“You’re not coming home with me, are you?”
He looked her in the eye. “No,” he said. “I have work left to do here.”
“Guess I should’ve known,” she said.
He reached his hand to touch her cheek, but she said, “Don’t. Don’t even talk to me right now.”
That night Lucy skipped dinner and went straight to bed. He tried to get her to talk again, but she turned away from him. He lay next to her, afraid to touch her for fear of bringing out her anger. In ten hours, she would be driving back with Mr. Pal to Calcutta, in twelve hours sitting on a plane headed first to London, then to New York.
“Lucy, will you hear me out?” he whispered. He wanted to tell her so much—his past, their future together, how he feared but also believed in it.
She turned to him. He’d never told her about those August days at the orphanage. He hadn’t even told Misha the truth about how he’d survived. It had felt to him always like a great shame, though he knew, when he could feel distant enough from it, that it was only survival willing him on.
“I have this nightmare about our last day together. It takes different shapes, it’s never the same. It was the last day I was together with Pan Doktor and Madam Stefa and Esterka, and my brothers and sisters from the orphanage. When Misha asked me about that day, I lied to him.”
The moonlight coming through the window illuminated her bare shoulder. In three days, the moon would be full again, with the rains likely to return.
“We don’t have to talk about this right now,” she said. “It’s all right.”
“No, I want to tell you the whole story,” he said. “I want you to know what it was like.”
He told Lucy what he’d kept from Misha. He told her about the day from its start, how they’d been awoken early and dressed in their best clothes. He told her how Esterka had brushed his hair until it nearly shined. They rarely felt like beautiful children, though that morning he saw how loved he was when he looked into Madam Stefa’s eyes, that frown that knew the world. He told Lucy how they’d marched to the trains as one, while the entire ghetto watched. He told her of the stink of the cattle cars, of the false promise of a loaf of bread, a pot of jam. Sixty miles east was the place he’d heard spoken of in whispers, whose name had gotten stuck in the cracks of the house, and when the train stopped midway, when he saw the window big enough for him—when he looked at Pan Doktor, the heart of his old, good life, when Pan Doktor winked back at him—he jumped on the old man’s shoulders and squeezed through to roll into the fields and run into the woods.
It didn’t matter which version of his story was the truth. What he’d wanted to tell her—what he hoped she now understood—was that he’d left his only family, everything he loved in this world.
“I remember the smell of that grass,” he said. “I could smell the cows who must’ve once grazed there. I was in the woods when everyone else was gassed.”
The clouds once again hid the light. He could no longer see the expression on her face. What would a woman like Lucy think hearing such things? He gulped for air, felt high from the telling, as if he had just surfaced after a plunge into cold water. If she was to carry his child, she should know who he was.
All those evenings in New York, when he wasn’t with Misha, when he sat in that axis of hallway where Chopin’s sonatas sounded as pure as if his beloved composer were playing in the flesh. He had no wish to repeat those evenings. To live as he had. Those years without shape.
“Jaryk, you’ve suffered more than anyone should,” she said. “You were just a child.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “I could’ve stayed. They were the only family I had.”
“I know who you are. You are a good man, Jaryk Smith.”
He heard her but didn’t accept her words. “Sometimes I lie awake and pretend Pan Doktor is telling me what to do with my life. There’s no God, but Pan Doktor and Stefa are watching me, encouraging me to do good in the world.”
Lucy burrowed into him. He couldn’t tell if he’d lost her. “Will you stay with me, Lucy? Will you stay for the play and for after?”
“Hush,” she said.
part 4
Labor Day
Labor Day weekend the city feels deserted, and for once Lucy thinks she could walk up Fifth Avenue all the way to the park without the jostling she has become accustomed to, the bursts of noise from storefront stereos and disgruntled traffic, and that feeling of always being in a hurry, which she’d first assumed was a by-product of efficiency, but sees now as something else—a desire to keep running, to not slow down and smell the city: the flowers along the sidewalks, the garbage left to rot. These days her sense of smell is working overtime, so there are mornings when she doesn’t want to leave home at all, except there’s work to do, groceries to be bought.
More and more, her evenings are filled with social calls. Through the summer her girlfriends have found new places to meet and people-watch: sidewalk cafés in the West Village, museums, and bars on the Lower East Side where she must clutch her purse to her chest, drinking tonic water by the bottle while her friends Julie, Margaret, and Renée drink chilled white wine. It must be the kind of life her Mebane crowd imagined for her, though until she returned from India she couldn’t have imagined it for herself.
When Jaryk was in New York, so many of their nights had been spent together, but now Renée and Margaret and Julie fill her calendar, the stories of their lives recast with degrees of embellishment or modesty, depending on the when and the how. She has grown to love their ease at being single, of navigating the city as if it were theirs alone.
Then there is Jonas. Soon as she’d returned to the office, he’d pursued her friendship.
“India,” he said. “Well, you are a cosmopolitan Christian.” This phrase alone is enough to get him grinning.
She’s headed to see him now. He’d suggested the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, and “Why not?” she’d said. “For once, it’ll be roses and hyacinths instead of mildew and trash.”
The only person at the office she’s told about India is Jonas, simply because it’s hard to lie to his baby face. So she’s told him the truth, at least partly.
“I went to visit someone dear to me,” she said. She didn’t say boyfriend—that word felt insufficient now. The rest of the story she’d kept to herself, and Jonas had the goodwill not to pry.
She makes it as far uptown as the Diamond District, at which point her feet might as well be walking on the hot pavement; her sandals are a year out of fashion and worn to their last walk. Past the displays of jewelry, past the pale man squinting into his microscope to guess the price of a gem, she descends into the subway, which even now, after a couple of years as a New Yorker, feels fraught with danger.
Especially on this day, when there are so few riding the trains, she can see, through the gaps in human traffic, the graffiti in all its grandeur, the scrawls that she assumes to mean “This gang was here,” and the murals of civil rights martyrs baking underneath the fluorescent bulbs, half of which are blinking out of sync. Scattered on the platform lies the New York Daily News with articles of robberies and acts of violence so seemingly mindless that she can’t believe the printed word. This is her chosen city, where entering a subway car, she feels she must keep her eyes to herself, though she won’t—she doesn’t have it in her to ignore the people with whom she shares space—glancing up to see a businessman, a teenager immersed in his comic book, and a woman without shoes, her bare feet scratching the floor of the car, exposing the cracks. This is the city she has chosen, and she will not look away.
* * *
………………
Her last day in India had felt full of miscues. “Mission failed,” her father would have said. That morning, she rose early and walked around the village. What a privilege it was to breathe the kind of fresh air alien to New Y
ork. “It was a little bit like Mebane,” she would tell Timothy, though only years later. On her way back to the Bose estate, she watched a deer cross the road, following an errant cow who’d escaped pasture. She’d heard cows sometimes walked the streets of India, but that deer could be seen in broad daylight still surprised her.
When she returned to the Bose estate, she found Jaryk had made her breakfast. Eggs, sunny side up, though for once she thought she would have liked the local cuisine, a last hurrah of sorts. They stayed in their cabin and ate with the windows open, the morning flies crawling over her leftover toast.
They didn’t talk about what he’d told her the night before, his story of escaping from the train. To raise that again felt like a grave undertaking, appropriate only at certain hours in the night, available only in moments of extraordinary intimacy. This meant they talked little at all, preferring the sunshine, the solitude of their own company. Still, she felt warmly toward him with the dull thud of love not far behind.
She’d come with expectations. Different ones, depending on the day. Mostly, that he would return to the city with her to practice for parenthood. That he would ask for her hand in marriage, then for her father’s permission. That he would allow himself to bury his grief—Misha’s death and the loss of his childhood. None of this had happened. He’d shared a story of his old life, brought her closer in a way she felt was a kind of gift in itself, but that had been all.
When it came time to leave for the airport, then to part ways at the departure lounge, he’d remained speechless but passed her a paper bag, which she waited to open until she was on the plane. It was a meal of bread and vegetables, the sort of fare one would take down to the trenches. She’d forgone the food the attendants brought around, savoring every bite of Jaryk’s last meal.
But then somewhere over the Atlantic, the plane hit a patch of rough air, even the flight attendants pale and grimacing. After the turbulence had passed, she’d grown angry at Jaryk, because he hadn’t been next to her to tell a joke or even to hold her hand. Her compassion for him began to dry up as a new wound opened.
Back home, it hadn’t been simple keeping her pregnancy a secret. To account for the nausea that had affected her so fiercely the first twelve weeks, she’d invented simple sicknesses—a stomach ache, an ear infection, a problem tooth—preferring to keep the excuses close enough to plausible in case a divine justice avenged white lies. It had been difficult to be alone with the news, though perhaps her girlfriends had guessed it from her choice to stop drinking wine, which seemed to have fooled no one at all; but still, no one had asked and she hadn’t told them outright. Soon there would be no choice but to tell. No amount of loose clothing would hide the fact of her changing body.
* * *
………………
At the gate of the Botanical Garden, Jonas has his hands on his hips. Something about the way he’s tilted his torso suggests he might topple over, though Jonas is often graceful—the time he opened the door of her taxi and bowed mockingly, for example, even that carried grace. He has the kind of blue eyes that comes with big sky and livestock, and perhaps in another life he’d balanced on bulls, but in this one he’s more Gypsy than anything else. And he’s tall, maybe even taller than Jaryk, though narrower across the shoulders.
“Is my clock off?” Jonas asks. “Could it be that Lucy Gardner is on time?”
“Don’t get used to it,” she says. He’s forever pestering her about the first time she’d agreed to show him around the Lower East Side, a tour to which she’d been an hour and a half late. But he’d waited, which she thought was either a flaw of character or a saving grace.
The rains haven’t been as fierce as in India, but the city’s gotten a few decent swells and the flowers look it. She tries to memorize the names of the roses from foreign countries, searching to see if there are any from the Far East. The first few times she stops to inspect the flowers, Jonas clicks his heels, impatient to track the rest of the place, but she waits him out and he heeds her pace. He’s into the bonsai house more than she is; he loves to study the minuscule worlds, appreciate the attention the artist gave to each plant.
“Could you imagine doing that? It takes hours to get it right.”
Her mind feels like a motorcycle on ice. “Not a chance, but I bet you couldn’t neither.”
He opens his palms to the sky, closes his eyes, and preens a long “Om.”
She pinches him hard on the arm.
“Ouch!” he says, not kidding.
She doesn’t like him joking about India. He’d tried something or other with “holy cows” a while back, and she’d punched him. He’d reacted much the same—a little girlishly. Still, he’s good company, a good listener, and she doesn’t feel conscious about letting her Southern drawl out around him. He doesn’t mind himself, either, interspersing his pent-up y’alls with every other word.
Jonas has brought sandwiches, which they eat on the lawn, surreptitiously and quickly because eating isn’t allowed in the garden. He’s even brought some wine in a flask, of which she entertains a few gulps. It’s one of those days of summer she had looked forward to through the whole winter. She presses her hands into the barely damp grass to feel the give of the good earth.
“Your friend that you went to see. Is he back?” Jonas asks.
She’s told him bits and pieces about her trip, about Jaryk. She’s certainly not said she’s carrying their child. Instead, she told him curtly on their first encounter, “Just want you to know, Jonas, that I am not available—this is strictly friends.” He’d nodded, not asking for more.
“I’m not sure if he’s coming back,” she says now, though as soon as she says it she feels as if she’s hurt Jaryk in some way. She doesn’t know if it’s true, and it feels spiteful to say it, though Jonas seems buoyed by the news.
He slides off his edge of the blanket to rest his head on her lap. The motion is so fluid, the weight of his head so comforting there, that for a long moment she doesn’t move. He locks eyes with hers, for once serious. She has no choice then but to make light of the situation, pulling his ear, chiding him, “Get off now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, rolling off into the grass, arms and legs spread-eagled. He doesn’t seem to care whether his light-blue shirt will stain from the grass; he is as far away from worry as any man can be.
“Hey, I got something for you.”
“Unless it’s an icicle I don’t want it. I’m too hot for anything.”
“It’s nothing special,” he says. “But it’s no icicle neither.”
In one motion he ties a necklace on her as if it’s a lasso trick. Before she can gasp, she notices the gold trim and fine inlay of rubies.
“Are you thick of head, Jonas? I can’t take this from you.”
“That’s a reaction,” he says. “Look, I’ve been trying to get rid of it. I won it at a poker game. It ain’t anything. Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Too late, I’m flattered, but I’m giving it back.”
“Man can’t wear a necklace,” he says, sliding back onto the grass.
“Don’t ever do this again, you hear?”
Her mother had this belief about alternate lives. A few low times in her life she’d broken down, shared how she could smell the other lives happening around her—her life as a pianist touring the halls of New York, Chicago, and Boston, her life as a wealthy man’s wife, her life as a teacher in a school that so needed her. Lucy rubs the necklace and catches herself wondering now of a life without Jaryk—how simple it is to forget!—when Jonas snaps to attention.
“Oh, I have an idea,” he says.
* * *
………………
She once revealed to him that she’s never seen the Statue of Liberty up close, which Jonas says is un-American. It’s a journey and a half, the IRT line from the Bronx all the way downtown to Bowling Green
. Then he leads them onto one of the tourist boats, which takes a long view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the underpass, where she’s heard artists and drug dealers roam freely. The boat cruises along the South Street Seaport, then heads toward Jersey until finally they turn back toward Staten Island and circle Lady Liberty.
It’s a day of clear sky. Lucy imagines taking a quick, sweet dip when she sees the statue in the water, the throngs crowding around the pedestal, climbing up her bones. It is as if by her floating in the water, holding the torch alight, that the city can bear to do its daily work. The sight moves her, though she won’t let Jonas see that. He’s brought his Polaroid, and she allows him to cradle her back while they pose for a picture with sky, sea, and Lady Liberty in the background.
Thirty years ago, Jaryk would have seen the same, or maybe for him the view would have been entirely different. She can only guess what it must have been like to land ashore, having escaped from a train sent for death, and to see the image everyone spoke of as if it were their freedom carved into stone.
* * *
………………
After Labor Day she can feel the city return to its sound and fury. It’s a town of always doing, she’s learned, and with the summer behind them, the pace of life shifts toward the hectic. The men who barbecued and brawled their summer away return to her for employment advice, but sometimes it feels to her as if they’ve just come to confess their wayward habits, their misspent dollars. The days are long and the paperwork longer, but the morning sickness has begun to abate. She’s bought a new wardrobe of flowing dresses she can wear even into the third trimester.
Jonas, too, has seen his workload increase. She’d always assumed city employment served more men than women, but now as many women come into their offices and seem to love chatting Jonas up. His office is always full, and he looks so comfortable in there—as if he’s propped his feet on his desk, though he hasn’t—smiling away, gunning for their trust.
A Play for the End of the World Page 20