“That’s not fair.”
She turned back to the paper, as if I was not worth her time unless I could be completely honest.
“All right, fine,” I confessed. “I’m hoping that he’ll call me right up and tell me he’s always loved me and wants to be close in the years he has left.”
“I wouldn’t count on that happening.”
“Why not?”
“Because people don’t change that much.”
“I disagree. People change all the time.”
“Whatever you say,” she replied.
I studied Hortense’s obituary like a tract of the Talmud. It had appeared in the paper exactly a year to the day after Molly and I were married. Surely this had to mean something!
“You know what really gets me? She died without knowing I had children.” I was unexpectedly flooded with emotion and heard my voice catch.
Molly put down the paper and cast me an angry look. “You don’t have any children, Seth. Remember?”
“Oh, right! I’ll try to remember that.”
She glared at me, then began to tidy up various sections of the paper. I wanted to remind her of the time Hortense had told me I would never have children. I wasn’t trying to be funny; I was recalling the cruelest thing Hortense had ever said to me.
“Well, you know what they could have said about her?” I said. “She’s the woman who put the bitch in obituary!”
I nearly fell off my chair laughing as Molly pushed away from the table.
Then the phone rang, jolting my heart. Could it be my father calling to tell me about Hortense? No. It was my mother, calling to wish me happy anniversary. She asked to speak to Molly, but I lied and told her that she had just missed her.
“Do you have plans for tonight?” she asked.
I lied again, telling her we were going to the Rialto in the Charles Hotel.
“All right, doll. I love you both.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Five minutes later, right after Molly left for the statehouse, I called Sarah. I hadn’t tried to imitate our father for years, but when she answered the phone, I said, “Hello, Sarah,” in a dead-on Elliot Shapiro voice.
“Dad?” she replied.
“Can you tell me what two plus two is?”
“Jesus, Seth. You asshole.”
“Look at the obituary page in this morning’s Times.”
“I was just reading it when you called. That’s why you caught me off guard. For a moment I thought it was Dad calling to tell me about Hortense.”
“Are you going to send him a note?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. The obituary says she died after a long illness. If he wanted our sympathy, he could have contacted us.”
“Do you know what the paper could have said about Hortense?”
“What?”
“She’s the woman who put the bitch in obituary.”
“You’re bad,” she said, laughing.
“I know.”
“I bet you’re going to repeat that line about ten more times before the end of the day.”
“Probably,” I replied. “But what can I do? I’m just so very bad.”
I drove to the Alewife T stop as usual. I knew my father was probably at home, grieving, mourning. On the ten-minute ride between Alewife and Harvard, I wondered if I ought to get off the train at Harvard and go to his house. I could try to console him, tell him that I was in bad shape myself. We were father and son, after all, both of us bereft and mourning in our ways. But when the train pulled in to the Harvard stop, I kept my seat as the car disgorged passengers and then loaded up with new ones. As the train approached Charles Street, I found myself sitting across from a man about my age, but his skeletal face was splotched with lesions and he shivered occasionally, though he was wearing an overcoat that fit him like a king-sized blanket. I kept reminding myself not to stare, but I couldn’t stop myself, couldn’t keep from imagining that he was the teacher I had replaced. He eventually caught my eye and smiled wanly at me.
Usually the classroom was my refuge, but that day it was a place where my sadness only seemed to ripen. We were discussing Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog,” and I prayed that I would be able to hold it together. The students began by discussing why we sympathize with Gurov even though he is an adulterer, a womanizer, a liar.
“Because Anna loves him, and she’s so pure,” said one of the students, Skylar Raab. Her long hair was twisted into a braid that reached the middle of her back; she wore an oversized button-down shirt (unironed, of course), jeans, and a hemp choker.
“But is she really so pure?” I replied. “After all, she’s committing adultery too. She lies to her husband so she can meet Gurov.”
“Well, it’s more like she’s innocent,” said Jason LaForge. He had bangs that fell over his granny glasses, sheepdog style, and he was wearing a T-shirt with a whale on it that said “Save the Humans.”
“Good,” I said. “I think innocent is a better word, but, still, how can she be innocent considering she’s committing adultery with Gurov?”
“Well, she’s innocent because her love for him is so pure,” Skylar said. “She loves him despite all his faults.”
“Yes,” I said. “Very good.”
Sonal Mukerjhee put her hand up. “But why? I really don’t understand what she sees in him. He’s like twenty years older than her. He lies about everything. He’s a serial adulterer.” Sonal was also dressed casually, in a rugby jersey, khaki slacks, and red high-top sneakers, but she permitted herself the vanity—or was it an ethnic statement?—of highlighting her beautiful hazel eyes with kohl.
Many of the students nodded in agreement.
“Well, maybe that’s the point of the story,” I said, my voice overly urgent, almost desperate. “They love each other despite who they are. They’re not pure, but their love is!”
Some nodded, but some looked at me strangely, puzzled by the burst of feeling I had let out.
“I think we need to go to the text,” I said, and directed them to the last page. Then I read:
“Anna Sergeyevna and he loved each other like people very close and intimate, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had meant them for one another, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as though they were a pair of birds of passage, caught and forced to live in different cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.”
I contorted my face to keep from crying, but the tears poured down anyway. The students all stared at me, curious and compassionate.
WHEN I ARRIVED HOME FROM SCHOOL, I sat down at the table and wrote my father a note:
Dear Dad,
I was very sorry to read about your loss. I’m married to a wonderful woman and we’re expecting a baby. I’m sorry too that we’ve never been able to reconcile our differences, but I want you to know that I’ve always loved you.
Love,
Seth
I placed it an envelope and went out to mail it. Then I shopped for dinner in the stores along Huron Avenue. I bought two Rock Cornish hens, a baguette, haricots verts, an expensive bottle of wine, and flowers. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, they forgave everything in the present, and felt that this love of theirs had changed them both. All afternoon, I repeated those words in my head, until I almost believed I was Gurov and Molly was Anna and we’d forgive everything in our past and forgive everything in our present.
I didn’t know if Molly would return home at dinnertime, and my heart sped up when I heard her come in at six. She looked over the mail and played the messages on the machine before coming into the kitchen. Then she stared at the table I had set: the two golden hens, flowers in the center, an open bottle of wine, the loaf of crusty bread.
“What’s all this about?” she said.
�
��It’s our anniversary—and my way of apologizing for this morning.”
She sat down with her coat still on. I sat too. She poured herself a glass of wine and gulped down most of it, and I knew that we were still Seth and Molly, not Anna and Gurov.
“Can you explain this?” she asked, and placed on the table a letter from the real estate management company for my apartment. It had come the day before, but I hadn’t bothered to open it yet. I read the letter: The company was terminating my lease because I had been illegally subletting my rent-controlled apartment.
“I was subletting my old apartment,” I said, understanding why she had been so angry with me that morning.
“I can’t believe you would do something like that!”
“It’s rent controlled,” I explained.
“Seth,” she cried in exasperation, “when people get married, they don’t hold on to their old apartments.”
“All right. I can see why you’re upset, but you’re acting like I betrayed you.”
“You have betrayed me. That’s exactly what this feels like, a betrayal! Someday our bucket is going to be full again, Molly. If you really believed that, if you really had faith in us, if you really wanted to be with me, you wouldn’t have kept your old apartment.”
We stared at each other. Of all my transgressions—laughing out loud when the president was shot, not proposing until Molly was pregnant, becoming tongue-tied in the minister’s office— this, I realized, was the most serious. I had always been too cautious to embrace what I most wanted; I had always played the odds in life.
“Why did you open my mail?” I asked. My question was more forensic than accusatory.
“I wondered why you were getting a letter from a real estate company. It was bothering me, so I opened it.”
“I see,” I said. “I see.”
“Seth, I can’t do this anymore.”
“This?”
“This!” she exclaimed. “You! Me! Hoping I’m going to have a baby! Hoping we might be happy again! Everything!”
I looked at the beautiful table I had prepared.
“We can be happy again,” I replied, but I could hear how empty my words sounded.
“Seth, stop telling me things you don’t believe.”
“So? Now what?”
“I need to live by myself.”
“Here?”
She nodded.
“You want me to move out?”
“Yes . . . do you think you could stay with Mara?”
“Probably. . . . Molly, I’m sorry I behaved so badly.”
She backhanded her tears away. “Seth, don’t blame yourself. It’s nobody’s fault.”
“Why do couples always say that?”
“Say what?” she asked, her eyes damp.
“‘It’s nobody’s fault.’ Of course this is my fault.”
She stared at me, red eyed, then reached for my hand.
“I mean,” I continued, “maybe that’s the attraction of conspiracy theories. They provide sensible explanations for random things. Think about the Kennedy assassination. We watch the same film over and over, see Kennedy’s scalp sheared off by Oswald’s bullet for the hundredth time, but we don’t want to believe that everyone’s life suddenly changed because of something so senseless and random. So we invent theories and fictions to explain the unexplainable.”
She smiled sadly, sympathetically. “That sounds like something you would say to one of your classes.”
“It is,” I confessed. “Word for word.”
ON NOVEMBER 22, 1989, I was walking through Harvard Yard when I saw my father approaching from the opposite direction. I stopped when he was about ten feet away. He kept coming, head down. I didn’t know if he was trying to ignore me or if he simply didn’t recognize me. “Dad,” I said. He stopped. For several seconds we just stared at each other, as if we were both encountering a warped image of ourselves. All of my childhood hopes immediately welled up: We were both alone, and he was finally free to love me.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, the word slicing like a blade. I waited for him to ask me how I was, but he didn’t say anything more.
“Do you know what today is?” I asked him.
“No.”
“The twenty-sixth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.”
“Happy anniversary.”
“My baby died and my wife left me,” I said.
He pressed his lips together and nodded his head vaguely. He might have been signaling, Yes, I know. It happens to us all.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Did you get my letter about Hortense?” He had never written back.
“A letter? You wrote two sentences. I thought you wanted to be a writer. That was the best you could do? Two sentences?”
“Actually, I think it was three sentences.”
“Two, three. It’s all the same.”
“But I wrote to you,” I replied. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
“Two sentences,” he repeated, as if this were the most damning evidence against my character. “Two sentences.”
“What more did you want me to say? Recall the many wonderful experiences we shared?”
He bent his head and closed his eyes, as if receiving bad news. “Do you know what your problem is?” he said. “You remember everything that’s unimportant.”
“You know, you’re right. You’re absolutely right!”
He gave me a small, appreciative laugh, and I could see his small, tobacco-stained teeth.
“I remember everything that’s unimportant,” I said. “That is so true. So many years of therapy, and you’ve had the answer all this time!”
He broke into peals of high-pitched laughter. I took it as a sign of affection, if not approval.
“Twenty-six years ago today I was in Mrs. Carmichael’s first-grade class at the Stillman Elementary School. I burst out laughing when Mrs. Miller, the principal, told us that the president had been shot. I remember the morning you left us. We were all sitting at the table, and my mother was hitting you with a box of Raisin Bran, crying and pleading with you not to go. You were fending her off with one arm as you continued to eat. You were in your undershirt. I remember that you always waited to put on your shirt and tie until just before you left the house. You use Dunhill aftershave. You used to keep Johnny Cash tapes in your car because you loved his music but Hortense wouldn’t let you play it in the house.”
His eyes widened with emotion behind his glasses, and he put a hand against my cheek. Then he continued on his way.
ON APRIL 25, 2004, I was strolling up Concord Avenue with Grace, my four-year-old goddaughter, riding high on my shoulders, when I recognized Molly at about thirty yards. We hadn’t seen each other since 1989, but her gait—timid and dazed—was immediately familiar to me. I waved to her but she didn’t respond; she probably thought I was waving to someone behind her.
“Molly, hello. It’s me. Seth.”
“Oh, my God. Seth. I didn’t recognize you.”
We didn’t embrace, though we were close enough to touch. Besides, my hands were holding on to Grace’s ankles, and Molly’s slender finger was banded with a gold ring.
“Is this your daughter?” Molly asked.
“No, my goddaughter.” Then, to clarify my answer even more, I added, “She’s the love of my life.”
Grace was the daughter of my close friends and neighbors, Bea and Ken Simon. After I had moved out of Molly’s house, I spent a month sleeping on Mara’s futon before I found a place to rent— the four-room attic apartment of Bea and Ken’s Victorian house in Porter Square. Bea and Ken, recently married, were rehabing the house themselves. He was an architect, she a photographer, and they had designed their dream home. After a month of hearing banging and laughter in the evenings and on weekends, hearing the sounds of two people joyfully building a life together rising up to my attic apartment, I volunteered to help out. Surprised, they offered to lower
my rent, but I refused, explaining that they would be saving me thousands of dollars in therapy bills. Bea and Ken laughed, but they knew I was going through a divorce and was in bad shape emotionally. “Think of it as occupational therapy for me,” I said. For more than a year, I helped them reconstruct their house, knocking down walls, stripping linoleum, installing Sheet-rock, and sanding floors. During the months when their bathroom and kitchen were gutted, they showered in my apartment and shared meals with me at my table. By the time the project was completed, Bea and Ken had become like a second family to me.
“I’m happy for you, Seth. You look just like each other.”
“Thank you,” I said proudly, not bothering to correct her misunderstanding about my relationship to Grace. “Gracie, my love, can you say hello to my friend Molly?” I said.
Grace bent down with her arms crossed angrily and said, “I’m not Grace!” To punctuate the point, she straightened the rounded brim of her yellow hat.
“Oh, excuse me. Madeline.”
“Madeline?” Molly asked.
“You know, Madeline. ‘In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. The smallest one was Madeline.’”
“Oh, yes, of course I know about Madeline. Well, it’s nice to meet you, Madeline.”
“Are you Madeline’s Mommy?” Grace asked, staring at Molly’s hair.
Molly paled, as if Grace had said something shockingly adult.
“Your hair,” I explained. “Madeline has red hair.”
“Oh, my hair, yes,” Molly said, relieved. Then she asked Grace if she would like to touch it. Grace smiled shyly and nodded. Molly leaned toward us, and I could see how extensively her rich auburn hair was threaded with gray. Her skin was more porous and textured than the last time I had seen her; deep lines ran between her nose and her mouth.
“I can see you’re married,” I said.
“Yes. Eight years. . . . And you?”
“No. Not married. . . . Any children?” I asked, though I was sure I knew the answer, had known it the moment I recognized her orphan’s stroll from so far away.
“No.”
“Uncle Seth. I’m bored!” Grace shouted. “You said we were going to buy my present.”
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