Troldhaugen (Pt. 2)

Reports of their wanderings swamped social media—starting at the airport bar (bloody marys), then the aircraft's first-class cabin. Flutes of champagne, hot towels, stuffed mushrooms. We'd never flown first class in our lives—could not foresee ever being able to afford it and loathed the whole despicable syndrome; classifying humans by rewarding them with special comforts for their ability to pay more. We loathed it bitterly but silently, because we had too many friends who did it and even swanked about it. This baffled us. How could any human fail to notice their fellow-people shuffling like cattle into the equivalent of steerage: the cattle-path leading straight through first class—therefore forced to look directly at the seated elites, their sleek, cushioned recliners, cocktails, hot bacon-y hors d'oeuvres, during those few miserable moments they, the cattle-people, trudged past? We would sit staring into our laps as friends insisted they were just too tall for economy or that life was short so they were seizing the day—by paying thousands more.

Also, the group sent postcards.

It must have pleased them, this retro touch, buying real stamps at the tabacs, addressing each card with a fountain pen (green ink) alongside expensive cafe crèmes, seated outdoors with their drink, probably on the Champs Elysee where they can eyeball the suave, de rigeur scene—or maybe it was the Marais near the falafel shops and fashion boutiques—the sorts displaying three sweaters (burnt orange and chartreuse), each costing the equivalent of a small diamond. They were morphing in their own minds into Anais Nin and Henry Miller, or maybe Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied. We knew the stores where those cards' turnstiles stood, some in the Marais, some near Notre Dame—amid jumblings of junk scarves, plaster figurines; a full block of turnstiles, we recalled, across from the Pompidou. We remembered harsh sunlight playing over those turnstiles, rendering them weirdly puny against the big bright sky and stolid buildings. The cards featured cartoons or gross visual pranks or old black-and-white photos of Parisian streets before Haussman bulldozed. Sometimes a dim figure or two floated in the backgrounds of those, huddled, blurred.  Other dramatic photo-portraits were famous: Zola, Hugo, Verlaine, musicians, singers—Piaf, Django, Trenet—still pulsing under their gauze caul of lapsed time. Long-ago images tapped something in us—a sense of play, of the possibilities of art: the Man Ray image of Kiki de Montparnasse, two violin f-holes superimposed over her nude back.

Hand-penned quips in the message spaces were brief and cryptic—we knew Giselle meant to channel her surroundings—inevitably in green ink: embarras des richesses or en délire or ravies or even que vous nous manquez. (How could they miss us? We rarely saw one another.) And so on, each message a ripe version of 'perfect life'. We can't remember which French critic called postcards the ultimate passive aggression but holy wow, was he ever onto it. Yes, social media. Our feeds became a nonstop pour of glossy freeze-frames, the group leaning in together against different backdrops, making faces—a performance troupe taking bows.

How did that make us feel?

Surly. Itchy. Like most sane humans lucky enough to have spent time there (teaching semesters, blighted only by the occasional moron student who fell off a roof or into the Seine or got thrown in jail) we loved Paris. But beneath our envy of Giselle's rescue-odyssey ran frank relief. We remembered how a kind of frantic impetus can hijack group travel. People boomerang in herds: let's all do this to oh god we've so got to do that; breathless, staccato, their own private screening of Jules et Jim—the next this, next that—taste this, feel this, climb these thousand steps. Who craves to be prodded and hustled along like some witless cow? Or to be made to feel stodgy if we resisted?

To soothe ourselves we agreed to go later. Soon as we gathered funds. We'd stay as long as those fucking Schengen laws would let us.

We thought about the Place des Vosges. As much as it has been oversung, overphotographed, overwritten—no matter. Strange how such a tiny, tiny patch of planet suffuses memory. The sweet, sad freedom of its grass, its walkways—air humid but soft, edged with birdsong, smells of sauteing and cigarettes and perfumes. Those upper appartements looking on from all sides like elders' faces, an ancient amphitheater. The way some sort of high came over everyone who entered that square as if onto a magic stage in magic air, as if the little arched passageway was a time portal—a headiness that made people sport on the grass, play music, whistle in the walkways' corridors.

Who whistled anymore?

Thinking this led us to remember the taste of fruit from the big chaotic expensive produce store on the boulevard across the way, the one you had to trot back through the archway past all the Turkish rugsellers and jewelry nooks—those apples, pears, clementines, grapes, everything there heavenly; hang the price, even a can of beans—it stood next to the big-ass cathedral, was it St. Paul?

We did not need Giselle and her entourage to impress us.

Were these legitimate feelings? Had we earned them? Or were they tourist clichés pasted over dailiness and grit? Both. How many French faces had we scanned to meet a thin curtain—not completely closed—over each face's cherished, private dream: their better idea of how to live.

For many of them—tragicomically, to us—this meant how to live elsewhere; often, it meant magically transplanting to California.

We weren't immune to the bundled messages of a city. Fat bundle.

We watched Giselle's posts—thousands of them. Meals, parks, bouquinistes; the little glass Pyramid plopped like a small spaceship onto the cobbled, lordly expanse of the Louvre. Canal St. Martin, its newly gentrified storefronts, boutiques, bars. Hotel rooms—the kind overlooking a manicured courtyard, with an array of careful breakfast items laid in the foreground. Translation: whopper-cost. (We always found the cheap ones—their tiny balcons looking across filthy rooftops, banks of chimneys, garbage-strewn alleys.) Ah: and how could seasoned theater people not make a pilgrimage to the red-velvet-and-polished-wood Comédie Française? They caught a production of Ubu Roi. Lord knew (we muttered to ourselves) how much of it they could actually understand.

After a time some toggle inside us flipped. We stopped pressing the Like buttons. We scrolled past faster. At last we got angry. Man, we thought, have some restraint! Samaritaine. Neuilly. Tuileries. Versailles! Giverny! Why did people do this to each another? The rock lyric echoed: Show business kids making movies of themselves. The more the troupe flashed us with coy, expensive settings, grinning, leaning in, raising glasses—best life best life best life—the more exhausted we felt. And what American grin, we ask you, is not also always placidly implying Yes, in fact I own all of this?

My patisserie. My Parc Monceau. My fleamarket. My Métro. My café-au-lait, fois gras, bowl of peaches kir.

My sorrowful, arrogant, brittle waiter.

My Musée de la Vie Romantique.

Please, please please please stop, we telegraphed silently from our minds.

We will pay you to stop.

Also, for God's sake—this we did say aloud—someone please remind us never, never to do this.

~

Not that we did not wish them happy.

Oh, happy.

Maybe happy meant: not bothering us.

It was finally—all that serene certainty. That guaranteed ease. Money, beauty, hijinx. Intramural admiration.

Hot wax dripping on our bare skin.

We knew burnout was a byproduct of social media. Also that scrolling acted like a drug—a compulsive vortex. Hard to climb out.

Get a grip, us.

Most people glided past those images. Nobody thought twice, or even paused for them. Move on. Move on.

~

Months of quietude passed.

We grew re-absorbed into the daily: reading, walking, admiring seasons, plotting meals, complaining about bad films and television and politics and noise of leaf-blowers. Sometimes we complained that all our waking time was filled with picking up objects and placing them elsewhere.

Giselle's social media feed also quieted, thank God. Other people's montages closed over and pushed on in habitual remorselessness: endless tides of tidings, strangers' gladnesses, despairs, and meals. Our dog died. A cake with candles. X-Rays of broken bones and metal implants. Close-ups on the gashed skull or thigh or infected toe. Forest and seashore, mountains and desert. Sunset, moonrise. A bear in a back yard, skunk on a porch, coyote trotting down an urban street. Flowers, cocktails, shoes, luggage, Rothko, Renoir, Sissy Spacek. Babies, first day of school, graduation. Most, unknown or scarcely known. We could exhale. Until one day by chance a new photo stopped our eyes—we almost blurred past it; nobody we might know. But something caught at the way-back of our heads; some mini-flash—and we stopped.

Scrolled back to it. Tapped the photo. Made it bigger. Then came the gasp, and the series of slow-mo heartsqueezing beats as the brain recoils, like a starfish, from the touch of alien information.

The photo was Howard.

A hardly recognizable Howard. Thin, bloodless, evidently bald with a wool cap covering the nude skull. Complexion a faint green-gray.

A terrible, telltale color.

He gazed into the camera without inflection—a face that simply dwelt, without opinion, without violence, inside its predicament.

The post was a GoFundMe petition to assist with medical expenses.

Dear God.

~

We jumped to scramble for cellphones: the people with the mansion first. They sounded, to us, weirdly calm, maybe a bit tired, reciting strictly what was known, conveying the data in voices that had, from the sound of them, practiced. Diagnosed some months back. Discovered a propos of nothing—as these things often were. Some minor discomfort, a routine exam, a mass showing up. No reason—yet there it was. One mass birthed another. Chemo, radiation, metastatic, aggressive. All the language. Dreaded language.

Apropos of absolutely fucking nothing.

A bitterly familiar, terrorizing litany. Logic and reason evanesce: that greatest insult to a postwar generation. Logic and reason had always been our hand-hold, our footing.

They'd had some insurance but not, it seemed, the comprehensive kind. Giselle's trust money had been gutted by treatment costs—at first slowly, then fast—followed by the internet appeal.

We had seen so many such appeals. They always surfaced like a sudden rash; then just as suddenly disappeared. One rarely learned of an outcome—even whether the appeal had worked—for that matter what “success” may have looked like.

Continuing to live. That would have worked. We'd have pounced on it.

We were so frightened our hands went cold.

We had to sit down. We took chairs at the kitchen table and sat on our icy hands. A mockingbird sang from the back yard through the opened windows: exuberant, tumbling globes of melodies, opalescent; a series of rainbow-coated bubbles. It kept trying new songs, each sweetly clear. This? No? This? How about this?

Oh, mockingbird.

Our minds felt locked.

Only thing to do was get out, get out. We fumbled with jackets, keys; fell through the front door into the streets. Walking the old neighborhood always calmed us like a chant or rosary, each weather-softened house a known bead on the string, a silent assent, connecting. Restating the known. Witnessing: This, then this. As it has been, so will it continue—until somebody or something tears it down of course, but never mind that. Fall: our best time in some ways, worst in others.

Leaves twinkling down like a Hallmark movie.

Start on the ground. Look at our feet placing themselves, careful, deliberate, as they're ingeniously made and taught to do. Then cast eyes up a notch and beyond—to scruffy grass yards, empty plant pots, random toddler's tricycle flung, its front tire torqued at a violent angle. Then further up: overarching trees, patient lacework, rust and gold, berry and wine, breathing.

Outward. Then upward.

Hello, things of this world. Hello fabric of leaves, orange and cranberry. Hello, quick-stepping cat. Hello dropped yellow apples, scarlet persimmons, bi-plane buzzing. Hello memory of walking home from school staring at our saddle oxfords wondering why we were alive, what was to become of us, and whether someone might love us one day.

How is it objects carry on? How is it houses sit exactly as they've sat?

When we returned, emptied, we phoned the Sorvino home in the city. We asked to bring food. Aniela, her voice now that of a self-possessed young woman, spoke in a half-whisper. Yes, fine, some simple food. She and her brother were taking turns taking care of everyone. Her mother, she said, was doing her best, but it had been hard, very hard.

How can we do this?

We have to do this.

~

We arrived mid-day (all thought razed by hellbent traffic). A mild day for the city, salty soft air—but an untimely frost had passed through; grass yellowing, leaves dropping. Our jackets stayed on. It was that held-breath time of year, so brief, during which we felt ourselves at the brink of some brilliant understanding; precious, vital, unnameable—just out of reach. Light veiled by ocean mist, color of lemon rind. Halloween had passed; flattened bits of bright candy-wrappers glinted from gutters. We thought, for no reason, about those who'd been tramping along the sidewalks devouring candy. Was there a sugar hangover?

The trees guarding the Sorvinos' now-scruffy drape of yard had shed dozens of untouched apples and pears—bruised but still luscious. We could not help bending down to scoop some of the prettiest, pocketing them to create comic, tennis-ball lumps at our sides. The air so still, so silent. Now and again a shower of brass-colored leaves swirled down: in any other context a sweet interval for wonder, for lute and cello and hot cider, for little kids being hauled in red wagons. We took the brick steps slowly. Silken as the air and light felt against eyes and cheeks, our hearts beat shallow.

Bearing a small quiche in a foil pie container, our pockets lumpy with gleaned fruit, we pressed the black doorbell button. Orange light glowed around it, fitting the season. If only we were arriving to a Halloween party. Our clothes didn't fit right. We'd rather do anything else. We hated everything; hated ourselves.

After a few long minutes, Aniela opened the door.

It was darkened in the house; not easy to see. Abruptly, our eyes made out the form before us: the sparkle-eyed peanut had grown into a beautiful young woman, tall and shapely in jeans and sweater but also, to our further shock, enormously pregnant. It gave a jolt we immediately tried to conceal. Of course part of this shock was familiar, the Suddenly Grown-Up part, recurring at fast-forward regularity as we've aged—we've never managed to feel ready or find fresh words for it, because you cannot say idiotic things like holy crap how you've grown or what you're about to be a parent that's not possible you were the size of a loaf of bread about twenty minutes ago to the person who's mindlessly committed no greater crime than become a young adult. The young woman's face, clean and unadorned but for a tiny, ultra-thin gold hoop between her nostrils, was calm. And here came the next shock: we saw she was quietly facing down what was at hand—chaperoning it; stepping up to it. Her comportment held so much dignity and courage it hit us like a body blow. We had to blink hard to become equal to it—even to fake becoming equal to it. How else could we could take her hand in ours and say anything that made sense? We took her hand—unable to think—and simply thanked her, which in fact made no sense.

Nobody cared.

We handed her the little quiche; stepped inside.

We'd only entered that house once before, for a party years back. It had looked then, from its front lawn in the deepening blue of evening, like a big cubist teapot with golden windows, almost visibly pulsing and bobbing with its load of crowds and noise. Once inside we'd found it vibrating, crazy-reckless, packed and roaring with people of all makes and sizes, filled with light and debris and some indecipherable rock music, clumps of gabbling humans clutching drinks, kids zipping around like lateral missiles, every surface littered with food, plates, cups, bottles and cans.

Now the darkened living room was stripped military-clean, smelling of lemon furniture polish and ginger tea.

They must have had people come in to clean, we thought, dazed.

Or maybe they had friends who cleaned for them, if there was no longer money. Or maybe Aniela did it, pregnant or not.

We did not yet want to presume ask where Giselle was. Or how she was. We stuttered like beggars: Giselle?

Visiting a friend, Aniela said simply.

We nodded: of course.

She led us to the carpeted stairs. At its base she paused. We tried to look straight into her eyes, and not at the enormous, sweater-cossetted balloon at her middle.

Please—he tires easily, she murmured.

Stupid with dread, we emphasized we understood.

Up the carpeted stairs. Down a hall. Soundless, muted—you'd never know that for so long this place had housed a raucous zoo—turning left into a bedroom where light from the wide window fell unaccountably, uniformly, powder blue. Walls were likewise pale blue, thin curtains, furnishings. The effect was that of an early Picasso, that we were dreaming the experience or underwater. Perhaps it was Howard's spirit color. He sat propped in bed against many pillows, clad in a satin bed-jacket—baby blue. Here the tea wafted the scent of sweet cloves—we remembered its name, Constant Comment. Books and magazines lay fanned around him, side-table cluttered with half-consumed drinks and medicine containers.

But what fell across the room just then like a flung veil was a thing we'd not been ready for. From a tiny black rectangular speaker nested among the side-table's cups and pill bottles rang the simple, declarative, pure notes of Bach. Prelude No. 1 in C Major. In a stroke the music re-ordered the room: its series of questions like the first ever asked, graceful, surreal yet clear and systematic, each giving over to the next as if in watercolor, a re-enactment of something ancient and distilled yet fresh as blossoms.

The notes were both asking and telling, building upon themselves.

Daddy, said his beautiful young daughter, your friends are here to see you.

Howard sat composed, like a receiving prince in a Russian novel. His once-thick dark hair had gone to a few small feathers; brown-pink scalp shone through, his facial bones prominent—we thought of St. Francis, or at least how we'd always supposed St. Francis or any of those young saints looked who'd been fasting and praying and receiving some gorgeous private assurance from the vast holy beyond. His face itself was so sweetly lit to see us that for the second time that afternoon our hearts bounced, as if a sling had swooped beneath them and yanked them up.

Bach's notes had become Haydn's sonatas, nodding and counting, bell-pure statements feeding each next like liquid.

Howard, we said. We stepped toward him; glanced around. Instinct made us want to kneel beside the bed like penitent children. But Aniela was already one-handedly dragging over a couple of folding chairs—we leapt to assist her—the little quiche still balanced like a religious offering in her other hand.

Please, she said, indicating the chairs.

She slipped into the doorway, her lovely roundness peeking forth.

I'll check back soon, she said.

She vanished.

Howard! We all looked into each others' eyes. Without thinking, the words we love you blurted from our mouths. Our eyes filled. We'd never known what we would say, or that our eyes would fill. Damn everything.

But Howard only smiled, at perfect ease. I love you guys, too, he said. And my family, and all our friends. All of us, he added calmly. We whiffed a faint scent of Tiger Balm.

What—we stammered. What can we—

He patted our hands.

(He patted our hands.)

It's okay, he said. I'm getting the best treatment. We're figuring it out.

But how—what do you—

I am not scared anymore, he said. 

We stared.

Not really. I was terrified for quite some while, believe me. But just now we've—ah—sort of—burned through that. We're keeping me comfortable, he said. Enjoying the time. I'm reading, listening to best music—my daughter has lined up all the apps that play this stuff nonstop—

He flipped a hand toward the little black speaker, its voice, now a Chopin mazurka, a glowing current.

Loving my people, he added.

Amazing us more, he then asked us about ourselves. Our own days.

Automatically, obediently, we ransacked whatever chewed-up clutter lay strewn around our brains. Tomatoes had not appeared this year, we began, glancing into the lower distance, immediately distracted and vexed by the images of those god-damned dried-up stems. And the fig tree: though leafy and robust it had not really fruited; just a few deflated green balls. And the damnable squirrels kept digging holes around the yard: sometimes they even dug in the plant pots to cache nuts. We'd picked a handful of crook-neck yellow squash, but they'd been so small they seemed stunted. We didn't know why the bad yield seemed so consistent. Some said it had been a weird year for flora everywhere. Climate change.

And oh, we'd taken ourselves to see some art. Edward Hopper.

At this, Howard's face opened and shone; he sat taller. Seeing this, we leaned forward, warming to the memory: The light in the work, the light. How we wanted to go live inside it. Just to walk into that world, pull that light over our own skins like a fresh crisp sheet and never come back. Even if Hopper had been a bastard to his wife and a mean-ass crank and so on. So many were. Anyway you handed your soul right over to those light-soaked surfaces, which seemed to know something big as the sky. Bigger. How one of the captions in the exhibit quoted him: All I ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house. How this statement by itself made us so crazy-happy we repeated it aloud to each other every chance we got—middles of chores, meal prep, walking, reading, silence. It became a kind of here and now, boys. Then Howard observed quietly:

There's a fine coldness about that light, isn't there. Saturates every work.

He said it so faintly we almost missed it.

We stopped gabbling.

Of course he was right.

It made our ravings sound naive. Facile. Romantic. Howard was cutting to the hard clear truth, so obvious as to be embarrassing. Hopper's light was cold, a perfect embodiment of his pitiless depictions, over and over again, of human anomie—even absent of humans; even in landscapes.

We sat mute, struck blank.

But then Howard smiled and said: Of course that doesn't make it one particle less beautiful. Please, go on.

No trace of condescension. To encourage us he began reminding us of Hopper's fabled youth as an illustrator; the sheer technical mastery of the earliest drawings. Slowly he brought us back to our initial gusto—our ad hoc blurts. Composed, keen, he considered our words, nodding sometimes to signal his enjoyment. The Chopin, meantime, had changed to Debussy's Sacred and Profane Dances, which made the room and us inside of it seem to be undulating together in a viscous, blue, undersea kingdom. Then it went to Rachmaninoff, the famous Prelude Opus 32 No. 5, G major, like walking a pathway straight into the stars—then a barcarolle—and we felt we might have begun to slightly float an inch or so above our folding chairs.

Beneath the groping talk we sensed—hapless, dismayed—that Howard was choosing to extend a psychic lifeline to us by coaxing us to chant the familiar. He set us tasks of describing; made us report the known. Relief—for us—was instant. Talk itself became a sort of handrail along a straight drop. But by querying us Howard was also giving himself the relief of distraction, taking himself beyond immediate settings, maybe especially those of his own mind. We became his periscope onto far shores, other vistas. Scarcely aware of it in the moment, only later, driving home, did we begin to grasp the enormity, the great gift, of his tactic.

Wanting to weep, we could not.

~

It happened offstage, many months later.

During those waiting months we did what almost everyone does—dove into the daily, the rabble-scrabble, busyness and clamor; errands and repeating loops of scenery: chores, bills, grime, nonsense diversions we would later claim, and truly believe, to have been utterly unconscious. Yet at some level—had anyone paying attention gathered the evidence, they could have buttonholed us. Why had we not visited more? Why had we not called more? We could hide behind saying we assumed the family needed privacy. But from scalded depths we'd be forced to admit our own terror. We threw ourselves into the motions and sounds, mule-to-barn clip-clopping. Because to think more about it, to stare the unspeakable in the face for long, meant the worst kind of freefall.

We sent the Sorvinos fruit from Harry & David's. We sent links to movies or books (though we'd no notion they could concentrate that long on anything). We mailed them pretty cards. One was a Wolf Kahn: “Glow III, 1999,” soaked with cherry-hearted flames—color so condensed you actually felt your own pupils contract with pleasure. Another was an early Hopper landscape, a quiet blue inlet: “The Dories, Ogunquit, 1914.” Inside each card we wrote insipid cliches by hand, stymied by the hopeless triteness of any words at all.

There had occurred, during those months, a slender interim when Howard could still walk and talk; he managed to get himself ushered to a few events. At one, the friends from the mansion threw an evening feed around a backyard firepit. Howard arrived like heavily-guarded royalty, flanked by watchful handlers (Giselle and both grown children, Aniela now lumbering with almost grotesque pregnancy, identified by then as twins, her belly a swallowed sports car). He'd been seated carefully in one of the fold-out canvas chairs around the fire, an arty New Mexico blanket draped around his shoulders and another tucked over his legs. Someone handed him a glass of the (completely forbidden) high-end scotch he loved. We approached and, squatting beside his blanketed lap, commencing to chat as if all were well. He had grown strangely silent by then, seeming to prefer spending most of his time listening. His breath was horrific. Howard had also begun to hesitate when he did speak, pausing long moments between sentences—unable, it appeared, to locate the word or thought once so fluidly at hand. Talk of food seemed safe while people passed bowls of chili and hunks of corn bread; this in turn made us think of The Big Night with its notorious last scene, its two reconciling brothers—one silently cooking eggs for the other—every movement in that scene a devotional act.

Howard listened to us talk about it, then gently shook his head.

I've not…seen the film, he said softly.

We looked at him.

The Big Night had been his calling card—another of those references that used to exasperate us, right up there with the Broadway re-enactments or the hijacking of Wedding Day at Troldhaugen. We would joke, when we were feeling extra wicked, that Howard owned a bunch of personalized Spotify channels for every damned thing—music, books, film, theater, restaurants—even a private station for African click languages.

Giselle, who'd been listening as she sat near, leaned in. She'd changed utterly. Gone now from Giselle were the flash and sass, the lapel-grabbing. Nowhere to be glimpsed was the brassy, hyped-up, braying showgirl. She was thinner; her face tight and lined, eyes raw. She'd cut her hair boy-short; gray seeped through it. She seldom spoke until spoken to—then tended to stare for a long, fraught interval as if the speaker had addressed her in an unknown language. She'd also, to our horror, taken up smoking—a cigarette between her fingers tonight; her eyes narrowed in its smoke.

She motioned us closer.

We own The Big Night, she said, looking past our faces into the licking fire.

We've watched it, she added, a hundred times. 

Her face had stilled, expressionless.

~

It took longer than anyone would have guessed—though no one let themselves dwell long on that kind of guessing, a version of sticking your hand in a fire. At the same time, when the news came it struck dead-center: abrupt, even rude by our (childlike) measure.

Far too soon. It felt far too soon.

Word came by phone—the people in the mansion.

It's over, they said.

We huddled by a single phone on speaker mode, our hands turning icy.

When?

In his sleep. No pain. Hospice. All the morphine he wanted. Family beside him, they said. The family closed his eyes.

The mansion people sounded bled out. They told us they had volunteered to call friends: something they could do.

We thought about it later. How strange, the way getting word out became the first duty, the first action. Maybe because so little else could be of use.

The family will bring his ashes to Naples, they told us, to the cemetery where his folks are buried.

Jesus. Jesus.

We tried to sound seasoned. Like adults who never lost possession of their existence; of the purpose of conversation; our grip on some unilaterally-agreed-upon meaning firm and steady. Perfectly capable of processing this kind of information in an orderly, mature manner, of speaking on the phone to people who were close for umpteen years to someone we'd also happened to know—who had happened to have just died.

Died died died.

Out the door we tumbled a second time, bundled now against gray bloodless cold of dull streets; flanks of trees raw black lines, gashes.

Tramping once more the concrete walks, the bare trees our receiving line. Objects and weather, we marveled yet once more, have no opinions. No help from them. How, then, to proceed? What—in this pageant, this ceremony missing its program—what have we not understood? What did we miss? Because furiously, moltenly, we feel we have forgotten something. Overlooked something—essential. Something that could make all that has happened slot into position, letting the gears of comprehension at last click and chug into motion.

Where, now, were the golden exhales of wisdom to fill a Howard-shaped space, this unassailable man who'd done his steady best by all the living—about whom we'd recklessly smirked and joked and brooded, whose seeming perfect fortunes we'd so long envied?

Where was the second shoe to thump down?

We had always assumed we could afford our slouchy, side-mouth louche, our cynical swagger-talk, our gossip and conjecture. Because all of it, the whole chaotic carousel of carping and musing, would go on forever.

Then of course, reliable as gravity, it stops. Wakey-wakey!

But (we wanted to shake someone) wake how, exactly? And to what?

And once awake, do what?

Breathe and walk? Fast and pray?

Social media convulsed into its usual 24 hours of chest-beating and garment-rending, followed by the gentle confetti-rain of helpless, generic, cliched blessings. Someone posted a young photo of the radiant, handsome Howard holding his toddling kids. A handful of paragraphs written by his son next appeared, summarizing Howard's time on Earth. Enzo called his father's life “rich and noble.”

Strings of sad and caring emojis popped forth one after the next, hearts and flowers and rainbows, alongside post after post: I'm so sorry for your loss. Sincerest condolences.

From that point, Giselle went entirely missing from social media.

And then—as with every such prior event, every catastrophe ever recorded—the ongoing gnashing and tumult, unceasing commerce and white noise, closed seamlessly over the loss like the sea.

We thought of the Levertov line: The myriad past, it enters us and disappears.

All minds seemed wiped clean.

The internet seethed ahead, deaths like Howard's snapping in concert at us like a field of frenzied castanets.

Where were the headlines, we wondered. Shouldn't the planet pause?

Good Man Dies. Family Bereft. No Second Shoe Yet Detected.

Except we could argue that a next shoe did fall, of its kind. Within a week after Howard's death Aniela delivered her twins, a boy and girl by scheduled C-section—a scare followed, just after the perfect tiny infants were lifted out, when her blood pressure spiked dangerously. Meds were administered; doctors monitored her for several days. The friends with the mansion sent bulletins while we all watched our phones in anguish: everyone clenched with the unspoken, gruesome history of childbirth. If we'd had faith we'd have prayed: please please please let these babies come out okay and let the young mother be well. Please. Aniela managed to endure it; photos texted by her brother made us weep: exhausted, her face bloated and clammy beneath those hideous hospital shower caps, holding each tiny twin against her upper chest; her eyes closed with the ordeal's aftermath, with her body's efforts to defend and repair itself. Each small head peeps above its tight swaddling sporting a rich crown of dark, feathery hair. She had not yet married the father, a young Korean man who, as we understand it, performs online publicity for a tech consulting firm. But the young father was on the scene—we were told this later by the mansion people. He was “participating.” They would probably marry: so the mansion people said. They told us the babies were given Howard's and Giselle's names as middle names, so that they, the infant boy and girl, could each commence their lives as originals.

There's a line following that Levertov declaration about memory's vanishing:

Except that within it somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed.

We hold this in our minds' hands, turning it about.

We wrote Giselle a congratulatory note. We knew she would, for the rest of her life, be pasted to those grandchildren. She would live for them: sell her house, her practice, move to a condo in the tony suburb across the bridge ten minutes from the kids, retire on whatever remained from the sale of the practice, set up Social Security to include her late husband's. We thanked the stars for the babies—we would not blame Giselle's sanity, or anyone else's, for otherwise shattering.

But the little boy and girl would grow up believing their grandmother Geegee's raked face and stammering words—Geegee is what they would call her—always to have been that way. Like most of us, they'd nod at the photographs of their handsome late grandfather. They'd see a younger, saucy-pretty Geegee with him, and this would intrigue them mildly, for a minute—but soon they'd scroll on and continue to assume Geegee was born old and ravaged, because that was how they'd always known her.

We have tried our best, though, to remember.

To remember them both from the outset—our outset with them, at least, Howard and Giselle—while we still can. And here's the thing. When you looked back on it, if you were paying the least grain of attention, you saw. Their outset—and all that followed, however meanly we scoffed at it—was the embodiment of Troldhaugen. That setting-forth. That radiance. The shy-yet-daring stepping ahead armed with that sweet, arrogant admixture of hope and resolve—recognizable anywhere. And they kept it going, see? Long as they could. That was their shining. How else to see it, or say it?

We think about it. We tell it.

And we watch winter's barrenness silently extend. The gray and cold and rains feel like a mercy, a cleansing. Any other colors or shapes, across the surfaces of this world, would profane how matters stand right now. Only the earliest hints—faint patches like russet bumps at the tips of Japanese maple's raw, gray-brown branches, a near-invisible rash—promise a later, warmer commotion. We know that commotion—every step of it—will be welcomed in its hour. We wait for it to erupt, watching the branch-tips every day. Faithful to the hidden commandments, the cosmic clock directing uncountable rounds of it, they will extend and unfurl, forming those tender red stems destined for stained-glass lime and later, fire opal: they will poke up, and out, and forward.