ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 139: Veronica Visits

Veronica, a friend since high school, calls.

She and her husband, John, flew in from California, where they visited their son and his family. John flew the plane himself. He built it himself, largely in the basement of their northern Virginia home. When the plane grew too big for the basement, he transferred it to a hangar. The trip to California was its first big trip, and now they’ve landed here to visit Veronica’s hometown before flying back to Virginia.

I’m at the cafe, at the window table where Ernie and I always settled, as I await Veronica. I see her coming, wearing a long dark raincoat topped with a tapestry shawl. Even from afar she looks lovely, her dark hair — now softly streaked with gray — casually drawn into a knot, its loose frills framing her face.

I go out to meet her. We hug. She looks me over. I’m in an olive-green skirt and black boots. I’m even wearing earrings, which I haven’t worn since Ernie died.

“Good. You’re taking care of yourself,” she says.

“Knowing I was meeting you this afternoon got me moving this morning.”

On this cool and rainy day, we order cups of tea. It feels as if we’re in an English tea shop. We sip our tea.

“I’m grateful for old friends and cups of hot tea on rainy days,” I say. “I’m learning gratitude. I never felt grateful before. I didn’t feel much of anything.”

“Why is that?” Veronica asks. “Something from your childhood?”

“It’s always something from our childhood, isn’t it? Remember Mary Osborn, our high-school classmate?” Veronica nods. “Mary once said to me: ‘If you were yourself, you wouldn’t be yourself.’ Veronica looks puzzled. “Mary picked up on my hollowness. There was a phony quality to me. I didn’t know who I was, so I faked it. She picked up on that.”

“I go by my instincts,” Veronica says. “Does something feel good or doesn’t it? Sometimes it takes a while to verbalize these feelings, think through them. But eventually, it works itself out. I finally know what to think or what to do.”

“I always ran away from my feelings.”

“So now you’re finally feeling something, and that something is pain, and it feels god-awful.”

“Yes.”

“There is beauty in your misery,” she says. “At least you’re no longer a walking zombie.”

“No.”

She pauses. “If you could be with Ernie the way you were with him, would you want to?”

“Not the way we were. But the way we could be? That is my longing.”

“John and I have talked of the pain that goes with a truly intimate relationship — and by intimate, I don’t mean the sex. I mean the vulnerability we expose, one to the other. The closeness. John and I have shaped each other to be the people we are. We’re not the people we were before we married. I’m not the person I would be if I’d married someone else. . . . We know we will die. That’s the pain of it.” She drops her head, covers her face with both hands. I wait. She looks up, smiles. “But the joy of our being together is worth the pain that will come.”

Jeanette said this, too. Jim and Jeanette felt the joy of their closeness.

I missed that. And so did Ernie.