A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  He put the diary in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Closer to ten.’

  Dana came back. Sometimes when she was around the Essingers, she started sounding like them, too – almost consciously. But then it became a habit and she couldn’t help it. Her mother sometimes made fun of Dana for this.

  ‘We can eat,’ she told everyone.

  Nathan had been staring at Jean. ‘Recaman,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The number sequence.’

  ‘No.’

  Something about her older brother was pissing Jean off, she couldn’t figure out what. The way he was late, just his general air of swooping in.

  ‘How do you know?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Believe me, you don’t know.’

  ‘There is no sequence. It’s just random numbers. I bought it in Camden, from something called the Random Number T-Shirt Company.’

  ‘There’s a sequence.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  Bill was already inside. Paul tried to hold open the door, for the stroller, but there were two doors, and they swung together, so Dana had to duck under his arm. There was nothing affectionate about the way she ducked, no physical contact. Both of them noticed this. Then Liesel, a little too late, took hold of one of the doors, resting subtly against it, and the girls, Julie and Margot, waited for her to go in first. ‘Go ahead,’ Liesel said, smiling at them, but they waited for their father. On the other side, Dana had turned the stroller around and was pushing backwards through the next set of double swing doors. Bill came to help her.

  ‘They’ve got us at the back,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure there’s room to get the stroller through.’

  ‘I’ll be okay.’

  She pulled the rain cover down to give Cal a little sound protection.

  ‘Well …’

  But people pushed in their chairs; it was all right. Jean said to Margot as the little girl walked past, ‘Are you hungry?’ but the girl ignored her.

  A waitress came by with a complimentary basket of blueberry muffins, steaming into a white cloth. Her face was heavily and cheerfully made-up; her skin had large pores, with the face powder caked in.

  Bill said, ‘Can we get some water? We need menus, too.’

  ‘Sure can.’

  Her accent was mid-western; she looked late twenties. Grad student? Nursing, maybe? Or just somebody working and having a good time? Jean thought, I wonder if she says she’s from New York, when people ask her. Not here, of course, but on holiday – when she goes out of town. Where you from, sweetheart? New York. Jean had lived in London for five years, but she would never say she was from London.

  ‘What’s the hurry, Dad?’

  ‘Nathan says we’ve got an appointment at one o’clock.’

  ‘But you don’t want to buy a place anyway.’

  ‘Still,’ Bill said.

  Julie pulled on her grandmother’s sleeve. ‘Tell me a story.’

  The kids were on their own with Liesel at the end of the table. Nathan was happy to give them the space – as a matter of policy he treated his children like responsible adults. Also, there was something he wanted to talk to Bill about.

  ‘What kind of story?’ Liesel asked, while Dana said to Jean, ‘Are you working on anything interesting?’

  Jean sat next to Dana, opposite the girls. Cal slept in his stroller at the end. Dana worried that Margot would wake him up – she kept shifting his rain cover to get a better look at his face.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Dana said, touching the girl’s hand gently. ‘He’s all right.’

  The restaurant had exposed brick walls, with a few rough plank shelves unevenly spaced, propping up ornaments, most of which were for sale – small birdcages, wooden letter racks and jars of jam. But the acoustics were poor, and the Essingers talked over each other.

  ‘About Hitler,’ Julie said.

  ‘I guess so,’ Jean said. ‘It’s interesting, I guess. Everything’s interesting, right? I don’t know. All these fucking interesting documentaries, which nobody really wants to watch. I don’t want to watch them either.’

  ‘Why do you want to hear about Hitler?’ Liesel said.

  ‘At Christmas you promised to tell me a story about Hitler.’

  ‘So why do you do it?’ Dana asked.

  ‘I don’t know, it’s interesting.’

  Liesel looked up; she was worried about Jean and sensitive to anything she had to say for herself. ‘I like to watch them. The last one you showed us, I thought—’

  ‘It was excellent,’ Bill said.

  ‘Well, I’m making another one with the same guy.’

  ‘Please tell me a story,’ Julie repeated.

  Nathan turned to Paul, who was sitting across the table from him, next to their mother. ‘If you have a chance to win each match, you have a chance to win the whole thing.’

  ‘I have a chance to win my first-round match.’

  ‘Well, and then in the second round you play somebody else.’

  ‘That’s how it works.’

  ‘Okay, and so you have a chance to beat him.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Immigration,’ Jean said. ‘There are all these people hanging out at Calais, trying to make it over on one of the ferries. Mostly from Africa – Eritrea, South Sudan. They sneak into people’s cars, they swim after the ships, they’ll do anything.’

  ‘That sounds—’ Dana began to say.

  Jean smiled at her.

  ‘Well, we want to turn it into a kind of cheesy drama, where you root for the little guy. So we’re trying to follow somebody the whole way, we’re hoping to document it – through Africa, through Libya, into Tripoli, onto the first boat, hanging out with them in Lampedusa, and so on. But it’s hard to just document these people, you want to step in.’

  ‘Are you going on location?’

  ‘It’s possible. Liesel and Bill don’t like to hear this stuff.’

  ‘We can’t hear you anyway,’ Bill said. ‘It’s too loud in here.’

  ‘I don’t really know any stories about Hitler,’ Liesel said. ‘I never met him.’

  ‘But you promised me.’

  ‘Maybe I meant the one about the postcard. But that’s not really a story.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  The girls both knew that their grandmother didn’t play with children, she never stooped to their level; but Liesel was also like their father in many ways. If you asked her a serious question, she gave you her full attention.

  ‘I’m basically a scaredy-cat,’ Jean said. ‘I don’t do stupid stuff. I hang out at hotels. I watch rushes.’

  Nathan turned to Paul. ‘How many guys are there on the tour that you’ve never beaten?’

  ‘There are a lot of guys on the tour I’ve never played.’

  ‘What’s your record against Federer?’

  ‘Oh for twelve.’

  ‘Okay, so don’t play Federer. What about Nadal.’

  ‘I beat him once. He beat me, I don’t know, seven or eight times.’

  ‘So let’s say you have a roughly twelve percent chance against Nadal.’

  ‘That’s not how it works.’

  ‘That’s exactly how it works.’

  ‘If he wants to beat me, he can beat me. If he doesn’t care, I can win.’

  Liesel said, ‘When I was a little girl, a little younger than you – and a little older than Margot, my school teacher asked us all to raise our hands if we had a picture of Hitler at home. She went row by row. We were supposed to talk about the picture, to describe it and say what it meant to us. She asked the first row one day, and the next row the next day, and I was worried that when she got to me I’d have to keep my hand down, because my parents didn’t have a picture of Hitler on the wall.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I told my mother.’

  ‘I just want to look at this on the numbers,’ Nathan said. ‘You don’t have to pla
y Nadal until the …’

  ‘Semis.’

  ‘So let’s assume that your chances of winning each round go steadily downwards. What are the odds on you against …’

  ‘Borisov,’ Jean said. ‘Seven to four.’

  ‘What did your mother do?’ Julie asked.

  ‘She bought a postcard of Hitler and put it over the fireplace, so when it was my turn, when it was our row, I could raise my hand with everybody else.’

  The menus arrived, printed on a piece of paper. Nathan started scribbling numbers on the back of one of them. ‘Okay, first round, eleven to eight, which translates roughly into a forty-two percent chance of winning. For you, I mean. Let’s assume that in a general way your odds of winning each match go down, round by round. We can work this out, too.’

  Liesel said, ‘Please, stop.’

  ‘Paul doesn’t care. Paul, do you care?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Liesel said, ‘Bill, tell them to stop.’

  ‘I’m going to tell them to order. Nathan, stop showing off.’

  ‘I’m not showing off. I’m interested. I want to know if I should put some money on Paul.’

  Julie said, ‘And what did you say about the picture?’ Liesel didn’t understand her, and she had to repeat herself. ‘When it was your turn, what did you say about the postcard of Hitler?’

  Liesel tried to remember – it was all a long time ago, and she had told these stories many times. First to her own children, and then to her grandchildren; she had put them in her memoir, too. But the way Julie asked also brought something out, a very faint feeling of what it was like to be a kid again. Liesel’s mother had had curly shoulder-length hair, which she cut herself, and Liesel used to watch her mother watching herself in the mirror and cutting it. There was a red tiled floor and afterwards she swept up the hairs in a dustpan and brush and threw them into the wood stove, where they suddenly crackled. The house had no mantelpiece – she must have put the postcard on a bookshelf.

  ‘I don’t remember what I said. I think I said, I was glad when my mother got the picture, because it meant I could be like everyone else.’

  ‘Nathan says there’s no point in doing something just to be like other people.’

  ‘Your father is very sensible,’ Liesel said.

  Bill waved the muffin basket over his head. It was empty; he had eaten most of them. ‘The muffins are good.’

  ‘This is a good place,’ Dana said. ‘That’s why I picked it.’

  She tried not to sound aggrieved, but in fact she found the whole thing, the presence of so many Essingers, the conversation about Paul, deeply upsetting – like the noise of the sails whipping around when you rig a boat. A kind of violence that you have to learn to ignore.

  The waitress came back and Bill said, ‘The muffins are excellent.’

  ‘I know, right?’ she said. ‘Can I get you some more?’

  ‘I’ll just eat them all.’

  ‘Well, that’s what we make ’em for.’

  Nathan said, ‘This is very crude, but let’s do it this way. Let’s assume you face Nadal in the semis. And let’s assume that the odds against Borisov are more or less accurate. Which means that you go from a forty-two percent chance of winning in round one, to a twelve percent chance of winning in round … six.’

  Meanwhile, people ordered and Nathan had to stop for a minute to find Margot something she could eat. Julie could order for herself. When the waitress was gone, Nathan said, ‘Let’s further assume that the drop in your likelihood of winning each match is constant. That’s a big assumption, but my guess is it’s also pretty close to the truth. In which case your chances go down about six percentage points per round. Thirty-six in the second, thirty in the third, twenty-four in the fourth.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ Liesel said.

  ‘I’m trying to point something out to him.’

  Bill said, ‘Everybody gets the point.’

  ‘I don’t think you do. Let me finish. If we carry this tendency over to the finals, that gives you a roughly six percent chance against whomever you face.’

  ‘That’s a ridiculous calculation,’ Jean said. ‘You’re just making this stuff up.’

  ‘Look, his record against Nadal and Federer is something like one and twenty, which is pretty close to six percent. It doesn’t matter. I’m just interested in ballpark figures.’

  ‘You’re not even parking at the ballpark. How do you know Nadal and Federer will make it that far?’

  ‘I don’t know. But my guess is, among the last twenty Grand Slam finals, the top four players have made up something like eighty percent of the finalists and top ten players account for most of the rest.’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘Paul, what’s your record against top ten players?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How about top four?’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re asking him these questions,’ Jean said.

  But Paul was smiling. ‘What I think is funny is that you really believe this is a meaningful way of assessing the likely outcomes. In spite of the total absence of any first-hand experience of what’s involved in winning a Grand Slam tennis match.’

  ‘Let me finish. What are the odds on Paul?’

  Jean said, ‘No.’

  ‘Just tell me. Don’t be an idiot.’

  ‘Twelve hundred to one. I’m sorry, Dana.’

  ‘Don’t apologize to me. You didn’t make the odds.’

  ‘I mean, for starting this thing off. For making you listen to us.’

  ‘I stopped listening like five minutes ago,’ Dana said. But then she worried that this came across as angrier than she felt. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Talk to me about London. Are you seeing anybody?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jean said, blushing.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ But she was still caught up in the fight with her brother. ‘What are you doing?’

  Nathan was still writing on the menu.

  ‘I’m working out the probabilities.’

  Jean watched him for a minute, shaking her head. Eventually she said, ‘Just use a phone.’

  ‘I haven’t got a phone.’

  ‘We’ve got like five phones here.’

  ‘I’m almost done.’

  Jean thought, there’s no point in getting pissed off; this is just what he’s like. You know this is what he’s like. You lived with him long enough. But she didn’t want to answer questions about her love life either – not to Dana. She turned to her nieces and said in her best camp-counselor voice: ‘When do you guys start school?’

  ‘Next week.’ Julie answered for both of them. ‘I’m very excited. Margot’s coming to my school for the first time.’

  ‘Look at you. Are you excited, Margot?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A little excited, a little scared?’

  ‘I don’t know because I never went before. So I don’t know if I like it or if I won’t like it. I don’t know.’

  She had large gray eyes and a round face. Everyone said she looked like Liesel, which was partly code for something else – her grandmother as a kid had the reputation of a good-natured bruiser. Margot’s voice was deeper than her sister’s, louder, too. She sounded faintly deaf, not just because of the volume but a faint tinniness or thickness in certain consonants. Also, an ability to ignore other people. In fact, her parents had twice had her hearing tested, but it was okay.

  ‘But you might be excited or worried anyway. It’s called anticipation. It means what you feel about something before it happens.’

  ‘I can tell you what your favorite day is going to be,’ Julie said.

  ‘What.’ Margot looked up at her sister.

  ‘Friday. Because Friday is fish day and you love fish.’

  ‘What kind of fish.’

  ‘It depends. Sometimes salmon fish. Sometimes fish fingers. I can tell you what my wor
st day is.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Pizza day.’

  ‘Oh, I love pizza,’ Margot said.

  ‘You won’t like this pizza. It looks like somebody threw up.’

  ‘Julie,’ Jean said, but in fact she felt pleased. The girl looked so self-conscious, it was nice to hear her sounding like a kid.

  ‘What, it does. It looks like somebody ate a lot of cheese and threw it up.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ Margot said. She had recently lost her front teeth and never seemed to close her mouth completely. When she spoke, you could hear the spit in her voice.

  ‘Julie, that’s not how polite people talk about food.’

  ‘She needs to know. I’m telling her all this because she needs to know.’

  Nathan looked up from his scribbled-on piece of paper. ‘Well, that’s not exactly the answer I was hoping for.’

  And then the food arrived, oatmeal and eggs, served in the cast-iron pan, hotcakes and syrup and bacon, more muffins and bread. Everything seemed a little over-presented. Large sprigs of dry parsley decorated the eggs; there were a few token strawberries. The table started filling with dishes and glasses had to be shifted. Bill lifted a vase and set it down somewhere else – on another table, where a woman was dining alone.

  ‘Madame,’ he said. She wore a gray jacket with shoulder pads; her red hair had faded. She was looking at her phone.

  ‘What were you hoping for, Nathan?’

  ‘I wanted to show you that you had a chance.’

  ‘And?’

  Nathan’s manner had changed, his voice, too. ‘I was stupid to start this. It’s my fault. Jean, can you help Margot cut up her food? I can’t reach from here.’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t matter to me,’ Paul said. ‘I’m not a tennis player out of delusion.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So tell me. You can’t start all this and not tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t start anything. I just wanted to prove to you that you’ve got a better chance of winning this thing than you think.’

  ‘So prove it to me.’