Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  It’s important to insulate yourself from loneliness, especially in old age. Though there is also something comforting in the thought of fighting with your brother, after all these years, as if … especially since you have the feeling that, over the course of your lives, that you … which is why, when you’re young, you should make as many people as you can. Because, children … but she had lost her train of thought. How many more years will we come together like this, at Christmas? Nathan and Susie and Paul and Jean. And their kids … and husbands and wives. Or ex-wives. Can I count them on one or two hands? And when I’m dead, what will Bill do with the house? Because in some ways the house is what you have made of your life, it’s the family museum. And after Bill … if the house is sold … where will they come together? Nobody will want to sell the house; nobody will want to live in it. Maybe Paul, if he has nothing else to do. But you can’t live like that, in a museum. Just because it’s where you grew up. You have to escape that, too, which is what I did.

  There was a particularly charming letter her father sent for Klaus’s birthday. He hoped it would arrive on time, and that the watch (there was a package, it was wrapped in cotton balls) had not been damaged. “You must explain to him,” her father wrote (Klaus was nine years old), “that he has to wind it at night before going to bed. Tell him that since he has a watch now, it’s up to him to make it to school on time.” Her brother was seventy-six now, retired from the law, he had nothing to do and nowhere to go, no reason to get up in the morning. To read this letter … it was like stepping on a gravestone, and she remembered anyway that she still had some wrapping to do before dinner. Just a few silly presents—half the pleasure for the children was opening them, and she could hear the front door opening, and Paul and Dana coming back with Cal.

  *

  Nathan and Jean were in the kitchen, having an argument about potatoes. Giblet stock was simmering in the pot, the window over the sink had steamed up, and the room smelled of bay and juniper berry. A heavily salted goose lay ready in the roasting pan, the oven was already going, making a kind of revving noise like a car in overdrive, but Dana (walking into the kitchen) had a funny brief feeling that the bird looked cold, in its pink skin, lying there. With half an orange sticking out of its … Nathan wanted to wait until the goose fat rendered to make roast potatoes—Jean had been planning on “going Dauphinoise.” Otherwise, what am I doing here she said. This is your show.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” Dana asked.

  “Ask the boss,” Jean said.

  “We’re fine. What did the doctor say?”

  Cal had an ear infection. It was probably viral, which meant that giving him antibiotics wouldn’t do any good, but they say that every time, Dana said, and every time you give them the pills and twelve hours later they stop complaining. So she persuaded the doctor to write a prescription.

  Paul, in fact, had the little white paper bag in his hand and put it on the kitchen counter. “What do you want to do,” he said. “Should we give it to him in front of the TV?”

  He noticed that he was deferring to Dana, but this didn’t bother him. The old competitive urge to insist on his fatherly expertise had abated somewhat, he wanted to show her that he wanted to please her, that he was willing to follow her lead, especially in front of his brother, so that Nathan could see what was going on and make his own inferences. Somehow in the car, on the trip to Far West Boulevard, in the waiting room at the clinic, his sense of allegiance had shifted—the fact that Jean was there, too, that she had trusted Dana with inside information, made a difference, too.

  “Do you have any strong opinions about potatoes?” Jean asked.

  “Make both,” and Paul said, “Come on, Buddy. You can watch a little TV.”

  “Is it the nice kind or the not nice?”

  “Is what?”

  “The medicine.”

  “It’s the good kind,” Paul said, “it makes you better,” and together with Dana, walking the way you walk when you’re lagging behind with a tired kid, but letting him make his own way, on his own two feet, they trailed him out of the kitchen and into the playroom.

  Nathan put the bird in the oven and told Jean, “I’m going to lie down, if that’s all right. I’m pretty tired. Do you mind turning down the heat after half an hour?”

  “What do you want it at?”

  “350.”

  And he walked out the backdoor onto the patio with the sun in his eyes. It lay seeming to rest on top of the treeline at the end of the long backyard. Over the tennis court, in the far corner, a billboard advertising Jose Cuervo stood at an angle—its base was planted in the patch of graveled wasteland behind the apartment building next door. Sunlight glanced off it now, the color of the tequila in the bottle, and Nathan could feel the sunlight on his skin, too, and the presence of the city around him. He was still wearing shorts and a T-shirt and stepped barefooted across the pebbled concrete to the apartment at the back. Kids were running through the yard, he could hear them and some of them were probably his—messing around in the bamboo hedge and playing in the shed, but he pulled open the sliding door and went inside. Clémence sat typing at the table under the window. She had the blinds down; the room was dark.

  “Are the girls outside?” he asked her.

  “I put Julie in charge, I’ll go check in a minute.”

  He took his computer out of the suitcase and lay down on the bed. At home in Cambridge they lived in four thousand square feet, but in Austin their only private space was his old high-school bedroom, and what they called the “library” next door, which had a pool table sitting in the middle. The girls slept on mattresses under the bookshelves. Every time you walked anywhere you had to find stepping-stones of empty carpet, because everything they took with them, books, clothes, suitcases, stuffed animals, lay spread across the floor. So what you did instead was withdraw a little inside your own head. Clémence without turning around said, “It’s amazing how makeshift all these local affiliates are. I’m trying to arrange for a couple of crew, but at this time of year …”

  Nathan, while he listened, was aware of the onset of what Clémence sometimes called his dissociative episodes, which he had learned (with her help) to recognize, the way people who suffer from migraines spot the early-warning signs … thickness of vision, difficulty reading. But dissociative wasn’t really the word. He went inward and got stuck and had a hard time climbing out. That stupid argument with Jean about the potatoes, which was really an argument about something else. But it bugged him when she called him boss. She had also sniped at him earlier when he asked Paul to come shopping. Yesterday she drove six hours to pick him up from DFW, but sometimes, when you do something nice for somebody, afterward … or maybe she regretted bullying him into coming and felt bad about that, too. She wanted him to meet Henrik, so he could give his approval, so he could say okay, that’s fine, go ahead, but at the same time resented needing it and so she … Or maybe she worried that he wasn’t going to give it. When these feelings struck him the world appeared slightly out of proportion, or weirdly close and distant at the same time, like images at the wrong end of a telescope, and one of the symptoms, at least this is how it felt, was a kind of super-acuity of motive perceptions—which had the effect of making him suspicious of everyone, even people he loved.

  The code they had worked out between them was that he said to Clémence, I’m feeling pretty tired, do you mind if I lie down for a minute, and she let him opt out of the normal obligations of the household, whatever they happened to be, looking after kids, putting the shopping away, entertaining guests. One of the comforts of their marriage lay in the age difference between them—because Clémence at forty-nine was old enough to mother him a little. She turned around now and said, “Maybe you should take a nap, we got in pretty late last night.”

  “So did you.”

  “This is a vacation for me.”

  “You’re working, too.”

  “I get to be the guest. You have to
be …” But she didn’t say what he had to be. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  “Lie down with me for a minute then leave me alone,” he said. So she joined him in bed, and he thought it strange, that even after all these years, where he lay in high school night after night, now she … With the blinds down it looked like they might be doing anything, but they both had their shoes on and she rubbed his forehead, pressing and smoothing the skin away from his brow between thumb and middle finger. Drawing the hair out of his eyes. On his back, he looked up at the ceiling fan. There was something pleasant about lying in a dark room with a sunny day outside. Though the sunlight was going, too, changing color, the planet was cooling, and eventually she said, “I’ll go check on the kids. You should take a nap,” but he didn’t want her to leave but he let her anyway.

  “I’ve just got an email to write,” he said.

  “I’m sure it can wait.”

  To get out of the room, you had to pull open the door and push through the blinds, which was like walking through ferns or rustling leaves, and then they settled again behind you as you closed the door. For a minute he lay there doing nothing, but then he sat up in bed and opened his computer.

  Nathan had been positioning himself for the past few years to take Judge Mannheim’s place on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Now Mannheim had announced his retirement. He’d been waiting for the election results to come in, and when Obama won, he thought, okay, I can go. He was seventy-three years old, he had a house in Wellfleet. From Nathan’s point of view, his timing was good. Elizabeth Warren, whom he knew pretty well from her Harvard days, was currently the senior senator from Massachusetts. Her recommendation to the president was likely to carry weight. If Ted Kennedy hadn’t died, there was no way Nathan would be in the running, but he got along well with Senator Warren, who used to teach at Texas and looked out for him when he came to Cambridge. She was an old friend of Bill’s old friend Judge Kirkendoll—another thing for Nathan to think about, making an appearance at the Judge’s Boxing Day party, which nobody else in the family would want to go to.

  Someone from the Justice Department had already gotten in touch. A guy named Michael Labro, whom he used to clerk with. They spent a summer fifteen years ago running through their per diems at various high-end Manhattan restaurants, but at this stage in their careers these conversations acquire a formal quality—it’s amazing the way you learn to talk. It doesn’t even involve a special effort. Nathan took the phone call at home, in his Cambridge study, which looked out on the yard (the wooden swing set had leaves stuck to the seat; the grass had grown too long and was now too wet to mow), and answered calmly and afterward went down to tell Clémence. She was in the kitchen. His method of expressing strong emotion was to speak matter-of-factly, and he told her, “Look, I don’t want anyone to know, not even Bill and Liesel.” It was still early days, they were at the vetting stage, and the next thing he did was return to his study and draft a letter explaining his medical situation. He worked into the dark, concentrating completely in the small arc of the desk-lamp light, and in the morning showed it to his dean, who was aware of his condition.

  Two and a half years ago, Nathan had suffered an attack of optic neuritis, an inflammation of the optic nerve. Basically, he woke up blind one morning. There was also numbness in his legs, and his doctor sent him for an MRI. The results were good, in the top ten, fifteen percent of expectation, and at the moment he was still operating under a diagnosis of what they called CIS—a clinically isolated syndrome, which is almost always a precursor or in fact the first instance of the onset of multiple sclerosis. Since then, on the advice of experts at the Mellen Center in Cleveland, he had been taking preventative medication, Avonex, which he or Clémence injected into his thigh once a week. There had been no relapse. At least, nothing symptomatic, but this is partly why he didn’t like driving at night or putting himself through any unusual stress, of the avoidable kind.

  He hesitated for twenty-four hours whether to send the email and then sent it. He might have printed and mailed it in but decided that it was wiser to leave an electronic trail, in case at any point in the future questions arose about full disclosure. So he pressed send and eventually received a courteous response. Now he was just waiting. Presumably there were people checking his background, interviewing old colleagues and professors (his doctors, too, probably), reading his articles and even, where they could get their hands on them, his student essays. Nobody talked to him about any of this; he didn’t talk to anybody else. It was like trying to ignore a mosquito in the room, and get some sleep …

  Meanwhile, he wanted to stay out of trouble. Some of his students had written a petition about Sandy Hook, and asked him to sign it. This was the email he was supposed to respond to, which he’d been putting off. Dear Professor Essinger, Please find attached … The petition contained various legal arguments about the right to bear arms, and Nathan was reluctant to get his name in the papers, fighting a fight that seemed to him almost completely hopeless, and therefore pointless, when he might have his own fights to fight at the Senate nomination in a few months’ time. Also, he felt uncomfortable putting other people’s words in his mouth, petitions are a clumsy form of argument. But several of his colleagues had already signed, it might look awkward for Nathan to refuse. He had a good relationship with his students; he didn’t want to spoil that either. Because there was also a danger in pissing off the left, he didn’t like either of his options, and so, like Buridan’s ass, he sat up in bed and did nothing, he scrolled through his emails.

  There’d been another attack in Afghanistan. An editor from the New York Times had gotten in touch, to ask him if he wanted to write an Op-ed about it. His message included a link to the story on CNN. Somehow Nathan had become the go-to guy for talking about the line between state and non-state actors in conflict zones. One of his articles had been cited by the Obama administration to justify its use of drone strikes against US citizens abroad without judicial process. This was something else he worried about, in the confirmation hearings. Nathan’s own views were much more equivocal, but he had argued that the law, and not just the law, but legal culture, the long-established and complicated traditions of the law, the kind of formal training lawyers have to go through, which is still regulated, controlled by academics, defended by tenure … remained the best defense against abuses of state power. It’s a question of what kind of people get to make the decisions, which also means, counterintuitively, that lawyers have to be willing to get their hands dirty, they have to be willing to get serious and involved—otherwise you surrender the field to CIA-types, private contractors and ex-military … but he didn’t want to go over his arguments, as he listened to someone crying in the backyard.

  In general, whenever possible, his policy had been to push his public pronouncements as far to the right as he was intellectually willing to. Or rather, to pick his topics carefully. Only Clémence knew his reasons, she was the only one he talked to about the fact that in the long run … what he was building toward … he felt foolish even articulating such ambitions, which somehow sound childish, like wanting to be president, and partly because … If you’re going to play this game, you have to play it. You can’t write something and not believe it, and if you believe it, what’s there to confess? Or who should he confess to? Bill? But it also meant that his marriage had a kind of privileged intimacy, which made him feel more dependent on Clémence, in a way that he basically liked and approved of, because it meant … but it also cut him off from other people. These arguments, which he had almost daily with himself, the kind of arguments you have in your head to prepare for the moment when you have them with other people, were now overlaid with other reflections. Paul, and what he said about girls … Jean and Henrik … the arguments you have to win with other people, which it’s your job to win, as their brother. At the same time, he remembered walking over the mountains in the DR, from one village to the next, eating what people cooked, but now because a wo
man had shot a man in Kabul, at Police Headquarters, after two years of US-sponsored training, he was supposed to have an intelligent opinion, and the reason he needed this opinion was so that he could defend his other intelligent opinions.

  The man was a civilian contractor, who worked for SimCorp, one of these hybrid outfits, a private company doing government work—over ninety percent of their revenues came from taxpayer money, and their boards were filled with former Department of Defense officials. Among other things, they supplied and operated drones for American crop-spraying programs in Ecuador (part of the war on drugs), where Karen Heinz had spent the summer a year before he met her. Farmers had filed a class action suit against them, alleging widespread medical “collateral damage”—ten years later the case was still ongoing. Public and private interests had become almost impossible to disentangle. CNN didn’t say much about the shooter, except that she was forty years old. The dead man came from Mansfield, Georgia. “A woman who answered the phone at his house said she had no comment,” and for some reason this line suggested instead a phone continuing to ring … and when he woke up Jean was standing in the dark room.

  It was the noise of shifting blinds that woke him, and Jean said, looking at him tenderly, “I’ve strained off the goose fat but I figured you probably had some idea about what you want to do with it.” And then, after a moment, “Clémence said it was okay to get you. They’ve all gone to look at the lights.”

  “So it’s just you and me,” Nathan said, sitting up.

  * * *

  Dana put Cal in his stroller and figured, if he falls asleep, that’s fine, he can sleep. She would have put him to bed but it was Christmas Eve, when the Essingers gave out presents, and she didn’t want him to miss out. For much of her childhood she ate Christmas dinner alone with her parents and Granma Mamie, her mother’s mother, who was divorced—Grampa Jack had remarried shortly after and nobody got along with his second wife. Her father had more or less lost contact with his own family. His parents lived in Annapolis and sometimes sent her a birthday card. There was also an uncle in LA but they never saw him. She wanted Cal for once at least to feel part of a crowd—maybe it was his last chance.