She gets blue enough thinking this through Monday morning, with the subway crowded and no one rising to give her a seat, that by the time she sees Glenn Adkins, her first client, she’s in no mood for his complaining about the night shift or about the jazz show he couldn’t play.
“Honey,” Lucy says, “you need to tough it out. Now, quit being a child.”
It’s not what Glenn needs at that moment; she can see that as soon as the words leave her mouth. He doesn’t have one of his quips ready, and the circles under his eyes look like they’ve been there for months. He’s suffering, like she is, just differently. A little trick: she closes her eyes for a moment to stuff her worries into a giant purse. Glenn’s come to be consoled, to know that he matters, no surprise. She reaches across the table to hold his hand, “I’m here for you, Glenn. I’m coming to listen to you play. We’re doing this together.”
She’s not sure it’s enough. He’s still looking at her as if she tore up their covenant and burned it in the trash. So close to him, she can smell the coffee on his breath.
“Think of one good thing now,” she says. She does this sometimes. She tells the men to close their eyes, imagine a place they could go. Maybe from childhood, a moment of extraordinary happiness.
Glenn closes his eyes. He tells her about a beach he once traveled to with his mother, the point stretching out like a long snout. On that beach, a stranger was playing a saxophone, his notes half-caught by the wind. He tells her about the feeling of his mother’s hand guiding him to the sand.
“Perfect,” Lucy says. “You hold on to that.”
* * *
………………
After Glenn, Jonas comes to visit. He’s wearing a gray blazer over a white linen shirt. If someone were to put Miles with his overstarched collars and immaculate Jonas in a room, you’d think Jonas was calling the shots. In fact, Miles has become the butt of Jonas’s jokes—the last one delivered within earshot, Miles turning beet red, not equipped even to retort.
“Thank you for coming over last night,” Jonas says. “My cornbread tastes better with you around.”
Oh, she thinks, he hasn’t given up his flirtation. “I’m sure all the girls hear it.”
“Maybe next time we’ll try it at your place—making bread, I mean?”
“All right,” she says. “But you’re bringing the butter, the flour, and the sugar.”
“Listen, there’s a concert in Central Park tonight. I’ll pick you up from your place, say around six?”
She considers the possibility of another date, but her head’s still full of Glenn. She’s not sure if she’s served him the way he needs. It’s harder these days to believe that she’s done enough to help someone change. “Oh, I’ll think about it. But now I got to get ready for my next client. And I have to go pee again.”
When she comes back to her office, Jaryk’s there with Jonas. It takes her a moment to process the two men in her office. Jaryk’s got a beard that makes him look as if he’s lived in a forest without a mirror. And he’s even more deeply tanned. Now his neck looks to her like a fisherman’s neck, gilded from the sun.
When Jonas leaves, he comes out with it, holding a clipboard full of paperwork. Will she meet him at Veselka? Oh, the nerve! She won’t, she won’t even consider it.
“You dropped out is right,” she says, and just like that he’s gone again. It’s over so quickly that afterwards she wonders if he came at all, if instead it was an unfortunate trick of the pregnancy, a hallucination of sorts, but no, there it is, his paperwork on her desk. She reads it line by line. He lists his history, that he’s from Warsaw, his date of birth, his job at the synagogue. “What are your strengths?” a question asks. He has written “endurance,” which she thinks indeed is true, and feels in herself a kind of softening.
On the bottom margin in his careful handwriting he’s copied down some lines of Tagore’s, which she recognizes from the book of poems he once gave her:
Trust love even if it brings sorrow. Do not close up your heart…
The heart is only for giving away
She sits for a moment with Tagore’s words and Jaryk’s handwriting. His smell still lingers in the room. It’s not enough to bring around poetry, expecting forgiveness. She throws his papers into the wastebasket and readies herself for her next client.
* * *
………………
What a privilege it is to listen to music under the canopy of dusk, so deep inside Central Park that the lights of the city do not permeate, only the waning sun and the few bulbs that illumine the stage, where a quartet is playing Brahms. Jonas knows the cellist, and after the concert he introduces Lucy as “my dear girlfriend.” She still doesn’t know what to make of his solicitation. To anyone who’s looking closely, she’s showing, and what suitor would be interested in a woman who’s due to give birth to another man’s child? Maybe it’s only friends he wants to be, though she takes pride in her good witchery to read a person’s intentions, so if she’s wrong about him, that’s troubling for its own reasons.
After the concert, they stroll through the park. All around them, couples whisper in a dozen languages, the New York of it, the denseness of all romance.
“Try it barefoot,” she tells him.
He’s game. From time to time, he finds honeysuckle, which he collects into a bunch and presents with mock solemnity.
Maybe she’ll ask Renée about a woman for Jonas, someone who will appreciate his kindness and his gestures of good faith.
“How about a ride in a carriage?” Jonas asks.
The horses are lined up against the edge of the grass. He points to the carriage driver leading the pack.
“I’m too full,” she says. “With the music, I mean. It was lovely.” Why, even now, does she hold him at bay, when all her options seem as thin as the ice over Mebane Pond? A man with means and an open heart. A half-choice, her mother told her, is not a choice at all, simply the soul agreeing to suffer.
“A walk, then?”
“No,” she says. “Tonight, I need some alone time.”
He has a bramble stuck in his hair that she would release were the moment opportune. “I’ll see you at the office tomorrow.”
He pulls close to her, “Lucy Gardner, have you been leading me on?”
“Have I been what?”
“I mean. you’ve been saying yes to every date. I thought we were playing the same tune. Are we?”
“I already told you, I’m not on the market.”
“Oh, right,” he says quietly.
He’s a delicate man, this Jonas, he’s got his tricks and his troubadour ways, and in one of her alternative lives she’s taking him up on his offer, a walk in the moonlight, a walk down the aisle. Except she doesn’t want to belong to anyone right now. Not Jaryk with his wild beard and his sunburnt skin, his lines of poetry come to reclaim some lost ship, and not this man who’s come into her life with purpose and mystery.
“Well, I’ll see you at the office, then,” he says.
In the days to follow, she’ll spot Jonas twice in the office halls but won’t say a word. In a month, he will have left the office. Rumors will abound that he joined a band traveling south; alternatively, that he found a job with a fancy corporation. No one will be sure, and Miles won’t tell her more than she already knows: he’ll be gone from her life—for good.
Now, alone again, she digs her feet into the grass. If nothing else, the earth’s still there. Jonas wanted more than what she was willing to give—she felt it from the beginning, she accepts that now. She’s let him go, into his own world, free from hers. She makes good speed, the map of the park known to her feet. A cool wind sends shivers, so she walks faster. At moments when she’s fearful, she rubs a wide circle around her belly. “A flower and a volcano,” she says, conjuring The Little Prince, until she’s clear of the park. “T
his is all I need.”
* * *
………………
When she turns the corner onto Seventh Street, she sees Jaryk again. At first, she thinks it could not be him but someone who only looks like him from behind, but when he stops to help Mrs. Esperanza at the door, she sees his face and notices that since the morning he’s shaved his beard. She’s close enough that he might turn and see her, but he doesn’t. He touches Mrs. Esperanza on the shoulder. Mrs. Esperanza, the nightingale of Seventh Street, who sings for everyone from the rooftops in summertime, and there’s Jaryk, guiding her up the steps.
Lucy circles the block, buying herself time. On First Avenue, a young man yowls verses from a poem everyone knows—Robert Frost, maybe—“The Road Not Taken,” maybe. He’s expecting money, but her change purse is empty. Back onto Seventh Street she turns. Ms. Esperanza and Jaryk are nowhere to be seen. She climbs up to the third floor, where she hears someone on the landing.
She invites him in for tea. She still doesn’t know what to say to him, but a cup of tea seems like the decent thing. They sit in her kitchenette, his large index finger hooked into her mother’s porcelain teacup. His sweat smells bruised, his skin a shade lighter where he’s shaved his beard, the smell of aftershave wafting over the tea, and he’s dressed himself in a suit, maybe one from the collection he keeps in plastic.
“You cleaned yourself up,” she says.
“I figured the beard wasn’t working anymore.”
“So, is it welcome home, or are you gone again?”
“Home,” he says. “Not gone again.”
He lifts the teacup to his lips, the steam clouding his eyes. She knows he’s not a talker, but if he’s here to apologize for his absence, she won’t drag it out of him—he’ll have to get there on his own. She meets his gaze and stares back.
He says, “I had this dream. The two of us—the three of us. We were going to our cabin in the woods. We had a dog with a face like a wolf. We had a kitchen with many windows, and through each window you could see trees, nothing but grass and trees. Sunday mornings, I made pancakes. For the three of us. We kept maple syrup year-round. The porch smelled like vanilla.”
“Sure, I know this dream,” she says.
“I saw Earl Minton this morning. I visited Misha’s grave. Earl’s been setting out fresh flowers.
“And the rabbi, he’s doing okay, getting old, really. But I’m working there again. Not as many folks come as once did, but lots to do still to get ready for the holidays.
“Oh, and the play, it went well, sort of. I mean, the kids did a good job. I had to get out of there. There was some unrest.”
“What do you mean, ‘unrest’?”
“A politician got shot, and they closed the roads. Everyone told me I should pack up and leave. I did.”
“Are you telling me you left because you were chased out?”
“I left because my job was done. We staged the play like we said we would. We brought the media. The villagers now have a fighting chance of making a life. Do you understand?”
His words feel cold. If she could’ve held his hand while he spoke, maybe it would’ve felt different, but she didn’t dare. There’s the iniquity of his long absence that still feels like a tender bruise.
“Sometimes I understand,” she tells him. “Mostly I don’t.”
There’s something she wants to give him. It feels like a stroke of cruelty, but she can’t stop herself. She pulls out one of Dr. Malhotra’s ultrasound photos, where her baby’s head and elbow and the tips of its feet are all visible. “This is what you missed,” she says.
“Oh,” he says, as if he’s been punched in the gut. A fly alights on the picture, and he brushes it away. He cups the image in his hands. “Beautiful.”
“Jaryk, I’m expecting someone tonight. You can keep that, though. It’s nice to see you.”
It takes him a moment to realize she’s again asking him to leave. When he gets the message, he tucks the picture into his coat pocket and arranges himself. He reaches toward her—what, for a handshake? a hug?—then pulls back, afraid, perhaps, he’s overstepped, and she doesn’t encourage him.
“Welcome home,” she says, though it sounds spiteful, not welcoming at all. While he gathers himself, she stares out the window. Down below the fire hydrant has been uncorked, and children squeal around its spoils.
“I realize I didn’t get you anything from India,” he says. “That was rude of me.”
“I’ll forgive you for that,” she says, opening the door.
She sees him as a boy, crawling through the mud, searching for scraps. What he’s lived through could break her. What he’s lived through to stand before her—to hold what she feels now, as if it could be poured into a bowl, as if it, too, could be kept in his heart. He brushes a stray lock from her forehead. “Goodbye, then.”
That night, she falls asleep in her dress and wakes to the sound of a telephone. It takes a moment to realize that it’s her telephone that’s ringing, and she crawls to it, manages a hello. Turns out, it’s a wrong number, a lady from Russia trying to reach her cousin in Manhattan. With as much kindness as she can muster, Lucy tries to explain that one digit has been missed, but everything else is fine. A few minutes later, the phone rings again: 2:15, the clock says. This time it’s only a caller’s deep breathing, and she thinks for a moment it’s Jaryk, about to say hello, but then she hears “Sorry” from the same Russian lady.
“Try again,” Lucy tells her. She doesn’t know why she’s so encouraging. She’s hopeful that the lady can reach her cousin for whatever intercontinental conversation needs to be had at this hour. Afterwards, it’s unremarkably silent again, the white noise of missed connections.
The Piano
The city seems transformed into a place of muted objects, silent walkers. When the line of homeless approach him at Union Square, he fails to hear the rattle of their cups, and the traffic that flows up Fifth Avenue does so without disharmony—without any noise at all. The subway scudders below, and though he feels its vibrations along the arches of his feet, even that carries no sound. He thinks of Lucy, the way she guarded her teacup, as she banished him from their lives. He stares at the photograph of his unborn child and cannot imagine the future without the two of them.
Near the corner of Seventy-Second, though it’s past eleven at night, he spots a lone food cart and stops for a knish, the smell of deep-fry rousing him from his numbness. The nocturnal street vendor takes his change and pours hot sauce at his behest, the smell of fire returning him to the sound of the city, which even at this hour is full of chatter that he can overhear from the open windows of the houses he passes.
Back into his hideout he retreats, the basement of Beth Israel providing the quiet of filial mice and leaky pipes, the detritus of old, collapsible buildings. With a bit of clear plastic tape he puts the picture of his child up on his wall. An elbow, an ear, the curved spine, and around it the elliptical barrier, protecting the shape—a him or a her, he still doesn’t know but has begun to wonder—from the troubles of the world.
Rosh Hashanah comes on the ninth of September, earlier than usual. He doles out prayer books, ensures that the new cantor, who is particular about drinking a hot cup of honeyed limewater before she sings and again halfway through the service, has what she needs. When the rabbi gives his sermon, Jaryk listens in the back pew. For once, the rabbi delivers in his old form; the entire congregation seems charged by his Torah reading, which quickly turns into interpretation and Midrash. Out with the old, in with the new. An embrace each day of what is holy, even if it does not feel holy. Keep your attention on the blue flame of this life, the rabbi says. Live this day and every day of this year with your highest purpose.
After the ceremony and the dinner, when it is only the cleaning staff and the two of them, the rabbi pulls Jaryk aside.
“You were weepin
g,” the rabbi says.
“Not at all,” Jaryk says.
“I just want to make sure you did not miss my point,” the rabbi says. “You’ve been trawling for days.”
Jaryk’s heard the rabbi use the word trawling once before in answer to the simple question “How are you?”—which in fact is hardly ever simple with the rabbi, who has told Jaryk not only “I’m trawling” but “Today I feel wobbly,” like an untended flower in a garden. “After seeing Lucy, I’m wobbly,” he’d like to say, but he doesn’t need to say anything—the rabbi speaks up. They should enjoy a piece of pumpkin pie, he says.
“Young people are always worrying about getting fat or being too thin,” the rabbi says, “but really, this is nonsense. Especially on this day, we should eat what we want.”
Pumpkin pie was the rebetsin’s favorite. In her time, slices of pumpkin pie could be found in the pews, on bookshelves, on the stairs leading to the altar.
“I screwed up with Lucy,” Jaryk says.
“Yes, I know.” The rabbi scrapes the last piece of pie off his plate. “Listen, the best way to deal with such situations is to take your mind away from the matter, at least for a thimble. Anyway, I need you to do something for me. The cantor would like some instruments for day school, and there’s a wonderful smithy who used to belong to the congregation, many years ago, who might be willing to give us something for cheap. Would you mind paying him a visit? His name is Amichai. Here, have the rest of the pie.”
To have work in the face of Lucy’s dismissal is no small consolation, a task as simple as a rendezvous with a tradesman a great relief, a reason, at least, to leave his basement room, which has begun to smell like his quarters in the military hospital, a little musky and a little dreary, on the cusp of arousing an unforgivable self-pity.
A Play for the End of the World Page 27