Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

  “Carola, please,” Gretchen says, reaching across the table, touching her arm. “Do we have to talk about this now?”

  “Oh, let’s talk about it,” Jill says. “Let’s talk about it.”

  Carola pushes her chair back and sits straight up. “Look,” she says. “I don’t mean to be confrontational. All I know is it’s easy for you to sit there and talk about the demise of the nuclear family and its being a bad thing. You never gave it a chance. You ran away as soon as you could. It’s in sickness that families matter, in sickness that they have to pull together, and I just want to ask where were the two of you when Mother got sick?”

  “Oh, let’s not open this up again,” Gretchen says.

  “You have no right to say that, Gretchen,” Carola says. “I just think there is such a thing as family responsibility. I stuck it out with Mother, you didn’t.”

  “It was your choice,” Jill says.

  “My responsibility.”

  “Your choice.”

  “You can’t say I didn’t visit,” Gretchen says. “I visited three times.”

  “More than Jill can say,” Carola says.

  “I made a clean, healthy break and forged my own life,” Jill says. “Don’t blame me because you didn’t.”

  “You ran away,” Carola says.

  “I didn’t owe Daddy anything.”

  “When parents take care of you, support you, love you for years, you don’t owe them anything? That doesn’t work for me, I’m sorry.”

  “I just think you have to ask yourself something, Carola,” Gretchen says. “When Mom got sick, did you stick around because she and Daddy needed you or because you needed them?”

  Carola’s mouth opens slightly. “Just what do you mean by that?” she asks.

  “I don’t think they needed you nearly as much as you needed them to need you. I think in some ways they would have been better off if you’d gone and made your own life. I’m sorry to be so blunt, Carola, but you asked for it.”

  Now Carola stands up, kicks her chair away. “Oh, damn you,” she says. “Damn you, damn you. You were hardly even there.”

  “Don’t blame us for leading our own lives,” Jill says.

  “Don’t tell me I didn’t have a life,” Carola says. “It was my life. It had to be. Just because I didn’t abandon my mother doesn’t mean I wasn’t alive.”

  “No one’s saying that, Carola,” Jill says.

  “I really think we’ve talked about this long enough,” Gretchen says. “I really don’t think this is very productive.”

  “Well, in that case, let’s all bow to Her Highness and never say another word,” Carola says.

  “I didn’t start it.”

  “Yes. Of course. I start everything, don’t I?”

  Gretchen rubs her eyes. “Why are you doing this, Carola?” she asks wearily.

  “Because you’re talking about my life. You’ve made it easy for yourself, but you can’t tell me I’m invalid. You just can’t.”

  “No one’s saying that, Carola,” Jill says. “We’re saying that you made a choice. We made choices, too.”

  “You have to accept our lives if you want us to accept yours,” Gretchen says. “You have to respect what we chose.”

  “Excuse me,” Donna Lee says, pushing her chair away and walking out of the room. Jill looks over her shoulder.

  Carola sits down again, slumping in her chair. There are tears in her eyes. “That’s what you can’t understand,” she says. “Maybe for you, but for me there never was a choice.”

  The first time Gretchen visited her mother in the hospital, it was in response to a call from Carola. “She may be dying,” Carola said flatly—something of an exaggeration, Gretchen found out later. Her mother lay in bed, her weight dropping, her hair falling. The TV ran all day—cartoons, game shows, Mike Douglas, the news. Gretchen flew out on a Friday from California and found Carola in the room, sitting by the bed, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her father was out getting something to eat. Earlier, Carola had managed to sneak her mother’s dog into her room for a visit, and what Gretchen remembers most vividly is that the room smelled of dog—a much more pleasant smell, she thought, than the antiseptic odor she usually associated with hospital rooms. Their mother asked Carola to go to the hospital gift shop and buy her some magazines and eye make-up. Carola was immediately off, grateful to have a purpose. Then her mother beckoned Gretchen closer to her.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “Carola’s driving me crazy. She’s here every minute. I have to pretend I’m better, just to keep her from feeling guilty. Things are bad enough. I just want her out of here.”

  “Have you asked Daddy to talk to her?” Gretchen said.

  “Yes, yes. He keeps putting it off. She doesn’t realize that this has nothing to do with her. It’s between me and your father. It’s our business, not hers.”

  What friends of theirs would say, for years afterward, was that their mother used her sickness to keep a hold on him. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Gretchen is convinced that there was a bond—thin as a wire but incredibly tough—that held her parents together. Perhaps it was this bond that Carola had imposed upon. That night, her father finally had a talk with Carola. She stormed out of the house, red-eyed, screaming, “You’re not being fair!” Her father followed her to the door, calling her name. Years earlier, he had demanded their dedication, when the number of business trips he took suddenly doubled and their mother started to cry, spontaneously, whenever she did the dishes. He had said, “I’d like you to stick around the house while I’m away, keep your mother company.” Only Carola heeded his request, never went out on dates. And now, suddenly, with that generation gone, she is thrown on her own. Though Gretchen has suffered through depression and worry, real pain is something she has rarely felt. Her lack of empathy disturbs her—a sort of dull ache. She knows it is nothing compared to what Carola must feel.

  There was another confrontation, two months to the day after their mother’s death. Gretchen’s father had called the daughters together, in his office, to inform them of his plans to remarry. They sat in chairs in front of his desk, and he stood stiffly and would not look at them. “I’m planning to be married,” he said. “To Eleanor Manley. She’s been a dear friend for years, and a great comfort. I know this may be hard for you to accept, but I’ve made my decision. We’ll be married in two weeks.”

  “Mother died so recently,” Gretchen said. “Are you sure this is wise?”

  He looked at them. “I feel no need to justify this course of action to you,” he said. “It’s my decision, not yours.”

  Gretchen clutched her chair, holding herself together against his attack. Jill began to button her coat. Only Carola’s eyes narrowed in anger. “How long have you been involved with her?” she asked.

  He cracked his knuckles. “For quite some time,” he said. “Before your mother’s death, but she never knew.”

  “She knew,” Carola said.

  “This is none of your business, Carola,” their father said.

  Jill went back to New York that afternoon. Gretchen and Carola stayed in his house, avoiding him and each other. The house no longer seemed theirs. When Gretchen woke up the next morning, Carola was already gone.

  I’d better go talk to her. Someone has to,” Gretchen says now to Leonard. They are sitting in the living room, alone. She gets up; Leonard watches her in silence, unsure of what to say or do.

  There is a fragrant smell of shampoo in Carola’s room. She is sitting on the bed in her bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. Gretchen sits down next to her.

  “I’ve decided to go back to New York before the week’s over,” Carola says. “I have things to do.”

  “Fine,” Gretchen says. “We can finish up here. It’s more of a vacation for us.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wanted to apologize,” Gretchen says.

  “Of course, you know, you’re right,” Carola says. “About everything.
About Mom and Dad. But I’m still angry. To move away—to move to New York, and find that apartment and that job, and keep them—you can’t know how hard it was for me just to sustain my life.”

  “You’re right,” Gretchen says. “I can’t know. I only wish I could.”

  When she was a teen-ager, Donna Lee liked to become the confidante of girls with boyfriends, so that after the boyfriends left, as they always did, the girls would cry on her shoulder and she could embrace them. It wasn’t until years later that she realized what she was doing—contriving intimacy, setting herself up to be let down. Love is still a contrivance for Donna Lee, a yearning for Jill to trust her, to touch her unexpectedly in sleep. She fully expects Jill to forget her at any moment.

  “I want to leave,” Donna Lee says to Jill after the scene at dinner. “I feel lost.”

  “I’ll leave with you, then,” Jill says.

  Donna Lee shakes her head, unable to keep from smiling in gratitude. “You should stay,” she says.

  “This happens whenever I see them. They badger me about running away until I do it. Besides, I have other priorities. I have you to think of.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Donna Lee says, amazed that she could be someone worth thinking of.

  In the morning, Jill and Donna Lee are standing on the front porch, packed and ready to go.

  “Before you leave,” Leonard says to Jill, “let me just ask you one thing. What does it do for you, that horse game?”

  Jill smiles. “Let’s call it my alternative to the nuclear-family dynamic.”

  “I see,” Leonard says. He laughs and claps his hands. Gretchen smiles at him as if she were his mother. Soon Jill and Carola will be gone; it will be her job to finish the cleaning out. She can be devastated, or she can go about it with a healthy contempt. For what remains in this house is a history about which she can hardly be nostalgic, and memories she would like to move beyond. Perhaps now she can sort through her father’s belongings with that blunt dispassion which is the essence of revenge. Perhaps she, too, can be cruel.

  “Have a nice trip,” Leonard says. “Come visit us in California.” And Carola, leaning against the wall of the house, waves, thinking that if she were on that desert island she would not write a word on the piece of paper. She would invent an alphabet of folding—an impermanent origami language that would mean nothing to anyone but her. It’s her secret answer; she’s sure none of the others have thought of it.

  Dedicated

  Celia is treading the lukewarm blue water of Nathan’s parents’ swimming pool. It is a cloudless Sunday in late June, the sun high and warm. She is watching the shadows which the waves she makes cast on the bottom of the pool—pulses of light and darkness whose existence is frenzied and brief, so different from the calm, lapping waves they reflect. Celia is at the center. The waves radiate out from where she treads, her arms and legs moving as instinctively as those of a baby held up in the air. Near the French doors to the library, Nathan and Andrew, her best friends, are dancing to a song with a strong disco beat and lyrics in German which emanates from a pair of two-foot-high speakers at either end of the library. The speakers remind Celia of the canvas bases her mother uses for her macramé wall hangings, but she knows that in spite of their simplicity, or because of it, they are worth thousands of dollars each, and represent a state-of-the-art technology. Nathan has told her this several times in the course of the weekend; he worries that she or Andrew might knock one of the speakers over, or carelessly topple a precious vase, or spill Tab on one of the leather sofas. They are not rich, he tells them jokingly; they do not know about these things. (The expensiveness of his parents’ house is, by both necessity and design, easy to overlook, but Celia’s eye for what she does not have has already rooted out the precious, notices that there are fresh bowls of roses in every room and that the gray parachute-cloth sofas are actually made of silver silk.)

  The song changes. “Oh, I love this,” Andrew says. He is an enthusiastic and uncontrolled dancer. He twists and jolts, and lunges forward accidentally, nearly colliding with one of the speakers. “Will you be careful?” Nathan shouts, and Andrew jumps back onto the patio. “Relax,” he says. “I’m not going to break anything.”

  Celia kicks her legs, pulls her neck back, and gracefully somersaults into the water; suddenly the music is gone, Nathan and Andrew are gone, though she can see their distorted reflections above the pool’s surface. She breathes out a steady stream of bubbles, pulls herself head over heels, and emerges once again, sputtering water. The music pounds. They are still fighting. “Andrew, if you don’t calm down,” Nathan says, “I’m going to turn off the music. I swear.”

  “Go to hell,” Andrew says, and Celia takes another dive, this time headfirst, pulling herself deep into the pool’s brightness. She can hear nothing but the sound of the pool cleaning itself—a wet buzz. When she reaches the bottom, she turns around and looks up at the sun refracted through the prisms of the water. She is striped by bars of light. She would stay underwater a long time, but soon she’s feeling that familiar pressure, that near-bursting sensation in her lungs, and she has to push off the bottom, swim back up toward the membrane of the water’s surface. When she breaks through, she gulps air and opens her eyes wide. The music has been turned off, Andrew is gone, and Nathan is sitting on the chaise next to the pool, staring at his knees.

  “You were sitting on the bottom of the pool,” he says to Celia.

  “What happened? Where’s Andrew?” she asks, wiping the chlorine off her lips.

  “He stormed off,” Nathan says. “Nothing unusual.”

  “Oh,” Celia says. She looks at her legs, which move like two eels under the water. “I wish I knew what to tell you,” she says.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  Celia keeps her head bowed. Her legs seem to be rippling out of existence, swimming away with the tiny waves.

  Celia has spent every free moment, this weekend, in the water. She lusts after Nathan’s tiled swimming pool, and the luminous crystal liquid which inhabits it. In the water, Celia’s body becomes sylphlike, a floating essence, light; she can move with ease, even with grace. On land, she lumbers, her body is heavy and ungainly and must be covered with dark swatches of fabric, with loose skirts and saris. Celia is twenty-three years old, and holds the position of assistant sales director at a publishing company which specializes in legal textbooks. Of course, Nathan and Andrew always encourage her to quit her job and apply for a more creative position somewhere, to move downtown and leave behind her tiny apartment and terrible neighborhood. But Andrew is blessed, and Nathan is rich. They don’t understand that things like that don’t work out so easily for other people.

  Here are Andrew and Nathan, as someone who hasn’t known them for very long might see them: blond boy and dark boy, WASP and Jew, easy opposites. They work for rival advertising companies, but work seems to be just about the only thing they don’t fight about. Nathan has dark, pitted skin, curly hair, a face always shadowed by the beginnings of a beard, while Andrew is fine-boned and fair, with a spindly, intelligent nose, and a body which in another century might have been described as “slight.” He likes to say that he belongs in another century, the nineteenth, in the tea-drinking circle of Oscar Wilde; Nathan is invincibly devoted to present-day. They live on opposite poles of Manhattan—Nathan on the Lower East Side, Andrew in an East Ninety-sixth Street tenement on the perilous border of Harlem. From his window, Andrew can see the point where the ground ruptures and the train tracks out of Grand Central emerge into open air. Three blocks down Park Avenue he can see Nathan’s parents’ apartment building. Sometimes he runs into Nathan’s mother at D’Agostino’s, and they chat about the price of tomatoes, and Nathan’s mother, who knows nothing, tells Andrew that he really must come to dinner sometime. Publicly, they are ex-lovers and enemies; privately (but everyone guesses) current lovers and (occasionally) friends. As for Celia, she floats between them, suspended in the strange liquid of her
love for them—a love, she likes to think, that dares not speak its name.

  That is what they look like to their friends from work, to the people they eat dinner with and sleep with, to all those acquaintances who find them interesting and likeable, but have other concerns in their lives.

  And what, Celia wonders now, floating in the pool, is she doing here this weekend, when she has sworn time and again never to travel alone with them anywhere, not even to a restaurant? She always ends up in the middle of their battleground, the giver of approval, the spoils which they fight over, forget, and abandon. She tells herself she is here because it is over a hundred degrees in Manhattan, because her super has confided that the old woman across the hall from her apartment hasn’t opened the door for days, and he’s getting worried. She tells herself she is here because Nathan’s parents are in Bermuda, the maid is on vacation, there is the swimming pool and the garden with fresh basil growing in it. And it’s true, they’ve had a good time. Friday, sticky with Penn Station grime, they walked along the beach, ran in the tide, let the dry, hot wind blow against their faces. Saturday, they went into East Hampton, and looked at all the pretty people on the beach, and Celia decided it really wasn’t all that surprising that those people should be rich and happy, while she was poor and miserable. They ate salad and watched a rerun of “The Love Boat,” and then Nathan and Andrew tucked Celia into Nathan’s parents’ big bed and disappeared together to another part of the house. She closed her eyes and cursed herself for feeling left out, for being alone, for having come out here in the first place. She tried, and failed, to imagine what they looked like making love. She tried to hear them. Now, Sunday morning, they have begun fighting because the fact that they still sleep together is a source of shame to both of them. And why not? Even Celia is ashamed. She is not supposed to know that Nathan and Andrew still sleep together, but Andrew calls her every time it happens. “I don’t even like him,” he tells Celia, his voice hoarse and strained. “But he has this power over me which he has to keep reasserting for the sake of his own ego. Well, no more. I’m not going to give in to him anymore.” But even as he says these words, she can hear his voice grow hesitant with doubt, desire, love.