All Around Atlantis (27 page)

I'm not going so far as to say it killed him, Peter. Of course not! It merely exasperated him; obviously it was his
life
that killed him.

 

Some months, I suppose, after you'd more or less dropped out of sight, I was just sitting idly, in our apartment, gazing out the window at the dark sky and dreary rain, and I saw the reflection of Lili's face overlap mine as Lili came and sat down next to me. “Poor Anna,” she said. “Do you miss Peter?”

I shook my head.

“No,” she said, and in the window I watched drops of rain trickle unevenly over our reflections as Lili stroked my hair. “Good. Well, I don't miss him, either.”

Naturally, no liaison between you and Lili could have lasted forever. That was understood. You were very young—Sándor and Lili were careful to impress this notion on me: your life was moving very fast.

But still, you might have come around a little more often, Peter. Lili would have liked to see you, you know. After all, you were family.

 

Enjoyable, and even appropriate as it is, to mock Lionel, I do have to say that in a way I'm not horrified through and
through
that he arranged yesterday's service the way he did. I certainly wouldn't have done it, myself, but I wasn't entirely sorry, I must admit, to see that dark, strange, creaky, stained-glass spaceship swoop down through the millennia to reclaim Lili. Though it was impossible, of course, to say anything of the sort to Lionel when I got up this morning, and there he was, first thing, in the kitchen.

Fortunately, he didn't want to see me any more than I wanted to see him. To Lionel, obviously, every presence is a presence that isn't Lili. He fussed around making a breakfast, and both of us pretended to eat it, and then Eric called, to see how we were doing, and to say again how sorry he was he couldn't be here with us.

“I hope he knows,” Lionel said, after we hung up, “how many people loved his grandmother.”

 

It
is
a beautiful day, isn't it? Lionel was right. Not warm, certainly, but just so bright! The benches along the avenue are filling up with old men and old women, sitting out in the sun—do you remember?—just the way they used to all those years ago.

When I visit Eric in Los Angeles, he takes me driving way out, to those elastic, self-generating peripheries, where the most recent immigrants are hoping to establish a life for themselves, and I marvel at everything, as though we were coasting down into the future.

Ma, Eric says, not every manicurist or waiter here used to be the most promising poet or physicist in Nigeria or Guatemala or Korea, you know.

Well, yes. I do know. But a few of them must have been something of the sort. And then, the point is, what about the others?

These old men and women have probably been coming out in the spring for half a century to sit on the very same benches. They're probably the very same people I used to see around here in my childhood. And let me tell you, Peter, they looked every bit as old to me then as they do now!

They're like little birds, perched on a phone wire, cheeping away from time to time in a sheer exercise of being alive, blinking in the indifferent American sun. They sit in the sun, they buy their few groceries, they play chess, they gossip. A few of them must get themselves to an occasional chamber-music concert. I suppose they still read their newspapers in Yiddish, in Polish, in Hungarian, in Czech…This spring, the next spring, maybe one more…

The elevated train still clatters by in the distance, and the old people gaze out through the traffic and fumes as if they were gazing across the Atlantic. If the great empires of Europe exist anywhere now, I guess it's right here, on these benches.

He seems to be a nice man, Eric, and I think things are working out pretty well for him. Neil was a very good father, I have to say, for what it's worth. Neil, in fact, is not such a bad human being—he and I just have various complementary horrible qualities. I, obviously, am possessive, jealous, resentful, dependent, quick to censure, slow to forgive…and there's not all that much I've been able to do about it, I'm afraid, other than keep my distance. On my own, in fact, I'm perfectly all right.

I
am
grateful, Peter (and if we'd had that cup of coffee yesterday, I hope I would have told you so) for the few sentences in your book that pertain to Lili. Because her mother's jewelry, the silver, the piano, the house—all that stuff must have belonged to the neighbors for a long time now. Or, actually, I suppose, to their children. Except what's just floating through Europe these days, from one antique dealer to another.

So, aside from those few sentences of yours, what's left? The challis scarf, a few strings of beads, some inexpensive furniture, bought on Lili's small salary or given to her by those admirers of hers, or organized by some relocation agency or charity…That's pretty much it.

Yes, so obviously I'm grateful. Well, I'm sure you know that.

I hope you'd be glad to know that I'm well—that I'm fortunate in my work, that I'm happy enough…

The time Neil told me he'd seen the talk show where there was someone who might have been the person he thought I'd mentioned, I asked him so many questions!
What did he look like? What was he saying? Did he say where he was living?
And I must have sounded frantic, because Neil stopped answering and just looked at me. He didn't know, he said slowly; he hadn't been paying attention. He'd simply
happened
to turn the show on while he was rummaging around in his suitcase for a presentable shirt, and he couldn't remember one single thing about whoever it was he'd happened to see.

Oh, I said, after a moment. Well. And I turned away to escape Neil's stare. There was really no need to have seen you myself; I knew it was you, and at least I knew you were safe.