“Guilty?”
“I’ve gotten to live many more years than a lot of my contemporaries, my husband included, and so really I should be grateful for what I’ve had and should walk toward the end with grace.”
“Maybe,” I said, resisting the urge to placate. “But gratitude doesn’t necessarily free us from sadness—or our fears.”
Claudia sighed gloomily. “It’s the unknown of it all that’s getting to me. The doctor said I had about two months, but it could be more or less than that.” I was glad she didn’t look at me for confirmation. “Sometimes I feel like I’m just sitting around waiting to die, and that everyone else around me—you included—is waiting for it too. Some mornings I wake up almost disappointed that I’m still here.”
“I can see how you’d feel that way,” I said, treading a conversational path I knew well. “If you did walk toward death with grace, what would that look like?”
“I don’t know, darling,” Claudia said with a hint of exasperation. “I suppose dying gracefully would mean squeezing the best out of my last days and not focusing on every little regret—all while wearing a fabulous shawl, of course.”
I allowed for a few beats. “What are some of those regrets?”
Claudia eyed me cautiously. “You’re not going to force me to focus on the positive things?”
“Believe it or not, you’re allowed to think about both the good and the bad right now.”
Relief softened her jaw. “It’s funny, I find myself going in circles thinking about mundane, inconsequential things,” she said, watching the neighbor’s cat navigating the fence like a tightrope. “I wish I’d stuck with ballet lessons when I was a child. Or that I learned to speak Arabic better. Or that I hadn’t wasted so much time pretending I liked Shakespeare because it made me look intelligent.”
“Everyone pretends to like Shakespeare.”
The joke earned a small smile.
“Selfish as it sounds,” Claudia said, “I mostly regret putting the needs of others ahead of my own. But as a woman, that’s what I was taught to do. Your husband, your children, your parents—their happiness all mattered more. You were always someone’s wife, or mother, or daughter before you were yourself. It’s like I didn’t live my life for myself, as myself. Like I wasted what I was given.”
“You did what was expected of you for the people you loved. I wouldn’t call that a waste.” I hadn’t had the chance to love many people, but I imagined it would be a privilege to be in service of their happiness.
“Once you’ve lived a long life, I think you might see things differently.”
A murmuration of starlings spread gracefully across the sky and we both leaned back to watch their flight.
“I’ve never told anyone this,” Claudia said, tentative, as if not quite ready to commit to her next sentence. “But when my son was a toddler, every night after I’d fed him, bathed him, and read him several bedtime stories—it was always me, never his father—I’d sit and watch him sleep. And every night, I tried to push away the bitterness that was welling inside me, so that I wouldn’t hold him responsible for the life I knew I wouldn’t get to live. Watching that little chest rise and fall, the curls so cherublike around his face, I’d whisper to him over and over, ‘I will not resent you. I will not resent you’.” Remorse flickered in her face. “But no matter how many times I said it, I never stopped feeling it. I resented him, I resented my husband, and, most of all, I resented this house for all it took from me. It felt like a prison.”
I clasped her hand in mine and offered a reassuring smile. People weren’t usually looking for a commentary to these sorts of revelations. They just needed someone to sit and listen to them without judgment. It’s tempting to try to fix it, to cheer them up. But the truth is, you’ll never find the right thing to say—because the right thing doesn’t exist. The fact that you’re there, and present, says so much more.
Still, I couldn’t help also feeling a little deflated by what Claudia had told me. I wasn’t naive enough to think all marriages were happy, but lately it seemed like real life was trying very hard to disprove all my romantic ideals.
“My life could have been very different,” Claudia continued. “Perhaps instead of sitting here with you, I’d be on a boat somewhere in the Mediterranean with Hugo. If he’s even still alive.”
I was glad she brought up Hugo again—I was so curious to hear more about him. “What exactly happened after you met at the bookstore?”
It was as if someone injected Claudia with a shot of adrenaline. She straightened in her chair and her face reanimated. “He invited me for lunch at a nearby café, and I drank too much pastis and ended up missing my train to Paris. I think I wanted to miss it, to be honest—to give myself one last adventure before I came home to be married. And I just felt this energy with him I’d never felt before. So when he suggested I come sailing with him to Corsica, I couldn’t resist. I was supposed to stay with a family friend in Paris for ten days before catching the ship to New York, and I’d planned to get a haircut and buy some new clothes. Instead, I spent the time on a sailboat with Hugo.” The cheeky glimmer returned. “I’ll let you fill in the rest with your imagination.”
“What was it that drew you to him so immediately?”
“I don’t know … I haven’t thought about him in so long.” Claudia watched the starlings again, contemplating. “I liked that everything about him was simple—he enjoyed life, even though his had been tough. The scar on his chin was from when his father hit him with a bottle in a drunken rage. And I liked that he was smart, not from any formal education, but from being out in the world. He learned English from working on fishing boats from when he was thirteen, and taught himself everything else by reading the books the other sailors left behind.” A long sigh. “But mostly, it was the way I felt around him—independent, sexy, intellectually stimulated, encouraged. He made me feel free, like myself, in a way my husband never did.”
“He sounds very charming.” I felt a flare of hope—perhaps I hadn’t falsely idealized the potential of romantic chemistry after all.
“That he was,” Claudia chuckled, then grew serious. “But then again, perhaps things wouldn’t have been as rosy with him either. He told me I shouldn’t give up my photography career, but his attitude might have changed if we’d had kids. It’s easy to glamorize the path you didn’t take. After all, we only spent ten days together.” A faint flush of pink spilled onto her cheekbones. “But I did love kissing that scar on his chin.”
Claudia closed her eyes and smiled, as if drifting off into a pleasant dream.
As I sat holding her hand while she dozed, I wondered if there might be a way to relieve her of at least one regret before she died.
34
The vigorous knocking on my front door implied urgency. I reluctantly untangled my limbs from the blanket on the sofa and nudged George off my shins.
A brief pause and then more knocking, each time a staccato series of five. I wished I had a peephole so that I could at least prepare myself for the drama that seemed to await me behind the door.
Sylvie stood in front of me, a huge grin on her face and a laptop under her arm. Her messy bun, pajama bottoms, and polka-dot socks felt intimate and comforting. Tacit confirmation we’d reached a level of friendship where we didn’t have to worry about appearances.
“I found Hugo!” Sylvie announced. “Can I come in?”
I hesitated. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Sylvie to come into my apartment. More that, except for Leo and our building’s super, no one had really ever stepped inside. I was also painfully aware of the aesthetic differences between Sylvie’s minimalist apartment and mine. And then there was that conspicuous odor of cat litter.
But her revelation was too enticing—especially since I’d asked her to look into it.