The World Without You (32 page)

Out in front, her father, seated on a bench, is staring into the distance.

“What are you looking at?”

He shrugs. “I’m gazing into the great beyond.”

“All you need is your telescope.”

“Now, that’s an idea.”

Lily hasn’t seen his telescope on this trip, though she expected it to be out, and for him to be behind it, peering into the heavens. He has joined the local Berkshires astronomy club, and he’s always dragging Lily’s mother to some remote meeting place beneath the stars. “It’s how I spend my summer weekends,” Marilyn says, “standing in the dark in an abandoned field.” When she tries to talk to him during these outings, David’s always shushing her, as if he thinks she’ll wake up the constellations. In the wilting heat, with the mosquitoes swarming around him, he can be found on the deck pointing his telescope at the sky, gazing into the stratosphere.

Lily leans against the bench, ruminating over a celery stick. She crunches on it like a hare.

“Come on,” her father says. “Let’s take a walk.” But he seems to mean only around the building, because he has guided her out back to the porch, where they sit now, looking at the tennis courts. “No matter what’s happening between Mom and me, I don’t think she’d say she regrets this.”

“Regrets what?”

“Our forty-two years together.”

“Oh, Dad. How could you even think that?”

A representative from the Community Center steps out onto the porch, with paperwork for them to sign. Lily removes her credit card, but it’s too late: her father has already paid the bill. “Come on, Dad, I asked you.”

“Indulge me,” he says. “Leo was my son.”

“And he was my brother.”

“Parents like to pay for their children. It’s written in the genes.”

Maybe so, she thinks, but they’re her genes, too, and she’d have liked to do this for Leo, if only this once.

Now they’re back inside the center, in the game room, which is housed in an alcove on the first floor. “Look at this,” her father says. “If the grandkids get restless, we can send them down here.”

On the shelves are piles of books and board games.
Angelina at the Fair, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Bears, Bears Everywhere!,
Junior Monopoly, Let’s Go Fishing, Scattergories, Apple to Apple. Down the steps is a foosball table, and Ping-Pong, air hockey, a soda machine, a VCR. A sign is tacked to the wall that reads
FOUL
LANGUAGE
AND
ROUGH
PLAY
ARE
NOT
ALLOWED
. They’ll have to remind the grandkids of that, too.

Out front again, they settle onto the bench facing Walker Street. A blond boy in a tank top sticks a pinwheel out of a car, and it lights up momentarily in the heat. In the rear of a station wagon a poodle paces, around its neck an American flag.

“I’m sorry Malcolm can’t be here,” her father says.

“I am, too.”

“Mom and I have always liked Malcolm. I don’t know if we’ve ever told you that.”

“You haven’t.”

“It’s not because we haven’t felt it.”

Lily’s quiet.

“It’s just that to tell your daughter you like her boyfriend is to imply that you could just as easily not like him. I’ve always thought praise was a double-edged thing.”

“I suppose it is.”

“And you’re such a private person.”

“Why?” she says. “Have I ever refused to answer your questions?”

“Not refused, exactly …”

“But?”

“You make it known when things are off limits.”

“Such as?”

“If you’re going out at night and I ask about your plans, you’re likely to say, ‘I’m getting together with a friend.’ As if to ask you anything more specific would be an intrusion.”

“You can ask me what my plans are.”

“Okay,” he says, “what are your plans?”

“My plans at the moment should be obvious. I’m sitting in the heat in this horrible dress.”

“Oh, Lily, it’s not horrible.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Come on,” he says. “Help me along here. You’ve caught me at a sentimental moment. Or a weak moment, at least. I’m feeling bold. I’m asking you about Malcolm.”

“You want to know if I’m happy?”

“You probably think I’m not entitled. Not when what’s happening between me and Mom.”

“You’re no less entitled than you ever were.”

“Well,
are
you happy?”

“Yes, Dad, I am.”

He stares out at the traffic. At the edge of the lawn, a boy is playing “The Star Spangled Banner” on the French horn, and now a car moves slowly along the street, the driver pressing on his horn, as if trying to play a duet.

“And now is when you ask me why we haven’t gotten married. Why we’ve decided not to have children.”

“But I can’t ask you that when I haven’t been much of an advertisement for it myself.”

“For children you’ve been an advertisement. At least, I hope you have.”

“But not for marriage.”

“Dad,” she says, “you and Mom were married for forty-two years, most of them happy from my perspective.”

“From my perspective, too.”

“And if Leo hadn’t died …” She even can’t finish the sentence.

His gaze bores past her, out into the distance where the sun is beating down. “Mom’s right, you know. It’s easy for me to cast her as the bad guy, but I haven’t been able to talk to her. I’ve become a workaholic, and I’m not even working anymore. A few months ago when we switched to daylight savings time, I forgot to adjust my watch and I didn’t discover it until Thursday. Thursday!” he says. “What kind of life am I living that I can block out the rest of the world for days at a time and not even realize it’s going on without me?”

“Dad …” She touches her hand to his jacket sleeve.

“There’s a shame in all this.”

“A shame in what?”

“There’s the shame at having failed at something big—at the biggest thing I know of. And there’s the shame at having let down my family.”

“Oh, Dad. You haven’t let us down.”

A hawk flies over them, holding something in its mouth. A fire truck rumbles past them. “Look at you,” he says. “You’ve gotten me to talk about myself when I was trying to talk about you.”

“You wanted me to explain why Malcolm and I aren’t married?”

“Not explain,” he says. “That makes it sound like I require a justification. I’m asking for a reason, which is something different. There are reasons for everything, presumably.”

“It’s actually quite simple,” she says. “I don’t want the state involved in my love life.” He’s right, she tells him—she’s a private person—and whatever else, weddings are so public. If she and Malcolm were to get married, they’d do it alone, with a justice of the peace, but even that she doesn’t want to do. It just seems—she doesn’t know—
silly.
Not for everyone, but for her.

“And Malcolm agrees?”

She nods. She feels more strongly than he does, but then on most things she feels more strongly than he does. It’s one of the things that make them well suited: there’s room for only so much strong feeling in one relationship. “And just so you know I’m not that stubborn, if Malcolm and I were to have children, we probably would get married, just because it would be easier on them if we did. It may not always be that way, but it still is, I think, and I wouldn’t want them to have to bear the burden of my principles.”

“But you’re not going to have children?”

She shakes her head. On this Malcolm feels as strongly as she does. She thinks of that saying, Why do they make two-year-olds so cute? Because if they didn’t, there would never be any three-year-olds. But for her and Malcolm, two-year-olds aren’t nearly cute enough to make them want to have a three-year-old. Or an eight-year-old or a fifteen-year-old, for that matter. She’s happy to be an aunt, and Malcolm’s happy to be an uncle, or whatever he is to Noelle’s and Thisbe’s boys.

“Married or not,” her father says, “do you think you guys are in it for the long haul?”

“I do,” she says. She and Malcolm have been together for ten years, which puts them ahead of a lot of people. Not that she can ever be sure. What’s happening with her parents—well, it’s enough to give anyone pause. She once read that when your friends get divorced it makes you twice as likely to get divorced yourself. Breaking up really is contagious. “I’ve been having this idea,” she says. “I want you to move down to D.C.”

“Oh, Lily. Why in the world would I move down to D.C? I hate it there.”

“I hate it there, too, and look at me. I’ve been living there for over a decade.”

“And that should be incentive for me to move there? Because you hate it there, too?”

“You almost moved to California,” she reminds him. “It’s harder to picture you in California than in D.C.”

“I didn’t almost move to California. I simply humored Mom until she came to her senses.”

“And if she hadn’t?”

“I probably would have gone.”

“And look where you’d be now.”

“I’d be alone in California, and you’re telling me instead I should be alone in D.C.?”

“You wouldn’t be alone. I’d be there.”

“Lily.”

“Seriously, Dad. What do you have left in New York?”

“I have everything there. I have my friends, my life, I still have the apartment. Clarissa and Nathaniel are right across the East River.”

“You could use a new start.”

“I’m almost seventy, darling. There are no new starts for me.”

“Come down to D.C., Dad. I’ll set you up with a senator’s widow.”

“I don’t want to be set up with a senator’s widow.”

“Or a congressman’s, then.”

“I don’t want to be set up at all.”

“Single or attached, I’ll be happy to have you. You can help out at Malcolm’s restaurant. He’ll put you to work.”

“As what? The world’s oldest busboy?”

“No one would know you were. I’ve heard about your jaunts around the Central Park loop. You probably run the mile faster than I do.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You can run along the Potomac, Dad. There’s opera in D.C., too. We can get you a subscription to the Kennedy Center.”

“Lily,” he says, laughing, “that’s nice of you. I’ll be all right, darling. Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m just saying I’d like to see you more.”

“I’d like to see you more, too.”

“Then can we rent you a place for a couple of months? You don’t even have to move down there. Think of it a test drive.”

He hesitates.

“Will you at least consider it?”

“Okay,” he says. “I will.”

He’s staring now beyond the lawn, out to the road girdled with traffic, where the rest of the family will arrive soon. For an instant he thinks he sees Clarissa’s car. “I’ve faced tough times before and I’ve gotten through them.”

“I know you have.”

“Really tough times.”

“You’re thinking about your father?”

He is. He was six when his father died. He has memories from earlier than that, recollections that go back to when he was three, but even in those his father is curiously absent. There are a few glints. His father, tall and broad-backed, striding through the living room as dinner is being announced. A Saturday morning and his father is shaving, and he stands on the toilet, eye level with the man, and afterward, alone, he draws swirls in the mirror with the discarded whiskers. Breakfast, the feel of his father behind him, a whiff of mint, his father’s hands in front of him as if they’re his own hands, cutting his waffle into tiny squares so that his meal looks like a chessboard. But when he visits these memories they disintegrate, and were it not for the photographs he has kept in a drawer he doubts he could recall what his father looked like. A year after his father died, he had a stepfather, and when he died, ten years later, another one lay in wait, and though both of them were good men who treated him kindly, he hardly remembers them any better than he remembers his own father; they were but dim music in the background of his days. He recalls his childhood as having taken place alone and in the company of a few solitary friends. He knows it’s not true, exactly, but he thinks of himself as a latchkey kid; it’s as if he raised himself.

For a long time he looked to father figures—his seventh-grade social studies teacher, a high school soccer coach, his dissertation adviser whom he so wanted to please he didn’t drop out of graduate school until long after he first wanted to, settling, finally, on becoming ABD only when it became clear that he’d sooner kill himself than do another semester of research. He’s not that way anymore (his own father, dead more than sixty years now, would be over a hundred if he were still alive), but he still has a thing about fathers and sons, about fathers and children in general. Marilyn was the one who insisted they stop at four (if it had been up to him, they’d have kept going), and back when he was still teaching, he would gravitate to the students who had lost a parent, knowing instinctively who they were without ever having been told. He was, in practice, the English-teacher-slash-guidance-counselor, though he’d been trained for only half the job. Late afternoons when classes let out, he could be seen in his office consulting with these students, who would sit there casting him their fugitive glances. His own father, who ran a big shoe conglomerate, always said that in a different life he’d have been a schoolteacher. It was math his father wanted to teach, but it was the teaching itself that interested him, and it wasn’t until David had his first teaching job, installed in the high school where he would remain for thirty-nine years, that he even made the connection. “It’s funny,” he says. “I always wanted a son, but then Mom gave birth to you girls and I figured I was destined to have daughters and it was probably for the best. I thought having a boy would be more complicated.”

“Was it?”

He shakes his head. “Or no more complicated than having any child.” When Marilyn was pregnant with Leo, it was the early days of amniocentesis and the doctor told her she was having a boy. David thought Marilyn was pulling his leg, so he called the doctor and made her tell him herself. It was as if she were telling him he was having a gerbil.

“Fathers and sons,” he says. He’s thinking about Calder, who certainly won’t remember Leo; he barely remembers him already. It’s probably better that way. It’s the same thing with divorce. Best to get it over with before the kids are born, and if there are kids, do it when they’re toddlers so they don’t remember what they’re missing. Still, he thinks, there’s a loss.