“But I’m just a woman who lives here,” Vivien said.
“My wife,” the man continued, “is a baker. She came from Austria-Hungary as a teenager. Her family moved to Chicago where her father worked in the stockyards. Disgusting work, for a man who once owned his own haberdashery shop right in downtown Budapest. Her mother took in sewing, and she would stay up all night working in the dim light, beading wedding dresses, hemming gowns, making layettes for babies. My wife, my Gy?ngyi, just a girl, but she baked pastries and sold them on the streets, to bring home extra money so her mother didn’t have to work so hard. Eszterházy torta and rétes and krémes. Do you know Rákóczi túrós? Cottage cheese cake? No? My Gy?ngyi made this better than anyone. Better than the finest bakers in Budapest.”
As the man talked, Vivien realized that he was the first person since she had left San Francisco who understood grief. Despite all of the hugs and words of comfort, unless you have suffered loss you cannot understand the depth of it, the seemingly bottomless pit of despair that goes with grief. But this man in the bright red jacket and straw hat, he knew. He understood.
Vivien took his arm and brought him inside. She sat him down on her sofa and she made him a cup of tea. He talked, and Vivien listened.
Eventually, he stood. By then dusk had fallen. But Vivien did not light a lamp for fear of interrupting him.
He said, “Gy?ngyi means pearl. Did you know this? No? A pearl is hidden in an oyster. Do you know, Miss Obituary Writer, how pearls get made?”
“No,” Vivien admitted, “I don’t.”
“When a piece of grit or sand or shell gets trapped inside, the oyster, it has to protect itself from this irritation. So it creates a liquid around the particle, which eventually, over time, becomes a pearl.”
Alone, Vivien sat at her small desk and wrote about this woman, this stranger. She described the pastries she baked, the flakiness of her crusts, the smoothness of her creams, how she perfectly balanced fruit and nuts and sugar in her strudels. Vivien took the final line of the obituary from Keats. “Asleep! O sleep a little while, white pearl!”
In the morning, she walked into town and found the newspaper office that the man could not find the day before. She explained her mission, handing the obituary to a skinny man with a big Adam’s apple.
“But this ain’t an obit, ma’am,” he said. “It don’t say when she was born. It don’t say how she died. And it don’t have much in between those two momentous occurrences neither.”
Vivien thought of David, of all the things she missed about him, the things she thought about when she yearned for him. The little word game they played. Delicious, she had said that last morning. And he had answered, Intoxicating. She missed his scrambled eggs. Such a simple thing, but on lazy mornings she would wake up to him bringing her breakfast on a tray. He added a bit of cream and sugar to the eggs, which made them light and sweet. He always had two pieces of sourdough bread, toasted and buttered and half a grapefruit that he’d already cut the small wedges for her so she could pick them up with her fork. She missed how when they stood together, her head reached his shoulder in the exact spot where she would rest it later that night in bed.
“This obituary,” Vivien said firmly, “has every important fact about the deceased. This is the obituary her husband wants.”
She didn’t know for certain that this last point was true, but she believed that when he read it, he would agree.
The man scowled. “What’s this business about pearls sleeping?”
But Vivien was done with this newspaperman. She instructed him to run it that very afternoon, and then she stepped outside where, for the first time in the six months since David had disappeared in the earthquake, she finally could take a breath without it hurting to still be alive.
Perhaps it was foolish of her, but Vivien booked a room for the night at the Hotel Majestic. She arrived in front of it on Sutter Street, and stared up for what felt like a very long time at its distinctive bay windows, trying to guess which room was number 208. Finally, she gave up, remembering that she had not paused to admire the view that night she and David spent here. Vivien lifted the handle of her trunk and dragged it to the entrance.
A bellhop hurried to take her trunk for her, and Vivien followed the man inside the elegant lobby. Everything seemed both familiar and foreign. How caught up in David she had been that long-ago night! All she could think of was touching him, and having him touch her. The check-in had seemed interminable. The slow ride up the elevator eternal. Had they even bothered to turn on the lights when the key finally opened the door and a bed awaited them? It seemed to Vivien now that their clothes came off right at the door, as soon as they stepped inside.
“Is room 208 available?” she asked the man at the desk.