Although the line of cars trailing behind the hearse is long, when we reach the cemetery it becomes clear that most of the funeral attendees hadn’t bothered, we are down to about one hundred people at most. The weather is gorgeous, one of those Northern California days with a deep blue sky of the type we rarely see in LA. A perfect mild temperature that allows people to go without a sweater or jacket. The cemetery is on a high hill overlooking the ocean. You can see a fog bank hovering offshore, but otherwise every object in the landscape for miles in every direction is visible. Below us a small seaside town, its back to the ocean. Farther north up the coast, is what looks like a military installation on a hill, complete with huge satellite dishes and control towers. Far to the south, where the coastline curves in a half-moon, another, larger town with a preponderance of white buildings that glow in the sunshine. John would have been happy on a day like this, in a place like this. Although he hated extreme weather, both hot and cold, he loved the sun. He’d open the patio doors of my condo in the early morning, before the day heated up, would drag one of my upholstered armchairs out onto the balcony and bask in the sunshine, have his coffee there. He hated my patio furniture, found it too unyielding, too uncomfortable. I’d been planning to replace it so he didn’t have to rearrange everything just to enjoy his coffee. He’ll never do that again, and the thought gets me right in the gut. I actually give out a little gasp of pain, so visceral is it. The man next to me leans closer. “Are you all right?” he asks. “Yes,” I manage to say, but I’m not. No.
The cemetery employees don’t lower the casket into the earth, but leave it sitting aboveground on a sort of metal apparatus. We are down to one priest, and he speaks only a few brief words. Amidst a few scattered amens people lay individual flowers on top of the casket, and that is it. No drama. Deborah reaches over and pats the coffin. A quick, almost impersonal touch, as if it were a piece of furniture, or a neighbor’s dog. Then the priest announces the reception, invites everyone to join Deborah at her house. And I hear Deborah’s voice for the first time. Deep and compelling. She cups her hands around her mouth so everyone can hear, but if you hadn’t actually seen her lips moving, you could have thought a man was speaking. “Everyone is welcome,” she calls out. I take one of the leaflets being distributed with the address and directions, get back in my rented car, and drive to the house of John’s real wife.
5
Helen
AS A PEDIATRIC ONCOLOGIST, I know grief. I’ve witnessed it in its rawest form, for nothing good ever comes from the death of a child. There are no mitigating circumstances. There are no words that comfort. “She’s no longer in pain” comes close, perhaps. But little else. I have been through this with parents dozens of times. You might consider that I would be inured to it.
But no. Sitting in my hot rental car in front of my husband’s house on a leafy Palo Alto street, I suddenly know the intimate meaning of the word. Grief. Bereavement. Bereft. So this is it, I think. The moment before, I had been considering a new case, a patient, six-year-old Cecilia, who has been suffering from what seems like a prolonged bout of flu. I had probed further. Bleeding from the gums. That is bad. Frequent nosebleeds. That is worse. The lab report has just come through by email. Not good results. Actually, terrible results. The problem with these mobile devices is bad news coming all the time. Should I inform the family of the lab results? my colleague wrote in the email. Ten minutes later, only after I have repeated the words family and lab and results until they are meaningless do I realize how large is the hole that has been blown in my heart by John’s death, his infidelity.
I roll down the window and try to fan some air into the hot car. I don’t want to approach the house yet. I have somehow beaten the crowd here and rather than knock on the door too early, I settle in to wait. The house surprises me. It’s a majestic colonial with white columns in front and a circular driveway edged with verdant bushes. A manor house from the Deep South. Tara. John had lived here, had been here when he wasn’t with me—not in some funky Victorian on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, as he had led me to believe. He must have been indulging in a fantasy when he talked about his San Francisco home. How the original anaglypta wall decorations were still intact, that the tall wooden windows wouldn’t open, that his office was lined with quarter-hewn oak. He’d been so convincing in his stories of the ancient plumbing, of the termite infestation. I’m stunned by the elaborateness of his fabrications. Such lies require forethought. He’d spoken of nights staying up until 3 AM doing dictations, pausing intermittently to admire the lights of the city below. He even described the pad thai of his favorite late-night delivery restaurant, his neighborhood café with Wi-Fi where he went over case notes, and how the noise from southbound 101 troubled him on evenings when the wind blew due south. He’d drawn me a picture of a life brimming with innocent busyness. We’d be sitting on the sofa, talking lazily about ourselves, still in that stage of discovery, and these things gradually came out. And all a fantasy. No. That is too kind. A con.
His reality was quite different. The house in front of me is pristine, perfect. No plumbing problems or termite infestations would be tolerated here. The hedges trimmed with military precision. Even the flowers are orderly, organized into discrete clusters in beds lined with evenly matched rocks, nothing growing free of constraint. The rosemary has been cut into boxy squares, the lavender shaped into neat hillocks. So this was John’s real life.
Oddly enough, my sense of being injured, of being betrayed, doesn’t take away from my grief. I still ache for him, for the John I had known. We could have worked it out, I tell him, now. You didn’t have to go and die over it. At the funeral, amidst the interminable readings and sermons and eulogies some dim-witted medical technician from John’s practice mixed her metaphors in an eager attempt to pay him homage. His heart was as warm as Texas. But Texas isn’t warm, it’s damn hot, I’d found myself silently arguing with her. Besides, that comparison was supposed to be about size. A heart as big as Texas, was the cliché she’d been searching for.