“I think you should give up the apartment.”
“I can’t!” I kind of yelled this.
But William stayed calm, and he said, “All I am saying is just think about it. Okay? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. But just think about it. Are you listening to me?”
I nodded.
“Okay.” He reached again and tucked my hair behind my ear, and he looked at me in a way that was very sweet and intimate. “Oh Button. You don’t have to worry as much as you do.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because you have me.” He put his hand on the back of my head and gently pulled me toward him.
* * *
—
Afterward, I put my nightgown back on right away; I felt like a shy new bride.
William said to me, “So this is it, right?”
And I said, “You mean until we die?”
And he half-smiled, we were lying next to each other in his bed, and he reached to touch my nose with the tip of his finger and he said, “No, stupid-head, I mean forever and beyond.”
We slept in the same bed every night after that, except sometimes he snored and I would go back to my own bed, but when he got up and felt anxious—I could half feel this in my sleep—I got up and went back into bed with him.
And that was that.
* * *
—
I will say this, and then I will not say any more about it:
But many, many years ago I knew a woman who had had an affair with a man for six years, and he was impotent. I asked her—I knew her well at that time—what it was like to have an affair with a man who was impotent; he had had kidney surgery, I think, and it had left him this way. And this woman said to me—she was a quiet-spoken woman, and she said this to me with a small smile, she said this quietly—“Lucy, you would be surprised how little difference it makes.”
And I thought: She was absolutely right. She was wrong, but she was also absolutely right.
* * *
But that first morning after, when I woke, William was gone! It turned out he had gone for his morning walk, but the fact that he had left me there alone in the bed, in the house, made me frightened.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he came through the door.
“Where did you go?” I said.
“For my walk. Sheesh, Lucy.”
* * *
—
So there was that too. He was still William. And I was still me.
* * *
—
But we were also really happy then. We were.
* * *
One morning I said to William, “Shall we tell the girls?”
And he said, “You mean about us?”
“Yeah.”
William sat down on the couch and squinted out the window. “I don’t see why not.” He hesitated and then said, “But it feels very private.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.” I went and sat next to him.
He put his hand over mine. “We can tell them later.” He glanced over at me. “We have the rest of our lives to let them know.”
“I get it,” I said.
vi
And then David came to me in a dream. He looked sick and gray and skinny and his eyes were sunken with a darkness around them, and he grabbed hold of me and was trying to pull me down into what looked like a big trash can that he was standing in, deep in the ground; I mean we really tussled. “No, David,” I said. “No, I am not coming!” And I did not, and he disappeared into the great big trash can that was deep in the ground. But he was angry that I did not come with him.
* * *
—
In the morning I told William about the dream, and I said, “That was a fear dream, it wasn’t really David.”
Although I was not sure—at all—that it was not really David.
William said nothing.
* * *
I had a memory one night: Years ago, when William and I were living with our young girls in our apartment in New York City, I saw his shoes next to the bed. I had walked into the bedroom to hang up a shirt in his closet and there were his shoes, not his work shoes but his casual shoes, they were like docksiders—I think that is what they are called—leather with a leather string that went around them. And this is what I remembered: I was put off by them, the way their shape so clearly fit the feet of my husband, how the right one went slightly to the side. I was put off by them, by my husband’s shoes.
Oh, the poor man!
And I thought: I wonder if he was ever put off by anything like that with me? He must have been.
These days his shoes did not put me off. I was always glad to see them on the porch.
* * *
I saw Charlene Bibber again one day. She was walking through the park in the middle of town and I went over to her and I said, “Charlene, hi!”
And she said, “Hi, Lucy.”
So we spoke for a few minutes, she was still working at the food pantry and also at her job as a cleaner at the Maple Tree Apartments, and after a few minutes we sat on the ends of one of the benches there. We were both wearing our masks, although Charlene’s mask was below her nose, and I asked how her summer was going, and she said, looking straight ahead, “Eh—”
“Well, why don’t you walk with me?” I said.
So we agreed to take a walk by the river on Friday, which was her day off from work.
That Friday, Charlene was in the parking lot already when I got there, and we walked for a little and then she said, “Mind if we sit down on that bench? I’m on my feet all day cleaning and I’d like to sit.”
“Oh, of course!” I said, so we sat down on a long granite slab of a bench; we were not six feet apart, but her mask was over her nose. And as we sat there she told me about the Maple Tree Apartments, she mentioned again Ethel MacPherson, whose one shoe she had stolen, and how bad she felt when the woman died.
I said I understood.
I told Charlene I thought my mind was going, and she said, “In what way?” And I said, Well, I couldn’t remember things and I got confused a lot.
Charlene leaned her head a bit toward mine as though really listening, and then she nodded and said, “I feel that way too.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do. And because I live by myself and can’t really see anyone much, I get even more worried.”
So we talked about that, about losing our minds, and then she told me about this woman she cleaned for, Olive Kitteridge, at the Maple Tree Apartments. “I feel really bad for her,” Charlene said. “She has a friend, Isabelle, but Isabelle had to go over the bridge and now Olive seems depressed.”
“What do you mean, over the bridge?” I asked, and Charlene explained that it was the next level of care after the independent part of living there, and it was more like a nursing home and you had to go literally over a little bridge to get there. So it was called “going over the bridge.”
“Why did Isabelle have to go over the bridge?” I asked.
And Charlene said it was because Isabelle had fallen and broken her leg and when she got out of rehab she couldn’t live alone again. “It’s so sad,” Charlene said.
We sat in silence for a bit, and then Charlene said, “But Olive goes to see her every day. They say that Olive goes into her room and reads her the newspaper every day from front to back.”
“Oh man,” I said.
And Charlene said, “I know.”
We agreed to meet again two Fridays from now.
vii
A week or so later—how do you know the time in a pandemic—but at some point after this, William, when I came back from my afternoon walk, was lying on the couch, and he said to me, “Lucy, I’m dizzy. I’ve been lying here for an hour waiting for you to come back and I am really dizzy.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said, sitting on the couch by his feet.
“I don’t know.” He said again, “But I’m really dizzy.”