What You Left Behind

You left behind two racks of wall-to-wall clothes that fill a walk-in closet cavernous enough to have garaged the Jaguar you totaled after letting your insurance expire. In back hangs a pallor-dusted cocktail dress. The one you wore that palm-sweaty Sunday plotted by Cathy after I finagled her out of her most recent DUI where she pushed into driving you home.

Scott? your dark visage ghosting from up behind me in the polished poplar bar I had gotten to fifteen minutes before then and downed a double Dewars while I told myself to stop looking at my watch and looked every 11 seconds anyway. I swiveled around, snapping shut the book I’d brought to show off how I definitely was not another of those self-centered yuppies I assumed you were used to meeting in bars. Short stories of John O’Hara. “Flight.” The one where the husband recounts his thousand and one missteps.

What if I said no, Erin? A misstep joke to break the ice you would tell me 13 months later when we lay on honeymoon dampened sheets damn near rankled you enough to leave me behind.

But you did not. Not that night. Did not leave until your straw swizzled what ice was left at the bottom of your third Long Island ice tea. Your third my male hubris left me to believe because you were so enthralled by that evening’s company. You crossed to the door, the whisper of promise in the sway of your hips, the swish of Renoir scarlet running through the rain-runnels on the window. Left behind instead a calligraphic number you scripted on my wrist as fingertips pained by a past that you prayed this once not mislead you to what’s true in another’s heart.

Hanging beside it, you left behind your chocolate Nehru jacket from when all the rage in junior high because you wore it (tongue skating over your upper lip when you told me) the first time a boy French kissed you only to leave you behind the next week for a better-bosomed cheerleader. Boatneck tee-shirts from when you tended bar at Captain Jack’s (using a cousin’s ID because you were underage) for the six years it took you to work your way through Wellesley after your father left town with his bouffant-haired secretary, leaving your stepmother behind to proclaim poverty, but not so impoverished she couldn’t set sail for Italy in October with her circle of commiserating crones. Navy peacoat from those long, left-behind New England winters that has only collected dust and moths because you vowed never to go back.

You left behind on the shelf above your peacoat an envelope of photographs. One of an oil painting commissioned by your mother of you humble-smiled and wearing a coral bathrobe over your black swimsuit, wet hair tied back, your tentative fingertips clutching as if it was undeserved, and one of the capricious judges might snatch away one of the score of blue ribbons you won your senior year when you graduated holding the school diving record, and though Michael said she only kept it canvassed under a dusty tarp up in her own hoarder attic and refused to give or even sell to you. Of us up at the Wrigley Memorial looking down on Catalina Island, you in acid-washed jeans and white tank top that showed the shoulder scar left behind from what your mother swore up and down was an accidental pan of hot cooking grease, the burn wound so odorous that after your discharge your friends ostracized you for months, and because the plastic surgeon botched the grafts, it was left to grow pubic hair you had to shave. Another of your Sunday-school class with you wearing a white-straw hat with black Easter bow, your cousin Rae radiant behind who everyone said could pass for your double. Who on the Sunday morning of the day she was to graduate hanged herself from a rafter in the barn raised by your great grandfather’s Anabaptist congregation in a single 1917 summer Saturday and who the Sunday before had whispered to you her despair at being two months late.

You left behind a gown of ivory taffeta you wanted so much to wear again because on the evening you wore it last down in Annapolis that spring you graduated when the midshipmen crowned you Belle of the Ball, one of them so mesmerized that years later he called and called and you claimed it must have been Cathy who gave him our number. Next to the gown hangs an embroidered Ursinia caftan from the following summer when you trekked across the Afghanistan badlands following the old Venetian spice routes where you said you left behind every spark of fire that had ever once kindled within you to join the Peace Corps. The eyelet sheath dress you wore while on your three-day layover home to a Madrid cafe to keep a midnight rendezvous with that season’s debut matador who had shared his cab when you returned from your Galleria shopping but never showed and next day at the airport you read in El Heraldo how he had gotten cogida, his recovery guarded.

In one of the sheath dress pockets you left behind another envelope of photographs. One of you as a done-up Daisy Mae straight out of Li’l Abner cradling a shotgun and looking mean enough to eat raw rabbit, or just had, and told everyone was our engagement picture. Of the stereo you could not afford but gave me anyway on our first Christmas a week after our engagement where you the one who proposed. A Christmas tree, though instead of crowned with a star or angel, beset by a frizzed doll’s head, our first purchase made on our second date when we daytripped up to Santa Barbara, and I had asked myself what was I hell-for-leather riding into with someone who would buy a doll’s head?

On the shelf above your Madrid dress, you left behind those Italian leather-wrap sandals you danced away that sultry afternoon when I introduced you to my grandfather, and he taught you the saltarello after everyone had put away at least one too many glasses of his Montepulciano. Goggles you wore the next morning when you charmed the rakish cad into letting you climb behind the wheel of his Mercedes Gullwing to drive into the village below because you had this craving for ciabatta, my grandmother glowering down the dusty road after the two of you from the stone-arched doorway. Boy Scout uniform patched with a plague of merit badges left behind at a Goodwill over on Wilshire you wore that first summer to all our county fairs and renaissance festivals and to the wiener-dog races run down at the horse track in Los Alamitos by sausage-legged dachshunds. A goatskin miniskirt you wore on your weekend shopping-mall sackings with Cathy the Conqueror that left behind no head unturned and those silk chemises you brought back that on champagne evenings you let me slip their spaghetti-strings from your alabaster shoulders. Top hat together with coat and tails and the vampire canines left behind in one pocket you wore the Halloween you made that one wide-eyed little boy, who only the year before had stepped off a refugee plane from Cambodia, burst into tears when you flung open our door. A Pointelle polo sweater you wore one crisp fall afternoon when you got us invited up to the Tommy Town stables the year before their colt placed in the Preakness and after we trotted down from the Malibu foothills you couldn’t keep your hands off their hours-old wobbly sorrel until you led me up the steps to the scratchy hayloft. A boucle dirndl and huckaback halter dress you wore into the office for casual Fridays where as you hurried out the door in the harried morning with raised lipstick in hand you said you hoped to Hell the phone would stay quiet so we could jumpstart our weekend but it would seldom acquiesce. Hanging beside it the calico shirtdress you lounged in when you at last did get home, multi-color painted toes propped on the coffee table with day-deadening glass in hand as you recounted your thousand-and-one run-ins with those clunk heads you claimed infested corporate. Seersucker blazer, in blazing pink of course, you wore to jazz up your yawn-fest pharmaceutical conferences. World War II bomber jacket you wore one rainy winter afternoon on the boardwalk down in La Jolla where a panhandler eying its shoulder insignia told us, as you fumbled in your purse, he hoped to Hell your father had avoided the luck God had left him and maybe a good idea next time for you to leave behind in your closet.

Hidden within the cloak’s floor-length folds you left behind a shoebox of still more photographs. Of us skeet shooting on Lanai, big grin swallowing your face after you gunned seven for seven and told me I damn well better watch my step from now on. Us in front of the Hotel del Coronado where that night two drunken guests woke us to ask if they could see the haunted room you had insisted we check into and the next morning insisted we check out of. Of us laughing in the limo on our way to see Showboat with Drs. Block and Koral, Dr. Koral later sentenced to three years in Folsom for setting fire to his by then ex-wife’s garage. Photos from that first flat and then later ones of our house, now set for sheriff’s auction next Thursday. A photo of your parent’s living room from the one time we visited their home and you tried to recreate in ours with discount floral prints and secondhand-store terracotta primitives. Stack of bodice-ripping paperbacks piled beside the oversized reading chair you lived in on weekends. Salt-water aquarium you devoted six months to restoring. A patio table set for Sunday brunch where you spent hours in the kitchen. Your tiny television we got by with at first because money tight after we paid for a wedding where your by then estranged parents partied with their uninvited friends until past midnight but refused to fork over so much as a single dime. Of Buckwheat, left behind from your hellraiser Venice Beach days, who fancied tearing through window screens that got us annoyed phone calls, and when he ran off you posted signs and knocked door-to-door and for weeks beside yourself following hysterical postings on telephone polls of coyote sightings in the neighborhood. Black-lacquer bedroom furniture you bought on credit after you lost your job but couldn’t pay for and I refused to. Of you not smiling between your recently reconciled parents at Marti Gras. You at Michael’s wedding back in Boston where I declined to attend.

You left behind a white Edwardian lawn dress with petal embroidery on its bodice you wore with a 1920s straw cloche, essential headgear you insisted becoming the well-appointed flapper, for a croquet tournament up at my then boss’s nouveau riche mansion in the hills of Newport Coast. Where afterwards on the drive home you let slip how he had proposed a rendezvous for an after-hours drink which when confronted about he demurred to as all your idea but I nevertheless felt compelled by principle to sucker punch him in the mouth. Puff-wing blouse and ditzy-print skirt I caught you flirting in at Harry’s Bar to teach me a lesson that one time I sort of got waylaid on my way there by our new paralegal who we ended up letting go the next week. Turquoise Tangiers tunic you wore for your more-and-more frequent girls-night-out where you slunk home later and later, the last time with your collar smelling of men’s cologne and you never wore again after you couldn’t get the blood to wash out. Quilted Mandarin jacket you picked up in Chinatown that one weekend you went with me to a legal seminar and had a tourist over from Taiwan snap your lonely-eyed picture. The rice-white gown you were forced to sleep in on our wedding night. And told me more than once you wanted to be buried in only to leave hanging in your closet to rot from mildew.

On the shelf above your wedding gown you left behind a keepsake box of birds-eye maple holding the brass casings ejected by honor-guard rifles. Medal bar affixed to the posthumous Silver Star awarded your Uncle Bunkle and on our wedding day you pinned to your collar for the requisite something blue to somehow resurrect the luck that had left him behind. A beaming-smile engagement announcement. Lace handkerchief salted by bridal tears you kept tucked under your sleeve. Maroon matchbook with May 6, 2011, scripted in gold. Still ribboned in a now-faded scroll, my self-penned vows, more aspirational than ever lived up to. Betrothal ring studded with diamonds and your ruby-stoned wedding band. Gold ring in proxy for the one I told you must have slipped off in the Christmas tree lot as you screamed from behind our bedroom door for me to for once stop with all my goddamn sonofabitching lying.

Beside your keepsakes, you left behind a box of cards. A couple from your mother whom we never invited back after she left you red-faced at your favorite restaurant because not up to her Beacon-Hill standards and where the staff all knew you by name but we never ate at again. More from Aunt Mike who you said you wished to God had been your mother. But mostly cards from me. Giddy cards from when we met. Thanksgivings and Christmases. Birthdays and anniversaries and the best ones of all for no reason. Sappy sentimental cards. Serious cards and silly cards. Snoopy and Garfield cards. The card I gave you one Sunday morning with a bouquet of street-corner roses to remind you you were still my Miss America after we had stayed up to watch. Cards where I told you I was sorry. Despairing cards begging you to get well. To not leave me behind. Tucked inside one, a photograph of you in straw hat and floral vest wearing buttock-drooping jeans after you lost all that weight and were working so hard to gain back, grinning a game smile, your once voluptuous breasts you so vain about shriveled to rotted radishes.

Next to the cards a box holding what you left behind in your bathroom. A half-used tube of Icy-Hot you would have me rub into your aching lacrosse muscles. Empty inhalant for the asthma that had plagued you since childhood. Brush threaded with strands of chestnut hair. Eyeliner and the blush you had to layer on ever thicker to hide the vodka-dilated veins blemishing your once Vermeer face. Empty bottle of birth-control pills and another of Clomid to facilitate fertility. Iron pills for anemia. Balsam for stress-aggravated acne. Turmeric and lecithin you said you had read in Cosmopolitan could alleviate the cirrhosis afflicting your liver and a bottle of steroids to impede jaundice. Nyquil from last winter where your compromised immune system caused you to come down with cold after cold. Beta-blockers. Near full bottle of Abilify years past its expiration date for the depression that never left you. Zithromax for a never-discussed diagnosis of gonorrhea.

You left behind your voice that as I turn off the closet light answers. Asks the caller to leave behind a message. Goodwill inquiring if Tuesday convenient. I pick up the phone, all misgiving behind me, because in the end we left behind nothing. Nothing but our long ago vows pledged one to the other as we turned to walk down the aisle off into the whatever that was our to be. Until death do us part we vowed. An unquestioned half-truth we swallowed whole. Because there is no parting not even in death. Death having no say in what we leave behind.

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