Tenth wedding anniversary gift

Calista Wertheim WaS, in her time-as most people are, in their times, I suppose-lovely. She had a propensity toward all things batik and slashed her way through life with that mane of frizzled yellow whipping behind her. Carry loved her, and I assume she him, with a devotion and a level-headedness I admire and understand. We were close friends, the four of us-Calista and Carry, me and Witold-for many, many years. There were countless dinners in Chinatown, summer barbecues, Sunday brunches on the terrace. We attended each other's events: Witold's openings, Calista's benefits. I use the past tense: Witold is dead, and though Calista has not yet passed, she is gone from us in most ways that merit use of the present. When she was alive, she ran a nonprofit center for the arts with a will of iron. And I laugh just thinking about Calista and iron. Some years ago she commissioned a piece by a young sculptor-an artist whose work I'll admit I actually admired, to a point. But a point decidedly shy of having a gigantic foot erected on the lawn of your Marin County home! A giant iron foot to serve as the backdrop for your daughter's wedding, countless showers and graduation galas, and two monumental anniversary parties, Carry and Calista's tenth and twentieth. The thirtieth will be this summer, but there will, in the end, be no party. We think (and I have been an instrumental part of this decision process) that Calista would have preferred not to celebrate anything just now, under the circumstances, and she's the one we have been trying to do right by.

The most recent lawn party was just a year ago, and I think we all knew it might be the last. Carry and Calista's son, Patrick, had graduated from high school. I drove out from the city the day before, a sheet cake the size of a small nation sprawled across the back seat. I was so terrified of crushing it I went forty-five the entire way. The Wertheims lived in the loft below ours before their kids were born, then moved to the suburbs to raise them, a move that made sense, for them. Witold and I pooh-poohed their flight eternally. Not a decision we'd have ever made ourselves, something that showed the differences in who we were and who they were. For all we liked one another, we weren't similar in the ways that friends often are. Witold and I could never have imagined leaving San Francisco; Calista and Carry dreamed of and did it. Their kids are good people: Sarah, in dental school; Patrick-who's the spitting image of Calista: the wide-set eyes, broad jaw, that shock of blond, too towheaded for his age-now just finished with his first year at UCLA. I like these kids, am proud of them in the way I imagine one might be of one's own. Children were not important to Witold and me, and though everyone wants to know if I regret that decision now that Witold is gone, I am more bothered by their questions than I am by my childlessness. just to have a part of him still here . . . they suggest, and I think: A part of him? I want all of him. They want to know if I have missed seeing children grow up, and I say, ? have seen children grow up. Do not be under the impression that I have glommed onto Carry and Calista's kids to vicariously experience the joys of parenthood. I have not. They know me, but not so well. I have been present, but not hovering. I did not want children. That has not changed.

So the lawn party. Patrick's graduation. An early summer day just made for a garden party, all of us drinking the first gin and tonics of the season, feeling very Gatsbian in our floral dresses, our pale, lightweight slacks, shirts rolled up and open at the collar. As a graduation gift, I had given Patrick a small painting of Witold's, a study he did for a landscape in the Sierras back when we were first married, more than forty years ago. Witold's work stunned me when I first encountered it, and him, and still does now: such subtlety, so little representation, everything in the suggestion of what might be, an impressionistic haze of what actually was. Patrick thanked me for the gift profusely. Later, I was nursing my G&T in private, out of sight of the milling guests, on the far side of the garden shed, when Carry came to me, a proffered spanakopita wedge bleeding grease onto a cocktail napkin. "He loves it, Lindy, loves it. I mean, of course he does-it's Witold's . . . Of course. But it's so special. Thank you." he pressed the hors d'oeuvre into my hand as if it -was all he could do. Carry is an exceedingly earnest man.

"I'm so glad," I told him. "I thought he might."

"You know," Carry said. "You know what else?"

"What else?" I teased him. Getting to the point is not Carry's strong suit.

"You know what else he said? he came to me, totally unsolicited, totally on his own, out of the blue, he came up to me, just standing there by the bar, I was talking with Merle Buschbaum, and Merle wandered off, and just Patrick and I were left, and he said, just looked right at me, like he knew, I swear, like he knew, and he was somehow trying to say, Dad, it's okay. I know and it's okay, okay? he said: Lindy s a really amazing woman. just like that. I think my jaw must've dropped into my drink. If he didn't know before, he had to know then."

I was smiling-a smile I hope conveyed what I was going for: love, mixed with sympathy, and understanding, but not just sympathy and understanding all full of priestliness and free love. I was trying for knowing understanding, with a dose of sagacity, for which I think Carry looks to me.

"I didn't know what to say," Carry continued. "It was like he knew, but how was I supposed to be positive? And how would he know anyway? Is it written on my face? Is he just a perceptive kid, just a super-perceptive kid who's figured it out somehow? We're not obvious. I know we're not obvious. There's no way we're obvious." he looked around him. No one was there. On the other side of the garden shed, Patrick's still-adolescent friends chatted it up with their parents' set, as if graduating from high school had suddenly made middle-aged men of them all. Their acne-scarred faces were puffed with self-importance that day. There was no one in the world who cared where Carry and I might be.

"We're not obvious," I said.

"I know," he said. "You're right. You're right. I know you're right. So I asked. I said, Patrick, what do you mean? And he just answered, straight, honest, nothing to hide, just said, She's great. I just really like her." Carry was famous for impersonating his children's speech. "She's always been around, and I guess I always knew she was great, but it's like it was just something I knew, like a family thing, like just something I knew was true because I knew you and Mom thought she was great but not because I knew myself that she was great. And then today she gave me the painting, and I just understood, I guess, somehow, that she really is great, and I understood why you and Mom love her so much. And that was that, and then he saw some friend and he skittered off to talk to them, and that was it, and I still don't know what he knows or if he knows or what he was trying to tell me, but I swear it was like permission. Is that crazy? That's what it felt like. Is that absolutely crazy?"

"Maybe he was?" I offered.