitous relatives helped him move again.
It was Al’s turn next. He sympathized with her parents. But he was numb, chronically stunned, not quite believing she was really dead, really gone. Let this be one of our lighthearted games, he thought, a kind of hide-and-seek in which he actually knew exactly where she was secluded but bumbled around as if he were clueless. Complete the ritual with the dirt, so as to be released and go to find her, to talk to her and listen to her and take her in his arms. In this state, he was able to perfunctorily enact his duty. He dropped soil into the grave, glancing at and away from the golden box at its bottom. Now I’ve completed the count: ready or not, girl, here I come! He staggered away from the graveside.
And he kept staggering, wandering in a daze for a week or two, half expecting her to bound off a car at the train stop or knock on his door some evening when the summer light had gone buttery and enshrouded everything in a tender veil. But he couldn’t find her or be found by her, and gradually grew tired and then frustrated with the game. Okay. I give up. Come out, come out wherever you are. And still she made no appearances. For several days he was flooded with unbearable anxiety, trying not to remember the funeral, the thing with the dirt, fighting and pushing it all back with memories of her pert nose, her so-alive eyes, her cinnamon-freckled breasts, her touch and embrace.
Then he was worn down and overcome. Frighteningly, bitterly, it was getting harder and harder to remember her as she was, in all her spiritual and physical vitality. More and more he could only think of her as dusty ashes and shards of incinerated bones. He could not find her, he could not recover her, in any other form. Only then, tortured beyond his endurance, could he admit to himself that she had passed away, she had departed, that she was no longer with him or anyone else on the face
