A Weekend in New York

by Benjamin Markovits

  ‘Everything’s real, in one way or another.’

  ‘You know what I mean. You dated, too. There were people you had nothing to say to, and people you did.’

  She felt awkward having this conversation with her big brother. Showing off. Look at me, I’m a grown-up, too, like you. When I’m really not. Also, she didn’t like red wine – it gave her a headache. In London, she usually ordered a gin and tonic. She didn’t drink at all in college, and then when she got to England it was the first thing she tried. Since it tasted okay, she stuck with it. At dinner parties, she sometimes drank wine with food, but even then not much.

  ‘I remember in grad school,’ she said. ‘You went out with somebody’s girlfriend.’

  ‘That ended well.’

  The wine was nicely cool and left a little resiny taste on the tongue. He looked out over the view – blackness broken up by irregular lights. Maybe you could see the trees, maybe you couldn’t; but you could feel the greenness, a different kind of darkness below, coming from the park. Traffic sounds floated up, sometimes even conversations. The night air had a loose quality, it seemed to echo a little, to retain sound. Your own voice carried. He wanted to get the phrasing right. Keep it simple, he told himself, so it doesn’t look like you’re thinking too much about it.

  ‘It’s different when kids are involved,’ he said.

  ‘Believe me, I know that. He knows that. But even at his age, you have a right to live a life you can put up with. Don’t you, I don’t know. I mean, the way he talks about his marriage it’s basically a professional relationship. It’s like a business arrangement. They share office space or something. There’s no tenderness. He said to me, if we were choosing now, who to be married to among our circle of friends, if we all got to choose again, at this stage I would pick her fourth or fifth.’

  ‘That’s a charming thing to say.’

  ‘According to Henrik, she feels the same about him. He’s very honest like that, he’s totally straightforward. It’s one of the things I like about him. He also said, if you want to know, that this is part of what makes family life so sad. Because for the kids even the idea of choice is ridiculous, it’s like blasphemy, you don’t want to choose your mother. But then at the heart of the whole enterprise is this weird decision, which your parents made twenty years ago, for reasons that don’t make much sense to them now.’

  Nathan let this go for a minute. Then he said, ‘You have to realize that these people have a depth of relationship you can’t really begin to scratch the surface of.’

  ‘Which people?’

  She was just wearing a T-shirt and beginning to tremble a little. She felt the cold easily.

  ‘This guy and his wife.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

  ‘You present their relationship as a business arrangement—’

  ‘I realize it’s more complicated than that.’

  ‘Maybe not. But if you think about a business as somebody’s life’s work, if you think of these people as colleagues in that work … People care about their business.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at. They don’t make each other happy. You should hear them talk about each other – I mean, I’ve heard it from both sides. I know that he has a choice to make, and that if he chooses me, it’s going to cost him. It will cost him money, for one thing. But it’s also going to damage his relationship with his kids. You don’t have to tell me that. But if you’re trying to say that their marriage is much more meaningful and real and deep and important than I can begin to understand, then you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Look, I’m on your side here …’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m on my own side here. Don’t think I’m happy about any of this. I’m not. I feel like shit half the time. And the other half I just feel insecure.’

  ‘Jeannie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This isn’t like you.’

  ‘Well, that turns out not to be true.’ Then she said: ‘Don’t tell Liesel and Bill.’

  ‘Who have you talked to about this?’

  ‘I told Dana. I’m talking to you.’

  ‘I feel I have to say something you’re not going to like.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a moral responsibility here. The primary obligation is not yours, it’s his. But there are people who will be affected by what you do. Not just the wife, who can take care of herself, but the kids. You have a minor but not insignificant duty towards them. This will have a real effect on their lives. And by real I mean measurable, in terms of expected future income, educational attainment, even marriage prospects.’

  Jean was crying by this point, partly from the cold. ‘If it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else.’ She was also unbelievably tired – in London now the time was three in the morning.

  Later, when they were waiting for the elevator in the hall (Nathan had left the front door propped open), he said, ‘There’s something else I want to talk to you about. Liesel hopes to retire in a few years. Bill has no intention of retiring. They are going to argue about this, because it affects where they can live. I think there’s a compromise solution, which may or may not involve buying an apartment in New York. But Bill doesn’t want to think about any of this.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Well, you’re staying there. See if you can talk to them about it. Separately maybe. You’re the good kind loyal loving kid. That’s your position in the family, they listen to you.’

  Then the elevator came and she got in and turned around and looked at him. In her jeans and Converse All-Stars, she seemed very young. Her hair looked draggled from the wet air. Her face was still a little red; she had Margot’s complexion. With Margot you also had to worry about allergic reactions. She had sensitive skin and often came out in hives. When Jean was a baby, she couldn’t drink cow’s milk, but she grew out of it and Nathan was hoping Margot would do the same.

  ‘Do you need any cab money?’ he said.

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  He watched the door close on her and went back inside.

  *

  Bill and Liesel didn’t stay long. After getting off the phone, Bill told his son that he had arranged to see ‘your Aunt Rose’ in the morning and probably wouldn’t get back to Manhattan until after lunch.

  ‘I figure you got things to do. And Susie doesn’t come in till the afternoon anyway.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Paul said. Bill often carried a canvas bag with him, which he had left in the hall and now went to pick up. Liesel was in the bathroom.

  ‘Your mother’s tired. We’re heading back to the apartment. You guys could probably use a break.’

  ‘Well, do what you want to do. But once Cal’s asleep, there’s nothing to do here. We can put a ballgame on, it doesn’t matter to me.’

  Paul felt the old reluctance to see his parents leave, even for a few hours, to watch them depart, looking older and more vulnerable than he imagined them to be, on the other end of a phone line. But it’s also true that he didn’t want to talk much. He wanted to turn on a baseball game and not have to think of things to say, which is partly why he hoped they would stick around.

  ‘I think Dana can use a break,’ Bill said.

  When Liesel emerged from the bathroom, with wet hands, they went home.

  The front door slammed, it was heavy and old-fashioned, with a kind of metal rim at the bottom, difficult to shut gently; maybe this is why Cal woke up. They both heard him crying, a sound so faint down the long corridor, it sounded like a memory of someone calling you, not quite real.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Paul said.

  Dana was still standing around, to say goodbye. For some reason, she had an apron on.

  Paul sat with Cal for a few minutes, in the nursing chair. By the time he reached the kid’s room, the crying had stopped. Cal lay on his side, with his head tilted back awkwardly and his mouth open. His blanket of knitted whi
te cotton had become tangled in his legs. Every time you bent over to adjust something, or to pick him up, you banged your head on the mobile attached to his cot. Paul sometimes argued with Dana about whether or not to intervene, if Cal looked uncomfortable. She always wanted to, he didn’t. ‘You’ll wake him,’ he said, and sometimes he was right. ‘Otherwise, he’ll just wake up later.’ And sometimes she was. But this time, for whatever reason, he pulled at the blanket until it came free, then laid it gently over his son. The summer night was on the cool side, and the heating was off all over the building.

  She was in the kitchen, doing her handwashing, when he came out. The sink was full of grayish water and bubbles.

  ‘Give me a hand with this,’ she said. ‘You’re stronger than I am.’

  So he wrung out a thin wool cardigan he once bought her at a Barneys sale, and which she wore all the time.

  ‘Well, that was quite the bombshell,’ she said, a turn of phrase that had always irritated him. Just the grammar of it – quite the this, quite the that, the kind of English-sounding idiom only Americans use, and only certain kinds of American.

  ‘I don’t think anyone was surprised.’

  ‘I was surprised. I was surprised you didn’t tell me before.’

  ‘I didn’t have a chance. I made up my mind this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s not what you said to Bill.’

  ‘Look, if you want you can have an argument with me about how I told you, we can argue about that. Or we can talk about what I said.’

  ‘I don’t want to argue with you.’

  ‘Okay, then don’t,’ he told her and went into the living room to watch TV.

  There was a ballgame on, the Mets were playing, and even though he didn’t much like baseball, he liked the background noise. His knees hurt him, a little; his feet, too. He took off his shoes and lay on the couch. Almost in spite of himself, his body put him in a good mood. It was tired; it had worked hard. Some of the shots he played against Luigi came back into his mind – a flat forehand down the line, no topspin. Something he was working on, just to vary the bounce. But it’s difficult to keep in play. Luigi could hit it hard and low like that. Paul needed work on his drop shot, too. He wanted it to look like an ordinary backhand slice, a rally shot. Once or twice it came off today, but with Luigi, who knew. The guy gave up running when he retired.

  When Dana woke him, the score was tied, four-all in the seventh, Jose Reyes was at the plate. Two–one count. ‘Go to bed,’ she said. The night sounds, the game sounds, had gone through their subtle alteration; you could tell it was getting late. He felt a little feverish, not feverish exactly, but shivery, childish and intimate, but maybe just because the apartment was cold.

  Putting on his pajamas woke him up again. He washed his face in the bathroom sink. Already he felt slightly panicky at the thought of not being able to get back to sleep. This is the sleep that counts, two nights before his first match. He shouldn’t have washed his face, but you need to stick to routine, you need to read a little. Books put him to sleep, especially since Cal was born. Susie had recommended Lord Jim, and he was fighting his way through it, a few pages at a time. He hadn’t read any Conrad since Heart of Darkness in high school, when he used to have opinions about books. Now he just read what people he respected recommended to him. That’s not quite true, but sometimes you tell yourself these things when you feel low. His announcement hadn’t gone to plan, it hadn’t made him feel what he wanted to feel. That retiring was the right thing to do, for example. Sometimes he had the uncomfortable sense that all of his big decisions were made at the same basic level of emotional maturity you have when you’re in the department store, looking in the changing-room mirror and picking out a shirt.

  Dana said, ‘Jean told me something today. I don’t know if you know or if I should tell you.’

  ‘What?’

  He had almost forgotten she was there. They had grown so used to each other in bed that her physical presence didn’t always protrude into his thoughts. Sometimes they turned the lights out without speaking or kissing.

  ‘She’s having an affair. With her boss. He’s married.’ Dana felt a little guilty, passing on secrets, especially since it involved a kind of boasting. ‘I think she expected me to tell you.’

  ‘Why didn’t she tell me herself?’

  ‘I guess she thinks you guys will judge her.’

  ‘What do you mean, you guys? So what was your reaction, congratulations?’

  ‘I told her she’s old enough to do what she wants.’

  ‘Well, maybe she should want better things.’

  ‘She wants a love life.’

  ‘There are other ways of getting it.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  He was hurt that Jean had confided in Dana but not in him. ‘I need to sleep,’ he said and turned off his bedside light. She put her book face down on the floor and switched off her own. They lay like that, in the half dark. For Cal’s sake, they left the hall light on, and even with their door half-closed, the light leaked in. The curtains over the windows also let through a kind of city grayness. As his eyes adjusted, the room around him looked clear enough, the outline of the dresser, the mirror on the wall (which gleamed faintly), the chair with their clothes piled on it, the sliding door of the built-in closet. Dana’s pretty dresses on their hangers. Only the color was gone. But he also thought, if Jean is confiding in her, it’s because she considers Dana a part of the family, like everyone else. Somehow this affected his view, so that when she said, into the air, ‘What do you want to do next?’ he wasn’t angry.

  ‘I don’t know. Something different.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I have this idea of buying some land outside Austin and building a house.’

  This wasn’t the answer she expected, and she laughed – she couldn’t tell if he was being serious.

  ‘Is that funny?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that it doesn’t sound like you.’ She added, trying to keep up her tone or air of amusement, ‘You can’t even drill a hole in the wall without making everybody watch.’

  ‘I don’t want to build it, I want to pay people to build it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  But it wasn’t easy, pretending to be amused, and she felt the dishonesty in her own voice. This is something Paul occasionally accused her of, that she didn’t confront him with her real opinions, she always seemed to be playing an angle. Because I don’t always know what they are every minute of the day, she told him. I’m not an Essinger. But even that line struck him as a kind of ploy. What do you expect, she said. This is how the women operate in my family, this is how we get what we want. Do you get what you want, he asked her. Not with you.

  ‘You think it sounds stupid?’

  ‘I don’t know, Paul.’ She was trying to do better. One of the reasons she loved him – this is what she used to tell her friends – is that he forced her to be honest. But maybe even this was an example of the way she had given in to him, to his version of events. It was so hard to tell. When you’re floundering, whatever people say about you seems true. ‘It sounds to me like you’re going off the rails a little bit. First you announce that you’re retiring, and then you tell me you want to build a house in Texas. I don’t get it.’

  ‘What don’t you get?’

  ‘I don’t get how it fits in with us.’

  That was as close as she could come to saying what she thought they were talking about. She was doing her best.

  ‘Who is us?’ he said.

  ‘You know who us is. Me and Cal.’

  They were both still staring up at the dark ceiling. Always you had this sense in New York of carved-out life. The pipes made noises, you could hear your neighbors’ footsteps overhead, suggestively moving around. Going to bed? Making something in the kitchen? And behind their heads, just two or three feet away, on the same level, there was another bedroom, a couple they knew, Bob and Linda; she was expecting a baby any minute. Dana kep
t meaning to pop by with a few things they didn’t need any more. Packets of baby diapers. Cal had gotten too big for his BabyBjörn.

  She broke the silence first.

  ‘I’m happy. I thought we were happy,’ she said.

  ‘Can we have a serious conversation about this? Without make-believe?’

  ‘I thought we were.’

  ‘You can’t have thought that, you’re not being honest. You keep telling me, you’re going crazy, stuck around the house all day.’

  ‘We have a small kid, that’s what it’s like.’

  ‘I don’t see why it has to be like that.’

  ‘Well, try looking after Cal a little bit more.’

  ‘I just don’t understand. You’ve got Inez five days a week.’

  ‘You don’t understand what?’

  ‘What you do all day. What you want to do with your life.’

  ‘You mean, like, move to Texas?’

  ‘Don’t take that tone. I hate that tone. If you want to disagree with me, fine, but don’t make a joke out of everything.’

  ‘I’m not trying to, Paul. I’m just trying to understand. Are we supposed to come, too?’

  He turned over and looked at her – he was only a few inches away. With his brown skin, a little sun-damaged, his stubble, his large brown eyes, there was something almost evangelical in his face. He picked at his eyelashes, too, a nervous habit. As a kid he suffered from blepharitis; he often woke up with heavy sleep on the lids. Cal did, too. It wasn’t a big deal, but she took him to the doctor anyway. She learned about it. Paul’s lashes grew back but they weren’t very prominent. Maybe this is why his eyes seemed bigger, more open and earnest. The Essinger earnestness, she used to think, but in fact, Paul had it worse than any of them. She found it very attractive, when they first dated. He was a serious guy, he took her seriously. Just now he seemed to her a little crazy. Not exactly happy or unhappy, but in one of those moods where it’s like everything has just occurred to you and makes complete sense.