Everyman

"Phoebe, I don't know what you're talking about. You're not making any sense. I'll get the first plane back that I possibly can."

His mother died an hour before he was able to reach the hospital in Elizabeth. His father and his brother were sitting beside the body that lay beneath the covers of the bed. He had never before seen his mother in a hospital bed, though of course she had seen him there more than once. Like Howie, she had enjoyed perfect health all her life. It was she who would rush to the hospital to comfort others. Howie said, "We haven't told the staff she died. We waited. We wanted you to be able to see her before they took her away." What he saw was the high-relief contour of an elderly woman asleep. What he saw was a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death – it's nothing more.

He hugged his father, who patted his hand and said, "It's best this way. You wouldn't have wanted her to live the way that thing left her."

When he took his mother's hand and held it to his lips, he realized that in a matter of hours he had lost the two women whose devotion had been the underpi

With Phoebe he lied and lied and lied, but to no avail. He told her that he had gone to Paris to break off the affair with Merete. He'd had to see her face to face to do it, and that's where she was working.

"But in the hotel, while you were breaking off the affair, didn't you sleep with her at night in the same bed?"

"We didn't sleep. She cried all night long."

"For four whole nights? That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't think even Hamlet cried that much."

"Phoebe, I went to tell her it was over – and it is over."

"What did I do so wrong," Phoebe asked, "that you should want to humiliate me like this? Why should you want to unhinge everything? Has it all been so hideous? I should get over being dumbstruck, but I can't. I, who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again. Yes, you wounded me with the secretary, but I kept my mouth shut. You didn't even know I knew, did you? Well, did you?"

"I didn't, no."

"Because I hid my thoughts from you – unfortunately I couldn't hide them from myself. And now you wound me with the Dane and you humiliate me with the lying, and now I will not hide my thoughts and keep my mouth shut. A mature, intelligent woman comes along, a mate who understands what reciprocity is. She rids you of Cecilia, gives you a phenomenal daughter, changes your entire life, and you don't know what to do for her except to fuck the Dane. Every time I looked at my watch I kept figuring what time it was in Paris and what you two would be doing. That went on for the whole weekend. The basis of everything is trust, is it not? Is it not?"

She had only to say Cecilia's name to instantaneously recall the vindictive tirades visited on his mother and father by his first wife, who, fifteen years later, to his horror, turned out to have been not merely abandoned Cecilia but his Cassandra: "I pity this little Miss Muffet coming after me – I genuinely do pity the vile little Quaker slut!"

"You can weather anything," Phoebe was telling him, "even if the trust is violated, if it's owned up to. Then you become life partners in a different way, but it's still possible to remain partners. But lying – lying is cheap, contemptible control over the other person. It's watching the other person acting on incomplete information – in other words, humiliating herself. Lying is so commonplace and yet, if you're on the receiving end, it's such an astonishing thing. The people you liars are betraying put up with a growing list of insults until you really can't help but think less of them, can you? I'm sure that liars as skillful and persistent and devious as you reach the point where it's the one you're lying to, and not you, who seems like the one with the serious limitations. You probably don't even think you're lying – you think of it as an act of kindness to spare the feelings of your poor sexless mate. You probably think your lying is in the nature of a virtue, an act of generosity toward the dumb cluck who loves you. Or maybe it's just what it is – a fucking lie, one fucking lie after another. Oh, why go on – all these episodes are so well known," she said. "The man loses the passion for the marriage and he ca

"Phoebe-"

"No! Don't you dare call me by my name!"

But these episodes are indeed well known and require no further elaboration. Phoebe threw him out the night after his mother's burial, they were divorced after negotiating a financial settlement, and because he did not know what else to do to make sense of what had happened or how else to appear responsible – and to rehabilitate himself particularly in Nancy's eyes – a few months later he married Merete. Since he had broken everything up because of this person half his age, it seemed only logical to go ahead and tidy everything up again by making her his third wife – never was he clever enough as a married man to fall into adultery or to fall in love with a woman who was not free.

It was not long afterward that he discovered that Merete was something more than that little hole, or perhaps something less. He discovered her inability to think anything through without all her uncertainties intruding and skewing her thought. He discovered the true dimensions of her vanity and, though she was only in her twenties, her morbid fear of aging. He discovered her green card problems and her long-standing tax mess with the IRS, the result of years of failing to file a return. And when he required emergency coronary artery surgery, he discovered her terror of illness and her uselessness in the face of danger. Altogether he was a little late in learning that all her boldness was encompassed in her eroticism and that her carrying everything erotic between them to the limit was their only overpowering affinity. He had replaced the most helpful wife imaginable with a wife who went to pieces under the slightest pressure. But in the immediate aftermath, marrying her had seemed the simplest way to cover up the crime.

Passing the time was excruciating without painting. There was the hour-long morning walk, in the late afternoon there was twenty minutes of working out with his light weights and a half hour of doing easy laps at the pool – the daily regime his cardiologist encouraged – but that was it, those were the events of his day. How much time could you spend staring out at the ocean, even if it was the ocean you'd loved since you were a boy? How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason? On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime. He got out of the car on the ocean road and went up onto the boardwalk and sat on one of the benches that looked out to the beach and the sea, the stupendous sea that had been changing continuously without ever changing since he'd been a bony sea-battling boy. This was the very bench where his parents and grandparents used to sit in the evenings to catch the breeze and enjoy the boardwalk promenade of neighbors and friends, and this was the very beach where his family had picnicked and su