Desolation swept through her, so real she nearly cried out.
Down the hill she heard the sounds of young men playing basketball. Saw by the stone steps the red tips of cigarettes. Conversation lapped around the edges of the park, even this late on a cold spring night.Young people without jobs, old people without jobs, people wanting drugs, people selling drugs, people who were always leaving their used condoms and empty nip bottles in the bushes. Sometimes she felt annoyance toward such strangers, and sometimes she felt them as a threat, but not tonight. She imagined herself as a soul again, a kind of vague guardian figure, flickering and gray, bearing a great tray of cocoa, picking her way through the wet grass, picking her way among the wounded—for wasn’t the park full of the wounded, even the joyful ones, even those having a good time tonight—dispensing angelically the steaming cups.
The sky was starless, moonless. Her eyes still stung from chlorine. She remembered a night long ago when she’d lain on the dock at Cabruda Lake, not with John but much longer ago, with her parents, her head in her mother’s lap, her father’s corduroy shirt spread over her legs. She remembered the Perseid shower, their patience, the meteors that never came. Or did come, sight unseen. Her father’s story about the Litvak, the rabbi with the ax and the rope. Her mother’s near-silent laugh.The water lap-lapping.
“Hey, Ma, what up?” A hooded figure brushed by her, turning as he passed to check her out. It struck her as comical, being mistaken for a sexual entity when here she was imagining herself a transparent bird-thing, no body, all spirit. She took no offense but it was her cue to walk again, to move toward her house, from which she had not, after all, been expelled.
JOHN MET HER in the front hall. He was putting on his jacket.
“I’m going out,” he said. “If that’s all right.”
“Of course.” She set down her swim bag. “Did something happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that . . . it’s late for you to be going out.”
“I’m meeting a colleague for a beer. I was waiting for you to get home.”
“Sorry.”
“Biscuit and Jess are both in bed. Paul’s watching TV.”
“Okay. Did you give him a time he has to go up?”
“No.”
He opened the door to leave.
“John.”
He stopped.
“About what I said earlier. We need to decide.”
He turned and looked at her. His eyes were cold, but perhaps not as cold as they had been of late. Perhaps they were mostly dim with exhaustion.
“Do you know what I mean?” she said. “About what we’re going to do.We need to decide.”
He looked at her the same way so long she supposed he wasn’t going to respond, but then he gave a nod. And was gone. Alone in the hallway, she worked her fingers through her damp hair, then let herself cradle her face.
From the den came the sound of a muted explosion. Ricky wandered in. Paul, watching
MythBusters,
barely looked up. She stood by the couch, the saggy old thing that was, in some alternative version of events, to have been replaced by now with a bed for Jess. Instead, these past two weeks John had been creeping down to sleep on it each night and as stealthily evacuating it early each morning. The formal proposal Ricky had rehearsed was never delivered, just as the scraps of fancy lingerie were never unwrapped from their tissue paper parcels.The thought of both made her feel worn, now, and ill. She combed her fingers slowly through the tangles at Paul’s nape. Ever so slightly, he moved his head away, as she’d known he would; the shake-off had been part of his repertoire for at least a year now.
“It’s really cool,” Paul said, in a dazed, preoccupied way. Biscuit did this, too, spoke in the same vacuous cadence whenever watching TV. “They’re using a whole bunch of roach foggers in this abandoned building to see if it’ll explode. If it works it’ll be the biggest explosion they’ve ever had on
MythBusters
.”
Ricky came around and sat beside him. Once, he’d wanted to tell her everything. How he’d gotten a triple in kickball; how polar bears steered with their back legs; how his friend Alexi had a wart on his pinkie but it went away; how he’d dreamed he was a red Lamborghini. He used to relate news from and about his life in so much detail that she had regularly tuned him out while he followed her around the house, chattering on. There had been a time when she’d felt worn out by his relentless attentions. She remembered all those nights—not even two years had elapsed since the last occurrence—when he’d appear in the doorway of her and John’s bedroom, the way he’d stand there, shoulders tensed, face red with the effort not to cry, telling them he couldn’t sleep, that something “didn’t feel right.” How weary she’d grown of this routine. She cringed to remember how she lost the ability to escort him back to bed without letting her annoyance show. How she’d made him feel guilty for troubling them, for failing to manage his worries, for being in some fundamental way deficient.Were these his memories, too?
Once, he had not been able to get enough of her. She’d been his favorite audience, requisite witness to all he did and thought. Now, she was honored if he so much as volunteered a synopsis of a TV show.
Ricky stole a sideways glance at his eye. If you didn’t know about the shiner, you wouldn’t notice anything, but she believed she could see the last cabbage-y green remnant littering the skin under his eye. She had to restrain herself from touching a finger to the spot, from touching her lips to it. She took stock of how his eyebrows had thickened, his nose and jaw become more prominent. His emergent wisps of mustache glowed clearly in the television’s unforgiving light. The Braille of his pimples was similarly, heartbreakingly pronounced. How little effort it took to picture him at nine, at four, at one: like a dandelion clock, slender and bright. Little towheaded Paul. Who was now neither little nor towheaded and did not want her touch. Who would not now come to her with his problems under any circumstances.
John, after his initial enraged phone call with the principal, and then a second, more mollifying and illuminating conversation in the principal’s office on Monday, had taken Paul aside and spoken with him at length, obtaining confirmation of what the principal’s interviews with teachers had suggested: that their son had been the target of increasing verbal bullying for months. The incident in the apple orchard was apparently not an isolated event, but the culmination of escalating provocation. Although it did appear Paul had thrown the first punch, and the mandatory three-day suspension for fighting on school grounds still stood (the principal had said apologetically), the other boys were regarded as the main aggressors; in addition to suspension, they would have to do community service and attend a weekly lunchtime anti-bullying affinity group in the guidance office. “It’s great they give the bullies all that extra attention,” Ricky had said. “What about Paul?”
“I don’t know,” John had replied. “Maybe you should have been the one to meet with the principal.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want to hear I’m right. I don’t want to hear you’re sorry.”
That was what it kept coming down to these days. A measure of civility; a measure of practical communication around the household and the children. But the least trespass into the realm of their relationship and anger flared, or else he shut her down. She was not allowed to apologize anymore; he was tired of those words’ progression from her mouth. For weeks she’d thought in the most desperate terms of penance, wishing for a sequence of words she might recite, a splintered board on which to kneel, a hair shirt, good works. Alternatively, she’d rehash the proofs that John was not blameless: he had a daughter he barely knew; he exploited Ricky’s income so that he could work at a job he liked; he hadn’t wanted a third child in the first place; he wouldn’t have understood, had never understood. A wildly assembled list of his wrongs to balance her own.
But life was not a balance sheet. Poor little quant. She’d known better, of course. Against her hopes, all along she’d known. It wasn’t a matter of tweaking the numbers to make the equation come out. It was not hers to control. Nor was it his to control. That was what John had kept trying to tell her.
I’m not trying to not forgive you.
That was the hopeless part.
And yet this truth—that neither one of them could script what would happen—was also where hope resided. She’d realized it in the kitchen earlier that evening, and realized it again while standing in the park after her swim, looking at their little house aglow on the dark street. It was what she meant when she’d told John, just before he left,
We have to decide.
A fearsome prospect but a necessary one, and the only one that offered any possibility of sanity or happiness.
“Here it comes,” said Paul. “Watch.” Ricky turned to the screen in time to see the explosion. A sliding door blew off the building. Flames roiled out. “Yes! Did you
see
that? Wait, they’ll show it again.”
At the end of the segment she sent him to bed. He went compliantly, yawning, not without letting her put her arms around him first. The difference in their height had become negligible. Within the year, she realized, watching him trudge up the stairs, he would overtake her.
She went to the kitchen, to the pantry, took down the old bottle of vodka, a holiday gift from someone in John’s department, and poured quite a lot of it into a jelly glass. Who was it, she wondered, John was seeing tonight? And why had he said “colleague” rather than the person’s name? She sat at the kitchen table and listened to the hum: the fluorescent light over the sink, or the fridge, or perhaps the very wires stretched arterially throughout the house behind the plaster. She laced her fingers around the jelly glass and drank it all in several gulps.
The stove clock read 11:47 when she picked up the phone and dialed his cell. It rang a long time and went to voice mail. She broke the connection and hit redial. Same thing. She broke the connection again, dialed a different number. Again it rang several times.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Dad. It’s Ricky. Sorry to wake you.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. We’re all okay. I just . . . I’m sorry, it’s really late. I shouldn’t have called.”
“That’s all right. What is it?” His voice, gruff with sleep and the effort to speak quietly, conjured the image of her mother asleep beside him. Simply that—the thought of her mother there beside her father, her parents lying together as they had these past forty years, nested in their own warmth within the worn linens, on their old platform bed, neither fine nor shabby but exquisite in its familiarity, the very bed she’d stood beside as a child when she needed them in the night, the bed in which she’d lain between them when she had measles, when she had mumps, when her ear ached or fever raged or nightmares frightened her awake—the thought of them in this bed now flooded her with longing. She ran her thumbnail around the threaded rim of the jelly glass.
“Well. I was just thinking about that story you used to tell? About the rabbi of—not Chelm. Something? The one with the ax . . .” She trailed off, catching her reflection in the top part of the Dutch door. It looked ghoulish, her eyes no more than hollow pits in a pale oval. She knew her father had wanted, had meant her to be like the rabbi in that story: selfless, ascendant, warming the houses of the sick, bringing cocoa to the wounded, all of it. “The thing is, I guess the thing I was wondering, Dad, is”—her voice was a beggar, scraping and tripping—“do you think I’m good? I mean, am I good?”
“What’s that?” He was still working to cast off the wool of sleep. “You’re talking about a story? You sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. Sorry. Never mind—it’s okay.”
“What is it, Erica?”
“Nothing. I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Okay.”
She pressed OFF and set down the phone, raised her eyes to her doppelgänger in the window. She gave a start: it had doubled. It hadn’t doubled; it was Biscuit, standing behind her in the kitchen doorway, her pale, troubled face an echo of Ricky’s own. Ricky swiveled around, conscious of the vodka bottle, ashamed of the jelly glass, her own breath. How long had Biscuit been standing there? Had she heard any of the conversation?
Her daughter stumbled toward her, hair mussed, pajamas rumpled. “
I
think you’re good,” she said. “You are good.”
“Biscuit, Biscuit. Why are you up?” Ricky drew her daughter onto her lap, rested her chin on Biscuit’s head and breathed: shampoo, girl sweat, sleep. The ticking clock. The darkness outside. “You should be in bed.”
“You’re
very
good,” Biscuit insisted. A validation. An exhortation.
“Shh, shhh.” Ricky almost brutally aware of her daughter’s weight, so dear upon her body.
2.
A
s I say, they’re not my field, but I showed them to Piers and he agrees they’re undeniably compelling.” Madeleine Berkowitz used her hand to transfer her heavy sorrel mane from the right shoulder to the left, with a commensurate adjustment to the tilt of her head. “I mean they’re naive, more folk art than anything. And yet.” She took a sip of her drink, a single-malt scotch and water on the rocks.
John, without shifting his gaze from her face, drank from his, the same minus the water. He’d been surprised when she offered scotch, then less surprised when he saw that the bottle was unopened. It was both flattering and unsettling, the notion she might have purchased it in anticipation of his visit.
They were at Madeleine’s place, a small bungalow in Grandview. He’d never been there before, and it was far more appealing than he’d imagined: unassuming, aged, listing.The downstairs comprised two crooked rooms of exposed brick and bulging plaster. Windows full of wavy glass panes that made the lights across the river wink on and off like stars. A cat, of course (he’d guessed as much), a gray Siamese with Popsicle-blue eyes that lifted its tail at him when he’d first arrived and then condescended to brush, disdainfully, against his ankles. (“He likes you,” Madeleine had pronounced.) The place was surprisingly—agreeably, to John’s taste—underfurnished. An enormous bunch of bare willow branches, stuck into a metal jug on the floor, reached up and across one wall of the tiny living room. Another wall was books and music; another, windows; the last cut diagonally by the staircase leading upstairs.