Free Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman Page B

found here and there in the apartment. Schmidt, sobbing. Thalia was holding Schmidt’s hand. Another older woman—who? Oh yes, the wife of the dead brother.
    Jamie, her quick eye sliding from face to face, her fingers tapping her own thigh, her tongue thrumming behind her crossed teeth…she counted them. Nineteen. Nineteen broken hearts. Well, eighteen: the sister-in-law was perhaps unaffected. Eighteen people who had lost a loved man husband ex-husband father grandfather son; who had lost him to sudden death; who had lost him because of an assistant they were glad to tolerate, no one minded his little failing; who had lost him because the upstart assistant had fastened onto him, exhausted him with her demands, driven him over the brink; and then, scared out of her silly wits, had shaken pills as if they were castanets, and weakly punched his sternum, and breathed fecklessly into his mouth, and wriggled a pair of trousers onto his uncooperative legs for the sake of his earthly reputation, or hers. To cover their shame.
    The sister-in-law burst into tears.
    Nineteen people, then.
      
    “Jamie left New York after that,” Fern wound up. “She got a master of arts in education at a state university, and she married a good dull math teacher who gave her two good dull sons. She scraped her hair back, and renounced contact lenses, and bought a lifetime supply of white blouses.”
    Silence for a while. Then Barbara said, “So she’s up in her room now, hair loose, glasses off, reliving it all, drenched in guilt.”
    “Yes,” Fern said. She was staring at the olive in the bottom of her glass. “Some people have all the luck.”

I.
    O n the first Monday in March Mr. Flaxbaum received the following e-mail:
    Distinguished Myron Flaxbaum,
    I am Professor Harry Worrell from King’s College Campus Here in London, UK. We want you to be our guest Speaker at this Year’s Unanticipated Seminar which will take place Here. We are writing to invite and confirm your booking. The Venue is as follows: King’s College campus in Strand, London, UK. The expected audience is 850 people. The duration of the speech is one hour. The date is the 31st of May this year. The topic is “The Mystery of Life and Death.” We came across references to you on the Internet, and we say you are up to standard. A formal letter of invitation and Contract agreement will be sent to you as soon as you honor our Invitation. We are taking care of your travel and hotel accommodation expenses and your speaking fee.
     
    Stay Blessed,
     
    Professor Harry Worrell

King’s College Campus
    Mr. Flaxbaum reread this epistle, removing his glasses for the second perusal. “I’m invited to give a lecture,” he mentioned to the three boys, who, though hurrying off to school, paused to look at the invitation. “Fab,” “Wicked,” “Steamy,” they agreed one after the other; and, one after the other, backpack following backpack, left the flat, their departure as usual causing a small conflagration in Flax’s heart. “Awesome,” added Felix over his shoulder, revealing for a moment the abbreviated nose and one of the blue eyes inherited from Bonnie. Bonnie had already been at work for several hours—she was a surgical nurse at a Boston hospital—but she would affirm late that afternoon that the Unanticipated Seminar would be elevated by the presence of her Myron. (No one except Bonnie called him by his first name; even his sister called him Flax.) Bonnie would bend her blond, large-chinned head toward the screen and review the topic—“The Mystery of Life and Death”—and then stand erect again, an oversize woman, authoritative as a Roman aedile though she wore pants and sweater and sturdy shoes rather than toga and sandals. “Darling, you could even do it in Latin.”
    Now, in Bonnie’s absence, and after the noisy departure of the boys—in the presence only of the Flaxbaums’ peculiar houseplant—Flax indulged in an unusual activity: he googled