‘I need to get through to somebody,’ she said, in a different voice. ‘I need to have like a real conversation. Of course, I know what the consequences are. I know he has kids, I take all that very seriously. But at the same time I feel like, I like this guy, it doesn’t happen often, I’ve been around enough to know that …’
‘You haven’t been around so much. You’re twenty-nine years old. There’s plenty of time to make your own life with someone.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to do. What do you mean?’ But she had lost the thread again, of whatever sleepy confession she had briefly felt like making. ‘I’m not trying to steal her life.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’
‘Yes, you did. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to pick a fight with you, too. I’m not an idiot, I know what’s going on, people tell me what I already know, and I shout at them for it.’
She could hear background noises on the phone, Paul was putting something down or picking something up, she could hear water running and said, ‘I’m sorry to dump my self-obsession on you like this. When you probably just want to go to bed.’
For a few seconds, he didn’t answer, and she tried to imagine what he was doing. Making himself something to eat or washing dishes or stocking his gym bag. Finally he said, ‘Don’t worry about it. It makes a nice break from my own self-obsession. Is Dana still there?’
‘I guess so, do you want to talk to her? They’re still in the restaurant. I made a scene and walked out, I’m over the road.’
‘Just don’t let Bill give her the doggy-bag to take home. She can’t say no to that kind of thing, but it gets on her nerves and then I have to hear about it later.’
She could see Julie coming out of the restaurant and looking around, a kid in Dr Martens, dragging her feet a little. She looked cold, too, from the air conditioning, she had bare legs. Ben was behind her, faintly self-conscious; he should have held the door and tried to push it open from outside. Then Nathan backed out, with Margot asleep in his arms. Somehow it didn’t matter if you knew him, there was something charming about a man in a suit, carrying a sleeping child. The girl’s shoulder had rumpled up his collar, her hair was in his face. Bill held the door for Fritz, who hobbled past on his cane, elegant and elderly, slightly top-heavy. He used to be a rugby player but at a certain point in life the muscles just weigh you down. Susie and Dana followed, two pretty women in dresses, though Dana was taller and prettier. Even in the way she moved and stood waiting you could see her confidence in that fact; it was just a habit, she couldn’t help herself. Everybody was waiting for Liesel. They were looking for Jean, too, but she, feeling wide awake now, had come out the other side of something and said into the phone, ‘How are you doing?’
‘I don’t know.’ The water was still running – maybe he was filling a bath. ‘I don’t want to play tomorrow. Part of me wants to walk out on the whole thing. You know, before they can kick me out.’
‘What whole thing?’
But Dana had seen her, and Jean waved back – she held up the magazine by way of explanation. Liesel came out, limping slightly; there were too many people on the pavement, anybody passing by had to walk around them. The kids kept getting in the way. Bill had a brown paper bag in his hands.
‘Listen, Paul, I should go,’ Jean said, but she didn’t go. The traffic intervened and she didn’t want to get off the phone. ‘Should I worry about you, too?’ she asked.
‘I feel like I’m not being very nice to Dana,’ he said.
‘So be nicer to her.’
‘I’m trying but maybe not hard enough.’
‘It shouldn’t feel like trying,’ Jean said.
‘Look, I don’t want to start the whole business up again. But that’s one of those things you say because you haven’t been there before.’
The lights changed and the cars pulled up at the other end of the block. ‘I have to go,’ Jean said. ‘I’m not mad I just have to go. Don’t worry about anything now. Listen, if I don’t see you before the match, kick his ass. Kick his ass,’ she said again and ran across Broadway to join the others; her cowboy boots clicked and slipped a little on the asphalt.
Nathan was heading uptown. Margot still slept in his arms, he was going to take a cab and stood out in the road to flag one down, shifting the weight of his daughter to put out a hand. Jean stepped out into the street. ‘I don’t want to fight with you,’ she said.
‘Nobody’s fighting.’
Then a car pulled up and he waved Julie in. ‘Say goodnight, Julie.’ Goodnight, she said – her voice had gone almost pale. After she was in, Nathan turned and, bending down, retreated awkwardly into his seat, so that Margot didn’t hit her head on the door. Liesel watched them go, there were tears in her eyes; she was very tired, it had been a long day. All of these complicated arrangements wore her down, cross-currents of sympathy. Nathan had such – he made himself so difficult to agree with, even when he was telling you … asking for help. But she always felt this way, even when he was a boy. And the more you disagreed with him, the harder he made himself to love. It was like a deliberate challenge. Susie was the other way around. If she didn’t get her way, she burst into tears. Paul never wanted anything, he just watched. Jean always wanted everyone to be happy, according to her ideas. Like a dog with a bone, she wouldn’t let it go until you were.
‘He’s a good father,’ Liesel said to Bill, whose knee felt stiff after sitting down for so long; he kept pacing around. She meant, I’m glad he has those girls to love him.
Fritz needed a taxi, too – he lived in Brooklyn. ‘I can drop you off en route,’ he offered, in his gentlemanly way.
But Bill wanted to walk. ‘It’s not far.’
‘Liesel?’
She would have preferred a ride, but said to Fritz, ‘Thank you, I’ll walk, too.’ Leaving him out, on his own, a single, childless man, returning home to his apartment. The taxi came and he put his stick in first then slid himself painfully along the bench seat.
‘You and me both,’ Bill said. Fritz had to lift his knee with his hands to swing his leg in.
‘In London, you can step into a taxi. You can walk in.’
But he closed the door behind him and the cab pulled away.
Slowly they were diminishing – just the six of them now, a more manageable number. Liesel said to Ben, the last child left at the end of the day: ‘Do you know how I hurt my knee? Have I told you that story?’
‘You can tell me again.’ His glasses both magnified his eyes and made them hard to read.
Dana and Bill walked a little in advance. Against the grain of the traffic on their side of the street, which was heading uptown, through Harlem and Washington Heights, some of the drivers making their way to the GW Bridge and the suburbs, going home on a Sunday night. They passed a bank, dark now but exposed, the arrangement of furniture, chairs around desks, a table somewhere, a long counter, strangely suggestive of a certain mood, a certain kind of friendliness … Then a pet store, with stuffed animals on display; another restaurant, half-empty, a couple sitting in the window over half-finished plates. She had her legs crossed, he was leaning back. Dana wondered what their relationship was.
‘Is everything okay in the apartment?’ she asked, in her good girl manner. ‘I’m sorry you can’t stay at ours.’
‘It’s an extremely comfortable apartment.’
Susie and Jean brought up the rear – Susie had been lingering a little. ‘I should just tell you, because I already told the others,’ she said, and for a second Jean imagined the most terrible things, cancer or divorce, something to do with the boys.
‘I’m pregnant,’ Susie said and Jean put her arms around her sister and held her so she had to stop walking.
*
Dana split off at 87th Street. Bill tried to give her the leftovers, but for some reason Jean stepped in. ‘She can give it to Cal tomorrow,’ Bill said, slightly hurt. ‘He probably likes meatballs.’
‘Dad, stop,’ Jean said. ‘Sh
e doesn’t want it. I’ll have it for lunch.’
Dana, feeling uncomfortable, tried to avoid choosing sides. She made a funny gesture with her hands, as if to take it, and then not – yes, no, yes, no. A kind of dance with Bill. But Jean insisted. ‘I’ll be up at four with jet lag. I’ll be ready for lunch by nine o’clock. And if we throw it away, we throw it away. That’s our business.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Bill said. Certain practical details gave him pleasure to think about. He had to hold himself back from discussing them, but then, when the opportunity arose, you could tell he had a kind of checked momentum. ‘How are you getting to the stadium? We could meet at Times Square and ride up together.’
‘I don’t know. Paul’s taking the car, but he’ll drive in early to warm up. I haven’t really started thinking about all that yet.’
‘We could share a taxi,’ Liesel said.
‘Not everybody fits. We’d need two cars, and the 7 train goes right there.’
‘Dad,’ Jean said. ‘It’s late. We can talk about it in the morning. Dana doesn’t have to stand here listening to this.’
‘All right, all right.’
In the end, Dana left empty-handed and walked along the half-block to the back entrance suddenly alone – out of their presence. Some silly part of her thought, I could go anywhere, the night is young, but in fact, she said hello to one of the younger doormen (a kid, really, with a scratchy bit of stubble on his face; his cap looked too large for his head, he was pushing an empty brass-poled trolley along) and passed through the little archway into the courtyard. The fountain sounded cool and quiet, it was the background noise of privilege, and reminded Dana that she had on nothing but a cotton dress. She felt chilly now and wanted to get inside.
Waiting for the elevator, she started thinking about Michael. For reasons she didn’t totally understand, she found it incredibly embarrassing to have her ‘in-laws’ staying at his apartment. Why? Because he was so rich? The Essingers were hardly poor, but she could imagine their reaction to the furniture, the gilt mirrors and Tiffany lamps and claw-footed sofas, the fake Roman frieze over the fireplace. Not Liesel’s style; it wasn’t really Dana’s style, either. Not anymore. Maybe what she felt wasn’t so much embarrassment as resentment, at the way the Essingers colonize everything. There are so many of them, and they are all so sure about everything; it gets into your head. But she thought about Michael, too – about what he was actually like.
When they met, she was a junior at Amherst; he was fifty years old and ‘semi-retired,’ as he liked to put it. He had just given some money to the Isenberg School of Management, and so they ‘let me give a lecture,’ he said, ‘about leadership. You know how much this privilege cost me? A hundred thousand dollars. I plan to enjoy it.’ Dana was a history major, but she worked part-time for the Special Events Facility Staff and helped to serve drinks at the reception afterwards. Michael chatted her up; she wore a little black apron, black shoes, she had her hair tied back. But her face looked serious – all that human contact stressed her out. Wandering around with a bottle of white in one hand and a bottle of red in the other. You have to think about when to approach a group of people and when to leave them alone. Around a third of the men try to start a conversation. Michael had a hard job persuading her to stop and talk. One of the things he said to her, in the course of the evening, something she never forgot, was this: you should get more pleasure out of being so handsome. It was a line, but that didn’t make it less true. She felt he had noticed something important about her. Afterwards, he asked her back to his suite at the Lord Jeffery Inn. (‘This place is a four-star dump,’ he complained. ‘That’s basically what four-star means.’) One of them joked, it might have been Dana, that she was part of the hundred-thousand-dollar deal – a way of addressing the creepiness but also turning it into part of the game.
That was that, she thought, walking back after breakfast to her college dorm room. But the following weekend he invited her to New York, he sent a car to drive her, and three hours later she arrived at that apartment. Everything made a tremendous impression on her, the gilt mirrors, the Tiffany lamps, the Roman frieze, the little view of the Park from the Juliet balcony … Maybe this was part of her embarrassment. From her mother, Dana had inherited very conventional ideas of class and taste; Michael appealed to them. He was also smart, attentive, lively, healthy and rich. And they had a good time. For a while, she thought of herself as the fun young thing, giving him new life, but later she realized, or maybe he realized, that in fact he was the one with the energy and the pleasure receptors, and she was holding him back – she was just an ordinary girl. The divorce was amicable and his idea, that’s how far she had fallen. There was something wrong with her, she didn’t have any drive, any initiative, she didn’t know what she wanted from life, she just drifted along. Even Paul could sense this, or was starting to.
By this point, she was in the elevator, riding slowly up. The light kept ticking along the fantail of numbers over the door. Arriving like this at the place where you live makes the whole set-up feel slightly imaginary – it’s like coming through a portal or a wormhole, your apartment has no immediate connection to the rest of the world, it’s floating somehow. She used to like this feeling, just the two of them, and then the three of them, alone together on their cloud-island in the city. But now she was thinking, as the lift opened out on her floor and she reached into her purse for the key, I wonder if he’s asleep. She also wondered if she wanted him to be or not, and if he was, whether she should sleep in the single in Cal’s room or climb in next to Paul under the duvet at the risk of waking him up.
*
‘Why wouldn’t you let her take the food?’ Bill said, when Dana was gone. ‘She’s got a small boy. It’s a lot of work, cooking from scratch every day.’
‘She doesn’t want our leftovers,’ Jean said. Already she could feel a shift in alignment, she was taking sides again, on behalf of others, in this case Paul by way of defending Dana. She felt slightly happier.
‘Then she can say so.’ Bill had reached the age when he was starting to lose these pointless battles. For the first ten years, that’s all you do with kids – argue them into bed, or out of bed. Get dressed for school, get changed. You shout at them to finish their plates, to empty the dishwasher, to practice piano. And in the end, when you want to, you get your way. There’s always some nuclear option on the table, you can raise your voice, you can pull rank. If you want to win, you win. Then they go away for a few years, to college, they make their own lives somewhere, and when they come back, slowly, you feel the tables turning. The power has gone, your rank is ceremonial, and something else is changing, too, more fundamental. You start to feel out of touch. Maybe you’re wrong, maybe they know better. Doubt creeps in.
‘She can’t say so. Not to you. Think about it for a second. You paid for the meal. What’s she going to say?’
‘Then she can take it and throw it away at home. What’s the big deal?’
‘If she does that, Paul has to hear about it. He has to get involved.’
‘Why should he be involved? It’s nothing to do with him.’
‘It’s like you’ve never met a human being before.’
‘All right. I give up.’ And then, a minute later, to show he has a little fight left in him: ‘I still don’t see what the big deal is.’ But it doesn’t sound like fight.
Liesel, limping slightly, was telling a story – and Ben walked with her, touchingly slow, keeping pace. Susie followed a little behind, listening; her son could play the gentleman when he wanted to. One thing David always insisted on, in his English way, was manners. He could be very charming, especially with old ladies, which tended to annoy Liesel, who didn’t want to be treated like one. Susie knew that David knew what he was doing, that it amused him to irritate his German mother-in-law by being extra-English and polite. You reach a certain stage in a marriage where the motives all seem ulterior. Not even that, but the whole point of an outer self is
to suggest and withhold information about the inner; and once you’ve stepped through the curtain it’s hard to keep believing in the magic show. In things like charm. But with Ben it was different. He was too young to appear condescending; he just seemed interested and well brought-up.
‘Were you mad at your brother?’ he asked. ‘Afterwards.’
‘No, I felt sorry for him. He was very ashamed. He always took everything – an sich. On himself: too personally.’
Liesel had told him how she first hurt her knee, years ago, when she was a twelve-year-old girl. It was the summer holidays, a few weeks after the end of school, and she kept following her brother around. Klaus was two years older and very handsome, with the sort of sensitive unhappy face you used to see in movie stars. Like Leslie Howard. (‘Do you know who Leslie Howard is?’) Not particularly masculine, though he was also very good with his hands, in the way boys were then. He could catch fish, he could build a fire, he could fix a bicycle. And Liesel kept tagging along, she wanted to be where he was. Mostly he was very patient with her but in sly ways he also got his own back.
There was a hill near their house, in the middle of a park. Not a natural hill but man-made, piled up in layer after layer like a wedding cake, with a kind of crown on top – a platform for looking out. To celebrate some famous inventor or statesman, after whom the park was named. No, it was an astronomer, she couldn’t remember his name. There were other things in the park, too, slides and seesaws, but Klaus decided the playground was for children. He used to push his bicycle to the top of the hill, climb on and let it roll down. There were ridges you could walk around, every ten or fifteen feet along the side of the hill; and when the bike hit a ridge, it flew. Klaus would skip into the air for a half-second and come back to earth again, on the next slope, and keep going. Liesel wanted to try it, too. He told her she was too small. She said, in that case, why don’t we play on the seesaw together. But he was too old for the playground. Children can spend hours like this, arguing back and forth. (‘Maybe you know something about this.’) Klaus had other friends around, too – all of the kids from his school ended up at the park. He couldn’t back down.
A Weekend in New York Page 23