Every Day (14 page)

My father, because of his poor Polish ancestry, will brook no cost-cutting when it comes to the food for our Saturday brunches. He scowls over Mother’s contribution. On his gleaming dining room table (Mother can’t abide a certain preciousness he has about his furniture: “What true Marxist cares about the decorative arts?” she quips), she has set down two store-bought coffee rings.

“At least take them out of the boxes,” he says to her.

To me he says, “So where are the others?”

I tell him Simon will be dropping them off.

“He’s going to shul?”

Dad skips a beat sometimes. I have to fill in: he’s surprised that Simon won’t be joining us and covers his concern with the obviously wrong assumption that Simon, a nonpracticing Jew, would be busy at temple on a Saturday morning. Professorship has given my father a lifetime of this sort of license. His students must feel they’re in the presence of genius—or lunacy—when he omits logical connections in his lectures.

“He’s going to do his own thing,” I toss off.

“Good,” Dad says, obviously hurt. “He should have some time to himself.”

Mother had taken her usual seat in Dad’s immaculate parlor, just off the dining room, where splendid sunlight dapples the Oriental rug he took from their apartment.

“Leigh has some news,” she tells him. Then, apologetically to me, “Really, dear, were you going to let it go?”

“Let what go,” he says. “What?”

“I’m staying with Mother for a while,” I stumble. “Daisy and I. We’ve been there all week.”

Dad stops arranging the glasses and platters of food, bagels, lox, onions, tomatoes. “Tell me the rest,” he says calmly.

“There’s been an interruption,” Mother says ominously.

Dad gives her a stern look. “You’ll let Leigh tell the story please, Marion.”

I see no sense in holding out. “I saw Fowler,” I say.

Dad takes a second, then walks to the center of his sitting room so that he is directly in front of me, not six inches away. He looks into my eyes like an eye doctor would, with some idea of what he’s looking for but in need of a missing detail.

“You saw that man?” he begs. “You saw such a man and you let him have an effect on you? After all that has gone on? Please, Leigh, tell me what I’m looking at here.”

A
fool,
I know he wants me to say.

Daisy screams just then from the hallway. I find her flat on her tummy after a fall over the molding. I bring her back into the parlor, where Dad sits opposite Mother in a matching chair.

“I am not going to let a thing like this ruin my Saturday,” he says. “But I will tell you right now that if you put in jeopardy your wonderful family that you have worked so hard to keep happy and healthy, you will put in jeopardy your time with me. I do not take this lightly at all. Simon is a good man, and whatever you’re doing with that cheapskate
from the South, and believe me, I don’t want to know, Simon doesn’t deserve a second of this. So you’ve heard from me, and now let’s have some food.”

He gets up and heads for the table, pulling at the seam of his jacket the way I’ve seen only elderly men do. He’ll be seventy in the fall, which makes my waywardness seem all the more heartless.

“Gopa,” Daisy calls to him.

He turns, takes her from me. I feel Mother at my elbow, shy away from her, then wait my turn for food I don’t feel like eating, but I will eat it because that way, at least, I have something to do with my mouth other than exercise it in these obviously fruitless and destructive ways. Perhaps if I’d taken off, left New York, to have Isaac, this debt I feel to my parents wouldn’t keep pulling me back to them. But it does, and, indications to the contrary, I don’t take my attachment to them lightly. I believe they are good people.

We settle back in the parlor and eat on our laps quietly, until the buzzer sounds. Dad gets it, and I hear Simon’s voice.

“Hi,” he blares. “The kids are here. Shall I send them up?”

“Please,” Dad answers. “You come too.”

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Please,” Dad begs. “We can all help.”

Either Simon didn’t hear or has chosen not to respond, because there is no further intercom communication, and two minutes later Jane and Isaac are standing in my father’s foyer.

Mother is on her feet, pulling them to her, trying not to cry.

Jane hugs her stiffly. “Hi, Grandma.”

Isaac hugs his namesake and then goes directly to the food.

Jane runs to Daisy, who is squealing with happiness. There is a crushing in my chest, and I think that this is what a heart attack must feel like, a total press of pain against everything that keeps me going.

Neither child speaks to me. I approach Jane for a hug, and she turns away, fighting tears. I do the same with Isaac.

“Save it,” he warns. “For the guy you left us for.”

I feel like screaming, telling them all to stop, please stop relying on me never to slip, never to wander, never to imagine myself differently, to make a mistake and apologize and keep on living, keep on being their mother, their daughter, their wife. And then something occurs to me, something that leaves me numb. I know that Simon is seeing Kirsten, but I’m not sure that it’s in the way I accused him of outside the high school. I suddenly think he may have called upon her in a needier, more threatening way, one that may or may not involve sex, a lasting way. My leaving has given him permission to do what I’ve always suspected him of wanting to do, and that is helping Kirsten out of her desperate boredom with Ted. It would be too humiliating to call her, too ironic to accuse her of something sordid. I stop myself short of imagining them together, what each would say, how they would get around to touching each other.

“How is camp?” I say loudly, generally.

Everyone looks at me, even Daisy. I continue, top volume.

“I just thought I’d ask how you were doing because no one asked how I was doing. No one asked me if I’d slept any since I’d been at Grandma’s, or if I missed my children, or if I thought that there was any chance I’d ever be coming back, or if it bothered me that I’m basically cast out. So I’ll tell you. I’m doing lousy. I miss you. I’m having some trouble that I’m not sure how to handle, and I know I’m making big mistakes all the time. But I love you, and I don’t want you to treat me like this. It makes everything even harder. You’re in my head all the time. I don’t even brush my teeth without thinking of you brushing yours.”

I’m looking directly at Jane, tears streaming down my face, and she is horrified, frantic.

“Mommy, please don’t,” she says, so softly she sounds like a child I don’t know. “Please don’t cry.”

She comes to me, and I’m shaking so hard, sobbing so noisily, and I don’t know how to stop this. I feel the family circling, retiring to the food table and peripheral seats. And I feel Jane’s tears soaking me, and I will this all to be over, and I will that no further harm come to her, to Isaac, to anyone in this room.

I whisper, “I’m going to find some things out that will help me get back to you. And in the meantime, you go to camp and have dinner with Dad and talk to me, please talk to me because there is no living without you and Isaac. Daddy and I will work something out between us that will be so much better than this you won’t believe it. I promise you.”

“Mommy,” she says. “I want you to come home. I miss Daisy.”

“I’m coming home,” I say loudly. “Soon.”

Mother and Dad look ashen, so heartbroken I can’t speak to them. But I can see that I haven’t done this very well, that Daisy is bewildered and clinging to Isaac, that Jane can’t let go of me, that Mother and Dad are too old to manage crises like this one, and I know what I have to do. I have to get to Fowler, to include him in the strife he and I have stirred up, to give up on doing all the damage alone. Dead or alive, he’s got to start taking some of the heat.

I kiss everyone, even Mother, who stiffens. To Dad I promise a sensible solution. To Isaac I vow better times. Jane has my word that we will meet each Saturday until I come home, and we’ll have lunch at Dad’s and shop and be silly girls together with Daisy.

“I’m going to talk to him,” I tell them all, cards on the table. “Watch. Nothing bad will come of it.”

Jane waves me into the elevator, cheered, but desperate.

•   •   •

It takes me exactly thirty-seven minutes to cross town by bus and walk south to Fowler’s building. I lean on the buzzer. Nothing happens. I do it again. Then I see the blind open above the windowbox, and his face, framed in the window, smiling.

“Hey, you,” he says, but he doesn’t get up. “Take my keys.”

I let myself in the building and then the apartment. I find him sitting by the window, holding one of his arms, trying to stop it from moving.

“I wasn’t able to get up,” he explains, shrugging, embarrassed.

I draw in a breath, and then I say, “You have to see him. You have to come home with me. There’s nothing else.”

“Sit,” he says, taking me in, my rush, my tone,
the whole catastrophe,
as he was fond of saying when someone burst into his classroom at a run with a lame excuse for being late.

I do so. He subdues the flamboyant arm with the tame one, but the shaking continues, slower, weighted. There is anger in this arm, the unaffected one, and I understand it. What is happening to him is an outrage. I should apologize.

“Tell me what you want.”

I conjure Eliot. “I want you to see Isaac.”

The shaking stops. He exhales.

“Does Isaac want to see me.” A statement.

“That’s not the point.” At least I don’t think it is. How would Isaac
know
if he wanted to do this or not?

“What
is
the point then?”

“You’re his father,” I plead.

He lowers his head, defers to the window view, the geraniums, the benevolent sunny street. “I haven’t been his father for a long, long time.”

“Don’t indulge yourself,” I tell him. No stopping me; applause from Eliot, from Gillette.

For several unbearable moments I watch as he pushes himself
up from the low chair, his arms taut hoists. Standing, he gestures miserably down, at himself.

“Come here,” he says, and I go to him. He holds me, as before, as he did when we were so much younger.

“I am so, so sorry,” he says.

We stand, sweating, folded into each other. I feel his hand at the back of my head, cradling, the way I do with Daisy when I put her down for a nap or a diaper change. I’m charged, not unhappy, as I was five days ago when Simon and I hurled words in the parking lot.

“I’m not,” I say.

There is, I’m coming to think, a logic that is beyond us, beyond our control, into which we must somehow fit, happily or miserably, neither being of consequence. I’m not about to give over to a Higher Power, to effect the canned speech of the reborn. But until now, except for Fowler’s leaving, I’ve directed traffic, and it has exhausted me. Now I loosen my hold on Fowler, which is to say I loosen my hold on the world, as per Eliot’s instructions, and again I am grateful.

“I’ll do whatever you want,” he says, and when I draw back to see if he could possibly mean it, adds, “whatever needs doing.”

•   •   •

I call Mother and tell her I’m coming back to pick up Daisy and bring her down here. She objects, sighing.

“My idea is that you put your affairs in order first. I’m happy to keep Daisy another night. It was really terrible for her when the others left with Simon.”

I ask for a description.

“Daisy wanted to go back with him, understandably. Simon was in tears. Your father was in tears. You
must
do something about all of this, dear.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“That’s fine,” she says.

I pace, my mind racing with strategies to win back Mother’s approval. Futile musings these, because I’ve worn her out.

Fowler holds out his arms, at peace for now, for me to come and lie down. But I can’t do this. I’m inclined only to act, to push things to a conclusion, ugly as it may turn out.

“I’m so far outside everything now I don’t know how to act, what to do,” he begins. “Everything I do has an echo. This may be your last time doing this, seeing that, speaking to this one, holding that one.” He shrugs. “I’m so certain that I’ve been a total asshole all my life, believing I knew what was best for me, how to get it, what to say about having gotten it or not having gotten it. Anyway.”

Unable to disagree, I stare, searching for signs of the Fowler I made into legend in my mind, the one without the crippling disease, without the self-loathing. “Join the club.”

•   •   •

In the morning, amazed that I’ve managed to sleep in his bed a full six hours, I ask for their names, the women, all of them who lasted more than a week. I’m feeling lithe from lovemaking, energetic, young. I’m thinner than I’ve been in years, sure of my own sexiness as I lie on my side, hip jutting up, breasts full, nipples a deep red. I actually believe I can compete with the other conquests.

He laughs, adopts a mock seriousness. “There was a Bridget, a Sandy, a Liz. There was a Cecilia, a Martha. Not to worry.”

“Any more kids?” I’m flippant, but the prospect does horrify me.

“No, Leigh.”

I don’t get any satisfaction out of knowing the names. I don’t even bother with visualization.

“Do Evelyn and J.T. know?”

“They know what I’ve got, yes,” he says.

“I don’t mean that. Do they know about Isaac?”

“They don’t.”

I sit up, hunt for my underwear, find it, start getting dressed.

“I couldn’t,” he protests. “They’d have made it worse.”

I stand up very straight, a mission in underwear. “They couldn’t have,” I tell him.

I ask him when classes start, and whether he’s got any money saved up.

Late August, I learn, and yes, there’s money. Money from film awards and lecturing junkets and endowment grants. Professional money. The kind I don’t have. Not that I have money of any other kind.

“First order of business,” I say. “We tell them they have a grandson, and we get them to meet him. We can all fly down. They won’t have to budge.”