A Week as Andrea Benstock
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: Arbor House
- ISBN: 978-0-87795-100-1
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «A Week as Andrea Benstock». Краткое содержание книги:
If indeed that was what it had been. It had been hard at the time to know what they were to each other and it was not much easier now. But if she and Cass were still spending their Thursdays together, or if they had never done so in the first place, he might have been a help to her now. He knew her so well, and he knew Mark so well, and if they could have a certain conversation, she and Cass...
Or perhaps not. She kept doing that, creating roles for people in her personal mythology, secure in the knowledge that circumstances made it impossible for them to play the parts she assigned them. Winkie, her father, all the men who had ever touched fives with her.
Her mother was saying something.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t get that.”
“I just said you’ll come in an hour or so?”
“If not sooner.”
“Dress warm.”
“Yes, Mother dear.”
It was generally agreed, and had been said repeatedly at the funeral and during the week of formal mourning which followed it, that David Kleinman had had a good death. He had remained active right up to the end. His first heart attack had served him as a warning, encouraging him to slow the pace of his life and savor his remaining days. At the same time it helped condition his family so that his second heart attack, which killed him, did not come as a complete shock.
Certainly some of the comments on the quality of his death were inspired by the usual impulse to look and to speak on the bright side, but not a few of the men and women who said what a good death he had had did so with a touch of wistfulness in their speech. They were of an age to acknowledge the possibility of imminent death, some of them already suffering from the diseases which would ultimately kill them, and while it was never quite possible to envy the corpse at a funeral, life clearly being preferable to death, they would have welcomed assurance that their own deaths would be as easy.
On the day he died, Andrea’s father finished his last dental appointment shortly after noon. He went home for lunch, napped afterward for perhaps an hour, then drove to Andrea’s house where he had a cup of coffee. Then he took his granddaughter for a ride. They drove around for over an hour, stopped for ice cream, then returned to the Benstock house.
“I told Poppa David it’s my birthday next week and I’m gonna be five, and he says he won’t let me,” Robin announced. She was pretending anxiety but was clearly delighted with the notion of needing permission to be a year older.
“I merely said I have never had a five-year-old granddaughter and wasn’t sure about the whole thing.”
“He says I’ll have to be four for a whole nother year.”
“I said maybe.”
“Well, maybe you’re silly,” Robin said, and whooped with delight. “Silly, silly.”
He returned to his own house, ate dinner with his wife at the usual hour. He helped her load the dishwasher. While it ran they sat with newspapers in the front room. First he read the Times while she read the Buffalo News. Then they traded. She was reading Clive Barnes’s review of a new English play when he said, “Syl?”
She lowered the paper. His face looked drawn and his expression was one of puzzlement.
“I don’t feel well,” he said.
“What’s the matter? Stay right there, I’ll phone Irv Zucker.”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing,” he said, and then he sat back in his chair and died. Her eyes were on him as it happened and she knew instantly what had happened. He was there and then he was not, he was gone.
She had planned to leave the house when Lucinda arrived, but half an hour after the cleaning woman’s appearance she was still finding things to do in the house. At last she was in her car with the key in the ignition, and then she realized the one thing that she did have to do. She got out of the car and went back into the house and called her husband’s office.
She said, “I was just leaving the house. I’m going to Mother’s.”
“Yes, you said you probably would.”
“She wants to go to the cemetery.”
“Is that a good idea?”
She closed her eyes. She said, “I don’t see that it matters whether it’s a good idea or not.”
“I just—”
“It’s what she wants to do.”
“You’ll go with her?”
“Of course.”
“Well. How are you feeling?”
“I am fine,” she said levelly.
“Well.”
She made herself take a breath and release it slowly. “The reason I called,” she said, “is to find out if you’ll be home for dinner.”
“Of course I will.”
“That’s all I wanted to know.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Pardon me?”
“Are you doing some kind of a number? I always call you if I’m not going to be able to make it for dinner.”
“Well, I’m not going to be home for a while,” she said, “so it would be difficult for you to reach me, wouldn’t it? So I thought I would call and make sure, that’s all.”
“That’s all.”
“Certainly.”
She heard him breathing into the phone. The previous fall a telephone pervert had taken to calling her for a period of several weeks, breathing into the phone in a similar way. He’d stopped when she learned not to panic but simply to hang up as soon as she recognized who it was. Mark’s breathing reminded her of those calls, and then he said, “Well, I’ll be home at the usual time, Andrea. You can rest easy.”
I’m glad to hear that.”
“I’ll see you then. In the meantime give your mother my love.”
“I will.”
She replaced the receiver and put her hand to her forehead. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She had known better than to make that call. And she had gone ahead and made it, she had been unable to leave the house without making it.
Stupid.
It was hard to say precisely when she learned that he was having an affair. She came to know gradually sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so that when she did suddenly realize that he was seeing somebody she realized simultaneously that she had known as much for some time, had known it without facing it.
Her own reaction surprised her. She was far more upset than she could ever have imagined she might be. She was hurt, she was threatened, and more than anything else she was astonished. Perhaps the hardest thing for her to forgive him was his having turned out to be so different from her image of him. That was the true infidelity — he had been unfaithful all along by letting her perceive him incorrectly.
Had he had other affairs before this one? And how long had this one been going on?
And what happened now?
When she decided that she had to talk to someone, she chose Eileen Fradin. The conversation had a frustrating beginning because Eileen kept marshaling arguments to convince her that she was mistaken, that Mark was faithful to her, that his infidelity was a creation of her own imagination. Andrea found herself in the position of lining up evidence to prove her own conclusion, all of which only served to reinforce her convictions. Eileen seemed to have an answer, however farfetched, for every point Andrea made, and for one wild moment she actually found herself wondering if it might be Eileen with whom Mark was having his affair. But that was clearly absurd.
“Look, this is all beside the point,” she said finally. “I know what’s happening. He’s seeing somebody. I absolutely know this.”
“The thing is you don’t have to know it.”
“You mean close my eyes and it’ll go away? Maybe that works for ostriches but I don’t think it makes sense for people.”