by Ani Katz
I’m much happier, much more sure of myself, once the structure is built. It may have problems, but now I can fix them. I’ve built a house that I know how to enter. I know where the rooms are, and what I will find in them. If I close my eyes I can feel my way around, find what I’ve misplaced, add what needs adding. I’m safe within those walls, secure with what I’ve accomplished so far. I wander around, making improvements.
* * *
—
We did not live in the house that my great-grandfather had built. That crumbling Victorian still belonged to my mother and my spinster sisters, and they played at being some kind of family within its walls, captives to its grand decrepitude.
My girls and I lived half an hour away on the North Shore in a tidy white Dutch Colonial with three bedrooms, a new kitchen, a gravel driveway, and a manageable mortgage. When I met my wife I had just begun to save for a house like this, working long hours at the office in Midtown, but my wife’s trust fund was what made it possible for us to have our dream home in the suburbs while we were still young enough to enjoy the feeling of our own lawn beneath our feet.
Before our daughter was born, my wife sometimes complained that we couldn’t buy the nice kind of toilet paper, or have internet in our one-bedroom garden apartment a gentrified block away from the Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn.
That’s what the library is for, I would tell her.
It was her money, she would complain. Why couldn’t she spend it the way she wanted to?
And then I would have to remind her that ultimately we both wanted the same things, and we were supposed to be on the same team, and that would be the end of it.
Back then I was making high five figures, but my wife wasn’t working. We tried to be fair about negotiating our spending and our saving, but it could be hard, especially because my wife wasn’t used to doing without all the little luxuries she was accustomed to. I loved the cozy feeling of a growing balance. She wanted her toilet paper.
Eventually she just started paying for the internet herself. I don’t even remember having a conversation about it. One day bills began to arrive, and they were in her name.
This all seems like an unnecessary tangent. But days return to me, unfurling in my memory like parts of a film: images and scenes, borrowed and spliced, more real than reality. Even when they don’t seem to tell a story, even when I’m not sure what they mean, they feel significant, somehow.
We should begin where my life really began, that year of firsts—the first night I met Miriam, the first sweet and effervescent months of our life together, the first time I brought her home with me. Miriam, my Miri—the woman who would become my wife.
We may as well begin there.
I
She found me at the bar on my corner. The oldest bar in Brooklyn, according to her dog-eared guidebook. It wasn’t exactly what she had expected. She adored the stained glass windows and all the old mahogany—like the choir of a cathedral, she said—but she was disappointed they didn’t serve cocktails.
At least you came along, she laughed, once we were a few rounds in and had gotten friendly with each other. She touched my arm, letting her fingertips linger in the crook of my elbow, blushing at her own boldness.
I can still see myself there, seeing her for the first time. I had stopped in for a nightcap after an arduous day at the office, and at first I was convinced I had made a mistake. On Thursdays the bar was always a madhouse, and on that night it was so crowded, so chaotic, that I almost turned around and walked out.
Then I saw her. She was perched by herself at the bend of the broad wooden bar, her dark head bent over her book as bodies blundered around her, careless voices flaring like firelight against the walls. She alone was serene, unbothered by the bedlam—the signal in the noise. I took the empty stool beside her, and she looked up at me, her face warmed with a garnet glow from the window above. She smiled.
My Miriam.
Since they didn’t serve cocktails, we made do with whiskey. One, and another, and another. I paid for it all. We inched closer to each other on our barstools, our kneecaps locking together like a well-worn wooden toy.
She told me about her childhood in Paris. Her maternal grandparents owned a successful kosher butcher shop on the cobblestoned Rue des Rosiers in the increasingly posh Marais; as a child, she’d spent long afternoons and Sundays helping out around the store, learning the cycles of soaking and salting to draw the blood from the meat. When she thought of home, she didn’t see her parents—a stern obstetrician and a depressed housewife prone to migraines—or their small, heirloom-filled apartment near Place des Vosges, but rather her grandfather in a spotless white apron, her grandmother handling money with a kerchief tied over her hair, ruby slabs of beef, thick knobs of lamb shanks, pale chicken parts nestled like newborn kittens.
Desperate to get away from home, she had gone to the University of Provence, several hours south of where she grew up. There she studied Courbet and the other realists, smoked cigarettes, slept with men, ate formerly forbidden foods like moules-frites and pork sausage. She worked as a waitress, a barback, a nanny, but only when she needed more cash than her monthly allowance could provide.
At twenty-five she gained access to her trust fund and could begin to travel—weekends in Barcelona and London, a month in Rome, always on her own. This was her first trip to the States, though she’d been to Montreal once before. She was in New York for a little more than a week, but she wished she could stay longer.
But why alone? I asked. Why not with friends? Aren’t you lonely?
Why should I need anyone else? They would just hold me back.
I told her my own story—a version of it, anyway. I glossed over my childhood on Long Island, flat land of strip malls and forever-flooded basements, leaving out all the meaningful details. I spoke of my scholarship to Amherst, my move to the city, my ascent from creative intern to junior art director.
I did not tell her that I had no plans to stay in Brooklyn, or that I only lived there because it was the accepted way station for young people who’d gone to good colleges. Brooklyn was just a stop before settling down.
And of course I did not tell her why I wanted to settle down so desperately, or why I ached to assume the status of husband and father. That would have required me to explain my own upbringing, and those hurts were far too ugly for a first encounter.
Later that night, I held her steady on the sidewalk as a bitter late-winter wind gusted through our open coats. I watched as she ate a chocolate bar I bought for her from the corner bodega and saw that her hand and lips were pale, that her eyes were unfocused but bright.
What do I owe you? she asked, the bodega’s door jangling behind us as we stepped back into the night.
Owe me?
For the drinks and everything. You know.
She stumbled and caught herself, then leaned against me, her cheek snug on my shoulder.
Nothing, I laughed as I steered us toward my apartment. Don’t be ridiculous.
At some point we had agreed that she should stay over—it wasn’t safe for her to go back to her hotel alone, not at this hour. But it wasn’t what you think. We got inside and immediately passed out on my bed, lights and clothes still on, without so much as a good night kiss. She was my guest, after all, a lone traveler looking for safety—a lady—and I was too much of a gentleman to expect anything else would happen that night.
It wasn’t until the early morning that she unfurled her sleep-warmed body against mine, and then we made love for the first of many times that dreamlike week—the first week of our lives together. She was so tender, so elated in her yielding to me, and when it was over and we lay beside each other with my hand still gripped in hers, I couldn’t believe what I had found.
That afternoon I called a car and we took a quick trip into the West Village to retrieve her bag from her hotel, and after that she hardl
y left my apartment for days. She would stay in bed when I went to work in the mornings, and I would keep that image in my mind, hungering for her. When I came home in the evenings she would still be lolling around in her underwear, sometimes reading my books, sometimes listening to one of the opera records I had played for her, sometimes cooking for us. I’d take her in my arms and the sauce would burn.
I’ve wanted you all day, I would say.
The truth was, I had known from the moment I saw her that it was all out of my control—that no matter what I did from then on, there was no question in my mind that she was going to come into my life and change it forever.
She was supposed to fly back to Paris the following Monday, but that Sunday night over the dinner I’d made for us she put down her fork and looked up at me with shining doe eyes.
I don’t want to go home.
Then don’t, I said. Stay here.
But I only have a tourist visa.
Just stay as long as you can, I said. We’ll figure things out.
I knew I was being impulsive. But I also knew that I wanted to keep her.
You mean it?
Of course.
She moved in. I already had most everything we needed, but I let her add her own little touches to the place—a few succulents and a fiddle-leaf fig, some framed prints from the Met Store, a new leather club chair that we picked out together. And of course there were her dresses filling half of our closet and her soft lace underthings spilling out of the laundry hamper, the shared showers and meals and daily chores. Before long, it felt like a real home that we had built together with mutual care and intention, so very unlike the home where I had grown up, where my parents could neither make each other happy nor keep their children safe from their particular expressions of misery—a home where it had always been so difficult to breathe.
My life with Miriam couldn’t have been further from that stifling morass, and our partnership was the polar opposite of my parents’ unfortunate union. Other people envied us—we always looked like we were on top of the world when we were out together, and we made an undeniably attractive couple. At thirty, I was a slender six feet. My blond hair still flopped boyishly over my forehead, but I had a gray suit and a navy suit that fit me perfectly, and I carried myself like the man I was becoming. And Miriam was the ideal woman. I loved the way she knew how to wear red lipstick, her assurance on heels, the way her hips moved when she walked. I loved her quiet way of assessing a room, listening while absorbing everyone else’s attention. I was always proud to be seen with her.
She met my college friends—the handful I’d kept in touch with—helped clear the table at dinner parties, chatted with the other girlfriends in galley kitchens (she got along so well with all the girls, even though she was the most sophisticated by far). She came to my company softball game in a yellow gingham sundress and a straw hat, a cold thermos of rosé in her tote bag. We went to the opera, went out dancing, went for brunch. In the dark, our heads on one pillow, I called her Miri.
I was in love. We were in love.
I know how hackneyed it must sound, but I had no idea that love could be like that. As children, my sister Evie and I had developed our notions of love from our father’s opera recordings and our furtive readings of our mother’s romance novels. We would play in Evie’s bedroom, pretending to be Mimi and Rodolfo, Tristan and Isolde, or whichever generic man-woman combination we found clinched together in a paperback’s pages.
That was our fiction of love. It took us a long time to understand why love—or what passed for it—looked so different in our own house: our father making French toast for family supper after a wrathful night and blacked-out morning, my mother staying with the twins in their bedroom long after they’d fallen asleep.
I told Miriam very little of this. We were moving inexorably toward a future together. The less said about the past, the better.
* * *
—
And then almost half a year had gone by, and we were traveling out to the overripe bayou of summertime Long Island not just to celebrate my mother’s sixtieth birthday—the stated purpose of the visit—but so I could search the cluttered ruins of my childhood home for the diamond ring that had belonged to my father’s grandmother and had graced the left hand of every married woman in my family since the early days of the century.
My mother had been the last to wear the ring, but not for over a decade now, and I had no idea what she’d done with it. I hoped that she was keeping it safe for me. More likely, it was buried somewhere in the bowels of her bedroom, where no one could find it.
Unless she had thrown it away.
* * *
—
When I remember that visit, I think of the drive out there—Miriam in the passenger seat, the streetlights grazing the tops of her bare knees as if they were rising up out of dark water. She’d been asleep since we’d turned onto Southern State. I’d planned to take the scenic route on the Ocean Parkway, so she could see the pockets of churning Atlantic peeking through the dunes, the red glow of the sunset spilled over the yawning calm of the bay, but since she had fallen asleep I decided to go the faster way.
We’d see the beach another time.
I glanced over and watched the streetlights slide over Miriam’s body, the bright beams slicing across her bare throat. She had worn the short black chiffon wrap dress with the tiny white flowers, a good choice—it showed off her figure and didn’t compete with the striking Picasso qualities of her face. On the radio, my favorite cast of Le Nozze di Figaro: Bryn Terfel merrily measuring out the space for his marital bed while Alison Hagley admires her bridal veil, her clarion soprano wreathed with joyous anticipation.
Without going into detail about the specific causes of dysfunction, I had warned Miriam repeatedly what it would be like—the house, my family. To head off disaster, I had called my mother the week before and given her clear instructions for the weekend: what we as a family would talk about, and what we would absolutely not talk about.
Keep it light, I’d said, and my mother had pouted and huffed, claiming not to understand what I meant.
I exited the highway and we crested into town. Now I could hear the hush of the AC straining against the vents, the hum of the road beneath us. I kept the windows rolled up against the darkness of the town as we crossed from one side to the other—through the neighborhoods of small homes shadowed by the soaring highway overpass, over the dividing spine of the train tracks, past shuttered strip malls and lonely diners and the glowing prairies of car dealerships—until we reached downtown. The prosperous and leafy neighborhoods were near the water, south of Main Street, where the lampposts had wreaths at Christmastime. In a few more miles I made a right, headed down a long and winding lane where houses stayed hidden behind tall walls of shrubbery. Finally, the familiar rumble as we turned in to the gravel drive, passing under the low-hanging trees and to the house.
I watched Miriam stir and wake. She let out a little moan as she peered out into the darkness, then turned to me, eyes still squinted shut, stretching.
Well, sweetheart, I sighed. We’re here.
Perhaps I should have warned her about everything once more. I probably should have apologized for bringing her into this house and foisting my family upon her, burdening her with her own role in our domestic drama. But I didn’t, because I knew she would have told me not to worry.
The truth was we could handle anything as long as we were together.
I carried the bags in: our weekend duffel and the groceries from the specialty food store near our apartment, because I never arrived anywhere—not even my own childhood home—empty-handed. We clambered up the wide wooden porch and opened the double-hung Dutch door that was never locked, and suddenly we were standing in my front hall, confronted by our faces reflected in the greasy gilded mirror balanced on the foyer credenza, our passage into the house blocked by th
e heft of the wraparound staircase, which the members of the household were now bounding down.
Mommy, they’re here!
My younger sisters, Deirdre and Katharine, though we always called them Deedee and Kit. The twins. They were painfully thin except for their cherubic faces; their light hair was wound into topknots, streaked with blue and ruby and amethyst. They were wearing pajamas—silky boxers and old T-shirts spattered with paint—but it was unclear if this was because they were going to bed or because that was what they’d worn all day.
They were twenty years old and considered themselves artists. Haphazardly homeschooled since the fourth grade, they were immature for their age—more like young teenagers than young adults. According to our mother, it made sense that they still lived at home. They were so young, she always said. Just little girls, really. How could anyone expect them to make their own way in the world when they’d been raised like veal calves, confined to a cage all their short lives?
The twins reached for Miriam, stroked her arms with quiet awe.
I’ve heard so much about you, Miriam said, and they drew back, suspicious.
Really?
Like what?
But before Miriam could explain, my mother was there, beaming at us with disagreeable intensity. She was a birdlike woman with yellowing teeth and ashen hair, the loose sleeves of her black sweatshirt like wings on her small frame. Even though she looked disheveled, she carried herself with rigid formality, as if she had decided that neither her past nor the present conditions of her life would determine her posture.
Oh marvelous, she trilled. How wonderful. So lovely.
I winced as she kissed Miriam on both cheeks, wondering where she’d picked up that particular affectation. Then she turned to me with a rapturous smile and opened her arms, standing on tiptoe to embrace me.