Six months after her husband died, Lily Weilerstein found his sex diaries buried in the back shelf of the cedar closet in the hallway of the Upper West Side apartment where they had lived together for almost forty years, since the “Age of Possibility” as Walter referred to it, back when they were almost young. Their first place had been a railroad flat, four flights up, three avenues over on Columbus, amid the drug dealers and the prostitutes, the opera singers and the social workers, fine for newlyweds starting out. But when ten years into the marriage Walter had found an ad for a sublet on Riverside Drive hanging on the bulletin board at the union where he worked, Lily had thanked God for it; or, better yet, God’s secular equivalent (luck). She was eight months pregnant with their third child at the time. Three bedrooms and a maid’s. Who was the maid? Lily? Walter?
In the beginning they each took turns scrubbing the floors and the toilets. Activists, every year they renegotiated their marital contract in the spirit in which they embraced their life’s work—“To each according to his abilities, to each according to her needs.” Walter needed more than Lily did, this much was obvious, and so that little cupboard of a maid’s room quickly became his study—a room of his own—leaving Lily only a corner of the dinner table for her leaflets and her tower of files (political campaigns, abortion rights, the PTA, a real job as a family advocate in an assemblyman’s office, then that dazzling move on up to Chuck Schumer’s). But the cedar closet, that was Lily’s turf; and for her it spelled out luxury.
Now, forty-some-odd years later, Lily was on tippy-toe on top of an ancient stepladder, breathing in the must of rotting papers and old photographs, the stale air of wool mufflers and winter coats, the rich red wood having long ago squandered and released its scent; she was searching the high shelves for one of Walter’s gray cashmere V-neck sweaters, actually thinking the stupid soft thing might smell like him and give her comfort—what a moron! She had been grieving him at the time. But once Lily opened the first in a series of eight spiral notebooks—just the sight of Walter’s handwriting had made her gasp, his elegant European penmanship exhibiting such a striking physical lyricism that Lily could almost hear the swelling musical accompaniment, those telltale strings—she realized the treasure trove she had uncovered.
Like a sleepwalker, she carried the notebooks into the bedroom. There she lay on their queen-size bed, paging through the riveting, devastating accounts of Walter’s shenanigans—feet up, belly down, the same posture she’d adopted when she’d read movie magazines as a teenager in her father’s house in East New York—hunting frantically for something to make her feel better.
Thank God, Lily thought, she had been included, referred to throughout as “my beloved, my one” in the entries. Walter’s determination of their not-infrequent couplings had been quite accurate: “sweet, loving, a physical home.” During the long, involved course of their marriage, she and Walter had had a real romance; they fought and laughed and talked incessantly, on the phone, at the kitchen table, in the bathroom while he shaved and she sat on the toilet to pee. She’d counted on the fact that they’d loved each other always. The damn notebooks had done nothing to dispel that notion. But clearly they had not had the hot, exciting, dangerous, truly erotic sex that Walter had so evidently been drawn to. Names, dates, positions; her friends, his friends, her own first cousin, Ceil, long dead now, from cancer of the breast—beautiful, neurotic, unmarried Ceil had schtupped her Walter! And a smattering (this stung particularly, although she wasn’t quite sure why) of citations of liaisons with men, some referred to by initials, some by number, men from bars, public lavatories, men from trains, business trips—Walter had been a labor lawyer, he was always off somewhere protesting something, saving the world, she’d thought, and sucking, it appeared now, some teamster’s cock. As soon as she’d uncovered her husband’s secret life, Lily didn’t mourn him any longer.
Instead, once she’d laid her eyes on the messy by-product of a complex, human existence—Walter’s—Lily was jealous and competitive and bent on getting even. If Lily had not had this amazing sex with Walter, she’d not had it with anyone.
Such words he used! For desire alone: lustfulness, goatishness, horniness, libidinousness, lasciviousness, hot blood, hot pants, and hot rocks! Why, his descriptions of the female organ were almost embarrassingly adolescent—like a pink oyster, a wet flower, a warm glove. But for the male jeweled set he chose the rough-and-tumble bag and basket. How he reveled in his clandestine role as archivist, as diarist, that adulterer.
They had been married for fifty lovely years. And three lousy ones. The lousy ones coming at the end, after Parkinson’s had taken hold and Walter’s hands had first begun to shake and then his balance had faltered and finally he was reduced to taking little mincing baby steps like that character Tim Conway used to play on The Carol Burnett Show. One night, when she was sound asleep—caring for him had exhausted her so!—Lily had woken up abruptly to the sound of a large thump, her Walter falling and hitting his head on their hardwood floor. He’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and with their three grown children surrounding her—one flying in from LA, one from London, the other hopping in a cab across town—he’d undergone two bouts of neurosurgery the next morning. A month in the hospital and another three in rehab had brought him home, home to a life of wetting the bed, spilling food, and a lot of incomprehension; it had been incomprehensible to Lily that the man she had spoken with nonstop for half a century now had so little to say. It seemed incomprehensible to her that the golden old age they had planned for—Elderhostel, a trip to China, together always together, protesting whatever horrible mess came next—had been taken away from them. It had seemed incomprehensible to her as she bathed and dressed Walter and schlepped him from one form of therapy to another that this was the manner in which her brilliant, desirable, always-interesting, somewhat-difficult husband would end his life.
But of course that is the way it ended; after three miserable years, he’d had a series of seizures in their bed as she frantically called EMS, and then died, just died there in that same bed, a bed they had shared for so long, a bed where she had nursed him and slept with him and watched TV with him and read to him and fought with him and made up with him, the bed she was lying on right now! He died on their bed with a miserable, twisted angry expression on his face that actually held more intelligence than she had seen in it for a long, long time. In death, his face was accusatory. It said: Why did you let this happen to me?
It had been an expression she had tried to erase from her mind. At present, she nurtured its memory.
Lily rolled over, now, onto her back, away from her husband’s meticulous ledgers, and tried to capture her breath, which along with her heart, these days, had the habit of running away from her. On the ceiling of their room, there was a rather large water mark and an accompanying crack and fissure. It was in the shape of the city of Tallahassee. Was this blemish somewhat new, or had it, like the rest of the decay in her life—the age spots that bloomed like lichen across the top of her hands, the foreshortening plait of her spine—been stealthily creeping up on her?
Lily made a mental note to look into the fissure’s origins. Her second-generation upstairs neighbors—the building was rent controlled—a family of five, had long ago moved to the suburbs (Ridgefield? Scarsdale? Montclair!) and used the seven-room apartment as a pied-à-terre, so it was largely empty. She could try and summon the new super, Fred, whom she’d met only through an announcement slipped under her door. He didn’t answer his pager and was therefore never around when she needed him. Household upkeep, and the wrangling of craftsmen, had been Walter’s responsibility, one he’d acceded to Lily with regret when illness had left him no longer competent. Not that he was handy by nature; Walter wasn’t, he was an intellectual, a campaigner, an advocate—his was a life of the mind! (And now, it seemed, of the gonads.) But he hadn’t relished handing over any part of his domain, even the aspects that he most despised.
She was old. This fact was incontrovertible. Lily was old and would die soon. She sat up. All the blood rushed from her head. She placed her palms on the bedspread to steady herself. She looked at her left hand, with the simple silver wedding band—she and Walter, they’d had such ideas! they’d had such purpose!—and she watched as the swollen blue veins rolled over the thin piano wire that played her fingers as she stretched them out. She stood carefully, and then when she’d regained her balance, Lily walked out of her bedroom and down the hall, past that stupid cedar closet, kicking the door shut, and into the kitchen.
There she opened the refrigerator, poured herself some organic Georgia peach juice she kept around for the grandkids. She sat down at the kitchen table, knocking the fat brown calico cat, Buster, off his smug little square of sunshine. She moved her own head and shoulders into it, resting on her elbows. The light that emanated from the interior courtyard (the windows here blessedly south-facing) bathed her kitchen and bathroom and the two children’s bedrooms, which long ago had been converted into a guest room and a TV room—Lily and Walter, a TV room, what a laugh; they never had time for TV, not unless you counted CNN and 60 Minutes, although in the end, she’d found herself watching Oprah for company—she loved that southern light! The sunshine felt good on her face, and for a moment she rested. Then she reached an arm back into the cabinet where she kept the booze, opened a little airplane bottle of vodka, and put it in her juice.
Her husband was dead. She couldn’t tell on him to his mother and swing Mrs. Weilerstein around to her side, or confide in her own angry, ever-humiliated father, who might have gone after Walter with a kitchen knife, because Pop had gone after her sister Rina’s first husband with a kitchen knife when Rina had found him with the cleaning lady. They were all dead: Mrs. Weilerstein, Lily’s pop, Lily’s sister, her sister’s first husband, Myman, and her second husband, Paul, dead, dead, dead, and, thus, in a conspiracy against her. Lily was on her own.
She drank her peachy screwdriver in one long voracious gulp. She would live without them, all of them, the bastards.
Lily picked up the phone. She dialed the number of her eldest daughter, Mirra. The wanton, wild one. The slut.
“How do I live without them?” Lily asked.
Three times a week, on average, in the last six months, Lily had called her daughter with this question. She stared at the Nature Conservancy calendar that she’d taped up to the kitchen wall as she asked it. It was April. Flowers and showers. So what.
Mirra had been booted from her own home by her own husband a couple of years back, caught once again, this time on her third go-round, with a younger lover. (She had her father’s genes! It was hereditary! If only Lily had known this, she wouldn’t have bothered spending so many years blaming herself. Mirra’s promiscuity was the provenance of her father. She’s your fucking fault, Walter!) Mirra’s three children had spent the last few years doing a shuttle-bus route between their parents’ apartments, for the boy East Side to West, and the two girls, a car service up from the Village. Mirra had discovered, she’d say on good days—on the days when she wasn’t calling Lily up and asking: “How do I live without them?”—that the only way to have a life and children was divorce. All the pleasures of motherhood and still every other week one could sleep in, read a book, have sex, go to the gym, eat out, see a movie, talk on the phone, maintain a career. Mirra had once been a divorce attorney but was now in-house counsel at a bank. (Fieldston. Buck’s Rock Work Camp. Oberlin College. A volunteer in a food pantry in one of the poorest sections of Colorado. And now a banker! Where had they gone wrong?)
“What’s ‘live’?” said Mirra, slightly irritated, chewing gum. It was an every-other Sunday, so she was on duty, and Mirra was always testy when she was on duty; she loved being with her kids in the abstract. In the background, World War III raged on between Lily’s grandchildren. On a day this gorgeous, they duked it out inside the apartment. Lily would bet money the windows were all closed. “Be qualitative, Mom. What exactly do you mean?”
“I want to get laid,” said Lily. The vodka had gone to her head.
Now, Mirra cracked her gum audibly.
“Go to Florida,” said Mirra.
It was good advice, but required preparation.
“Too far,” said Lily.
“That’s where the boys are,” Mirra said. “At your age.” She shrieked over her shoulder: “Lizzie Borden Junior, put that knife away. Now.” She returned her attention to her mother. “You can’t go to a bar. You’re too old. You should dig up someone you used to know—some widower of a friend you always thought was cute, or a guy from high school, or the settlement house. City College. Recycling usually works for me. You could google. I googled Billy Rappaport last week, you know, from camp? And it paid off. He’s divorced and a real estate agent living in New Jersey. He took me to Le Bernardin and spent oodles of money, even before I let him go to second base in the back of the Uber.”
Mercifully, the line went dead. Lily hoped that one of the grandkids had yanked it out of the wall so that she wouldn’t have to talk to that idiot Mirra any longer. The younger grandchild, the evil one, Adam. He probably did it. Adam was Lily’s favorite.
The 92nd Street Y. That’s where the old folks go when they’re lonely. When they don’t go to Florida, Lily thought, and they’re not yet too demented. She’d never had time for all the stuff she’d read about in the Y’s catalog, but she’d always title-glanced the descriptions, oohing and ahhing over the lectures she would never attend, the art classes she could not make room for. Now Lily had space for a lot of things. Like reading the 92nd Street Y catalog cover to cover. There were poetry recitations: a waste of time. There were concerts, which she loved, especially the strings, and lectures. There were one-day Italian-language immersions—how clever, one-day immersions, for her set this was commitment enough. She picked up the phone and registered for the language lesson. Then she hit the minis again and got drunk enough to fall asleep before the six o’clock news, in the TV room—she was not interested in her queen-size bed, where in 1987 Walter had apparently practiced his own fingering on Mirra’s homely, overweight piano teacher.
He was an equal opportunity adulterer, that Walter. For a moment Lily allowed herself to miss his soft and generous heart.
*
The morning of Lily’s first and last Italian class, she had a wake-up call in the shower. She realized she could hold her candle in the looks department! She had been grooming her body painstakingly—not that she expected anything to happen right away, she didn’t expect anything to happen right away, she knew that these things, romantic things, take time, but she wasn’t looking for love, she was looking for sex; and so Lily prepared herself for the possibility. Because sex, apparently, sex according to Walter—that’s how she now referred to the notebooks in her mind, Sex According to Walter—could happen without even a cursory introduction.
She shaved her legs carefully across the Stiltony varicosities that mapped her calves and around the triangle of her pubic hair, silver now and sparse, and under her arms for the first time in months. Since before Walter died. Since way before Walter died. It took a while to do this. Her legs were still slim, but they were wrinkled, the skin fanned softly around her inner thighs in little pleated folds. She soaped her body carefully, each breast slippery and heavy as one hand lifted so the other could take a good swipe beneath and around it. She washed and conditioned her hair. When the water was off, she applied lotion to the soft moving mass of her skin, so separate now from the body beneath it. She’d taken tweezers to the dark down near her belly button, around her nipples, and then finally, daring the full-length mirror, around her chin. God. Then she’d stared for a good long time. Her breasts sagged, but they were still full, her skin was loose, but she wasn’t fat, and oddly enough her body looked younger than her face and hands. Far less crinkly. Surely she could find someone to have sex with her, someone old and desperate, nearly blind. Surely some old codger would be glad enough with the help of Vaseline to stick his penis in her tushy, one of the many sexual acts Walter had clearly relished—he’d waxed on about it so in his notebooks—and yet had not ever even once attempted with his wife. Lily turned around and spread her butt cheeks and examined her anus in the mirror, its pretty pink pursed lips. There was nothing wrong with her in this department.
She wrapped herself up in a towel. Applied makeup and deodorant, brushed her teeth and her drying hair. Then she padded down the hall to her bedroom, where she did her level best to dress attractively. She wore jeans, regular jeans, not the grandma kind but the Levi’s she’d been sporting since she’d admired them on the bodies of all those younger women at all those antinuke marches: jeans, short boots, a soft pink sweater. She first swept up her silver hair into a French twist, but the class was in Italian immersion; she wanted to look Italian! (Perhaps it had been a mistake to shave her armpits?) So she undid her hair and let it hang loose in waves around her shoulders. Was that too beachy and wild? She fastened the sides back into a princess-pony with a clip.
She’d been an attractive girl, with a good body, strong, large breasts, not-so-large hips. Over the years she’d thickened and then she’d slimmed; after Walter died she’d stopped eating. If same-sex dalliances had worked for her husband . . . Maybe a woman would be more forgiving. A pink oyster, a wet flower, a warm glove.
That’s when the ceiling literally fell in. Or at least a great big chunk of it, a piece in the shape of the entire state of Florida. It fell in a shower of paint and plaster, missing Lily by inches, covering her and her outfit with dust.
It took Lily a moment to recognize what had just happened. The ceiling was now on the floor, the world had turned itself upside down, her outfit and her day and her rug were seemingly ruined—and yet she herself was not hurt. She pinched the back of her own thin hand, the skin tented and stayed that way, elasticity a thing of the past. She was alive, the fractured state of Florida in pieces all around her. So much for discovering the joys of homoeroticism today. She was alive and alone with a mess to clean up, story of her life.
It was then that God spoke, or what sounded like God the way she had been trained to think of him, a masculine voice from on high, a mature contralto, stentorian.
“L—y, are you all right?”
L—y. Lily wasn’t sure if the voice was saying Lady or Lily, the personal salute being that much more appropriate for an all-knowing deity, the other more suitable to the “great truck driver in the sky,” and this, too, she found stunning.
She gazed heavenward and saw a hole amid the mess in her ceiling. In the center of the hole was an eye. It peered down at her.
“Perhaps a waterbed was not the best idea,” said the voice, deep and resonant, the inflection of a radio announcer, presumably attached to that eyeball—the iris bright blue, framed by black lashes, that much detail surprisingly clear. It was then that Lily noticed the steady drip drip drip of water raining down on her bed. It was thickening some of the plaster into glue. “I was unaware of the leak, but I shall have it patched up in no time.”
The situation was hurting Lily’s neck, so she stopped looking up. Instead, she exited her bedroom in search of a plastic sheet to cover her ruined coverlet and a change of clothes for herself—both located in the cedar closet. The mirror in the hallway startled her: Covered in plaster the way she was, she looked already dead, white as a ghost.
She had just stepped out of her outfit, so carefully selected and hopefully donned—could a dry cleaner save that soft, pink sweater?—and into a vintage Diane von Furstenberg knockoff Mirra had bought Lily as a bribe after she was kicked out of high school for giving blow jobs to the math team, when the doorbell rang.
Perhaps it was Fred, the new super, here to rescue her. Lily walked to the front door, tying the wraparound dress shut, trailing dust. Maybe he would be her guardian angel.
When she opened it, an elderly gentleman, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and jeans, stood unshaven in her doorway, his gray hair long and curling about his ears, blue eyes light as morning sky, framed by dark, long, interferon-produced lashes, Barbie lashes, wasted on a fellow. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this old guy was the owner of the waterbed upstairs. He was carrying a vacuum, a mop, and a garbage bag.
“Please,” he said. “It’s my fault, I didn’t realize the valve was leaking, allow me to man the cleanup.”
“Man” the cleanup? He could take over for all Lily cared, except who was he? She hadn’t seen him before.
“Who are you?” said Lily.
“Forgive me,” said the elderly gentleman. “Irv, Irv Gorenstein, I am Nathaniel Swan’s uncle. They have been letting me stay in their apartment.”
Nathaniel Swan was Lily’s upstairs neighbor.
“Well, Irv,” said Lily. “You’ve pretty much destroyed my bedroom. Now that there is a hole in the ceiling, I think we should call in the professionals, don’t you?”
“Professionals, shmessionals,” said Irv. “I’ve never been afraid of honest labor. I left grad school for the factories and the factories to work the rails! I’ve built bridges and I’ve built tunnels. I was a garbageman, a waiter, I registered voters. For one blissful summer I harvested grapes in France. I tended sheep on a commune in California, all this before I got my CPA.” He was inside the foyer of her apartment. He was leading the charge to clean up. Before she could say a word, Irv Gorenstein was halfway down her hallway.
“Well, if you insist,” said Lily, as if she’d had a choice. “But what about the flood upstairs?”
“Taken care of,” said Irv, over his shoulder. “I lived in Florida for a long time, I did a lot of pool maintenance.”
He was in her bedroom. She had no choice but to follow him.
“I was always stopping up leaks and mopping up deluges,” said Irv. He said it to the ether; he didn’t bother to look Lily’s way. He was too busy righting wrongs, making reparations. He had a lot to make up for. “Too bad the hurricanes didn’t wash that whole festering sore of a state away.” He was grateful now for a task at hand, this much was obvious.
“Parkland! The Pulse nightclub! A twelve-year-old Black kid with a life sentence! People of color turned away from the polls! And all of them registered Democrats! Is this America?”
Irv was a gray-haired whirling dervish, an aged Deadhead spinning across her hardwood floor. (Lily knew from Deadheads, her middle child, Eric, had spent two years of his life on a drug-addled “tour.” She and Walter had found him tripping his brains out in a parking lot in Red Rocks, Colorado, surrounded by hundreds of pathetic, lost children just like him. Hazelden. Recovery. Now he had his own freightshipping company in Los Angeles. He was married with a mortgage and two kids of his own. Lily would never forget that evening in Colorado—Eric’s pupils like concentric circles, his face as crimson as the enormous ridge of rocks that surrounded them in the glow of sunset—Walter picking the boy up like a baby, hoisting him over his shoulder, turning to her: “Lil,” he said, “did you ever see such a color?” Indeed, the mountains looked like a slab of rare steak. A sensualist, even while rescuing his son, Walter had been overwhelmed by the gorgeousness displayed before him and was momentarily stopped by it. At the time, Lily wasn’t sure if this quality made her love her husband more or gave her cause to hate him.)
Now Walter was dead, and here in her apartment was Irv Gorenstein, the aged hippie who’d probably sold her Eric his first tab of windowpane. Irv was lifting huge, soggy chunks of plaster and cramming them into the garbage bag.
“The duvet I’ll send out to the dry cleaner’s,” he said. “They know me there.”
“Okay,” said Lily, but she was thinking: They know him there? Why? Because he does the deliveries?
“You should take a shower, shake the dust out of your hair,” Irv said. “It’s dimming the silver, obscuring the shine.”
He’d noticed the shine in her hair! Lily’s hand went to pat her head. Her palm met grit.
“Okay,” she said, obediently, like a little girl, a little girl flattered and scolded, perhaps flirted with? She headed back into the bathroom, which was still damp from her shower of an hour ago.
Once again, Lily stepped into the tub. Once again, she let the hot water pound down upon her. In the rising steam, watching the swirl of dust collect around her drain, funneling downward like sand in an hourglass, Lily stopped to think: There was a man in her house, a stranger! She was naked and alone in the shower. Before fear or common sense kicked in, opportunity knocked. Perhaps this Irv would be her salvation. No guts, no glory, better late than never, blah blah blah and blah. To hell with Italian immersion. She’d save the fare on the bus crawling across the park.
Irv was in possession of a penis and his eyes were pretty. Lily stepped out of the shower and wrapped a velvety pink towel around herself, exposing her shoulders, the immutable beauty of her collarbone, her soft white arms.
She walked back into her bedroom.
Irv Gorenstein was still there, in Lily’s boudoir, his back to her, his tie-dye like a bull’s-eye around his potbelly, but from the rear, except for what appeared to be a little rattail of a ponytail, she could almost admire the strength of his slightly curving spine.
“Do you believe in love?” asked Lily.
Irv turned around slowly. “I used to,” he said. “Back in my days at the commune.” He paused and said sadly: “But three wives later and all that alimony, I learned that nothing comes for free.”
“What’ll it cost me, then?” asked Lily, aiming for insouciance, but hearing the little tremolo of desperation herself, as the words vibrated and caught on their journey out her throat.
“Are you serious?” said Irv. He was facing her now, black
Hefty garbage sack in one hand, the hose of his vacuum in the other. He held it upright from the hip like a massive, silver hard-on. That bull’s-eye belly! She’d have to do her best to put it out of her mind.
“Well,” said Lily. “My husband is dead.”
“I wish my wives were.” Irv sighed. “Two of them joined forces and are sharing a condo in Palm Beach. For all their connubial pretense,” he said, “I can’t imagine that they’re”—he put the hose between his legs and lifted one hand into the air to make bunny ear quotation marks—“ ‘doing it.’ ” He sighed again. “Just a business deal to shake me down.”
The misogyny! Lily thought.
“The other wife, my Jenny, she was my high school sweetheart and it was the miracle of my life that she came back to me! We re-met around the pool at assisted living. She was visiting her sister, Linda. We were only married for a few years, too young, too young, and so when fate once again brought us together, we decided we’d given up too early. But after the trouble, oy, all that trouble!”—here Irv Gorenstein sighed a guttural old Jewish man sigh, one time-traveling through him from another generation, a sigh that could not be ignored, it reminded Lily of her father’s—“Even fat, sweet, loyal Jenny could not rise me from my torpor.” He shook his head.
“Your bedroom,” he said, “Look at that. It’s almost spick-and-span. You need a new ceiling of course, and a professional carpet cleaner. I will personally buy you fresh bedding, a quilt, if you like, or I could make you one myself.” He lowered his gaze to the rug.
“You quilt?” said Lily. If she were a man, she would have felt her own erection begin to wilt. “You’re a quilter?”
“Life is all about reinvention,” said Irv. “The question is how am I going to do it this one last time.” He sat himself down on the corner of the mattress.
Oh God, no, thought Lily, is this the part where you whine on and on about your life?
“I need to get dressed now,” said Lily. “You need to go back upstairs to your apartment.”
“I didn’t take my Viagra this morning,” said Irv. “But I’m game if you are.” He spoke to the floorboards. “You are a Democrat, right?”
“I’m practically a socialist,” said Lily.
“I and others like me are the reason we are in this mess,” said Irv. He put his head in his hands and began to cry. “I’m clinically depressed,” said Irv. “As if you haven’t noticed. The Viagra interferes with the Wellbutrin.”
“None of this sounds very promising,” Lily said. She was sure she’d never been so rude.
“Of course you disdain me,” said Irv, between sobs. “I disdain myself.”
“Oh, Irv,” said Lily. Her whole life she’d been consoling men. The response was Pavlovian, the practice ingrained in her by her own mother, who spent much of her time pacifying her insecure and whiny husband.
“Now you ‘Oh, Irv,’ ” said Irv. “But when you find out the truth, you will no longer bother to ‘Oh, Irv,’ me.”
“What? What?” said Lily. “Don’t make me guess. I’m too old, there’s so little time. Where’s the deal-breaker in this equation?” asked Lily. She was quoting Mirra, Mirra-thebanker on the phone.
“I’m from Palm Beach,” he said.
“So,” said Lily.
He looked up at her. “So, the butterfly ballots? The morons who voted for Pat Buchanan? One of them was me.”
Lily stared at him. “That was years ago!” she said.
“No, no, no,” he said. “I changed the course of history! I’m one of the idiots who put Bush in the White House. And then what? 9/11. Iraq. Syria. The destabilization of the Middle East. All that death and destruction! Mass migration. The rise of nationalism. Without Bush, there would be no Trump. Without Irv Gorenstein, there would be no Bush.”
“What about Obama?” said Lily.
“Obama,” Irv said. “For eight straight years I was stoned on Obama.”
He sighed again. That sickening sigh.
“At the end of the day, lovely Lily, it all begins with me,” Irv said.
Lily considered this. There was both wisdom and insanity to his narcissism. Maybe it was valid, at this point, with all the ethical backsliding and hate-mongering, the about-face to bigotry and worship of money, to say that the life’s work of the Irvs, the Lilys, and the Walters had been a waste of time. Her boy Eric had babbled on and on about the sand mandala when he was young and seeking. Tibetan Buddhists on their knees for weeks, crafting intricate floor paintings out of crushed gemstones, only to sweep them away after their glorious completion. Eric-the-junkie had intoned to his even-then-passé parents, old-schoolers bent on building systems that would stick, that the monks were celebrating the ephemeral beauty of physical existence. While he louchely lectured them from their worn-out sofa, the kid’s chocolatebrown irises spiraled like brownie mix in an electric stand mixer. Be here now, said her poetic boy, her favorite, high that time on heroin.
No wonder Walter fucked anything that moved.
“I think you’d better go home,” Lily said, readjusting her bath towel more snugly around her breasts.
Irv rose sadly to his feet.
“You shouldn’t blame yourself,” said Lily. “You’ll feel better when you wash your face.”
“Maybe,” said Irv, doubtfully.
Lily handed him his vacuum and mop, picked up the garbage bag herself, and started their progress down the hall by giving Irv a little shove. She guided him all the way to the front door.
When she opened it, an attractive and fit man in black jeans and a black T-shirt, holding a tool kit, was standing on her doormat.
“Ahhh, Fred,” said Irv. “You received my messages.”
Fred’s face did not move a muscle. It was carved, Lily supposed, out of a tea-stained wood. He looked like the statue of an angel from another civilization, perhaps one blessedly from the future? His green eyes glimmered for a moment, like there was energy pulsing deep inside him, although maybe it was the rich, red sheen of his glossy hair—the color of the interior of her cedar closet—that caused those eyes to glow. Or could be, they just flickered in amusement at the sight of this ridiculous geriatric situation? The one Lily regrettably and mysteriously found herself a part of.
“The problem is in the bedroom,” said Irv.
Fred, lithe as a jungle cat, sidled past Irv in his tie-dye and Lily in her towel, and made his way down the hall.
“It was a pleasure to talk to you,” said Irv, focusing now entirely on Lily. “You are a good person.”
Good, shmood, thought Lily. Good never got anybody anywhere; but she said: “Thank you.”
“Perhaps I can take you out sometime for a cup of coffee?”
“We’ll see, Irv,” said Lily. “God knows what’s next for any of us. At this age I don’t bother buying green bananas.”
He brightened a little at the statement. He took the garbage bag from Lily’s hand. Then Irv turned, also with his vacuum and mop, entered the vestibule and buzzed the elevator button.
Back in her apartment, in the bedroom, the mysterious feline Fred was eyeballing the hole in the ceiling.
“Some plaster should take care of that, no?” said Lily. Fred turned his gaze from skyward to sideways, taking Lily in with those emerald eyes.
They stood this way for several moments, before Lily realized that her towel had slipped, exposing the left side of her chest.
Fred was staring at her breast.
Well, why the hell not, thought Lily. You only live once.
She let the towel fall to her feet.
(She’d seen this move many times in the movies!)
Later, when they were naked on the bed in the TV room, Fred having entered her from behind, one hand stroking her clitoris, the other cupped around her breast (Lily had half expected his body to be hairless, his crotch as smooth and seamless as a Ken doll’s, but no, Fred was all man, all man in every department. She would tell this afterward to a proud, but envious “way-to-go Mom!” Mirra), Lily had felt the urge to cry out: Oh Walter! How could you have forsaken me?
But he was dead and Lily wasn’t.
And so, her cri de coeur came out as one great, big, fat, satisfying moan of ecstasy.
__________________________________
From Fools for Love: Stories © 2025 by Helen Schulman. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.