The Pull of the Moon_ A Novel - By Elizabeth Berg Page 0,41

seeing a man cry and I said oh no, not at all, hoping my face was not giving me away. He said Well, looked to the door. It was very quiet. You could hear the low buzz of the living-room lamp. I said suddenly, I have a bottle of wine, would you like a drink? He nodded, sat down again, and I poured us two coffee cups full, and we began to talk.

He told me how his wife died, it was an aggressive form of lymphoma. From the time she was diagnosed until the day she died was only seven months. She was thirty-three. He said on the day they got the bad news, she came home and changed out of her dress and he saw her standing at their bedroom window in her slip, and he thought, this is the end of normal. I don’t know how I’ll live without her, he said, I don’t know what I am without her. They had no children—she’d not been able to conceive, and he said now he didn’t know whether that was good or bad. I know children usually offer some compensation, he said, but if I had someone around with her face, with her eyes … Then he asked did I have any children. I said yes and I told him about Ruthie. I told him little stories about her growing up, from bringing her home from the hospital all the way up to moving her into her own place. He listened, but in an abstract way that let me know my words were just a calming distraction. He listened the way a child listens to soothing words from a parent; the content doesn’t matter, it’s the fact of a kind voice that counts, that works.

I realized at one point that my throat hurt a little from talking and I looked at my watch and it was 2:50. I started laughing and he looked at me and I said do you know what time it is? I showed him my watch and he said oh I’m so sorry and I said no, you didn’t make me do this. I wanted to do this. My hair had started to fall down from the bun I’d put in so long ago, and I pulled the pins out and he said oh, you have long hair, that’s nice. I said well, when you got to be my age it looked sort of silly, but I had always had long hair, I didn’t feel myself without it. He said what do you mean “your age,” how old are you? I had an awful temptation to say, How old do you think? but I hate it when people ask that. How they cock their heads when they ask that. Then I thought of saying, I’m sixty-four, so he would say how young I looked. But I didn’t. I said, I’m fifty, and I felt ashamed. He nodded. The age of losses, I said, and he said, pardon? I nearly yelled, This is the age of losses! as though he were some wizened geezer sitting next to me cupping his hand around his ear. What are you losing? he asked. And what I thought I was losing in the face of what he had in fact lost seemed so ridiculous. My great tragedy is that I got to live past thirty-three.

I said, you know, it’s so small. It’s so egocentric. But I’m losing … well, my youth. My fertility. My sex appeal. I feel like I’m losing myself. It’s so scary. I feel like all the self I’ve ever been is leaving, and this new self is standing at the station. I don’t know who this new person is. Every day I look in the mirror expecting to see my old self back, and every day I have changed more into this new thing.

Well, he said, you haven’t lost your sex appeal. You haven’t lost your appeal at all, I hope this is all right to say. I sat still, said nothing. He said, you’re a very attractive woman, physically. And you’re attractive beyond that. You’re very … present.

Well, I said. I couldn’t look up.

He said, I remember when my mother went through her change. For a while, I think for a whole year, she acted crazy as hell. She was all depressed and weepy—used to lock herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out, I don’t know what she was doing in there, but it