“What’s that?” he had asked in the middle of the conversation. “I hear a kind of funny sound.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Jane had said. And she’d run her hand over Maisie’s downy head in apology for denying her.
As if cued by the memory, the phone began to ring. Jane waited for the answering machine to get it. She watched the red light on the machine blink on, but she felt very distant from it. It might have been Mars appearing in the evening sky.
Her brother Davis’s voice came through the speaker.
“Jane,” Davis said. “Guess where I am? I’m in Madison for a conference! I’ve been meaning to call and let you know I was coming, but I guess I never got around to it. I thought maybe we could get together.”
His voice sounded forced, halfhearted. No doubt he’d had to make himself call her, his little sister with whom he had once watched television, sat in the backseat on family trips to Portland or Mount Shasta, walked to the library. He had never minded being with Jane as long as talking was not required of him. Talking had never been his strong suit.
Davis recited the number of his hotel. In a moment he would hang up, and although Jane did not exactly want to talk to him, the idea of missing him entirely was worse. The air in the house was so thick with sadness it was virtually unbreathable. She jumped up and grabbed the phone. He was her older brother after all, and she loved him.
“Davis?” she said. “It’s me.”
Davis paused. “Oh,” he said. “I thought you weren’t there.”
“No,” she said. “Sometimes I feel that way, but no. I’m definitely here.” She carried the phone to the back door and stood looking out into the yard. Her memory of their mother’s garden on Euclid Avenue was suddenly sharp and clear. She felt she could see it like an underlay beneath her own—the dusty gray-greens and brilliant purples, the spiky succulent leaves of the yuccas and the tiny white fragrant blossoms of the jasmine vine almost visible below the sharp midwestern grass, the weeds so green they hurt your eyes, the wild blackberry brambles where the mosquitoes caucused.
“Well,” Davis said. “Good.” He cleared his throat.
She had rattled him. She was always doing that.
“So,” she said. “A conference?”
“One of the APS divisional meetings. It’s on recent progress in many-body theories,” Davis said.
Jane had had many-body theories explained to her before, but she still didn’t know what they were.
“Do you have time to get together?” she said. “What’s your schedule?”
Out in the yard the insects droned. It was hot and still, the white sun pasted in the sky. The idea of anyone having a schedule, of any individual instant being differentiated from any other instant, seemed absurd.
* * *
Davis was already waiting at a table when Jane came in. She had chosen a slightly nicer place than Davis was comfortable with—she could see that in the hunched, fidgety way he sat in his chair—but she ignored it. When did she ever get to go out to dinner? The host led her to him across the room, and Davis half got up as she kissed his cheek. He smelled clean and musty at the same time. A faint astringent smell hung around him, too, which might have been skin cleanser or some off-brand of aftershave, but which Jane always associated with science.
“Hi,” she said, sitting down.
“Hi, Jane,” Davis said.
They looked at each other. Davis’s face looked less round and more serious than Jane remembered it, and there was a little gray in his hair. Suddenly, Jane was on the verge of tears. It was so good to see him, her awkward, irritating, inward brother! It was good to be with someone with whom she knew exactly where she stood.
“I’m glad you called,” she said sincerely.
“So this is Middle America,” Davis said.
“Sort of. You know they call Madison the Berkeley of the Midwest.”
Davis looked around. At the table next to them, two young women with blond, sprayed hair drank cheerful green drinks. On the other side, a man in a suit and tie was digging into a large pork chop.
“I guess this particular restaurant doesn’t show off that aspect of our culture too much,” Jane conceded.
“I guess not,” Davis said.
They smiled at each other.
The waiter appeared. “Are you expecting someone?” he asked, indicating the empty place setting.
“It will be just the two of us,” Jane said, a little more loudly than necessary. “I’ll have a gin and tonic.” She was feeling giddy, as though she were on a blind date and not yet sure who she would turn out to be tonight.
“Billy’s not coming?” Davis said.
“Billy and I are no longer living together,” Jane said, looking just past Davis’s ear.
Davis blinked. “You’re kidding me!”
“No, I’m not. Are you going to order a drink or what?”
Davis ordered a beer. When the waiter was gone, he cleared his throat and lined up the silverware carefully on either side of his plate. When he was satisfied with the arrangement he put his hands disconsolately in his lap. “What happened?” he asked, as though he had looked around for a way to avoid asking the question but hadn’t found one.
Though she had been waiting for him to ask, Jane found she couldn’t answer. “I don’t know,” she said with some agitation. “Men are pigs!” But looking at her unhappy, uncomfortable brother who’d never done anything cruel to a female in his life that Jane was aware of, she amended, “Billy is a pig. He had an affair with the babysitter, and I kicked him out!” It sounded so clear and straightforward when she put it that way.
“Does Mom know?” Davis asked.
“No,” Jane said. “I haven’t told her.”
“She likes Billy,” Davis said. He sounded faintly plaintive, as though someone had turned off the television show he was watching.
Jane was annoyed. So their mother liked Billy, so what? That was hardly Jane’s problem. “She liked Dad, too,” she said. “Once.”
Davis nodded. “Dad’s not a bad guy,” he said cautiously.
“No, of course Dad’s not a bad guy!” Jane said. “Except for walking out on his marriage!” Davis was fidgeting the spoon between his fingers now, and she felt a great, enervating despair. “And us,” she reminded him.
Davis nodded again without looking at her.
“But Billy didn’t walk out?” he said. “You told him to go?”
“I—” Jane stopped. She shut her eyes, opened them again, and tried to speak calmly, to explain the situation clearly. “He slept with my graduate student.”
“I thought you said the babysitter.”
“Yes! She was the same person!”
“I’m sorry,” Davis said. He put the spoon gently back down on the tablecloth, beside the knife.
It wasn’t at all clear to Jane what he was apologizing for—for upsetting her, or for not understanding what she’d said, or for the hard time she’d been through.
“Thank you,” she said. “But you know”—she leaned across the table, wanting to make sure he understood—“it’s not really like Mom and Dad. You know why? Because Mom just sat back and let it all wash over her. She took whatever he did to her, but I’m not doing that. She would have let Dad stay, you know, even after she found out about Pei. She would have put it all behind them and never breathed a word about it.” She took a piece of bread from the basket, buttered it thickly, washed it down with gin. The butter was sweet and smooth in her mouth, and the drink tasted of juniper and limes. She felt better. She liked the way the silverware glittered on the white tablecloth, the dissonant harmonies of the jazz that spilled out of the wall speakers. “For Mom,” she told Davis, though she had never actually thought about it before, “life was something that happened to her, not something she took charge of. But that’s not the way it is for me.”
“Well,” Davis said uncomfortably, “good for you.”
“You sound like you don’t believe me,” Jan
e said.
“Of course I believe you.” Davis took a sip of his beer before putting the glass down precisely inside the ring of condensation it had made. “You’ve always been like that. You’re a take-charge person. You were like that when you were six years old.”
“Yes,” Jane said with a stab of lonely pride. “Yes, I was.”
When their dinners came, they ate in silence for a while, comfortably. Davis had ordered the trio of sausages and Jane had the sea bass, but otherwise it was not so different from eating TV dinners together in the kitchen of the house on Euclid Avenue.
Then Davis said, “Maybe this isn’t the right time to say anything about it. But I have this, kind of, girlfriend.” His voice seemed to expand and deepen as he spoke.
Jane put down her fork and looked at him. Her brother’s face was contorted, jaw pulling one way, sparse eyebrows pushed down over his deep-set eyes, in what she saw was an effort not to look excessively pleased with himself.
“Davis!” she said, trying not to sound too surprised but still to sound happy for him. “That’s great! Who is she?” They had ordered a bottle of wine and she poured herself another glass. It wasn’t very good wine. Billy not only knew about birthdays and tire pressures, he also knew about wine. She squinted at the label on the bottle and tried to commit the name to memory so she would never make the mistake of ordering it again.
“Her name is Andrea,” Davis said. “She works at a restaurant I go to a lot. The Blue Daisy. She’s . . .”
Jane watched with fascination as Davis’s eyes unfocused and grew dreamy. She’d never seen this particular look on his face before. It made him seem younger, like someone just starting out in life. “What?” she prompted. “She’s what?”
“She’s, about my height, I guess,” Davis said. “Her hair is—Well, her hair is long. And her eyes . . . Her eyes are indescribable.”
Jane couldn’t help smiling. “Give it a shot,” she said. “Blue? Brown?”
“That in-between color,” Davis said. “Not exactly blue or gray.”
“Hazel,” Jane said.
“No, not hazel. Sometimes kind of green, depending on what she’s wearing.”
“That’s the definition of hazel,” Jane told him.
“Is it?” Davis looked surprised. “I always think of hazel as a kind of light brown.”
“It’s not,” Jane said. “You’ve been mistaken.”
“I think I’ve been mistaken about a lot of things,” Davis said. “Andrea is always correcting me. For example, she drinks a lot of diet soda, and I told her it worried me because it wasn’t healthy to consume so much saccharin, and she laughed and told me they don’t use saccharin anymore. They use something called aspartame. Did you know that?” The elbows of his checked shirt were on the table now, and his face wore a look of happy bafflement, as though ignorance were the most delightful condition in the world. This was what love did, Jane thought. It took intelligent people and turned them into sheep.
“Yes,” she said, “they haven’t used saccharin for years.”
“That’s what Andrea says! Decades, she says. Why don’t I know things like that? Ordinary things everyone knows?”
“You’ve been thinking about other things. Many-body theories.”
He pushed a piece of sausage across his plate. “It worries me,” he said. “It’s as though I’ve been living on some other planet, and now I wake up and find myself here.”
“Well, welcome,” Jane said. “Welcome to the planet of aspartame.” The planet of sex, she thought. Of betrayal and heartbreak. Why should Davis be spared any of that?
“I mean, why would someone like Andrea want to go out with an alien like me?” Davis asked his sister.
“That’s the wrong question,” Jane said. She took another drink of the wine, then pushed the glass away. “Maybe you should be asking yourself whether you want to go out with someone who corrects you all the time.”
“I didn’t say all the time,” Davis said. “And I don’t mind. It just makes me feel odd, that’s all.”
She couldn’t stop herself from continuing to lecture him. Didn’t almost five years of marriage give her that right?
“Why should you feel odd?” she said. “You should feel happy! Cared for. Does she make you feel cared for?”
Davis considered the question. “Mostly, she makes me feel normal,” he said at last. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt normal before.”
Jane felt drunk. Her imaginary podium dissolved, leaving her unsure what to do with her hands. She groped for her napkin in her lap. “I’m happy for you, Davis,” she said, relieved to find that the words were true. Sad as she was, she was still happy for him.
“Thank you,” Davis said.
“I would toast you, but the wine’s so bad. I’m sorry I picked such terrible wine!” She wanted to tell him how Billy always chose the wine but she felt too ashamed. She wanted to come around the table and embrace him, but they didn’t do things like that in their family.
“I think it’s okay,” Davis said, meaning the wine. “The thing is, about Andrea and me. I just don’t think it can possibly last. I’m just not the kind of person who has relationships. I’m too strange. I don’t know what people do.” He was looking at his sister intently now. ”What do you do?” he asked. ”In a relationship? If you want it to continue.”
“Oh, Davis,” she said. “You’re asking me?”
* * *
Sunday morning Jane woke up feeling sick, her head spinning. Five minutes later she was in the bathroom, vomiting up the gin, the sea bass, the wine. How much more pathetic could she get? She washed her face and went downstairs and made coffee and toast, but she didn’t feel like eating anything. It was not quite seven: twelve hours to fill before Billy would bring Maisie home. She wandered out the back door and looked at the garden. The peonies had faded and the grass was overgrown, but something purple was opening in the back corner by the chokecherry tree. She walked out through the calf-high grass to see what it was. Irises, a thick clump of them, their succulent stalks standing as straight as ballet dancers, unfurling their cheerful flags amid the weeds. Beyond them, beyond the boundary fence, the black stones of the Moravian church looked cold even in the sun and cast a chilly shadow across the alley. The world seethed with contradictory indications.
At nine she tried Olen again. The phone rang for a long time before the woman answered.
“Hello,” Jane said. “This is Jane Levitsky calling again, from the University of Wisconsin. Is this a good time to talk to Greg Olen?”
“Greg’s working,” the woman said. Her voice sounded flatter this time, less flutelike. Probably she wasn’t getting enough sleep.
“I’m sorry!” Jane said. “I’m sorry to keep bothering you.” She wasn’t getting enough sleep, either. “You have a baby and everything. You must have your hands full.”
There was a pause. “How do you know about the baby?” the woman asked.
“I heard it,” Jane explained. “Through the phone.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Yesterday when I called, you were nursing. I heard the sucking. I used to feed my daughter when I talked on the phone, too, so I know. It’s impossible to get anything done with a baby! So many things you can’t do at all, especially when you’re nursing. My daughter used to nurse all day long.”
“Caroline is a milk fiend,” the woman said. “I think she would never stop if I didn’t make her.”
Jane’s own breasts tingled painfully in sympathy. “It doesn’t last forever,” she said.
“I thought everyone liked nursing,” the woman said tentatively. “The books all say how great it is.”
“I didn’t like it,” Jane said. “But it wasn’t so bad, once I got used to it.”
Another pause.
“The thing about Greg,” the woman said, “is that he hates to talk on the telephone.”
Me, too, Jane thought. She didn’t like nursing, and she didn’t like the telephone, but
both were sometimes necessary. She said nothing, however, waiting to see what the woman was getting at.
“Even if you call when he’s around, he won’t talk to you,” she said. “Or if he does, he’ll be as unhelpful as possible. If you want to talk to him, the thing to do is to drop by. Ring the doorbell. He’d like to be a recluse, but he can’t resist a ringing doorbell. He even talks to Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“Drop in?” Jane repeated. “Really?”
“Afternoons are good,” the woman said. “Greg’s usually around in the afternoons.”
The empty day seemed to take shape suddenly. It sat up and thumped its tail, sniffing the wind.
Chapter Sixteen
JANE SAID, “It’s nice of you to talk to me.” She was standing nervously on the stoop of a run-down gray house on a quiet street pitted with potholes. In the doorway stood a man in his late twenties, wearing jeans and a pale green shirt patterned with jaunty, darker green zigzags. His black hair was thick and wavy, and his dark eyes gleamed irritably in his fine-boned face.
“You happened to catch me,” he said as she followed him into the hall, which was crowded with shoes and newspapers and a big black old-fashioned baby buggy. Coats hung from pegs on the wall, and the air smelled of cigarettes. He led her into a small, sparsely furnished living room. Against one wall paperbacks crammed a tall, unvarnished bookcase—Kerouac and Nabokov, Karkov and Solzhenitsyn and Mailer. On top of the bookcase, a silver samovar gleamed in the cloudy light that drifted in through the windows.
“That’s a beautiful samovar,” Jane said.
“It was my great-grandparents’,” Olen said, looking at the vessel with pride.
Had it been Masha’s, then? Had she passed it down to her children, who’d carried it all the way to America, to the vast, fertile farmland of the Mississippi valley that was the counterpart of the endless wheat fields of the Russian provinces? Jane had seen a photograph once of Masha serving tea. Could she have been using this very samovar? Jane stared at it, well polished, shining here as it had shone, perhaps, on the sideboard in the long, elegant zala of Dve Reckhi. She wanted to reach up and touch it, but she didn’t know if Olen would like that. She looked at his pale face, his sharp nose and furrowed brow, searching for a sign of Masha—for Masha’s ghost peering out at her from his eyes. He looked Russian, she thought. There was a kind of fierce imperiousness about him. You could imagine him giving orders, drinking vodka, riding a horse in tall, gleaming boots.
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