(III)
Salix Sepulcralis
Sharon
would have been appalled by the sheer ordinariness of her death. It was all so
badly staged.
There
was no poetry in it, no melodrama or mystery. The Grim Reaper had not waited
for the shattering three-hanky climax of a La
Traviata or a La Bohème to step
onto the stage, making his vaunted cameo with a dark flourish. Sharon had not
warbled away the first two acts like Violetta or Mimi, the tragic center of
attention bravely denying her piteous fate, slowly fading, if barely consumed,
by consumption. No family or friends had gathered about a deathbed strewn with
roses—Sharon would have adored that
particular detail. No penitent lover wept upon her bosom or took her dying
breath into himself with one final passionate pledge.
She
had simply ‘dropped dead’ one afternoon, the way just-plain folks so often do,
without fuss or fanfare. One moment she was standing in front of her kitchen
sink, drying dishes, talking and laughing with one of her chums on the phone.
The next she was lying lifeless on the faux-marble tile, surrounded by broken
shards of heirloom china. This supernaturally youthful, magically intriguing woman
with three or perhaps even four dazzling decades ahead of her had become, virtually
in the blink of an eye, an unextraordinary mass of diverse necrotic tissues
turning to mush on the embalming table, this soul that had so longed to sing,
reduced to a voiceless assortment of cells in random, untidy decay.
No
explanation had been forthcoming beyond some nebulous pronouncement of ‘natural
causes,’ a verdict that satisfied no one and only inspired the sort of cruel
gossip Sharon herself had thrived on in life. ‘Still,’ people said, ‘such a
tragedy! She was so young! How could God be so uncaring—so capricious? Why
would He do this? Especially to someone so well-liked and popular—so righteous
and upstanding? The heavens, as ever, were stolidly silent, and Sharon (née
Chance) Kennedy-Sweet-Street-Withers-McDonald had been buried on what would
have been her 55th birthday under the lowering slate-gray sky of a
snowless Iowa February.
“You
were at the committal service,” her daughter said. “I saw you—”
True.
I’d paid my respects from a discreet distance, standing, hat over heart, in the
naked willow grove that etched the borders of the Chance family burying ground,
itself a flat, dreary acre, five miles beyond town, shadeless in summer, ever
open to the wind—one might as easily have planted corn there as corpses. I
watched the old rock-ribbed country preacher saying his semi-literate piece
over the tasteless gunmetal casket—knowing her people, it had been open full-length
during the service at the poky white-frame church back in town—watched and
witnessed the assembled mourners bowing their heads in solemn unison to mumble
the Lord’s Prayer—words that I had given up long ago.
“It’s
like I told you, honey, Sharon and I were friends once upon a time.”
“But
you were there?”
“I
had my reasons.”
“Which
were?”
“My reasons.”
“Why
didn’t you come over and say something? To Dad? To me and Ash?”
“I
didn’t think it would be appropriate. I’d been out of your mom’s life for so
long.”
“That
sounds like an excuse—”
“As
opposed to what? I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“I
know. But I was hoping—”
What? To hear me confess that I
absolutely hate funerals? All that unfocused emotion, and everybody’s
suddenly manic depressive, laughing one minute, weeping uncontrollably the
next. People are impossibly raw-nerved or cataleptically numb, both at once
more often than not, and everybody’s miserable. Irrationality becomes contagious,
and it’s far too easy to say things one shouldn’t.
“I
didn’t want to make a scene, that’s all.”
“Fair
enough,” she said. “We all deal in our own way.”
Yes,
my sweet, nubile nymph, and we all want our death to mean something. We want it
to be a kind of eloquent summation of our life no matter how badly we may have
screwed it up, our passing from it deeply dignified, poignant and powerful,
with the people we love most hovering around us, straining to catch our final
words, something glorious, pithy, true, and wise, a perfect aphorism that will
echo down the ages, as if, somehow, we could stage manage our own legacy for
all time. We want death to make us famous, even if we never had a claim to it
in life, our funeral an elaborate media event, televised live around the world
for all our inconsolable fans to share in real time.
“When
were you friends with her?” she asked.
“Your
mom was 39 when we met—”
“I
would have been 5.”
“That’s
right. I was nine years older than Sharon. We were... close for about three years.”
“What
attracted you to each other?”
“Shared
interests—fine art, music, culture—”
And sex, of course—that most common
of common interests—there was a lot of that, too.
“—you
knew she was something of a frustrated artist?” And, for much of her life, a frustrated mother as well. She dreamed
of buying some grand old Victorian mansion in the city, filling it up with fine
antiques and perfect children—a Currier and Ives Christmas card come to life.
She wanted to throw lavish parties with expensive champagne and caviar and
string quartet music to accompany the kind of brilliant conversations you hear
in old movies.
What
she ‘got’ was Rory McDonald, a man so obviously beneath her that even his few
friends scratched their heads in utter disbelief. I gleefully cuckolded that
hapless hayseed without ever giving much thought to anything beyond my own enjoyment
of his wife’s stupendously fuckable body. And Sharon had been right there with
me every pelvic thrust and earth-shattering climax of the way, my concupiscent
co-conspirator, unblushing, blithely brazen, seductively cold-blooded in her
spider-like embrace of infidelity, though, in the end, she could never bring
herself to leave the fool, whom, for all practical purposes, she’d married as a
‘legitimate’ sperm donor.
One
weekend we managed to get away together to Chicago. I’d wrangled tickets to the
Lyric Opera’s production of La Bohème
and Sharon was over the moon. She’d never looked so heart-stoppingly stunning
as she did that evening, stepping from the cab in a long, sequined evening gown
with the sort of daring décolletage that would have inspired a month’s worth of
disapproving sermons in church back at home. She swept into the Civic Opera
House on my arm, a vision in midnight blue, and, for one shining moment, all
eyes were upon her and her alone. She herself was far more impressed by the glitter
of the audience than the rather sentimental tale of impoverished artists
unfolding on the stage—until that moment in the final act when Rodolfo rushes
to Mimi’s side only to discover that she is past all hope.
And
suddenly Sharon was weeping because it was all so beautiful and there was
nothing like that kind of beauty in her ‘real’ life. She was clinging to my
arm, burying her head in my chest, trying to muffle her sobs, “Oh Jim! Let’s
move to the city! Let’s buy that big house and have a couple more kids of our
own! I want this! I want it so badly! I’ll leave him now for sure, I promise!
I’ll divorce him and marry you, and we can live happily ever after...”
Back
at the hotel that night, making love, she swore through her tears that I was her
true soulmate, the only one she’d ever truly loved, the only one who could make
her dreams come true...
Brave
words, yet I knew she would never follow through. I’d heard the same promises a
hundred times before—and what is it they say? You can take the girl out of the
country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. For all she longed so fiercely
to deny, a part of her was still that simple farmer’s daughter from Iowa, the
good girl who never disappointed. And Sharon simply could not bear the
disapprobation of her people, could not tear herself away from the world she
knew, that place where existence is predictable and safe and certain, a million
miles from where real life actually happens. For all her dreams, her gilded
hopes and starry-eyed ambitions, Sharon (née Chance) Kennedy-Sweet-Street-Withers-McDonald
had simply dropped dead one afternoon, having never truly lived at all.
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