“Myself, I have stood outside locked door. And also, my child. I think, what if someone had let her in?”
Now she sits beside me, her hands clutching the photograph of the soaking wet girl who is her daughter. She runs a finger over the color-saturated image of the child saved from drowning.
“Everything was lost during the time she spent in the nursing home,” Judah explains. “There was a storage unit, but no one was keeping up with the payments.”
“No nursing, at that home,” says Mrs. Auslander. She looks at Judah. “He gets me out of that place, brings me back home.”
“But it’s the same,” I say. There are doilies on the television set, a bright afghan. The mushroom curtains hang in the window. “It’s like I remember.”
“He tried,” says the old woman. She is dressed differently from the last time I saw her. The ratty house coat, and gray slippers are gone. In their place, she wears a velour track suit and white sneakers. “For make me feel at home.”
“So,” Judah says. “So it’s the only photograph we have of her.” He looks at me.
Still, I glance around, and I can’t help the impression that things have been shifted, time collapsing and collaging itself into something not quite continuous with what has come before.
“Do not,” says the woman. “Do not begin with the branching and the connections. The friend needs finding. This is what is important.”
I glance at the clock. Hours are missing, lost.
“I still think you should go to the police,” says Judah.
“Police,” says the old woman. “With Andi. I go to police. I try police. They do nothing.”
Each time, you come down from the sickness, when you reassemble yourself, there are things are returned to you, things not your own. Now, as I sit in the living room, I find something of this man inside my thoughts. He was not a man yet, but he became a man, and was standing with the girl on the train platform. It was old between them, and she was sick with it, but she could not do what she needed to do without him. He said no. Still, it was fifty-fifty he would follow her. It was fifty-fifty for a wedding in California. Seaside, hymns, cake and dancing. There is more I remember. Or it is not cloud, but these mushroom curtains, the fanciful buildings crumbling back into the Fens, the old woman with her ancient sorrow.
Also, each time, each fugue, you lose something. The thing I’ve lost is right there at my breast bone, breath on my skin, but the feeling that should accompany it is gone. Don’t misunderstand. I remember her like you remember a car accident, the blank shock of exposed bone and sinew, of the mangled metal and the beginning smoke. I can hear her crying as if she were right here, each breath and sob, but it is all attached to me like a prosthetic limb. It dangles from me. Nothing rises, no yearning. Which is only right, because I have left her, have done the one thing I could not do, and I have always known I would.
The old woman stands and tries to lift the tea things, but her hand shakes, and Judah steadies her. He is not a son, but I see between them that feeling. He is like a son, he is as if a son, with grief instead of blood between them. The girl with the red hair had never arrived at the place where she was headed. I remember that now, too.
“Get map,” says the old woman. “You show her.”
“There is no map,” he reminds her. “The man took the map.”
“Computer map,” she says. “GSP.”
“There’s the field compass, but it’s—I don’t know. It might work, but—here, come with me.”
“Wait,” says the woman. Then, she is handing me a piece of rye bread, wrapped in a paper napkin. I look from one to the other for an explanation.
“You never heard that?” asks Judah. “Cloud sickness and rye?”
“You’re making that up,” I say.
“Try it and see.”
The field compass he used to navigate to Kif-Vesely’e only charges in his battered car. I follow him out while he begins to attach the wires to the decommissioned radio. Now, he taps in coordinates to a field compass. The screen clears, and a map of Sullivan county comes up. The area on the screen is roughly a pentagon, transected by three minor routes into six parts.
“This guy,” says Judah. “You think he was the one who broke into my apartment”
“Looking for your father. He had a map. Your map, I think. But there were only four lakes on it.”
“Give me a minute,” he says. “Something like this?”
“Something you marked off,” I say. “A portion? A circle?”
“Four lakes, you said?” He zooms in on the screen, taps one of the wedges. It enlarges.
“That’s only two,” I say. “Or—what’s that?”
There’s a dark mass at the center, kidney-shaped, two circles conjoined.
“A glitch,” he says. “Bad satellite coverage? It always registers like that. Kif-Vesely’e, and yeah, there’s a lake inside . . . maybe a little pond as well, but Mellie—”
“I have to take it,” I say.
“Mellie, listen. Your daughter, she’s what? How old? I’ve only ever seen her in the stroller.”
I close my eyes. “Judah, what are you doing? I can’t. Please. Not now.”
“Not two? Not quite two years? I have something to say. Something I need to tell you. I did the math, with your bus ticket. You would have been close, when you went there. You were about to have the baby.”
“All right,” I say. “So?”
“So, I went back,” he says. “After you gave me the photograph. Maybe the picture, or talking to you. Something had changed for me. I went—right there.” He points to the dark mass on the field compass. “I found it. But Mellie, it’s not what I thought. The cabins, the mess hall. Look, whatever that place was, polarity, trough. It’s all gone. There was—I don’t know what to call it—a kind of nest there, as if someone had waited, camped out for some time.”
“You’re saying, me?”
He shakes his head. “Even my father. I can’t see him sending a pregnant woman to a ruin. What I thought was—forgive me, I know this sounds crazed—but it was as though the thing inside, it had been wiped out. Like the place that was there had become the blank. The possibilities vanished.”
“But that’s you,” I tell him. “For me, it doesn’t have to be the right place. It doesn’t matter about Kif-Vesely’e, or the camp. Or what I can see, or if it was some different thing before. It just matters where Emily is going, and the place she’s going is on your map.”
“Of course,” he says. “I see that. But, you know my father has diabetes? He was in the jungles of Laos, but that was a long time ago. I can’t see him hanging around there either.”
There’s some outcome, some eventuality, where this matters. I am returning from my sickness, my thinking regulating itself. I can almost see it, but I can’t quite grasp the significance. I chew on my bread. It’s helping. Maybe it’s helping.
I hold out my keys. “So, can I take your car? Mine is in your old spot at Longwood.”
He shakes his head. “I have a failure of judgment, where you’re concerned. I kept calling, and calling. There was a way I was going after you, Mellie. And I had to stop, to talk myself out of it. Because, I said, it isn’t right. Pushing someone. To get something. It’s how I made my mistakes, by fixating. Kif-Vesely’e, you and the baby carriage. It’s how I’ve made every mistake. It wasn’t the right track, but I didn’t just hop off. I am a person who has to have rules for myself, but the people who have to have rules for themselves are also the kind of people whose brains are always finding sneaky ways of breaking them.”
“What kind of rules?”
“Woman rules,” he says. “Intimacy rules. Rules like, not, phoning someone thirty times who doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“You called me thirty times?”
“Here’s what I want to say, Mellie. I can tell about you. That you’re breaking your own rules, too.”
The old woman—Andi’s mother—has come to the porch and
is listening in. “Are you doing branches again? Empty place? Friend is in trouble. You give car.”
He rubs his head, then hands me the keys. “If you do find my father—” he pauses. “You know, I was raised on that stuff, the stuff he makes. This is what I thought was love. It’s not just you, and Emily. A lot of people get caught in those gears. I hope he isn’t there. I hope he’s nowhere near.”
“I have to go,” I tell him.
The clock is chiming. Hours have gone and, in the morning, Emily will have outlived her value. The kidney on the compass throbs, shifting slightly and I begin to drive toward whatever is inside.
Nineteen
New York City
1993
At St. Luke’s ER, they treat Paul’s black eye and put an ice pack on his stomach bruise, but they can find no rodent bites, no visible leg abrasions at all.
“Violence,” Paul says. “I need to make violence.”
“What kinds of drugs have you taken,” they ask, flashlights strobing. “How much have you had tonight?”
He is shaking. “If you don’t make violence, they make it to you. You need to learn violence.”
I use my EMT training to try to command some authority. “He’s in shock.”
“Who’s this woman?” they ask Paul of me.
When he and I have been together for longer, when we’ve seen enough crises to make this one seem minor, I will have built the reflex to claim sister. Later, our America will become one anxious enough about color that my paleness against his darker skin will no longer disqualify me as a relative. But now, ringless and white, the nurses do not believe I am anyone to him. I am ejected to the waiting room to pace with the other illegits, the gang members and the rent boys and the assailants.
The 700 Club is on the television. The hours elongate toward morning.
It’s not far from St. Luke’s to my apartment, and I think of collecting his dirty clothes and laundering them into a neat bundle. I think of having for him this small offering when he is released. Five in the morning is a good time to slip in, I reason. I’m wearing Paul’s hoodie, and I pull it down over my face and make the walk down Amsterdam. I turn the corner. I get about a third of the way down the block before something shifts in the shadowed doorway across the street from my sublet. I flinch. I pause, pretend to be confused, and then wheel around. I manage not to look back; I manage to keep my pace steady until I make the corner. I can live without the things in that sublet. I can live without my books and the three-hundred-dollar tennis bracelet from my paternal grandmother. What I can’t live without is Paul. I will take whatever small thing is offered.
A miracle: the check from my mother has finally cleared. I withdraw the first twenty and wait for the orderlies to return Paul to me. On the a.m. news, a group of protestors, gorgeous in evening dress or bone-thin with illness file through a line of cops, hands on their heads. I think of Nancy’s ballet dancer friend. The protestors look dirty and defeated on the small screen above the waiting room.
Paul, too. He’s been given some Neosporin and a Band-Aid for what they insist is a healed wound several days old, but at least there is less gray beneath his skin. I wrap his hoodie over his shoulders. On the walk to the subway, he keeps stopping, bending down, rubbing at his ankles. It is morning, very early morning.
“Where should we go now?” he asks me. “I should go to the theater. I missed rehearsal. I should at least explain.”
“Should you?” It’s in my head, how I will tell him about getting cut, about his being dropped from the cast of the extended production, but I can see that he’s somehow worked it out—or has always known—the news. “You don’t owe them anything.”
He shakes his head. “Naw, I guess not.”
He rubs his ankle again. I slip a token into the slot and guide him through the turnstile. My mind is like something brittle, cracking. It is trying to hold onto thoughts, but they keep falling apart. One thought is, last night. Is, did he see me? Is, when he was sobbing and clinging to the fence, then, did he see how long I hesitated, how many coward’s seconds I waited before I came to his rescue? We played a game, once, Paul and I, and Nancy and some other people, called Dilemma, which basically broke down to if you had to choose between x and y, which would you go for? A lot of the questions were like, sex with Paulina Porizkova for a gut shot at close range or a million dollars for letting someone crap in your mouth. In love, I think, we often end up asking ourselves at what point would I deny him? The Jews and the Christians have all sorts of stories along these lines. The martyrs dying by lion, Mordechai refusing to bow before Haman. In love, you might ask, what price my betrayal? I know now. I wouldn’t lay down my life for him. But OK, we’re even there. Given the chance, we sold each other out to survive. Paul and I, that’s our kind of love, one that wouldn’t risk its own skin for the other. I am trying to hold onto this, at the same time as I’m wishing I could excise it. It’s too much to know about each other, the hard boundaries at the border of our feelings. My brain is shedding things; thoughts are curling off me. I am sick. I am cloud sick. Why I have been abstaining is one thing I can’t remember. Why not cloud. It’s the early morning after a holiday and the platforms are empty. I put my arm around Paul, my cold skin touching his cold skin in the warming July morning.
“Let’s go to Avenue D,” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Mellie, yes. You and I. Together. We need to eat cloud until it comes out of our pores.”
It is something we can do entirely, entirely together. We can eat all the cloud in the world.
Twenty
New York City
1993
—pop—
Our mouths are sharp with lemon. He pushes me; I push him; he pushes back; we kiss. I touch his arm, as if in tenderness, but his muscles resist me. I don’t recall why we’ve come to this particular gallery, but here we are, being warmed by the light through the tall barred windows. There are no mistakes that cannot be undone.
Paul slumps against the marble wall and I drop a quarter into the payphone and tell the operator it’s collect from Mellie.
“I should get up,” Paul is saying. “I should help you.”
My mother answers. Her voice sounds groggy and I picture her in the ragged pink robe she got from a boyfriend ten years ago. She thinks it’s sexy. She thinks it makes her look elegant.
Paul says, “I could use a cigarette.”
“Mom.” I am surprised to hear the sob rising in my own throat. What can it be about? I’m so happy.
“I know,” my mother says. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be OK.”
“I can’t stay here,” I say, smiling and crying.
“Listen: I understand. Nancy said she’d sent you some kind of message, or warning, but that you didn’t receive it.”
“An elevated danger,” I say. “A great risk. Mom. Mom.”
“She called me. We’ve got it arranged. She’ll pick you up soon.”
“Nancy?”
“Sweetheart,” she says. “We’ve been so worried.”
For an instant, my mom is as tall as the Statue of Liberty; she is marking safe harbor for me. Mothers: what is missed in all your psychology is also their super powers to heal, is how a mother’s love is a port after a shipwreck. Sails tattered, mast split, it’s where you drift when all the instruments fail.
“Stay where you are,” my mother says. “Nancy is coming to you, because of your friend in California. You’re going to be OK.”
“What friend?” I say. “Who is in California?”
But when I look in my paperback, I find a note from myself, written weeks ago: Wedding in California. Fifty fifty. Between that page and the next, wedged into the spine, is a photograph of a man and a girl at a lake shore. Are these the bride and groom? I crouch beside Paul on the gallery floor and show him the photograph.
“She looks too little to get married.”
Paul shakes his head. “That was before,” he says.
“Anyway,”
I tell him, “it sounds like a nice plan.”
I pull Paul to his feet and we emerge onto the steps of the gallery.
It had been I, and not my mother, who had gone to my grandmother’s funeral in New Jersey. I’d taken the train, a Thursday because our law says you cannot wait on convenience before you put your dead in the earth. My grandmother had lived her life, the second half of her life, in the shadow world of mid-century Jewish wealth, JCC and country clubs and gated complexes and charity auctions. In all ways but the intervals of matzoh and menorah, fasting and feasting, noisemaking and shiva sitting, these institutions were like exactly the institutions of goyim, striving and bland and monochrome. But something had happened, late in my grandmother’s life. Her assimilated friends had died off, moved to Florida, or she’d lost them in temple feuds. They were all gone, these golfing and dinner-party friends. There was a whispered intimation she’d picked up an atheist boyfriend. She’d bought her first blue jeans, and given her library card a workout. And then, she left a disconcertingly large gift, not to Combined Jewish Philanthropies or Temple Beth-El, but to Workmen’s Circle labor relief fund. Her service was held in a funeral parlor rather than a synagogue and the guests, whether from an earlier life or acquaintances of the secret boyfriend’s, were not who I expected, were not the pearls and prime rib crowd. They were union organizers and bookshop owners and the Catskill bungalow colony neighbors. A tiny wizened man, so bent he came up to my elbow, rose on his cane and made his way to the front of the room.
“She was always a friend to the workers. She was in solidarity with the people until her last breath,” he said. Then he winked at me, and I understood that this person, his wild white hair and his crooked spine, had been my grandmother’s last love.
The Likely World Page 31