“I really shouldn’t. But if you’re making some . . .” Her voice trailed off as she walked down the hallway to the bathroom, flicking on the lights and rubbing her temples.
John went to the kitchen and got the jar of popcorn kernels down from the cupboard. He liked to make popcorn the old-fashioned way, in a big steel pot with a long metal arm that stirred the kernels. He lit the stove, melted the margarine, poured the popcorn in, and stood over the pot with his eyes closed, turning the handle slowly and feeling the warm air rise toward him, remembering moments on the island when the sun on his face had struck him as so hot, so intimate, it was like Marcia’s breath on his cheek.
As the kernels began to pop, he brought his ear to the lid of the pot, closer to the heat and the noise. The irregular staccato made his pulse speed up. The heart fascinated him. Sometimes he liked to put his ear to Marcia’s chest and listen. Her heartbeat was light and chatty, a rhythm that made you want to waltz around the kitchen. John could have been a cardiologist, but he’d pursued dermatology instead. At parties, he wowed people with descriptions of boils and rashes and growths, strange hair patterns, nasty scars, pus-filled cysts, bizarre freckles, cancers, moles. “Within six feet of this fellow, you could detect the distinct smell of porcini risotto,” he’d say. “His armpit was filled with fungus.” At the stove, John righted himself, continued to stir the popcorn with one hand, and took his own pulse with two fingers of the other, pressing on his throat and breathing slowly until his heart rate returned to normal.
Meanwhile, Marcia took two extra-strength Tylenol, splashed some cold water on her face, brushed her teeth, and went to sit on the leather sofa in front of the television in the living room. A sudden excruciating pain in her head made her vision blurry. It was as if she’d been plunged underwater, the room murky and muffled, and she couldn’t breathe. She tried to call out to John. “Honey? John?” She could only gasp. Her throat gurgled, her hands trembled, and then she died. It was that simple. She was gone.
When all was quiet, John turned off the stove and poured the popcorn into a wooden salad bowl. He carried the bowl and the saltshaker into the living room, sat down next to Marcia’s dead body, salted the popcorn, ate several handfuls, and turned on the television. “Which movie did you say?” he asked her, scrolling through the pay-per-view listings. He looked at her downturned face. Her head hung to one side, resting on her shoulder. John smoothed her hair, put a hand on her knee for a moment, changed the channel to the baseball game, lowered the volume, ate the rest of the popcorn, then fell asleep beside her.
? ? ?
“I’m sorry, Mr. John,” Eduardo said in the lobby, as the body was wheeled out early the next morning. John nodded, still in shock, having woken up and discovered Marcia, cold and limp, slumped across the couch beside him. He followed the EMTs out onto the street and watched them load her into the back of the ambulance and drive away, the siren blaring—but for what? “She’s already dead!” John cried out after them. Eduardo took him by the arm and led him back inside and up to the apartment. A neighbor brought him some water from the kitchen. The glass, a souvenir from a cruise that he and Marcia had taken through the fjords of Norway, retained a faint smear of her berry-colored lipstick on its rim. John put his mouth on it and sipped.
The memorial service was a week later. The chapel ceiling at St. Ignatius was vaulted and painted a cornflower blue with spiky white stars. The carpet was dark red, with a jagged gold pattern that reminded John of shattered glass. Marcia’s friends filled the pews. They moaned and wept. Maureen and Barbara embraced John and held his hands and babbled all at once, drowning out the few words he had to say as he took his seat in the front pew. He dabbed at his eyes with old tissues he found squirreled away in the breast pocket of his suit.
Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she’d touched their lives. Marcia would have liked it, John thought—all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She’d have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her? What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room. In the days since her death, he’d felt her drifting through the apartment. He’d done double takes the way you do when you think you see your own cat or dog begging for food under the table at a restaurant. Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia’s coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?
When it was his turn to get up, John spoke of their recent trip to the island. “She was so happy there,” he said. “So alive.” He paused, waiting for a laugh, but there was none. He looked out at the crowd, all those drawn, wrinkled faces wet with emotion. He could imagine Marcia sitting among them, already composing her opinion of the speech he was giving. “He was terribly overcome,” he imagined her saying to her friends over coffee and cake at the reception. “You could see him really straining to get something across. To no avail, I’m afraid. Well, that’s John. Not the best talker. But that’s why we got along so well.”
John leaned against the lectern for balance, trying to think of interesting memories to relate. “The seafood,” he began to say, but stopped himself. It all seemed so trite. “Why tell stories?” he wondered aloud. “As soon as something is over, that’s it. Why revive it constantly? Things happen, and then more things, inevitably, happen next. So?” He shrugged. His hands trembled. He tried to smile, but he was now, indeed, terribly overcome. He left the lectern, tripping down the shallow steps. He felt as he did when he was gassed at the dentist’s office—disoriented, befuddled. “Eduardo?” John called out. He staggered drunkenly. His secretary came up and guided him back to his seat.