I slowed as I neared the glass. I could see the numbers on his computer screen, carefully organized into various rows and columns, stretching across the screen and down, as incomprehensible to me as the man who’d placed them there. On the floor surrounding his chair stood piles of paper, all with numbers, endless numbers, meant to reinvent our present notions of mortality.
I saw Mark scanning the screen with his eyes. Then I saw him grab a fresh printout to his right, a huge pile of pages attached one to the other with perforated edges and tiny holes running up and down each side. He lifted the top sheet and began scanning it somewhat frantically as the bottommost pages fell to the floor. He scanned with both fingers and eyes, searching page by page until the topmost layers began grazing the floor. Now his eyes fell back on the screen, then to the pages, then to the screen, where he opened a new window, stared at a different set of data. Now back to the pages. Now back to the screen. And then, his back muscles tensing, his fists clenched into balls, he screamed, “Fuck!” and threw the whole mess onto the floor.
He took a swig from a water bottle and threw the heels of his feet up on his desk. Bouncing one foot absentmindedly, he stared in the direction of the family photo I’d recently had framed for him. It was the four of us, standing in Sheep’s Meadow the previous fall, the midtown skyline rising up out of the fiery-hued trees behind us, a family perfectly captured by a passing tourist. Daisy was beaming warmly at the camera, her hair aglow with yellow light. Tess, who’d become distracted by an ant below and was worried that one of us might step on him, stood half bent over, her forehead wrinkled with concern. I was kneeling next to Tess, midsentence (“The ant will be fine, sweetheart, I promise . . .”), while my face was in profile, staring up at Mark, who stood with his fingers gripping Daisy’s shoulders, his eyes turned out of the frame, away from us.
Next to the photo sat a small Yahrtzeit candle, its flame casting a flickering shadow against the wall. Of course. I should have remembered. The anniversary of his mother’s death. Then again, he could have reminded me. We could have lit a candle at home, with the girls, by the kitchen window. They were always asking him about his mother. Was she funny, smart, nice? “She was wonderful,” was all he could muster. Even to me. In fact, over the years we’d been together, I’d only ever been able to extricate the tiniest nuggets of information: she was studying to be a clinical social worker, with an emphasis on counseling unwed mothers; she’d become fascinated with Jung’s collective unconscious, and at the time of her death had been researching the archetype of the “goddess mother,” who appeared nearly uniformly in people’s dreams and mythologies, no matter their cultural, socioeconomic, or religious heritage; she had a raging sweet tooth, especially for licorice.
“But what was she like?” I’d ask, hoping for a more nuanced portrait.
“She was . . . wonderful,” he’d say again. And then he’d change the subject. At first I thought it was because the memory of her was too painful. Then I realized it was simply too dim.
Every once in awhile a ray of detail would break through. One night, after Tess had been particularly moody at bedtime, Mark recalled the night a couple of weeks before his mother was killed, when she came into the communal children’s room to kiss him good-night. “I’m too old for snuggling,” he’d said out loud, so that the other children would hear. To which she’d responded, trying to validate his feelings like she’d been taught in her training, “You’re right, Mark. You’re almost thirteen. I can see why it would be difficult for you to be treated like a baby.” From that night forward, his mother would wave good-night to him from the doorway, and though he’d been meaning to talk to her about this—maybe she could come in every once in awhile to give him a good-night kiss—by the time he felt ready to broach it, she was gone.
According to the few outside accounts I managed to scrape together, she was indeed “wonderful,” or at least as close as humanly possible to the Jungian archetype of her studies. But so many blanks had been left unfilled by her early departure that expecting Mark to recite Kaddish and light a candle in front of his family was probably asking too much.
Suddenly feeling too spylike for comfort, I raised my hand to knock on the glass when I saw Mark turn to his computer and click open a new window. This one had no numbers. Or letters. Or columns or rows. It did, however, have breasts. And a vagina. And a length of rope attached to its wrists. Now another figure appeared, much like the first but with a disembodied hand touching its shoulders. Now a third, bound and gagged. Then a fourth. And a fifth. Now Mark began switching maniacally back and forth between his data and these images, the fingers of his right hand working the mouse (breasts, data, lips, data, thighs, data, mouth, data), the fingers of his left running back and forth across his scalp, until his shoulders were heaving and his head collapsed into a convulsing heap on his keyboard.
“Mark!” I said. I pounded my palm on the glass wall dividing us. “Mark!”
Mark swiveled around in his chair. “What the . . . ?” He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve and walked to the door to let me in. In our decade together, I’d only seen him cry twice, once each at the births of our daughters. He nearly cried one other time, during the N’ila service the year the towers fell, when all of the children, including our then two-year-old Daisy, were marching in their white clothes down the aisle of the darkened sanctuary, carrying flashlights in the shape of candles and singing a mangled version of Hatikvah, but he nipped that one in the bud. “How long have you been—”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Mark, you’re crying.”
He stood there in the doorjamb, his arm leaning against it, blocking my entry. I could feel the support beams within me loosening, splintering.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course,” he said, stepping aside.
We sat on the windowsill, staring out over the grids of light stretching in perfect vanishing point perspective toward New Jersey. I could just make out a barge in the far distance, slicing its way through the ice floes on the Hudson, pushing its giant load upstream. Airplanes were conjured out of the dark, only to fade into the night just as brusquely. Mark pointed to the new building that would soon block his view, which he’d only noticed after overhearing a couple of tenants ten floors down lament the loss of their sunsets.
“What’s that?” I said, trying to bring us back into the room. I gestured to the piles of printouts littering his floor.
“That,” Mark said, “is a fucking mess.” The whole concept behind his project was a fallacy, and Mark was only just beginning to realize to what degree. It was one thing to try to restructure the mathematical model of risk, to hyperindividualize the variables for each client seeking coverage, but to do so without accounting for chance was like building a brick wall without mortar. “I build it up to about this high,” he said, marking with his hand a random spot in the air just above his head. “And then, boom! I plug in the catastrophic event and the whole thing falls to pieces.”
“An earthquake hits,” I said.
“For instance, yes.”
I turned my gaze in the direction of the candle. “Or that.”
“What?”
“The catastrophic event.”
“Zab, I’m talking numbers here. Not people.”
“But don’t they represent people?”
“No. They represent statistical models of . . . Okay, people. To a certain extent. And to a certain extent not. But it’s complicated. God, what was I thinking? I knew I’d have this problem the minute I took the job. I knew fundamentally the premise was flawed. Predict individual probable death to within an hour? Fucking joke. Some marketing executive’s idea. ‘Here at Lortex, we know exactly when you’re going to die.’” He shook his head and slumped against the window. “You want a soda? They give them out free in the kitchen.”
“How nice of them,” I said, thinking that for the hours Mark put in every day, they should maybe be h
anding out free magnums of champagne. “Yes,” I said. “Sure. A ginger ale.”
Back from the kitchen, sodas in hand, he no longer wanted to talk about his work. So I told him about my own work and its less-than-stellar progress: the letter from Shep, the conflicting accounts, the lack of information about Adele Cassidy’s final hours. I told him about two other stories I’d tried to pitch, after turning down the assignment in Iraq, one in rural China, on the effects of exporting so many girl babies abroad, the other in Bangalore, India, on the economic realities of outsourcing; about how the executive producer I’d contacted had said that recent budget cuts and lack of interest prohibited her from commissioning any segments outside the US. I told him of Tess’s concern over Knut, the orphaned cub in Berlin, and about Daisy coming home from school upset over an assignment to write a report on one of the early explorers, a list of whom, she was miffed to learn, contained not a single female. I told him about Weinreb refusing to fix the flap of carpet on the stair, about the camp bills that were overdue, about how Astrid believed me when I told her I was going to the SoHo Grand on a Craigslist sex date.
For a moment we were silent, staring down at the white and red stripes of light vibrating up and down Sixth Avenue, and then Mark told me about some guy in his office who got a tattoo of the Starship Enterprise on his left butt cheek he wanted everyone to see.
“So what did he do, moon everybody?” I said.
“Better. He sent a digital image of it into everybody’s inbox.”
And as I started to laugh, as I felt myself being drawn once again into Mark’s quirky orbit, I thought to myself, Okay, now, I remember this. This marriage might actually be salvageable. But it might require more work than either of us is able to muster.
“Light of my life?” I said.
Mark squeezed my hand in his and smiled. “Yes?”
“Why were you . . . why were you crying before?”
Mark stared at his feet, uncomfortably. “I wasn’t crying, Z.”
“Yes you were. I saw you.”
“Look, I know where you’re going with this, and I want to go there with you, I do, I really do, but can we talk about all of it tomorrow?” He put his arm around me and hugged me to him. “I promise we can talk through everything you want tomorrow. I just, I don’t know.” He stole a glance at the candle. “I can’t deal with it tonight.”
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m going to hold you to that promise.”
“We can grab dinner together tomorrow night, how about that?” he said. “I’ll even find a sitter. And I promise—I promise!—I won’t stand you up again.”
“Oh, you better not. That would be a really bad mistake,” I said.
“Bad mistake,” he repeated.
Later that night, Mark spooned me to him and kissed the back of my neck and told me he loved me.
“I love you, too,” I said. And I meant it right then, I really did.
But then I heard the familiar scrape, the metallic clang of the handcuffs sliding along the bottom of the bedside table drawer.
CHAPTER 20
ASTRID ANSWERED THE DOOR, peeking out from behind her safety chain looking half asleep and annoyed, but when she saw my face her expression instantly softened. “Oh, sweetie, hold on a sec,” she said, closing the door and unlatching the chain. “What happened?” She ushered me to the couch, her arm draped over my heaving shoulder. “Half an hour ago you two looked fine. Like a pair of newlyweds even.”
“I . . .” I couldn’t catch my breath, let alone speak. “He . . .”
“Shhh, shhh,” she said. “Forget it. Don’t talk. Can I make you some tea? Do you want something to eat?”
I shook my head no. The thought of food, of going through the motions of daily sustenance, made me dizzy with dread. I started mumbling incoherently again, the words and phrases surfacing one by one, without the ballast of language to hold them together: What if? Can’t. I tried. But.
“Shhh, shhh,” said Astrid again, rubbing my shoulder. “You don’t have to make any decisions right now. Okay?”
She held me to her, tightly. Then she suddenly pulled away. “Wait,” she said. “Hold on a sec. I have an idea.” She fished around in a nearby drawer until she located a set of keys. “Here.” She tossed them to me. “My cabin. Just go. Clear your head. Works for me every time.”
Astrid had a small cabin in the middle of the Catskills near New Paltz, where she retreated nearly every weekend. It had been a gift to herself a couple of years after her husband, who’d never cared for the sight of trees, had left. We’d been invited as a family once, when the girls were toddlers, and Tess had drawn all over the kitchen wall with a red Sharpie. Astrid had shrugged it off with a smile, saying she’d been meaning to get a new paint job anyway. I remembered wondering at the time what kind of a man had left a woman like her: a woman who didn’t care that her wall was ruined; a woman who toted huge casseroles of lasagna up the stairs after each of our girls were born; a woman who, every Halloween, treated the neighborhood kids to a haunted house leading from the stoop, which she covered in fake spider webs, all the way through her apartment; a woman who spoke several languages, ran six miles every other day, and was still, at fifty-three, as beautiful and astral as her starry name implied.
When Jim left her, with her two small children and a mountain of debt, she abandoned the dissertation she’d been working on and took a job as a communications director for an Italian bank. She didn’t want anything else about her sons’ lives to so suddenly and painfully change again: not their home, not their schools, not their precarious (she now realized) existence. Meanwhile, as the years had passed, she’d been secretly working away during stolen moments at the cabin in the Catskills, putting the finishing touches on the long-abandoned dissertation. Now Princeton University Press, she’d just heard, wanted to publish it as part of a ten-volume anthology they were compiling on The Inferno. Pain and Pain’s Outlet: A Dialectic, she’d called hers, in reference to the trees in the Wood of the Suicides, who, because they’d thrown away their lives when they were mortals, were now forced to spend eternity rooted firmly in the earth, unable to speak unless pecked by Harpies. In the fall, she would finally apply for the teaching job she’d always wanted. It didn’t matter where or how; she wanted to reclaim the life she’d put on hold.
“The Medeco unlocks the front door,” she was now saying. “Sometimes it sticks, but if you just jiggle it a bit to the left, you’ll be fine.”
“Oh, Astrid, that’s a nice offer, but I can’t. We don’t even own a car.”
“Take mine. Keys are on the same chain.”
“What about the girls? I can’t just leave them here with Mark.”
“Why not?” This last question was uttered harshly, with fading compassion, like a teacher grown suddenly frustrated by a promising student’s lame excuses. “Lizzie, at some point, you just have to let go. Trust that things will be okay without you. Okay?”
“It’s not that,” I said, even though every time I left Mark alone with the kids when I had to travel for work, something always broke: a toy, a glass, a bone. Then there was the weekend I’d spent with my college roommates up in Vermont, when Tess had hidden herself in the hamper for several hours, emerging only after Mark had called the police.
“Then what is it?” said Astrid.
“It’s . . .”
When I’d asked Tess why she hid herself in the hamper for so long, when everyone was worried sick, she’d shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “I needed to smell you,” she’d said.
Astrid stared at me, awaiting my response.
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll go.”
I MADE MY WAY up the nearly desolate Palisades Parkway and onto Route 87, taking swigs from a cup of sludgelike coffee I’d bought, along with some groceries, at the Korean deli near where Astrid’s Honda Civic had been parked. I stole a glance through the rearview mirror. The girls were folded over one another like rag dolls, all flaccid limbs and i
sosceles joints, Daisy’s head lying limp on Tess’s lap, Tess’s arms splayed across Daisy’s torso, her mouth ajar to the sky.
I’d snuck back into our apartment to gather some clothes, but when I kneeled by the side of the girls’ beds to kiss them good-bye, I couldn’t go through with it. What if I were gone for days, weeks? What if, having left, I never returned? In the back of my mind, I could already hear the cross-examination at the custody hearing: And yet didn’t you, on the night of March 2, 2007, abandon your children and flee to the Catskills?
“Where are we going?” Tess had muttered, rubbing her eyes as the three of us stumbled out the door into the frigid night, down jackets tossed over our pajamas.
“On an adventure,” I’d said. “A secret one.”
Luckily the girls were too tired to ask for details. I had no idea where we were going. To Astrid’s cabin in New Paltz, yes, but after that, what? We couldn’t just stay there indefinitely, hiding out from reality. As a kid I’d been so good at chess, at sinking down in my seat until my eyes were level with the board, planning ahead several dozen moves to the moment when the path to the king would become clear. But the pawns this time felt too big, too heavy. I could barely see around them, let alone lift one.
I turned on the radio, hoping to drown out the static in my head. “Crocodile Rock” came on. Good, I thought. Then I remembered Leslie Lifshitz belting it out while standing on our family-room coffee table, gripping the baguette my mother had planned to fill with cold cuts for lunch. When Mom discovered the bread in Leslie’s hand, she snapped. “You couldn’t have used a goddamned flashlight!” she yelled. “And just look at these crumbs!” I pretended it had been my idea, turning our lunch into a microphone, the coffee table into a stage. But Leslie never came over again.
Even then I knew my mother was not like other mothers. That she was slightly damaged inside, like a cracked vase, whose thin veneer of grace would, if held up to the light, reveal a web of spindly fissures. But I always thought her brokenness could be contained in the presence of outsiders. In that I was much less savvy than April, who even at six sensed that attempting to project normalcy to the world would only end in disappointment. A mother was either busy fighting her inner diamonds or she was not.
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