The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588364562
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

The telephone light was flashing when I got home. Two messages. The first was a man, clearing his throat and then saying, “Yes. My name is Tom Bartlett. This isn’t a sales call. You don’t know me, but I heard you on the radio this morning and uh . . . well, you said you wrote children’s books and I wondered if you, you know, ever taught or anything like that or if you . . .” He laughed. “Guess I’m going on here. A bit. You know what? If you wouldn’t mind calling me, I’m at 555-7501. I hope you don’t mind my having called you—Ed Selwin gave me the number. Thank you.”

I replayed the message and wrote down his number. Nice voice, low and easy. The second message was from Susanna. “Oh, my GOD!” she began, and I pulled up a chair to listen to the rest. Lorraine had just called her from the airport, Susanna couldn’t believe this, she couldn’t believe this, she would be home tonight, all night, call her, call anytime even if it was in the middle of the night, in fact she liked to be called in the middle of the night. I dialed the number.

“Susanna?”

“Yes!”

I smiled. “How are you?”

“More like, how are you? Oh, sweetie, I’m so, so sorry. About your husband. He died.”

“Yes.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. So you spoke with Lorraine.”

“Yes, and I am so glad we found you! We’ve looked for you, you know, every now and then. We all went to Barcelona, years ago, and we tried to find you to come with us then. That was when we were in our thirties, infants. My God, it was over twenty years ago! When can we get together?”

“Um . . .” I wasn’t sure, suddenly. I needed a breath, a respectful visitation to a place I’d been ignoring. It had been good—it had been a relief—to be so purposefully away from the reality of what had brought me here. But in an odd way, I missed my sorrow.

But then Susanna said, “No rush. We’ll wait. But when you’re ready, we’ll all come there together. Oh, sweetheart, we’ll have such a good time. Maybe it’s a function of age, maybe it’s the scary political climate, but more and more we’re talking about how necessary it is to tell people you love them, how important it is to keep in touch. And you meant a lot to us. We all used to fit so well together! And the three of us have had such a good time over all these years. Did Lorraine tell you about the concerts?”

“No.”

“Well, we go to them at least once a year, we go to all the Stones concerts—Mick is just cadaverous, worse than in photos. We saw Leonard Cohen, who depressed the hell out of us, and we saw Joni—what a great jazz vocalist she is now, isn’t she? She’s aged so much—although what she said about happiness being the best face-lift? Is that not our girl? Is that not just the most beautiful, soulful, wise thing? Of course, it’s not true.

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