So Near

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  “How’re you doing? I’m wondering if you’ve seen Daniel Brandt around?”

  She looked me over, expressionless.

  “He’s moved back to Manhattan.”

  “Really? Are you sure? I thought he said that he was just commuting back and forth for a while.”

  “No,” she said, turning her attention back to the stack of receipts. “He’s gone. And don’t bother asking—he didn’t exactly leave me a forwarding address.”

  I felt so let down by the news. Hurt that he’d moved on without a word. Though I hadn’t seen him for a while—I guess the Horigan Lumber Christmas party had been the last time—I still considered him a part of my life. A big part. In many ways, it’s Daniel’s voice that I keep hearing these days whenever I start to feel uncertain or afraid about what I’m trying to do. I think about that aura of calm and utter self-confidence that impressed me so much when I first met him. The sense of connection I’d felt with him almost from the start. He’d arrived in my life just when I needed guidance. And he’d helped me more than anyone else get over the torment I felt those first few weeks after Betsy died. I could still remember almost word for word what he told me when I’d asked him point-blank if he thought I was responsible for what happened:

  I don’t buy into the idea that actions necessarily result in consequences. That way of thinking? I think it’s just a very clever system for keeping people in line, holding them back.

  I had his cell phone number somewhere. But I knew I’d feel awkward calling him when he hadn’t even bothered to tell me he was leaving the area. I’d thought we’d become friends. I’d given him a pretty decent commission. I’d taken him out for drinks. Solicited his advice. Listened eagerly to his opinions. I remember the way I’d introduced him around to all my dad’s suppliers at the party, singing his praises, hoping it’d help generate some work for him. But I realized now, thinking back on it all, how one-sided the relationship had been, really. How unequal.

  As I drove back toward Covington, the moonlight gleaming on the rain-slickened roadway, it occurred to me that I still didn’t have a very clear picture in my mind of who Daniel actually was. All I really knew about him for certain was what he said he believed in. What I had so eagerly taken to my heart as gospel:

  As far as I’m concerned, the whole idea of guilt is probably the worst concept mankind has ever come up with.

  The phone was ringing when I walked into the house, and the message light on the answering machine was blinking; I had nine messages. I heard Eddie’s voice before I had a chance to pick up:

  “Where the fuck are you? If you don’t—”

  “Hey there,” I said, lifting the receiver to my ear. “I just walked in.”

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get through to you since late afternoon. You can’t go AWOL on me like that, Cal. You can’t leave me here, holding the goddamn bag.”

  “Whoa, take a deep breath,” I told him. “I’m sorry. I guess I had my cell off. Are all these messages from you?”

  “Me. Janet. Lester. The shit’s really hit the fan. I can’t believe it! I just can’t believe it.”

  “Why don’t you stop foaming at the mouth, and tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s Kurt,” he said.

  For a panicky moment I thought something had happened to Kurt. That he’d been in an accident and was hurt. Or worse. The room swayed.

  “What? What’s happened to Kurt?”

  “He’s on Gannon’s list.”

  “What?”

  “He’s on Gannon’s list of witnesses! Janet’s freaking out. Lester’s been ripping me a second asshole. What the fuck is going on?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, relieved that Kurt was okay. “How could he be on Gannon’s list?”

  “How? You’re asking me how? Because he’s planning to testify against us. That’s how.”

  20

  Jenny

  I’d been down to Manhattan a couple of times before this. Jude and I snuck down one New Year’s Eve when we were still in high school and froze our tails off in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop. Cal and I spent the first night of our December honeymoon at the Marriott Marquis on our way to St. Lucia, then almost a whole day hitting the tourist spots—Ground Zero, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center—on our way back home. What I remember is a place that seemed a blur of traffic, people, noise: windblown trash swirling beneath the Christmas-tree lights, “Auld Lang Syne” drowned out by the whoop of police sirens. Chaotic, unnerving, exciting.

  Daniel’s apartment on the Upper West Side was nothing like that. Sublet from a couple of Columbia University archaeology professors on sabbatical in Europe, it was all wall-to-wall bookcases and staid, upholstered furniture. The long front hall was lined with photos of the middle-aged academics, smiling into the camera, at various ruins—Pompeii, the Acropolis, the Roman Forum—obviously at home amid the rubble of history. In fact, their apartment felt as still and silent as an ancient tomb.

  “It’s prewar,” Daniel explained to me the first night I was there, when I remarked how quiet the place seemed. We were standing in the kitchen, where Daniel was opening a bottle of wine for dinner. He put the corkscrew down and knocked against the decorative tile above the sink.

  “You don’t have to worry about hearing the neighbors in this place. These walls are probably half a foot thick.”

  We had Thai takeout that night from someplace in the neighborhood Daniel had already discovered and was championing. He seemed to be an expert on the cuisine, favorably comparing the take-out pad thai to versions he’d had at restaurants in Miami and San Francisco. He looked over at me between bites at one point and said, “You’re not eating much.”

  “I’m guess I’m just exhausted,” I told him. Which was true, though the train ride down to Grand Central couldn’t have been easier. Jude had dropped me off at the station in Hudson. She was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive over. Long silences stretched between our short exchanges. We were both still smarting from our argument. She waited with me until the train arrived, hugged me hard, and said, “I promise not to call you—but you have to promise to call me if you need anything, okay? Remember: you don’t have to be afraid. I’m here.”

  I think she must have rehearsed that last bit, but it got to me anyway. I just nodded as I climbed onto the train, my throat constricting. I remained tearful as we passed through the little picturesque Hudson River towns, the harsh winter sunlight glancing off the surface of the water. But it was more like a memory of a feeling—rather than real emotion. When I closed my eyes, I could see the ghostly imprints of leafless branches and telephone poles—glimpsed for a split second but already being sorted and stored away somewhere in my brain. Along with the millions and millions of other images—including how many of Cal and Betsy alone?—that made up the catalog of my life. That’s all they seemed to me now, though: content. Bleached of color and context. Meaningless. But the burden of not caring—the effort of feeling no regret—caught up with me by the time I reached the city.

  I listened and nodded as Daniel spoke. About the new project. How he’d have to get up at the crack of dawn most mornings and would generally not be back until seven or so at night. He’d leave me keys. I could explore the neighborhood. Take in the city. We’d have the weekends together. He didn’t ask me how I’d squared things with Cal. Or how long I planned to stay. It struck me that Daniel always seemed to be living in the moment. For the moment. How easy it was to be with him, I thought. How painless this was turning out to be. It was no problem—just what the taxi driver at Grand Central had told me when I gave him Daniel’s address. And then I don’t remember much of anything. I must have nodded off at the table. I woke up alone in the king-sized bed. Sunlight flooding the room.

  For the first time in months I’d actually slept through the night. Daniel had somehow gotten me into one of his T-shirts and folded my clothes on top of my suitcase, which he’d left unopened by a ch
est of drawers. I could tell by the intensity of the light that it was already at least late morning. He’d probably left for Westchester hours ago. I felt logy with sleep, but still bone tired. I think that I’d been holding everything in for such a long time, that it took me until then—when it finally felt safe to let go—to realize how exhausted I’d been. I turned my face back to the pillow. It had a clean, slightly antiseptic smell—lavender, perhaps, mingled with bleach.

  So began my empty, drifting days. I would get up midmorning, make a pot of coffee, and read the papers that Daniel left behind. The apartment was larger than I realized that first night, with a perfectly square, book-lined study off the living room and another half bath. The high ceilings, the French doors connecting the various rooms, and the ornately carved, old-fashioned furniture gave the place an air of timeless, faded refinement. I wandered through the rooms. Then, feeling both restless and intrigued, I looked in the closets. I opened a few drawers. I discovered that the apartment was owned by Drs. Jonathan and Fran Traeger. I carefully examined their books and photo albums. They’d been married for thirty-four years.

  I filled my aimless mornings slowly piecing together the details of the Traegers’ lives. From the most recent photographs, I guessed that they were now in their early sixties—both graying, though still fit. (I’d come upon several pairs of running shoes in a hall closet.) He was shorter than she was by an inch or so and was starting to bald. She’d cut her long straight hair—it had been halfway down her back in their wedding picture—into one of those no-nonsense short crops. But what struck me most about them was how alike they looked now. The same round, old-fashioned glasses. The same down-turning, self-deprecating smiles. I guessed that, over the years, they’d slowly taken on each other’s characteristics—until, at this point in time, it seemed to me that they could as easily be taken for siblings as for spouses.

  I went out for long walks in the afternoons—down along the esplanade in Riverside Park or up to Grant’s Tomb—slowly familiarizing myself with the park’s long, tree-lined walkways and the small, carefully maintained flower gardens that seemed all-volunteer community efforts. The city was a few weeks ahead of Covington in terms of the growing calendar: the crocuses had already wilted and the daffodils were bursting into bud.

  The flower garden just below Ninety-fifth Street was the most mature and extensive of the community plots, and I began to visit it almost daily. It was a charming hodgepodge: a rock garden in one spot, another given over to a variety of hostas, another all rosebushes. It was like a crazy quilt of the many different gardeners’ enthusiasms and, even before most of it had leafed out, I was able to envision how lovely the whole would look later in the summer. Certainly not as perfect and professional as Daniel’s, but boisterous with passion. I thought of my own lost garden and—despite the pleasure I’d first taken in Daniel’s designs—found myself longing to have it restored to me, with its problems intact, just as it had been before Betsy died.

  For the first time I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. What had I done—letting Daniel take over and complete almost overnight a job that I had intended to work on for the rest of my life? I began to worry that I’d traded something important—maybe even essential—in my hunger to find some kind of solace.

  At night, over dinner I would usually have waiting for Daniel, we talked about his work. The plans he was drafting for the corporate park. The problems the client’s new cost efficiencies were raising. I enjoyed listening to his shoptalk. In everything that had happened between us, it was easy to lose sight of his stature as a landscape architect. The fact that he was respected and well-known only added to the pull he had over me—and my inability to get him in any kind of decent perspective. He always seemed to be looming too close—or casting too distant a shadow—for me to see him in his entirety.

  “How did you end up choosing this career?” I asked him the third or fourth night I was there, as we relaxed over the last of the wine.

  “Oh, it chose me, really. I worked in an uncle’s greenhouse when I was a boy. So I learned the business from the ground up, so to speak. It came naturally—I had most of the genuses and species down before I even started my degree—and I tend to take the easy route in life.”

  “Only easy because you love it, I bet,” I said. For the first time in many months I remembered the feeling of digging my fingers in the cool, damp spring earth. “I’d hoped to be a professional gardener, too, someday.”

  “Hoped? What held you back?”

  Nothing. Everything. Cal starting his business. My job at Pellani’s Garden Center, which seemed to satisfy that craving during the years I was employed there. Then having Betsy. But the real answer to Daniel’s question—what held me back—was, I suspect, part of larger questions about myself and my dreams that I was just now beginning to understand I’d been avoiding for years. That Betsy’s death had over-shadowed—but not erased.

  “Oh, you know,” I replied, finishing my wine, “all the usual excuses.”

  Out of some tacit understanding, we managed to avoid talking about anything of real substance. Anything too personal. I did my best to follow Daniel’s example and live in the moment. I sealed my new self off from the past, my marriage, the tragedy—everything but the here and now. As a consequence, almost from the instant I woke up in the morning, I began looking forward to going to bed again. I longed for Daniel’s hands on my body, for his mouth to close over my mine.

  Each night I felt as though I was drowning in his arms. He took me deeper and deeper into a kind of subterranean sensory world. A place where pain had the power to give pleasure. Where nothing was forbidden. Sometimes I felt as though my head—my whole body, really—would explode from the intensity of such pure, undiluted sensation. As before, I let him do whatever he wanted. And, in turn, I did what I was instructed. Turn over. Get on your knees. I think part of me cried out to be punished—and Daniel understood and exploited that. But then, too, I discovered something I’d begun to sense about myself since Betsy’s death: I’ve lost all sense of shame.

  The second week I was there I found a couple of Fran’s old journals, tucked into the back of her desk drawer in the study. I hesitated, weighing the simple black leather notebooks in my hand. Reading them, I knew, would be far more of an invasion of privacy than any of the poking around that I’d done up to this point. But curiosity—and a growing compulsion on my part to know more about the Traegers’ lives—got the better of me. I spent the rest of that morning reading entries that Fran had composed—more or less on a daily basis—some twenty years ago.

  What I soon discovered was that it was a journal of her ongoing attempts to get pregnant. At almost forty years old. After five long years of miscarriages. Some of it was a straightforward record of her in vitro fertilization efforts. The shots. The doctors’ visits. That day or two every month when she began to believe that her luck had turned. Their luck, because it became clear that Jonathan wanted a child as much as she did. He’d been adopted as a baby and had never known—or apparently wanted to know—his birth mother. Other sections were more personal and revealing:Period started in the middle of the night. Soon as I crawled back into bed, J. took me in his arms. I didn’t have to say a word. We cried together. Sometimes I think he needs this even more than I do. I believe that our having a child—his child—would somehow help him solve the riddle of his own identity. More than solve, actually, salve it. I feel so strongly that giving J. a child would help heal the pain and anger he insists on dealing with on his own. It’s probably all these damned hormone shots, but I also secretly—no doubt delusionally—feel that having a baby would help heal the world. With each new life there’s new hope. Another chance. But I’m beginning to fear that our chances are running out.

  The journal ended two months after that. The entries had been getting shorter, more perfunctory. Then they stopped altogether, midpage, almost half the notebook left blank. There were no further insights or reflections. The last entry read:On the
downtown #1 this morning. Hope ended.

  It was just a matter of time, I suppose. If not the journal, something else would have triggered it. But it happened to be Fran’s words—and the Traegers’ decades-old heartbreak—that broke through whatever flimsy barricades I imagined that I’d constructed. Hope ended. Just like that. It was the finality that got to me. The courage to face it. And then, obviously, to go on. To find another way forward.

  That night, as I was helping Daniel clean up after dinner, I found myself asking him:

  “Did you ever want children?”

  “What?” he said. He was leaning over the dishwasher, but he straightened up.

  “I was just curious,” I replied, handing him one of the plates to load. “Did you ever want to have a child?”

  “Honestly?” he asked, taking the plate from me. “No. I don’t think I’ve ever even seriously considered it.”

  He finished loading the dishwasher and turned back to me and pulled me into his arms. He kissed the top of my head; then his lips traveled down my neck and he whispered in my ear: “Hey, don’t go there, okay? Let’s not talk—we’ve better things to do.”

  The next morning, I put Fran’s journals back, carefully arranging the contents of the drawer to look just as they had when I first discovered them.

  I began spending most of my days away from the apartment now, visiting museums and galleries. And gardens. The ones in Central Park and Brooklyn. I began to realize that I was searching for something as I walked along the carefully groomed, formal pathways. I took the subway up to the Bronx, where the botanical garden had mounted an orchid exhibit. I wandered through the conservatory filled with room after room of exotic bromeliads. At first, the warm, heavily humid air felt inviting. How flawless the orchids seemed! After a while, though, I started to feel slightly claustrophobic. It was getting hard to breathe. I began to realize that there was something about the plants’ waxy perfection that was unsettling to me. Everywhere I turned now I saw how futile—how essentially superficial—this time with Daniel was turning out to be. The graceful sprays seemed lifeless to me, more like effigies of flowers than real ones. I found myself automatically leaning down to breathe in their aroma. I smelled nothing. I’d forgotten that many orchids were scentless. It only added to my sense of emptiness.