what to do,” he said. “I mean, I’m grateful, and I should be overjoyed, but I’m just beginning to really like it here and I’m learning the language and making friends. Think they’d let me defer the fellowship for a year?” “I already asked her about that possibility,” she said. “She told me you have to accept it now for this year or reapply with completely different supporting material for the next year, though you wouldn’t need to get new references. That’s their policy.” “The madame’s staring at me. I have to hang up. I guess I’ll take it, then. My feelings are mixed, as you can see, but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. And California should be fun.” “Monsieur?” the owner said. “Sometimes,” his sister said, “you have to give up something good to get something better or even comparable. And I’ll fly out to California to see you, which will be a nice break for me.”
And his next happiest moment? Can’t think of one now, or where he was just as happy or even happier than he was in some of the last ones he mentioned. Maybe, going very far back, when he won the All Around Camper Award at the sleepaway camp he went to with his sisters and his brother Robert in the summer of 1948. So when he was told he won it by the head counselor. Or when the principal of his elementary school—this was in 1949, a couple of months before he graduated—called him and several other eighth-grade students into his office to tell them they’d each gotten into one of New York’s elite public high schools, and one of them got into two and would have to choose, and which schools. His was Brooklyn Tech. He was happy but at the same time a bit disappointed because he wanted to go to Stuyvesant, where Robert was a sophomore at, but he obviously didn’t do well enough on its admissions test to get in. Odd, because he thought the Stuyvesant test was a breeze compared to the one for Brooklyn Tech.
Any other time? Oh, how could he forget? They were in a little hill town in Southern France, looking at a Giacometti drawing on the wall of a small museum, when he turned to his wife half a year before she became his wife, and said “Let’s get married.” She said “Are you joking?” and he said “I’m dead serious. Here, or in Nice by a rabbi if they have one there or some justice of the peace,” and she said “If I got married again it would have to be in New York so my folks and relatives and friends could come. And I’d think you’d want your family there too. But let’s talk about it in a few months.” “So you’ll consider it then as a possibility?” and she said “Let’s say I’m not rejecting the idea outright, as preposterously as it was presented,” and he said “You don’t know how happy you’ve just made me. All right. I’ll shut up about it for a few months.” Of course, he hugged and kissed her and then he took her hand in his and led her to the next Giacometti drawing.
And the saddest moments in his life? His wife’s death, of course. Next Robert’s. Then his younger sister’s. Then his oldest brother in a boating accident a few years ago. Then his mother’s. Next his father’s. After that, his two best friends dying a year apart, both from strokes. But he doesn’t want to think about them. Actually, the second saddest moment of his life had to be when his wife, two years before she died, was in the hospital for pneumonia and her doctors told him she’d have to be intubated and that there was still only a slight chance she’d survive. “One to three percent,” they said, or was it “three to five”? He can’t say, when he was told by them several days later that she’ll survive, that it was one of the happiest moments in his life. He was too sad at the time. He’d just seen her in her ICU room—in fact, he remembers at that moment looking at her on her bed—struggling with the ventilating tube inside her. “Get this thing out of me . . . please, please,” her painful look seemed to say. No, he knew her look; that’s what it was saying. But if he was going to list the saddest moments in his life, those would probably be it, plus a few he missed. His wife first, his wife second, then the rest in the order he gave.
And, to end it, something like this: He gets off the bench and walks the rest of the way to his house. The cat’s waiting for him by the kitchen door. He wants to be let in and fed. He’ll want to be let out after, but he won’t let him. It’s already getting dark. He gets the opened can of cat food out of the refrigerator, gets the cat’s empty plate off the floor, washes it and spoons the rest of the food in the can on it and puts it back on the floor. The cat starts eating. He’s about to make himself a drink—something with rum tonight, he thinks; he’s been drinking vodka every night for a week—when he realizes he forgot the Gorky book on the bench. Leave it till tomorrow. No, it’ll be gone, or if it rains, wet. Get it now.
He goes back to the bench. The book’s gone. Who’d want to take it? Nobody was around; no cars were in the lot, so nobody was in the church. And really, no one but a Russian literary scholar or maybe a serious fiction writer would be interested in it. Maybe someone who lives around here was out for a walk and saw it. He wants to look at the good side of things. So it’s possible a passerby got it and will bring it to the church office tomorrow and say he or she found it on one of the benches outside and thought it might belong to someone connected to the church. Ah, just forget it, he thinks. He’s never going to read anymore of it. If his wife were alive, he’d go to the church the next day—midafternoon, though; he’d give the person who might have taken it time to bring it to the church—and ask if anyone turned in a book about the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky. He goes home, carefully opens the kitchen door so the cat doesn’t run out, and gets some ice out of the freezer and puts it in his glass. Rum it is, with a sliver of lime.
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