In his little house attached to mine, we cut each other’s hair. There’s not much of it, both of us balding so that only the hair along the sides keeps growing, though I still have a little on top. We don’t talk about my wife and her postcards. Next stop, Trieste! She signs herself Z. I trim him close, now it’s summer and his hat line is perpendicular to his white sideburns. When it’s my turn, he tells me my bald spot is pink from sun, I should be careful. Maybe my sister, Eve, calls from Atlanta, or his granddaughter from San Francisco, or the mechanic calls about the Buick being ready, or Dr. Diek’s office for a checkup on his eye they slipped the cataract out of last January. I have an incipient one myself. Distances are getting fuzzy. And I tell him the pilot light is out again on his stove. I smell gas. He says “Oh,” and goes into the kitchen, the scissors still looped on his fingers, and puts his hand on the stove top over the pilot to see if it’s warm. “You’re right,” he says. I get up, carefully folding the bath towel that is draped around my shoulders so I don’t scatter any of the clippings, and go into the kitchen and lift up the stove lid and light the pilot. I know what he’s going to say. “I can’t smell anything anymore. That’s why I feel it with my hand, to see if itwarm. If it’s warm, I know the pilot’s okay.”

She sends postcards. And something in me—calm, accepting, nearly joyous—turns to exultation as I read that Rijeka, once named Fiume and ruled by the poet D’Annunzio after World War I, is just another city, busy with Fiats and pedestrians, graffiti on the plaza wall opposite her hotel. How funny the sign was in Munich, over the escalators of the U-Bahn, Rechts stehen. Links gehen. High tea in Kew Gardens, all that butter on the cucumber sandwiches. And the rain. The dolor and dampness of England—not the bucolic village life of a British mystery set in the 1920s, Miss Marple poking about with her wry, acid observations. But Ziva had been restless for a long time. Our son off in Vancouver, working for a film company, his life away from us summoning her blood, a small trumpet calling her forth. All those years caring for an invalid mother. Then she married me. Then she had Mark. After Mark started school, she taught dance as an adjunct at a community college, happy enough, I thought, even when I sold my discount glass and stemware store and retired. A year ago, my mother entered the final stage of her illness, her slow degenerative spiral something that Ziva understood as second nature, since her own mother had died of ALS. But she never complained, getting a little blackboard that my mother could write on, and when she could no longer hold the chalk, a magnetic board on which my mother could slide around the block letters that spelled out water, bathroom, cold, even how you? When my mother died during a horrendous thunderstorm that flooded the driveway, Ziva nodded, saying, “She’s not leaving easily.” She stood there gazing out the picture window of my parents’ little house that is attached to ours by a breezeway, watching the leaves being torn off the branches of the catalpa tree, her lean face showing lines and shadows, her dark eyes dilated, her mouth—the mouth I loved so much—drawn into a speculative pout, as if she were examining a metaphysical issue, when other women would be thinking what to wear at the funeral. Three months later, she said, “Harvey, I’m going to leave you for a while. I’m going to travel. By myself.” I understood all this. I encouraged her. But now I keep waiting for the last postcard from Paris or Rome, telling me she isn’t coming back.

I live only an hour from Lincoln Center and opera, which I attend every year—without Ziva. “It gives me a headache,” she said, trying to read the text of the libretto that moves along the little display on the back of the seat in front of her. “It’s just so unspontaneous, all this preparation. Like taking a course I’m afraid I will fail.” So I go with members of the Opera Club. Today I enjoy the peonies lolling their heavy heads, the pruned apple tree showing little vase-shaped beings that will be apples in September, the hardy hibiscus almost knee high, unfurling, that will be gaping and wrinkled parchment flowers, pink and white, in August, reminding me of the Virgin Islands and bruised mangoes, thudding coconuts, and the dank bunker-like cabin we stayed in, where wild donkeys tore open garbage bags and we gasped in the thickening air. Here, outside on the slope that was covered with gravel when we bought the house after my parents could no longer care for theirs in Dutchess County, the silver-filigree maple that Ziva planted has produced a new, slender limb. I remember her cool hand and the wet washcloth she put to my back when I came in from mowing. There’s the stokesia, the tall purple liatris, the wild daisies, and rows of alyssum and begonias and impatiens she planted before she left. Not so long ago, I’d found her weeping in front of the TV. “Granny dumping,” she said. “They’re talking about people who leave their old parents and grandmothers in the street. With notes attached to them.”

He comes to the kitchen door, the straw hat with its scalloped edges at once insouciant and something mass produced to emulate a one of a kind from an artisan south of Texas or California. He knocks as he enters, a tuft of freshly cut chives in his hands, and in his shirt pocket, three red radishes. I know what he will say. “Produce man!” Not the optician who had spent his working life in the Bronx, under the Jerome Avenue El, fitting an increasingly elderly clientele with glasses. I don’t remind him it’s his daughter-in-law, not his son, who likes radishes. It would be like saying she won’t come back to us. And I would have to wonder who’s been most important to him. Z. Or me. Maybe she’s traveling with another man. Maybe all our oohing and ahhing over his vegetable garden is a lot of fakery. Maybe no one should live as long as he is, soon into his nineties. Maybe I’m steeped in his bromidrosis and denture odor and my right pinky swollen in the middle joint from arthritis is an admission I can’t handle this aloneness. I tell him I’ll add the chives to our tuna salad.


 
When Z writes from Avignon, I notice the hair growing down my neck and bristling out from my temples. It’s six weeks since our last haircut, and he is worried about tomato worms on his Big Boys. A woodchuck has discovered his butternut squash, so he has sprinkled broken glass around the perimeter of the wire fence—something I wish I could do where Z is, create a no-touching zone around her defined by a ring of glass shards. A theater festival in progress, artists, writers, students flooding the small city, feasting on the mythology of France, while I think of the women I’ve known and run a comb through my hair, brooding over its thinness.

When I first met Ziva, she was examining a cut-glass carafe in my store on Central Park Avenue in Yonkers—turning it in her hands, holding it up to the light, looking for flaws. She worked the stopper in and out, twisted it, testing the smoothness of the fit, her long fingers handling it like a musical instrument. She looked up and smiled apologetically. “I once bought a cheap carafe and the stopper never fit right. How do you manage with these prices?” She didn’t say it was her mother’s carafe, bought decades ago on Canal Street, that it had been knocked to the floor in the last week of her mother’s illness, that she was reassembling herself, the shadows under her eyes just beginning to fade, her smile a tentative crease each side of her mouth, her shag hair cut growing long now, the way mourners let their hair grow back after they’ve shorn themselves in grief. “Because I know where to buy, to begin with,” I answered. “No junk!” Right away I wanted to tell her, “Look, you think I’m just a shopkeeper? My father is a published poet (a chapbook anyway), I studied art history, my mother wrote a book on genealogy, I go to the opera, I . . . I think you’re beautiful.” And she was. She moved like a dancer, bending at the waist, posing her arms if she needed to retrieve something, or spinning when she turned around, as if someone would catch her, or standing on tiptoe with one leg behind her at a forty-five degree angle, her long, smooth calf a perfect living artifact that one wanted to stroke and stroke—reminding me why I loved glass so much, porcelain, faience—though Ziva was no made thing but a spirit descending into my little store, her blouse clinging and her skirt creasing when she moved to reveal the perfect anatomy of a loved one. Something, perhaps, I had been prone to believe about other women, but this time, this time . . .

“You want some zucchini?” my father asks me. His basket is full. “If you let them grow too big they’re full of seeds.” “But there are so many,” I complain. “You can make zucchini bread!” he replies. I see the hope in his watery eyes. I see the dimming glitter of his age. I see the uncomplicated physiognomy of the man my mother always said was a good man. “You don’t know what other fathers are like,” she used to say to me and my sister. The drinking. The gambling. Never mind what else. “Dad, I’m no baker. Why don’t we just cook them all up into some kind of ragout?” Ziva would have cooed with delight. She would have made bread, salads, pasta, roasts, anything that zucchini could garnish or be imbedded in, the way she used to take me into herself when business was bad. “It’s not your fault,” she would assure me. She didn’t say that before she left, knowing it’s what people say when they break up. I could have blamed her very old uncle for leaving her so much money that I found myself saying, “You should do something special for yourself with this.” What do you tell a lovely woman in her fifties about searching for herself in foreign places? That some experiences belong to a place and cannot be transported? That the taste of tomatoes will not be the same in New York as in Istanbul? That the illusion of change ends with fucking a stranger in Budapest? Her last card spoke about the Tower of London. I can just imagine Sir Walter Raleigh losing his head here. That night I woke sweating.


 
He has trouble getting out of bed this morning. “Damn back,” he says. I know how twisted from osteoporosis his spine is, having seen the x-rays of what resembled a serpent beginning to twist and coil. “Maybe you can get the peaches before the raccoons do.” Last year, he’d waited too long, and when he went out with his basket to harvest the old-style cling peaches, they’d all been eaten, the pits littered everywhere. I hate gardening, but to him, who grew up in the molded and mortared environment of the city, whose family had emigrated from a city without a river or trees, growing vegetables and fruit was like rediscovering Eden. After he moved here, he’d driven my mother crazy with his January seedlings in Styrofoam coffee cups placed on the window sills. Then he bought a grow light and spread his cups out on the dining room table, the lamp beaming down. She said, “My God, Milton, are we so poor? Is this, what, Tobacco Road? I’m living on a farm here!” “You never know what you’re buying,” he’d say. “With these, you know everything is clean. No chemicals.” It was the kind of thing he’d say about the poets of the Renaissance or the Romantics. “With them, you know what you’re getting.” (Except he did spray for worms or poke arsenic-coated peanuts into the mole tunnels. And he did like Walt Whitman—“What a guy!”—his eyes bright with an inspiration that at once thrilled and baffled him, until he finally printed up a hundred copies of his own chapbook, maybe thirty poems, which never seemed half-bad. He found a small publisher on Varick Street and got them to print my mother’s little book on the history of her family, beginning in a Russian shtetl. He actually got copies of it placed in a number of Manhattan literary bookstores, in the History section. In their day, my parents were proud authors.) I remember how at our apartment window in the building near Mosholu Parkway he would look with longing at the green median, the trees, and sigh, “Man was not made to live among rocks and breathe shitty air.” We could hear the Woodlawn train pulling into its elevated station—a sound I always associated with childhood, the distant clank and hush of air brakes an urban melody that each night I went to sleep by. “Some day,” he said, “we’ll go where it’s nothing but green.” “So,” my mother would retaliate, “does this mean I’ll have to drive a car? When I can just walk everywhere I need to go right here?” They’d argue about such things. Once, she called him a godless man. “Why,” he retaliated, “should I believe in someone who doesn’t believe in me?” I go out to the peach trees that are bleeding sugar from their black, gnarled branches, and slide the ladder into place. Some of the peaches have dark congealed spots, from a worm of some kind. But most are clean and I easily fill the basket. Then another. The peaches are not entirely ripe, but they’ll sit in our windows, taking sun, and in a week’s time we’ll have peach juice running down our chins.


 
The leaves on the silver maple are beginning to turn and Z is in Seattle, visiting a cousin. Soon, she’ll go north to see Mark. She’s been to Hong Kong. Eaten things she was afraid to know the origin of. Her back hurts from all the hours spent in the coach seats of airplanes. She says she’ll be going down to San Francisco to see our niece, my sister’s daughter, and from there go to L.A., then cross the desert, later see the pueblos in Arizona, do the Grand Canyon. This is the first time she’s written an actual letter, and I think, “The next one or the one after that will be the kiss-off.” My father is canning the last of his tomatoes in mason jars and storing carrots in sand in the garage. I have a butternut squash—one of three that survived the woodchuck—in a basket on top of my refrigerator. Not just any basket, but the Gullah sweet-grass basket that Ziva and I bought in Charleston on our tenth wedding anniversary, when she told me it was definitive, she couldn’t have any more children. “Does that upset you?” “We could adopt,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” she replied. “Don’t tell me we could adopt a nice Korean baby or go to Africa or Guatemala. This is what is meant to be. We have Mark.” Her face, tan from the South Carolina sun, was smooth, her cheekbones more prominent since her weight loss and the hours at the gym, her hair pulled back, her expression resigned, accepting, peaceful—the way she must have been after her mother died. Something had gone out of her. She snuggled into my arms and I suggested we do the harbor tour, go out to Fort Sumter, where the Civil War started. “Sure,” she said, pulling away, leaving suddenly a cold space between us, and I felt the shift, the change, a kind of weeping so private it wasn’t grief or loneliness or despair. It was like the empty sunlit space on a table where a Steuben vase had once created an etched but voluble silence.


 
The first frost and the parsnips are now sweet, he says, holding up a handful. He’s wearing a flannel shirt, a sure sign of the approaching cold, and as he displays the parsnips, I see how sun-speckled his hands are. I want to remind him to wear gloves, that basal cell skin cancer is too frequently a visitor, that he’s bent over more than usual, that some days I wish I had not sold the store, that all my friends are getting old and we talk too much about illness, that my son Mark writes to tell me how great his mother looks but he’s not saying what he really thinks. I watch my father waver as he descends the brick stairs leading down from my kitchen door onto the path that goes around Z’s garden, her fall crocuses and nodding chrysanthemums. “Dad, are you feeling okay?” “Nap time!” he says. “Listen, let me go next door with you.” “Do I look like a cripple?” “No, I just . . . ” “You know what?” he interrupts. “Maybe you should get on a plane and go meet Ziva where she is. You’re getting a little strange in the head. A husband should be with his wife.” “Dad, this is her special time, for herself. She’s done so much for everyone all her life.” “Yeah, yeah,” he says, stopping on the path, the basket dangling from the crook of his elbow, the plump yellow parsnips and their leafy green tops that can leave acid burns during growing time, “and who doesn’t? You think I wanted to come home every night?” He shakes his head. “Get on a plane. Before your wife runs off with someone else.” “I’m not going to do that! It’s too close. If I do that now, she’ll think I don’t trust her.” “So? Do you?” I see how loose the skin is under his chin, how layer upon layer seems to be cascading down, like something that had been full and was now empty, collapsing on itself. “You know, your mother left me once.” He looks out over the garden at the black birch losing its leaves and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. “She left me for Harry, my son-of-a-bitch brother.”

I remembered Uncle Harry as the man who gave me two quarters out of the cash register in his dry-goods store whenever I came to visit with my mother, who would be buying something like dish towels or sheets or a tablecloth. He didn’t resemble my father much, being thin and long, while my father was square (the way I am), but he went bald the same way, front to back, and his voice had a similar mellow quality. He’d studied the violin, my father literature, both boys entering the business world as something that was expected of them—my father buying into Mosholu Optical after he’d worked there for five years, and his brother Harry buying out old man Levy, whose store had been a staple on Jerome Avenue, under the El, near Gun Hill Road, for as long as anyone could remember. Was it any surprise I went into business myself? “My brother Harry was a lady’s man, but your mother didn’t know that. She thought he had eyes only for her. Those women who worked for him, he was always in the back, fooling around. He’s lucky no husband came around to shoot him. Like I almost did.” My father is sitting in his living room, his produce basket on the kitchen table, the parsnips soaking in water. He‘s already clipped the greens off. His eyes are bright and he talks with a raised fist, suddenly the long fatigue of his years evaporating from him. “Your mother and I weren’t married yet. I was working all the time, harder now I was part owner, and all these new styles were coming out, these designer frames, more people asking for contact lenses, and the civil service union was using another vendor for their benefits. It was tight. I used to sit up late reading poetry because I couldn’t sleep.” As he waves his hands, I can imagine my father talking to a group of students, intoning a poem, an artistic something that had come to me as a love of opera, an admiration for the crystal and porcelains of Steuben, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, a love of the aesthetic that neither my father nor I, nor my Uncle Harry, who collected old violins, ever brought to more than a secret patina of consciousness, a gleam and furtive craving that some women, like my mother or Ziva, could appreciate as the nonmaterial something that was all the religion we’d ever know. No one in my family went to temple, though we observed Passover, and in his day my father had been an ardent Zionist. “The Bible,” he’d say, “the Old Testament, it’s about how we survive. God doesn’t have a lot to do with it. He’s just the history of what we had to do.” “You talk like a Communist,” my mother said. “Bite your tongue,” he replied. But what could possibly have attracted my mother to Uncle Harry enough to leave my father?

“It was all because of one thing,” my father says. “One thing.” He holds up an index finger. “And it’s why you got to get on an airplane and get Ziva where she is.” “I don’t think so, Dad,” I say. “We have a special understanding. You know, Ziva had a life before she met me.” “A life? What? She was a sick-room nurse.” He grimaces and I protest. “No, no, no. Did you know she wanted to be a choreographer? She was even in a Broadway show once.” “I know, I know.” My father nods, tired now, being held from a nap by his own insistent narrative. For my benefit. “One thing,” he continues, “almost ruined your mother and me. It was a goddamned vase.” I think about the Gullah basket in our kitchen. The crystal ice bucket with the etched circles around its base that I’d given Ziva last year, how she looked quizzically at me and said, “Are we switching away from wine to something that needs ice cubes?” “No, no,” I protested. “It’s to look at.” But she was disappointed.

“A fucking vase,” my father says. “It was a birthday gift from Harry to your mother. ‘For the flowers Milton never brings you,’ he said, courting her right there in front of me. Later, your mother said to me, ‘You see what it means to be really thoughtful?’ ‘You know what he wants?’ I said. ‘What he really wants? All he wants is to get into your pants. Before I do.’ She slapped me.” I laugh, remembering how petite my mother was, how she must have stood on tiptoe to slap him. And I remember Ziva crying in the middle of the night, after I’d bought the wrong perfume for her birthday. “You don’t even know what I wear,” she said. Which was true. But an honest mistake. I just can’t remember things the way I used to. I couldn’t tell her that, a woman who’d seen two mothers into the grave. Now a husband? That’s what I told myself. Why didn’t I remember her scent? “Your mother stopped seeing me for over two months,” my father proceeds. “I was screwed. The love of my life, gone. She wouldn’t take my calls. Two letters were returned unopened.” And how, I ask myself, could I be writing Ziva if I didn’t know where she was from day to day? There were American Express offices where I could leave a letter, but she didn’t want that. “That would tie me down,” she said.

“So one night, I sat in my car next to a fire hydrant outside her apartment building,” my father says. He seems invigorated again, his eighty-seven years a fluid element that had resumed its onward current. “I knew she was dating Harry. That grease ball.” The fact that Uncle Harry had died two years ago and that my father had wept profusely at graveside did nothing now to soothe his jealousy. “Here she comes, walking with Harry, her arm in his, back from somewhere—as if I didn’t know they’d been to the movies, his hands all over her.” My father shakes his head. “Who could believe it, my own brother.” “But you always seemed so good to each other, Uncle Harry and you,” I say, trying not to imagine Ziva walking around Puget Sound, looking at the ghostly profile of Mount Rainier in the distance, a man ten years my junior with his arm around her waist, maybe someone who had followed her from Hong Kong. “Yeah, well, you get old. You learn to forget. We always fought as children. He always wanted to do what I was doing, the squirt.” “It’s that way with all younger siblings,” I say, remembering how my sister Eve used to follow me around, and it was my father who put a stop to it, telling her, “You’re a girl. You can’t do what your brother does.” “Why not?” my mother said, hands on hips, facing him, her jaw jutting forward. “Is he a god?”

“I got out of the car,” my father says, “I pointed at Harry there in the street. ‘You!’ I yelled. ‘You’re dead to me! You rat!’ Your mother started shouting at me, ‘Stop this! Stop this now!’ ‘Admit it,’ I said to her, ‘you’re sleeping with him!’ She came right up to me and slapped my face—the second time! ‘You’re disgusting,’ she said, and turned away. I went right after Harry. I grabbed him around the head, the scrawny bastard, I had him in a head lock, like you used to see from Sunnyside Gardens on TV, those wrestlers, I just wanted to break his skull like an egg. You know what he did? He started to cry. Including your mother, she’s crying now.” He stops and begins to sniffle himself. “What a woman! Sixty years together, she knew me like a book. Even then.” I begin thinking, what would I do to keep Ziva? Track her down, threaten her boy friend with . . . what? A knife? I couldn’t get it on the plane. I look at my hands, a shopkeeper’s hands, soft, an artist’s hands, though my only art is how I look at things, how I touch things, spun glass, crystal flutes, the long smoothness of Ziva’s back, her . . .

“You see?” my father says. “This is what you have to do, to keep your woman.” “What,” I say, “put her in a head lock?” He points his finger at me. “Don’t make fun.” “I know, I know. So what happened?” “There in the street, I went on my knees, I held out my arms and begged her forgiveness.” I try not to smile, try not to imagine my father breaking out into song on the Grand Concourse, my mother responding, their voices raised in a duet that shakes the traffic lights loose, stopping traffic, while cops join passersby in a chorus. “Harry went up to her and told her it was okay. He knew she really loved me. He knew she was just going out with him to make me crazy. He knew that, the son of a bitch.” I imagine three of them, singing back and forth, dusk settling on the Bronx, the exhaust fumes of buses stinging the nostrils like a salt air, though no ocean is near, only the eternal to and fro of desire. And when, I ask myself, did I ever cry for Ziva? I think of Evita. Something cheap and common is trying to enter my brain. “Nine months later, we got married. And just in time. You were born almost exactly nine months from then.” He’s really tired now, the garden dirt under his fingernails not yet scrubbed out with the brush he keeps on the bathroom sink. He points at me. “Sometimes you have to work at it. I don’t mean love, anyone can be in love.” Yes, but it’s all I care about now. Being in love with Ziva. Wanting her, but trying not to possess her singleness. When that’s all I want to do.


 
She sends me a birthday card from L.A. that has on it a picture of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the stars’ hand- and footprints in the sidewalk. For My Very Own Star, Who Has Left His Mark on My Heart. She signs it Z. I think of Zorro. I see her wearing a black mask, dressed in tight pants, wearing a short jacket with studs, Z-ing the air with a sword, I’ve pulled my shirt open, ready for it. Zing, zap, zowie. I feel like such a schmuck that I go into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. Enough is enough, I think. My father’s right. It’s time to just go out there and get her. But she can’t be in L.A. any longer. What would I do, wander around all the airports from California to Texas? Tell strangers that the crack maple near the shed is bare as bones, I’m looking for my wife, have they seen a tall woman with a loping stride wheeling behind her a small black suitcase with an infinite number of pockets, in one of which is the letter of goodbye that she will mail from a post office near a souvenir stand?

Last night, he said, “Harvey, I’m giving up the car. Before I kill somebody.” He was sitting opposite me in my living room, in what had become his chair, a recliner that Z and I had purchased in Freight Liquidators, its arms turning dark from the friction of his gardener’s forearms. “You having trouble?” I asked. “Almost,” he said. “I almost hit a woman carrying a baby in the Shop Rite lot.” He was still doing his own shopping, picking up his own prescriptions, even taking the car in for servicing. “You sure?” I said. “Am I sure I’m old? That if I reach across a cup of tea to you my hand shakes like an earthquake? That my legs feel like fallen trees?” He was giving me the Buick, hardly eight thousand miles on it. “You’ll never have such a nice car,” he said. “Enjoy it.” “You sure?” “Are you deaf? I’m sure.” He leaned back in his chair, his large hands—that had once adjusted eyeglasses for customers leaning toward him as they would to a doctor, listening to his gentle voice, “How is it now?”—those hands hanging loose and open over the edge of the armrests, tired of grasping, of holding, of trying to implement his will, while that faculty or organ or whatever it was grew quirky and strange to him, that it should continue its onward momentum, when so much of him wanted to halt. “I just don’t care about anything anymore,” he said. I could see the widower in him lying back on a phantom couch, folding his hands over his chest, saying, “I need to rest now. Your mother will need me later.”

Now I’m afraid to leave him alone. I cancel a meeting of the Opera Club. I take him with me shopping, doing his and mine together, and we have hamburgers at McDonald’s, and fries, the same that he and my mother would bring home after one of their junkets—little bags and boxes of this and that left on their kitchen table, while they wolfed down the burgers and fries in their living room. For the first time I feel like a caregiver. Like a wife. I speak in low tones, I try to be soothing. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” my father says. “Nothing,” I say. “Why is ‘nothing’ always something? Did you get a card from Ziva? I haven’t seen anything in days. Did she run off with somebody? I told you that would happen.” He snorts. “Wake up, Harvey!” “Just stop with that stuff,” I yell at him. “You think I’m a ten-year-old, you have to be on me all the time? Shit!” “Oof,” he says. “Okay. See?” He draws a zippering finger across his closed mouth. I see his hair is bushing out over his ears. I run a hand along the side of my neck, up around my ears. We need a haircut, but I’ll be damned if right now I want a pair of scissors in my hand or even the battery-operated clippers. “Okay,” I say.

I haven’t told him about the last few cards from the desert and places like Taos—with a picture of D. H. Lawrence peering out at me, and all I can think is how his wife Frieda slept with anyone who wore pants, while he groomed himself a Messiah, something I was once drawn to, dreaming of spiritual sex and women who gave themselves totally. These last cards from Z had me in a quandary. She said she was coming home. She missed me. She missed my father’s garden. In an actual letter, she confessed that she had trouble sleeping, imagining being next to me. How her body ached for mine. All I could think was, “This is the Taos effect. This is Ziva pretending she’s in a novel. This is my wife trying not to hurt me, because when she gets home, she’ll tell me the truth. That it’s all over between us.” I began to think of all the women who had left me. But that was so long ago! What’s the matter with me?


 
He’s sitting in the usual chair, in front of his picture window, a bath towel wrapped around his shoulders. “Just a trim, please.” He laughs. Then he coughs, a sound too deep in the lungs, his voice thick with catarrh. The early autumn light is still bright enough to fill the room, and the last of the rust-colored chrysanthemums are in a vase on top of his TV. In his hand is the card from Ziva that says she’ll be home this Friday, which is in fact today. She’s taking a limo from the airport, spending the last of her money. It’s so matter of fact it could be acknowledgment of a catalogue order for balloon wine glasses. Or steak knives. I can’t help imagining her arrival in a Lincoln Town Car. She’s wearing sunglasses, a poncho, jeans, her long legs unfolding in a slow ballet of awakening as she steps onto the driveway, her face shining, more evident streaks of gray in her sun-drenched hair now more brown than black, a vividly colored travel bag—like something out of New Mexico, rich in ocher and yellow tones—hanging from her shoulder, handcrafted rings glinting on the fingers of her fine-boned hands. She smiles and waves, a woman stepping out of a glossy magazine ad.

The image is so strong and I’m so distracted that I pinch my father’s ear with the scissors. “Hey!” “Oh, I’m sorry, Dad!” “Pay attention to what you’re doing,” he says, rubbing his ear. “Is it bleeding?” “No, I just nipped it. It’s a little red.” “I’m glad you’re not my surgeon.” “Me, too,” I say. This week he’d been in for a physical. The doctor wanted to do a sonogram of his kidneys. “Not a chance,” my father said. Then looking at us, “I’ll bury both you guys.” The doctor, a small man with Einstein hair, shrugged. “It’s your body,” he said. “You bet,” my father replied. I knew he’d been having trouble sleeping and some days his appetite was off. “I’m not an animal, I don’t have to gorge myself,” he told me. “Besides, I could lose some weight.” And he has. He spends more time in his chair, looking out of his picture window, up the driveway, at the huge Douglas firs of the property opposite ours. His eyes, though still glittering, seem opaque, as if he were receding deeper and deeper into himself. I found him asleep one morning in the chair during the time he was usually in his garden, pulling up dead tomato plants or raking in manure for next spring. “Just a nap,” he said. “I’m entitled.”

“Okay,” he says, carefully folding up the towel. “Now you.” He stands and takes the white-hair-besprinkled towel outside and shakes it over the lawn. I sit in his chair, feeling how warm it is and wondering how I will live when he’s gone from me. “Sit up straight,” he says, and gives me a little tap on the back of my head. “So, what have you got that’s special for Ziva when she comes home?” “Champagne,” I say. “Two bottles of Piper-Heidsieck.” “You’re not as dumb as you look.” And he gives me another tap on the head, the scissors upright on his fingers. My sister called last night and asked him how he was, and he said, “Probably better than you on that crazy job of yours.” She runs a weight-watchers program, still fighting off the pounds herself. She really doesn’t like dealing with the public. “I told her,” my father used to say, “she’s a good-looking woman, like my mother, so a little heavy, so what.” Last night, on the phone, he promised he would visit Atlanta, now summer was past. I know he hates flying. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You pick me up at the airport, I’ll be there. Promise.” He was so tired he could hardly put the phone back in its cradle.

“You know,” he says, looking at my bald spot, “you should put a little sunblock on that. You’re beginning to glow.” Last night I sat up listening to my CD of a 1951 performance at the Manhattan Center of Carmen, with Rise Stevens and Robert Merrill and Jan Peerce. I went right to the last act, thinking of Carmen running away with the matador Escamillo. Then Corporal Don José, who loves her, finds her. And he ends it all. I could see myself there, declaring my love even as I dispatch her, the music swelling. This opera that was such an initial flop, that became such a classic. Then I put on my CD of La Traviata, with Maria Callas singing in Mexico City, I listened to the deathbed duet of Alfredo and Violetta, the courtesan who agreed to give him up when his father said she would ruin his son. And I thought of my father telling me to go find Ziva in a hurry. Each father trying to save his son from . . . passion? Jealousy? Stupidity? My son Mark had called the night before to tell me he was going to marry his actress girl friend Celeste in Vancouver, and he wanted me and Ziva there. “But your mother was just there,” I said. “Dad, it’s not the same. Besides, Celeste and I just decided this.” I could imagine him with the fine dark hair he inherited from his mother, almost the same smile, the way it creases each side of his mouth, his eyes like mine, slow and steady in its gaze, appreciating a form, a color, a voice, a surface gleaming like the crystal fish sculpture we kept for years on the table under the hall mirror. He moves quickly, like his mother, an impatience coded into him, an awareness that inspiration is ephemeral, that human connectedness is no more durable than the yellow daylily’s bloom. No wonder he wants to make films. To capture the nuance of desire in the shadows of objects, the half-light of a face, the frown, the clenched hand, the lilt of a word caught in flight. “We won’t be able to put you up,” he said. “That’s okay. We’ll stay at the Hotel Vancouver. I love that place.” It’s where Ziva and I spent two nights of delirious lovemaking, when we came out to see Mark in his new city, his new life. Before my mother died.

“Hey,” my father says. “Sit up straight. Stop moping.” “I can’t mope, if I’m sitting,” I say. “For that I need to be standing.” “Baloney,” he says. “You I bet can mope even in dreams. You should be happy.” He runs the clippers up the back of my neck. He turns away and coughs. “Aggh!” He blows his nose. “Excuse me,” he says. “Did you take the Claritin?” I ask, knowing that it used to dry up his sinuses during allergy season. “Yes, I took the damn thing,” he says. “Lean forward.” He finishes with the clippers. Now he’s combing what hair I have on top, patting it down. “Not so bad,” he says. “You’re not bald yet.” “Great,” I say. “What do I have, three weeks?” “Your health is all that matters,” he says. “You worried you won’t attract the girls?” “There’s only one girl I worry about.”

And like magic, there it is. A black Lincoln Town Car is pulling into the driveway. There are still some fallen catalpa leaves rimming the lawn like pieces of brown parchment. The leaves of the blown peonies each side of the driveway are black spotted, those huge blooms that each spring Ziva liked to bury her face in, the hot pinks, the golden-centered white ones, the rich deep scarlet ones, such soft-skinned beings she made me sniff and rub my nose in until I thought I had melded with another species. The frost-bitten hydrangea has crumpled just beneath my father’s window—dark, wet, limp—and I am standing up, hair shedding off the towel, onto my father’s carpet, and he’s saying, “Hey, Harvey . . .” I see the back door of the Town Car open and out comes a long leg in jeans, then another. I think my heart is going to burst.