and bends forward to make eye contact. “So why?”
Stanley sighs and opens the door to his apartment, motions for her to come in and she surprises him and does, leaving him suddenly worried about the way it looks or what he might have lying about that she might latch onto. She walks straight and picks up a copy of Wrestlemania under which is a copy of the New Yorker and Harper’s, a stack of Wall Street Journals and all of his gardening catalogs. And under Herb Alpert she finds Frank Sinatra and Louis Prima and Cab Calloway and a whole library of classical. “What’s the deal?”
“My son. He wouldn’t leave me alone, said he was going to move in with me. I just want him to have a life.” He pauses, realizing how stupid it all sounds as he says it, recognizes how he has avoided dealing with all the barriers standing between the two of them, barriers that have been in place for as long as he can remember. “He thinks I saved him and that he’s forever indebted to me or some such crap and I want him to break off and have his own life.”
“But isn’t this kind of extreme?”
“Yes, but it’s such a long tiring story.” He waits, giving her the chance to bail, but instead she sits and makes herself comfortable and motions that he continue. “He fucked up early in life—always in trouble—one of those kids who always got caught, then it looked like he was on a path and was going to be okay but no such luck. Too vulnerable. I want him to have a life. Kids need to live their own lives.” He takes out the Herb Alpert album and puts it on the stereo. “It keeps people from bothering me.” They both laugh. “In the beginning, people would come by and want to hear it, say things like, I haven’t thought of this in years, but after a while, it got old. Even Toby is sick of it.”
“But surely there’s an easier way to do this with your son,” she says. “I mean, think of what you’re missing by not having a real relationship with him.”
“We’ve never had a relationship,” he says, and the weight of the words hit him. He sits down, shocked by how sad and stupid it all is. “Oh God. We really have never had a relationship.” He puts his head in his hands and takes several deep breaths. “Me telling him what to do. That’s it. That’s all.” He feels her hand on his shoulder, patting and then held there. “Enough about me,” he finally says. “Tell me about you. Tell me about Joe Carlyle.”
She begins talking and he listens. In fact, he can’t believe how open and honest she is, her voice rising and falling in a way that he finds mesmerizing. She is able to describe in a few simple words the loneliness she felt in her life, the kind of loneliness that others don’t really see because everything looks so good and full from the outside. An inner loneliness. She said it was something she always thought would go away and then she thought, no, you just learn to live with it. Then she met Joe Carlyle at the height of loneliness and it felt like the whole world shifted. She was almost forty and was suddenly aware of all the doors that were going to begin closing—childbirth and career pursuits, even the geography of what you call home, family members and friends aging and dying and leaving new empty spaces to fill.
“Sounds pretty depressing, doesn’t it?” she asks, and smiles at him in a way he has never seen her smile. She is relaxed, leaning on the arm of his sofa, fingers toying with a piece of needlework thrown over the arm that Martha had always kept there and that Ned had reverently placed just so when he helped Stanley move into this place. Martha had done the work as a young woman and now Rachel Silverman’s sturdy ringless hand strokes the fine threads in a way that is tender and admiring. “But it feels good to talk.” She nods at him. “It does. It feels like I’m alive again. Which is what I felt that summer I met Joe. We live days and weeks and months and years with so little awareness of life. We wait for the bad things that wake us up and shock our systems. But every