‘Turn it off, turn it off. I wasn’t watching anyway.’
‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry to come and disturb you. We thought you would be out.’
‘One of these stupid business shows, it doesn’t matter. What? I never go out.’
She tried to sit up; the room smelled of sleep. It was also very hot and a vase of lilies on the table in front of the big bow window had dried out. The rich dust of the stamens lay scattered over the cloth.
‘Do you mind if I open the curtains?’ Nathan said to the old woman.
‘I keep them closed, otherwise I can’t see the TV.’ And then, when he didn’t move, ‘Go ahead, open them. You turned it off anyway.’
Even when he opened them, the ivy on the bars outside kept out most of the light, but the leaves cast pretty shadows on the floor; there were edges of light that shifted slightly on the wooden boards.
Bill said to her, ‘These buildings have beautiful high ceilings.’
‘I’m sorry, they told me you were coming. I meant to get dressed.’
She wore a pale blue nightgown, which might have been a dress, and a cashmere cardigan, which had pockets you could put your hands into. After sitting up, she adjusted the blanket across her knees and smiled rather deliberately. ‘What’s your name, little girl?’
‘I’m Julie. This is my sister Margot.’
‘Do you like licorice?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I always keep some Twizzlers for my grandkids.’
Julie glanced at her father, who told her, ‘As far as I’m concerned.’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Yes please what?’ he said.
‘I’d like to try one.’
‘Me, too,’ Margot said, and took the piece of sucked-on candy out of her mouth. She still had the wrapper for it, and carefully wrapped it up and put it in her jeans pocket and licked her fingers afterwards and dried them on her T-shirt.
Mrs Mitroglou watched her until she was finished. ‘All set? Well, give me that tin on the bottom shelf over there. The one that says Old Soldier. I’ve got other things as well – you can have a look.’
‘Do you mind if we look around?’ Liesel asked her.
‘Look, look,’ she said.
A wall used to separate the living room and kitchen, but most of it had been taken down. There was now a wide arch, and Liesel wandered through onto cracked linoleum tiles. The kitchen hadn’t been changed in thirty years – the wooden worktops were rotting around the sink, there were burn marks elsewhere, in perfect circles, where somebody had put a pot down straight from the hob. Everything looked sticky to touch. The contents of the spice rack had discolored the wallpaper behind, and dried needles of thyme lay scattered among the cereal boxes underneath. A tall sash-window over the sink showed the back garden, which was paved with dirty yellow bricks. The downstairs neighbor had put out a few flowerpots: begonias and ivy, euphorbia, a few ferns. A bay tree. There was a bench and Liesel could see the edge of the fire escape, the characteristic rust-colored purple of the painted metal.
She felt surprisingly and deeply upset by the whole thing, the smell, the lily stains on the cloth, the wet brown wood around the sink, the sofa-bound old woman, who probably had to move out because she couldn’t look after herself and her daughter didn’t have the time. Maybe her husband was dead and she needed the money. Liesel would never buy the apartment, she knew that already, but she wandered into the bathroom and checked out the padded seat, the freshener in the toilet, the limescale on the taps and the medicine cabinet, whose old-fashioned mirror gave an almost green depth to everything in it, including her own face. A study contained an exercise bike, probably her husband’s. They seemed to have a lot of radios. Bill would like the rose Kilim at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom. Two big windows on either side of the headboard let in some light, though one of them was partly blocked by the fire escape. Some bachelor lawyer would buy the apartment and sit out there and smoke with his girlfriends.
The difference between Liesel and this woman was five or six years and maybe one serious health event. If they moved in here it would be a short-term measure. Coming back into the hallway, she heard Margot saying, ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Just swallow it,’ Nathan said. ‘I’ll get you some water.’
‘I can’t. I don’t like it.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do about it?’
She had scrunched her face up and was shaking her head from side to side, starting to panic, and Nathan put his hand under her mouth. ‘Just spit it out,’ he said, and ‘I’m sorry about this,’ to Mrs Mitroglou. Margot spat the black purple mess into his hand, and he went to the kitchen sink to clean himself up. Julie followed him and whispered, ‘I don’t like it either.’
‘Well, you can eat it anyway.’
*
Outside, on the brownstone steps, Jean said, ‘I feel like I’m being pissy with everybody. Am I being pissy?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything.’ Dana looked surprised by the question; she had the clumsy and sometimes endearing habit of answering people honestly.
‘You mean, because I’m always a bit like this.’
‘I don’t think you are. I mean, you’re not being anything.’ And then, in a different voice: ‘Don’t confuse me. So who is this guy?’
‘Which guy?’
‘The one you don’t know about.’
‘Oh.’
The truth is, Jean wanted to tell her. In addition to everything else, she felt a very small amount of pride in the fact that she was having an affair with a married man. It was like getting drunk for the first time or smoking your first joint, it meant you were in the world. And she had never had a serious relationship, not even in college. This was the first one.
In college she sometimes made out with friends, guys she liked who didn’t want to go out with her, and she pretended to have the same attitude towards them. She called them by their last names. In England, during grad school, she had sex for the first time. It turned out to be easy to get drunk at a party and go home with somebody. But she was getting old for that, too, she wanted a real life. Henrik would turn forty-seven in October; he had a house in Acton and three kids. It was like one of those cooking shows – here’s one I made earlier.
They met through Jean’s supervisor at Oxford. She was doing the BPhil, following in Nathan’s footsteps; it was partly just an excuse to stay in school. To avoid real life. Jean complained to her professor, ‘Philosophy gives me a pain in the head.’ That probably means you’re doing it right, he told her. But he was also one of these media dons, who spent time posing as a public intellectual (this is how he put it) on radio and TV – the kind of person they call in to express pre-packaged views, against the backdrop of an Oxford study, with a gas fire in the grate. Henrik was one of his contacts in the industry; he ran a production company. After finishing her degree, Jean wanted to stay in England and needed a job. Her supervisor put her in touch with Henrik, and she started working for him, first as a runner, then as a researcher. Later she became his assistant; the whole thing took time, she’d been with the company for five years.
In the early days, she also dog-sat for him at the weekend. They had a German shepherd named Tinker, and Jean lived about twenty minutes away by overground train. She came on Saturday, she came on Sunday, she changed Tinker’s water, she took him for a walk, she filled his bowl and went home again. But she also saw the books on their shelves, she saw the kids’ bikes in the garden, she saw the Roberts radio on their kitchen windowsill – she saw his life. They lived in a tall narrow house that backed onto the tracks; South Acton station was at the end of their road. There were five or six trains an hour, and Henrik once told her, before anything started between them, that his kids were so used to sleeping with the noise they found it hard elsewhere – a line that for some reason stuck with her.
The first time she do
g-sat, he introduced her to the family – they were late getting away and in the middle of an argument. His wife couldn’t fit the stroller in the back of their old Golf, which was filled with other bags.
‘We don’t need it,’ Henrik said.
‘Then you can get him to sleep.’
‘There’s nowhere to walk anyway. It’s the countryside.’
But she gave in in the end and made a very slightly exaggerated show of a wife’s tired patience, blinking once slowly, with a little intake of breath, for Jean’s benefit, by way of apology. She was tall, skinny and small-breasted; her hair was light brown and growing colorless in parts. Jean knew that she ran half-marathons and imagined she might look exactly the same at sixty.
After their relationship began, the dog-walking stopped.
It was easy for them to find time and a place on location, but in London they used a friend’s apartment. One of Henrik’s friends, an academic, who was himself in the process of going through a divorce and had been teaching at Boston University for the year. But he planned to come back at the end of September; they were going to have to make different arrangements. For that and other reasons, the start of the school year seemed like a turning point to Jean. Things could go either way.
Part of the problem with having an affair is that there’s no public record. It’s like nothing is happening, even though at the same time you feel caught up in the middle of something incredibly urgent. So she said to Dana, ‘He’s my producer. He’s married.’
‘Oh, one of those.’
‘What does that mean? He’s not a bad guy – he’s the opposite of a bad guy.’
‘I meant, one of those complicated situations.’
‘I guess it is. Though it also feels pretty simple to me. We want to be together, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt about that.’ After a minute, she said, ‘I’m sorry, I probably sound prickly. I haven’t told anyone.’
‘Nobody at all?’
‘Nobody in the family.’
They were sitting on the bottom of the brownstone steps, so that Dana could push the stroller back and forth. Cal was still sleeping – ambient noise often knocked him out, and the restaurant had been very loud.
‘He’ll be in a bad mood when he wakes up,’ Dana said. ‘He’ll be hungry.’
‘Do you have anything to give him?’
‘One of these mushy pots. Sweet potato and lamb.’
‘Fancy schmancy.’
‘Well, we’ll see. Do you not want me to mention this to Paul?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I should tell him myself, but I don’t want to. You know, one of the reasons I almost didn’t come, flights are expensive. Of course, Bill and Liesel offered to pay, but I don’t want to take their money when I’m fairly certain they would disapprove … of how I’m living. Which is fine, which is their right, but if I want to be such a big-shot grown-up kid, making my own difficult life decisions, then I shouldn’t take handouts.’
‘They wouldn’t mind.’
‘They wouldn’t mind about the money. They would mind about the other thing.’
‘They love you anyway.’
‘Of course, they love me,’ Jean said, a little testily, and then, more calmly: ‘I think Paul would probably be the most sympathetic.’
She meant this in a general way, that he seemed the least likely to judge her, but afterwards Jean wondered whether Dana might have taken it the wrong way – as if Paul would naturally be sympathetic to a married man’s reasons for having an affair. Maybe she did mean something along those lines, who knows. Something else to beat herself up about.
‘I don’t know if you care about my opinion,’ Dana said, ‘but if you ask me, these things happen. You can’t be too – I don’t know – proper about who you fall in love with. I think you sometimes worry too much about what your family thinks.’
‘That’s what I’m saying, I should stand on my own two feet.’
‘I mean it’s okay to live your life and still let them buy you a ticket home.’ But Dana heard herself and added: ‘Maybe I would say that. Isn’t that what everyone says about me? About my ex-husband, and probably about Paul, too.’
‘What?’
‘That I don’t mind living off other people.’
‘Who says that? Nobody I know says that.’
‘That’s not what your parents think? I mean, they don’t think it’s weird to stay in Michael’s apartment?’
‘Of course that’s not what they think.’ But Jean knew this wasn’t quite true and blushed slightly.
‘Then what are we arguing about?’ Dana said.
‘Nothing. Nobody’s arguing.’
Dana had to push the stroller aside for a woman pulling a suitcase behind her – a stewardess, in matching blue skirt and jacket. She had that artificial pretty look, which is the look you can give yourself with prettiness-indicators, like make-up and hair color, even if you aren’t particularly attractive. She smiled at Dana, she smiled at Cal, she looked tired. Her high heels seemed to wobble under her feet; the wheels of her suitcase clicked over the paving stones as she walked away. Dana had never needed such indicators.
‘It was sweet of you to buy those things for the girls,’ she said. ‘You’re good with kids.’
‘I wanted to get something for Cal, too.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I was just thinking, how nice it was to watch you with them.’
‘What does that mean?
‘Nothing, it doesn’t mean anything. It was a compliment.’
‘Fine,’ Jean said. ‘Thank you.’
But something about the way she smiled made Dana keep going. ‘Okay, look,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about the right or wrong, I really don’t. I just don’t want you to get sucked into a situation that isn’t going to give anything back.’
‘What does that mean – give something back?’
Dana wasn’t good at this kind of game. Like all the Essingers, Jean could make you say things you didn’t mean or take positions you didn’t want to take. They pushed you into arguing with them. The worst of it was that sometimes you realized later, maybe these are your positions, maybe this is what you think. It was all pretty tiring.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
But Jean wouldn’t let it go. ‘You mean, like kids?’
‘I don’t know what I meant. Forget it.’
‘Because that seems like a very old-fashioned idea of what a relationship is.’ She added, in the silence that followed: ‘Just ignore me, I told you I was feeling pissy.’
*
Bill spent the time talking to Mrs Mitroglou. In his chinos and frayed jacket, with his untucked shirt, he looked presentable enough but also approachable. Nathan liked talking to strangers, too, he touched you on the elbow, he laughed at jokes, but there was a class difference between father and son – Nathan descended from the heights. Whereas you could still imagine that Bill’s uncle owned a grocery store, and that Bill himself as a teenager used to help out in the stockroom.
‘Your name,’ he said to her. ‘Is it Greek?’
‘My husband was Greek. But my father came from Silesia. I grew up in Milwaukee.’
‘Which part of Milwaukee? I have cousins who used to live in Sherman Park.’
‘It’s all changed now. We lived in Lincoln Village.’
‘They were nice neighborhoods. Nice houses.’
‘Can you imagine?’ she said. ‘When we were kids, we used to go to church at St Josaphat’s. For us it was like Notre Dame.’ She said it in the French way, with the short o and the short a.
‘I apologize on behalf of my children,’ Nathan broke in.
‘I don’t care. Nobody eats licorice any more. My grandkids take all the cherry flavors and that’s what’s left.’
‘Should we turn the TV back on?’
‘Yes, turn it on, turn it on.’
And Nathan closed the curtains, too. He looked behind him, in the half-light. The place had good bones, a marble fireplace, high cei
lings, original floorboards. There was plenty of space to walk around in, especially if you took away the roll-top desk in the corner, the side-tables by the sofa, the piano and the plant stands and the extra chairs and the piles of newspaper. The kitchen was large enough for Mrs Mitroglou to eat at a table pushed against the wall. If you tore down the ivy, you could have sunlight coming in from two sides, because of that window over the sink. It was a nice apartment. But Bill wouldn’t want it, because he didn’t want to move to New York. He was resistant to change, even the kind that makes you happier. And Liesel didn’t have the energy to budge him anymore. They were both running out of energy. Which meant, if decisions were going to be made, it was up to Nathan to push them along.
On the steps outside, the realtor apologized. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not good. She shouldn’t be there. But what can you do.’
‘It’s a nice apartment,’ Nathan said, and she gave him her card – her name was Bruna Pereyra and he watched her walk back to the corner of Amsterdam, where she stopped to look at her notes. Then she was on the phone again. There was something affecting about her, the trouser suit, her boyish face, her accent, with almost all of the foreignness rubbed away. So many apartments in New York, people showing them around … and for a moment he wondered whether giving out her card like that contained any kind of a come-on. Not because he thought it did, but just because these things occur to you.
She turned downtown and disappeared and Liesel said, ‘She’s too skinny. The women in New York are all too skinny,’ and Dana couldn’t tell if she was one of them.
Jean asked, ‘So how was it?’
‘I don’t want to live there.’
‘What was wrong with it?’
‘There was nothing wrong with it,’ Nathan said. ‘It’s a great apartment.’
‘It was depressing,’ Liesel said. ‘Lying there all day with the television on. And the curtains closed. No outside space.’
‘You can walk out the front door whenever you want.’
A Weekend in New York Page 8