Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  “Sure.”

  “What about Dana?”

  “You can ask her,” Paul said.

  They drove into the driveway, clanking at the dip, and Paul, who had been holding the food on his lap and at his feet, waited until Bill got out and handed it to him, before getting out himself. His lap was slightly damp from the heat of the bags. Walking into the house, Bill called out, “Soup’s up,” and Paul said to him, “Cal’s probably asleep.” They walked into the kitchen and Bill put the food on the counter. “Soup’s up,” he said again. Dana and Jean were laying the table; Liesel was already sitting down, sewing something. She had her glasses on and a little roll of needles and threads on her plate, which she put away.

  “My favorite food,” Dana said, a little loudly.

  Supper was weirdly normal, it was weirdly like the suppers they used to have before their separation. Dana didn’t talk much, it wasn’t easy merging into the Essinger family conversational traffic. But that’s how it used to be anyway. Jean and Paul had an argument, which wasn’t really an argument, about a TV commercial that Jean had walked in on while Bill was watching sports. This is the kind of thing they talked about, endlessly, like it was politics or art, or something that actually matters. Speaking of Nike, Jean said, in a different voice after standing up to get more food. Henrik wants to meet Lance Armstrong when he comes over. If that is at all possible. Paul said it was just a question of timing, their regular Sunday morning ride was on … and they tried to work out the date. The thirtieth, if it was happening, which Paul assumed it was. Lance tended to stick to his routines, at least when he was in town.

  “When does Henrik get in? We just have to find him a bike,” Paul said.

  “I don’t know if he’s up for a twenty-mile ride,” Jean said. “He’s still pretty weak.”

  “Well, he can come along and say hi.”

  At one point, while they were working this out, Dana turned to Paul and said, “What’s he like?” and there was something about the way she said it, like an attractive acquaintance at a dinner party trying to break into the conversation, trying to interest you … that had a powerful effect on him. Because he realized, something he knew perfectly well, that she was alone in his family, slightly adrift, that she was probably doing her best, but also, and this was part of the effect, it struck him again what an attractive stranger she was. It was like some of the unfamiliarity had grown back, and he could see her again the way a stranger would see her, as a tall pretty well-dressed woman who asks questions and listens to your answers.

  “He’s like … in some ways, he’s this typical Austin guy, kind of chilled-out and relaxed, but basically in an extremely intense and competitive way.”

  “Do you like him?” Dana asked. She sat very straight at the table, always, and she looked at you when she spoke.

  “I like him. Somehow that doesn’t really come up, when people are famous. Everything they do has a slightly different moral weight. Just the fact that he goes riding on Sunday mornings with a bunch of guys like us makes him a good guy.”

  “I’m a fan,” Jean said.

  Later, when supper was over, and Bill had moved over to the TV room to watch the Spurs game, Paul and Jean and Dana were clearing the table, and Paul said to Dana, “Do you want to come out and see the Wimberley place while you’re here?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” she said.

  “Okay … it’s a little … the work on the house is finished. And they’ve started building some of the cabins. The foundations are dug. Cal likes going out there.”

  “Sure,” Dana told him. “I’ll come if you want me to.” There was a silence in which something had to be said, to fill it, and eventually Dana said, “I think I’m going to check on Cal. It’s stupid but … I don’t want him waking up and thinking, where am I.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. He sleeps here all the time.”

  “Go check on him,” Jean said.

  Paul put a hand on her shoulder as she turned away—a kind of apology, but maybe it came across as something else. He noticed her calf muscles under the cream tights, the way they took the strain, and had a faint sexual response, or more like an appreciation. She walked well, she walked like an athlete. What Bill had said in the car came into his mind. About the fact that Dana was hard to read, she didn’t give much away. Because of her Waspiness or Waspishness, whatever the right word for it was. The idea that for one week his family would live with her, see her, judge her, come to conclusions about her, without his full-time presence to deflect their judgments was suddenly painful to him. But what could he do. He didn’t want to be there either.

  After she went up, Jean said to him, “What’s going on there?”

  She was filling the garbage with empty Styrofoam containers, which crackled in her hands, the juices dripped. Paul picked up the bag and lifted it from the trash can and pulled the edges open, so that Jean could fit the rest of the containers in.

  “Nothing, it’s fine. We get along fine.” He sounded defensive when he didn’t mean to, but he also sounded, to his own ears, something else: lightweight or superficial, like somebody who doesn’t take life seriously enough. Which wasn’t what was going on at all.

  “That’s what I mean. People who get along fine usually stay together.”

  “Is that right?” Paul said.

  Jean took the garbage bag out of his hands and stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, looking at him. Her eyes were a little shiny. She looked at him like you look at someone departing in a car, after they can’t see you anymore, then she went outside to put the garbage in one of the cans.

  * * *

  It’s about a fifty-minute drive to Wimberley, most of it along I-35. But there wasn’t much traffic, which allowed his thoughts to run on a little, he could cover plenty of ground.

  For the first few weeks after moving back home, Paul was just happy to be home. He slept at Wheeler Street a lot of the time, while work progressed on the house in Wimberley, he slept in his old bed, touched the same window he used to touch when he woke up, and jogged around the neighborhood where he used to ride his bike. And the truth is all of these things made him actually happier. He had a feeling of rightness, even the weather felt like the weather in which he belonged. Hot until early November, when the first norther blew in and knocked the leaves off the trees, then variable, drippy sometimes and mildly cold, or sunny and hopeful, even with the dead grass. And so on, all year round, one season after another, the seasons he grew up with. But after five or six months, maybe even sooner, after a couple of months, when the boredom kicked in, and not just boredom but something worse, like some kind of leukemia of boredom, a disease of the blood and bone, he realized that even if you decide to retreat from the world you need something to do. Otherwise you have no reason to get out of bed, you have no reason to get out of the house. A couple of his high-school friends had stayed in town. One of them had kids, and he used to hang out at their house, feeling like, I have a kid, too, I have a home. There was a limit to how much time he wanted to spend at the periphery of other people’s lives.

  Sometime after New Year, a mutual friend, a sports columnist at the Austin American Statesman, put him in touch with Lance, and Paul started joining Lance and several other guys on their Sunday morning bike rides. He couldn’t keep up at first, he had let himself drift out of shape, and for two days after his first ride he could hardly walk around the house. Just sitting down on the pot caused a heat map of pain to spread from his knees to the left side of his lower back, and he had to push himself up afterward with his hands on the edge of the bathtub next to the toilet. At this point he figured, I could go either way, and the way he went was to get back in shape. He started running again in the mornings, first around Wheeler Street, around Barton Creek, and up to Shoal Creek, and along the greenbelt, and later, when he moved out to Wimberley, along Lone Man Creek, a tributary of the Blanco River that formed the southern perimeter of his property, and sometimes down Red Hawk Road into Wi
mberley itself, through various neighborhoods with spread-out houses and back again, farther and farther, until he was routinely logging fifty miles a week.

  All of which kept him busier than just the hour and a half a day he spent on the road or on the bike, because you’ve got to recover and wind down and eat right, and shop to eat right, and so on. It’s a process that involves a certain amount of concentration on the self, a certain kind of intense and painful loneliness, and if you stick with it long enough, and push through the first five or six weeks where the pain barrier is all that you can think about, something semireligious starts to happen. You realize first of all that you’re a physical human being, that you live in a body, a fact which, as an athlete, he had always been more or less aware of, but then his body was always a means to an end, taking care of it was part of his job, but not the part that got measured, whereas now …

  If you push through the boredom, if you push through the depression of the boredom, if you manage to find a purpose, or not even a purpose, if you manage to give a shape to your days, something to do when you get up in the morning and something to think about when you lie down, eventually a new kind of life starts to kick in, a new frame of mind. You start to see your relation to the world more clearly, what matters and what doesn’t, which is something that Lance had been coming to terms with and was willing to talk about. Some of the other guys they rode around with had semi-famous pasts, too. There was an actor who dropped out of LA after drawing a blank in pilot season, and thinking, all right, I don’t need to spend my life waiting around for people I don’t particularly respect to say yes to me. There was a retired baseball player, there was a NASCAR guy, people who had settled in Austin because it’s a nice place to live and not totally off the beaten track in celebrity terms but not in the spotlight either. In other words, people who had been forced into some clear perspective on the meaning of worldly success. But he didn’t talk about this stuff with his family, maybe with Jean, but even with her not much, because he was aware that they didn’t respect this kind of pseudo-philosophical enlightened calm and also because on some level he realized he was making use of it as a stepping-stone toward something else.

  The irony, which he was perfectly willing to admit to, was that as soon as he decided to drop out of the world the people he started hanging out with were all these B-list types, instead of ordinary civilians, guys like his high-school friends, who tended to view what he was doing as an example or side effect of decadence and privilege. He could see it from their point of view. But he also had a point of view. Which is just that, for reasons unrelated to any kind of deserving, he had made a lot of money, and what this money made possible for him is that he could live a life entirely of his own choosing. So the question becomes, what do you choose. This is not an easy question to answer. You can choose to help other people, and in fact, every year, after conversations with his accountant and Nathan, who had a sophisticated sense of the charity market and where you get the most bang for your buck, he gave away roughly a hundred thousand dollars a year. (Enough for him to feel a pinch, a slight constraint, given the fact that he didn’t expect to earn anything but interest and dividends for the rest of his life, and was living off the capital.) But this also seemed to him like a way of avoiding the question. Because obviously there are people who need quantifiable things, like clean water and prenatal care and access to the internet, which money can supply. But the question he wanted to think about, the question he wanted to answer by example, is how should you live when all of these material concerns have been met? There’s got to be a kind of life possible that would seem to him worth living.

  At the moment, he was reading a lot. In bed, on the toilet, on the exercise bike. Different kinds of books, he had bought a Kindle. High-end self-help stuff like Thinking, Fast and Slow and Blink, neither of which Nathan or Susie or Jean had much respect for. But also biographies. He was fighting his way through the Caro volumes, the stuff about LBJ’s early days in Texas interested him, the way the century changed around him. You grow up in one time and learn certain valuable lessons, whose application to the time you end up in, as an adult, isn’t always immediately obvious. Books had a way of leading on to each other, and without Cal around he had the leisure and headspace to follow the tracks and see where they would take him. But there were certain premises he had firmly established in his mind. That the feelings he had now, of pointlessness, of randomly directed anger, which flared up and disappeared almost instantly, of disillusionment, were of a relatively recent growth, that they did not have their roots in his childhood. That his childhood was meaningful to him in a way that no subsequent life seemed meaningful to him, not the couple of years he spent at Stanford, or his tennis career, or even his relationship with Dana. That everything apart from his feelings for Cal was corrupted by this sense of pointlessness, or colored by it, and that what he needed to do was find a way to reproduce, not the innocence of childhood (because he had no interest in innocence; guilt was not the problem, he rarely felt guilty; besides, as everybody knows, children are full of cruelty), but something like the meaningfulness or authenticity of childhood. Though these were clearly the wrong words, and the fact that he couldn’t find better words for what he was after might be part of the problem.

  You turn off I-35 at Mountain City, and when you get through that, end up on the dark roads, in the deep middle of Texas nowhere, where even the land looks like nothing much, not like farmland or anywhere you’d want to build, made up mostly at that time of year of dead grass and dead bushes and a few low trees, driving along Old Kyle Road, where there aren’t any houses or stores or shacks by the side of the highway, just telephone poles. There aren’t any streetlamps, and for several miles you think, this is what it feels like to travel through an unknown continent, until the outskirts of Wimberley appear.

  Maybe love was one of the words, though that seemed a stupid way of putting it. But what he meant was just the thoughtless unquestioned feelings of brothers and sisters for each other and for their parents, people you’re basically stuck with and didn’t choose, your simple relations with them and physical lack of embarrassment (he still pissed in front of Cal, he wiped Cal’s ass), even if what went along with those feelings in many cases was boredom and shortness of temper (on the parents’ side) and endless trivial competitive rivalries on the kids’. The boredom of love on the one hand and the battles of love on the other, which is maybe why, for the rest of your life, boredom and fighting seem like indicators of honesty or sincerity or the real thing, and everything else feels like playing around.

  Okay, what he had taken so far were a few long- and medium-term steps, like buying the house and trying to develop the land. He was reading up on permaculture, too, which was making a move in Texas, in spite of the climate. There was a school in Plano he had made some initial contact with, though it was a long way from Wimberley, about four hours in the car. Not that he really intended to enroll—you get these ideas, but somehow the content of them never lives up to the shiny surface. As soon as you start to follow through with anything it becomes clear why you didn’t want to bother in the first place. And he realized somewhere along the way that who he was explaining himself to was probably Dana, though not all of the time, that he was listening to Nathan, too, and Jean, and other people, who occupied critical points of view on whatever he thought, but it was mostly Dana, who just seemed to sit there at the back of his mind and listen to him. Without saying much.

  There weren’t many houses on his stretch of Red Hawk Road, just above Lone Man Creek, and the few there were lay spread out enough you couldn’t see your neighbors. Irregularities in the land got in the way, trees got in the way, and as he pulled up the drive to his house, which didn’t look like much from the front, just a concrete shed with a horizontal window under the eaves, like a two-car garage, the faint, faint fear of living this far out on his own pressed in on him. Even after a year and a half of living like this he felt it. Movement-sensitive lights, whic
h lined the drive, flared on, which was both a source of comfort and mild anxiety, because every time you came home at night it was like a big announcement. In New York you get sick of all the people crowding in on you, sharing walls and sidewalk space and subway air, so that you can’t even shout at your kid, not anywhere, not at home or the street, without feeling like you’re under observation. But out here you had the opposite problem. The distances around you were so great and so empty that you yourself became a kind of witness to yourself. There was nobody else to do the job, and you developed, at least Paul had developed, a weird kind of double-consciousness, where every step he took, between the car and the front door, felt semi over-deliberate. You wondered what was out there watching you, so it was like you yourself were watching yourself. But this was part of the point of it all, this is what he wanted to get used to. At night in the hills the temperature dropped and you could smell the cold air over the river at the foot of the yard. He was glad to get the front door closed behind him, and to turn on the lights.

  The telephone rang just as he walked in, and he could see the red light blinking on his answering machine. The house had poured concrete floors and exposed limestone walls, big single-pane windows, and even after Bill brought over a couple of rugs to lay down, from his years of hoarding (more lay rolled up under the pool table in the back apartment at Wheeler Street), noises echoed. Paul picked up the handset and sat on the couch, looking mostly at his reflection in the glass, which shone and glared a little under the overhead lights. Behind this reflection, dimly, you could see the bent reaching arms of the live oak tree outside the patio porch, and behind it, sloping away, the yellow wintry grass that led to the river. On the far side, vaguely, the green outline of a hill.